Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Cash, he wrote, ‘was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him’. Dylan remembered how his friend had sent a letter of support in the mid-’60s when the dogmatic editors of Sing Out! were ‘chastising me for the direction my music was going’. At that point, he and Cash had not actually met, but ‘the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.’ Johnny Cash, said Dylan,

  is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses.

  These were honourable sentiments. Dylan’s affection and respect for Cash had deep roots. Those who admired either or both of these men could ingest a little of their essential nobility vicariously from the artist’s words. A touching moment, then. It was slightly difficult, however, not to notice the disjunction sundering the Dylan who wrote so movingly of those ‘various lost causes of the human soul’ from the Dylan who materialised in Italy, handy and undeniably dandy, in January 2004. The ghost of John Cash had not brought this individual to his senses.

  Dylan was in Venice to stand around in a rented palazzo for a couple of days, more or less alive and apparently in person, to shoot a minute-long commercial for the Victoria’s Secret lingerie company. The song sold for the occasion, along with the artist’s services, was ‘Love Sick’. The first self-evident fact, therefore, was that not a soul involved in the exercise save the writer could have listened to the track beforehand. The existential significance of undergarments is not, even at a stretch, one of its themes. Was this Dylan’s private joke? Hardly. He was there for the cheque.

  As a provocation, as an art event staged with subversive intent to wring some comedy from commerce, it might have engendered all sorts of scholarly chatter. Instead, there was the sight being prepared for American TV audiences of a 62-year-old Dylan and a model almost 40 years his junior posing their way through a series of meaningful looks and sultry stares. She wore angels’ wings and examples of the company’s products; he wore his best rueful old devil empty face. Skin crawled on five continents. Even Salvador Dali, who had not been called Avida Dollars for nothing, spun gently in his unquiet grave. But what was a poor boy to do? Victoria’s Secret had thrown in an offer to sell a $10 Dylan compilation ‘exclusively’ at their outlets.

  The online magazine Slate gave the artist a headline precisely as crass as his behaviour. ‘Tangled Up in Boobs’, it said. The Wall Street Journal, on most mornings predatory capitalism’s handmaiden, reported that it was all ‘part of a move to bring Mr Dylan’s music to new audiences’. Quote: ‘A moustachioed Mr Dylan, 62-years-old, appears in a new television ad for the sexy chain’s “Angels” line while models cavort to a remixed version of his 1997 song “Love Sick”.’7 The problem with all of this, dispassionately, for anyone who cared even slightly, was not that the artist had sold himself, but that he had sold the song. Slate invited its readers to ask themselves ‘why Bob Dylan, respected counter-cultural artist, would choose to sell panties’. The sole available answer was straightforward: he got paid.

  Questioned by Rolling Stone later in the year, the artist would attempt a familiar trick and affect oblivious ignorance of the whole affair. As with all inconvenient events in his life, it somehow had nothing to do with him. ‘Was I not supposed to do that?’ he asked the journalist innocently. Why, he hadn’t even seen the ad.

  I wish I would have seen it. Maybe I’d have something to say about it. I don’t see that kind of stuff. That’s all for other people to see and make up what they will.8

  In any terms, by anyone’s biographical method, it counts as another puzzle. The Dylan who had written Masked and Anonymous, who had recorded ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, who had paid homage to the integrity of Johnny Cash and done a few other useful things in his time, was taking the cheque – grabbing the cheque – to play an aged roué in some adman’s wipe-clean fantasy while Ms Adriana Lima looked celestial in underwear, feathers and his handmade cowboy hat. Everything Dylan owned was his to sell, but he was forcing the ethical issue. If he didn’t care, why should anyone else? It seemed that every ounce of his famous mystique, every last fragment of the latest self-determined identity, had become a commodity. One excruciating thought was that the entire Victoria’s Secret debacle had happened just because it appealed to the vanity of an ageing man. The other explanation, more plausible by the year, was that anyone could hire Bob Dylan if the money was right. The money, it seemed, was of consuming importance.

  It made no sense. Those who had claimed that he toured because of alimony commitments were as erratic in their arithmetic as the Dylan who tried to pretend – talking to his old Village friend Izzy Young in Stockholm in October 2003 – that he worked just because ‘I have 14 grandchildren!’ Thousands of singers, actual thousands, had covered his songs. Lennon and McCartney aside, no one could match Dylan’s music publishing empire. Having bought off Albert Grossman’s estate, he owned everything he had ever written save the titles in which Sara had a share. Thanks to the Bootleg Series and a reliable back catalogue, meanwhile, his albums and ‘greatest-hits’ packages still turned a pretty fair profit. Those 100 or so shows a year still delivered a multimillion-dollar gross, season after season. Yet he would betray a great Bob Dylan song, and make himself seem like a sleazy ancient mask for hire, just for the money? Yes, he would.

  It counts as one context for his late renaissance. The identity being defended in the first years of the twenty-first century was paradoxical. He was least true to himself in the moment he truly did bring it all back home as a writer. In parallel with any art he might be creating ran a money-making juggernaut to which he was at all times subservient. No one ever said a genius is obliged to be likeable, but the best excuse loyal fans could manage for the grisly Victoria’s Secret affair was that old Bob was ‘just having fun’. Few among his less-slavish admirers were able to share the pleasure. Dylan had called his own enduring integrity into question. His right to assail anyone had been rendered suspect, let’s say, by a single minute of the softest soft porn.

  In March, as though the younger artist was mocking his older self across the decades, another volume in the Bootleg Series, volume six, was released. This was the Halloween concert from New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1964, the one with the joke about the singer wearing his Bob Dylan mask. The album, bootlegged for years, had an eleven and a half minute version of ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ on its first disc. You could play it while waiting for the Victoria’s Secret ad to come on. On the other hand, if you happened to have bought a ticket for the show at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory on the night Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall was released, you could catch the 62-year-old’s contemporary version. The words didn’t alter much: ‘Advertising signs they con / You into thinking you’re the one / That can do what’s never been done.’ Live 1964 also contained several examples of what had once been called protest songs from a 23-year-old who was getting ready to move beyond that kind of thing. Adventures in the advertising industry had been no part of his plans.

  In June, just before a couple of shows in Glasgow, Dylan found his way to St Andrews, the little university town and golf resort on Scotland’s east coast. He had agreed to accept the degree of doctor of music, honoris causa, from an ancient institution that had only recently shed a reputation for disdaining anything smacking of modernity in literature. On the other hand, as usual, Dylan was being honoured for his work in the field of music, not poetry, but he donned his robe with no obvious reluctance. He had a soft spot for Scotland, as the laureation (big speech) recognised. That was del
ivered by Professor Neil Corcoran – of the department of English, not music – who managed to say most of the right things without collapsing into the usual clichés. The professor, a fan with scholarly credentials, had organised the whole affair. On a wet Scottish day, he captured the essence of Dylan better than a lot of the big books.

  Bob Dylan’s life as writer and singer has the aspect of vocation, of calling, and his is an art of the most venturesome risk and the most patient endurance. He’s spent a lifetime applying himself to such long-sanctioned forms of art as folk, blues, country, and rock music. And, partly by transfusing them with various kinds of poetic art, he’s reinvented them so radically that he’s moved everything on to a place it had never expected to go and left the deepest imprint on human consciousness. Many members of my generation can’t separate a sense of our own identity from his music and lyrics. He’s been for us an extension of consciousness – a way of growing up, and a way of growing more alive. And his work acts like that for succeeding generations too …9

  It was, as these things go, a nice affair. It also marked another aspect of Dylan’s life in his late pomp. The honours were coming thick and fast. A surly reviewer could still observe that ‘his voice hovers between that of a shrill housewife and Yoda, and he teeters around the stage with the elegance of the Elephant Man’, but within what had once been known as the establishment it no longer mattered.10 Dylan had been certified as a figure of substance and significance, in part because a ’60s generation had taken charge of the prize-giving machinery. He was about to justify their faith, but not, to the evident delight of purely literary types, with songs alone. Those still waiting for a new album could pass the time reading.

  Chronicles: Volume One was published on 4 October, Lyrics 1962–2001 a week later. Dylan meanwhile submitted to a round of interviews with what were still known as major publications to explain himself as an author. As an offering to the reading public, Chronicles would scarcely need the help. The book with the biblical title would sell in quantities sufficient to justify any publisher’s hyperbole. Simon & Schuster’s main task was to print enough copies. Inducing Dylan to explain what had caused him to attempt the work after so many years spent refusing to explain himself was, predictably, a trickier matter.

  John Preston of the Sunday Telegraph was told: ‘In part, I guess I wanted to set the record straight.’ For contrast, Edna Gundersen of USA Today was informed: ‘I wasn’t trying to explain anything to anybody.’ David Gates of Newsweek heard, in a third version, that something resembling serendipity had guided the author. ‘It’s like I had a full deck and I cut the cards and whatever you see you go with that,’ Dylan said. ‘I realise there’s a great gap in it.’11

  The author told Preston, in all apparent seriousness, that he had been ‘determined to write a book that no one could misinterpret’. He had found the writing ‘quite an emotional experience in places’, but had also discovered the bitter truth about the ‘tedious process’ of making books. To Gundersen, he confessed that ‘I was just trying to charm my way through it, really’, but he insisted that in no sense was the book ‘an open confession’. Gates was another who heard that the splendid isolation of authorship was not ‘that splendid’. In this round of interviews a few semi-secrets were revealed. Dylan admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that in the 1980s ‘I was just above a club act’. Close to two years before an album existed to substantiate the claim, Austin Scaggs of Rolling Stone heard that new songs were being written: ‘I have a bunch of them. I do.’12 For all that, none of the journalists who were invited to these meet-the-author sessions seems to have come to grips with a simple question: why a book?

  After the laudatory reviews began to arrive, the idea would gain ground that Chronicles was just another Dylan performance, albeit one of his finest. When the close, forensic reading commenced the book would come to be viewed either as a sustained exercise in appropriation and worse, or as a kind of postmodern parody of autobiography. Most of these approaches still seem fantastically over-complicated. Who gains when literature is treated like evidence extracted under oath? To regard Chronicles as a piece of documentary reportage to be challenged and rebutted at every turn was to show a certain honed talent for missing the point. What got overlooked was a perverse fact: you could doubt Dylan and still believe him.

  You could doubt the author’s understanding of what was taking place when he told John Preston that in the process of writing his memory, to his surprise, ‘seemed to unlock’, allowing him to visualise people, clothing and furnished rooms from days long gone. You could doubt that he remembered conversations word for word. You could certainly doubt that he got all his facts right. It was not a question of decrying Dylan’s veracity (saints preserve us). Doubts arose from common reality. After four long decades memories that seem brilliantly clear are still liable to be deceptive. Certainty, the sense of recovered truth, is no guarantee of anything.

  Dylan’s description of memories being unlocked, of a book that ‘took on a life of its own’ as he wrote, was akin to Marcel Proust’s celebrated account in Swann’s Way (1913) of ‘involuntary memory’. This was the instinct set free on the instant, supposedly, that the novelist dipped a little cake into his tea. In modern psychological theory, the speculation runs that memories awakened in such a manner set off a chain reaction, much as Dylan described the experience during the writing of Chronicles. For his part, Proust got better than 3,000 pages out of this ‘chaining effect’ as one remembrance led to another. Yet In Search of Lost Time is, avowedly and triumphantly, a work of fiction. No one ever said that every vivid memory the writer described was factually accurate.

  Dylan might have believed that every last word in his book (even the borrowed, embedded words) involved the honest truth. Belief wasn’t relevant. Read Proust attentively and you discover him describing the sheer effort he made to remember the past after the cake was dunked in the tea; the process was not spontaneous. Read about Proust and you find that the memorialised madeleine started out, in a 1910 draft of Swann’s Way, as biscottes.13 If the great novelist dithered over his memories of bakery products, what else can be trusted? Some of the techniques Dylan employed for his book suggest he understood perfectly well that memory is never a simple, dispassionate recording device. The one thing he failed to remember clearly, nevertheless, was his motive for putting the truth down on paper.

  There is a lot of truth in Chronicles. Some is the kind you can check – this place, that event, those characters – and some derives from the ineffable coherence of art. In one important sense Dylan made it all true. The boys (always boys) in the literary forensics labs can run all the tests they like. The artist had been investigating the way past and present entwine long before he sat down to write. History might be the dream and nightmare from which we cannot awaken, but in this regard Dylan tends to side with Gatsby. You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can. Proust did it; our artist did it in the pages of his Chronicles. If he had not, he would have been overwhelmed by his own history.

  That was piling up, year upon year. In 2005, while Dylan toured with Willie Nelson, or pulled together another song for another movie (an interesting song called ‘Tell Ol’ Bill’, a picture with some integrity entitled North Country), the artist’s management were hard at work. The project would turn out to be the grandest monument yet. Filmed interviews for what would become a three-and-a-half-hour documentary had been going on, without publicity, for the best part of a decade. In 2000, Dylan had talked at length to his manager, Jeff Rosen, under the camera’s quizzical eye. Yet after the finished work was broadcast in two parts in the United States and Britain in the last week of September, the subject would pretend to know little about it and care less.

  ‘I’ve never seen it,’ he would tell an interviewer in 2009. ‘Well, a lot of that footage was gathered up from the ’60s. So I’d seen that and I thought that was like looking at a different character. But it certainly was powerful. And I don’t, or can’t, do that anymore.’
14 His management, his name, his office, his music, his life: nothing to do with Bob Dylan, apparently. Presumably the fact that the film omitted all mention of certain topics – drug use, say, or a first marriage – was also none of his doing. It was as though he could only support an identity through periodic denials. Somehow the rejection of every previous self was a perverse affirmation of who Dylan thought he was. For all that, No Direction Home, ‘A Martin Scorsese Picture’, was a landmark.

  It was not without a few problems, however. For one thing, the famous director’s chief contribution seemed to be to truncate the filmed performances fans wanted most to see. Above all, the startling long-lost colour footage shot on 17 May 1966 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall was cut short, apparently for the sake of ‘dramatic effect’ and some by-the-numbers film-school editing. The viewer was granted the infamous ‘Judas’ moment, but just a taste of the music that ensued. Once a fan had recovered from the astonishment of seeing a visual record of the fabled incident, a certain resentment followed. Given the dramatic structure of the entire documentary, with Dylan accelerating towards an almighty psychological crash, the miserly use of footage from Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester seemed self-defeating.

  Scorsese had been brought in to make sense of all the material, new and archival, that Rosen had compiled. In exchange, the director had been allowed to put his million-dollar brand on the finished picture, though his actual role was in essence supervisory. Scorsese shaped the narrative, the ‘Bob Dylan story’, with great skill, but it was Rosen who asked the crucial questions. Inevitably, many choices were then made. The decision to end the film in 1966 was in one sense obvious, in another sense too obvious. That’s how the story of Dylan’s life and career is always told, but in No Direction Home it had the effect of locking the artist into an era, an era of which he tends to speak with a well-rehearsed disdain. Anyone coming to Dylan’s work for the first time thanks to the documentary would have received a sample of the ‘voice of a generation’ legend and little else. The only dissenting, gently sceptical voice to be heard was that of the artist himself. Some of his contemporaries, it’s true, were fascinating. Suze Rotolo, consenting to a very rare interview, was refreshingly dispassionate. Joan Baez was nicely acerbic. But everything was fashioned to preserve the orthodox view of the ‘poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll’, the one parodied in all those Al Santos stage introductions.