Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  That said, Scorsese brought an unerring sense of period to the work. His depiction of Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota’s North Country – crucially, his use of Dylan’s own memories of childhood – was a marvel. Arguably, the viewer got a better idea of a man’s sense of himself from those early sequences than from any other part of the film. Scorsese also managed to document the tumults of the ’60s, the struggles and the rupture with all that had gone before, in a way that avoided most of the clichés. As a documentary record of a period, Dylan or no Dylan, No Direction Home was a corrective to a lot of glib pseudo-historical chatter. If Britain was swinging in the ’60s you wouldn’t guess it from the dreary scenes of a glum brown world captured in this film.

  As Michael Gray, suitably indignant, puts it in his Dylan Encyclopedia, the documentary gives only a minimal account of one part of its subject’s musical education. The desultory treatment of the blues, that crucial formative influence, is indeed ‘scandalous’.15 The misjudgement on Scorsese’s part spoke of a willingness to accept without argument the old ‘folk singer’ label and ignore the complicated roots of Dylan’s affections and art. This director, of all directors, should have known better. But then, you could also observe that the documentary does not delve deeply or often into its subject’s literary background. If Dylan is the near-unique product of musical circumstances – he and Elvis had that much in common – the same could be said of his development as a writer. That he is very well-read is well known, but he is well read in unusual ways. No Direction Home does not begin to explain what this autodidact made of himself when he began to make verses.

  The film remains a wonderful piece of work. Its release raised Dylan to the American pantheon while reminding you that despite everything, the honours and the awards, the veneration and the three and a half hours of airtime, he remained discrepant. Somehow he still didn’t fit with the larger culture, high or low. That might have been one reason for his importance, of course. Nevertheless, though no one has admitted as much, least of all the figure at the centre of it all, the release of No Direction Home on the heels of Chronicles looked like an attempt to reclaim Dylan’s history. Or rather, to shape and control perceptions of that history. A memoir that was not a memoir, a biographical film with just one contestable version of a life, above all the old illusion of a figure forever slipping off into the shadows: along with the Bootleg Series, these were offered as the approved, official record. Any idea that Dylan had at last decided to confess all was spectacularly wide of the mark.

  Even the movie’s ‘soundtrack’ album was no sort of soundtrack, though none the worse for that. Instead, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack was another large trove of treasures, with a couple of outtakes apiece from Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde to surprise even the most avid of bootleg collectors. The point was control, control of the past as it loomed over the present, control of reputation, work and image. Dylan knew everything there was to know about the myth of Bob Dylan.

  Product continued to appear, each release a seeming exercise in coming to terms with historical memory, the problem of a vast ‘legacy’ and the demands of the bottom line. So it was that in August 2005 Columbia released Live at the Gaslight 1962, an artefact from the beginning of recorded time. Since this album captured the coffee house singer in the last days before fame’s hurricane, someone thought it clever to strike an ‘exclusive’ distribution deal with the Starbucks beverage chain. Depressingly, revealingly, this kind of thing had become standard practice for the 64-year-old artist. As though to balance the historical accounts, still another Best of was issued for the American market in November. Providing the sleeve notes, the author and TV executive Bill Flanagan had the good grace to call the unremarkable release ‘a sampler for new listeners … a starting point’. There was no other excuse. Those listeners might have been better advised to begin, meanwhile, with Live at Carnegie Hall, a promotional ‘EP’ or mini-album that also appeared in November.

  Quite why Columbia/Sony chose to release just half a dozen tracks when they had the full 19-song concert recording in their possession was, as ever, baffling. The show Dylan gave on 26 October 1963 had been taped in preparation for an In Concert album that was abandoned for unexplained reasons. Two tracks had since turned up on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 and two on the No Direction Home soundtrack. This Carnegie Hall made use of the artwork designed for In Concert decades before, but it amounted to another ‘sampler’. As a response to the bootleggers, it was close to useless, even if the handful of tracks did demonstrate just how powerful a performer the young Dylan had been. Predictably, an illicit double CD set of the full 1963 show entitled Unravelled Tales would appear in the summer of 2008.

  *

  February 2006 found him back in the studios in New York. This time, finally, he was at work on his own behalf. Whether he knew it or not, Dylan was about to make his most successful album since Desire 20 years before. All the attention earned by Chronicles and No Direction Home, all the journalism expended since Time Out of Mind on the alluring theme of the impossible creative renaissance: all of that was about to pay off handsomely. As any number of reviewers around the world would soon confirm, the artist was about to complete his late-period trilogy with a masterpiece. Someone should have told the artist.

  The point is less trivial than it seems. Dylan’s recorded work is classified persistently in terms of ‘trilogies’ even when he denies having any such notion. As with the tour that never ends, helpful critics tell the artist what he has done when their favourite theory has been no part, so he says, of his intentions. So the three albums that appeared like lightning flashes between March 1965 and May 1966 are described as a trilogy when the differences between the works, thematic and musical, are obvious. Nothing on Bringing It All Back Home would sit easily on Blonde on Blonde, but that detail is ignored. Similarly, the albums made while Dylan was in the throes of Christian evangelical belief get called his ‘gospel trilogy’, despite the fact that Shot of Love pays attention only intermittently to the obsessions of Saved. Neither album involves gospel music in the proper sense, in any case, but that too is forgotten. To some ears, ‘trilogy’ sounds irresistibly impressive. The evidence says Dylan doesn’t think that way.

  He certainly did not think that way about the album he would call Modern Times. It was not intended to complete a design commenced with Time Out of Mind because there had been no such design. Talking to the novelist Jonathan Lethem late in the summer, the artist would ‘demur’ at the word trilogy.

  Time Out of Mind was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner. But by the time I made ‘Love and Theft’ I was out of the corner. On this record, I ain’t nowhere, you can’t find me anywhere, because I’m way gone from the corner. I would think more of ‘Love and Theft’ as the beginning of a trilogy, if there’s going to be a trilogy … If I decide I want to go back into the studio.16

  In other words, he had paid no attention to the idea before it was put to him. By 2006, the attempt to give his work the formal unity of a trilogy, to ascribe to it a fixed set of themes, ideas and interests, was in danger of becoming another of the labels he had always detested. The truth of the work was at risk of being submerged by the latest clichés. Chief among those was the one that confused Dylan with a historical figure just because he wasn’t getting any younger and because he was fascinated with origins and roots, sometimes as ends in themselves, sometimes as explanations for modern times. He was being consigned to the archives while he yet lived. In 2006, the New York Times would call him ‘an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear, where he finds clues to eternal truths in both the blues and the Bible’.17 The description would be fair enough, but it would carry a noxious whiff of obituary, as though better voiced in the past tense. The idea that history could and should be deployed for a modern purpose was being lost. The specific idea that an older America mired in hard times might have something to say to the country after 9/11 was being missed entirely.
Instead, too often, the artist was being treated as a revered antique.

  A kind of unthinking cultural nationalism was also beginning to emerge. By 2006, Dylan was being described as one of those great, quintessential Americans, a maker of culture and history, a figure who seemed to contain the country’s whole spirit and character. Again, this was not too far from the haphazard truth. He approached the idea of America much as Whitman, Twain, or Scott Fitzgerald had approached it. But he was also a living, working performer in the twenty-first century, with all that implied, not some exhibit trapped inside the museum of collective memory. As Dylan aged, the urge to treat him as a national monument, the last American hero, was becoming a little perilous for his art.

  You can take it, then, that he did not name his album Modern Times for nothing. He had been called Chaplinesque often enough in his youth; one of the allusions made by the album’s title was therefore plain. Chaplin’s 1936 comedy had mocked the modernising pretensions of capitalism and satirised its dehumanising effects. First and foremost, it was a movie about exploitation. The running gag was that industrialisation was crazy and liable to drive people crazy. Modern times were bad for the human race. One of Dylan’s responses would come in language of a kind he had never before employed.

  There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town

  Starlight by the edge of the creek

  The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down

  Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak

  The place I love best is a sweet memory

  It’s a new path that we trod

  They say low wages are a reality

  If we want to compete abroad

  The artist’s interest in the buying power of the proletariat had not been noted hitherto. On the other hand, Dylan was straightforwardly correct: real wages for American workers had been in steady decline for years while wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The verse quoted is not one he has been accused of stealing, a fact that is interesting for its own sake. By 2006, the obsession with plagiarism among those who watched over Dylan meant that much of his work, the work for which no handy antecedents could be found, was being neglected. What was being said in the songs was being ignored studiously. ‘Borrowing’ had become the only topic when it ought to have been a footnote. The statement made by ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ and by the rest of the album was not unimportant, after all.

  Praised extravagantly as it was, Modern Times would turn out to be a victim of some truly purblind scholarship. Even now, the album tends to be discussed in terms of what it owes to ancient blues, old popular songs, or poetry. What Dylan did with his sources somehow becomes a secondary issue, perhaps because he did complicated things with found materials. It is a lot easier to investigate alleged thefts from Henry Timrod, Robert Johnson, or Bing Crosby – Dylan is nothing if not eclectic – than it is to talk about an artist’s belief in biblical prophecy and the precarious lives of the downtrodden poor. Some seemed to think the title Modern Times was merely whimsical. In reality, it signifies a deeply political piece of work by an author still inclined to believe that these times are the end times. He might have sneered endlessly at party hacks, but he had not stopped thinking about power and powerlessness.

  Politics in the plain sense is far from dominant on the album, of course, but here and there Dylan could pass for Jim Casy, the faithless preacher of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, oppressed by sex, righteousness and justice. Yet ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ – number two because the country singer Merle Haggard had used the title first – is more than just a series of oblique observations on current affairs and tough economic times. It ranges across the country’s history, speaks the biblical language of revolution straight from Dylan’s old song ‘When the Ship Comes In’, displays a real empathy with poverty’s victims, takes a detour by way of classical literature, and yet remains rooted in twenty-first-century realities:

  Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue

  Gonna give you another chance

  I’m all alone and I’m expecting you

  To lead me off in a cheerful dance

  Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife

  I can live on rice and beans

  Some people never worked a day in their life

  Don’t know what work even means

  If you say that Dylan is full of surprises you have said nothing at all. This is the writer who ‘rejected politics’? Nevertheless, all those years of muttering that party politics is meaningless, fraudulent or the work of the Devil led a lot of listeners to assume, even when the contrary evidence was plain, that he took no interest in the woes of this world. All of the people in the songs of Modern Times are common folk, distressed, spooked, confused and oppressed. They struggle with life and faith, but their suffering is no accident. As often as not, bad things have been done to them. A lot of vengeance is plotted on this album, even when the rhymes are outrageous.

  Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches

  I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages

  ‘Love and Theft’ had a light heart; Modern Times wears the organ bloody and ragged on its sleeve. The album exists in a smoky twilight, out on dusty roads, in bare rooms. It contains the nagging sense of ending, perhaps for America, perhaps for the world. Hence that odd line in ‘Workingman’s Blues’, ‘I can see for myself that the sun is sinking.’ It is as though the speaker has just noticed the approaching darkness for the first time.

  The producer, this ‘Jack Frost’, knew his business. When he told journalists that doing the job himself simply saved a lot of time and ‘rigmarole’, Dylan was being too modest. Modern Times was solid evidence for the claim that some of his previous albums had been ruined by eager industry pros convinced they understood the needs of his music better than he ever could. Even if they did not justify his erratic decision-making, the new recordings were proof that the artist could achieve the sound he wanted without anyone’s help. ‘I know my form of music better than anyone else would,’ as Dylan put it in 2009.18 It was just a pity that it had taken him so long to grasp this self-evident fact. Modern Times sounded wonderful.

  The opening track, ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, all but painted a picture. However the effect was achieved, it was like listening to some supernatural roadhouse band crowded onto a tiny, ill-lit stage in the early hours with a singer who sounded as though he was facing his last night on earth. This, though, was rockabilly, ‘primitive’ rock and roll, a source code invested with the spirit of Carl Perkins and carried by two guitar players (Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman) performing as though they have just heard Chuck Berry for the first time. Meanwhile, the vocalist – there is no other word for it – declaims.

  I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love

  I think it will fit me like a glove

  I want some real good woman to do just what I say

  Everybody got to wonder

  What’s the matter with this cruel world today

  In due course it would be pointed out that Dylan had slipped in a reference to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’) and that there were other lines from the Roman poet’s works scattered throughout the album. A snatch of Virgil’s Aeneid had already turned up in ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ on ‘Love and Theft’. In New Zealand, the poet Cliff Fell would write in the Nelson Mail in October of his amazement on discovering several lines from Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Black Sea Letters’) in the songs of Modern Times.19 In most cases, the correspondences were exact, dead ringers in fact. For example, the seventh verse of ‘Workingman’s Blues’ has the lines ‘No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you.’ In the translation used by Fell, Tristia (2.52) runs: ‘My cause is better: no one can claim that I ever took up arms against you.’ Scott Warmuth would duly add to the tally of Ovidian echoes and Richard Thomas, professor of classics at Harvard, would contribute half a dozen more.20

  This would be interesting, jus
t as the citations derived from the works of Berry, Bing Crosby, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Timrod, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Stanley Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins and others besides would be interesting. Whether the discoveries could be called significant was another question. If the desire was simply to run up an indictment of Dylan for theft, the game was as banal as ever, founded in ignorance. On the other hand, anyone who wanted to ask why the artist was laying claim to a near-spiritual connection with Ovid, old and sick, exiled to Tomis on the war-torn edge of the empire (and therefore of civilisation) by a ruler’s inscrutable whim, was entering fascinating territory. What Dylan had done mattered far less than why he had done it.

  Cut off from the world, family and friends, Ovid believed that exile had destroyed him as a poet. In his Metamorphoses he had described the ages of humankind as golden, silver, bronze and iron. The last of these – faithless, savage, lost to truth – was for Ovid his modern times. Dylan was borrowing these lines for a specific poetic purpose. By the time he made Modern Times he almost certainly knew that every last example of ‘intertextuality’ would be netted and pinned to someone’s tray of specimens. Cliff Fell, who believed the ‘homage’ to Ovid was something to celebrate rather than bemoan, probably put it best. Dylan, he wrote, had ‘cast the songs as a modern lament, in the mask of a new Ovid, a kind of modern exile in the modern world’. Fell used the handy word bricoleur and pointed out what should have been obvious: ‘Ovid, himself, stole lines and stories from Homer, as did Virgil. And Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole ideas and lines from Virgil and Ovid. It goes on. It’s a part of the poetic process.’