Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  For whatever reason, that process was not well understood. As David Kinney would observe in a New York Times op-ed piece in 2012: ‘For the past decade, a great debate has been boiling about the authenticity of Mr Dylan’s work.’21 Out in the ‘blogosphere’, where Joni Mitchell’s blunt allegation of plagiarism had raised temperatures, the pot had boiled over. The media’s headlines would meanwhile arrive clad in protective question marks, but their very ambivalence would be suggestive. ‘Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?’, said one. ‘Is Bob Dylan a Phony?’ ran another.22 The witless charge of simple plagiarism, like the demand that Dylan should have named all his many sources, ran up against a familiar but fundamental question. Who else could have shaped all of those found materials into these songs?

  Even ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, at first hearing the most blatantly imitative and derivative track on Modern Times, is intended to be understood as the artist’s contribution to a piece of blues heritage held in common by a host of musicians. Dylan made no attempt to disguise what he was doing. Listeners might think of it as a familiar Muddy Waters tune – he had the hit and took the credit – but old McKinley Morganfield also ‘stole’ the song. The sole issue of real substance arose when anyone asked if one rich man deserved every cent of the royalties from an album whose credits announced, ‘All songs written and composed by Bob Dylan.’ Still, if plagiarism is defined as ‘passing off’, what does the artist’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ have in common, in meaning and intention, with Crosby’s ‘When the Blue of Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’? A melody has been adapted; the lyrics are worlds, universes, apart.

  The artist’s ‘Spirit on the Water’ sounds at every turn like something you’ve heard before. We can take that to be Dylan’s intended effect. It’s western swing; it has stride piano, a walking bass, some lines you could sing in church and some you certainly would not. But you need hear neither the voice nor a rather pretty harmonica break to know that this could be no one else but Dylan. Nor is this one of those ‘American songbook’ exercises that seem to attract unthinking praise as often as this artist has attracted suspicion. All the borrowings littering the album are mere cues, musical and rhetorical. Dylan’s way with words is utterly distinctive.

  I wanna be with you in paradise

  And it seems so unfair

  I can’t go to paradise no more

  I killed a man back there

  Is that last line an allusion to Johnny Cash and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’)? Or does Dylan get to it by way of a hundred murder ballads, country laments and blues songs? The Cash song was itself based on a movie and a stolen melody, but who still knows or cares? One of the great achievements of Modern Times springs from the artist’s refusal to give a damn for arguments over method. He knows that songwriters, songmakers, have always operated in the manner he has adopted. They faced less scrutiny than Bob Dylan, but that’s another story. His lovely ‘Nettie Moore’ shares a title and a few words with a nineteenth-century song. It takes a cliché – ‘They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don’t think it will’ – from ‘Moonshiner’, a traditional piece he had performed in his days in the Village. Numerous blues singers had also found the line irresistible. But the ‘Nettie Moore’ of Modern Times bears no resemblance whatever to its sources. In any sense that matters, it’s a new song. With its antique language intended to evoke a sense of lost time, it exists for the sake of the last line of its chorus:

  Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore

  And my happiness is o’er

  Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise

  I loved you then and ever shall

  But there’s no one here that’s left to tell

  The world has gone black before my eyes

  The fact that Modern Times amounts to a full-spectrum analysis of pre-modern American music would be noticed by all. Every style that went into the making of popular song, and therefore of the country’s native culture, was there. Dylan would be applauded for his range of reference, the ease with which he made it all seem his own, the fact that he understood what tradition involved. Any comparison with Presley as a one-man pop-music melting pot, fusing every influence, was justified by the album. It would sometimes be forgotten, however, that Dylan’s pursuit of pre-rock and roll styles was not a species of nostalgia or some antiquarian hobby. The concerns of Modern Times are eternal and therefore contemporary. The final track, ‘Ain’t Talkin’’, stands out from the rest as the summation of everything the album has been about: faith and the loss of faith, failure, the urge to vengeance, hard times and injustice. Still the pilgrim keeps on walking. No single verse gives an adequate idea of the whole. It is enough to say that while critics prepared to celebrate the triumphant conclusion to a so-called trilogy, Dylan ended the album with words that were as bleak as they were unflinching.

  Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

  Up the road around the bend

  Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

  In the last outback, at the world’s end

  Cliff Fell yielded to no one, it seems, in his admiration for what Dylan had achieved. He did make one point, however: ‘Section 13 of Tristia begins with Ovid sending greetings from “his outback” and section 14 speaks of Ovid’s wife being known “to the world’s end”.’23 In terms of poetic method, this was fascinating, but of no greater consequence than that. It should have given pause, nevertheless, to anyone still inclined to treat Dylan’s lyrics as specimens of purest autobiography.

  When the album was released at the end of August it would go straight to number one in America and in several other countries. At 65, Dylan would achieve the curious feat of being recognised as the oldest performer ever to have topped the US album charts. But that was apt. Though a few critics carped that Modern Times did not justify all the fuss, or argued that the artist was being lauded less for the music than for his improbable longevity, it was impossible to maintain that he had failed to achieve his ‘renaissance’. It was hard, too, to ignore the fact that Dylan had re-emerged with a new kind of songwriting, writing less flamboyant than it had been once upon a time, but more acute and more considered. Allied to his innate talent was the kind of editorial intelligence required to make sense of all those sources. Words, his own or borrowed, no longer spilled from him in torrents, but the songs were none the worse for that. Some of them stood comparison with his greatest works of the 1960s. It would soon be possible to argue, in fact, that some among them might prove more enduring than the magical songs of his youth. As to quality, this listener holds to the belief that there are six truly terrific pieces of work in the ten tracks of Modern Times. Very few albums, in any period, achieve that kind of ratio. As it happens, most of those are Bob Dylan albums. He had not merely recovered creatively. By the end of 2006 it was clear that as a writer he was as good as he had ever been, and in some respects better. If the charge ran that he was assembling and arranging fragments, they were glittering fragments turned into a glittering whole. These too were compositions.

  All that was truly lost, never to be recovered, was the voice, once his chief instrument. In Modern Times, as in Love and Theft, Dylan employed several stylistic tricks – elisions, stresses, slurs, abrupt pauses – to distract attention from the fact that there were notes he would never hit again. Sometimes he achieved remarkable effects. Sometimes, in fact, there were things emerging from those corroded pipes – ‘Nettie Moore’ is one good example – of which the young Dylan, always desperate to sound older than his years, had never dreamed. Vocally, nevertheless, the artist was covering his losses as best he could. Somehow the fact made the success of Modern Times seem all the more remarkable. Dylan wasn’t raging against the dying of the light. He was treating the diminution of his powers as just another creative problem to be solved. Jonathan Lethem put it well when describing his meeting with the artist just before the album’s release.

  What we do understand, if we’re listening, is that we’r
e three albums into a Dylan renaissance that’s sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out …24

  In staking his claim to the deep soil of American music, Dylan ceased to be a figure beyond the mainstream. At the start of the twenty-first century he was reordering the criteria by which both music and literature were understood, much as he had once ‘put an end’ to Tin Pan Alley. He would never be conscripted by the academies, but he was being accepted, even embraced, by the arbiters of what was important. Hence all the awards, hence all that ‘cultural nationalism’. There was no longer a qualm over describing him as the most significant artistic figure, or perhaps just the most significant American, of his age. Having been down and almost out, having been reduced – having reduced himself – to a performer barely one thin cut above a club act, he had confounded friends and enemies alike. No one, in any field, had come back in this manner before. He had defied age, time and, above all, every prowling, mocking ghost that had ever borne the name Bob Dylan.

  *

  Just before his 65th birthday, he had consented to become a disc jockey. The deal had been done with the XM Satellite Radio subscription service in December 2005, but the first broadcast from Studio B in the fabled Abernathy Building (which didn’t exist) was not heard until 3 May 2006. Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan would become one of the most quixotic and charming episodes – or rather, 100 episodes – in his career. Who couldn’t love a DJ who followed Jimi Hendrix and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ with Judy Garland? Who, save those who ran radio by computer program and the hokum of market research, could not warm to someone who fashioned his broadcasts around off-the-wall ‘themes’? ‘Mother’, ‘Jail’, ‘Flowers’, ‘the Devil’, ‘Dogs’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Luck’: only when an unavoidable event such as Christmas intruded did the host deviate from his plan of having no plan.

  The first show, for no immediately obvious reason, was entitled ‘Weather’. Eighteen tracks, dating from 1928 and the Carter Family to Hendrix in ’67, pursued the topic of meteorological events wherever it happened to lead. Dylan seemed to enjoy every minute. After all those years and all those concerts spent saying absolutely nothing to his audiences – ‘Nobody gives a shit how you’re doin’ tonight in Cleveland’ – he turned out to be a natural broadcaster. The kid who once listened avidly in the small hours to 50,000-watt clear-channel stations for music ‘blastin’ in from Shreveport’ had become an older gentleman with the freedom to play any record that took his fancy. As a youth he had listened out for Muddy Waters. The first record played on the first Theme Time was Waters and ‘Blow Wind Blow’.

  Dylan was often wickedly funny in these weekly broadcasts. Most people knew about the wit; he was famous for that. Few had been exposed to the artist as a shameless stand-up, purveyor of sensationally bad jokes and sheer whimsy. Yet on tour, if in a good mood, he had been known to crack some awful gags. In the days when he was using back-up singers he had on occasion introduced the women as ‘my ex-wife, my next wife, my girlfriend and my fiancée’. The drummer George Receli had once been described as ‘probably the best drummer … on the stage’. If Dylan was feeling particularly jolly, no joke was too juvenile. Thus, to the good folks of Wisconsin’s metropolis: ‘Nice to be here. One of my early girlfriends was from Milwaukee. She was an artist. She gave me the brush-off.’ Between records, Theme Time could involve an hour or more of this sort of drollery interspersed with poetry readings, ancient jingles, cocktail recipes, fake calls and invented emails, advice on divorce and any odd if unreliable fact Dylan’s researchers had managed to dig up. There would be speculation, inevitably, that he was working to a script supplied by the TV writer and producer Eddie Gorodetsky, from whose vast collection many of the deeply obscure tracks broadcast on the show were taken. Theme Time rarely sounded as though it had been scripted.

  Only Dylan, you thought, could have uttered the irrefutable statement, ‘Few things go together as well as country and western music and crazy people.’ Only he could have spoofed his listeners – and be taken seriously by some of them, journalists included – by claiming he was thinking of hiring out his sandblasted voice to the makers of satellite navigation systems. ‘I think it would be good if you’re looking for directions,’ Dylan muttered on the ‘Street Maps’ show, ‘and you heard my voice saying something like, “Take a left at the next street … No, a right … You know what, just go straight.” I probably shouldn’t do it because whichever way I go I always end up at the same place … on Lonely Avenue.’

  The first show began with the voice of the actor Ellen Barkin as the somewhat-mysterious ‘Lady in Red’. ‘It’s night-time in the big city,’ she said, exhaling each word. ‘Rain is falling. Fog rolls in from the waterfront. A night-shift nurse smokes the last cigarette in her pack … It’s Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan.’ Barkin and the DJ would keep this glorious nonsense going for the best part of three years. The introductions would vary a little from week to week, but the parody of long-gone radio links would remain a beloved vignette within the show. Episode ten, ‘Summer’, commenced with ‘It’s night-time in the big city. Angry prostitutes fight over a street corner. A man gets drunk and shaves off his moustache.’ Show 13, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’, began: ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A guilty man goes home to his wife. It’s time to make the doughnuts.’ The introduction to the two-hour episode broadcast for Christmas and New Year in 2006 might count as Barkin’s finest moment. ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A department store Santa sneaks a sip of gin. Mistletoe makes an old man sad. Eight reindeer land on the roof of the Abernathy Building.’

  In dull reality, Dylan recorded the show in his spare moments while touring the world. When the first episode went out he was nowhere near Washington DC, where the temporaneous Abernathy Building was alleged to be situated, but out on the road between Davidson, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. When the ninth show was aired, Dylan was performing in Bournemouth on England’s south coast. During the next broadcast he was in transit between Clermont-Ferrand in France and Cap Roig in Spain. It made no difference to the fiction of the nodding night owl in Studio B who seemed to say whatever came into his addled head while playing records no other station would recognise, far less touch.

  Amid the entertainment, the show offered an unimpeachable musical education. Whether the tracks were picked by Dylan, Gorodetsky or by some collaborative process was neither here nor there. When Episode 14, ‘The Devil’, opened with Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ it wasn’t hard to guess who had made the selection. The DJ played a lot of his well-known favourites and took the listener on an inimitable journey through the history of American popular culture. It was another way, more playful than his albums, of explaining a country’s past. When Theme Time was picked up by the BBC and Ireland’s Phantom FM in 2007 it was in recognition of the fact that something unique in broadcasting had been achieved by the ever-eccentric host and his omniscient producer. Something very funny, too.

  During an early show entitled ‘Father’, Dylan reported: ‘We got an email from Johnny Depp from Paris, France. He wants to know “Who was the father of modern communism?” Well, Johnny, Karl Marx was the father of modern communism. He also fathered seven children.’ Apropos of the Tom Waits song ‘On the Nickel’, the host said: ‘Waits has a raspy, gravelly singing voice, described by one fan as like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razorblades after not sleeping for three days. Or as I like to put it, beautiful.’ At one point during the 2006 Christmas broadcast, Dylan sent out his idea of season’s greetings: ‘To all of our friends listening in behind bars, we know you made mistakes, we’re sorry you have to be there, but Merry Chris
tmas to all of you, from all of us here at Theme Time Radio Hour.’ When the theme was ‘Flowers’, the host began: ‘Tonight we’re going to be talking about the most beautiful things on earth, the fine-smelling, colourful, bee-tempting world of flowers – the Bougainvillea, the Passion Flower, the Butterfly Cleradendron, the Angel’s Trumpets, the Firecracker plant. We’re going to be talking about Rosa rugosa, the Angel Face, All That Jazz, the Double Delight …’ So it went on, plant after plant, the names no doubt plucked from the internet by a researcher, yet turned into a weirdly hypnotic Dylan performance.

  If Theme Time ever had a serious point – the proposition is open to question – it might have had something to do with the DJ’s belief in music’s deeper meaning and importance, in the galvanic force that had once propelled him unstoppably out of Hibbing, Minnesota. No one knew better than Dylan that music could change lives; no one believed more sincerely that something important was being lost from the culture. When he grumbled about modern recording technology and its failure to capture the pure truth of a performance, he might as well have been bewailing the decline and fall of the West. It made him sound like a crusty reactionary, but Dylan believed he was defending something precious, something irreplaceable. So for three years the essence poured forth from the Abernathy Building of his mind: Muddy Waters and Buddy Holly; Ray Charles and George Jones; Van Morrison and Charlie Parker; Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson. There was an implicit question in all of this: why did no one else ever play these things? Amid it all, the artist did what he did best: he told stories to strangers. That said, only Dylan could have illustrated the theme of ‘Birds’ with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ followed by Al Jolson singing ‘When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’.