Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  He ploughed on, for better or worse, when some of the younger stars in his business were making no apologies for miming on stage to pre-recorded backing tracks. Their audiences wanted spectacle and music that sounded exactly like the downloaded noises in their headphones. Why risk screwing up? Dylan risked it year in and year out. At some point, therefore, he deserved to be taken at his word. Performance, he argued, was central to his artistic being. Why then would he do anything else? The trouble was that this artist’s public performances were sometimes bad and often, at this point, no better than dull. Only rarely did the shows reveal anything new about the songs. The desire to be on stage was less an artistic imperative than an end in itself.

  By 2008, it was inconceivable that the annual tours were being staged to meet a financial need. He didn’t put on all those concerts, as most of his surviving contemporaries put on concerts, just to plug a new piece of product or to celebrate some so-called reunion. He didn’t do it for the sake of critical appreciation. Despite all the complicated theories, he wasn’t out there, in country after country, simply to remake his songs or reinvent his art. No one needed to go all the way to Andorra to mess around with a melody. The judgement remains, nevertheless, that while the obdurate spirit was only too willing, the voice was weak and growing weaker. On any estimate not clouded by the conviction that Dylan could do no wrong, he had not staged an interesting tour in five years. Even the shop-worn claim that each attempt to reconfigure a melody or switch a few words in a lyric counted as a creative act no longer held up. Sometimes it seemed like a game, a mere distraction from the fact that in reality Dylan had nothing much else to offer. Yet still he needed to be Bob Dylan, showing himself to the world.

  In April 2008, the author of Chronicles would find himself on the receiving end of a ‘special’ Pulitzer Prize. This one was for his impact on popular music and American culture. Mention was also made of ‘poetic power’. His son Jesse collected the citation on Dylan’s behalf, but amid general applause a few doubts were raised. The artist was the first ‘rock musician’ to be honoured with a prize meant for writers and journalists, yet the Pulitzer people had failed to give him the award for poetry, or to select his prose work for attention. John Coltrane, too, had been given a posthumous ‘special citation’, not the music prize. Writing in the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff wondered how many people were ‘ambivalent, or even uneasy, and fretted that the grizzled troubadour’s authenticity was being co-opted’. The journalist contended that ‘Dylan aficionados’ were ‘apprehensive’ and called in aid the novelist Jonathan Lethem as one of those ‘who see the Pulitzer as another chapter in [Dylan’s] complicated history with the establishment, an ongoing dance of distancings and détentes’.1 Clearly, the artist had no such qualms.

  In the following month, Suze Rotolo would publish her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. The smiling girl on the second album’s cover had kept a resolute near-silence for decades, but having been misrepresented so often by strangers she had decided it was her turn to tell a few stories. Her relationship with Dylan had been brief enough, three years at the most, and as nothing to the forty-year marriage Rotolo had enjoyed with the film editor Enzo Bartoccioli, but no reviewer of her book would pause over those facts. Such was the way Dylan’s supereminence warped reality around anyone touched by the nimbus. Encroaching fame had been one reason for the failure of the affair, his juvenile selfishness aside, after Rotolo had refused to surrender her independence to the impossible demands of his career. Her book was more than a collection of superstar anecdotes, but it too was caught still in Dylan’s orbit, what with its title and its cover image taken from that famous Freewheelin’ photo-shoot on Jones Street, near the little apartment they had shared at 161 West 4th Street before the storm carried him away. Despite her best efforts, one brief episode had cast its shadow over Rotolo’s entire life. So how could anyone hope to live with this man? And where, as a human being, did that leave him?

  Like Dave Van Ronk, Rotolo had never left the Village. She would tell one interviewer that she and Dylan had kept in ‘occasional’ touch over the years, but that was all.2 Respect for their shared history had endured and he had made no attempt to interfere with her book. Nevertheless, she knew and he knew that the things his audiences wanted from songs such as ‘Don’t Think Twice’ were long lost in the deep past. Only the legends remained, but the legends were all-consuming. For decades, Suze had been an artist, teacher and activist in her own right, but when she died of lung cancer on 25 February 2011, obituaries would be published around the world for a single reason. That Rotolo had taught Dylan a little about politics and poetry and introduced him to the habit of sketching during a short romance in a bygone decade counted for more than a life well lived. Once upon a time, for a brief while, Suze had been privy to a handful of the secrets of which ‘Bob Dylan’ was composed. For most of those who would mark a woman’s death, nothing else would really matter. But then, she is not remembered in these pages for any other reason. Dylan would offer no public response to her book or, when the moment came, to a former lover’s passing.

  At some point between 7 September and 23 October, between the ending of one tour in Santa Barbara, California, and the resumption of performances in Victoria, British Columbia, he went back into the studios yet again. Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters in Malibu was about as close to home as Dylan could get, but the circumstances in which an album came about were as odd as any in his long recording career. With a certain impertinence, the French film director Olivier Dahan, fresh from the Oscar-winning success of La Vie en Rose, had asked the artist to contribute not one but ‘ten or more’ songs to a new picture to be called My Own Love Song. As he would tell the writer Douglas Brinkley, Dylan didn’t quite know what to make of this Gallic gall.

  At first this was unthinkable. I mean, I didn’t know what he was actually saying. [In faux French accent] ‘Could you write uh, ten, twelve songs?’ Ya know? I said, ‘Yeah, really? Is this guy serious?’ But he was so audacious! Usually you get asked to do, like, one song, and it’s at the end of the movie. But ten songs? Dahan wanted to put these songs throughout the movie and find different reasons for them. I just kind of gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing.3

  Dylan would call on the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter for help with all but one of the songs on what became Together Through Life. Once again, a collaborative effort would be treated as though it was all the artist’s own work. While Dylan was in the studio, meanwhile, another instalment in the Bootleg Series appeared that made the need for a co-writer seem faintly ludicrous. The set called Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 was volume eight in the never-ending project and the most striking chapter in what amounted to a counter-factual history of Dylan’s career. It was also, in any one of three released forms, a remarkable album in its own right. Those who talked of trilogies forgot to take this large piece of work into account. It was, as it remains, easily the equal of Modern Times and ‘Love and Theft’. There is a good case for saying that, whether as a single, double or horribly overpriced three-disc set, it was better than either of those albums.

  In part, nevertheless, it was another episode in the old story. Here were the works, sometimes in several forms, that Dylan had elected to discard or neglect. Here finally was ‘Red River Shore’ twice over. Here was ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, two tracks from the 1992 sessions with David Bromberg, the better attempts (three of them) at ‘Mississippi’ and a taste, albeit just one track, from the shows at the Supper Club in New York in 1993. Critics, it is fair to say, were delighted and perplexed, irritated and approving. Most of the irritation would arise from the fact that someone, whether within Columbia or the artist’s management, had let greed’s mask slip. While the two-CD Tell Tale Signs would be sold at a normal sort of price - $18.99 in America, £10 or so in Britain – the fans devoted enough to want the three-disc ‘deluxe edition’, with its flimsy bo
ok and a two-track piece of ‘bonus’ vinyl, would have to find $129.99 or its equivalent in their local currency. Most fans were furious. Even the diehards understood that they were being exploited simply because of their willingness to buy anything with Dylan’s name attached. These were the people most likely to covet the ‘deluxe’ package, after all, and these were the people being gouged. For some, the price seemed to mark what the artist really thought of his most devoted admirers.

  The chance offered late in October by the Hohner musical instrument company to purchase a ludicrous limited edition ‘complete set of seven Marine Band harmonicas in the natural keys of C, G, D, F, A, B, and E which have been played and hand-signed by Bob Dylan’ was taken as an insult added to injury, even by those with no aspirations to attempt a tune. Neither wit nor elegance was involved in this joke. Yet in the summer of 2013 bobdylan.com was still offering the ‘Bob Dylan Signature Series Harmonica’, gold-plated reed plate and all, for $120. Should anyone have desired the ‘Individually Hand-Signed Harp in a Carved Ebony Box’, the price given was $5,000. For those interested in owning the full seven-harmonica set, one of only twenty-five known to ‘exist worldwide’, with each instrument guaranteed to have felt the warm breath of the artist himself, the tab was $25,000.

  Tell Tale Signs was a mesmerising piece of art with a lot to say about the human condition. By 2008, the marketing effort for the Dylan brand also said something unmistakable about human nature. Fans who had stuck with the artist for four decades found the realisation hard to take. Those struggling to balance the poetry with the price tags found it impossible to explain. Yet the obvious explanation was probably the right explanation. Tell Tale Signs contained a couple of versions of the song called ‘Dignity’, the Oh Mercy piece that Dylan had failed to record to his satisfaction in New Orleans in 1989. Two lines run:

  I went down where the vultures feed

  I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need

  The last Theme Time, broadcast on 15 April 2009, also carried a whiff of corporate manoeuvring, coming as it did after XM Satellite Radio fell under new ownership. The reasons for the show being brought to an end were never made clear, though it had probably run its course in any case. The final theme, naturally enough, was ‘Goodbye’. Dylan said: ‘It’s one thing to make an entrance, it’s another thing entirely to get out alive. So for the next hour we’ll be checking all the exits, finding our way outta here … And this show might run a little long this week, but that’s OK. What are they gonna do, fire me?’ He was approaching the age of 68, but all the familiar talk of packing things in, of giving up on recording or touring or meeting the demands of the expanding Bob Dylan corporate enterprise, had disappeared. Like some monarch without an heir, he had no intention of abdicating. His life had become a bizarre mixture of high art and low commerce, of thoughtful statements on the state of man and the modern world interspersed with textbook examples of the kind of behaviour that gives stardom its disreputable name.

  *

  Together Through Life would turn out to be a big hit. Most critics would esteem it less highly than Modern Times, but most album buyers would pay no mind to another round of media feuilletons describing the writers’ long, personal and fraught relationships with the slippery art of Bob Dylan. Among reviewers there was a sense that the creative renaissance thesis had run its course. They had worked the idea almost to death, after all, without coming to terms with what it might truly signify. Memories of the depths to which the artist once had descended were beginning to dissipate. By May 2009 he was rich, famous, legendary, garlanded with awards and with his name on an album that had charged up the charts to number one in America, Britain and a host of other countries. According to the weird logic of music journalism, Dylan was therefore fair game for reviewers prepared to hit all the notes on the gamut between level-headed and empty-headed. One even managed to say that while the album offered ‘many great things’ it was ‘rendered underwhelming’ simply by the fact that some of the writer’s peers had praised it too highly.4

  Together Through Life contained fewer appropriations, borrowings and obvious thefts than hitherto. This reduced the opportunities for learned prosecutorial statements on the difference between intertextuality and dishonesty. On this album, Dylan sounded both droll and righteously angry. That tested critical systems in which a reviewer’s little printed stars were supposed to be worth a thousand words. Self-evidently, the artist had taken some 1950s Chicago blues standards for his templates and reworked songs associated with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Otis Rush and the like. Then the Tejano accordion of David Hidalgo, leader of the Chicano band Los Lobos, had been featured prominently, inevitably lending a Southern, borderland ambience to the songs. In Dylan’s poetic universe, borders are the places where things fall apart, where rules and laws break down and madness looms. Those presentiments ran through every track on Together Through Life.

  Even the songs which sounded affable drew on the belief that in the modern world social order is precarious. The title of the first track, ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothin’’, was another borrowing from Ovid in his exile. The next song was the scarcely ambiguous ‘Life is Hard’. ‘If You Ever Go to Houston’, its melody and chorus lifted wholesale from the traditional ‘Midnight Special’ that Lead Belly had made his own, seemed jolly enough until you gave some attention to the words. The speaker, this eternal tipsy wanderer, was not cheerful.

  I know these streets

  I’ve been here before

  I nearly got killed here

  During the Mexican war

  Similarly, ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’ seemed almost optimistic when set beside some of the album’s other offerings. It appeared to be a raffish love song, testimony to the enduring emotions apparently implied by the album’s title. ‘Life is for love,’ Dylan sang, welding clichés together, ‘and they say that love is blind.’ The next verse said something else entirely.

  Well now what’s the use in dreamin’?

  You got better things to do

  Dreams never did work for me anyway

  Even when they did come true

  If a single song characterised Dylan’s mood on Together Through Life it was the final track, the mocking, defiant, contemptuous ‘It’s All Good’, a cliché transformed into an indictment. It would be fascinating to know who actually composed each line of this lyric, but the artist performed the whole as his own. Those who still assumed that he had put ‘topical song’ behind him long before would have some difficulty explaining this rackety number.

  People in the country, people on the land

  Some of them so sick, they can hardly stand

  Everybody would move away if they could

  It’s hard to believe, but it’s all good

  The widow’s cry, the orphan’s plea

  Everywhere you look, more misery

  Come along with me, babe, I wish you would

  You know what I’m sayin’. It’s all good

  For the most part, the album worked well, flagging only when Dylan allowed his readings of the blues to become a little perfunctory, as in the pointless ‘Shake Shake Mama’, or the truly tiresome ‘Jolene’. At its best, Together Through Life possessed both an aura and a swagger that the artist had not displayed for a long time. The issue of authorship would not be resolved, least of all by Dylan, but certain of the best lines were invested with his familiar tone, even when he was leaning on a favourite writer such as Edgar Allen Poe. In ‘Forgetful Heart’, for example, there was the brief but lovely conclusion ‘The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door’. In ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’, meanwhile, Dylan (or Hunter) came up with a brilliant, gnomic verse that so delighted the country singer named he emblazoned it across his website.

  I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver

  And I’m reading James Joyce

  Some people they tell me

  I got the blood of the land in my voice

  One dim-witted lis
tener (this one) spent a week convinced that Dylan was making reference to the blood of the Lamb, though why it would be in his voice was never obvious. On the other hand, ‘blood of the land’, whatever it might mean, has no clear connection with country singers. There might be something involving Joyce, ‘blood and ouns’ and Ireland, but that’s a stretch. Dylan mentioned the novelist in Chronicles only to say that as a youth he had failed to make much headway with the prose. He recited the Joyce poem ‘Sleep now, O sleep now’ during Episode 28 (‘Sleep’) of Theme Time, but he recited a lot of poetry on the show. The Dubliner was a gifted piano player with a deep interest in music. Any help? On the other hand, ‘Joyce’ is one of the better rhymes for ‘voice’.

  As is often the case when Dylan offers a non sequitur, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The performance imposes its own logic. One large part of his gift has always been the ability to turn statements whose meanings are private (or mysterious even to him) into a kind of sense beyond sense. There is nothing accidental about how the effect is achieved. As David Hidalgo would remember the Together Through Life sessions, Dylan ‘was always rewriting the lyrics’. Robert Hunter seems to have played no part in this procedure. The idea that the artist had taken on a collaborator because he was once again stuck for words is therefore nonsensical. In the studio, as the songs were shaped and reshaped, the only writer was Dylan. As Hidalgo would describe the process, ‘he has, you know, 20 verses that he’s got laid out, and he’ll pick and choose and rewrite while he’s going. It’s amazing to watch him work.’5

  In the end, Olivier Dahan got more Bob Dylan music for his wayward Renée Zellweger road movie than he could have dreamed possible. In addition to five tracks from the album, the artist came up with sixteen bits and pieces of incidental music and allowed cover versions of older songs such as ‘What Good Am I? and ‘Precious Angel’ to be used. On his own behalf, meanwhile, Dylan turned Together Through Life into a memorable oddity, a set that was vivid, energetic and, unmistakably, an old man’s album. In this case, the aged individual was dismayed by the world yet furiously defiant of all it could throw at him. Dylan was ageing on his own terms. In an account of an interview given in Paris to promote the album, he was described as a kind of tenacious anachronism, out of step with the times and proud of the fact.