Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Dylan seems to have the [Great] American Songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web – anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual … If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube.6

  It was a slight exaggeration, but not too far wide of the mark. He who had once sailed effortlessly into a future only he could discern had put down his anchors. On the other hand, Together Through Life could make even Dylan’s eccentricities sound rational. There were plenty of those. In May, just after the album’s release, he was in the fair city of Liverpool for a show. To the evident astonishment of the National Trust, keepers of the modest house called Mendips in Woolton where John Lennon had been raised by his Aunt Mimi, one of the 14 curious tourists paying £16 for a bus trip and tour could claim to have known the dead Beatle personally. ‘He spent ages going through photo albums and was thrilled at all the memorabilia,’ reported a representative of the trust.7 Dylan had been spotted previously at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, but this excursion to Mendips and to Strawberry Fields was odd even by the artist’s standards. There he was, a performer who claimed to be sceptical of fame and fans, goggling at ‘memorabilia’ like a true prying fanatic. The artist who had asserted that there is no difference between nostalgia and death might even have seemed a little wistful. At least no one in Liverpool tried to arrest him for it.

  That honour would fall to Officer Kristie Buble in Long Branch, New Jersey, in July. The ‘eccentric-looking old man’ was causing no trouble as he strolled around in the rain on a summer’s day. On the other hand, the officer was only 22 and unfamiliar with the names and faces of people who were famous long before she was born. As Buble would tell ABC news: ‘I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something.’ Locals had reported ‘an old scruffy man acting suspiciously’. The young cop would confirm that detail, more or less. ‘He was acting very suspicious,’ she would say. ‘Not delusional, just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything.’ The suspect had no useful ID on him. When Buble therefore took him back to his hotel to investigate his paperwork, she felt it necessary to call her precinct to ‘check who Bob Dylan was’. After the laughter down the line from the station house had subsidised, the artist was free to go about his business.

  Journalists who thought they knew their man tried to turn a guess into a weird ‘fact’ by deciding that he had been wandering around looking for the house in which Bruce Springsteen had written Born to Run. Asked about the incident in an interview three years later, Dylan’s explanation was mundane: he had simply gone for a walk. ‘I guess in that neck of the woods they’re not used to seeing people walking in the rain,’ he said. ‘I was the only one on the street.’8 His ID was missing simply because ‘I wear so many changes of clothes all the time.’ Dylan’s mistake, if that’s the word, had been to forget that in a country obsessed with crime no one could act as though it was still 1958 in Hibbing, Minn. But even his run-in with Officer Buble was not the strangest episode in 2009 for one globally famous complete unknown.

  Towards the end of the summer, a rumour began to circulate within the Dylan-watching fraternity to the effect that he was recording again. Given his limited productivity in the twenty-first century, this was a surprise in itself. As ever, speculation and amateur investigations commenced. When the facts were established, they were treated by some earnest fans as a worse betrayal than a $129 price tag for a box set. A Christmas album: how could Dylan even contemplate such a surrender to the worst kind of crass commercialism, far less carry it through?

  He could and he did, much to the benefit of the charities Feeding America and Crisis in the UK, to whom all the album’s royalties were directed. Christmas in the Heart, a seasonal affair played (almost) entirely straight, was a gift to anyone who enjoyed the holiday and retained a sense of humour. It was no great surprise to discover that a lot of Dylan fans were lacking in that department. Quite what they had made of Theme Time Radio was therefore anyone’s guess. How they squared Dylan’s complicated religious affiliations with the discovery that, where Christmas was concerned, he was a middle-of-the-road Middle American who loved the entire affair is also likely to remain mysterious. But why would he not cherish the festival? The birth of his messiah was of no small importance to the artist.

  Christmas in the Heart – by David Hidalgo’s account entirely Dylan’s idea – did not labour that point when it appeared in October. Religiosity was notable by its absence. Equally, there was little of his usual sardonic bite to the artist’s treatments of standards and carols. Even when he cut loose with ‘Must Be Santa’, filming a truly demented video to accompany the track, he seemed to be evoking, not mocking, the polka bands of his Minnesota childhood. A few would remember that the song had once been a hit for Mitch Miller, the professionally bland Columbia producer who had led the old school’s chorus of contempt for ‘Hammond’s folly’ back in Dylan’s early days, but that had nothing to do with the spirit of the track, or of the album.

  On the internet, nevertheless, scandalised fans reacted as though the artist had contrived another Self Portrait (as though that would have been a bad idea). Not for the first time, many missed the point. Not for the first or the last time, their reluctance to accept that Dylan was entitled to autonomy, or just to his whims, was striking. Elvis had made Christmas albums; Springsteen had done Christmas songs: where was the by-law forbidding a wistful messianic Jew with a taste for tales of the apocalypse from participating in an all-American tradition? That such recordings, good or bad, were meanwhile as traditional as anything contrived by ‘folk process’ was a truth some fans were never likely to concede. Christmas in the Heart was fun: wholly innocent, daft and incongruous, but fun. It would get nowhere near to number one in America, but number 23 was a sight better than the result achieved by Under the Red Sky. And those charities, granted royalties in perpetuity, would benefit for many years to come.

  *

  On 9 February 2010, Dylan was back in the White House, this time to perform – he had never played the hall before – during a concert entitled ‘Songs of the Civil Rights Movement’. He sang ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ in a gentle, piano-backed version with an unusual air of quiet pride and even, though he claimed to despise the emotion, of nostalgia. An old man stood for a few minutes in a young man’s shoes. A veteran, voice cracking and striving, sang the words of a beginner for the sake of an African American president. It was an affecting moment, but it was also a reminder of just how much time had slipped away. In the second decade of the twenty-first century Dylan remained a modern artist, perhaps the most modern of them all, but he was also becoming a piece of history. There was no way to escape the contradictions lodged in that truth.

  Early in the summer, undaunted, he found a few more fresh pastures. Touring took him to Greece, Bulgaria, the republic that called itself Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and the Slovak Republic. In most of these concerts the artist who had made his earliest marks during the worst of the Cold War’s paranoia was bringing his music to formerly Communist countries for the first time. It made for an odd disjunction. In America and western Europe people were still turning up at Dylan concerts just to complain that he sounded nothing like his records. In Bucharest and Sofia, Skopje and Zagreb, they were trying to match the image of the aged man on stage with the tale of the most significant artistic figure in half a century. Just to complicate matters further, he gave them ‘Jolene’, trivial and dull, as an encore.

  Past and present were entangled. Bob Dylan, every last one of him, existed in a weird continuum. Each new instalment in the Bootleg Series – new for many, ancient for the artist – imposed its echoes on his existence, his image and his reputation. At every turn, all those previous Dylans infiltrated hi
s life. The question of identity, personal and artistic, was more complicated than anything Todd Haynes had imagined when he was writing I’m Not There. Bob Dylan seemed to exist at numerous points in time simultaneously.

  In September 2010, an exhibition of the 40 canvases he called the ‘Brazil Series’ opened at the National Gallery of Denmark. In October, another volume in the Bootleg Series, one entitled The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964, made its appearance. Anyone who knew nothing about the makers of these works would have had problems connecting one with the other. No amount of learned argument over ‘pictorial’ songs and narrative paintings – and there would be plenty of that until the uproar over the Asia Series commenced – solved this puzzle. Brutally, you could observe that the rough, mud-hued canvases shown in Denmark lacked clarity, drama and any real instinct for composition. That wasn’t often said about Bob Dylan songs, even the minor pieces taped at the start of the ’60s just to satisfy the youth’s publishers. Yet something more than lost time or a gulf in technique separated the two collections. The young singer getting his work down as fast as he could scribble the verses might have amounted to little more than a found identity, a personality assembled or imposed by circumstance. His songs, even the earliest, had chiselled out the contours of individuality with a madcap intensity. The 69-year-old painter displayed no personality of any kind. His canvases were less dispassionate than disengaged, less objective than inert. If Dylan had put his heart and soul into these images, evidence for the sacrifice was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that was what had attracted him to painting in the first place.

  The Copenhagen exhibition, though spared a fuss over plagiarism, was given what is known among polite critics as a mixed reception. Which is to say that those who staged the show at the Statens Museum for Kunst spoke proudly of their achievement and highly of their artist. The Danish press, on the other hand, were less than kind. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, the gallery’s curator, Kasper Monrad, reckoned that Dylan’s work had ‘ties to a figurative tradition that has remained vibrant up through the twentieth century’. The ‘painterly mode’ identified was meanwhile placed in line of descent ‘from French modernist painting of the 1920s’. John Elderfield, the Englishman who had served as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and who would become Dylan’s ambassador in the world of high-end galleries, wrote about ‘the imperatives of his visual imagination as it travels back and forth across the borderline between painting and song’.9 The names of famous artists, Matisse chief among them, were thrown around. Judging by press comment, the critics must have looked at different pictures entirely.

  According to agency reports, the daily Berlingske Tidende said: ‘When we talk about music, Bob Dylan is one of the great Picassos of the twentieth century, but this is not the case for his painting.’ The newspaper also believed that the Statens Museum had staged the exhibition ‘not because his canvases are good, but because he is Bob Dylan’. The financial journal Boersen was also unhappy with the national gallery for putting ‘financial interest ahead of artistic judgement’, knowing that the name would be a draw regardless of the quality of the work. In Information, an art history specialist named Peter Brix Soendergaard offered the opinion that ‘Bob Dylan paints like any other amateur, using a rather oafish figurative style. He is what we used to call a Sunday painter.’10

  In conspicuous contrast, bad reviews for The Witmark Demos were hard to find. Sales were pretty satisfactory too, taking Dylan to number 12 on the American chart. It was as though critics had forgotten just how good the young singer had been. That said, the 47 tracks possessed a ragged, unquenchable vitality that would have deserved success at any time. Among the juvenilia were sketches of some of the works – ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Times They Are a-Changin’ and ‘Tambourine Man’ among them – from which agreeable Albert Grossman had for years extracted fully 50 per cent of Dylan’s publishing earnings. The fact did not diminish the quality, or the sense of remembered and imagined excitement, of the Witmark set. Even those who knew the performances well enough from bootlegs were startled by the freshness after more than 40 years of the refurbished recordings. Once again, the Bootleg Series was demonstrating the extent and durability of Dylan’s achievement. The claim that he was an artist bigger than any era was becoming hard, if not impossible, to dispute. He had outlived many of his contemporaries and outlasted them all.

  The beginning of 2011 brought news that he was, in his own mind, a long way from done. Anyone who signs a six-book deal with his seventieth birthday approaching either has ambitions for longevity, or no interest in the issue of age. Dylan’s claims in 2006 that he was contemplating a second Chronicles volume were in any case confirmed. But half a dozen books? It seemed that the Proustian knack, once acquired, can become a habit. As it transpired, the artist had signed with Simon & Schuster to provide not one but two more books in the vein of Chronicles. A third book would ‘reportedly’ comprise samples of the wit and wisdom of Theme Time Radio Hour’s DJ, but details of the other promised volumes were not disclosed. That might have been just as well. No news report was indelicate enough to make much of the fact that almost seven years had elapsed between the appearance of Chronicles: Volume One and the signing of the six-book agreement. At that rate, the third book was liable to arrive as the author celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday. Asked in September 2012 if there would even be a second volume, Dylan’s first reply was ‘Oh, let’s hope so’.11 He then said that he was ‘always working on parts of it’, that he didn’t mind the writing, but found making time for rereading difficult. By the middle of 2013, in any case, there was no sign of Chronicles: Volume Two.

  He was an author, then, and he was a figurative artist. He was a stage performer and a living historical project. He was the recipient of more awards than you could fit into a U-Haul trailer, a movie composer for hire, available for acting jobs, radio, documentaries and TV advertising. He would blow briefly into very expensive harmonicas for sale and resale. He could be hired for the most select private engagements. In short, the making and recording of albums was just one line of work among many. The revenue stream it represented was a minor tributary, even if the flow had increased slightly since the appearance of Modern Times. But then, no one still produced records pell-mell, year in and year out, as they had in the 1960s. The few remaining conglomerates no longer wanted product in that kind of quantity. A specialist back-catalogue line such as the Bootleg Series, with no recording costs at stake and a guaranteed market of willing buyers, was a welcome exception. The fact remained that albums had ceased to be the cornerstones of Dylan’s business plan. They mattered only as works of art, for whatever that was worth.

  In this, he was no different from other stars of popular music in the early twenty-first century. There was no money to speak of in album sales, or so they said. The big bucks, the customary rewards, were to be had from the concert circuit: hence the extraordinary ticket prices being charged by the acts making their laser-lit homes in gigantic arenas.12 By the time Michael Jackson died of a self-inflicted heart attack in June 2009 he had sold 100 million records and blown hundreds of millions of dollars on toys and trash. At the end, his intended solution to his fantastically complicated financial problems was a scheme to stage no fewer than 50 concerts in succession at London’s 20,000-seat O2 Arena. According to promoters, Jackson would have made £5 million a show. Dylan had never been in that league. Equally, there was no sign that he had ever squandered his earnings in the style of the screwed-up maker of Thriller. (If anything, the artist had a certain reputation for being ‘careful’ with cash.) Yet the detail overlooked in all the award citations straining for eloquence with their talk of poetry and culture was that Dylan’s most profound gift had long been a secondary concern. When he felt moved to make an album he would apply himself, most of the time, with the same concentration he had brought to the task in his greatest days. But art was no longer his main business. Those who wrote the big books o
r argued over allusive imagery too often forgot an obvious truth.

  Nothing interrupted the tours. Time that could not be spared for prose revisions could always be found for those. At the beginning of April, Dylan set off on a month-long trip to the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. He began with another new country, known to most as Taiwan, known to itself as the Republic of China. No one in the western media was troubled by this choice of destination. In contrast, the artist’s next stop three days later, in another Chinese republic, the vast empire that claimed to be in the sole possession of its people, would set off one of those miniature typhoons of controversy that seemed to engulf Dylan periodically. Most of those involved, not least the artist himself, would miss the point of the argument entirely.

  According to some press reports – reports Dylan would later dismiss convincingly – shows in Beijing and Shanghai had been cancelled during the previous April after permission was refused by China’s Ministry of Culture. The Guardian, acting on information from Taiwanese promoters Brokers Brothers Herald, had said that the ministry ‘appeared wary of Dylan’s past as an icon of the counter-culture movement’.13 Yet on 6 April 2011, there he was on stage at the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing. This time The Guardian reported that the artist was ‘singing to the culture ministry’s tune’. In a story that was part report and part review, datelined on the night of the show, the paper ran an unsourced quote stating that the performance was ‘strictly according to an approved programme’. In other words, Dylan had allowed himself to be censored. If the story was true, he had agreed not to perform songs deemed provocative by an oppressive one-party regime. Worse, as the tale told by the Guardian and others stressed, this surrender had taken place in the week in which the admired dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been locked up.