Quite a bit, since he, more than any other artist, raised the possibility that folk music and rock & roll could have political impact. “Right,” says Dylan, “and I’m proud of that.”
And the reason questions like these keep coming up is because many of us aren’t so sure where he stands these days—in fact, some critics have charged that, with songs like “Slow Train” and “Union Sundown,” he’s even moved a bit to the right.
Dylan muses over the remark in silence for a moment. “Well, for me,” he begins, “there is no right and there is no left. There’s truth and there’s untruth, y’know? There’s honesty and there’s hypocrisy. Look in the Bible: You don’t see nothing about right or left. Other people might have other ideas about things, but I don’t, because I’m not that smart. I hate to keep beating people over the head with the Bible, but that’s the only instrument I know, the only thing that stays true.”
Does it disturb him that there seem to be so many preachers these days who claim that to be a good Christian one must also be a political conservative?
“Conservative? Well, don’t forget, Jesus said that it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. I mean, is that conservative? I don’t know, I’ve heard a lot of preachers say how God wants everybody to be wealthy and healthy. Well, it doesn’t say that in the Bible. You can twist anybody’s words, but that’s only for fools and people who follow fools. If you’re entangled in the snares of this world, which everybody is . . . ”
Petty comes into the room and asks Dylan to come hear the final overdubs. Dylan likes what he hears, then decides to take one more pass at the lead vocal. This time, apparently, he nails it. “Don’t ever try to change me/I been in this thing too long/There’s nothing you can say or do/To make me think I’m wrong,” he snarls at the song’s outset, and while it is hardly the most inviting line one has ever heard him sing, tonight he seems to render it with a fitting passion.
AGAIN, 1986. Another midnight in Hollywood, and Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers are clustered in a cavernous room at the old Zoetrope Studios, working out a harmonica part to “License to Kill,” when Dylan suddenly begins playing a different, oddly haunting piece of music. Gradually, the random tones he is blowing begin to take a familiar shape, and it becomes evident that he’s playing a plaintive, bluesy variation of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” Keyboardist Benmont Tench is the first to recognize the melody, and quickly embellishes it with a graceful piano part; Petty catches the drift and underscores Dylan’s harmonica with some strong, sharp chord strokes. Soon, the entire band, which tonight includes guitarist Al Kooper, is seizing Dylan’s urge and transforming the song into a full and passionate performance. Dylan never sings the lyrics himself but instead signals a backup singer to take the lead, and immediately “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” becomes a full-fledged, driving spiritual.
Five minutes later, the moment has passed. According to Petty and Tench, Dylan’s rehearsals are often like this: inventive versions of wondrous songs come and go and are never heard again, except in those rare times when they may be conjured onstage. In a way, an instance like this leaves one wishing that every show in the True Confessions Tour were simply another rehearsal: Dylan’s impulses are so sure-handed and imaginative, they’re practically matchless.
Trying to get Dylan to talk about where such moments come from—or trying to persuade him to take them to the stage—is, as one might expect, not that easy. “I’m not sure if people really want to hear that sort of thing from me,” he says, smiling ingenuously. Then he perches himself on an equipment case and puts his hands into his pockets, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Quickly, his face brightens. “Hey,” he says, pulling a tape from his pocket, “wanna hear the best album of the year?” He holds a cassette of AKA Grafitti Man, an album by poet John Trudell and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. “Only people like Lou Reed and John Doe can dream about doing work like this. Most don’t have enough talent.”
Dylan has his sound engineer cue the tape to a song about Elvis Presley. It is a long, stirring track about the threat that so many originally perceived in Presley’s manner and the promise so many others discovered in his music. “We heard Elvis’s song for the first time/Then we made up our own mind,” recites Trudell at one point, followed by a lovely, blue guitar solo from Davis that quotes “Love Me Tender.” Dylan grins at the line, then shakes his head with delight. “Man,” he says, “that’s about all anybody ever needs to say about Elvis Presley.”
I wonder if Dylan realizes that the line could also have been written about him—that millions of us heard his songs, and that those songs not only inspired our own but, in some deep-felt place, almost seemed to be our own. But before there is even time to raise the question, Dylan has put on his coat and is on his way across the room.
IT IS NOW twelve years later, 1998, and Bob Dylan—presently in his late fifties—is still an active figure in rock & roll. Over the last several years he has been busier than at any time since the mid-1960s, releasing several collections of new recordings—even at one point writing and singing with the first major group he has ever joined (the Traveling Wilburys, including George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and the late Roy Orbison).
Yet despite this activity, and despite the enduring influence of his 1960s work, until 1997 the modern pop world had lost much of its fascination with Dylan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artists like Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Public Enemy, Metallica, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Beck, Pearl Jam, U2, Courtney Love, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and Master P all produced (more or less) vital work that has transformed what popular music is about and what it might accomplish, and some of that work affected the culture at large, fueling ongoing social and political debate. Dylan hadn’t made music to equal that effect for many years, nor had he really tried to. At best, he tried occasionally to render work that tapped into pop’s commercial and technological vogues (such as Empire Burlesque and 1989’s Oh Mercy), or he mounted tours designed to interact with the massive audiences that his backing bands attracted (such as his 1980s ventures with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). More typically, he produced records that many observers regarded as haphazard and uncommitted (like Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove, and 1990’s Under the Red Sky—though to my tastes, they are among his best latter-day records and hold up wonderfully). In the early 1990s, he also released a mesmerizing set recorded for MTV, Bob Dylan Unplugged, plus two all-acoustic albums of folk material by other artists, Good as I Been to You and the exceptional World Gone Wrong. The latter two records feature some of the most deeply felt, spectral singing of Dylan’s entire career—the equal of his best vocals on Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and Blood on the Tracks. (They also feature his all-time best liner notes. “STACK A LEE,” he writes “is Frank Hutchinson’s version. what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality through public acclaim.” Later he writes: “LONE PILGRIM is from an old Doc Watson record. what attracts me to the song is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point. salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.”)
Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong remind me of something Dylan said during our first conversation, back in 1985. We had been talking about the music of Bruce Springsteen and Dylan said: “Bruce knows where he comes from—he has taken what everybody else has done and made his own thing out of it—and that’s great. But somebody will come along after Bruce, say ten or twenty years from now, and maybe they’ll be looking to Bruce as their primary model and somehow miss the fact that his music came from Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie. In other words, all they’re gonna get is Bruce; they’re not gonna get what Bruce got.
“If you copy somebody—and there’s nothing wrong with that—the top rule should be to go back and copy the gu
y that was there first. It’s like all the people who copied me over the years, too many of them just got me, they didn’t get what I got.” Over thirty years after Bob Dylan’s first album (which was also a testament to his folk sources), Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong worked as reminders of what the singer “got”—and still gets—from American folk music’s timeless mysteries and depths.
In addition, by 1997 Dylan had been touring almost incessantly for over a generation. Beyond his stylistic, political, philosophical, and personal changes, beyond the sheer weight of his legend, Dylan continued to play music simply because, in any season, on almost any given night, it is what he would prefer to be doing; it wasn’t just a career action, but instead, a necessary way of living—as if he had returned to the restless troubadour life that he effectively renounced following his motorcycle accident. And yet Dylan’s reclamation amounted to one of the best-kept secrets in modern music. In the early and mid-1990s, in a period when popular music achieved an all-time saturation effect in the media—when numerous network and cable entertainment outlets pumped the sounds and looks and news of pop into our homes on an around-the-clock basis—Bob Dylan worked underneath the pop radar level at the same moment that he was, once again, making some of the most remarkable music of the time. In a low-key yet determined way, Dylan invested himself in his music’s sustaining power perhaps more than ever before. Whereas in his tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, Dylan sometimes seemed to be casting about for a clear sense of his purpose and whereas in his tours with the G. E. Smith band, he semed to want to tear through his songs as if finally to flatten them, in the mid-1990s, Dylan once again played as an itinerant bandleader in firm control of his art’s textures, depths, and contexts—and at the same time willing to see to what lengths he might push it all to. Accompanied by mandolin and steel guitar player Bucky Baxter, bassist Tony Garnier, organist Brendan O’Brien, guitarist John Jackson, and drummer Winston Watson (O’Brien later departed, Jackson was replaced by Larry Campbell, and Watson was replaced by David Kemper), Dylan once more was playing his songs as if they were living moments—new possibilities waiting to be found, explored, explained, even questioned, rather than as if they were simply time-old obligations to be endured, then escaped.
On his best nights onstage, Dylan might take a song like “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” or “Desolation Row” and turn it upside down, filling it with new energy and craziness. Moments later, he may turn around and deliver a folk ballad like “One Too Many Mornings” with a heart-stopping grace, in a voice as sweet as the voice with which he first recorded it, over thirty years ago, or he could produce “John Brown” (for my money, his best antiwar song) and render it with a truly breathtaking force. In May 1998, I saw Dylan take the stage at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and cleave into “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (from the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde) with new rage, new thoughts, new rhythms, and a new melodic fancy. It was plain that Dylan and his current band had achieved an impressive brand of musical kinship, much like the quick-witted empathy that the singer once shared with the Band during their concert sprees of the 1960s and 1970s. But in the late 1990s, Bob Dylan played “Tangled Up in Blue”—the Blood on the Tracks song about what lies past lost fellowship and ruined faith—with more ferocity and openness than any other song in his set. Night after night, he would push into a stinging flurry of acoustic guitar riffs and strums in midperformance, as if trying to break the song wide open and find its last meanings, and the audience would react as if they were hearing something of their own story in the turmoil of the music, and the lyric’s account of flight and renewal.
But as I say, these nightly triumphs went undernoted until the middle of 1997. Popular music magazines did not document Bob Dylan’s amazing resurgence. In fact, with their increasing dependence on the flawed science of demographics (which so often determines the content and cover-story decisions of many of today’s magazines), most pop media simply didn’t know how to write about a renewal that wasn’t trumpeted and orchestrated by a publicity stratagem. (Two notable exceptions: a series of mid-1990s articles written by Paul Williams in the reborn Crawdaddy! and Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic.) It took two events to bring popular attention back to Dylan. The first happened in late May 1997, when Bob Dylan entered a Manhattan hospital after suffering severe chest pains. Early reports claimed that the singer had been struck by a heart attack (it turned out that Dylan had incurred histoplasmosis, a severe but treatable fungal heart infection), and the day’s evening news and cable entertainment programs treated the illness as prelude to an obituary. Dylan didn’t die, of course, but he was hit harder with the illness than he let be known at the time. Still, the episode served as an admonition of sorts: Bob Dylan had changed the world, and the world had all but forgotten him.
The second turnaround event was an affirmation of Dylan’s songwriting and singing talent. In late 1997, Dylan released his first album of new songs in over six years, Time Out of Mind—a work that proved as devastating as it did captivating. In the song “Love Sick” in the album’s opening moments, a guitar uncoils and rustles and Dylan starts an announcement in a torn but dauntless voice: “I’m walking”—he pauses, as if looking over his shoulder, counting the footsteps in his own shadow, then continues—”through streets that are dead.” And for the next seventy-plus minutes, we walk with him through one of the most transfixing storyscapes in recent music or literature.
Though some critics saw Time Out of Mind as a report on personal romantic dissolution—like Blood on the Tracks twenty-two years earlier—Time’s intensity is broader and more complex than that. It is, in part, an assembly of songs about what remains after love’s wreckage: Dylan sings “Love Sick” in the voice of an older man, talking to himself about the last love he could afford to lose, wanting to let go of his hopes so he can also let go of his hates, and damning himself for not being able to abandon his memory. For singing this haunted by abandonment, you have to seek the lingering ghosts of Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, and Frank Sinatra. But Time Out of Mind goes beyond that. By the point of the album’s sixteen-minute closing epic of fatigue, humor, and gentle and mad reverie, “Highlands,” Dylan has been on the track of departure for so long that he arrives someplace new—someplace not quite like any other place he has taken himself or us before. Is it a place of rejuvenation? That seems too easy a claim, though this much is sure: Time Out of Mind keeps company with hard fates, and for all the darkness and hurt it divulges, its final effect is hard-boiled exhilaration. It is the work of a man looking at a new frontier—not the hopeful frontier seen through the eyes of an ambitious youth, but the unmapped frontier that lies beyond loss and disillusion.
Time Out of Mind is an end-of-the-century work from one of the few artists with the voice to give us one. And, like Dylan’s best post-1970s songs—including “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” “Man in the Long Black Coat,” “Under the Red Sky,” “Dark Eyes,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Death Is Not the End,” “Blind Willie McTell,” and “Dignity”—Time’s songs aren’t that much of a deviation from such earlier touchstones as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Shall Be Released.” That is, they are the testament of a man who isn’t aiming to change the world so much as he’s simply trying to find a way to abide all the heartbreaks and disenchantment that result from living in a morally centerless time. In the end, that stance may be no less courageous than the fiery iconoclasm that Dylan once proudly brandished.
IT IS TEMPTING, of course, to read some of Dylan’s recent music as a key to his current life and sensibility—but then that has long been the case. That’s because, in the aftermath of his motorcycle accident, Dylan became an intensely private man. He did not divulge much about the details of his life or the changing nature of his beliefs, and so when he made records like Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning—records that extolled the value of marriage and family as the redemptiv
e meaning of life, and that countless critics cited as Dylan’s withdrawal from “significance”—many fans assumed that these works also signified the truths of Dylan’s own private life. Later, in the mid-1970s, when Dylan’s marriage began to come apart, and he made Blood on the Tracks and Desire—with those records’ accounts of romantic loss and disenchantment—his songs seemed to be confessions of his suffering, and the pain appeared to suit his artistic talents better than domestic bliss had. Well, maybe . . . but also maybe not. The truth is, there is still virtually nothing that is publicly known about the history of Bob Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lowndes—how it came together, how it survived for a time, or how and why it ultimately failed.
Since that period, there is even less that is known about Dylan, beyond a few simple facts: namely, that he has never remarried and has apparently never found a love to take the place of his wife, except, perhaps, his love for God (though there were rumors in early 1998 that Dylan may have secretly remarried—maybe even more than once), and he reportedly maintains an attentive and close relationship with his children. Past that, Dylan’s personal life pretty much remains hidden; in fact, it is one of the best-guarded private lives that any famous celebrity has ever managed to achieve. Dylan’s friends do not disclose much about his secrets—except, that is, when they leak his unreleased recordings—and Dylan himself likes discussing these matters even less than he likes discussing the meanings of his songs.
Which only causes one to wonder: Are Dylan’s songs truly the key to Dylan? Does his life still pour into his work? And is he a happy man—or have his history and vision instead robbed him of the chance for peace and happiness forever, as some critics surmised with Time Out of Mind?
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