by Bob Dylan
Harry Lorayne, however, was no match for Machiavelli. A few years earlier, I’d read The Prince and had liked it a lot. Most of what Machiavelli said made sense, but certain things stick out wrong—like when he offers the wisdom that it’s better to be feared than loved, it kind of makes you wonder if Machiavelli was thinking big. I know what he meant, but sometimes in life, someone who is loved can inspire more fear than Machiavelli ever dreamed of.
The record that we were working on was eventually indeed called New Morning (the title of one of the songs I’d composed for the MacLeish play) and it did have the photo of me and Vickie on it. The twelve-song record was released and the flow of reports came streaming in. Some critics would find the album to be lackluster and sentimental, soft in the head. Oh well. Others would triumph it as finally the old him is back. At last. That wasn’t saying much either. I took it all as a good sign. To be sure, the album itself had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo. All this was in what the critics would later refer to as my “middle period” and in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album—and it was. It would be the first of many.
The MacLeish play Scratch opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre on May 6, 1971, and closed two days later on May 8.
4
Oh Mercy
IT WAS 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage—it didn’t even feel like it was mine. I didn’t know what had befallen me, and this was a bizarre shift of fate. All potentialities had gone to pieces. With a hundred show dates scheduled for me starting in the spring it was uncertain that I would be able to perform. This was a sobering experience. It was now only January, but my hand was going to need plenty of time to heal and be rehabilitated. Staring out French windows into an overgrown garden, with a cast on my hand that went nearly to my elbow, I realized that my playing days might well have faded out. In some sense, it would have been fitting, for up ’til then I had been kidding myself, exploiting whatever talent I had beyond the breaking point. I’d known it for a while. Recently, though, the picture had changed and now the historical implications of the situation bothered me.
The public had been fed a steady diet of my complete recordings on disc for years, but my live performances never seemed to capture the inner spirit of the songs—had failed to put the spin on them. The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. My audience or future audience now would never be able to experience the newly plowed fields that I was about to enter. There were many reasons for this, reasons for the whiskey to have gone out of the bottle. Always prolific but never exact, too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I’d been following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know it.
Prior to this, things had changed and not in an abstract way. A few months earlier something out of the ordinary had occurred and I became aware of a certain set of dynamic principles by which my performances could be transformed. By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave—stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out. It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fire in the fireplace and the wind was making it roar. The veil had lifted. A tornado had come into the place at Christmastime, pushed all the fake Santa Clauses aside and swept away the rubble. It was mystifying why it had taken so long for this to happen. That it didn’t happen earlier is a damn shame. I also knew that I had written perfect lyrics to complement the style of music that I played. The previous ten years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I’d come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn’t keeping my word with myself. What that word was, I couldn’t exactly remember, but I knew it was back there somewhere. I tried to figure this out, but there didn’t seem to be any formula. Maybe if I had seen it coming, I could have fixed it in its tracks, but I didn’t. My performance days in heavy traffic had been grinding to a halt for a while, had almost come to a full stop. I had single-handedly shot myself in the foot too many times. It’s nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough. You have to deliver the goods, not waste your time and everybody else’s. I hadn’t actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed, almost was shut down and was supposed to be wide open. I hadn’t gone away yet. I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him. Now and again, I did try a few times, tried hard to force it. In nature there’s a remedy for everything and that’s where I’d usually go hunting for it. I’d find myself on a houseboat, a floating mobile home, hoping to hear a voice—crawling at slow speed—nosed up on a protective beach at night in the wilderness—moose, bear, deer around—the elusive timber wolf not so far off, calm summer evenings listening to the call of the loon. Think things out. But it was no use. I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn’t dump the stuff. Wherever I am, I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. You name it. I can’t shake it. Stepping out of the woods, people see me coming. I knew what they were thinking. I have to take things for what they were worth.
I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill. If I wasn’t careful I could end up ranting and raving in shouting matches with the wall. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future—an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.
I had written and recorded so many songs, but it wasn’t like I was playing many of them. I think I was only up to the task of about twenty or so. The rest were too cryptic, too darkly driven, and I was no longer capable of doing anything radically creative with them. It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat. I couldn’t understand where they came from. The glow was gone and the match had burned right to the end. I was going through the motions. Try as I might, the engines wouldn’t start.
Benmont Tench, one of the musicians in Petty’s band, would always be asking me, almost pleadingly, about including different numbers in the show. “Chimes of Freedom”—can we try that? Or what about “My Back Pages”? Or “Spanish Harlem Incident”? And I’d always be making some lame excuse. Actually, I don’t know who was making the excuse, for I had closed the door on my own self. The problem was that after relying so long on instinct and intuition, both these ladies had turned into vultures and were sucking me dry. Even spontaneity had become a blind goat. My haystacks weren’t tied down and I was beginning to fear the wind.
The tour with Petty was broken up into parts and during one of the layoffs, one of the organizers, Elliot Roberts, had set up some shows for me to do with The Grateful Dead. I needed to go rehearse with the band for these shows, so I went to San Rafael to meet with The Dead. I thought it would be as easy as jumping rope. After an hour or so, it becam
e clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates. I had no feelings for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them might have been only sung once anyway, the time that they’d been recorded. There were so many that I couldn’t tell which was which—I might even get the words to some mixed up with others. I needed sets of lyrics to understand what they were talking about, and when I saw the lyrics, especially to the older, more obscure songs, I couldn’t see how I could get this stuff off emotionally.
I felt like a goon and didn’t want to stick around. The whole thing might have been a mistake. I’d have to go someplace for the mentally ill and think about it. After saying that I’d left something at the hotel, I stepped back outside onto Front Street and started walking, put my head down against the drizzling rain. I wasn’t planning on going back. If you have to lie, you should do it quickly and as well as you can. I started up the street—maybe four or five or six blocks went by and then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead. Walking past the door of a tiny bar, I looked in and saw that the musicians were playing at the opposite end of the room. It was raining and there were few people inside. One of them was laughing at something. It looked like the last stop on the train to nowhere and the air was filled with cigarette smoke. Something was calling to me to come in and I entered, walked along the long, narrow bar to where the jazz cats were playing in the back on a raised platform in front of a brick wall. I got within four feet of the stage and just stood there against the bar, ordered a gin and tonic and faced the singer. An older man, he wore a mohair suit, flat cap with a little brim and shiny necktie. The drummer had a rancher’s Stetson on and the bassist and pianist were neatly dressed. They played jazz ballads, stuff like “Time on My Hands” and “Gloomy Sunday.” The singer reminded me of Billy Eckstine. He wasn’t very forceful, but he didn’t have to be; he was relaxed, but he sang with natural power. Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. It was like he was saying, “You should do it this way.” All of a sudden, I understood something faster than I ever did before. I could feel how he worked at getting his power, what he was doing to get at it. I knew where the power was coming from and it wasn’t his voice, though the voice brought me sharply back to myself. I used to do this thing, I’m thinking. It was a long time ago and it had been automatic. No one had ever taught me. This technique was so elemental, so simple and I’d forgotten. It was like I’d forgotten how to button my own pants. I wondered if I could still do it. I wanted at least a chance to try. If I could in any way get close to handling this technique, I could get off this marathon stunt ride.
Returning to The Dead’s rehearsal hall as if nothing had happened, I picked it up where we had left off, couldn’t wait to get started—taking one of the songs that they wanted to do, seeing if I could sing it using the same method that the old singer used. I had a premonition something would happen. At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain. That had never happened before. It burned, but I was awake. The scheme wasn’t sewed up too tight, would need a lot of stitches, but I grasped the idea. I had to concentrate like mad because I was having to maneuver more than one stratagem at the same time, but now I knew I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words. This was revelatory. I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it. Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me. I had that old jazz singer to thank.
I rejoined Petty for what was to be the final run of a long, drawn-out tour and told Tom’s band that if they wanted to play anything, just tell me and we would do it. We started up in the Middle East on that run with two shows in Israel, one in Tel Aviv and one in Jerusalem, the next one in Switzerland and the next one in Italy. In these first four shows I sang eighty different songs, never repeating one, just to see if I could do it. It seemed easy. The angles I was using were unwieldy but highly effective. Because of this different formulaic approach to the vocal technique, my voice never got blown out and I could sing forever without fatigue.
Night after night it was like I was on cruise control. Regardless of all this, I was still planning to quit…retire from the scene. I hadn’t planned to take it any further, hadn’t talked myself out of that—I didn’t figure I had much of an audience anyway. Even on this tour, as big as the crowds were, Petty was drawing most of the people. Before the Petty shows I hadn’t been going on the road consistently anyway. It was tedious having to assemble and disassemble bands for a thirty- or forty-show run. It had become monotonous. My performances were an act, and the rituals were boring me. Even at the Petty shows I’d see the people in the crowd and they’d look like cutouts from a shooting gallery, there was no connection to them—just subjects at random. I was sick of it—sick of living in a mirage. It was time to break it off. The thought of retirement didn’t bother me at all. I’d shaken hands with the idea and had gotten comfortable with it. The only thing that had changed from then ’til now was that performing now wasn’t taking anything out of me. I was sailing along.
Then suddenly, one night in Locarno, Switzerland, at the Piazza Grande Locarno, it all fell apart. For an instant I fell into a black hole. The stage was outdoors and the wind was blowing gales, the kind of night that can blow everything away. I opened my mouth to sing and the air tightened up—vocal presence was extinguished and nothing came out. The techniques weren’t working. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had it down so well, yet it was just another trick. There’s no pleasure in getting caught in a situation like this. You can get a panic attack. You’re in front of thirty thousand people and they’re staring at you and nothing is coming out. Things can really get stupid. Figuring I had nothing to lose and not needing to take any precautions, I conjured up some different type of mechanism to jump-start the other techniques that weren’t working. I just did it automatically out of thin air, cast my own spell to drive out the devil. Instantly, it was like a thoroughbred had charged through the gates. Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension. Even I was surprised. It left me kind of shaky. Immediately, I was flying high. This new thing had taken place right in front of everybody’s eyes. A difference in energy might have been perceived, but that was about all. Nobody would have noticed that a metamorphosis had taken place. Now the energy was coming from a hundred different angles, completely unpredictable ones. I had a new faculty and it seemed to surpass all the other human requirements. If I ever wanted a different purpose, I had one. It was like I’d become a new performer, an unknown one in the true sense of the word. In more than thirty years of performing, I had never seen this place before, never been here. If I didn’t exist, someone would have to have invented me.
The shows with Petty finished up in December, and I saw that instead of being stranded somewhere at the end of the story, I was actually in the prelude to the beginning of another one. I could put my decision to retire on hold. It might be interesting to start up again, put myself in the service of the public. I also knew that it would take years to perfect and refine this idiom, but because of my fame and reputation, the opportunity would be there. It seemed like the right time for it. After the tour, I was sitting in London at the St. James’s Club with Elliot Roberts, who had engineered both the Petty shows and the Dead shows. I told him I needed to work two hundred show dates the next year. Elliot was pragmatic, said that I should take a couple of years off and then come back.
“The picture
is perfect like it is,” he said. “Let it be.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not perfect and I have to correct it.”
I poured the beer from the last bottle into two glasses and listened to him say that it might be more practical to wait at least ’til spring, give him more of a chance to get it together.
“All right,” I told him. “That’s good.”
“I’ll get you the band, too,” he said.
“Sure, I don’t mind.” I thought that was fantastic. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, that somebody else would find me the band. That would take a big weight off. I also told him that I needed him to book a similar amount of shows in the same towns the following year and also the year after that—a three-year schedule of more or less the same towns. I figured it would take me at least three years to get to the beginning, to find the right audience, or for the right audience to find me. The reason I thought it would take three years was that after the first year a lot of the older people wouldn’t be coming back, but younger fans would bring their friends the second year so attendance would be just about equal. And in the third year, those people would also bring their friends and it would form the nucleus of my future audience. The fact that some of my songs were more than twenty years old wouldn’t matter. I’d have to start at the bottom and I wasn’t even on the bottom yet. There was nothing evolutionary about what I was about to do, no one could have expected it. Without knowing as much, I had a gut feeling that I had created a new genre, a style that didn’t exist as of yet and one that would be entirely my own. All the cylinders were working and the vehicle was for hire. I definitely needed a new audience because my audience at that time had more or less grown up on my records and was past the point of accepting me as a new artist and this was understandable. In many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was. My fame was immense, could fill a football stadium, but it was like having some weird diploma that won’t get you into any college. Promoters didn’t want to touch me, either. They’d been burned often in the past and the anger hadn’t gone out of them. “I’m all for you,” they might say, “but I can’t do it.” In reality I was just above a club act. Could hardly fill small theaters. There weren’t any alchemic shortcuts—critics could dismiss me easily, too, so I wouldn’t be able to depend on them to tell my tale. Most music journalists had become nothing more than a public relations staff anyway. I would have to rely on word of mouth. I’d rely on that like my life depended on it. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire, doesn’t take “no” for an answer. I wished I was at least twenty years younger, wished that I had just dropped on the scene all over again. But what could you do? I would have liked some help, but I didn’t expect any. I’d been around too long for things like that. I was going to do like Roberts had said—wait until spring. I’d go home knowing that I was on the threshold of something—maybe not as pure as heaven’s rain, but something anyway, and that whatever I was on the threshold of was going to deepen as the years went on.