Bob Dylan (2 page)

The story I followed was, in its beginning, the story of Bob Dylan as he tried to transcend, match, avoid, deny, or escape what he’d already done. I was a fan; I looked for those dropped cigarettes. But if the achievement of the previous years was a given as I began to write, what was not a given was how the story unfolded, and how so far it has turned out. This chronicle really begins with Dylan’s 1970 double album
Self Portrait;
by the end of the year, the Beatles would be defunct; Jimi Hendrix, a great Bob Dylan fan and perhaps his greatest interpreter, in time maybe a partner, would be dead; and the notion of Bob Dylan as someone who could not open his mouth without telling his own kind of truth would be gone, too. So I began as a disbeliever: Is that all there is? This
can’t
be all that there is. One record, one show followed another as the seventies turned into the eighties, as Ford replaced Nixon and Carter Ford and Reagan Carter and all through those years Bob Dylan sang, “Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked”; for a time, I tried to convince myself that whatever the record or the show, it was as good as I wanted it to be, until the falsity became just too clear.

If the decline, a kind of public disappearance, became a given in itself, what was not was the almost biblical story the music would tell: that it would take Bob Dylan more than twenty years to play his way out of the trap set for him by his own, once-upon-a-time triumph, that after all that time of wandering in the desert of his own fame—that time, as Dylan once put it, explaining the imperatives
of folk music, by which he meant the Bible, by which he meant the mystery of plenty and famine, of “seven years of this and eight years of that”—that the old pop star, the antique icon, the dormant oracle, might then begin again as if from the beginning, with no limits to what he might say or how he might say it. There was no telling that this turn in the river would occur in 1992, with a quiet little album released on election day, carrying the cigarette-butt title
Good As I Been to You,
a collection of the kind of songs Bob Dylan was singing in coffeehouses, in friends’ apartments, before he ever stepped into a recording studio. It was an event that passed almost unnoticed, and which opened up the next two decades as fields in which anything was possible, where any new song could be discovered and any old song could be, in itself, the oracle that, once, people had taken the singer to be.

From that point on there was a new story to follow—and it was so strong, so surprising, that it cast everything that had preceded it in a new light. That is the arc of this book.

 

 

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people’s responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it was my way of doing that.

The pieces collected here begin with a rumor and end with a presidential election. There are reactions in the moment and long looks back for undiscovered stories. But more than anything there is an attempt to remain part of the conversation that Bob Dylan’s work has always created around itself: You have to hear this. Is he kidding? I can’t believe this.
You
won’t believe this—

A lot of the noise of that conversation is in the items scattered through the book from my column Real Life Rock Top 10, which I began writing in 1986 at the
Village Voice,
and has since migrated
to
Artforum, Salon, City Pages
in Minneapolis,
Interview,
and the
Believer,
where it is as I write here. From any particular column it might be a 2) reconstructing an advertisement, a 7) quoting someone’s letter or e-mail, along with a 1) for one song from an album and a 10) for another. But as much of that conversation is in longer pieces following the way a Bob Dylan song found its way into people’s lives, real, as with “High Water” after the terrorist attacks of 2001, or fictional, as with the episode of
Homicide
that was not ripped from the headlines but from “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

More than half of this book was written in the last thirteen years, both because that period in Bob Dylan’s career and work is infinitely interesting in its own right, and because what he’s done in those years has brought all of his previous work, heard and unheard, and all that lies behind it, back into play. There are pieces here I cannibalized in the course of writing other books, but that may have said more, or anyway something else, in their original and shorter form. There are any number of times when what I wrote was wrong—usually when I convinced myself something was better than it was—and in these pages I’m still wrong. I have edited to omit redundancies as best I could, but I haven’t gone back to make myself look smarter than I was, or for that matter to make myself look like a better writer. There are a few early pieces that are not here because they’re simply too puerile to see the light of day. But I stand behind everything that is here, even when it’s wrong—in the midst of a conversation, especially one I think many somehow knew would last their whole lives, the heat can’t always be separated from the light.

The conversation I’m speaking of ultimately goes back to Bob Dylan’s voice—his conversation with his audience, his songs, other people’s songs, and himself. It’s a conversation that has enlisted Ma Rainey and Roy Orbison, John F. Kennedy and Brigitte Bardot, Charlie Chaplin and Blind Willie McTell, Medgar Evers and Stagger Lee, Tom Paine and the Fifth Daughter on the Twelfth Night, Gene Austin and Robert Burns, Georgia Sam and Martin
Luther King, Jr., Lyndon Johnson and Diamond Joe, Arthur McBride and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Jack-a-Roe. Finally, in that conversation, I think Bob Dylan has kept his promise. Heedlessly, haltingly, clumsily, with mastery, from Hibbing, Minnesota, to wherever he might be playing tonight, from the age of twenty, when his public life began in New York, to almost fifty years later, he has worked as if his age meant nothing and his name less. He has moved from state to state and decade to decade as if nothing was certain, as if everything was up for grabs. The conversation in and around his music has for many made life more interesting than it would have otherwise been, more fun, more frustrating, and it has raised the stakes of the lives of those who have taken part.

This is a constant, and it is a constant subject of this book, by the happenstance of pieces following one after the other over more than four decades, the left hand likely not remembering what the right hand did in any one moment, but ending up holding the same albums and singles and books and movies and letters. The constant is Bob Dylan’s voice—I mean the physical thing, what you listen to. It’s not the pitch, the tone. In the songs that come to life, whether in 1962 with “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” or 2009 with “Forgetful Heart,” it’s the attack, the point of view, the way the voice enters a piece of music, what it does there, how it gets lost, how it gets out, how it remains the same, which is to say that voice remains unpredictable.

This is music as a game of three-card monte. It’s what happens in the curls in the words in “As I Went Out One Morning,” the heavy steps in the cadences of “Ain’t Talkin’,” when you are, suddenly, taken out of yourself, out of your house or your car or the street where you’re walking, into a place that you recognize but can’t name. It’s this ability to unsettle, to unhand the conventions by which anyone lives a life—what one expects to hear, say, be told, learn, love, or hate—that defines Bob Dylan’s voice, in the smallest and in the greatest sense. It’s the ability to bring the whole world into focus with the dramatization of a single
syllable—the way the word
care
drops off its line in “High Water” like someone quietly stepping out of a tenth-story window, or being pushed—and that I’ve tried to follow.

24 December 1968

 

Raised high above the audience were three paintings done in orange and red, somehow a confusion of the masks of comedy and tragedy, now in their own spotlights. The bass player, bending his instrument into circles, was bopping all over the stage, even in motion like a still photograph of the personality of movement which is the freedom of rock ’n’ roll. The singer was flashing a red axe at the lead guitarist, sending out the last lines of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” as he set up for the crash of notes that was sure to follow. They hit it; the two musicians whirled around the microphone, guitars only inches apart, fingers almost touching, the sounds climbing higher and up to the rafters, the roof getting in the way.

Moving out now, the singer twisted around with a grin for the crowd, the band on its own, building toward the final chorus, the singer framed by the tangles of his own hair, hands traveling fast over the red guitar:

That was Bob Dylan in the fall of 1965, over three years ago. Bob Dylan and the Hawks onstage—there’s been nothing like it before or since. Three years of memories, of waiting, scares of the end and false starts toward another chance. Will we remember the
thrill of that last time? Memories turn inward and return with legends, images too big to hold.

Legends are out of sight but not quite out of mind; they never intrude, but only emerge out of the day, off the streets, out of the walls. Legends are supposed to represent the pomposity of death, but they can tell jokes, too. The legend of the sightless blues singer used to mean a lot in Berkeley; somehow that story brought people into contact with suffering and creation on the road, down the American highway, maybe to the mountain men before the beaver were trapped out of the high streams, back to Oedipus and Homer, the man who walked but couldn’t see, the man carried by his own secret knowledge.

It got to be something of a cult, and cults don’t tell jokes. People turned around and laughed at their legends, and lo, out of Blind Lemon Jefferson came Blind Joe Death and the immortal Blind Ebbets Field. New legends were appearing, though, some that at times seemed too grand to speak with, figures with an innocent grandeur that somehow made you nervous. Such was the mood one night in the old Jabberwock in Berkeley.

The place was filled and it was late, time for that ever-recurring Berkeley rumor. One guy turned to another and began it. “I heard ...I heard that Dylan’s in town.” Two minutes, and everyone in the place had heard it as well. By itself, the process began to grow. “Somebody said he might show up here, don’t know yet...” Every time the door opened or closed heads turned and eyes brightened and then turned away. Before half an hour had passed the tension was almost unbearable.

Backstage, eager minds were plotting. A man stepped onto the platform. Quiet came, and he began to speak. “Tonight a very wonderful thing has happened. As some of you may know, someone who has created much of our finest music has arrived in Berkeley—a singer, a musician, a songwriter. As a special favor, he has agreed to do a song for us, but because of complications in his contract—I just can’t explain them right now—he cannot allow us to announce his name. But,” he winked, “I’m sure you all know who
I mean.” It was going to happen. Everybody beamed. The announcer retreated backstage, and returned. “I’ve just learned,” he said, “that because of those complications I just mentioned, B—, I mean,
he,
cannot actually appear in person. But”—and there was a pause—“he
will
perform!”

There was a great scuffling noise. Backstage, a figure was being lowered into a huge box, harmonica in hand. Out front, the audience edged closer. The announcer moved in for the kill. “And now, since he cannot actually appear in person, since we cannot actually pronounce his name, we bring you—
Blind Steamer Trunk!
” The enormous box was carried onto the stage, the lid propped up, and out of the old timbers and rusty hinges came a tantalizingly brief harmonica solo in the best Dylan style. The lid plopped down and the great box was borne way into the night. Blind Steamer Trunk belonged to the ages.

 

Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” on
Long Distance Operator
(Wanted Man bootleg, recorded Berkeley Community Theatre, 4 December 1965). An even hotter version can be found on
the bootleg series volume 4: Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
(Columbia, 1998, recorded Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966).

23 July 1970

 

Written and arranged by Greil Marcus
Chorus: Charles Perry, Jenny Marcus, Jann Wenner, Erik Bernstein,
Ed Ward, John Burks, Ralph J. Gleason, Langdon Winner, Bruce Miroff,
Richard Vaughn, and Mike Goodwin

 

(1) Sung by a female chorus, “All the Tired Horses” is a gorgeous piece of music, perhaps the most memorable song on this album. In an older form it was “All the Pretty Horses in the Yard”; now it could serve as the theme song to any classic western. Can you hear the organ standing in between the strings and voices?
Shane
comes into view, and
The Magnificent Seven:
gunmen over the hill and out of time still got to ride. It sounds like Barbara Stanwyck in
Forty Guns
singing, as a matter of fact.

The beauty of this painted signpost promises what its words belie, and the song’s question becomes the listener’s: he can’t ride when the horse is asleep in the meadow.

“I don’t know if I should keep playing this,” said the disc jockey, as the album made its debut on the radio. “Nobody’s calling in and saying they want to hear it or anything . . . usually when something like this happens people say ‘Hey, the new Dylan album,’ but not tonight.”