Bob Dylan (35 page)

That old dank room is still there too, but no one else has been there for years; the singer would like company, but he can live without it. As Dylan told Richard Avedon’s collaborator Doon Arbus around the time “Highlands” was first being heard, “One of the feelings” of the old folk milieu “was that you were a part of a
very elite, special group of people that was outside and downtrodden. You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one . . . That’s been destroyed. I don’t know what destroyed it. Some people say that it’s still there. I hope it is . . . I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one, you know?”

 

Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” recorded 30 July 1965, with Harvey Brooks, bass, and Charlie McCoy, electric guitar. Included on
The Genuine Bootleg Series
(bootleg).

 

———. “Desolation Row,” with Charlie McCoy, acoustic guitar. From
Highway 61 Revisited
(Columbia, 1965).

 

———. “Desolation Row,” Los Angeles, 3 September 1965. Included on
We Had Seen a Lion
(VigOTone bootleg). With a fabulous concert review by Shirley Poston.

 

———. “Desolation Row,” Bristol, UK, 10 May 1966. Included on
Away from the Past
(Wild Wolf bootleg).

 

———. “Desolation Row,” recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, London, 27 May 1966. Included on
Genuine Live 1966
(Wild Wolf bootleg).

 

———. “Desolation Row,” recorded at Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966. From
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4—Bob Dylan Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall Concert”
(Columbia, 1998).

 

———. “Desolation Row.”
MTV Unplugged
(Columbia, 1995).

 

Al Kooper,
Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards
(1998). New York: Hal Leonard, updated edition, 2008.

 

Wilhelm Fränger,
The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951. On the triptych better known as
The Garden of Earthly Delights
(c. 1500), 30.

 

Doon Arbus, in Richard Avedon and Arbus,
The Sixties.
New York: Random House, 1999, 210.

 

The Superhuman Crew: Painting by James Ensor, Lyric by Bob Dylan,
edited by John Harris. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999. Ensor’s
Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889
orchestrated by the words to “Desolation Row.” The piece here was originally given as a talk at the Getty Museum on 14 October 1999 to mark the publication of Harris’s book.

12 June 2000

 

7) Bob Dylan: “Blowin’ in the Wind” (live) on
The Best of Bob Dylan, Volume 2
(Sony UK). In this seven-minute, undated 1990s “field recording” the song is less a message than an occasion for music, with a lot of guitar. The song itself is now blowing in the wind, and has long blown away from its author; on this night people have momentarily attached themselves to it, the author with little more claim to the composition than the audience. The confidence and condescension of a younger man—
Don’t you get it?—
have turned into the regret of an older one. The song is no oldie, though. Singing alongside Dylan, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell take the tune to a new, higher register, and suddenly “Blowin’ in the Wind” is not only an occasion for music, not when it’s daring the future to shut it up.

 

26 June 2000

 

7) Favorite Albums of Senatorial Candidates in Minnesota, from “So You Want to Be a Senator” questionnaire (
City Pages,
Minneapolis, May 31). Mike Ciresi (Democratic-Farmer-Labor, 54): “Ann’s Favorites” (wife’s compilation of his favorites); David
Daniels (Grassroots—party, not group—45): Bob Marley & the Wailers,
Natty Dread;
Leslie Davis (Independence, born 1937):
Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits;
Mark Dayton (DFL, 53): Jefferson Airplane,
Volunteers;
Dick Franson (DFL, 71): “All of Frank Sinatra’s albums”; James Gibson (Independence, 47): “my wedding album”; Jerry Janezich (DFL, 50): Meat Loaf,
Bat Out of Hell;
Steve Kelly

(DFL, 47): Mary Black,
Collected;
David Lillehaug (DFL, 46): Kansas,
Greatest Hits;
Steven Miles (DFL, 50): Bob Dylan,
Time Out of Mind;
Erik D. Pakieser (Libertarian, born 1969): Beastie Boys,
Paul’s Boutique,
Ice Cube,
Death Certificate,
Beatles’ “white album”; Ole Savior (DFL, 50): Rolling Stones, no album named; Rebecca Yanisch (DFL, 47): Van Morrison,
Moondance;
Rod Grams (Republican, incumbent): did not respond.
¹⁵

 

10 July 2000

 

5/6) Colson Whitehead:
The Intuitionist
(Anchor) and Bob Dylan: “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” from
the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991
(Columbia). Dylan’s weary 1966 piano demo is about whether or not to get on a train; Whitehead’s 1999 novel is a metaphysical mystery about elevator inspection; and these lines, from Whitehead’s gnostic textbook “‘Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two,’ by James Fulton,” could have been written to translate the song: “You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure.”

7 August 2000

 

10)
Bob Dylan: The American Troubadour,
directed by Stephen Crisman, written by Ben Robbins (A&E, Aug. 13). This two-hour documentary is a thrilling exercise in the legal doctrine of fair use. With no permissions forthcoming for any material controlled by its subject, let alone a contemporary interview, the drama proceeds according to occasional fragments of old recorded Q&A’s, enough panning of still photos to make you think the career in question predated the invention of motion pictures, never more than a single chorus of any given song, and a great deal of time devoted to the pronouncements of not very many talking heads, one of whom, Todd Gitlin, in the sixties a head of Students for a Democratic Society and currently a sociology professor at NYU, emerges as his generation’s David Halberstam. Around the edges are traces of an untold story: a circa-1958 audio tape of Dylan’s high-school combo the Golden Chords harmonizing on a piece of original doo-wop (“I’ll be true, I love you, yes I do”—after a moment it sounds just like Fargo’s Bobby Vee on his earliest Buddy Holly imitations) is really not that far from the 1967 basement tapes Dylan tune “Dontcha Tell Henry” as performed here by Levon Helm of the Band. At sixty he’s been through cancer and looks it. He sounds it: his barely audible rasp, mandolin clutched to his chest, calls up a simple music that will outlive its singers, not that people like Helm or Dylan seem likely to grant that death’s mortgage on their bodies ought to take priority over the music’s lien on their souls.

 

13 November 2000

 

1) Ethan and Joel Coen:
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Touchstone Films). Three white prisoners escape from a Mississippi chain gang and run straight into a series of blackouts about old-time music—starting when they stop their jalopy to pick up a young black man
in suit and tie, bluesman Tommy Johnson, fresh from selling his soul to the devil for guitar prowess and ready to rock. Unlike the younger Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson (“Cool Drink of Water Blues,” 1928, though here he’s given Skip James songs to play) actually bragged of the transaction. (What could be cooler?) When in the Coen Brothers’ version he’s seized by the Ku Klux Klan for ritual lynching, he figures it’s just payback coming sooner than he bargained for.

It’s a scene that recalls
The Birth of a Nation,
but so culturally blasphemous there are really no precedents for it. In a clearing in the dead of night, hundreds of Klansmen in pure white robes whirl about like a college marching band at halftime, executing lightning moves as if they were born to them. They come to rest in formation, facing a red-robed Grand Master. Johnson is brought before them—and then, from a high platform, from inside the Master’s mask, issues the most horrifying, the most full-bodied, the most perfect rendition of the ancient plea “Oh Death” imaginable. As the long, tangled song goes on, with no accompaniment but the audience, the victim, and the night, a lynching becomes a philosophy lesson—and the slapstick escape that follows takes off none of the chill.

 

2)
O Brother, Where Art Thou?—Music from the Original Soundtrack
(Mercury). Typically, the dynamism of the film doesn’t carry over into disembodied recordings—even if, with the torrential “Man of Constant Sorrow” that the cons plus Johnson cut in a radio station, it’s the same recording. Pick to click, among the modern recreations by the likes of Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, the Cox Family, and the Whites: running under the titles, Harry McClintock’s 1928 version of the hobo jungle anthem “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

 

3) November 3, from the ether: A friend writes: “I went to sleep when the networks called Florida for Bush, woke up ninety minutes or so later to see they were recalling it again, down to 500 votes at that point—and, shortly, someone cut to a shot of an Elvis
impersonator (in black street clothes, but with the sideburns/hair/ aviator glasses), presumably in Nashville, clasping his hands in silent prayer. It was that kind of night.”

 

4) Al Gore: Huntington, West Virginia (November 4). Lest we forget, as we will, at the close of the campaign, with Gore taking up George W. Bush’s truthful but (simply because of, in Bush’s mouth, the accidental nature of its truthfulness) bizarre claim that “The people in Washington want to treat Social Security like it’s some federal program,” Gore finally hit the note that had eluded him for so long: “It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was an expression of ingrained hostility, a preference on the other side for a dog-eat-dog, every-person-for-himself mentality that—” And here the words vanish into the next four years.

 

5) Bono: “Foreword” in
Q Dylan Q,
October 2000). “The best way to serve the age is to betray it,” Bono says of Bob Dylan, quoting Brendan Kennelly from
The Book of Judas.
He goes on: “The anachronism, really, is the ’60s. For the rest of his life he’s been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not. That’s it for me. He keeps undermining our urge to look into the future.”

 

6) Richard Carlin and Bob Carlin:
Southern Exposure: The Story of Southern Music in Words and Pictures
(Billboard Books). Mostly pictures, from the 1880s to the 1950s—pictures of musicians who made the music that in the 1920s was already the last word of another world. It’s the real world of
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
especially in one mottled, degenerating photo: it shows a dashingly handsome, dark-haired man with dark, hooded eyes looking you in the face under a broad-brimmed hat. Foulard tie, jacket, vest, watch chain: holding his five-string banjo, he is the dandy, the woman stealer. You wake up next to him and he’s already gone. In Warren Smith’s irresistibly slow, beckoning 1957 rockabilly tune he’s the man with a “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” but all through Lee Smith’s 1992 novel
The Devil’s Dream,
back from her to the Carter Family in 1940, making a circle with Bob Dylan’s 1992
Good As I Been to You,
he’s Black Jack Davey. Given what stories, regrets, laments, fond memories, or erotic dreams he might have left behind in Hope, Arkansas, where he stands as his picture is taken, sometime in the 1890s, he’s also Bill Clinton.

7/8) Kasimir Malevich:
Dynamic Suprematism,
1915/16, and Bill Woodrow:
Twin-Tub with Guitar,
1981, at the Tate Modern (London, through 2000). In a huge, insistently conceptual long walk through twentieth-century art, these pieces jumped out. In the
Manifesto Room of the History/Memory/Society sector, the old broadsides covering the walls shout and stamp their feet, announcing Futurism, the Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s New Theater, Suprematism itself, while off in a corner Wyndam Lewis is Blasting England to bits. Among a few other paintings is the Malevich, a tilted but upright triangle: it’s quiet, modest. From somewhere in Russia it pulls all the noisy declarations of the future into its own abstraction and silences them. In its abstraction, the piece at least seems to speak clearly—about the
ease
of remaking and rearranging the world, its constituent elements of life. If you keep looking, though, the triangle begins to seem like a figure, an idea, a person, someone with a name. With the bars and squares that score the triangle now arms, eyes, and hats, the figure gestures. It is now obese, absurd, threatening, its identity so obvious: Alfred Jarry’s loathed and loved Pere Ubu, in Jarry’s own woodcuts the same shape, the same fascist trod across whatever might be in his way—and now, with Ubu on the march into the New Day, somehow morally cleansed.