The Dylanologists (15 page)

Then he got down to business. He wanted them to do something for him: start a fan club. Caroline and Kait were perplexed. Was he serious? Though there had never been an official club, there were a lot of fan communities. Wanted Man in England. The Cambridge Bob Dylan Society. The Dylan Pool, an online forum that ran a contest to guess which songs the singer would play onstage. The Usenet group rec.music.dylan and its offspring, the Exchange Dylan Lyrics Internet Service, or EDLIS, whose members met up at many concerts. Expecting Rain, a clearinghouse for Dylan news run by a man near the Arctic Circle in Norway.

Dylan told Caroline and Kait they needed to spread the word. He performed for people like them—people who understood the songs and why he still traveled the globe singing them. The media got it wrong.

Sure thing, they told him. Whatever you want.

Back out front, they giggled throughout the show. When they got home they built a website and launched the Bob Dylan Fan Club.

Dylan never called.

6

Michelle Engert, transcriber of the
Blood on the Tracks
notebook and tour regular in the early 1990s, couldn't think of anything she wanted less than to meet Dylan. During her four years on the road, she went out of her way to
not
make contact with him. One night in Germany after a concert, Michelle's friends stopped at a gas station in the middle of the night on the trip between towns. She walked through the sliding doors of the convenience store to buy some bottled water. She looked up and found herself face-to-face with Dylan. Startled, she turned around and went right back to the car. She didn't even say hello to be polite. He was known to be mercurial and moody even with his bandmates and friends. Sometimes he could be the best friend in the world, people said; other times he could be rude or silent. What if they met and Dylan treated Michelle cruelly? She would never be able to enjoy the music again.

Michelle stumbled into the orbit of the tour regulars when she was only eighteen. She had moved out of her parents' home and gotten a job at a hair salon, but she had a major case of wanderlust. A friend introduced her to Keith Gubitz and Ray Cougle, who took her out west to see Dylan in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. She met Bev Martin and eventually fell in with Glen and Madge and their band of tourgoers. She was absorbed into the tribe, even though she was decades younger.

She had an uncanny knack for getting a spot front and center. She might slip in a side door unnoticed before the venue opened. Or at a general admission show she'd bat her eyelashes at a guy up at the front and tell him how she'd driven all the way in from Chicago and she'd only seen Dylan a few times and could she scoot in here? They always said yes. She was young and attractive, with long black hair and alabaster skin. She would chat up strangers at the front of the line until there was no question she would be going in with them instead of heading to the back. She once went so far as to set up a row of chairs for herself and her pals between the stage and the actual front row, and somehow no one stopped her. She also became close to people in Dylan's circle, the crew and the musicians and the security. In a jam she'd beg them for help. She always got in, by hook or by crook.

In 1993, word spread that Dylan was going to play two nights at the tiny Supper Club in Manhattan, an acoustic performance that would be professionally filmed. All of the regulars sprang into action to get passes. They were free, but scarce: two per person. Fans started lining up the day before the tickets were available. But not everybody could get there in time—Glen and Madge had to arrange flights—so one of them started hiring people from a homeless shelter across the street. They paid guys $200 to wait around in line all night. Everyone scored tickets.

Michelle got inside early with help from her friend, the sound engineer, and she watched the rehearsals crouched down under the mixing board. When the doors opened she had a head start, and she helped the rest of the regulars as they dashed for the tables up front.

It was at the Supper Club that she and Dylan shared a moment. She would never forget it; it was hard to say whether he would even remember it. The band started in on “One More Cup of Coffee,” a song Dylan recorded in 1975. He could not recall the first line, so he turned to his bass player, Tony Garnier, who shrugged.

“Your breath is sweet!” Michelle called out.

Dylan looked over, smiled, and sang the song. After what Michelle thought was the last song of the night, she grabbed the set list off the stage, only to have Dylan return, and as she went to put the list back he called her over. “Okay,” he said, “now I want you to tell me the first line of ‘I Shall Be Released.'” She was overjoyed. It was the sweetest acknowledgment. She was twenty-two, and she wondered if the very best moment of her life had already happened.

Once, after several years of traveling, Michelle had a conversation with Dylan's guitar player at the time, Bucky Baxter, over breakfast at a German hotel.

“When are you going to get your own life?” he asked her. “When are you going to go and do something? Because you can't do this forever.”

The idea stuck in her brain and weakened her resolve to stay with the tour. Then somewhere in Florida she finally decided that Baxter was right. She needed more from life than she could get being a full-time concertgoer. She got off the road and enrolled in college.

Dylan's songs had taught her something about love and politics, and about the power struggles in the world. They made her think about things from the underdog's point of view. The songs pulled her into American history. Dylan listened to Guthrie, so she did, too, and you can't listen to Guthrie without learning something about the Great Depression and the suffering of the dust bowl. “Bob brought me there,” she said. “Because he cared about it, I wanted to know what it was about. You either connect or you don't, and I did.”

When it came time to choose a topic for her undergraduate thesis, Michelle decided to go to the Mexican border and interview
maquiladora
laborers, who worked long hours for low wages to manufacture products for foreign markets. She couldn't stomach the idea that the things she bought in Chicago were cheap because they were made by people working at cut rates. She decided to go to law school, and when she graduated she wanted to sue the corporations on behalf of these and other impoverished workers. She realized soon enough that she wouldn't be able to do that right out of the classroom, but she found something else that made her feel like she was serving society: public defender.

Michelle left the highway with street smarts. She learned how to be independent and fearless. She learned how to deal with people who were savvier than she was.

Nobody would have believed it in a million years, but she was sure of it: Dylan had made her a better lawyer.

7

In Glen's basement, an entire wall is given over to Dylan CDs. He collects a recording of every show, though he has less interest in listening to them these days; baseball, fantasy and the real thing, is his obsession. Over the years, when people shared recordings with Glen, he would jot down who taped the show and which songs Dylan played. That grew into
Tangled Up in Tapes
, a discography of underground recordings that earned him a measure of fame in the Dylan fan universe. Once, a woman came up to him on the road, and when he told her his name she said, “
The
Glen Dundas?” He couldn't lie: He got a small charge from that. He might never have survived life in his little frozen Canadian town if not for all those nights following Dylan.

One year, a
Los Angeles Times
music critic met Glen at a show, and Glen gave a copy of
Tangled
to the man, who then handed it to Dylan when they sat down for an interview. Dylan flipped through Glen's book for a moment and handed it back. “I've already been all those places and done all those things,” he told the reporter. “Now, if you ever find a book out there that's going to tell me where I'm
going
, I might be interested.”

A quarter century after he started, he was still touring, and most of the world had no idea. Fifty years after he left Minnesota, people could still go and see him play. Those who studied Dylan's music had a hard time wrapping their arms around the unpredictable mass of live performances. He said he had no choice. He made it sound like he'd become addicted. He said he wouldn't retire until he couldn't do it anymore. “It's as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I'm driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it,” he told one journalist in 1997. “I'm mortified to be on the stage. But then again, it's the only place where I'm happy. It's the only place you can be who you want to be.”

As time went on, some of the road regulars began to pass away. The survivors would write tributes and go to funerals. A lot of serious fans had long ago stopped going on the road to follow the tour as they once had—Glen and Madge included—and they could only shake their heads in wonder that Dylan, in his seventies, was still taking his act from city to city. Like clockwork, a new year arrived and new tour dates were announced. Beijing and Hong Kong. Brooklyn and Philadelphia. São Paolo and Buenos Aires. It really had become never ending, until it began to feel as if Dylan's road show would somehow outlast them all.

6

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

I
n September 2001, Dylan released an album with so many personalities that, a decade later, people were still trying to figure out who was who.
“Love and Theft”
choogled and swung. It sashayed. It burst into barroom rowdiness. There were bad jokes. There was Shakespearean burlesque and enough swagger for an army. “It speaks in a noble language,” Dylan said cryptically as he sent the record out into the world. “It speaks of the issues or the ideals of an age in some nation, and hopefully, it would also speak across the ages.” In case anyone thought about taking it too seriously, he also declared it a new greatest-hits record. “Without the hits; not yet anyway.”

It was the second new release of what will come to be regarded, presumably, as Late Dylan. When the era dawned with the release of
Time Out of Mind
in 1997, he had gone seven years without releasing an album of originals. It was the longest gap of his career, so long that some people wondered if he had given up songwriting forever—Dylan included. “I really thought I was through making records,” he recalled later. One reason was that he couldn't write the kind of songs he wanted. He would sketch out a few verses, then lose the thread and abandon the song. “Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks,” he told one interviewer. “It's something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. You've got to program your brain not to think too much.” During this pause, Dylan immersed himself in the sort of traditional music he had loved since his days in Minneapolis and Greenwich Village. He had long been an aficionado of the hissy, antique recordings of early American artists: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, the Carter Family, the Memphis Jug Band, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, all those mysterious figures from generations past. Those songs were the roots of the music he grew up hearing, and they became the foundation of his own music. When the Never Ending Tour began in 1988, he sprinkled his sets with British, Scottish, and Irish folk ballads, rural blues, spirituals, and country standards. In 1992 and 1993, he set up in his garage studio in Malibu and, alone with an acoustic guitar and harmonicas, recorded two albums of traditional music, songs like “Frankie & Albert,” “Delia,” and “Ragged & Dirty.” Late Dylan flowered from this rich soil. He rediscovered his urge to write.

But Dylan needed more than mere inspiration from the antediluvian songs; he needed the words themselves. His originals on
Time Out of Mind
were scattered with antecedents. “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” drew from familiar folk songs (“Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” “Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad”) as well as a handful of songs that could be found by flipping through Alan Lomax's
The Folk Songs of North America
. The title came from “The Old Ark's A-Moverin'” (page 475), and distinctive phrases from “John the Revelator” (480), “Miss Mary Jane” (498), and “Buck-Eye ­Rabbit” (504).

Four years on,
“Love and Theft”
went even further. The album was the logical conclusion of a musical career spent repurposing—a true mother lode of quotation. The title apparently came from academia, a book about blackface minstrelsy by an English ­professor at the University of Virginia. Just as the minstrels twisted black culture out of shape, so Dylan was now doing with what he was recycling. More studious fans, who didn't listen to new Dylan songs so much as dissect them, noticed a line from bluesman Robert Johnson, a bit of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” a snippet of Woody Guthrie, and a quote from W.C. Fields. (“It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast.”) Somebody spotted Virgil. Admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald caught dialogue cribbed from
The Great Gatsby
: “ ‘You can't repeat the past.' ‘Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!'” Like the quotation marks around the record's title, his pilfering of that exchange between Fitzgerald's Nick ­Carraway and Jay Gatsby was a neatly nested in-joke. What with the antiquated musical styles and the borrowed words, everything about
“Love and Theft”
had to do with the past making claims on the present.

But two years after the record's release, Dylan's audience learned that his use of other material on
“Love and Theft”
was more wide-ranging and peculiar than it had first appeared. That summer, an English schoolteacher from Dylan's native Minnesota was poking around in a bookstore in Fukuoka, a teeming harbor city in southern Japan. He picked up an oral history of Asian mobsters,
Confessions of a Yakuza
, by Junichi Saga. It told the stories of the country's elaborately tattooed gangsters, men who live by their own code. (If they do something dishonorable, for one thing, they cannot just issue an abject apology; they must cut off a pinky.) On the book's first page, a mobster proclaims, “My old man would sit there like a feudal lord.”

Reading this, the teacher, Chris Johnson, felt a rush of recognition. The words may as well have been highlighted, he said later. Johnson had listened dozens of times to the
“Love and Theft”
song “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” which is not unlike having an incoherent conversation with a crazy man you meet sitting on a bench in front of a general store, a man who insists on sharing an unexpurgated picture of the cumulus drifting through his mind. He wishes he could be with his second cousin, now and forever. He is “listening for footsteps” but he doesn't hear anything. Don't screw with him or he'll kill you right dead, understand? “My old man,” he grumbles, “he's like some feudal
lawd
.”

One match could be coincidence, but Johnson was intrigued, and he brought the book home. By the time he reached the last page, he had discovered more than a dozen likenesses, on “Floater” and other songs. His surprising find merited a story in the
Wall Street Journal
, with the newspaper raising the specter of wrongdoing by noting the recent exposure of plagiarism by historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. But Saga felt flattered that Dylan had read his words, and his publisher only wanted a blurb from the musician for the next printing. Sales of the book jumped.

The discovery raised so many questions. It was one thing for Dylan to reuse ancient melodies, folk lyrics, and blues riffs. But taking random lines from an unknown book published halfway around the globe—that seemed like appropriation of a different magnitude. Were there other such thefts? Was Dylan trying to get away with them, or did he expect fans and scholars to catch on? Above all: Why?

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a music fan named Scott Warmuth read about the yakuza discovery, and he was astounded. Over the next decade, he would spend a lot of free time trying to answer the vexing questions about Dylan's borrowings. A rabbit hole seemed to open that summer in 2003 and swallow Scott up. On
“Love and Theft,”
Dylan recycled lines from so many different places that one writer guessed every word of it would eventually be traced back to another source. But it was not just that record. The more Scott dug into the writing of Late Dylan—post-1997 songs, the 2003 movie
Masked and Anonymous,
the 2004 memoir
Chronicles
—the more he thought the game went even deeper than anyone had realized.

2

In October 1961, Dylan visited the Folklore Center, a small storefront in Greenwich Village that was the hub of the folk music revival in the city. The man who ran the shop, Izzy Young, was arranging for Dylan to play the Carnegie Chapter Hall, and needing a proper program to give attendees the night of the show, he asked the young singer to come in for a short interview. Dylan, twenty that spring, was about to sign a deal with Columbia Records, and they got to talking about what he would play when he went in for his first professional recording session. His early repertoire was mostly borrowed blues and folk and old spirituals; the handful of “originals” he'd written at the time were straight from the Guthrie mold. He told Young he had about twenty songs ready to put down on tape. “Some stuff I've written. Some stuff I've discovered and some stuff I stole,” he said. “That's about it.”

Fifty years on, when he was an old man with six hundred songs to his credit, he could have said much the same, and it would have been just as true.

One of his first originals was “Song to Woody,” a tribute to Guthrie built on the chassis of one of his hero's songs, “1913 Massacre.” His next three records borrowed traditional lyrics and melodies for songs that would be instant classics, like “Blowin' in the Wind,” “Girl from the North Country,” and “Masters of War.” It was no secret. Any musician in the Village folk scene knew the old songs that Dylan used as templates. That was how it was done. These songs had been passed on through the ages. They were there, free, for the taking. That was the folk tradition. Guthrie had told Dylan his secret: Just take some song and start messing around with it, and soon enough you'll have your own. Many times Dylan didn't even do that much. He let the original melody and some of the words show through like old layers of paint on a weathered house.

Soon, Dylan was incorporating other material. Michael Gray, whose
Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan
examined Dylan's songwriting in granular detail, conducted an exhaustive analysis of the musician's use of pre–World War II blues lyrics. Studying a concordance of commercial blues records from 1920–42, Gray found that 1960s Dylan, so hip with his sunglasses, so mysteriously avant-garde, had been performing with “the cloak of the blues around him.” His roots were antique, rural, Southern. The signs were all there for anyone paying attention. In that photo on the cover of 1965's
Bringing It All Back Home
, the piles of records sitting around Dylan included Robert Johnson's
King of the Delta Blues Singers
. He named his next LP after the thoroughfare connecting the fountainhead of the blues to the north: Highway 61 runs from the Mississippi Delta through Clarksdale and Memphis and clear up through Dylan's birthplace, Duluth, Minnesota. That
Revisited
should've been a clue about what was at work.

When Gray looked over the blues concordance after listening to Dylan records hundreds of times, he had the strangest experience. “To put it wrong way first, I kept coming across bits of Bob Dylan,” he said. “I came to realize Dylan was a closet blues freak.” Dylan took ancient blues lines and sneaked them into songs, sometimes word for word, sometimes with a twist. Gray found the line “Sugar for sugar, salt for salt . . . it's gonna be your own damned fault,” from Dylan's “Crash on the Levee” (1967), on a song that Rabbit Brown had recorded in 1927 and included on a popular folk music anthology. It had first sounded to Gray like drug slang, or “Dylanesque playful weirdness.” Dylan used “mama” to mean “lover” (not “mother”) like the blues singers did. “Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident,” a positively Dylanesque verse from “Pledging My Time” on
Blonde on Blonde
, echoed something Skip James, Robert Johnson, and Blind Willie McTell sang more than thirty years prior. The harmonica opening is like Jimmy Reed circa 1957. The melody is the same as the Mississippi Sheiks' “Sitting on Top of the World” and Johnson's “Come On in My Kitchen.” Dylan “takes from the blues because he loves it,” Gray wrote presciently in a book published a year
before “Love and Theft”
went on sale, “and then makes of it something his own.”

Dylan wasn't doing anything blues and folk singers hadn't always done. Songs were handed down and passed around, mutating as they went, half remembered, patched together with spare parts. Stock phrases migrated from one song to another. Sometimes the new lyrics made sense; sometimes they became non sequiturs.

Gray studied literary criticism in college, and in his book he also plumbed Dylan's borrowings from poetry and fiction. The exquisite line in Dylan's “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” about wanting to lay with his lover once again came from a poem written five hundred years earlier. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” didn't just have the same ironic spirit as Robert Browning, but also some of the same line endings. It struck Gray that a century before Dylan rhymed “sandals,” “scandals,” and “handles,” the English poet had done so. It said something about Dylan's mash-up methods that the song also mimicked Chuck Berry's “Too Much Monkey Business.”

“I like to think of it as deepening a resonance,” Gray said. He saw Dylan taking things from the entire back catalog of human culture, and regenerating them. He was finding the innate poetry of a line and releasing it. “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He's created something out of something else. You can't make something from nothing.”

Dylan didn't say much about this publicly, even on the occasions when he was asked. He did say once that when he read poems, like Shakespeare's sonnets, he heard guitar accompaniment. “I always keep thinking,
What kind of song would this be?
” The reports of his appropriations circulated in fanzines and dense, small-press studies. They were too picayune for mainstream publications. In 1985, Dylan came out with
Empire Burlesque
, a record beloved by no one, given its gloopy sound, but subjected to the fans' fine-toothed combs nonetheless. They found extensive borrowings from classic films like
Key Largo
and
The Hustler
. John Bauldie, editor of the
Telegraph
fanzine, got a chance to quiz Dylan about it at a London press conference in 1986. He asked Dylan whether he had seen
The Maltese Falcon
before writing the songs. “It was full of lines that sounded as though you could have written them,” he said.