Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (15 page)

Campbell prescribes a meeting with a goddess – the ‘Queen Goddess of the World’, indeed – and sees nothing amiss with casting Woman as Temptress whose lure has to be ‘surpassed’ by the hero. Dylan-Levy seem to subscribe to this notion – ‘What drives me to you is what drives me insane’ – but their story ends with their hero’s return to his Isis. As for the quest’s reward, the treasure and boon: the tomb in the song is empty. As the artist sang: ‘There was no jewels, no nothin’, I felt I’d been had.’ The Dylan-Levy song is close to a parody, in fact, of Campbell’s theory. Their protagonist’s return, having dumped his dead companion ‘down in the hole’ and having ‘said a quick prayer’, does not fit with the allegedly immemorial narrative. In the slightly amended version given in
Lyrics: 1962–2001
, the relevant verse, by far the best in the song, runs:

Successful or not, ‘Isis’ showed Dylan to be dabbling with ideas on the border between poetry and religion. Whether of his own volition – he picked the title, after all – or because Levy had given ‘Isis’ its direction with, allegedly, that first line, Dylan was striking out on a new course. However you read the tale, it treats the union of two people as a metaphysical, even
sacred
bond. In 1975, this was new for Dylan. It went far beyond the more-or-less conventional pieties of ‘Wedding Song’ on
Planet Waves
. It also aligned the artist, fast approaching the end of his actual marriage, with the credulous transcendentalist wing of his post-’60s generation. Only one outcome was likely.

In fact,
Desire
provided evidence that he was a lot closer to encountering his God in 1975 than anyone cared to notice at the time. After the throwaway (if only) ‘Mozambique’, a track that probably justified its existence because it involved the only truly uptempo pop song from which a useful recording had been extracted, came ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. The refrain, ‘One more cup of coffee for the road / One more cup of coffee ’fore I go / To the valley below’, seemed like an obvious enough comment on death and possible resurrection. The next track all but shouted its meaning, yet few bothered to listen.

‘Oh, Sister’, the album’s fifth song, was instead regarded as an attempt – an obtuse and maladroit attempt – to come to grips with emerging feminism. Such it was, in part. As such, it was a big improvement on the entirely witless ‘Rita May’. But Dylan-Levy did more than attempt to address, in a self-serving kind of way, the Women’s
Liberation Movement and second-wave feminism in the United States in the 1970s. The authors had awoken late to that, in any case. By 1975, books such as Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
and Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
(both 1970) were long established as bestsellers, the visible and vocal expressions of a global upheaval. Dylan, never previously mistaken for a born feminist, was only crashing the party, clumsily, when he sang, ‘Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you?’

In reality, the Dylan-Levy song, if it counted as any sort of serious response to feminism, embodied an ancient sort of paternalism in the joint authors’ treatment of their ‘sister’. As Michael Gray pointed out in his
Song & Dance Man III
(2000), and more explicitly in his
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
(2006), with this piece ‘Dylan’s religious focus is on its way to the conventionally Christian’.
³⁵
You could even argue that Dylan and his focus have arrived intact at that righteous position with ‘Oh, Sister’. Then you would find yourself agreeing with Gray’s rueful observation that ‘it’s hard to understand how we could have ignored [this] at the time’.

No one figured Dylan for a believer in 1975. No one wanted to believe it,
despite
the words coming out of his mouth. Mystical ‘Isis’ was one thing, a reflection, perhaps, of the decade’s spiritual fads and fancies.
Christianity
? Here it was, nevertheless. Each of the first three verses of ‘Oh, Sister’ ended, respectively, as follows:

Whatever the definitions of sisterhood and brotherhood, this was paternalism from the biblical source, with Emmylou Harris providing dutiful backing vocals as Rivera’s violin played second fiddle to the preacher. The ‘theory’ that Dylan was instead engaged in a kind of songwriter’s call-and-response with Joan Baez because of something she
might
have written seems flimsy. When you begin to talk of being ‘mysteriously saved’ you are not raking over old love affairs. Religious or not, the result was twee.

On the album, in another unsettling contrast, the long ballad called ‘Joey’ followed. If ‘Hurricane’ was held to be controversial because of its disputed relationship with the truth, here was real myth-making, though not in the sense understood by Joseph Campbell. The Joseph in this song, ‘Mad Joey’ Gallo, might have been portrayed as a victim of his society and of his times, just like Rubin Carter. Dylan-Levy, or Levy alone, might have been attempting to depict an individual ‘Always on the outside of whatever side there was’, an honourable man seeking only ‘peace and quiet’, hounded by the police and gunned down while trying ‘to protect his family’. The merest brush with the facts of the career of a lifelong vicious mobster dispelled that nonsense. The facts, in any case, were no secret.

Musically, ‘Joey’ strikes a nicely wistful, elegiac note, even if the ‘Little Italy’ accordion might test the patience of a few Italian Americans. Once again, it is possible to assert that if Dylan-Levy had stuck to outright fiction they would have stayed clear of trouble. This piece of Mafia chic was asking for that trouble. Americans, New Yorkers above all, were hardly ignorant of organised crime by the middle of the 1970s. The testimony of the informer Joseph Valachi during the 1963 McClellan Hearings had exposed the existence of the Mob’s ruling ‘Five Families’. Those hearings had led to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations legislation in 1970. The 1972 House Select Committee on Crime had then investigated the connections between gangsters and horse racing. Thanks to the word of another informer, one Joe ‘The Baron’ Barboza, allegations – vigorously denied – had been made against the original superstar, Francis Albert Sinatra. ‘Joey’ said nothing new about hoodlums. Its treatment of bloody reality was the problem.

The fact that Francis Ford Coppola’s film of
The Godfather
had appeared in 1972, and had brought forth a masterful sequel in 1974, is clearly relevant. Call it an influence. The first film of the eventual trilogy was based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel. That had taken its title, in turn, from an expression first heard publicly during Valachi’s 1963 testimony. There was something to be said, thought author and film-maker, about honour beyond the law, about bonds of loyalty transcending society’s demands, about working to survive and surviving to work. Dylan-Levy followed along behind. As the latter would tell Larry Sloman, one of the ‘wonderful’ things about the co-written songs of
Desire
was that they gave Dylan ‘a chance to do some acting’.
³⁶

On one reading, Coppola created an allegory of American capitalism.
According to several other readings, he romanticised, even glorified, men of unspeakable violence who corrupted everything they touched. A fair verdict might be that the director managed both feats. Where’s the contradiction, after all? The movies are explicit in portraying the corruption and the destruction, physical and moral, to which inevitably corrupted ‘honour’ must lead. Equally, the pictures are fiction: parallels might be drawn and interpretations made, but Coppola and Puzo were free to reject them. Nevertheless, when you cast Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as your stars, Hollywood’s dazzling lustre overwhelms most of the distinctions between light and shade, squalid and heroic.

When you name your song for a real person and employ documented incidents from his career, a burden of proof descends. If you have made your reputation as a truth-teller, meanwhile, responsibilities are unavoidable. Dylan-Levy did not linger much over moral gradations. They made an outlaw hero not from a Billy the Kid, a figure mired in legend, but from an individual who had been shot to pieces – back, elbow, backside – in that clam house on New York’s Mulberry Street in 1972. They (or Levy) even introduced an improbable godfather of their own at Gallo’s grave, come ‘to say one last goodbye to the son that he could not save’.

The real Joey had launched a Mob war and died as a result. Whatever his literary pursuits in prison, whatever his friendships with incarcerated black men (who ‘seemed to understand / What it’s like to be in society with a shackle on your hand’), he was a hit man, an enforcer, a racketeer preying on the weak, and an individual party to certain scenes of mayhem that might well have inspired passages in
The Godfather
. Gallo read Tolstoy; it didn’t make him a hero.

As though to demonstrate how deluded celebrity folk can be, ‘Joey’ appeared while America was enduring a justified panic over rising crime rates. In 1960, 288,460 crimes of violence had been recorded, 9,110 of them murders. By 1970, the equivalent figures were 738,820 and 16,000; by 1975, still climbing, the numbers said 1,039,710 and 20,510.
³⁷
The romanticising of Gallo in such a circumstance was crass. To call ‘Joey’ ‘just a song’, to argue that all artists blur the difference between truth and fiction, to say that art has its prerogatives, does not answer the case for a singer with Dylan’s pedigree, even if he did not contribute a line to the finished piece. The argument would ring hollow, in any case, when in ‘Hurricane’ he was hammering away at the need for unpolluted truth and demanding an end to lies.

In his
Village Voice
comment on
Desire
, early in March 1976, Lester Bangs would peel ‘Joey’ apart.
³⁸
Otherwise forgiving of outrageous outlaw behaviour (much of it his own), Bangs made the obvious point that certain New York gangsters had been given sufficient cause to ‘blow away’ Joe Gallo. The crook had been the opposite of an innocent man swept along by events. Crazy Lester didn’t care for the song at any price – ‘ponderous, sloppy, numbingly boring’ – or for Dylan, most of the time. Among other things, a writer long disenchanted with his former hero had decreed
Blood on the Tracks
to be an instrument, variety unspecified, of self-abuse. The artist scrambled most of the big Bangs theories about ‘rock’ and its ineffable potency.

In the
Voice
, the journalist nevertheless asserted that Gallo had been a wife-beating thug who was fed the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine routinely, by the same suffering wife, after his release from prison. Bangs also managed to speak to Jacques Levy, who appears not to have mentioned that Dylan might have contributed little, if anything, to the lyrics of ‘Joey’. Instead, the co-writer asserted, as if it was news, that, ‘You know, Bob has always had a thing about outlaws.’ Levy then asked if anyone would call John Wesley Harding ‘a small-time hoodlum’ (in point of fact, the real Wes Hardin was a murderous medium-scale hoodlum). Dylan’s collaborator further defended Gallo as no psychopath and, indeed, right on cue, as ‘a victim of society’.

Bangs, for his part, offered the view that Dylan was simply lazy, that
Desire
was ‘an exploitation record’. In answer to the wholly rhetorical question, ‘What is Dylan thinking?’ relentless Lester got the jump on his own last coma – 30 April 1982, wrong drugs in the wrong order at the wrong Manhattan time in an apartment above a Chinese restaurant – by asserting of the artist that ‘he is not thinking at all’. In the case of ‘Joey’, there was some truth in the statement. The only journalistic trick missed by Bangs involved another simple question. When even the murdering subliterates of the Mafia knew an individual by playful nicknames involving ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’, what hope was there for the usual, folk-type liberal Greenwich Village defence of a poor boy forced to live outside the law?

In
Rolling Stone
’s review of the album, also in March, Dave Marsh would demonstrate that the once-deferential magazine was no longer awestruck on demand. Reviewers, some of them, were losing patience with Dylan’s presumed right to please himself.
Desire
had become an odd and confused piece of work. Of ‘Joey’ and the artist, Marsh – who otherwise praised the album highly – wrote that the track was ‘musically seductive’, but argued that

his neatest ellipsis is to avoid all mention of the public execution of Joseph Colombo [the crime family boss survived the execution attempt], which the evidence suggests the Gallo mob ordered. In which case it is hardly relevant that Joey Gallo did not carry a personal weapon [reports of his killing state that he drew a handgun when the attack began] and much more understandable that he himself was gunned down in front of his family. Gallo was an outlaw, in fact, only in the sense that he refused to live by the rules of the Mob … Is an intellectual Mafioso really that much more heroic than an unlettered hood? This is elitist sophistry of the worst sort, contemptible even when it comes from an outlaw radlib like Bob Dylan.

Sheer fiction saved the record. Clinton Heylin describes ‘Black Diamond Bay’ as ‘something of a lost gem’, apparently because Dylan has never played the song in concert.
³⁹
If the artist pays no attention, why should we? A degree of neglect for the piece might also have arisen from first impressions – everyone’s first impressions – of the
Desire
album, when any long ballad was liable to wind up becalmed in the wake of ‘Hurricane’. ‘Black Diamond Bay’ was nevertheless a striking piece of art and craft to begin with. It grows in stature with the years.