Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (46 page)

That moment had passed, in any case. You can take the cynical view and judge that he had made a hard-headed commercial decision. Purely evangelical music was losing Dylan audiences, sales and a lot of critical respect. Whether he was being persecuted for his beliefs is open to doubt, despite all his complaints, but he was certainly being mocked. On this accounting, given the choice between Christian preaching and a career, he chose the career.

A more generous judgement might be that Dylan had recognised and begun to address a real artistic problem. The fundamental issues of faith were few in number. He had stated them repeatedly in three – or two and a half – albums. A broader and deeper kind of discourse needed a different kind of songwriting. There is no doubt that he was under pressure to relent, not least from his record company, but he had his own thoughts on the matter. For all that, God would never be far, ever after, from Dylan’s words and music.

*

In 19 days and nights in 1983, between 11 April and 17 May, he made an album that was both the best and the most troubling thing he had done since
Street-Legal
.
Infidels
would involve one of the finest studio bands he had worked with in many a year. Thanks to Mark Knopfler, it would be better produced, for whatever the fact is worth, than a great many of his records. There would be only a couple of real duds among its eight songs and only a modest amount of controversy over what the artist had to say in those songs. The album would seem, for a while at least, to have restored Dylan’s critical and commercial fortunes and to have earned its success. There would be nothing terribly wrong with what was offered on
Infidels
. The problem would lie with what was withheld.

Once you know what this piece of work could have been and should have been, the album becomes maddening. When you begin to consider the choices made and the reasons why those choices were made, the puzzle called Bob Dylan grows ever deeper. If you pause to attend to the works absent from the finished product, the temptation to drop the artist a stiff note of protest, even 30 years too late, grows strong. If ever a Dylan album cried out for the restoration and refurbishment services of the people involved in his archival Bootleg Series, it is
Infidels
. The self-doubt evident on
Shot of Love
here becomes pathological.

With
Infidels
a pattern was established that would influence critical reactions to the artist’s work through all the decades to come. Thanks to countless bootleg releases, legal and otherwise, two Dylans would seem to co-exist, one actual and one potential, one the author of the albums as they were set before the public, the other an artist reconstructed from the counterfactual history of what might have been. When countless concert recordings began to be thrown into the mix, dozens of them preferable to the albums sanctioned by Dylan, arguments over his reputation and worth would grow ever more tortuous. Certain fans and students would enjoy the never-ending archaeological effort for its own sake. For some, the collecting of illicit tapes and the ensuing Jesuitical debates over this or that outtake would become a consuming hobby, even a career. To have knowledge denied to the common herd was part of the fun, it seems. For others of us, it would all become just a bit tedious. Why couldn’t Dylan stop screwing around with his work? The fact would remain, nevertheless: without a knowledge of certain bootlegs – not, God help us, all of them – an understanding of the art and the artist would become hard to achieve. That truth would be as relevant to the worst of his albums, ironically
enough, as it would be to the best.
Infidels
was far from the worst, but it could have been a lot better.

No such thoughts arose when the vinyl disc appeared at the start of November 1983, of course. Only a few, led by Knopfler, knew what Dylan had done and what he had refused to do. To anyone who lacked that insight it was simply the best album he had released in at least five years. Some still contend that
Infidels
is superior to anything he had managed since 1976’s
Desire
. When the album appeared a couple of reviewers, befuddled by cask-strength hyperbole, called it his best since – a pair of words that surely deserve to become a compound adjective –
Blood on the Tracks
. The man in the vinyl mine at
Rolling Stone
got his mention of the 1975 masterpiece into his first sentence, then wrote of Dylan’s ‘stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him’.
¹⁴
Not everyone agreed. Some reviewers continued to be dismissive, less of the music or the production than of certain sentiments expressed, but the American record-buying public was more forgiving than it had been towards any Dylan release since
Street-Legal
. That was fair. All in all,
Infidels
is not a bad piece of work.

There was a degree of sheer relief evident in the album’s reception. Many critics gave it the benefit of all sorts of doubts simply because at first it seemed – an important word – that Dylan had been cured at last of his religious delirium. One song, ‘Neighborhood Bully’, struck a few listeners as an alarmingly right-wing piece of Zionist rhetoric, but most put aside their concerns. Another track, ‘Union Sundown’, sounded a little strident in its analysis of America’s labour relations and economic misfortunes, but at least the writer was taking an interest in the world around him. There were odd, even eccentric touches. Did Dylan truly believe that ‘man has invented his doom’ just by landing on the moon? Could it have been him or a character in a song declaring, ‘a woman like you should be at home / That’s where you belong / Taking care of somebody nice’?
¹⁵
Neither question was treated as a big deal. Even when a bit of sustained attention proved that the artist had not in any sense left religion behind,
Infidels
was exempted from scorn.

Perhaps it had something to do with the set’s teasing title. Perhaps it was because Dylan was no longer brandishing a religious affiliation like an all-areas backstage pass. Perhaps he had been right all along about prejudice and born-again belief. For whatever reason, the album was granted an acceptance that had not been available to its immediate predecessors. Even when it was made explicitly obvious that the artist
was still gripped by his Antichrist fixation – ‘sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace’ –
Infidels
was deemed ‘secular’.

‘Jokerman’, the opening track, helped matters somewhat. This was, unambiguously, one of Dylan’s great songs, recognised as such from the moment the album was released. It was also one of those great Dylan songs that did not yield its meaning instantly, if at all. Most who liked it didn’t quite know what the hell (and so forth) it was supposed to be about
specifically
, but that didn’t matter. The evangelical Dylan had forgotten the art of writing in this manner, in this meshing of melody and images to create something that seemed to make a sense of its own even when the sense could not be defined. He did not perform the trick to perfection with each of the
Infidels
songs, but in ‘Jokerman’ and in a few other places hope was restored.

Dylan, conscious of his deficiencies as a technician, had considered a number of people for co-production duties before inviting Knopfler to return to the combat zone. A couple of the big names who would be mentioned as rival contenders for the honour still boggle minds. Asking what Frank Zappa or David Bowie would have done with or to the artist’s work is like asking what might happen if the laws of physics could be suspended. Knopfler, clearly the best candidate, recommended his own keyboard player, Alan Clark, and the sound engineer Neil Dorfsman. The latter had handled the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s
The River
and the 1982 Dire Straits album
Love Over Gold
. Both of those vastly successful collections had been recorded at the Power Station studio on West 53rd Street in New York; Dylan followed suit. If the former ConEdison plant and its miraculous acoustic properties had generated millions of sales for Knopfler and the usurper Springsteen, the artist wanted all the benefits they had enjoyed.

He didn’t have to be reminded of what had become of
Saved
and
Shot of Love
. Columbia had given him another five-album contract in July 1982, but Dylan needed to regain both his credibility and his authority within the company. He had pushed his luck hard, several times over, in the preceding decade and a half among people whose idea of poetry began and ended at the bottom line. Having Bob Dylan on the roster was good for Columbia’s image, in theory, but the lawyers who ran the empire from the Black Rock building on a corner of Manhattan’s 6th Avenue put their real faith in the miraculous transmutation of cheap vinyl into gold. Dylan had been failing to weave that brand of magic. In April 1983, as he commenced work on
Infidels
, corporate lawyer number one was about to sack corporate lawyer number two as a war between the company’s president, Walter Yetnikoff, and his deputy, Dick Asher, came to a head. Neither man could have been mistaken for a born music lover, nor for an individual in instinctive sympathy with artists.

Dylan wasn’t happy with them and they were not happy with Dylan. Performing at the Stade de Colombes in the Paris suburbs on 23 June 1981, he had expressed grumbling irritation over the fact that he was touring to support
Shot of Love
while Columbia, inept or apathetic, was failing to get the record into stores. The album, Dylan had told the French crowd, ‘should be coming out sometime soon. If you know exactly when, you call up the record company I record for,
whatever one that is today
.’ (My italics.) The plain truth remained that
Shot of Love
had expired like a mayfly. That fact, in turn, might well have had a bearing on Dylan’s rediscovery in 1983 of the joys of ‘secular’ song and the art of disguised meanings.

Dick Asher would be remembered as a typical major label corporate philistine in an article published in 2008 by Simon Napier-Bell, former manager of the Yardbirds, Wham! and several other groups.
¹⁶
As he recalled the incident, the Englishman had just entered the executive’s office for a meeting when a secretary announced that Bob Dylan was ‘on line one’. The artist, as Napier-Bell would write, had just made ‘a couple of albums full of evangelical zeal but they’d bombed’. Dylan’s contract had come up for renewal – this would be around the time
Shot of Love
was being recorded, in other words – and Asher was not eager to take the call. As Napier-Bell remembered it, the conversation as it began ‘wasn’t too interesting’. Then the executive began to yell into the phone:

I’ve told you, Bob – no fucking religion! If you can’t agree to that, the deal’s off … Look, I’m telling you. There’ll be no fucking religion – not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God’s sake, man – you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn’t it? So stick with it, for Christ’s sake. I’m giving you 20 million bucks – it’s like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we’re telling you is … No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It’s going in the contract.

If indeed it did go ‘in the contract’ a great many of the earnest things written and said since about Dylan, Christianity, Judaism, philosophy, the trials of faith, religious art, the fate of humankind and gospel music might deserve to be erased. No one need go that far. Demonstrably, the artist did not abandon his complicated beliefs. Did he get his company orders, however? In Napier-Bell’s account the orders could not have been more explicit. And did Dylan obey Asher in exchange for 20 million pieces of silver? One reading of the
Infidels
lyrics says that might well have been the case. Napier-Bell’s ability to give a verbatim account of things allegedly said better than a quarter of a century before their transcription verges on the supernatural, of course. Nevertheless, the gist is clear enough. With a witness present, one of the top men at his record company gave it to Dylan straight: ‘no fucking religion’, not if he wanted a $20 million deal. You could call that interesting.

What can be said with certainty is that after
Shot of Love
he began to write about matters of religion in a manner that would not be confused easily with religious writing. He hid his meaning and purpose, hid them well enough to fool a lot of critics and, presumably, executives so dim-witted they could tell him to stick with Judaism ‘for Christ’s sake’.
¹⁷
That happened to be the artist’s intention, more or less. Napier-Bell would further observe, dryly, that as a devout atheist he had no personal objections to Asher’s rant, though ‘it seemed tough that a contract should include such specific restrictions’. That, nevertheless, was his description of the exchange. If it was accurate, Dylan began to record
Infidels
under the thumb of a corporate lawyer type whom the English observer called ‘a very dull man indeed’.

Some details can be added. When the album was almost complete, for example, the artist would make several statements to the journalist Martin Keller that were markedly less forthright than before. Almost defiantly, Dylan would assert that
Shot of Love
was his favourite among all the albums, that the song of the same name was his ‘most perfect song’, that it defined him and showed anyone who was interested where his ‘sympathies’ lay. Despite ‘Neighborhood Bully’ and ‘Union Sundown’, he would also maintain, in the familiar manner, that ‘I don’t write political songs. Political songs are slogans. I don’t even know the definition of politics.’ When the talk turned to the issue of religion, on the other hand, Dylan would become downright evasive. Whether thanks to Asher’s expletives or to his own evolving beliefs, his opinions would not be calculated to please the holy rollers of the Vineyard church, or the ascetic rebbes of Chabad-Lubavitch. They would cheer a lot of his old fans, however.