Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (48 page)

Dylan’s narrative is not linear. The third verse lies in the heart of darkness, but it reverses time. It harks back to William Tecumseh Sherman’s pitiless Savannah campaign during the Civil War, his ‘March to the Sea’ in the winter of 1864 that set the South aflame. That happened for the reasons set forth in eight astonishingly evocative and impeccably concise lines. Dylan begins with the Union’s attempt to raze the Confederacy and traces the line of cause and effect back to captive tribes.

The fourth verse contains scenes from a later South. There’s a young man ‘dressed up like a squire’ with a bottle of bootleg whisky and a woman in tow. There’s a chain gang on the road and the rebel yells of the Ku Klux Klan in the distance. Racism is resurgent. The verse could be placed in any of the decades after Reconstruction, but inevitably the bootleg booze suggests Prohibition, the 1920s and early 1930s, when the Klan were once again busy and the chain gang, that favourite punishment in the Southern states with blacks its special victims, was a common sight on the highways. Blind Willie McTell made his first recordings, it should be noted, in 1927.

At the song’s close, Dylan draws as much of a moral as he intends to draw. ‘God is in his heaven’, indeed, as Robert Browning’s line from ‘Pippa Passes’, long since reduced to cliché, has told us, but all’s not right with this world. Browning took his inspiration, in any case, from the Bible’s placing of the Lord God above and humanity below. The song takes this old revealed truth and makes it a cause for doubt. We can aspire to the kingdom, but whether this deity cares to intervene is a question the narrator will not answer.

Is it the same narrator as the one heard at the song’s beginning? There is a possibility of doubled voices, as in
Desire
’s ‘Black Diamond Bay’ when it turns out that the speaker is not doomed within some Conradian episode but sitting at home in LA drinking beer. In ‘Blind Willie McTell’, the last personage is ‘gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel’ after announcing that God’s creation seems to contain only ‘
power and greed and corruptible seed’. Is this just the voice of a storyteller, one who has only heard of those who saw the arrow on the doorpost and the big plantations burning? There is no possibility of proof in such an argument. It can only be said that the voice heard in this song is better understood as the voice of a hovering collective memory surveying the landscapes of a shared past. Multitudes are contained within it.

Michael Gray has pointed out, nevertheless, that Dylan’s work connects to McTell himself through a couple of related songs, Willie’s own ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’, recorded late in 1940, and the old, ubiquitous ‘St. James Infirmary’.
²⁴
The latter piece was not attempted by the bluesman until 1956, but both songs form part of a vast musical tangle extending from venerable British folk song to ‘Streets of Laredo’, the late-nineteenth-century piece ‘Those Gambler’s Blues’, McTell’s ‘Dyin’ Gambler Blues’, and many more besides. Both ‘Crapshooter’ and ‘St. James’ involve doubled narration, as Gray describes, and both depend on the imminence of death suggested in Dylan’s last verse. In a footnote, meanwhile, Sean Wilentz observes that there was a St. James Hotel in Selma, Alabama, both before and after the Civil War, and another in New Orleans at around the same period.
²⁵
(Dylan could equally have been speaking in his own voice at the window of a deluxe modern joint. That last idea is possible, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely.)

The final verse of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is, in one sense, a wholly conventional ending. It says: this has been the American past. It asks: wasn’t it hellish and is it not in the nature of humankind to descend into savagery? That’s Dylan’s nod to his born-again evangelical studies. The reference to ‘corruptible seed’, fallen humanity, is direct from 1 Peter 1:23: ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which lives and stays for ever.’

So why Blind Willie McTell? He was no antique curiosity from the pre-history of American music. A neat, sometimes godly man who liked to preach and never forgot to dress well, he drank a fair bit, especially towards the end of his life, but made pretty decent money for years as a polished, professional travelling musician. He had a good head for business, too, by all accounts. McTell played the songs, any kinds of songs, that people would pay to hear. It might even be a mistake to call him a bluesman. Like many of his contemporaries, Blind Willie performed blues, ballads, spirituals, ragtime, show tunes, hillbilly songs and original songs. If anything, he tended at times to steer clear of the earthier versions of ‘the Devil’s music’. After following every clue and trail, Michael Gray has called him a ‘human jukebox and local hero’.
²⁶
No one ever said McTell had made a pact with Satan at the crossroads at midnight, or suffered the attentions of a hellhound on his trail. He was a fine guitar player in the Piedmont fingerpicking style of the eastern states, but he was a pragmatic working pro, not a tortured artist. He favoured a Stella 12-string guitar as much for the volume he could extract from the instrument as for its musical possibilities. McTell did not endure the chain gang or moan the blues. His was a respectable life, mostly, and he sang with a clear, respectable diction, albeit in a slightly nasal voice. He never made a hit record, but a couple of his things, ‘Statesboro Blues’ in particular, would become popular among the folk revivalists of the ’60s and beyond.

Blind from birth, possibly as a result of maternal syphilis, McTell was as much the white world’s victim as any African American born in the South near the start of the twentieth century. His ancestry contained an irony that was also common enough: his great-grandfather had been white. But it is simply not plausible to claim that Willie suffered as badly as many of the abused sharecroppers and common folk of his era. He did not match the stereotype and nor did he suffer the violent, degraded end inflicted on some of his peers in the music business. He coped very well, it appears, with his blindness. In fact, according to contemporaries he had for compensation astonishing hearing, not to mention perfect pitch, and a remarkable sense of direction. Educated at the State Blind School in Macon, Georgia, and in private institutions, he learned to read both books and musical notations in Braille.

It is hard, then, to depict Willie McTell as the quintessential voice of the blues in the old, outworn sense. He was no importunate hobo or singing convict. There is nothing harrowed or harrowing about his music. You can’t even say – though the game is futile in any case – that he was the best blues musician who ever lived. So why, of all the dozens of black people living and dead to whom he owed a debt, did Dylan pay homage to Blind Willie McTell?

It’s not clear that he did. What’s truly tantalising about the song is that it has nothing to do, in terms of biographical fact, with the man named in the title. Its scenes have no direct relevance to McTell’s life. Musically, there are those patently obvious opening piano chords straight from ‘St. James Infirmary’, but that tune was hardly Blind Willie’s property. It is almost easier to name the blues and jazz people who didn’t perform the standard as it is to name those who did, but he was not prominent among the latter. As for Dylan himself, the invocation of McTell seems to amount to this: the artist is putting all of that faith of his into music, his own music and the music of tradition. It is, in this song, the only thing that’s left to be trusted in a fallen world. He is calling on Blind Willie in the way some people call on saints: you can all but hear it in his voice. Dylan does not say that this was the very best of the bluesmen. Pushed for a judgement on that score, he has generally tended to nominate Robert Johnson. What the song does state, over and over, is that no one could sing the blues
like
McTell.

Why would that distinction matter? One explanation could be that Dylan was making a case for creative affinity, declaring that Blind Willie was, in the very deepest sense, his kind of musician, one who bore witness to origins and the meaning of art without being reduced to complaint or bluster or mere reportage. For McTell read Dylan, in other words, right down to a shared if erratic religiosity. A better idea, perhaps, is to take Blind Willie as an example of prototypical genius seeming to emerge from nowhere. This was the miracle attributed to the young Dylan – who was he, where the hell had he come from? – but the writer who was approaching his 42nd birthday when he made the song his first order of business at the first
Infidels
recording session knew better. Willie McTell had been ‘rediscovered’, like so many of his contemporaries, because he had first been ignored by a white world. That world, with its minstrel shows and movies and rock and roll, chose to forget his music’s origins and the reasons why, back to slavery and beyond, it had come into existence. All those aged ‘obscure’ bluesmen of Dylan’s youth had come from somewhere, after all, but they and their music were things America had tried to forget. In reclaiming the man, the artist was reclaiming the past. He was making Blind Willie McTell emblematic.

In 2006, interviewed by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, Dylan would dismiss the song as released, both in its official and unofficial versions. By then he had begun to play ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in his concerts, but only ‘because I heard The Band doing it’. He would compare the bootlegs of the
Infidels
outtakes to ‘taking a painting by Manet or Picasso – goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are “Picasso fans”’. Where many of the bootleg recordings are concerned, he had a point. Does the artist have no say in the matter? As so often, however, Dylan’s memory would then become a little vague. ‘Most likely it was a demo,’ he would say, ‘probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record.’
²⁷
In 1984, closer to the event, he would tell
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder that the song was discarded because ‘I don’t think I recorded it right’.
²⁸

As ever, Dylan’s answers would be occasions for still more questions. Neither version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ sounds anything but ‘right’. Whether the song could have sat easily alongside the other tracks on
Infidels
is another matter entirely. That consideration might, in the far realms of guesswork, have been a reason for setting aside the work. Another guess sometimes heard is that Dylan believed his own vocal performance had been a failure. If the song was truly ‘half-finished’, on the other hand, you can only speculate and marvel at the vision that eluded the artist.

‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ should have been on the album; ‘Foot of Pride’ should have been on the album. In both cases, the arguments are, for this listener, straightforward. In the former case, Dylan knew he had a song of value. He would rework it when he came to make the album
Empire Burlesque
as ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’ and make the piece the opening track on a set that would need all the help it could get. Like ‘Foot of Pride’, the song works by transposing Dylan’s biblical imagery to his version of the modern (if pre-apocalyptic) world. Here there is still ‘fucking religion’ aplenty, but it is not insisted upon, not in a manner liable to trouble a Columbia executive. The dismissive allusion to the blood of Christ might, on the other hand, cause grief to a toiler in the Vineyard.

‘Neighborhood Bully’ should not have been on the album; ‘Man of Peace’ should not have been on the album. The former work, as was noticed instantly, was more than just a defence of Israel’s right to exist. Instead it was an attempt to justify the most right-wing variety of Zionist ‘security’ policy and would be recognised for what it was, as if for irony’s sake, even by Israelis. Robert Hilburn of the
Los Angeles Times
would discover as much when Dylan came to play two concerts in Israel in 1987. Ron Maiberg, editor of a magazine called
Montin
, would tell the American critic that the song ‘portrays Israel as a helpless neighbor in a neighborhood full of bullies, which is a very right-wing political view here and it depresses me that Dylan is speaking for them’. Another prominent local journalist, Robert Rosenberg, would agree that ‘it’s a right-wing song in strictly Israeli jargon’. Nevertheless, this writer would ‘understand completely how Dylan, visiting here, takes a look around at the region … at the vulnerability of the country and says, “Yeah, you’ve got to be a neighborhood bully to survive.” It is not an unnatural reaction.’ For what it’s worth, the song would not be performed in either of the concerts in Israel.

There is probably little point in recording that the reasons for decades of conflict between Israel and its enemies have been just a little more complicated than Dylan chooses to believe. It is worth observing, however, that the artist’s reaction to Middle Eastern affairs would have gratified the Religious Right in America and cheered their conservative allies in Israel. Equally, as though it needs to be stated, there was once upon a time a Bob Dylan who would have abhorred this species of dim-witted propaganda. Nowhere in ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is it so much as suggested that anyone who was not an Israeli could have suffered in the region’s endless bloody confrontations. Asked about the piece a year or so after it was recorded, Dylan tried to say that it was not ‘political’ because he had no allegiance to any of the ‘maybe 20 political parties’ in Israel. He also tried to say that he didn’t deserve to be labelled – stuck with ‘some party-political slogan’ – because ‘I don’t know what the politics of Israel is’. He thought he knew enough to come out swinging on one side, however. Coming from the writer of ‘Masters of War’, the
Infidels
song is indeed depressing. Given what was sacrificed to allow it to remain on the album, the track, pedestrian enough just as a piece of music, is doubly dispiriting.