Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (49 page)

‘Man of Peace’ is meanwhile just a throwback to the overt, dismal proselytising of
Saved
. It is a rerun of a favourite born-again argument, founded on the distinctly weird contention that ‘Good intentions can be evil’, that the Antichrist – who might turn out to
seem
like a great humanitarian or philanthropist – is among us even now. (As though, as ever, we’ve nothing else to worry about.) The song does not begin to compete even with Dylan’s better evangelical songs.

‘Sweetheart Like You’ is a good song, despite its touches of not-so-latent sexism. ‘Union Sundown’ is a little confused but not catastrophic and rocks along in fine style. ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ stands up well even now. ‘License to Kill’ and ‘I and I’ have their merits, though even their merits are nothing special. In the end, one song of those Dylan allowed himself raises the entire
Infidels
album above the commonplace. A very strange song it is, too.

‘Jokerman’ took part of its inspiration, according to the writer, from Caribbean legends of ‘these spirits they call
jumbis
’.
²⁹
The usual spelling, if it matters, is either
jumbee
or
jumbie
, while the weird tales of the creatures’ shenanigans vary greatly from island to island. It seems the stories also derive from a bewildering variety of ethnic and religious sources. Some of these evil dead busy themselves with vampirism, some with lycanthropy, some with basic possession of the living, some with sucking out the brains of unsuspecting passers-by. In other words,
jumbees
are malevolent spirits, in one guise or another.

Dylan’s mention of these entertaining folk myths could be ignored as just another of his vague explanations for the creative process were it not for the quantity of things he seemed capable of believing in 1983. His interviewer was told that ‘Jokerman’ is ‘very mystical’, as indeed it is. In the islands, the ‘shapes there, and shadows, seem to be so ancient’, Dylan said. But then he
seemed
to say that the spirits themselves had ‘sorta inspired’ the song. Even for him, that was fanciful. Yet when he had been asked by another journalist not long before if he believed in reincarnation, this same writer had answered, ‘Yeah, I do. I don’t think there are any new souls on earth.’
³⁰
It was not the first time he had affirmed such a belief. So what did he not believe? The chances of laughing all of this off as a playful Dylan hoax diminish slightly when you realise that he was talking about
jumbees
just after insisting, in the same interview, that the Bible is the literal truth and that ‘the battle of Armageddon definitely will be fought in the Middle East’.

You needn’t take him seriously – or the
jumbees
might get you – but it is worth pausing to think about what might have been going on in the mind of the author of ‘Jokerman’. With that exercise complete, you can ask how such a very strange concatenation of beliefs, ideas, images and emotions could result in a song that is as powerful as any Dylan ever recorded. If what goes into a piece of work is any guide to what comes out, ‘Jokerman’ should be no better than the usual ‘mystical’ prophetic nonsense. Instead, the song is potent enough to make you think twice about the allure of apocalyptic myth, messiahs false and real, and what evil means to those who daily detect its existence on every side. Dylan made art from the oddest materials.

The Jokerman has various guises: born with a snake in each fist, shedding his skins, ‘a man of the mountains’, a cloud walker, a benign demagogue, a twister of dreams, yet a ‘Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame’. Fair of face, worthy indeed of a Michelangelo, yet obedient only to ‘The law of the jungle and the sea’, the Jokerman rides a milky white steed and bears witness to a world tearing itself apart amid ‘Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks / Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain’. This joker also witnesses the birth of the Antichrist:

This is Revelation for the 32-track age, for the video age. With
Infidels
, in fact, Dylan acknowledged the existence of newly born MTV and the advent of the promotional clip. In the film for ‘Jokerman’ he supplied, among other things, the basis for what remains one of the most arresting examples of a peculiar genre, even if he did keep his eyes tight shut for most of the movie. Images and his lyrics emblazoned across the images communicated ideas in a dizzying rush: Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait as Christ, a Turner, two Michelangelos, William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, Munch and varieties of primitive art. Amid it all were newsreels and still photographs from a troubled world: dead Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Ronald Reagan mocked, the first American combat troops into Vietnam, a nuclear blast, and mankind making its big mistake by ‘touching the moon’.

One set of verses from the song was reserved for a series of images of all the previous Bob Dylans. The artist was not entirely happy with the notion that a photograph could illustrate even a single ambiguous line from a song, but he played along. You sense that, grumbling or not, he knew what he was doing. Even if the video’s ‘concept’ was not his – George Lois, the advertising man who had fought so hard for Rubin Carter, deserved most of the credit – the conjunctions between life and art were surely no coincidence. The folk singer, the artist of 1965–6, the creator of Rolling Thunder: on the TV screen, one identity followed another.

Perhaps because of the video, or perhaps because he has so often been represented as a trickster, image manipulator and inveterate myth-maker, ‘Jokerman’ has sometimes been taken as Dylan’s song about his own legend, a track intermingled with a certain scepticism, all of a sudden, towards Christ’s active role, if any, in the world. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that the number could cover all those bases. When this messiah witnesses the arrival of the Antichrist, the Deceiver, He seems utterly passive.

If this is the usual Jesus, He isn’t doing His job. If this is Dylan getting carried away with his Christ-fixation, meanwhile, it all makes precious little sense, even given the endlessly perplexing nature of the song. It might be better to ask, first, why ‘Jokerman’, then to ask why, chorus after chorus, the incarnated, uninvolved deity would ‘dance to the nightingale tune’.

Perhaps because this a song about gods, not God, a song about humanity’s ability to touch the divine without hope of a guarantee that this world will be spared its usual biblical fate. Christ, if Christ it is, has a lot of humanity in him in ‘Jokerman’. He also carries the traces of many of the gods worshipped by man before the nativity. He dances? That’s an ancient idea. Those Caribbean spirits who ‘sorta inspired’ Dylan took (or take) possession of people during frenzied dances. Divine madness achieved in dancing is a notion common to cultures around the world. The old English carol, medieval in origin, called ‘Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day’ took this stately notion and presented a Jesus whose entire time on earth could be understood as an enactment of a celestial dance. The modern hymn, ‘Lord of the Dance’, simply exploits the conceit. In fourteenth-century England, they sang:

Dylan’s Jokerman has within him the tension Nietzsche perceived between the Apollonian and Dionysian, order and disorder, law and misrule, intellect and instinct, mind and body. This god-figure dances to keep the world turning, dances to a tune supplied by John Keats
and poetry’s nightingale. Meanwhile, He stands on water, walks on cloud and avails himself of whatever human vice is to be had in Sodom and Gomorrah. Freedom, of that variety, is ‘just around the corner’. Yet still, ‘with the truth so far off, what good will it do?’ The same figure is simultaneously obedient to ‘the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy’, Judaism’s rule books, and to ‘the law of the jungle and the sea’ underpinning earthly existence. Necessary order and divine disorder: the human dialectic. But still, how could a messiah be a joker?

Dylan has been at his Tarot again. This time there is not much ambiguity about the hand played, but the pillaging of the esoteric deck has interesting resonances within the song. In the standard Rider-Waite pack the Joker is known as the Fool, numbered zero if he is numbered at all. In older French and Italian sets of cards the Fool was rendered as some version of ‘Madman’. The figure was depicted, furthermore, either as a kind of holy fool, divinely deranged, or as the ragged Wildman of the Woods, the last descendant of pagan Dionysus. Commonly, even today, the Fool is shown as the possessor of a small dog. So:

Near
the stars might allude neatly to Oscar Wilde’s boast on behalf of those who rest in the gutter yet can see beyond grim reality; of the wee dog, there can surely be little doubt. Yet how would that fit with Dylan-plays-Christ? The former has kept dogs (rarely small) but Scripture makes no mention of Jesus in the company of pets beyond the familiar texts on sheep, lambs and straying flocks. The hound is in the song for a reason, nevertheless, and it can only be a Tarot-related reason. It is certainly a fact that the animal is present in an alternate ‘Jokerman’ take, one that gathers the Fool and his Dionysian antecedents together. As Dylan sings in this earlier, better version:

Perhaps he’s just fond of animals and gave us a Tarot joke to be going on with, interpreting until kingdom come. There are several points of difference between the two versions of the song, nevertheless, and one of these indicates a fascinating moment when the writer clearly had second thoughts about the truth he meant to convey. In the track as released, the earthly struggle between good and evil is conveyed as follows:

On the bootlegs, meanwhile, Dylan can be heard to sing:

There were sound and obvious metrical reasons for getting rid of ‘pre-determined’. By the time he settled on his preferred version, however, Dylan might also have decided – indeed, did decide – that he had no wish to pursue the kind of basic theological point that was otherwise transubstantiated meat and drink to the evangelicals. Whether he was heeding Dick Asher’s alleged $20-million threats or changing his own way of thinking, whether he had returned to secular views or not (not), there is a world of difference, in fact and logic, between what is pre-determined and what is uncertain.

There is plenty of doubt in ‘Jokerman’. That’s what helps to make it a great Bob Dylan song. The doubt is neither existential nor cosmological. For the artist, the fundamental issues had been settled, once and for all, before 1983. But in this song he is asking learned questions. What is a god who becomes a man and lives among men? What difference does it make to the existence of men? How does a messiah function ‘when He returns’ and the Antichrist is disguised by good deeds and clad in the scarlet of the Whore of Babylon? (Revelation 17:4: ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.’) In Dylan’s belief, Christ does not, because He cannot, ‘show any response’.

Give the writer credit for audacity, despite it all. As albums containing ‘no fucking religion’ go,
Infidels
opens with a remarkable piece of work, a marvellous machine made of interlocking rhymes, rhythmic pulses and transcendent singing. Soon enough, people would be wondering what became of that Bob Dylan.

*

Some of the reviews for the album wouldn’t help. In New York’s
Village Voice
(29 November 1983), quantifying artistic success and failure with a helpful B-minus on his critic’s pocket calculator, Robert Christgau would judge that the artist had managed a ‘complexity of tone’ but nevertheless ‘turned into a hateful crackpot’ with his lectures on industrial relations, Israel and the risks of space travel. ‘Jokerman’ would not even be mentioned by the voice of the
Voice
. Others, such as the reviewer for
Rolling Stone
, were cheered by the album, excessively so, but the Christgau view would not disappear. Michael Gray, that most notable of writers on Dylan, grants everything to the opening track, but still finds
Infidels
giving off ‘feigned emotion wrapped in a fog of mere professional competence’. As for the artist, Gray has written, this ‘dissembling demeans him’. The album is ‘a small, shifty failure’, failing ‘in a small-minded, cheating way’.
³¹