Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (55 page)

Bob Dylan could still justify three nights in Birmingham and four nights at the Wembley Arena. Whether he could still justify himself, or do justice to songs he no longer understood, was another story, a tale growing darker as age and time pressed in upon him. As he would confess in due course in his 2004 book
Chronicles: Volume One
, the songs had become ‘strangers’ to him. Why, in truth, did people continue to turn out for concerts by this performer? Just for a glimpse of what still passed for a legend? And was that enough, in turn, for him?

He had called the tour Temples in Flames, as though passing his own judgement on desecrated monuments. In Locarno in Switzerland on 5 October, while concealing himself among the backing vocalists, he had experienced what he would remember as a strange, daunting moment of self-awareness. Years later, one who was present at one of the Wembley shows would describe Dylan’s performance as ‘an inspired vandalisation, brutal and challenging, a scorched earth triumph, charred and astonishing’, but admit that many other fans were appalled or infuriated by what had been done to the songs.
¹⁴
In
The Observer
, the BBC disc jockey John Peel would write: ‘Being an enigma at 20 is fun, being an enigma at 30 shows a lack of imagination, and being an enigma at Dylan’s age is just plain daft … From the moment the living legend took to the stage, it was evident that here was business he wanted accomplished with the minimum of effort.’
¹⁵

He was pulling the temple down around his ears. It might have counted as creative destruction, as an artist’s defiant gesture, but sometimes explanations are no better than rationalisations. In
Chronicles: Volume One
, Dylan would explain that after the European concerts he had planned a touring schedule with the deliberate intention of alienating his older fans. Somehow they were to be replaced with a younger crowd on the grounds – you can only admire the gall of this rationalising writer – that his traditional audience was no longer up to the task of appreciating his shows. If that was the plan, it would be postponed. As the book tells it, Dylan sustained a ‘freak’ injury that left his hand gashed. The wound is described as serious and painful, injurious to his body and his hopes, but the dates and details are vague.

Early in 1988, Dylan would distract himself for a while as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, a kind of musical club for superstar hobbyists of a certain vintage, as though to prove there was nothing more pressing on his mind than messing around with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Petty and Jeff Lynne. The gang would give themselves silly names – Dylan would be ‘Lucky’, supposedly – and manage to come up with an album full of inoffensive music that would fare far better than any of the artist’s recent works.
Traveling Wilburys Vol
.
1
would in fact sell many more copies than any album Dylan had ever made. His chief contribution would be a fairly sharp song, its lyrics a parody of Bruce Springsteen, complete with the appropriate allusions, entitled ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.

The song was adequate, if that was your taste, though clearly the writer did not take it seriously. Why would he? In January 1988 he had been ‘inducted’ into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a big ceremony in New York. Springsteen had given a passionate speech in tribute that had sounded only a little like a requiem. For all his rhetoric and for all his affected disdain, the artist accepted the world’s baubles readily enough. He seemed not to notice that such honours sometimes come at the end of a career.

These things filled up his time. In essence, it was all little better than displacement activity. Dylan’s real problem was that he was going through these motions because he did not know what else to do.

NOTHING MUCH WAS EXPECTED OF INTERSTATE 88, THE TOUR
inaugurated on 7 June 1988 out in the golden west. To begin with, it seemed that nothing much would be delivered. The Pavilion amphitheatre in the city of Concord, in San Francisco’s suburban East Bay, though designed by Frank Gehry and prestigious enough, was just another oversized open-air entertainment space. Given the choices available to him, it was not the most appropriate or intriguing venue Dylan could have picked to commence a run of 71 concerts in the United States and Canada that summer. For one thing, the appeal of his name alone could no longer fill the wide and open expanses of a place like the Pavilion.

What was the average casual fan entitled to expect, in any case? In Europe in 1987 Dylan had too often crashed and burned amid those pseudo-mythic temples in flames. Any Californian observer who had read reports of the four shows at London’s Wembley Arena would have noted only insinuating tales of an artist in bad shape and, as most reviews insisted, wretched voice. Once again, the omens were poor. None of the 6,000 or so people who saw Dylan return to work after his vacation with the Traveling Wilburys – at a venue capable of containing 12,500 – could have expected something historic. Quite how historic remains a matter of dispute, not least if the artist is offering an opinion. In his version, nothing particularly unusual happened at the Pavilion, or in its long aftermath, not at his behest. He had pulled himself together, that was all.

Second on the bill that evening were The Alarm, a briefly popular, well-meaning Welsh band who might just have been mistaken for The Clash on a bad day if there was plenty of static on the radio and you weren’t listening too hard. Who knows who chose them, big hair and big pretensions, for the tour? The Alarm were better suited to providing the introductory bombast for U2, as they had done in 1983, but such was the price Dylan fans had to pay for the stadium-rock experience. If nothing else – and truly there was precious little else – the support act provided a handy illustration of the nature of the decade in which the artist had been cast adrift.

Given all that had gone before, these were not popular music’s finest hours. Another of heavy metal’s Monsters of Rock tours was soaking up the middle-American youth dollar when Dylan took the stage at Concord. Michael Jackson was, it seemed, everywhere that year. George Michael had commenced his campaign for hearts, minds and sundries that very week with the single ‘I Want Your Sex’, an introduction to what would become the year’s most successful album. If the aim was to fill stadiums, the high-end competition was Guns N’ Roses. As ever, the charts tell their story.

Dylan might have been the agent of his own artistic decline in the trough of this low, dishonest decade. He might have made some very foolish moves. But how, in truth, was he supposed to react in such an environment? By courting slow, sure artistic death as a nostalgia act? By accepting that his moment in the spotlight was long gone? It amounted to a further series of questions. Did he still know what he wanted? Did he still care? Did he still know how to achieve what he wanted? For most listeners,
Down in the Groove
, released just a week before the Concord show, was providing dispiriting answers.

*

Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, Dylan would sit down with David Gates of
Newsweek
in a hotel room in Santa Monica, California, for an interview designed to publicise the album
Time Out of Mind
. In the course of the conversation the singer would make a couple of statements that were frank by most standards, far less by the infinitely pliant standards of the entertainment business.

Those who had judged him finished and done by 1987 had not been far off the mark. ‘I’d kind of reached the end of the line,’ Dylan would tell Gates. ‘Whatever I had started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.’

As he told the tale, the performer had been left with very little choice. Decadence, carelessness, bad habits and cynicism have been adduced often enough by critics, friendly or hostile, to explain Dylan during this late ’80s period. In his own recollection, something more profound was going on. The inability to write much of anything, easily or often, was by then well established. But as Dylan told Gates, he had lost even the ability to perform his songs. A decade on, he mimicked and relived his dread: ‘I can’t remember what it means, does it mean – is it just a bunch of words? Maybe it’s like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense.’

Later, in his 2004 book
Chronicles: Volume One
, Dylan would return to the memory of the burned-out relic of 1960s folk-rock – a term he had always despised – who found himself empty and wrecked in the middle of the ’80s. This erstwhile ‘troubadour’ – a word he had once found comical – was heading for cultural oblivion. Above all, as the book would record, he had nothing much left to say.

Only rarely does self-doubt go deeper. Nothing had remained of that old ’60s swagger, that instinctive certainty, the knowledge that one song would thread itself seamlessly to the next whenever he chose. More than Dylan’s confidence had disappeared by the end of 1987. A decade later, the remembered emotion sounded like nothing so much as the despair of a man who had gone blind by stages.

Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead had managed to coax Dylan back to a kind of life, for a while at least, but the respite had been no cure. As represented on the miserable
Dylan & the Dead
album, those half-dozen stadium appearances in July 1987 had demonstrated only that the foremost songwriter of his generation could get up on a stage, if needs must, and remember some of the words. The performances had been dire; rumours questioning the star’s physical condition had circulated. As often as not, great songs had been shorn of verses and meaning while the Dead treated their eternally faithful fans to the usual grimly predictable minor-league rock.

As he told the story to Gates, Dylan’s luck turned at last on a foggy, windy night while he peered at an audience spread across the damp cobblestones of the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Switzerland. He would return to the tale several times in subsequent interviews. Deep-dyed fans would meanwhile give the anecdote a pseudo-religious tint by talking, in all apparent seriousness, about an epiphany. Whatever happened, it mattered to Dylan the storyteller. Locarno became part of his personal mythology, the moment when the long withdrawing tide began to turn.

It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was me thinking it.
I’m determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not.
And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. And I noticed that all the people out there – I was used to them looking at the girl singers, they were good-looking girls, you know? And like I say, I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But when that happened, nobody was looking at the girls any more. They were looking at the main mike. After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.

So it came to pass. Doubters might struggle to find much of a difference between minor bootlegs such as
Locarno 1987
and snatched recordings of the following night’s show such as
Paris, France
. Only a minority in the Wembley Arena left the building at the tour’s end convinced that Dylan had redeemed himself. Connoisseurs of the numerous illicit Temples in Flames recordings can point to fine performances, here and there, both before and after the ‘epiphany’. It is also self-evidently the case that we only have Dylan’s word for this life-changing Locarno experience, this moment of understanding. He believed, in any case, that words of defiance and resolution had come unbidden into his head, as though from nowhere, and he believed in what they meant. As he knew better than most, faith is a powerful thing.

Recasting the story for the benefit of
Rolling Stone
’s Mikal Gilmore at the end of 2001, Dylan said: ‘That night in Switzerland it all just came to me. All of a sudden I could sing anything. There might’ve been a time when I was going to quit or retire, but the next day it was like, “I can’t really retire now because I really haven’t done anything yet”, you know? I want to see where this will lead me, because now I can control it all. Before, I wasn’t controlling it. I was just being swept by the wind, this way or that way.’
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All that remained was to persuade disillusioned audiences to believe it too. A Bob Dylan who could still sing ‘anything’? Proof of the proposition would not be the work of moments. The 1980s had produced a mountain of lousy reviews for which amends were required. One of the decade’s many glib formulations was as applicable to Dylan as it was to any beleaguered politician: he had a credibility problem, a big one. Just ‘to go out and play these songs’ would not be enough.

Whatever took place in Switzerland, the alleged Locarno incident became a declaration of faith. It has been used since by fans to explain everything about Dylan the dedicated, even obsessive, public performer. The phenomenon known as the Never-Ending Tour, 2,480 concerts in 24 years as of the end of 2012, is always said to have begun in California on 7 June 1988, and is always explained by what happened to the artist in Switzerland. There remains the sense, nevertheless, that a few things are missing from the story.

*

On paper, the 13-song Concord set list does not these days seem like anything out of the ordinary for a Dylan show. A little brief at 70 minutes, perhaps, certainly when compared with the concerts of ’66 and ’76, and with concerts since, but that’s of no account: with this artist, only quality is supposed to matter. Dylan opened with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and closed with ‘Maggie’s Farm’ for an encore. He gave the crowd ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, second to last. Along the way there was a fair enough résumé of his career, from the first album’s traditional ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ through ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ to ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ from
Blood on the Tracks
and God’s own ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. Most of the choices were not startling. The American Civil War ‘Irish’ ballad ‘Lakes of Ponchartrain’ – Creole would be a better description – made for an interesting preface to ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ in an acoustic sequence. It introduced, or rather reintroduced, traditional music to the concerts: thereafter one obscure piece or another would feature in the set. But the rest of the songs performed at Concord would have been familiar to anyone who knew anything about Dylan.