Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (56 page)

The first real surprise had come, in fact, when he took the stage. The girl singers, the star accompanists, the instrumental paraphernalia and the rest of the supporting cast were gone. Aside from an appearance by Neil Young – barely audible on the recording – it was just Dylan and three musicians. The intention, like the musical setting, was stark. For the first time in years, he was leaving himself with no place to hide.

He was meanwhile refusing to employ his famous harmonica while granting the first public performances to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. That was worth noting. But the important fact, faintly astonishing in 1988, was that Dylan was audibly performing as though he cared, as though his songs meant something once more. Whatever the excuses made for the Temple in Flames ‘scorched earth’ approach – and some of those are elaborate – this new demeanour amounted to an acknowledgement of how low he had sunk. Now he was a serious performer again.

It didn’t make for a flawless first show. Dylan’s rehabilitation had barely begun. Equally, Concord’s implicit manifesto was no guarantee that every performance would be unimpeachable in the years ahead: anything but. In Sacramento two nights later the tour’s next stop saw another half-empty amphitheatre and a set drastically curtailed for reasons only Dylan could explain. Press reviews were poor, in the main, perhaps because journalists had closed their minds instead of opening their eyes and ears. Nevertheless, Dylan still gave them a certain amount of ammunition, not least with his perverse decision to perform one fairly new song from
Down in the Groove
, the lamentable ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, amid the purest products of the songwriter’s art. Assembled for
Hearts of Fire
, that gutted turkey of a movie, and inserted between ‘Girl From the North Country’ and ‘Just Like a Woman’, a song that counted as close to the least in Dylan’s canon did no more than remind listeners of how good a writer he once had been.

It was a minor detail. The recording says that the crowd, though sparse, was enthusiastic. The Sacramento audience had reason. Dylan’s trio of musicians had begun to carve a little piece of legend for themselves. G.E. Smith, guitarist and bandleader from TV’s
Saturday Night Live
satire show, was intuitive, empathetic and sure of himself. The artist had meanwhile found in Kenny Aaronson (bass) and Christopher Parker (drums) a rhythm section that would never let him down, no matter what might transpire. A lot could yet transpire, but Dylan had made his choices. What remained to be seen was their effect, if any, on his writing, the core of his art.

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Devotees of the tour-without-end don’t necessarily see things that way. They are avid, year upon year, for word of a new song being performed somewhere in the world, but their fascination with a cultural phenomenon has as much to do with the supposedly ever-changing manner of Dylan’s renditions as it has to do with a body of recorded work. For these believers, the public stage is the true locus of his art. The appearance of another Bob Dylan album is, in a strange way, secondary. Predictably, the artist doesn’t see things that way. He despises the idea that he is adrift, like some musical Ancient Mariner, on a never-ending voyage, but he also rejects the claim that he is forever rearranging his songs. In 2006, he said as much to the writer Jonathan Lethem.
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I’ve heard it said, you’ve probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. The arrangements don’t change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that’s all. You can’t change the arrangement night after night – it’s impossible.

Undaunted, some of his fans possess hundreds of bootleg concert recordings. In legend, a few have collections numbering in the thousands, of show after show after show. The inner circle of adherents think nothing of crossing America, Europe, or the ocean between to follow Dylan from place to place when he tours. They have seen the ‘nightly ritual’ dozens of times and have never tired of him, despite all his failures and provocations. At venues across the world this fraternity, by now old friends, will gather. Set lists from far-flung cities circulate among them, each one pored over for evidence of ‘revealing’ choices (or a veteran singer’s whims).

So in Brittany on 22 July 2012, he performed ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ for the first and only time in 86 shows that year? He did ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Under the Red Sky’ only once in the entire tour? Fascinating; tell me more. These days, internet databases, Dylan’s own not least, keep track of such important facts. Those for whom the statistical record is better than a hobby find nothing peculiar in the endless pursuit of details. They are less likely to remember that Dylan endured booing at Brittany’s Festival Vieilles Charrues in Carhaix from a section of the crowd apparently demanding more modern (or more intelligible) entertainment. Committed fans do not long discuss the fact that Tour 2012 – ‘Don’t You Dare Miss It’, as the poster said – went through some rough patches.

The art-in-progress failed to sell out at most stops along the way, even in the United States. In a few places, concerts were cancelled, apparently because of a lack of local interest. Media critics were meanwhile, it is fair to say, divided. Some things had not changed since 1988.

Of a performance at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent on 30 June 2012, the reviewer from London’s
Daily Telegraph
wrote: ‘Somehow between the magic of his fantastic songs, the liquid groove of his superb band, the mysterious charisma of the legend himself and the will of the crowd to enjoy the moment, something strange and truly spectacular happens, a thrilling performance that nobody, perhaps not even the man at its centre, can really explain.’ Elsewhere it was recorded that in Toronto that November, ‘The 71-year-old Dylan spent the bulk of [the show] seated behind a piano at stage right, barking, braying and hoarking [
sic
] unintelligible linguistic formations into the microphone and banging out ill-disciplined boogie-woogie licks on the keys.’
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At Concord in 1988 Dylan was making his stand, fending off retirement, and attempting to save his career. A quarter of a century on, even those who found his ruined voice ridiculous had given up asking why he refused to quit. Were his overheads so high and his record sales so low that he needed to keep going, night after night? Surely songwriting royalties, his songwriting royalties above all, would maintain him in comfort and style?

It seemed that the Dylan who had once been able to transform himself in an instant, to astonish with the speed of his changes, was chained to an idea. He could protest all he liked that his working habits were misrepresented. For the media, for his audience, he was the man on the never-ending tour.

His exasperated response has become familiar since he advised readers of the sleeve notes to 1993’s
World Gone Wrong
album to avoid becoming ‘bewildered by the Never-Ending Tour chatter’. That particular tour had ended, he wrote, ‘in ’91 with the departure of guitarist G.E. Smith’. Since then, Dylan has treated interviewers to variations on the theme of ‘Playing is a job. My trade’ (to Sweden’s
Aftonbladet
in 1997), or to discourses on longevity in the performing arts. A typical example of the latter appeared in
Rolling Stone
in May 2009.
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You never heard about Oral Roberts and Billy Graham being on some Never Ending Preacher Tour. Does anybody ever call Henry Ford a Never Ending Car Builder? Is Rupert Murdoch a Never Ending Media Tycoon? What about Donald Trump? Does anybody say he has a Never Ending Quest to build buildings? Picasso painted well into his 90s. And Paul Newman raced cars in his 70s. Anybody ever say that Duke Ellington was on a Never Ending Bandstand Tour? But critics apply a different standard to me for some reason. But we’re living in an age of breaking everything down into simplistic terms, aren’t we? These days, people are lucky to have a job. Any job. So critics might be uncomfortable with me. Maybe they can’t figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do.

The intensity of this rebuttal suggested a man who was sick and tired of being buried under still another pile of legend. There was also a hint, however, of something like fear, fear of retirement, fear of the road’s end, fear of having to decide what else he might do with himself. He wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight.

Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire. People who have jobs on an assembly line, or are doing some kind of drudgery work, they might be thinking of retiring every day. Every man should learn a trade. It’s different than a job. My music wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early.

This otherwise unimpeachable defence overlooks the fact that the speaker had spent the best part of eight years (1966 to 1974) staying as far away from the public stage as possible. Even when he was performing in the years before and afterwards, the former ‘song and dance man’ did not talk about his work in terms of a trade or a vocation. And what did Dylan mean, exactly, by claiming that his music ‘wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early’? It sounded as though he was lashed to the wheel, forbidden by the music itself to alter course. At the time of the interview he was 67, about to turn 68, and well beyond the usual age for early retirement.

He won’t allow the adjective ‘never-ending’ to be attached to his concert schedule and yet he describes his annual peregrinations as a task to which he is bound. He has millions of miles under his belt. After a quarter of a century a map of Dylan’s travels across the continents would probably resemble a chart of the planet’s prevailing winds and ceaseless tides. As 2013 began, plans were being laid for his return to Japan and Australia. For those who track Dylan in perpetual motion, the fun quiz game in the twenty-first century is to name a city he has not yet visited. For all that, the idea that he is forbidden from retiring by the demands of art is, at best, an appropriately poetic conceit.

He doesn’t have to do this. Sometimes he sounds as though he has neither a desire nor a taste for it, but he certainly has the wealth and the opportunities to allow him to take up any other pursuit he might fancy. Yet touring is what he does. More precisely, it seems that today, after everything, Bob Dylan only truly exists through and within public performances. He has been known to make a virtue of the fact. But when yet another innocent dope of a journalist tells this Ancient Mariner that his voyage is unending, he recoils. Just when did Dylan shoot the albatross?

Neither did he label his touring schedule ‘never-ending’ nor once conspire in the elaborate accompanying mythology. That much is true. As Michael Gray has demonstrated in his
Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
(2006), it was a helpful journalist for
Q
magazine who turned a question about tours into a printed statement by his subject.
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All that Dylan said in an interview on Rhode Island in October of 1989 was, ‘Oh, it’s all the same tour.’ From a single casual remark an edifice of speculation and theory has been constructed. Yet even while knowing full well that Dylan detests and rejects the adjective, journalists, authors and diehard fans still refuse to relinquish their Never-Ending Tour. Sometimes a legend is too good to waste.

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In 1988, the featured artist and his band picked up speed soon enough. Even as he struggled to sell records, Dylan began to acquire a new reputation as a concert performer. His choices from his vast catalogue of songs became more eclectic. For those who remembered Dylan the folk singer – and for plenty of those who did not – the traditional pieces performed with only Smith as an accompanist provided another source of fascination. Reviewing one show towards the end of the tour, Michael Gray would observe that ‘Dylan’s avid alignment with such material, for the first time in more than two decades, holds out tantalising possibilities as to where he might land next time he jumps’.
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In the meantime, shows grew longer, the critics warmer. At the end of July, Edna Gundersen of
USA Today
was writing of the tour as ‘the sleeper hit of the season’ and quoting
Rolling Stone
magazine’s welcome for the performer’s ‘extraordinary no-frills rock & roll’.
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At Berkeley, on the third night, Dylan enjoyed the first of several triumphs. Soon enough, the tour was being extended.

The emerging argument in the artist’s defence was that, with his vast stock of songs, record sales no longer really mattered. He began to make the point himself: he was a performer, first and foremost. His real work happened on stage. The recordings were sketches, at best, mere glimpses of the art attempted and frustrated in the alienating confines of the cursed recording studio. Only in performance could the songs be fully realised. Before July was out, Dylan was telling
USA Today
’s readers:

Touring is part of playing. Anybody can sit in the studio and make records, but that’s unrealistic and they can’t possibly be a meaningful performer. You have to do it night after night to understand what it’s all about.

Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, as the tours rolled on endlessly, he was sticking to his theme, explaining to the
New York Times
that ‘A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing’.

I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be disappointed in daily life. But the cure-all for all that is to get on the stage, and that’s why performers do it. But in saying that, I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity. I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.
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