Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (63 page)

*

Presley’s sequinned shade might have been amused to hear that Dylan had contemplated the final curtain after recording his first album of new songs in seven years. Had he taken his last bow, the crepuscular mood of
Time Out of Mind
would alone have been enough to keep believers in presentiment and grim fate talking long after the event. Since his histoplasmosis had intervened between the recording and release of the longest piece of work he had produced since
Blonde on Blonde
– the vinyl version would be a double album – these songs ‘about death’ gave a lot of people the wrong idea.

Some reviewers were certain Dylan had received his intimations of mortality, looked up the number for the King’s celestial direct line, and recorded
Time Out of Mind
as an acknowledgement of how fragile life can be. Who writes songs with titles such as ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’ if he hasn’t had his interview with the Reaper? Where histoplasmosis was concerned, those who jumped to conclusions landed badly. The coincidence of illness and songs of melancholic fatalism was arresting, but coincidence it remained. Still, the album that inaugurated the most thrilling of all Dylan’s recurring comebacks was not a work designed to spread sunshine and happy thoughts. The author himself would call
Time Out of Mind
‘spooky’. It was as good a one-word description as any. Dylan used the word, he would say, ‘because I feel spooky. I don’t feel in tune with anything.’
⁴

If thoughts of death had inspired the album, however, they might have had less to do with the artist’s inevitable fate than with the passing of Jerry Garcia on 9 August 1995. The guitarist had barely turned 53 when years of drug abuse and obesity shut down his worn body and distressed mind while he was residing, appropriately or not, in a rehab clinic. Dylan, ever attuned to the larger meaning of loss, had been badly shaken. In a press statement he had said that Garcia ‘wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he will ever know’. In point of fact, the guitarist had been the younger man by better than a year.

Garcia’s Grateful Dead, it is worth observing, had been famous, or infamous, for their own ‘endless tour’, that gesture against changing times, fashion, common sense and a cynical age. They had defied every problem, personal and professional, just to keep on keeping on. The band toured because the band toured, year after year. Much good it had done Garcia. Music had not been his salvation. Despite Dylan’s eulogy, 30 years on the road had taken the guitarist nowhere in particular save on a version of life’s fated journey. That must have been a thought for the artist to ponder. In an album full of songs of aimless movement, of endless walking, of travel without purpose or end, of images of sickness, love and death,
Time Out of Mind
would place a higher final value on stoicism than on any other human virtue. It would be droll in places, but only, it seemed, because humanity’s vanity in the face of futility was comical. Dylan’s writing began again, at a best guess, just a few weeks or months after Garcia’s death.

Interviewing the artist for a
Newsweek
cover story after the album’s release, the second, third and fourth things David Gates saw fit to notice were ‘the white hairs among the curls, the two days’ worth of stubble and the 30 years’ worth of lines’.
⁵
The first thing mentioned was a face still capable of spooling through the cycles of inscrutability. The message of the piece was that, despite ‘a near-fatal illness and a near-terminal career slump’, the artist – whose attitude towards ‘the media’ had been poisoned by a ‘hatchet job’ interview with the selfsame magazine in 1963 – was still a figure of cultural importance. It was as though by 1997 a collective decision had been taken that it was necessary for Dylan to matter again. Another comeback was required after all the derision and near-contempt.
Time Out of Mind
was being greeted with sheer, exultant relief even before Gates sat down with his questions ready in a fine hotel by the Los Angeles shore. Several critics had been extravagant in their praise for the album.

Early in the interview, Dylan made a remark that would attract a lot of attention from those still trying to work out where he stood on issues of faith and belief. He would return to the theme several times in other encounters with journalists. Speaking to Gates, it sounded as though he was attempting to explain the album – and therefore to explain himself – by calling a halt to questions about God. Instead, inadvertently or not, Dylan simply confused matters.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest On a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ – that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

It seemed to explain everything and yet it explained nothing at all. Dylan was not prepared to give allegiance to a particular creed, but that was hardly news. In fact, any half-attentive listener to
Time Out of Mind
would be left wondering about the lazy claim, persistent still in 1997, that he had long before returned to ‘secular’ music. He might have sounded world-weary; he might have seemed obsessed with mortality and the passing of time; but his album was another deeply religious piece of work. ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ was unambiguous, but there were plain declarations of faith scattered everywhere throughout the recordings, obvious enough even for those who cared nothing for the ‘biographical approach’. Thus: ‘I know God is my shield and He won’t lead me astray’ (’Til I Fell in Love With You’). Thus: ‘I know the mercy of God must be near’ (‘Standing in the Doorway’). Thus: ‘It’s mighty funny, the end of time has just begun’ (‘Can’t Wait’).

As with Dylan’s born-again albums, there was nothing about any of this that sounded remotely like joy. Equally, there was nothing that didn’t sit easily with messianic Judaism. The only way to argue otherwise is by dismissing any possibility that the songs contain autobiographical content while simultaneously ignoring the artist’s previous declarations on God and related topics.
Time Out of Mind
might have marked the start of one last, startling resurgence in Dylan’s creativity, but religious faith endured. His ‘late period’ work, as remarkable as anything he had achieved, would be at least as devout as the charmless proselytising songs of 1979–81.
Time Out of Mind
was filled, as the writer would tell the
New York Times
, ‘with the dread realities of life’.
⁶
He would employ the adjective with care. Dread can mean fear, in the usual usage, but it also has an older sense, meaning awe. For a man in a certain frame of mind, it could mean two things at once.

*

Dylan had begun to write again, so it appears, while snowed up at his Minnesota farm during the winter of 1995–6. What isn’t clear is what spurred him to begin to write then and there, or caused him to write in a new way. In his own mind, as he would tell the story, he had given up on the art. The need had disappeared. No song demanded to be written, no creative urge was so overwhelming it could not be denied. The death of Jerry Garcia and his own darkening mood, one that caused Dylan to seem to shun most of the normal forms of human contact, are therefore only partial, proximate explanations for the
Time Out of Mind
songs. There had been plenty of other trials in his personal life that might have caused him to pick up pencil, his second divorce and some very public drunken misery above all, but nothing had forced new work. Suddenly the songwriting began again, just like that, despite all the long, arid years. Perhaps, for these things happen, Dylan enjoyed a kind of spontaneous remission in which his gift was restored miraculously to health. Perhaps the belief that he was running out of time provided inspiration. It might also be that sheer necessity forced him back to work.

He could tell Edna Gundersen that it ‘mortifies me to even think that I am a celebrity’, that losing anonymity ‘short-circuits your creative powers’. True enough, no doubt, but these were problems that went with the territory of stardom, a landscape he understood as well as anyone.
⁷
The parallel fact was that unless he chose to retire entirely, unless he decided to give up performing along with writing, Dylan had a choice. Either he could come up with something new, or he could become the fading star of a touring nostalgia show, ‘reinterpretations’ and all. One way or another, he was running out of road.

Dylan had done his two albums of old folk and blues songs. He had failed, for whatever reason, to extract anything he wanted to use from fine performances at The Supper Club. The greatest-hits packages could arrive at intervals (and with increasing frequency) in the hope that the eyes and ears of still another generation might be caught, but that was a game of diminishing returns. Unless he could record a new album, ‘Bob Dylan’ would become a performer represented only by the marvels of the Bootleg Series, those tell-tale signs of an encroaching history, and by concerts dependent on the old songs, each performance appropriated the instant it happened by real bootleggers. The shows meanwhile varied horribly in quality and they catered, too often, to a self-selecting niche audience.

One myth of the unending tour rests on Dylan’s declared intention to find himself new customers who did not wish simply to gawk at the legend and demand the old hits as they thought they remembered them. In the 1990s, his concert crowd were often younger, it’s true, than the fans attracted by most of his peers. For better or worse, he also managed to inherit a choice collection of Deadheads after Jerry Garcia’s passing. Nevertheless, a great many among the college-age generation were still turning out at Bob Dylan shows just to see what all the fuss had
once
been about. Without new songs it was not, as marketing folk say, a sustainable strategy. That left only the problem of actually writing and recording those new works. It was one thing to decide what had to be done, quite another to carry it off.

By Dylan’s own account – one account, at any rate – none of the above bears any resemblance to the truth. In 2006, he would tell the novelist Jonathan Lethem blithely that
Time Out of Mind
had come about almost against his will. Someone had pointed a loaded cheque book at him. The album wasn’t personal, just business. And seven wasted years of his artistic life had been his choice. Dylan would say:

They gave me another contract, which I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to record anymore, I didn’t see any point to it. But, lo and behold, they made me an offer and it was hard to refuse. I’d worked with Lanois before, and I thought he might be able to bring that magic to this record. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try.’
⁸

In another version of events, he showed some songs to Daniel Lanois in June 1996. ‘I had the songs for a while,’ Dylan would say, ‘and I was reluctant to record them, because I didn’t want to come out with a contemporary-sounding record.’
⁹
Contrary to the suggestion that he had written the album while on the farm, in this interview the artist would claim that the
Time Out of Mind
works had been assembled on the road, enabling him to run through material with the band and ‘hear it right’. In all probability, lyrics were drafted in Minnesota and refined in rehearsals and at soundchecks. There had also been at least one informal recording session before Lanois was called in. Thereafter a lot of serious rewriting would take place while the album was being made at the Criteria studios in Miami, Florida, in January 1997.

Talking to the
Irish Times
in October, just after the album’s release, the producer would remark, perhaps a little disingenuously, that Dylan had ‘slowed down writing for a while, then came back at it with a vengeance’. Lanois would also remember that ‘when we first got together he didn’t play me any songs; he read me the songs. He read twelve lyrics back-to-back for an hour and it was like listening to someone reading a book. Then later, in the studio, he modified the lyrics.’ Nevertheless, Dylan would tell
USA Today
: ‘There was no pressure on me to write these songs. There was no one breathing down my neck to make this record.’ The album had just ‘happened when I had the time’.
¹⁰
So much for the contract offer that couldn’t be refused, then.

In one way, the euphoric reviews and the Grammy awards it earned – Album of the Year, ‘Best Contemporary Folk Album’, ‘Best Male Rock Vocal Performance’ – did
Time Out of Mind
a disservice. They gave the appearance that an album containing greatness was itself, in the round, a great piece of work. Where Dylan was concerned, people were beginning to hear what they wanted to hear. Lustre was granted to some mediocre tracks simply because of the refulgent things around them on the album, because Dylan was ‘back’, because all was somehow right with the world. The acclaim was also a distraction. As it transpired, seven years of silence as a writer had taught the artist nothing useful about assembling a collection of diverse songs and resolving any contradictions, thematic or musical, that might exist between them.
Time Out of Mind
was not, by a dirt-road country mile, the album it should have been. By 1997, the statement had so many antecedents it was becoming either redundant, annoying, or the only insight worth possessing. In due course the set would be better understood than it was on first hearing, thanks partly to the bootleggers and thanks, belatedly, to Dylan’s own Bootleg Series. That would not solve all the proliferating riddles. Perceptions of this artist were becoming peculiar, dislocated in time, dependent on who heard what and when they heard it. The Bob Dylan story had acquired a set of conflicting time schemes and a host of complicated themes.