Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (65 page)

A metaphor, then. Even if a Mississippi riverboat founders, or if a ship is wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, no one is left drowning in the kind of poison that eradicates an identity. Dylan is talking about the Ship of Faith and/or the old allegory of the Ship of Fools, another version of life’s journey. That the writer probably means the former rather than the latter seems clear enough from the next couplet. ‘Drownin’ in the poison’ or not, he sings:

For once, the cliché will do: most writers would have sold their nearest and dearest for these two songs. Either Dylan let his weariness get the better of him when he failed to realise the works to his satisfaction – it wouldn’t have been the first time – or he failed to hear what everyone else can hear. One argument goes in his favour, for all that. Given all the versions since issued of these songs, it is perfectly clear that their inclusion in any form would have caused the whole album to sound entirely different, certainly less cohesive. The ‘swampy’, layered production that seemed to be the only bag of tricks Lanois had to offer would have made no sense for ‘Red River Shore’ and done little justice to ‘Mississippi’. Had Dylan got the kind of sound design he thought he was getting – ‘like an old record you put on a record player’, as he told a French journalist in October – the two songs would have been perfect.
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Instead, an album in which ‘Red River Shore’ sat anywhere near ‘Cold Irons Bound’ or ‘Make You Feel My Love’ would have sounded ridiculous. Yet if that was the case, why did an artist perfectly capable of getting his own way not put the songs before the producer’s tastes?

One answer, perhaps, is that he had been deferring to others for too long. As soon as someone promised Dylan the latest thing in production any ancient-sounding songs became obstacles. This was paradoxical, given that the sound he wanted on
Time Out of Mind
was old and gramophone-like. Besides, it wasn’t Lanois who insisted on dropping the better tracks and keeping the likes of ‘Make You Feel My Love’. Not until Dylan despaired of the professionals and began to produce his own sessions would he begin to find a solution to these problems. The fact remains that substantial parts of a long album were flawed in their execution. Dylan realised as much, or came to the realisation in due course. In 2001, talking about
Time Out of Mind
, he would say:

Repeatedly I’d find myself compromising on this to get to that. As a result, though it held together as a collection of songs, that album sounds to me a little off. There’s a sense of some wheels going this way, some wheels going that, but ‘Hey, we’re just about getting there.’
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Sometimes he got there. ‘Not Dark Yet’ is unquestionably one of the great Dylan songs. Lanois served it well too, to be fair. Had this been played to despairing fans hearing
Knocked Out Loaded
or
Down in the Groove
for the first time, it would have been hard to distinguish relief from gratitude. Above all others, this
Time Out of Mind
song gave rise to the conviction that Dylan was meditating on age, mortality and regret. There is, if nothing else, that key statement: ‘time is running away’. In this dark night of the soul, you conclude, the artist’s faith is less sure than in other songs. Faith persists, but the singer is in a place where he can’t ‘even hear a murmur of a prayer’. Then, inevitably, you wonder: why? At the time of the album’s release, even after the histoplasmosis scare had distracted the world’s attention, the evidence of the lyrics seemed to say that Dylan had been in a bleak mood long before he was hospitalised. Because he had lost dear friends? Because he had been overtaken, not for the first time, by ennui? Neither possibility quite explains this song. Equally, there are odd things going on throughout
Time Out of Mind
that do not quite serve the age-and-mortality thesis.

There is a risk, in any case, in assuming that a song such as ‘Not Dark Yet’ is necessarily autobiographical. Dylan has contradicted himself often enough down the years when the subject of self-portraits has come up. Sometimes he has warned journalists against taking personal pronouns too seriously, reminding them of the nature of art and the liberty imagination needs and demands. At other moments he has said that the songs are ‘always’ about him. Then he has placed a thick layer of ambiguity over what he might mean by ‘about’. In 2001, nevertheless, he would dismiss the idea that
Time Out of Mind
, undeniably sombre as it was, amounted to a glimpse of his innermost thoughts as he entered the last stretch of middle age.

People say the record deals with mortality – my mortality, for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say, ‘It deals with my mortality’ – you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way …
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It’s a fair point. Would ‘Not Dark Yet’ be any less of an achievement if it failed to fit a biographical narrative? Part of the profound appeal of the song is that it contends with the second fundamental fact of every existence. The theme is by definition universal. Bob Dylan will die one day? Who won’t? One essential part of his gift as an artist, present from the very start, has been his understanding of the dangers of confessional writing. The crude appetite for the ‘true story’ diminishes art, artist and audience. This writer had spotted the risk of autobiographical banality many years before. All those ‘interpretations’ telling us that the majestic ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is ‘about’ Dylan dropping acid didn’t just insult the intelligence of the writer, they insulted his song. That had been one reason for a habit of self-concealment.

Still, no writer is immune to circumstance. No artist is wholly, coldly impersonal, supremely dispassionate. The prevailing mood of
Time Out of Mind
is dark. It turns, too, on particular images. Its better songs – this song above all – tend to come at the close of day. These works have their own weather, thundery or wet, and their own cheerless landscape. Then there is the weird, wired, dislocated mood familiar to insomniacs, when sleep won’t come or is resisted, and there’s nothing to do but walk and think the thoughts that will allow no rest. In song after song on this album the voice is that of a man who is exhausted and ill. Always, inexorably, time is passing.

You can pick out these motifs, if that’s the adequate word, easily enough. Thus ‘Love Sick’: night, walking, air full of thunder, ‘the clouds are weeping’, ‘I hear the clock tick’. The sickness might be more than emotional: ‘you destroyed me with a smile / While I was sleeping’.

Thus ‘Standing in the Doorway’: another night, still walking, time playing tricks, he’s ‘sick in the head’ and worse, contemplating the final mortal moment at which ‘the flesh falls off my face’. Thus ‘Million Miles’: ‘voices in the night’, he’s ‘drifting in and out of dreamless sleep’ and risking psychic infection from ‘every mind-polluting word’. Thus ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’: still another hot night, more thunder, more walking before the struggle to sleep in an effort to ‘relive my dreams’.

Thus ‘Can’t Wait’: ‘it’s way past midnight’, ‘the air burns’, skies are grey, ‘things disintegrate’, his mind is a ‘lonely graveyard’ and he knows he won’t be ‘spared this fate’. Thus ‘’Til I Fell in Love With You’: night again, ‘my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense’, beyond healing save for a redemptive human touch, expecting rain, wondering if he’ll still be ‘among the living’ when the next night comes, and showing symptoms that sound all too real:

The effect, inevitably, is cumulative, but it is also specific in its details. Weather, walking and sickness are either key metaphors or a poet’s plain reports from the ravaged front lines of body and mind. Love and women have failed him, or betrayed him, at every step of the way and nothing else remains. ‘Not Dark Yet’ is at the heart of all of this. The song is retrospective: it happens after all struggles have ceased. The last darkness hasn’t quite arrived, but the body is shutting down, every nerve ‘vacant and numb’. For this speaker, the end is close. Dylan had every right to say that none of this had much to do, in truthful essence, with him. On the other hand, the average listener is entitled to wonder what it was that put the writer in this frame of mind.

The best of the rest of the songs, by personal choice, are ‘Standing in the Doorway’, ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ and ‘Love Sick’. They are variations, inevitably, on the theme. The first renders inner desolation as film noir, the tough guy vigilant in the doorway but weeping inside, with lines such as

Or

‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ reaches the same viewpoint – for almost all of these songs reach that viewpoint – but the style this time is Dylan’s version of a spiritual. He takes the standard, even stereotypical idea of the sinner who must make his peace with God before it’s too late, but he transforms it into another kind of statement. This protagonist has suffered the trials of Job. At the song’s end he will be left to wonder ‘if everything is as hollow as it seems’. In the Hebrew Bible Job asks the fundamental existential question ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’ only to discover that God isn’t answerable to His creation. The song yields an equivalent truth: ‘When you think that you lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more.’ Faith guarantees nothing in this world. Hence the unmissable – because Dylan doesn’t mean you to miss it – adaptation of Woody Guthrie’s adapted ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’:

‘Love Sick’ comes across as Gothic R&B. Perhaps only Dylan would have chosen to open his first album of original music in seven years with the line ‘I’m walking through streets that are dead’, but why bother to pretend that 73 minutes of jolly noise lie ahead? Two things are then apparent. One seems trivial, but cannot be accidental. This, the opening to the latest comeback album, is entitled ‘Love Sick’, not ‘Lovesick’. The condition alluded to is not the fey pining of romantic convention. This is love as a physical affliction, an enervating venereal assault that has left its victim sick to his soul, attracted and yet repulsed
by his desires, first declaring ‘I wish I’d never met you’ before surrendering at the last: ‘I’d give anything to be with you.’ Few songs in the pop field with the word love in their titles sound anything like this.

The second striking aspect is a matter of writing style. It marks out the entire album as something new in Dylan’s work. He had been struggling against his glorious youthful eloquence since 1967’s
John Wesley Harding
. It seems he came to distrust his effortless ability to forge those chains of flashing images. In ‘Love Sick’, as with the rest of
Time Out of Mind
’s best songs, he is rigorous with his language. In places it is spare-to-skeletal. Equally, given several accounts of the rewriting Dylan did in the studio, even when it meant returning to a song that had already been recorded, we can assume that the album contains few casual remarks. Even the clichés are intentional. ‘Love Sick’ is written, with great precision, to echo the rhythms of a man walking the streets. Its minimal melody pulses as though to match his breathing. All the while the song’s end rhymes and internal rhymes circle like the speaker’s thoughts, caught in their obsessive loops. ‘Love Sick’ is one of Dylan’s works that can cause you to forget what is being said while you wonder at the sheer craft that allows it to be said.

Then there is ‘Highlands’, conventionally ‘the longest song Dylan ever recorded’. That’s perfectly true, but what of it? The tendency to invest a piece with significance simply because the writer is demanding more of your time than usual is a strange quirk among Dylan’s fans and critics. It’s akin to saying that if an airport novel is as long as
War and Peace
it must be as important as
War and Peace.
‘Highlands’ is not Dylan’s sixteen-and-a-half-minute masterpiece. Ironically, in fact, its qualities have nothing to do with its vast length and everything to do with its smallest details. The problems arise, meanwhile, because Dylan attempts the difficult feat of welding two contrasting songs into one, or rather of interrupting one song with a comic (mostly comic) dialogue ‘bridge’. A lot of people have found the result enchanting or intriguing. This writer is less enthusiastic. ‘Highlands’ is more often a piece to be admired rather than enjoyed.

The compensations, and they are numerous, are in those details. One, obvious enough, is to hear Dylan pay his respects to Robert Burns, one ballad-maker (and borrower) to another, by adapting ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’. Here is the ‘folk process’ with a vengeance. Dylan’s ‘Highlands’ lifts one of the most famous lines by the Scottish poet, despite the fact – surely not because of the fact? – that it was the one line in the famous song that Burns himself didn’t write when he was rescuing the fragments of a culture almost destroyed by imperial England. As the Scot’s note to the song had it: ‘The first half stanza is old, the rest is mine.’ In other words, the key line ‘My heart’s in the Highlands’ came from an old thing called ‘The Strong Walls of Derry’ (itself in part derived from a song called ‘Boys of Kilkenny’). So Dylan is borrowing a borrowed fragment from a poet who not only adapted older works but felt he had a patriotic duty to do so in order to preserve relics. If rescue often involved stripping multiple sources for spare parts and adding a Gaelic melody just because it seemed to fit, Burns didn’t care. In fact, he would not even have understood the problem. He was a greater poet than any of the anonymous peasants from whom he borrowed. That statement might have made for a few arguments in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. As to the grand question of folk ‘authenticity’, Burns was in no sense a Highlander. His song of 1790 begins: