Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (70 page)

Other reviewers who knew their Dylan had reached very similar conclusions. A few had been needlessly stern on the subject of veracity. My account argued, somewhere along the line, that the kind of truth being offered did not depend much, if at all, on specific facts. To me, those didn’t matter alongside Dylan’s version of the truth. You could call that truth deeper or higher; I would have said ‘artistic’. And that was while setting aside until this volume most of the arguments over precise words, precise phrases and their precise origins.

Chronicles
is a marvel. It counts as a significant piece of American literary art, one all the better for its solid craft in the age of celebrity tell-all-tell-nothing confessions. Pulling it apart like a questionable witness statement is about as useful as denying the power of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ just because Dylan was shaky – as he was – on the facts of that celebrated tragedy. But where
Chronicles
was concerned the issue of honesty cut a little deeper, it transpired, than any argument over whether the writer had got his stories straight. Suddenly the topic for discussion became the nature of his art in the twenty-first century.

By 2004, it wasn’t exactly a whole new symposium. Noises had been made before about Dylan’s methods, his influences, inspirations, sources, borrowings and the uses to which sometimes he put them. Back in the 1960s he had dismissed all such questions with a famous crack to the effect that influence was impossible to avoid. You open your eyes and ears, he had said, and you’re influenced. That had not been the sole basis for an avid student’s speed-learning in the art of songwriting. It didn’t make him guilty of the glib charge that he was ‘a master thief’. It didn’t establish his unsullied innocence, either. It did help to explain him, however.

Dylan had come to fame by way of a Greenwich Village scene and a folk tradition that saw nothing wrong with ‘borrowing’, adaptation, imitation and the subtle (or not so subtle) shaping of ‘influences’ into a style the artist could call his own. In an important sense, that process
was
the folk tradition. It amounted to the casual, communal effort continually to remake songs that had been handed down from generation to generation. For some, folk was inspirational on that account alone. Its problems arose only when the old egalitarian hootenanny habits began to run up against a capitalist entertainment industry with a vested interest in copyright and ownership.

Dylan, always remembered as a ‘sponge’, even by those who had done plenty of sponging themselves, had his share of trouble on that score in the first half of the ’60s. His management were obliged to pay off Jean Ritchie, the Appalachian ‘Mother of Folk’, when her arrangement of the ancient ‘Nottamun Town’ turned up as the basis for Dylan’s 1962–3 ‘Masters of War’. His ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was born, indisputably, from a version of the traditional ‘Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)’ developed and placed under copyright by his friend Paul Clayton. For what it’s worth, the publishing companies settled that argument out of court. As Dylan had admitted in a 1962 radio interview and would cheerfully admit again in
Chronicles
, he had also lifted the tune for ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till’ from Len Chandler, another Village colleague. Amidst all this it hardly required perfect pitch to hear that ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was built around the Child ballad ‘Lord Randall’, or that ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ owed its existence to an early-twentieth-century recasting by John Jacob Niles of the old work song ‘Go ’Way From My Window’. The scruffy prodigy’s borrowings from ‘obscure’ black blues players were meanwhile extensive and wholly unselfconscious. It was what everyone did, after all. Copyright arguments aside, the folk scene amounted to a nightly test case for the proposition that originality of authorship, pure, protean and sufficient unto itself, was a myth.

The musicologist Charles Seeger, father to Pete, had devised the phrase ‘folk process’, though the idea was far from original, aptly enough.
³
The International Folk Music Council had already attempted to codify the whole business in 1954 with a few lofty-sounding rules involving ‘oral transmission’, reinterpretation and ‘transformation’. It didn’t solve every problem. Interviewed in 2001, Pete Seeger would remember his father describing the folk process as akin to cooks adapting recipes, or to legal systems devising new laws for each new generation.
⁴
The analogies were neat, but they failed to explain, for one conspicuous example, how Pete Seeger himself could wind up as one of the copyright holders to the civil-rights anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’.

The refrain originated in an early gospel song, ‘I’ll Overcome Someday’, written by the Rev. Dr Charles Tindley and published in 1901. By 1947, that piece formed the basis for a song published in its turn as ‘We Will Overcome’. Taken up by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, it was heard by Pete Seeger and others who then joined in the process of (slight) adaptation. Four individuals or their heirs today hold the copyright, along with various publishers, for this product of the ‘folk process’.

In a 1993 book, Seeger explained that he had taken out the copyright as a purely defensive measure to protect the song from music-business predators.
⁵
It is worth noting, too, that all royalties from ‘We Shall Overcome’ have gone to a fund that bestows grants to aid the cultural efforts of African Americans in the Southern states. The simple fact remains, nevertheless, that only the rectitude of Seeger and his friends prevented the most famous of all folk songs from ending up as a spectacular example of how ridiculously easy it was in the 1950s and 1960s to abuse the fabled ‘process’. Dylan’s Greenwich Village knew all the arguments. Everyone was a staunch believer in folk’s ancient uncorrupted practices until they had a song, or even an arrangement, they could call their own. Claiming to have ‘arranged’ some old, familiar piece in fact became a favourite device in the copyright game.

In his youth, Dylan was also inhabiting another ’60s entirely. In this universe adolescents and students across the western world were reading T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
(1922) and discovering that it was perfectly OK – fascinating and revolutionary, in fact – to bulk up one’s text with big chunks of imported writing by other hands. The New Criticism, of which Eliot was a household god, was then infesting the English departments of American colleges with the delightful (to critics) notion that an author’s intentions, therefore his ‘authorship’, didn’t really count for much. In France, the critic Roland Barthes was working towards an essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), in which readers and the ‘liberated’ text would be judged to matter more than any writer with a byline. Dylan didn’t know much about all of this, if he knew anything at all, but it was part of the era’s background noise.

If creativity could not happen in isolation, if authorship was therefore a disputable idea, how could a line be drawn? For some, easily enough. Copyright protection was sought for the many songs of Bob Dylan, as standard practice, almost as soon as they were written. On a few occasions even songs to which other writers had prior claims were filed under his name. Since the early ’60s all of Dylan’s many works – albums, art, films, even acclaimed books – have been protected as a matter of course. Like any artist, he has his rights.

In pop art in the ’50s and early ’60s collage and photomontage, adapting and juxtaposing ‘found’ or borrowed images, were fashionable techniques. By 1962, Andy Warhol’s Factory was up and running on New York’s East 47th Street, mass-producing copies of mass-produced imagery and offering the results, at excellent prices, as artworks. Pop music, the other art with the name, had long been excusing plagiarism and theft as the name of the creative game. While Warhol was challenging international art buyers to question their preconceptions towards authenticity and the role of the artist, fans of the
Billboard
Hot 100 were taking precious little interest in the names of the Tin Pan Alley hacks who wrote or rewrote the hit songs.

Dylan, like his generation, had come to adulthood amidst all of this. In an affluent age the cultural chatter said that anything found, borrowed, remade or copied was justifiable as art simply because of the choices made in the act of appropriation. Authorship was an arguable matter. But for one writer who would later assert his right ‘to be identified as author’, the issue was a little more complicated. From the start, Dylan had been uncertain, deeply so, about his identity. He couldn’t get a fix on himself. As he mentioned in a 1991 interview: ‘Yes, well, what can you know about anybody?’
⁶
In
Chronicles
he would write of a missing person, a person missing ‘inside’, who had to be found. Pronouns confuse the matter, but he needed to find ‘him’. So who really did the making and who did the taking? When the time came to unmask the author, he told some Bob Dylan stories instead.

*

In a book of five long chapters, Dylan composed three concerning the near-year straddling his blizzard-blown arrival in New York in January of 1961 and the making of his first album in late November. He conjured up a long-gone city, its streets, rooms, speech, textures and preoccupations, with a rare sensitivity to the peculiarities of memory, how it looms unexpectedly and fades unpredictably across the span of the decades. Patently, Dylan mythologised his younger self, just as the critics alleged, but that seemed apt. Who looks back with perfectly clear eyes? For his part, the artist was attempting to look backwards through the deep murk of fame and myth at a long-lost youth with a fragile sense of himself who had laboured under the self-imposed burden of an invented name and a heap of juvenile fabrications. Was clarity even possible?

Dylan’s storytelling, the
faux
reminiscences, wry asides and sly humour that provoked all the flattering comparisons with Twain, made an insistent point. In a proper celebrity memoir he would, for starters, have got his chronology straight and paid due attention to the usual arc of fame. Then he would have hosed his pages with superstar secrets and notable names. His publishers must have prayed nightly for such a manuscript. Instead, the author ignored all the stuff of legend, all the controversies and all the moments, famous and infamous, that had been written about so often by others. He gave his readers tales of old New York – almost a distinct American genre, as it happens – and episodes involving two of his less-celebrated later albums. This, Dylan seemed to be saying, is what I remember when I choose to remember. This is
how
I remember. For encounters with God or ‘going electric’ (and all that) readers would have to look elsewhere. Or wait.

Late in the autumn of 2012, he would admit that volumes two and three of
Chronicles
were gestating. If nothing else, there was a contract to be honoured. His readers might yet be allowed to share his thoughts on his moments of high fame, or they might receive nothing much from the horse’s mouth. His original scheme, it appears, had been to anchor his memories to particular albums, but that had already gone awry. The matching idea had been somehow to inhabit the past and the future simultaneously. But with
Volume One
Dylan had lost one thread and found another, surprising himself in the process. His own youth and his early days in New York had become ‘extremely interesting. When you start doing that, it amazes you what you uncover without even trying.’
⁷

It was not a promise to dish the dirt.
Chronicles
, properly understood, was of a piece with the music Dylan had been making since
Time Out of Mind
. The past was in the present; all time was present. Plainly, he found it impossible to say what those future non-memoirs might contain. In any case, as he informed his
Rolling Stone
interviewer in September 2012, his memory wasn’t great. He remembered what he
wanted
to remember. ‘And what I want to forget, I forget.’
⁸
His book writing, Dylan said, followed links in a chain. Allen Ginsberg, dying in the year
Time Out of Mind
was released, had once invoked chains of flashing images to describe the singer’s art. In his songs, as in his book, Dylan followed an associative logic that was not always readily apparent to the listener or the reader. Imagery provided the syntax of the songs. In prose, or so it seemed, he allowed wandering memory to make the connections. A standard autobiography would have followed a linear chronological path.
Chronicles
was informed by the knowledge that memory simply doesn’t work that way, that to pretend otherwise is a kind of fraud. Then again, a writer who remembers only what he wants to remember, who throws aside the restraint of a chronological structure, can write whatever he likes and call it the truth.

The pair of least-expected chapters devoted to two of Dylan’s less-famous albums,
New Morning
and
Oh Mercy
, were disconcerting when set amidst all the engaging reminiscences of Greenwich Village in the early days. Why Dylan would be hung up 30-odd years after the fact on what had passed between him and the aged patrician poet Archibald MacLeish as they attempted to add songs to a play was mystifying. It had been, by any measure, one of the least significant episodes in the singer’s career. His account of his dealings with the producer Daniel Lanois during the making of the
Oh Mercy
album, aside from raising certain questions of ‘veracity’, also seemed near-redundant. For the reader, the chapters became a puzzle in their own right. Perhaps that was the idea. But why were these events on Dylan’s mind, of all the events in his life, early in the twenty-first century?

If you needed to know, the
New Morning
section would tell you that he had never cared to be regarded as any generation’s spokesman, that demented fans had ruined his Woodstock idyll, that the conferring of an honorary doctorate by Princeton in 1970 had left him angry enough to want to rend flesh. Set beside riveting accounts of his creative origins, the story of his first encounter with the music of Robert Johnson above all, tales of hard labour in a New Orleans studio, or of strange days under siege in his own home, were almost pointedly beside the point. The episodic anecdotes were beautifully told, but why tell these of all stories?