Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (76 page)

In fact, many of the critics and fans who had listened hard to
Time Out of Mind
and
‘Love and Theft’
, who had pored over all the verses, unpicked the quotation-collages and tracked down every fragment of borrowed melody, said
he
had become the keeper of tradition’s flame, the archivist of the American experience. The idea was already in danger of becoming a cliché. Reviewing
‘Love and Theft’
in the
New York Times
, Greil Marcus had remarked that Dylan’s new music opened up a window in time.
⁴
That was no more strictly true than the accusations of betrayal in 1965 had been wholly true. But it contained truth enough. Dylan was not quite the last person in his country still capable of remembering a few things about the republic’s history. He was hardly alone among performers in trying to pierce the veil of cultural amnesia. Americana, a term he would mistrust until he claimed it nonchalantly for his 2013 Americanarama tour, had been thriving without his help during the 1990s. Somehow, for all that, Dylan’s explorations hinted at a bigger statement than anything that could be contained in a revivalist pastiche. Walt Whitman was being invoked increasingly often by admirers. The artist, it was asserted, was finding a way to articulate a sense of the past in the present, alive and active. He too had become part of the American tradition, lodged in the collective memory he was mapping.

Dylan returned to Newport less than a fortnight after the death of Alan Lomax, the left-wing folklorist who had been among those shouting loudest for less volume back in the middle of the ’60s. The artist had chosen to forget about that. On being ‘inducted’ to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York in January 1988, Dylan had picked out the folk-song collector – along with Little Richard, no less – for special thanks. During a show in Vienna, Virginia, in August 1997, Dylan had once more expressed his gratitude to the ‘father of world music’. The artist would also make respectful mentions of Lomax in the pages of
Chronicles
, as though all the fuss of 1965 had never happened.

There was an odd sense in which that was almost true. By 2002, the three albums of rococo R&B and opaque verses that had forged Dylan’s reputation in the middle years of the ’60s looked increasingly like aberrations, however brilliant they might have been in conception and execution. Journalists writing about him were still talking of
Bringing It All Back Home
,
Highway 61 Revisited
and
Blonde on Blonde
in terms of ‘rock and roll’. He had said often enough, correctly but in vain, that the term had never been descriptive of his music. The other truth was that those three monumental albums did not represent the dominant strains in his art. Strange as it sounds, they had been a phase.

By the end of his life, Lomax had long since come to terms with popular music, though he never lost his contempt for homogenised mass culture. Dylan had travelled in the opposite direction. His thanks from the stage at the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna in 1997, just after singing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, had included the following statement: ‘Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan.’ That had been as explicit as the artist ever gets, even if it overlooked the fact that the Lomax version of love and theft had sometimes involved dubious methods, not least a tendency on the collector’s part to behave like a condescending patron towards black performers. Dylan had always talked of folk song in terms of mystery and secret knowledge. In thousands of field recordings, in
Folk Song Style and Culture
(1968), in
The Land Where the Blues Began
(1993) and in many other publications besides, Lomax had spent 70 years making the connections that had helped others to solve the riddles. He had helped white boys to sing the blues, at any rate. Dylan’s twenty-first-century approach was more sophisticated. As with borrowed words and phrases, he laid himself open to the charge that he had built a career by appropriating the creations of overlooked or anonymous artists. In his defence was the fact that he had, in essence, perpetuated tradition more surely than any other performer. So dominant was he in the art of American song, it was hard to say where tradition ended and Dylan began. His late recordings were meditations on that truth.

Still, when he returned to the stage in Newport after 37 years it seemed to most members of a huge audience that he had been taking his ethnomusicological researches a little too far. Either that or he had landed a job playing third villain from the left in a particularly bad western. The big white Stetson was in place, but there the resemblance to any known Bob Dylan ended. His hair was shoulder length, straight and unkempt. He wore a beard that looked as though it had been drawn on by an impish child. What made this all the more bizarre was that some fans knew he had looked entirely different, which is to say more or less normal, during the previous night’s show in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Newport, Dylan made no attempt to explain himself. As was often the case, he said not a word to the crowd, but carried on as though nothing whatever was amiss. His eccentricities had long been proverbial; this – the weird hair like a stringy curtain around his head, the billy goat beard-thing – invited diagnosis. When photographs got out, a small frenzy would ensue among those who worry over What It All Means.

It meant that Dylan had been shooting a video for a new song called ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. The mystery lay in the fact that he had not bothered to take even ten minutes to remove a silly wig and a fake beard before going on stage. Perhaps it was his oblique comment on expectations and the return to Newport. Perhaps he thought it was funny. When a
Rolling Stone
journalist asked a couple of years later, ‘What was up with the wig and fake beard?’ Dylan’s answer almost gave the game away. ‘Is that me who you saw up there?’ he asked.
⁵
Perhaps he just liked the look, or the idea that photographs of what seemed to be late-period Howard Hughes in a cowboy hat would certainly find their way around the world. He didn’t look much better in the video, but at least the get-up was appropriate to the subject.

Behind all the nonsense, typically, lay one of his finest songs. That the piece would be relegated for better than five years to the soundtrack album for a failed Civil War movie called
Gods and Generals
is almost too predictable to be worth stating. It was the kind of perverse decision that had also become typical. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, a majestic threnody for those who fell in the war between the states, vindicated Dylan’s literary borrowing habit. It confirmed, too, that his attempts to address a century and a half of American history, to contain its strands and contradictions within his work, were not whims.

Ted Turner, the billionaire ‘media mogul’ and founder of CNN, had financed
Gods and Generals
with tens of millions of dollars from his own pocket. The exact number of millions is open to dispute. By the time the picture was released in February 2003, an original budget of $56 million had grown to what the
Los Angeles Times
understood to be $90 million; others said anywhere between $60 million and $80 million. In the end, this ‘prequel’ to the movie
Gettysburg
took just $12.9 million at the box office. Some of the many critics who dismissed the epic as mannered, verbose and far too long would think the receipts generous. One result was that Dylan, apparently intent on a second career as a composer of songs for films, would sacrifice one of his most affecting statements to a risible piece of Southern ancestor worship. Thanks to
Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006
, the eighth volume in the Bootleg Series, the song survives and still manages to say more about America’s Civil War in just over eight minutes than
Gods and Generals
achieved in three hours and forty-nine minutes.

It’s a song without a chorus, dolorous as a funeral march, couched in a fair facsimile of the language of the period, religious yet clear-eyed, and streaked through with the found poetry of historical truth. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ also manages to be a movie song that is cinematic in its own right. The work is complete and self-contained. It has no need of the picture’s thunderous battle re-enactment scenes, or of promotional videos of famous singers in fright wigs. From verse to verse it moves across ‘the ravaged land’ with a more penetrating gaze than any feature film.

Dylan’s method is immediately apparent. ‘Heaven blazing in my head’ has been connected by several critics, rightly, to the W.B. Yeats of ‘Lapis Lazuli’, he who speaks of ‘Heaven blazing into the head’. What’s often forgotten is the connection Dylan is making. The next line of the Irishman’s 1938 poem follows a punctuating colon with ‘Tragedy wrought to its uttermost’. In the succeeding verse there is the line ‘Old civilisations put to the sword’, then ‘All things fall and are built again’. This being Dylan, meanwhile, the thing emerging from the sea and a monstrous dream no doubt originate in Revelation 13:1: ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’ This being Dylan, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ formulation, ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’, is shorn of bombast. The ‘land of the rich and free’ has lost its prosperity and liberty to carnage and the beast within. Blasphemy will meanwhile reappear in the song ‘on every tongue’, as though to say that the conflict itself is blasphemous. Yet ‘virtue lives / and cannot be forgot’.

The wonder of the piece is the quantity of imagery Dylan manages to condense. An entire nineteenth-century notion of sacrifice on the ‘altar’ of war, of the ‘good’ Christian death for one’s country, is caught in a few bare lines. Then the entire scene of a coming battle, with all its bathetic pretensions to honour and gentlemanly conduct before the slaughter, is laid out in 20 words.

Throughout the song, Dylan sticks to his brief.
Gods and Generals
was an attempt both to tell the story of a decisive period in the Civil War and to portray General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the insanely devout hero of the Confederacy. The song, like the movie, intends to give an idea of vast loss on both sides, but for much of the time, inevitably, its perspective is Southern. Jackson was shot three times by the pickets of his own rebel army towards the end of the battle of Chancellorsville early in May 1863. After an arm was amputated, pneumonia set in and he died of its complications. The South greeted the loss of a brilliantly audacious general with a keening panic. Some historians of the struggle argue, in fact, that Jackson’s death was the war’s turning point. Without his aid, Robert E. Lee was unable to beat the odds at the battle of Gettysburg a few weeks later. After that, it is claimed, the Confederacy’s defeat was inevitable. Dylan’s song takes no interest in any of this. By contrasting veneration and banal, bloody reality, he gives instead a working definition of war’s infinite stupidity.

‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ has the gravitas of a hymnal, the brooding undertones of a graveside eulogy. Dylan’s abraded voice becomes the only conceivable instrument for this kind of mourning. His touring band provide still more evidence, meanwhile, that he has no need to draft in big-name session players. The violin of Larry Campbell and the organ of Benmont Tench are the only counterpoints the lyrics require. Within the words the restless shades of nineteenth-century American poetry move at a steady, ponderous pace. Dylan’s reliable Henry Timrod is there, with both a line from a verse and an echo of the rhetorical style of the poem ‘Charleston’. In part, that reads:

Herman Melville’s poem ‘Running the Batteries’ has been heard in Dylan’s song; Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ has been adduced; part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Killed at the Ford’ could almost have been one of the verses in the song.

Anyone who fails to see the point of the allusions and borrowings, who prefers hunt-the-plagiarist and elects to ‘deconstruct’ a piece of art as though it were a clockwork toy fit only to be taken apart, will find plenty to work with in ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. This is Dylan:

This is Whitman (from ‘Come Up From the Fields, Father’):