Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (77 page)

Again, Dylan’s ability to edit and condense is startling. Whitman goes on for two more verses before reaching the point:

Dylan’s source is obvious enough, then. What’s worth remembering is that while he intermingles unassuaged grief from both sides of a warring nation – his ‘Captain’ could as well be Lincoln as Jackson – he fuses the poetry of North and South, Whitman and Timrod. Dylan also traces a cultural continuity. His lines ‘Stars fell over Alabama / I saw each star’ are, aptly, a luminous evocation of extinguished Southern lives. But they are also adapted from a 1930s jazz song, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. That tune, in turn, borrowed its title from a book describing a never-forgotten Leonid meteor shower over the state in 1833. The past is in the present; the present is somehow within the past. By its tone the song seems to say, meanwhile, that the war between the states has never truly ended. Grief has never been forgotten; the reasons for grief and enmity have yet to be addressed; nothing is healed. Modern America was born of this conflict and modern America, as Dylan knew perfectly well, remains a house divided against itself.

Finally, there are those verses which, though no doubt unearthed from someone’s prose, become purest Dylan. They leave you to wonder what all the charges of plagiarism can truly mean. So the merest hint from an old jazz song becomes a verse remarkable for its concision and precision. The writer does not have to state all that has been lost. There is a world of mourning in a few words:

*

The government of the United States was threatening war while Dylan was recording ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. George W. Bush, the latest president, did not mean to be deterred from his ambitions for a conflict in the Middle East, least of all by the facts. An elaborate plot to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for the sake of a strategic incursion was in train. The fiction of an Iraqi dictator’s weapons of mass destruction was being spun out across the media, all outlets. If he cared, Dylan got still more points for prescience:
People are crazy and times are strange
…

Another movie song, the ancient-sounding one that had plenty to say about futility and loss, had made no comment about the manner in which wars are sometimes contrived, or about the kind of people who fix things so that others do the dying. That had been the younger Dylan’s style. But the older man still knew, as he had known in his youth, that politicians will lie reflexively to achieve their ends. That understanding had never disappeared from Dylan’s thinking and he had not relinquished every right to an opinion. ‘Summer Days’ on the
‘Love and Theft’
album had offered a sour, minor joke:

The adventure known simply as ‘Iraq’ would be constructed upon a mound of calculated deceits and do America no credit in the world. Americans themselves would find much of it shameful and most of it troubling. Many citizens of allied countries would feel the same. Worst of all, the war when it came in March 2003 would see all the old ideas of duty, honour and country despoiled by cynics once again. Dylan – patriotic enough and certainly no pacifist – had said all he needed to say in ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ about the terrible things done in virtue’s name. Interviewed in the autumn of 2001, he had tried to make a distinction between being simply ‘anti-war’ – impossible for a supporter of the State of Israel – and his abiding distrust of those who ‘manipulated’ patriotism.

Take ‘Masters of War’. Every time I sing it, someone writes that it’s an anti-war song. I’m not a pacifist. I don’t think I’ve ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it’s about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in this country. I believe strongly in everyone’s right to defend themselves by every means necessary …

I think something changed in the country around 1966 or so. You’ll have to look at the history books to really sort it out, but there are people who manipulated the Vietnam war. They were traitors to America, whoever they were. It was the beginning of the corporate take-over of America.
⁶

The one-word debacle called Iraq would be a sharp lesson for those still prepared to learn. The notion that there could be untrammelled American power in a ‘unipolar’ world would be refuted. Grandiose boasts of ‘the second American century’ would come apart like cheap cement amid a welter of excuses. The claim that democratic ‘values’ could be pressed on peoples whose desire for liberation was taken for granted would dissolve in the keen light of reality. Meanwhile, the ‘corporate take-over’ would be extended to the very business of war-making as private enterprises made fortunes from Pentagon contracts, much as fortunes had been made during the Civil War. In Iraq, the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower’s nightmare, would emerge defiantly from the shadows. Yet when the official lies became too obvious to ignore, trust in America’s government would be shaken once again. For the last superpower and for those still attempting to redeem history, Vietnam above all, Iraq would become a bloody mess. Dylan gazed upon all of this with the eyes of one who regarded war as fallen mankind’s perpetual condition. Bloody Chancellorsville or irradiated Fallujah: the only real difference was that in the modern atrocity Americans were not killing one another.

You cannot assemble an opinion on Dylan’s behalf just from the evidence of his public statements. He has had decades in which to master the arts of evasion and self-contradiction. You must go to the art instead. He appears always to say that it is beside the point for some mere singer to pontificate, that poetry, as W.H. Auden insisted, ‘makes nothing happen’. All the wars meanwhile say that humankind isn’t altered in the slightest by art, however passionate, however moving, however true. That had been the youngster’s insight in the ’60s. Protest songs made people feel better about themselves, but they didn’t truly change anything. The cities of the western world would erupt in protest against the Iraq conspiracy. Brave songs would be sung and brave words spoken, but the military machine would roll on regardless. Besides, if you cleave to Revelation, as Dylan does, your belief in immutable prophecy is liable to make everything else seem like trivia. But.

The coincidences that saw this artist writing
Masked and Anonymous
and ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ within the same brief span allow for the sketching of a rough composite picture of part of Dylan’s thinking. The idea of a war in the Middle East no doubt revived a few of his high-definition apocalyptic fantasies. Nevertheless, his movie said he had a precise idea of the forces at work within his country. His movie song said he had understood what becomes of essential humanity when it is exposed to pitiless warfare. Together, two overlooked works testified to the fact that, despite everything, he was clear-eyed and undeceived. Radical, too.

*

In October 2002, as though for the hell of it, Dylan’s performances in concert began to amount to something again. Whether this was because he had taken to playing the electric piano on stage, or because he had begun to tackle other people’s songs more often than before, there was a vitality to the shows, first on the American west coast and then in the east, that had not been evident in years. Renditions of works by Warren Zevon, who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, became a speciality. Dylan had not known the writer of ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ and ‘Werewolves of London’ especially well. He had played a little harmonica at a Zevon session in 1987, but did not claim to be a friend. Nevertheless, it seems the artist felt compelled to honour a dying man whose work he admired by performing his songs, often three in a night, at show after show.

As more than one Dylan fan noticed, he took pains to get his performances right when works that were not his own fell into his care. Amid all the exculpatory talk of ‘reinvention’, few had paused to ask how many times the feat could be attempted or accomplished with Dylan songs that were 30 and 40 years old. This would be his 15th year out on the road in a touring programme that had been interrupted just once, unavoidably, by the histoplasmosis infection scare. What was left to be squeezed from ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or ‘It’s Alright, Ma’? So it was that on 19 October the crowd at San Diego State University heard not only Zevon’s ‘Mutineer’ but Van Morrison’s ‘Carrying a Torch’, Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’, Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ and, remarkably, a version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’. Arguably, the last of these was the best of the lot. Dylan was testing himself with songs he didn’t know inside out, asleep or awake, in every conceivable improvised variant reading. It did him a power of good to sing what others had written.

For all that, the exercise also served to prove that he was once again in need of new material. Each of the songs of
‘Love and Theft’
had by this point been performed in concert, with varying degrees of success. Dylan was meanwhile turning to a few of his less-obvious older pieces to keep the customers satisfied. But if the tour never-ending had truly won him a new audience, the customers seemed strangely content with the same core set of the same old songs from the ’60s at show upon show. Perhaps, in the main, they were the same old customers. Still there was no sign of a new album. It seemed that Dylan could happily produce work if there was a Hollywood cheque attached, but could not be galvanised by any other means.

The consolation for fans late in 2002 was the release of
The Bootleg Series Vol
.
5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue
. It was a very fine double CD set that nevertheless managed to annoy a few people by giving only a partial and misleading account of a typical revue concert. The album, a memento of idealism and high passion long gone, was nevertheless the best Dylan had to offer. For all his complaints about bootleggers, the appeal of ‘rare and unreleased’ recordings was his sole commercial proposition in the absence of new work.
The Bootleg Series Vol
.
5
would sell in respectable quantities, neither a golden goose nor a turkey.

In January 2003,
Masked and Anonymous
received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and went to meet its maker. Dylan was at risk, not for the first time, of becoming a world-famous cult figure. He toured Australia and New Zealand once again, went through the Southern American states in April and May, covered most of the rest of the country in July and August, reached Europe in October … And so on. If touring was not just a job, it looked very like one. On 12 September, after a good deal of hard living and the loss of his beloved and stalwart wife June, Johnny Cash died in Nashville at the age of 71. Dylan prepared still another of his eulogies. This one was longer and more heartfelt than most.

Cash, he wrote, ‘was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him’. Dylan remembered how his friend had sent a letter of support in the mid-’60s when the dogmatic editors of
Sing Out!
were ‘chastising me for the direction my music was going’. At that point, he and Cash had not actually met, but ‘the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.’ Johnny Cash, said Dylan,

is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses.

These were honourable sentiments. Dylan’s affection and respect for Cash had deep roots. Those who admired either or both of these men could ingest a little of their essential nobility vicariously from the artist’s words. A touching moment, then. It was slightly difficult, however, not to notice the disjunction sundering the Dylan who wrote so movingly of those ‘various lost causes of the human soul’ from the Dylan who materialised in Italy, handy and undeniably dandy, in January 2004. The ghost of John Cash had not brought this individual to his senses.

Dylan was in Venice to stand around in a rented palazzo for a couple of days, more or less alive and apparently in person, to shoot a minute-long commercial for the Victoria’s Secret lingerie company. The song sold for the occasion, along with the artist’s services, was ‘Love Sick’. The first self-evident fact, therefore, was that not a soul involved in the exercise save the writer could have listened to the track beforehand. The existential significance of undergarments is not, even at a stretch, one of its themes. Was this Dylan’s private joke? Hardly. He was there for the cheque.

As a provocation, as an art event staged with subversive intent to wring some comedy from commerce, it might have engendered all sorts of scholarly chatter. Instead, there was the sight being prepared for American TV audiences of a 62-year-old Dylan and a model almost 40 years his junior posing their way through a series of meaningful looks and sultry stares. She wore angels’ wings and examples of the company’s products; he wore his best rueful old devil empty face. Skin crawled on five continents. Even Salvador Dali, who had not been called Avida Dollars for nothing, spun gently in his unquiet grave. But what was a poor boy to do? Victoria’s Secret had thrown in an offer to sell a $10 Dylan compilation ‘exclusively’ at their outlets.