Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (85 page)

The last
Theme Time
, broadcast on 15 April 2009, also carried a whiff of corporate manoeuvring, coming as it did after XM Satellite Radio fell under new ownership. The reasons for the show being brought to an end were never made clear, though it had probably run its course in any case. The final theme, naturally enough, was ‘Goodbye’. Dylan said: ‘It’s one thing to make an entrance, it’s another thing entirely to get out alive. So for the next hour we’ll be checking all the exits, finding our way outta here … And this show might run a little long this week, but that’s OK. What are they gonna do, fire me?’ He was approaching the age of 68, but all the familiar talk of packing things in, of giving up on recording or touring or meeting the demands of the expanding Bob Dylan corporate enterprise, had disappeared. Like some monarch without an heir, he had no intention of abdicating. His life had become a bizarre mixture of high art and low commerce, of thoughtful statements on the state of man and the modern world interspersed with textbook examples of the kind of behaviour that gives stardom its disreputable name.

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Together Through Life
would turn out to be a big hit. Most critics would esteem it less highly than
Modern Times
, but most album buyers would pay no mind to another round of media
feuilletons
describing the writers’ long, personal and fraught relationships with the slippery art of Bob Dylan. Among reviewers there was a sense that the creative renaissance thesis had run its course. They had worked the idea almost to death, after all, without coming to terms with what it might truly signify. Memories of the depths to which the artist once had descended were beginning to dissipate. By May 2009 he was rich, famous, legendary, garlanded with awards and with his name on an album that had charged up the charts to number one in America, Britain and a host of other countries. According to the weird logic of music journalism, Dylan was therefore fair game for reviewers prepared to hit all the notes on the gamut between level-headed and empty-headed. One even managed to say that while the album offered ‘many great things’ it was ‘rendered underwhelming’ simply by the fact that some of the writer’s peers had praised it too highly.
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Together Through Life
contained fewer appropriations, borrowings and obvious thefts than hitherto. This reduced the opportunities for learned prosecutorial statements on the difference between intertextuality and dishonesty. On this album, Dylan sounded both droll and righteously angry. That tested critical systems in which a reviewer’s little printed stars were supposed to be worth a thousand words. Self-evidently, the artist had taken some 1950s Chicago blues standards for his templates and reworked songs associated with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Otis Rush and the like. Then the Tejano accordion of David Hidalgo, leader of the Chicano band Los Lobos, had been featured prominently, inevitably lending a Southern, borderland ambience to the songs. In Dylan’s poetic universe, borders are the places where things fall apart, where rules and laws break down and madness looms. Those presentiments ran through every track on
Together Through Life
.

Even the songs which
sounded
affable drew on the belief that in the modern world social order is precarious. The title of the first track, ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothin’’, was another borrowing from Ovid in his exile. The next song was the scarcely ambiguous ‘Life is Hard’. ‘If You Ever Go to Houston’, its melody and chorus lifted wholesale from the traditional ‘Midnight Special’ that Lead Belly had made his own, seemed jolly enough until you gave some attention to the words. The speaker, this eternal tipsy wanderer, was not cheerful.

Similarly, ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’ seemed almost optimistic when set beside some of the album’s other offerings. It appeared to be a raffish love song, testimony to the enduring emotions apparently implied by the album’s title. ‘Life is for love,’ Dylan sang, welding clichés together, ‘and they say that love is blind.’ The next verse said something else entirely.

If a single song characterised Dylan’s mood on
Together Through Life
it was the final track, the mocking, defiant, contemptuous ‘It’s All Good’, a cliché transformed into an indictment. It would be fascinating to know who actually composed each line of this lyric, but the artist performed the whole as his own. Those who still assumed that he had put ‘topical song’ behind him long before would have some difficulty explaining this rackety number.

For the most part, the album worked well, flagging only when Dylan allowed his readings of the blues to become a little perfunctory, as in the pointless ‘Shake Shake Mama’, or the truly tiresome ‘Jolene’. At its best,
Together Through Life
possessed both an aura and a swagger that the artist had not displayed for a long time. The issue of authorship would not be resolved, least of all by Dylan, but certain of the best lines were invested with his familiar tone, even when he was leaning on a favourite writer such as Edgar Allen Poe. In ‘Forgetful Heart’, for example, there was the brief but lovely conclusion ‘The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door’. In ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’, meanwhile, Dylan (or Hunter) came up with a brilliant, gnomic verse that so delighted the country singer named he emblazoned it across his website.

One dim-witted listener (this one) spent a week convinced that Dylan was making reference to the blood of the Lamb, though why it would be in his voice was never obvious. On the other hand, ‘blood of the land’, whatever it might mean, has no clear connection with country singers. There might be something involving Joyce, ‘blood and ouns’ and Ireland, but that’s a stretch. Dylan mentioned the novelist in
Chronicles
only to say that as a youth he had failed to make much headway with the prose. He recited the Joyce poem ‘Sleep now, O sleep now’ during Episode 28 (‘Sleep’) of
Theme Time
, but he recited a lot of poetry on the show. The Dubliner was a gifted piano player with a deep interest in music. Any help? On the other hand, ‘Joyce’ is one of the better rhymes for ‘voice’.

As is often the case when Dylan offers a non sequitur, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The performance imposes its own logic. One large part of his gift has always been the ability to turn statements whose meanings are private (or mysterious even to him) into a kind of sense beyond sense. There is nothing accidental about how the effect is achieved. As David Hidalgo would remember the
Together Through Life
sessions, Dylan ‘was always rewriting the lyrics’. Robert Hunter seems to have played no part in this procedure. The idea that the artist had taken on a collaborator because he was once again stuck for words is therefore nonsensical. In the studio, as the songs were shaped and reshaped, the only writer was Dylan. As Hidalgo would describe the process, ‘he has, you know, 20 verses that he’s got laid out, and he’ll pick and choose and rewrite while he’s going. It’s amazing to watch him work.’
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In the end, Olivier Dahan got more Bob Dylan music for his wayward Renée Zellweger road movie than he could have dreamed possible. In addition to five tracks from the album, the artist came up with sixteen bits and pieces of incidental music and allowed cover versions of older songs such as ‘What Good Am I? and ‘Precious Angel’ to be used. On his own behalf, meanwhile, Dylan turned
Together Through Life
into a memorable oddity, a set that was vivid, energetic and, unmistakably, an old man’s album. In this case, the aged individual was dismayed by the world yet furiously defiant of all it could throw at him. Dylan was ageing on his own terms. In an account of an interview given in Paris to promote the album, he was described as a kind of tenacious anachronism, out of step with the times and proud of the fact.

Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
, Dylan seems to have the [Great] American Songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web – anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual … If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube.
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It was a slight exaggeration, but not too far wide of the mark. He who had once sailed effortlessly into a future only he could discern had put down his anchors. On the other hand,
Together Through Life
could make even Dylan’s eccentricities sound rational. There were plenty of those. In May, just after the album’s release, he was in the fair city of Liverpool for a show. To the evident astonishment of the National Trust, keepers of the modest house called Mendips in Woolton where John Lennon had been raised by his Aunt Mimi, one of the 14 curious tourists paying £16 for a bus trip and tour could claim to have known the dead Beatle personally. ‘He spent ages going through photo albums and was thrilled at all the memorabilia,’ reported a representative of the trust.
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Dylan had been spotted previously at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, but this excursion to Mendips and to Strawberry Fields was odd even by the artist’s standards. There he was, a performer who claimed to be sceptical of fame and fans, goggling at ‘memorabilia’ like a true prying fanatic. The artist who had asserted that there is no difference between nostalgia and death might even have seemed a little wistful. At least no one in Liverpool tried to arrest him for it.

That honour would fall to Officer Kristie Buble in Long Branch, New Jersey, in July. The ‘eccentric-looking old man’ was causing no trouble as he strolled around in the rain on a summer’s day. On the other hand, the officer was only 22 and unfamiliar with the names and faces of people who were famous long before she was born. As Buble would tell ABC news: ‘I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something.’ Locals had reported ‘an old scruffy man acting suspiciously’. The young cop would confirm that detail, more or less. ‘He was acting very suspicious,’ she would say. ‘Not delusional, just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything.’ The suspect had no useful ID on him. When Buble therefore took him back to his hotel to investigate his paperwork, she felt it necessary to call her precinct to ‘check who Bob Dylan was’. After the laughter down the line from the station house had subsidised, the artist was free to go about his business.

Journalists who thought they knew their man tried to turn a guess into a weird ‘fact’ by deciding that he had been wandering around looking for the house in which Bruce Springsteen had written
Born to Run
. Asked about the incident in an interview three years later, Dylan’s explanation was mundane: he had simply gone for a walk. ‘I guess in that neck of the woods they’re not used to seeing people walking in the rain,’ he said. ‘I was the only one on the street.’
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His ID was missing simply because ‘I wear so many changes of clothes all the time.’ Dylan’s mistake, if that’s the word, had been to forget that in a country obsessed with crime no one could act as though it was still 1958 in Hibbing, Minn. But even his run-in with Officer Buble was not the strangest episode in 2009 for one globally famous complete unknown.

Towards the end of the summer, a rumour began to circulate within the Dylan-watching fraternity to the effect that he was recording again. Given his limited productivity in the twenty-first century, this was a surprise in itself. As ever, speculation and amateur investigations commenced. When the facts were established, they were treated by some earnest fans as a worse betrayal than a $129 price tag for a box set. A Christmas album: how could Dylan even contemplate such a surrender to the worst kind of crass commercialism, far less carry it through?

He could and he did, much to the benefit of the charities Feeding America and Crisis in the UK, to whom all the album’s royalties were directed.
Christmas in the Heart
, a seasonal affair played (almost) entirely straight, was a gift to anyone who enjoyed the holiday and retained a sense of humour. It was no great surprise to discover that a lot of Dylan fans were lacking in that department. Quite what they had made of
Theme Time Radio
was therefore anyone’s guess. How they squared Dylan’s complicated religious affiliations with the discovery that, where Christmas was concerned, he was a middle-of-the-road Middle American who loved the entire affair is also likely to remain mysterious. But why would he not cherish the festival? The birth of his messiah was of no small importance to the artist.

Christmas in the Heart
– by David Hidalgo’s account entirely Dylan’s idea – did not labour that point when it appeared in October. Religiosity was notable by its absence. Equally, there was little of his usual sardonic bite to the artist’s treatments of standards and carols. Even when he cut loose with ‘Must Be Santa’, filming a truly demented video to accompany the track, he seemed to be evoking, not mocking, the polka bands of his Minnesota childhood. A few would remember that the song had once been a hit for Mitch Miller, the professionally bland Columbia producer who had led the old school’s chorus of contempt for ‘Hammond’s folly’ back in Dylan’s early days, but that had nothing to do with the spirit of the track, or of the album.