Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (87 page)

Had Dylan submitted to these controls? The
Los Angeles Times
, with a correspondent on the spot, reported that ‘at a time when many other American performers would have been banned from China’, the concert at the Workers’ Gymnasium ‘omitted Dylan’s most famous ballads of dissent’. The newspaper also stated as fact that the artist’s ‘set list had to be sanctioned beforehand by the Ministry of Culture’. In this version, the demand that Dylan should ‘conduct the performance strictly according to the approved programme’ had been part of the ‘formal invitation’ to play in China. This was going on ‘in the midst of a crackdown on Chinese intellectuals, activists and artists in which dozens of people have been arrested or investigated’. The story filed by the correspondent for the
Washington Post
made much the same points. The concert was ‘devoid of any numbers that might carry even the whiff’, it said, ‘of anti-government overtones’. Dylan had played ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in Taiwan, but dropped them for the show in China’s capital. ‘There was no “Times They Are a-Changin’” in Beijing,’ reported the
Post
. ‘And definitely no “Chimes of Freedom”.’
¹⁴

Across the West, comment followed. Conspicuous among the artist’s critics was Maureen Dowd of the
New York Times
, who began her op-ed piece with an unequivocal statement: ‘Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.’ For Dowd, his long-standing refusal to engage with America’s impeccably democratic politics was not worth mentioning. The failure to perform certain songs in the heart of totalitarian darkness was ‘a whole new kind of sell-out’. As the columnist put it:

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of ‘Hurricane’, his song about ‘the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done’. He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
¹⁵

The fact that Dylan had not performed ‘Hurricane’ on any stage since the days of the Rolling Thunder Revue in the middle of the 1970s slipped Dowd’s mind, as did the fact that he had given a rendering of ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ in Beijing, though not in Taiwan. That piece of evidence was also overlooked by most of those who seemed as intent on dictating the artist’s set list as any Chinese bureaucrat. For that matter, the country with the somewhat famous wall, the one built to keep nervous autocrats safe, had also heard ‘All Along the Watchtower’. In a
New Yorker
blog, Sean Wilentz waded in on Dylan’s behalf. To the professor, it was all just like the bad old ’60s days when the artist was arraigned by purblind leftists for failing to do his progressive duty. Wilentz argued that there was plenty of subversion, if few slogans, in some of the recent work Dylan had performed in China. The old nonsense yet prevailed: ‘He is not allowed to be an artist, he must be an agitator. And he can only be an agitator if he sings particular songs.’ Wilentz added:

Depending on whatever agreement he made with them, I’d argue Dylan made a fool of the Chinese authorities, while getting paid in the bargain. He certainly made a fool of Maureen Dowd – or she has made a fool of herself.
¹⁶

Just for a change, Dylan decided to speak for himself. Clearly, the charge that he had been pushed around by a few dour men in suits had rankled. Presumably an artist who had stood up to censorious lawyers for
The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1963 needed no lectures on how to handle the People’s Republic of China. Dylan, to be fair, was just setting the record straight, more or less. In a statement headed ‘To My Fans and Followers’ published on
bobdylan.com
on 13 May, he said there had been no shows planned for China in 2010; therefore, ‘we were never denied permission to play in China’. The whole tale had been ‘drummed up by a Chinese promoter’. Then Dylan denied that there had been a lot of empty seats at the Beijing show and rebutted claims that the audience were mostly foreigners. (The majority of press reports in fact said that there were
some
vacant seats and a significant minority, though still a minority, of non-Chinese in the crowd.) Then the artist stated:

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous three months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

Set lists had indeed been demanded, then, and duly provided. On the other hand, there remained the demonstrable fact that Dylan had been altering his nightly programme to suit his mood for decades, no matter the venue, no matter the country. ‘Desolation Row’, one of the two songs that supposedly ‘disappeared’ in Beijing according to the
Washington Post
, reappeared in Shanghai. Were the censors less vigilant in China’s most populous city? ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, allegedly ‘dropped’ in China, was also omitted during each of nine subsequent concerts in Australia. Were the totalitarians of Oz at work? Dylan was entitled to be taken at his word. In Beijing, ‘we played all the songs that we intended to play’.

And so what? Amid all the arguments over censorship, sell-outs, the songs he could have played and the songs he should have played, no one asked an obvious question of Dylan. What was he doing in China in the first place? What possessed him to believe that a police state like that – if there is a police state ‘like that’ – was just another place to play, another region to be conquered, another patch on the map to be checked from the list while the box-office take was calculated? For Dowd and certain other journalists it would have been enough if Dylan had taken all the Chinese money he could scoop up just as long as ‘a statement’ was made. Rhetoric was the issue, not the fact of doing business with a regime with an unspeakable human-rights record.

In 1985, Dylan had signed up for a campaign called Artists United Against Apartheid alongside Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, U2, Gil Scott-Heron, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, Pete Townsend and many more besides. Their chief object had been to make a campaign record called ‘Sun City’, a track declaring their refusal to perform at that all-white resort while apartheid remained. Dylan had added his voice. So why was China different? His statement didn’t say. Much of the criticism the artist attracted over the Beijing show was simplistic; Wilentz was right about that. But in the commotion over the failure to sing some journalist’s favourite protest songs the moral choice involved in agreeing to appear in China was ignored. One commentator (this one, it so happens) had no interest in the choice of material, but wrote: ‘The point in dismissing politics is to grant freedom from every politician. Had you happened to be called Dylan, and written “Chimes of Freedom”, and then found yourself in the middle of Totalitarian Central, that might resonate.’
¹⁷
Dylan, it was argued, had donated a little of his credibility to an obnoxious regime just by his presence in the Workers’ Gymnasium. For once, the songs were not the issue.

*

On 24 May 2011, he reached the age of 70 and induced another spasm of media interest around the world. Some writers wondered what had become of their youth, some their idealism. Many contemplated a world gone wrong with the failure of the counter-culture, even if the artist had never subscribed to that confused and confusing notion. There were a multitude of assessments, reassessments, reminiscences and profiles amid the celebrations. It was a rare publication that had nothing to say. (This writer’s drop in the ocean: ‘Bob Dylan’s real triumph at 70? He’s a twenty-first-century artist and the central American poet of his age. I should probably wish him happy birthday, but the old miscreant wouldn’t thank me.’
¹⁸
) There was also general wonderment that Dylan was still around to rack up his three score and ten, what with one thing and another. That the survivor remained ‘relevant’ in a world that was losing its collective attention span as fast as it was losing its ozone layer counted as another miracle. In the end, most agreed that the grand puzzle set by the artist and his career endured. Some wondered, reasonably enough, if the man could endure as an artist for very much longer.

Taking a break after his return from New Zealand at the end of April, Dylan was not foolish enough to be standing on a public stage when his birthday moment arrived. The celebrations would not spare him the Asia Series fiasco in September, in any case, or free him from the attentions of the plagiarism industry. The more his achievements were proclaimed, the greater the effort became, so it seemed, to cut him down to size, to make him fit, to render him comprehensible within someone’s idea of religion or politics, history or literature. On 4 November, he was playing in Stockholm when an anniversary more significant than his birthday was reached. According to the stakhanovite work done by Olof Björner, this was show number 2,382 in the unending tour.
¹⁹
It also marked fully 50 years to the day (or night) since Dylan had given a real concert, his first, at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York City. He had measured out his life in songs. For him there had been no other existence, no existence in any normal sense, for better than half a century. The art of songmaking and all it had brought him, good and bad, had shaped those many identities, those serial lives. The all-consuming habit of art had consumed each life one by one. Dylan had never ‘reinvented’ himself, adopted roles, or put on ‘masks’ to bewitch, deceive or confound. Those appearances had been the effects of 50 years and more of writing songs, of following where the songs led. A detestation of the recording studio had altered nothing. There had never been a choice in the matter. When 2012 arrived it was time to make another album. All other bits and pieces aside, this would be number 35.

Dylan went to work at Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters in January and continued to work until March. In July, Columbia would announce that an album of ‘ten new and original Bob Dylan songs’ – an interesting form of words – was scheduled for release on 11 September. It would be called
Tempest
. On the internet, the reaction would be instantaneous, as though someone had pushed a starter button. For months, the hum of online chatter would be almost audible. A one-word title would produce a chain reaction of speculation ending in the conclusion that this must surely be Dylan’s last album.
Tempest
, ran the thinking: just like Shakespeare’s play (not quite). Just like Shakespeare’s
last
play (not exactly). Just like the play in which Shakespeare made his farewell to his art and to the stage (not if you prefer one of a dozen other interpretations of the drama). In due course, our artist would become a little peeved at being pensioned off in this manner. First, however, he had a real farewell to make.

We can probably guess that a collection of Dylan’s valedictory messages for friends and heroes was not among the volumes he promised to Simon & Schuster. Nevertheless, taken together these notes of acquiescence to age and mortality would make for interesting reading. His remembrances might be the closest anyone gets to the unguarded Dylan, the ‘real’ Dylan. There are no riddles in his eulogies. When Levon Helm, singer and drummer with The Band, was taken by cancer on 19 April after almost 14 years of intermittent struggle, Dylan’s response was released within hours. He was in Belo Horizonte in Brazil, on the third stop of a tour through South and Central America, but he caught the essence of a friendship in a few words. He even sounded a little lonely.

He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.

At the end of May, one leg of the now-familiar spin around the globe completed, Dylan paused in Washington DC to suffer the distress – or so it appeared – of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama. It might have counted as his nation’s highest civilian honour, but the artist looked as though he was being fitted for a noose. His dark glasses reflected the East Room of the White House back upon itself and kept his thoughts, if any, penned within. The rest of Dylan’s face, both drawn and blank, seemed only to hint that if he could be anywhere else he would be back out on the road, or just – for how often had he expressed the hope? – left alone at home. But where was that exactly? Sometimes he said that he could make his home wherever he happened to be. At times he even spoke like a song. In reality, he had European festival engagements to complete over the summer.

‘Reportedly’, ‘apparently’, ‘reputedly’ – for not a word of it had been confirmed – arthritis in his hands would once again prevent him from attempting the guitar. Another tale said that a bad back made the weight of a solid-body instrument too much to bear. Dylan’s age was beyond concealment. No one who wrote about his concerts forgot to mention the passage of time, what it had done, what had been won and lost. Yet he seemed spry enough at the first show, part of the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, as he laughed and joked with his band, or postured, sometimes comically, through songs whose broken bones and gleaming entrails were scattered across the stage. Reviews were favourable, for the most part, but even the writers who still found something spellbinding about a performance by this artist had to couch their praise in strange language. For example, the critic from the
Daily Telegraph
, invariably supportive, first observed: ‘At 71, the great troubadour is still out there, presenting his works of genius in weird, garbled, sometimes barely recognisable forms, for reasons that nobody can really understand but himself.’ But then:

Dylan delivers his highly charged lyrics with three-note melodies that don’t necessarily bear much resemblance to the originals, chopped up into short rhythmic phrases that frequently seem to baffle his own band, who watch him like hawks throughout, looking for clues and cues.