Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (88 page)

And then again:

Somehow between the magic of his fantastic songs, the liquid groove of his superb band, the mysterious charisma of the legend himself and the will of the crowd to enjoy the moment, something strange and truly spectacular happens, a thrilling performance that nobody, perhaps not even the man at its centre, can really explain.
²⁰

Others present failed to detect this supernatural event. That, though, had become the way of things. The stratagems Dylan had been forced to adopt to compensate for the disintegration of his voice had grown ever more elaborate, ever more extreme, inventive or preposterous according to taste. To say this divided audiences is like saying that some people are colour-blind and some are not. But which was which, in this case? At Carhaix in Brittany, three weeks after Hop Farm, the booing and the heckling directed at Dylan was impossible to ignore. The racket raised questions. Should those who saw merit in everything he did just have told themselves that it was ever thus, that it was worse in ’66? Or should they have grasped that loyalty had become blind (or deaf)? By the summer of 2012, those who stuck by Dylan tended to say, almost blandly, that anyone who didn’t get it should go elsewhere and find something else to misunderstand. As an answer, it felt incomplete. The artist was about to release an album that would become still another of his big twenty-first-century hits. The praise from reviewers would be as lavish as any he had ever received. Yet a lot of people who would buy and admire
Tempest
would still emerge baffled from many of his shows. That counted as strange to everyone save those inside the cocoon.

*

Tempest
is one of the finest things he has ever done: add it to the list. At this stage in the game the stock of superlatives is almost exhausted. Most of the things said in praise of Dylan have been said many times before. That’s a problem, if it matters, for the reviewer’s trade. The habit of asserting that album A is the ‘best since’ album B might do for a five-year pop career, but not for a career more than half a century long, one tangled up in arguments that often have nothing to do with music. In the case of
Tempest
the ‘best since’ yardstick would be extended, regardless, even unto
Blonde on Blonde
. You would be better off talking instead of Picasso in his final years of raging turmoil, remaking Old Masters obsessively, mocking death, locked in a futile combat with age and libido. You will not have said much about Dylan’s album, but you will have located the territory.

Tempest
is a work of grim relish and flamboyant recklessness. Dylan has spent most of his long career seeming not to give a damn what anyone thinks, but with this set the contempt for restraint is ostentatious. Whether the issue is artistic method, politics, age, truth, women, religion, or a profound desire for revenge against allcomers, this Dylan doesn’t care what you think. He’s pretty sure that God doesn’t care, either. The world represented in the ballad-stories and movie-stories of
Tempest
contains little for your comfort, nothing for your enlightenment. Even the album’s one, uncertain eulogy, the song for John Lennon that was perhaps inspired by Dylan’s strange visit to Aunt Mimi’s house in Liverpool, all but says, ‘So it goes.’
Tempest
is an album, as the old oath has it, of blood and thunder. In these songs the skies darken and the corpses pile up thanks to betrayal, fate, or because the artist is offering to do the job himself. Those who chose to see Dylan as Shakespeare’s Prospero got the wrong character. Lear would have been a better fit.

Besides, as the exasperated artist took pains to point out to
Rolling Stone
, Shakespeare’s enchanted castaway play has the definite article in its title. The difference might be no more than a nuance, but for Dylan it mattered: ‘The name of my record is just plain
Tempest
.’
²¹
There was nothing plain about the contents. Even the opening track, ‘Duquesne Whistle’, is another of those tricks of misdirection at which the artist had long been adept.

It opens with the sunny, gentle sounds of what could be an old western swing band reaching the end of a number, as though we have just tuned in to some local Texas radio station back in the ’40s. That’s one clue to this album: amid the rockabilly, folk, blues and country most of the music is drawn from a time before there was the sound of someone called Bob Dylan. Then the song proper kicks in. It’s a train song, a jolly-sounding uptempo piece that could be in the lineage of all the old gospel train songs pointing down the track to redemption. But there’s something a little off here. Why is the train’s whistle blowing ‘like the sky’s gonna blow apart’ when the voice the singer says he can hear ‘must be the mother of our Lord’? Why, if that’s what is in his head, would the whistle sound ‘like it’s gonna kill me dead’? Dylan isn’t telling, but this jaunty roadhouse number is utterly deceitful. Even its promotional video would attract a little spurious controversy for a scene of notable mock brutality amid a scenario that had nothing whatever to do with trains of any description. In his ritual
Rolling Stone
interview to mark the album’s release, Dylan would manage to explain everything and nothing.

Tempest
was like all the rest of them: the songs just fall together. It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration – to pull that off ten times with the same thread – than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.
²²

So:
anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense
? Dylan is describing both his method and the moral universe of the songs. The two are connected, in any case. It has nothing to do with God’s presence or absence; the artist continues to testify, here and there, to his faith. But one subtext of
Tempest
– in the title song it becomes explicit – is that anyone expecting explanations from the deity is wasting time and effort.

Several of the album’s songs tell stories; all are fabulistic in one way or another. A couple of the longest pieces, ‘Scarlet Town’ and the title track, are modelled explicitly on the old, endless folk ballads, shot through with supernatural mystery, that had once entranced the young Dylan. Indeed, ‘Barbara Allen’, the Scottish ballad he had sung at the Gaslight in the Village back in 1962, begins ‘In Scarlet Town where I was born’. ‘Roll On, John’, the song for Lennon, is constructed like a movie, opening on the murder scene before tracing moments in the victim’s life and work in a series of flashbacks. The death ballad ‘Tin Angel’ is meanwhile a hybrid of folk and film. Its immediate ancestry lies in the song ‘Love Henry’ that Dylan had performed on
World Gone Wrong
, but its origins stretch all the way back to one of the Child ballads first known in old Scotland. The tale of love, infidelity and murder – in which by the end bodies are actually piled up – could nevertheless be taken from a bloody western movie. That said, even a song such as ‘Pay in Blood’, which sounds like nothing so much as one of Dylan’s mid-’60s revenge songs, is a parable of a people enslaved – in biblical bondage, perhaps – rather than just the artist’s curse on those he happens to despise. Though the works sound utterly dissimilar, the nearest thing there is to
Tempest
in Dylan’s back catalogue is, in fact, the fable-laden
John Wesley Harding
.

Needless to say, the comparisons are anything but exact. For one thing, the obsession with enemies is harder to detect in the older album; for another,
Harding
’s treatment of women involves none of the sheer malevolence that recurs in
Tempest
. What Dylan intends by these themes is hard to puzzle out. Who are these ‘foes’? Is he serious when he gives free rein to vitriolic misogyny? By the time he made this album he had spent half a century picking fights in song. He had also been accused, often enough, of sexism as an artist and as an individual. ‘When the Ship Comes In’ from 1964 was a mock-biblical call to class war; ‘Positively 4th Street’ from the following year was a young man settling scores on his own behalf. As for his attitude towards women, pick an album. Dylan’s inability to see beyond his precious Madonna/whore caricatures has been criticised for decades. For many tastes, it has created odd undertones, let’s say, even in some of his best and loveliest songs. But something more is going on in
Tempest
.

Had Dylan been a hip-hop act – and in another time and place, who knows? – the denunciations would have come thick and fast. It is a fact, nevertheless, that violent language is thrown in all directions in most of the
Tempest
songs. It is also worth remembering that in these moods, for better or worse, the artist isn’t seeking approval. More importantly, the picking out of a handful of words here and there obscures the fact that statements function differently within different songs, that sometimes they act as a counterpoint to an entirely different sentiment, often within the space of a few lines. The raw accusation of fantastic promiscuity in ‘Narrow Way’, for example, takes us to an odd refrain: ‘If I can’t work up to you, / You’ll surely have to work down to me someday.’ The cheap insult has come from a man who thinks better of her than he thinks of himself. Another couplet manages the same effect. It is vicious by any measure – ‘Your father left you, your mother too / Even death has washed its hands of you’ – but it reaches that same refrain. Similarly, the poor ‘flat-chested junkie whore’ of ‘Scarlet Town’ is followed directly by that marvellous song’s marvellous conclusion:

Here and there in the songs you can hear Dylan, or the speaker, trying to come to terms with his perceptions of women and womanhood. He responds to what he takes to be different aspects of femininity, for good or ill. So much is recognised in a verse in ‘Soon After Midnight’ that manages to toy with the whore/Madonna cliché and introduce a mythical note with a nod to Elizabethan poetry and Edmund Spenser:

Perhaps only this artist could meanwhile combine lechery and sanctity in the same verse. Once again, the song is ‘Narrow Way’:

The lines from ‘Pay in Blood’ and ‘Early Roman Kings’, in brutal contrast, are hurled at enemies, at parasites and the makers of slaves, no matter the gender. In neither song does the singer intend to mind his language in the presence of ‘foes’. Dylan is at war. He has a lot of enemies. He treats them all badly. Again, however, they are not the same enemies in every context. In one song the singer is ‘armed to the hilt’, in another he threatens to drag a man’s corpse ‘through the mud’. But there is a difference between vengeance, rebellion and honour.

‘Early Roman Kings’ is a prime example of Dylan’s ability almost to hear history as a series of echoes. Interviewed by
Rolling Stone
, he was clear about how his understanding had affected the writing of
Tempest
, far less forthcoming, as ever, about any specific conclusions he was prepared to identify or share with a journalist:

The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries.
²³

‘Early Roman Kings’ therefore treats its imperial figures as mere gangsters in ‘Their sharkskin suits / Bow ties and buttons / High top boots’. Historically, it makes for a neat connection: ancient Rome’s rulers, with their clans and casual murders, were like nothing so much as the Mafia. But Dylan’s ‘kings’ are also America’s nineteenth-century robber barons ‘Blazin’ the rails / Nailed in their coffins / In top hats and tails’. They are, too, the slouching figures of organised crime, heading for ‘a Sicilian court’. They are the bankers, the lawyers, the politicians, the corrupt ruling elite of modern life. If Dylan calls them the kings of old Rome he is saying that, when power and money are at stake, nothing important ever changes.