Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (89 page)
Read Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan Online
Authors: Ian Bell
They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’ll destroy you as well
They’re lecherous and treacherous
Hell-bent for leather
Each of ’em bigger
Than all them put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearing fancy gold rings
All the women goin’ crazy
For the early Roman kings
Dylan’s hyper-awareness of history as an active presence has been one of the distinguishing features of his ‘late period’. It explains many, if not all, of his acts of alleged plagiarism. But as interesting as the awareness of the past is the use to which he has put his understanding. Rarely does he content himself with just the facts. For him, everything has a mythical dimension. The past is a dream state, sometimes the nightmare, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says in
Ulysses
, ‘from which I am trying to awake’. ‘Narrow Way’, far from the best
song
on the album, has yet another extraordinary verse.
Ever since the British burned the White House down
There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town
I saw you drinking from an empty cup
I saw you buried and I saw you dug up
The album’s most obvious point of contact with history is in its title song, ‘the
Titanic
song’. Yet again, the sheer length of a work would guarantee the attention of reviewers ever quick to assume that if Dylan was taking 45 verses to say something it must, almost by definition, be something important. ‘Tempest’ in fact competes for the title as the least of the album’s songs, ‘epic’ or not, and length has nothing much to do with its flaws. Too many of the verses are redundant, several are clumsily written and the song does not count, for this listener at least, as a musical treat. ‘Tempest’ is too self-conscious, even obvious, as an excursion into folk tradition. Talking to
Rolling Stone
, Dylan was entirely aware, as always, of his musical antecedents.
If you’re a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the
Titanic
, because that’s the bar you have to pass.
24
In part, Dylan was explaining the fact that his work begins with an almost straight lift from ‘The Titanic’, a Carter Family song from the early 1950s. Before that there had been Lead Belly’s song of the same name, one that Huddie had chosen to call his own. Before
that
there had been
Titanic
songs by the dozen, some reputedly composed within days or weeks of the great ship’s sinking in 1912. What interested musicologists for long enough was that many of the early performers were black, despite the fact that the only non-white passenger allowed on the vessel had been a French Haitian with a white wife. African American singers, Lead Belly not least, took a certain grim satisfaction in the disaster as retribution for racism. Some chose to detect a divine judgement. In his
The American Songbag
(1927), in a note to a version he called ‘De Titanic’, Carl Sandburg asserted that ‘Negro troops sang the song crossing the submarine zone and in the trenches overseas’.
25
In other words, there was a sardonic black song in circulation within five or six years of the tragedy. Equally, it has been claimed that the
Titanic
song group drew on African American folk tradition and a ballad describing the sinking of a long-forgotten Mississippi river-steamer.
26
Dylan knew a lot about these things, but neither his borrowings from the Carter Family, nor his several shameless references to James Cameron’s risible 1997
Titanic
movie, greatly aided an interminable song. To these ears ‘Tempest’ comes perilously close in places to sounding like something poor William McGonagall might have cherished.
It is a ship-of-fools song, an allegory. While the watchman sleeps and catastrophe approaches, humanity goes about its petty business. When disaster strikes, people show themselves for what they are, good or bad. Dylan’s point, the repeated theological note struck throughout the album, is that none of it sways an indifferent God whose purposes are not to be judged by His creation. One oddity is that an iceberg is never mentioned, perhaps because the writer thought there was no need to state the obvious. On the other hand, Dylan calls his song ‘Tempest’ while history relates that
RMS Titanic
met her fate on a clear, calm night. The artist gets to the burden of his tale, in any case, in three verses rather than forty-five. Yet again, Dylan’s favourite scriptural thriller justifies all.
In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best
They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
Of the judgement of God’s hand
The phrase ‘dark illumination’ probably does not count as Dylan’s finest moment, just as ‘Roll On, John’ is a long way short of his finest song. Would so many reviewers have found it quite so affecting if its subject had not been quite so famous and so beloved? Dylan quotes Lennon songs – no problems over ‘attribution’, then – and throws in some of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Because Lennon was fond of Blake? Because there was both primal ferocity and gentle beauty contained within the former Beatle? Because it’s a jungle out there? But then, long delayed mourning aside, the song’s motives are not clear. You are given the uneasy sense, in fact, that this is a communion between superstars, those burdened souls. A long album would still have run for over an hour if Dylan had decided against this song. As it is, what with the near-fourteen minutes of the title piece and this seven-and-a-half-minute eulogy,
Tempest
’s concluding passages feel like a long haul.
Miraculously, the album is not greatly diminished on that account. ‘Pay in Blood’, ‘Scarlet Town’, ‘Long and Wasted Years’, ‘Early Roman Kings’ and ‘Soon After Midnight’ more than prove that ‘late Dylan’ lacks nothing whatever in fire, power and poetry. The touring band, once again the studio band, are exemplary. Dylan’s eroded rock formation of a voice sounds wonderful, which is to say right, and once again the producer, this cool Jack Frost, has done a better job in producing a Bob Dylan album than most others have managed. If the artist had chosen to drown his books and break the spell with
Tempest
, disavowing Shakespeare all the while, it would have been a fitting ending. But there was no sign of any such intention.
*
He was on the road again in April and the first half of June. Touring took up most of July, all of August and the first half of September. In October, Mark Knopfler joined him on the trail for the first of 33 North American concerts. Read cold, the reviews seemed to depend on who was doing the writing. The critics who had observed Dylan for years allowed a benefit to every doubt. The
New York Times
sent the vastly experienced Jon Pareles to the reopening of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, at the beginning of September. ‘A current Dylan concert is always a matter of shifting expectations,’ he wrote.
At first his voice sounds impossibly ramshackle, just a fogbound rasp. But soon, at least on a good night, his wilful phrasing and conversational nuances come through. While he has – for decades – rearranged many of his songs so that only the words are immediately recognizable, his musical choices aren’t exactly arbitrary. They lead listeners, and Mr Dylan as well, to grapple with the songs anew.
The
Times
man conceded, nevertheless, that the artist was not ‘courting new fans with anything that’s easily appealing. Nowadays Mr Dylan is singing, and cackling, to loyalists.’ In Vancouver in October the
Sun
reported that two types of fan had been in evidence, one ‘completely enchanted’, the other ‘fairly disappointed’ by the performer’s ‘mumble-jumble rambling style’. The
Los Angeles Times
reviewer called one concert in the city an ‘unimpeachable’ 15-song display of the artist’s work. But the critic added: ‘Way up in the Hollywood Bowl’s cheap seats on Friday, it was hard to tell whether the guy with the gutter-nasal voice was actually Dylan or a monster with indigestion.’ The
Chicago Tribune
’s veteran Greg Kot stuck, meanwhile, with the fable of reinvention that had seemed to explain everything once upon a time. ‘He treats his songs as portable, mutable works in progress – forever subject to change,’ wrote Kot. It was therefore impossible to write the artist off or ‘embalm’ him in his own history.
27
Perhaps so. Perhaps, in a weird way, it no longer really mattered. If he still wanted to play and if people still wanted to pay, that was a matter for the artist and his audience. All the possible explanations for touring became irrelevant, in any case, as the 25th continuous year of concerts began. On 1 May 2013, according to
bjorner.com
(also unstoppable), Charlotte, North Carolina, saw show number 2,500 on the unending pilgrimage. As this is being written, the annual European tour is being announced. So here he goes again: Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, France, Luxembourg. Then three nights in Glasgow in November? You never know. You can tell for certain, though, which city will draw most attention. His sense of history – or is it humour? – is intact. In 2013, Dylan means to finish up with three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. That’s almost where we came in.
*
In his interview with Mikal Gilmore of
Rolling Stone
in September 2012, Dylan said one of the strangest things he has ever said. It could all be explained – survival, belief, the ability that ‘allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it’ – by transfiguration. Or as the artist said to the writer, ‘I’m not like you, am I?’
Since Dylan had been expounding on his perfectly truthful
Chronicles
tale about a character named Bobby Zimmerman, the Hell’s Angel dead thanks to his own stupidity at the start of the ’60s, Gilmore wanted to know if they were talking not about transfiguration but about the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis. (You suspect the journalist also wanted desperately to ask if Dylan was kidding.) The artist denied it, though he seemed a little unsure, suspiciously so, about his terms, far less his theology. He certainly affected not to realise that by claiming transfiguration he was placing himself among the Old Testament prophets – finally – and the mother of God, and the Christ Himself. In the usual version, we humans get our transfiguration, if we’re lucky, only in the life eternal. The artist’s real point seemed to be that Gilmore was asking his questions of a person who ‘doesn’t exist’. Dylan went on: ‘But people make that mistake about me all the time.’
He doesn’t exist; the truth sets him apart. In some strange, beguiling sense, there is no Bob Dylan. After all those lives, all those incarnations, all the years under so much scrutiny, you can just about see why it might make sense to him. Perhaps it also imparts a truth about poor human existence to the rest of us.
Transfiguration does not explain art. An artist’s gift might amount, though, to a kind of transfiguration. If there is truth in art, each and every Bob Dylan might count as a product of the imagination, with Robert Allen Zimmerman its first page and its first canvas, not invented but made real, time and again, time out of mind, like a folk tale told and retold. The tale is American, of course, and probably the oldest story of them all.
Chants of the prairies;
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea;
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota;
Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless to vivify all.
28
A number of Bob Dylan’s songs, as listed below, have been quoted for purposes of criticism and review:
see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Narrow Way’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Pay in Blood’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Tempest’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ (Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Wedding Song’ (Copyright © 1973 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2001 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
, ‘Idiot Wind’ (Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
‘Shelter from the Storm’ (Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Isis’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ (Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003, 2004 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
, ‘Rita May’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
‘Joey’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Hurricane’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
, ‘Oh, Sister’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
‘Romance in Durango’ (Copyright © 1975 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Sara’ (Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003, 2004 by Ram’s Horn Music); see
here
, ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ (Copyright © 1971 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1999 by Dwarf Music); see
here
, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ (Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ (Copyright © 1971 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1999 by Big Sky Music); see
here
, ‘Is Your Love in Vain?’ (Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ (Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Changing of the Guards’ (Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)’ (Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘I’d Hate to Be With You On That Dreadful Day’ (Copyright © 1964, 1968 Warner Bros. Music, renewed 1992 Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Spirit on the Water’ (Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Chimes of Freedom’ (Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody’ (Copyright © 1980 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘One Too Many Mornings’ (Copyright © 1964, 1966 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992, 1994 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Covenant Woman’ (Copyright © 1980 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit’ (Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music); see
here
‘Trouble in Mind’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’ (Copyright © 1979 Special Rider Music); see
here
‘Precious Angel’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘I Believe in You’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Slow Train’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘When He Returns’ (Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
‘Every Grain of Sand’ (Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Trouble’ (Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Dead Man, Dead Man’ (Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Property of Jesus’ (Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Shot of Love’ (Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Caribbean Wind’ (Copyright © 1985 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’ (Copyright © 1981 Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Lenny Bruce’ (Copyright © 1981 Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’ (Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘License to Kill’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Man of Peace’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Julius and Ethel’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music)’ see
here
, ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Man of Peace’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Jokerman’ (Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘When the Ship Comes In’ (Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’ (Copyright © 1985 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Dark Eyes’ (Copyright © 1985 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Brownsville Girl’ (Copyright © 1986 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Night After Night’ (Copyright © 1987 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Death Is Not the End’ (Copyright © 1988 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ (Copyright © 1988 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Series of Dreams’ (Copyright © 1991 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Most of the Time’ (Copyright © 1989 by Special Rider Music); see
here
‘What Was It You Wanted’ (Copyright © 1989 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ (Copyright © 1990 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Not Dark Yet’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘’Til I Fell in Love with You’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Standing in the Doorway’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Can’t Wait’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Mississippi’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Red River Shore’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Love Sick’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Million Miles’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Highlands’ (Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Things Have Changed’ (Copyright © 1999 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’ (Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘High Water (For Charley Patton)’ (Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Floater (Too Much to Ask)’ (Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Summer Days’ (Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Po’ Boy’ (Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ (Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ (Copyright © 2003 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ (Copyright © 2006 Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ (Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Nettie Moore’ (Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Ain’t Talkin’’ (Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Dignity’ (Copyright © 1991 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘If You Ever Go to Houston’ (Copyright © 2009 by Special Rider Music and Ice-Nine Publishing); see
here
,
here
, ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’ (Copyright © 2009 by Special Rider Music and Ice-Nine Publishing); see
here
, ‘It’s All Good’ (Copyright © 2009 by Special Rider Music and Ice-Nine Publishing); see
here
, ‘Forgetful Heart’ (Copyright © 2009 by Special Rider Music and Ice-Nine Publishing); see
here
, ‘Duquesne Whistle’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
,
here
, ‘Scarlet Town’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
,
here
, ‘Early Roman Kings’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music); see
here
, ‘Soon After Midnight’ (Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music)