I try to live within that line between despondency and hope. I’m suited to walk that line, right between the fire. . . . I see [Time Out of Mind] right straight down the middle of the line, really.
—Bob Dylan, Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 1997
Examining the evolution of the music industry from the 1980s through the early decades of the new millennium reveals a topsy-turvy era marked by widespread upheaval. The beginning of this time frame dates back to the launch of MTV and the introduction of the CD and concludes with music downloads and the iPod. The turmoil is sweeping and impressive. In its hurricane force gale, it caught the staunch music industry repeatedly off guard, whether it was the move to video and MTV or the rise of the mp3 player and music swapping.
In the 1980s, Dylan experienced both great heights and major disappointments as a commercial artist. On the one hand, critics harshly panned several of his albums and consumers reacted indifferently. On the other hand, he scored hit records in unlikely places, such as his live album with the Grateful Dead, Dylan & The Dead, and his work with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and the other members of the super group the Traveling Wilburys. That collaboration resulted in multiplatinum album sales and seemed to get Dylan back on track, at least commercially. While much of the decade saw Dylan struggling to reach audiences—or was it that audiences struggled to understand him—the high notes at the end of the decade gave him momentum that carried into the 1990s.
At the end of the 1980s, it could be argued that he stood as close to artistic irrelevancy as he had at any point in his illustrious career. For much of the 1990s, he continued to flounder. Yet, by the latter stages of the decade, based on the critical and commercial success of Time Out of Mind, it is as if he wiped away decades of rust and indifference. Before that CD hit the stores, few observers could have anticipated the great heights Dylan would scale as a result. The album refueled his career and rejuvenated fans who had long yearned for their hero to return to glory. It is as if the world waited for a CD like Time Out of Mind from Dylan and its delivery heralded a new age of Dylan reborn.
Technology defined music as the world entered the 21st century, becoming so pervasive a force that it left no one outside its wake, even a star as stanchly iconic as Bob Dylan. Innovations in the way music could be shared, transferred, and downloaded based on small, digital packets of information—dubbed mp3s—resulted in CD sales plummeting. Caught almost completely off guard, the major record labels scrambled to redefine the industry. And, as with most transformative technologies, the corporate entities struggled as startups and individuals recreated the industry.
The collision forced a new dynamic between performance (the music itself) and consumer response (people listening and/or purchasing). The music business would no longer be driven by CD sales, or even music videos (as it had since the rise of MTV), but on an intricate mix of marketing channels. Soon, the heart of the music industry—so long dependent on concerts and CD sales—moved to websites, Internet advertising, the creation of ring tones, and downloadable singles.
In this new music environment, pop music and hip hop garnered a great deal of attention, particularly from those under the age of 25. Yet rock and roll remained a lynchpin of American culture. Based on new consumer impulses and purchasing decisions, the music industry moved toward a blockbuster mentality, just like the film business had done dating back to the 1970s. This change in the way music would be marketed and sold had far-reaching consequences industry-wide. As a result, musicians and bands found themselves judged by their latest hits, with much less emphasis on defining or creating an ongoing career. Singles ruled the sales charts, not the traditional CD. Success meant achieving the top spot on Apple’s iTunes singles sales chart, not necessarily where one’s album appeared.
The notion of who or what comprised a rock star at the dawn of the new millennium stood on shaky ground given the transition into an era dominated by instantaneous music downloads and ring tones (free, paid, and illegal). The future of the music business, at that time, seemed bleak for rock’s elder statesmen collectively. In their place rose up a collection of overly hyped artists who were less concerned with sustaining a career of any lasting impact.
The notion that the rock star might be at the end demonstrated the greatness of timeless musicians and bands, such as the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. The subsequent generation also proved its longevity, with artists like Prince, U2, and Pearl Jam creating groundbreaking and popular records. For example, Springsteen’s 2007 album Magic debuted at No. 1, a great feat for an icon who released his first album before many in music’s primary demographic were even born. The Rolling Stones’s A Bigger Bang tour, which lasted from 2005 to 2007, became the second biggest tour in music history at the time, grossing $558 million. And, as always, Dylan continued on his “Never-Ending Tour,” crisscrossing the globe many times over.
In the always-losing battle with entropy and mortality, music’s aging stars walked a delicate tightrope between becoming seen as little more than greatest hits acts and searching for ways to connect with increasingly disjointed audiences. In the early years of the 2000s, fresh off his critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind disc, Dylan confronted this challenge headfirst by returning to his roots—making musically and lyrically interesting music—and letting fans and critics sort out the rest.
The success of the Traveling Wilburys, the release of another album of greatest hits (Greatest Hits, Vol. III), and a relentless touring schedule fed into a strange, new twist for Dylan—performing on the hit MTV show MTV Unplugged. The unplugged (i.e., acoustic) performances by big stars in the music business revitalized many careers or at least lit a fire under performers that showcased them to new audiences. For example, Eric Clapton’s 1992 performance and subsequent album, featuring the heart-wrenching single “Tears in Heaven,” earned the rock icon six Grammy Awards and sold more than 10 million copies.
On the surface, it may have seemed that young music television fans would want little to do with Dylan, an aging icon, then 53 years old. But, as Clapton proved—along with a 1990 performance by Paul McCartney and Neil Young’s 1993 concert—MTV had the power to open new audiences for music heroes outside its typical demographic. Aired December 14, 1994, Dylan’s televised appearance drew from a two-night recording session about a month earlier.
Reviewing the show, journalist Jon Pareles, said Dylan “savors and reinvestigates lyrics he has been singing for up to three decades.” Although Dylan did not play to the crowd or explain the meanings behind the songs as other Unplugged performers chose to do, he connected with the crowd through the music, despite the jumpy, flyover camera shots and innumerable crowd shots. Pareles describes the connection between the singer and fans, explaining, “Dylan is an improviser to his bones; as he toys with melodies and shifts from croon to quaver to rasp, he makes the words hit home.”1 Long-time Dylan commentator Paul Williams highlighted the unplugged performance of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” explaining, “The band finds a groove that makes the singer light up like a Roman candle, which just pushes them deeper into the groove.” The vastness of the song enables viewers to feel “the singer’s feelings, and they are huge and rich and visionary and complex.”2
The Dylan MTV Unplugged CD hit stores in May 1995. It did not fly off the shelves, like the acoustic sessions by Clapton or Rod Stewart, but the disc reached No. 23 on the U.S. charts and No. 10 in the United Kingdom, respectable sales figures and Dylan’s highest in years as a solo act. Perhaps more importantly, though, the MTV appearance, which came on the heels of a riveting set at the 1994 Woodstock gathering (also shown live via pay-per-view television), gave Dylan an avenue into drawing younger fans to his shows in an era dominated by Seattle grunge by the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
As a kind of package deal that began and ended the decade, Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1991 Grammy Awards show and then later in 1997 was named a Kennedy Center Honoree. The latter included a televised gala held at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C., and a visit to the Clinton White House. The irony in looking back on the 1991 and 1997 events now is that some observers certainly believed that these lifetime awards were given in gratitude for Dylan’s many gifts to American society and also spelled the probable end of his career too. Many viewers of either event might have concluded that Dylan had little left to offer. Time (and Time Out of Mind, released in late 1997) would certainly prove dissenters wrong.
At the 1991 Grammy Awards, actor Jack Nicholson introduced the singer, calling him a “disturber of the peace . . . his own as well as ours.”3 Clips then highlighted the singer’s many early hits and showed him on stage in a variety of guises, from the early mod days in London to the white-faced, pancake makeup he donned in mid-1970s’ performances. Fittingly, the video tribute ends with Dylan tapping away on a typewriter, paying homage to his status as a poet and songwriter.
Performing at the show, Dylan sprinted through a nearly unintelligible version of “Masters of War,” perhaps as a statement to the bombs falling on Iraq at the onset of Operation Desert Storm that began a few weeks before the Grammy event. Then, he awkwardly accepted the plaque from Nicholson, constantly fidgeting with his hat and unable to harness his energy, bouncing from one foot to the other. The singer, despite countless public appearances and concerts over decades, nervously wrung at his hands and looked uncomfortable in the spotlight. Stepping up to the microphone, Dylan let loose with a cryptic, spiritual speech, filled with seemingly awkward pauses that the audience interpreted as planned. Throughout most of the brief remarks, he even oddly held his hat on his head, as if a giant hook was about to pull him offstage, like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
President and Mrs. Clinton hosted a gathering at the White House, December 7, 1997, celebrating the year’s Kennedy Center Honorees, including winners Charlton Heston, Bob Dylan, and Lauren Bacall.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Dylan told a story about the gift his father left him, despite that he was “a very simple man.” What most viewers probably did not understand was that Dylan’s speech modernized Psalms 27:10, a biblical verse that ultimately declared that God would be the final arbiter regarding a person’s life, when even one’s mother or father turned away. Haltingly, Dylan then thanked the audience and abruptly left the stage.4
At the Kennedy Center party six years later, Dylan sat with Bill and Hillary Clinton as actor Gregory Peck introduced him and narrated a video featuring highlights of the singer’s long career. Leading with black and white photos of Hibbing and stills from Dylan’s early days in New York City, Peck describes Dylan’s songs as “the rallying cry for a generation. The anthems of their time.”5 The five-minute video emphasizes his role as a poet and role in expanding what rock and roll could become. Peck later compares him to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and the many unnamed blues singers that make up a unique sound rising from the heartland and providing a one-of-a-kind stamp on American culture. Although these kinds of honors are heartfelt, one could not help wondering if these were glorified retirement parties for the great musician. He seemed on the downside of an illustrious career.
When Time Out of Mind appeared in 1997, no one could have predicted the way fans would react or that it would spark a Dylan revival that continues well into the new century. Prior to its release, there were whispers that Dylan wanted to fade into the sunset. He had not put out an album in four years since World Gone Wrong, a collection of cover songs. The only other entry was MTV Unplugged (1995), which many critics disparaged, primarily for it not meeting some imaginary level of quality that they felt it lacked. Or maybe they viewed it as a crass attempt at jumping on a bandwagon simply to make some money. No artist seemed further from the MTV generation than Dylan.
In contrast, however, the new CD grabbed many new fans and reignited many old ones, serving up a version of Dylan that seemed remade as the world stood poised for the end of the 20th century. The popularity of Time Out of Mind hit such monumental heights that some longtime Dylanologists and fans turned on it, as if its commercial viability sullied its contents.
Like 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, the new disc appears filled with personal songs, recorded in a really listener-friendly manner, primarily featuring Dylan’s throaty voice and some fine bass lines and guitar work. Alex Ross, profiling Dylan in the New Yorker, sums up Time Out of Mind, saying:
The melancholy could become crushing, but Dylan doesn’t let it. The best of the new songs are inexplicably funny: There’s a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatteredness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with the past, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon.6
The introspective nature of the new album seemed to humanize Dylan for a new generation of fans. The songs questioned the aging process and seemed reflective without dipping into sappy nostalgia. After a seven-year absence from making his own songs, the album drew listeners to Dylan’s magic as a songwriter.
“Not Dark Yet,” one of the most popular songs on Time Out of Mind, mixed the imagery of a person preparing for the end with a subtle desire to stay alive. The beginning of the song speaks of the coming darkness and time running out, which Dylan sings in a lilting, desperate voice, backed by a deliberate drumbeat, mournful organ, and haunting guitar. The bleak lyrics are also completely clear and full, stuffing the criticism about Dylan’s not being able to sing back in the commenter’s face. When he laments, “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear,” one feels the anguish and torment in the heart of the song.7
The pain is replicated across the CD, and despite its heavy vibe, spoke to audiences in a manner that Dylan had not done for decades. Biographer Sounes discusses the tie between singer and listener, saying, “Bob was communicating with this audience as he had in his prime, with words poetic and true that flew like magic birds from his mouth into the mind of the listener.”8 No wonder, then, that critics, fans, and other musicians hailed Time Out of Mind as one of Dylan’s strongest works, ranking up with the albums from the 1960s. The singer and songwriter—more or less an icon from the start—developed into something different and even more powerful after the album, almost a deity among stars, beyond criticism or reproach. The kind of accolades that are usually reserved for a star after death suddenly appeared everywhere, as if American culture had entered a new age of Dylan.
Based on the novel by acclaimed writer Michael Chabon, the film Wonder Boys (2000) showcased a new song by Dylan: “Things Have Changed.” Filmed in Pittsburgh and surrounding locations, including Carnegie Mellon University, the movie starred Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, an English writing professor struggling with a disintegrating personal life and wildly unpublishable novel, bloated to over 2,000 pages. The pressures of a literary conference and visit by his editor (played by Robert Downey Jr.), his girlfriend’s pregnancy (the university president played by Francis McDormand), and a seemingly suicidal star pupil (Tobey Maguire) serve as the plot points, which critics enjoyed, but audiences did not understand. Despite its many nominations and awards by the global film community, including an Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for Dylan, Wonder Boys failed at the box office, earning a meager $33 million.
Dylan’s Academy Award win, however, kept him in the post-Time Out of Mind limelight and convinced fans and audiences that the Dylan renaissance they hoped for would continue. Sounding as if it could have been on Time Out of Mind, musically the tune captured the imagination of Dylan fans, since it is both catchy and intense simultaneously. The upbeat tune, driven by a pulsing drumbeat, masks the seriousness of its lyrics—summed up the contrasting mix of world-weariness and exuberance that characterized 2000 and what seemed like the beginning of a new era.
In “Things Have Changed,” Dylan sings of insane people attempting to live in a crazy age, jumbled together by a sense yearning for love while also searching for inner peace. The song is full of dark imagery and contradictions that seem to make up a person’s complete life; a mixed-up, muddled up, shook up world that carries one from intense highs to dangerous depths. In perhaps the song’s most memorable line in the chorus, Dylan contrasts the narrator’s fleeting sense of concern for the world with a new understanding that the attention costs too much and is no longer viable. He is of this world and outside it, searching for elusive ideals in places that are mere mirages or empty vessels.
The success of “Things Have Changed” pointed to other directions Dylan would take in the 2000s. One of the first clues offered was the music video for the song, which spliced together clips of the singer on various film locations and actual scenes from Wonder Boys. As a result, it seems as if Dylan appears in the movie, for example, visions of the Pittsburgh riverfront at night hurtling by as he sings directly to Robert Downey Jr., sitting in the passenger seat. Dylan vamped it up in the video, essentially acting and interacting with the film’s characters, revealing his willingness to move in a more commercial direction.
Perhaps the music video performance served as just another example in Dylan’s long career of zigging when others thought he should zag. Several years later, in 2004, the singer shocked his fans when he appeared in a commercial for Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Two years later, he partnered with marketing superpower Apple to release digital versions of his disc Modern Times, which included a television ad. Given over to the full celebrity pitchman role, Dylan next starred in a series of 2007 commercials and print ads for the Cadillac Escalade and XM satellite radio, the latter serving as his launching pad for his weekly satellite radio show, “Theme Time Radio Hour.” In the TV spots, also shown online, Dylan looked cowboy chic in a black hat and dark jacket, with a single voice line, “What’s life without taking a detour?”9
At the same time, it seems as if the critical acclaim of Time Out of Mind carried Dylan into the new millennium in a more secure and thoughtful place than he had been for a long time. The release of the album and praise it received launched Dylan on a string of successes and hit records—a kind of a comeback, if you will—that had rarely been achieved. His long-time friend Johnny Cash had experienced a similar revival at an age when most singers were decades into retirement or collecting paychecks from golden oldie shows in Las Vegas. The early years of the 2000s sustained his late-1990s momentum and enabled Dylan to spread out into other artistic endeavors.
Released on the fateful and tragic day that will always be remembered for the terrorist atrocities unleashed on American soil, “Love and Theft” featured a cover photo of the singer looking perturbed, yet vulnerable. The image seemed to capture the postattack mood of the nation, even though there is no way he could have imagined the fallout from the attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. While Dylan’s grim visage captured the aura of the day, the music on the new disc surprised listeners who probably expected something more akin to Time Out of Mind.
“Love and Theft” contained songs drawn from a wide array of influences, from delta blues to early rock and roll. As a matter of fact, the CD could have been released in the 1930s or 1940s and felt just at home. As commentators combed the album’s lyrics, examining Dylan’s songwriting, they uncovered numerous old songs that Dylan rearranged or lifted for the record, perhaps Dylan meant this an inside joke for a body of work titled “Love and Theft.” The most egregious in the eyes of some commentators was the direct pilfering that seemed to be done from a Japanese book published in English as Confessions of a Yakuza, the life story of a Japanese gangster who gave a series of interviews from his deathbed.10 Given the media’s love for sensationalism, news of the alleged plagiarism found outlets across the web and traditional media channels. One would have thought Dylan spit on babies, given the outcry. I guess these people, so indignant in their righteousness, never realized the debt Dylan and others owed to early folk, country, blues, and jazz performers whose songs were reworked and recorded for almost a century—just as these individuals had rearranged songs and poetry by artists dating back centuries.
No one could divorce “Love and Theft” from the day it hit stores, but as fans and commentators turned to the CD, they bought it in droves. The critical acclaim seemed to match, if not exceed, Time Out of Mind. The new record hit No. 5 on the U.S. charts and jumped to No. 3 in the United Kingdom. Pulling in another Grammy Award, Dylan won for “Best Contemporary Folk Album.”
Famed rock critic and writer Greil Marcus may have described Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles best when he said, “the story is that of someone with a gift to live up to, if he can figure out what it is.”11 What makes this line so perfect is that it succinctly explains why Dylan’s memoir really is not a memoir at all (as if the public could ever expect such a straightforward or linear kind of thing from him). Rather, Chronicles is Dylan’s story built on episodes in his life that found him searching to fulfill what he perceived as his destiny. Instead of a traditional memoir, usually a chronological account of the writer’s life, Dylan provides the reader with a book full of secrets; glimpses of how he became a songwriter, his thoughts about his own destiny, and the path he took from the Northern Minnesota iron range to the heady folk scene in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
One of the most prominent aspects of Chronicles is that the book is in one sense Dylan’s love letter to New York City. The Big Apple he invokes is a beautiful, nostalgic 1960s’ version of the city. Dylan speaks of it in heroic tones. He first arrived in the city “that would come to shape my destiny” in the midst of a harsh winter: “The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked.” Dylan lovingly contrasts the bleak cityscape with his expanding sense of himself, explaining, “I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity.”12 Dylan’s confidence here is striking. What gets lost in the text is the realization that when he arrived in New York City, Dylan was only 19 years old and completely alone.
One of the book’s underlying themes is Dylan’s sense of his own destiny and whether or not he can fulfill it. As a matter of fact, the word destiny appears on eight separate occasions in the text, each one indicating a time when the singer and future icon felt guided by a force greater than himself.
From one perspective, Dylan’s sense of destiny has a mystical aura. He recalls being empowered by finally getting to New York City, explaining, “I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”13 Looking back on this point in his development more than 40 years later, the older Dylan admits to his boyish confidence and feeling of being chosen. It is as if the young folksinger saw himself personally pulled toward greatness. Later, in a 2009 interview with historian Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone, Dylan firmly asserts, “I’m a strong believer that each man has a destiny.”14
In a different section of Chronicles, Dylan’s writing about destiny grows bigger, encompassing the nation as a whole. “America was changing,” he says. “I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. . . . My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch.”15 Here, Dylan is being carried along by forces that wash across the country. He is an actor, playing a role handed to him, rather than searching for a part.
As one might imagine coming from a writer of Dylan’s power, there are also many beautiful passages in Chronicles, the kind that convince the reader that Dylan certainly could have been a wonderful novelist. In keeping with the love letter to New York City notion, Dylan pens a terrific scene of the snowy city from a walkup apartment where he crashed on the couch: “I looked out through the beaded glass window across to the church. The bells were silent now and snow swirled off the rooftops. A blizzard was kidnapping the city, life spinning around on a drab canvas. Icy and cold.”16 In Dylan’s prose the scene becomes essentially supernatural, perhaps a memory that transports the much older man back in time to the icy fields of northern Minnesota, boyhood dreams, and still far away from the city of lights.
Of course, with Dylan, Chronicles contains a great deal of cryptic material. A deep textual analysis could take a lifetime and still not exhaust Dylan’s worldview. The prose is both crystal clear and exasperatingly obtuse, even when beautifully invoked. When he talks about his future, or at least what he says about thinking about his future as a young musician, Dylan puzzles over meanings, while simultaneously offering clues about what the future could be. “What was the future?” he asks. “The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening—all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn’t one big joke.”17
Interestingly, in the preceding quote, Dylan switches from looking at the past to potentially examining the present or future. He makes the transition from what the future was to him at the time (“all bunk”) to what it may mean today and tomorrow (“not even the guarantee that life isn’t one big joke”). As a young man, then, Dylan saw the future as a thing that blocked him, but not in an ominous way. Writing decades later, the future is blank. The wall is removed. However, it is replaced by the potentially sobering or depressing thought that life is nothing more than “one big joke.”
What is certain is that fans and critics alike appreciated Chronicles. The pseudo memoir met with widespread acclaim and strong sales. It reached No. 2 on The New York Times bestseller list, spending 19 weeks on the list. Chronicles also received a nomination for a National Book Critics Circle prize.
In a 2006 interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem, Dylan admitted to not only reading the reviews of the memoir, but also nearly shedding a tear, claiming “some of ’em almost made me cry—in a good way.”18 Marcus, for example, praised Dylan’s writing voice, describing it as “keen-eyed” and “doubting” with the author as a kind of “pathfinder” with keen insight: “He watches the world from a distance; he watches himself only as a reflection of the light the world gives off.”19
Assuming the stars align properly, there will be much more from Dylan the writer in the 2010s. In early 2011, news reports claimed that Dylan signed a six-book deal with Simon & Schuster to write two additional follow-up volumes to Chronicles, along with four books on undisclosed topics. Both fans and Dylanologists eagerly await these tomes, hoping that the announcement is real and not (yet another) prank their hero pulls over on them. Our demands on him never cease, and he, in turn, gives us everything and nothing.