45 1994–2010: An Artist, He Don’t
Look Back

45

In the end … you’ve just got to let the work go, and hope you’ll know to do better next time.

 

—Dylan to John Preston, 2008

It was an uncomfortable moment for the both of them, the professor and the poet. It was the former who was in line to be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, having never written a line of poetry in his life; it was the latter who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and countless other literary awards, without ever publishing a single collection of page-bound poetry in his life.

The invite backstage had been a long time coming, but now the moment had arrived, neither really knew what to say. So the esteemed professor asked the poet if he’d read anything good lately. ‘Richard III,’ he replied. Was he putting him on? He hadn’t just plucked that play out of thin air. Had he really seen that piece he’d just written in some literary journal, comparing the narrator’s point of view in ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ with the opening soliloquy of Richard III (‘Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, / Have no delight to pass away the time’)? Tell me that it isn’t true. But he really did want to talk about Richard III, and he didn’t even chafe when the professor mentioned ‘Hattie Carroll.’ ‘So you like that song?’ The professor replied, ‘I think it’s perfect.’ ‘Well, I won’t be playing it tonight.’ Instead, he played a cross-section of other picture-perfect visions of sin: songs like ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time,’ ‘To Ramona’ and ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ And then he played ‘Hattie Carroll’ the following night, in Lowell.

It has always been a difficult marriage—academia and art; the more popular, the more problematic. And in Dylan’s case, he had long ago realized that to be academically acceptable, one had to be either dead physically, or dead artistically. Yet having conquered one medium so convincingly that even the academics had begun coming on board, he had spent the past decade or so trying out other media, where critical acceptance was harder won, and maybe somehow sweeter.

Despite this, it was the scraps which were offered by Sony and his own one-man archive program that still seemed to garner the greater media interest. Two lavish sets in the ongoing Bootleg Series, No Direction Home: The Soundtrack and Tell Tale Signs, issued in 2005 and 2008 respectively, had provided a further five CDs’ worth of largely unissued studio recordings spanning the full gamut of Dylan’s recording career to date: from a hugely interesting but pretty crappy teenage love song recorded onto a schoolfriend’s reel-to-reel in 1959 to his solitary post-Modern Times original to date, ‘Huck’s Tune,’ a sign-off to former times if ever there was one. Meanwhile, Dylan continued expressing his annoyance at the idea that his discarded songs were somehow public property, even as he gave in to such demands with releases like these:

Bob Dylan: I’ve been criticized for not putting my best songs on certain albums but it is because I consider that the song isn’t ready yet. It’s not been recorded right. With all of my records there’s an abundance of material left off—stuff that for a variety of reasons doesn’t make the final cut. And other people seem to think they have some kind of right to it. That it’s their property even. [2001]

The 2004 edition of Lyrics continued to suggest he considered many of these songs off-limits—even as they began to make their passage from surreptitiously circulated bootlegs to Sony product. Not a single non-album track was added to the sections covering the three original albums released between 1990 and 2001—Oscar winner ‘Things Have Changed’ excepted—as if there were no other songs from this period warranting inclusion in what was supposedly a complete edition of his lyrics (a state of affairs to which Tell Tale Signs would truly give the lie). Who was fooling whom? Did he really believe these overlooked songs would go away if he looked the other way?

In the past decade, a number of his contemporaries who at least warranted a mention in the same breath—Springsteen, Neil Young, Van Morrison—had all issued (though, in Young’s case, not until 2008) multi-volume sets of ‘lost’ tracks while at the same time incorporating a healthy slug of these songs into their live sets. But the number of previously unreleased songs from any of the nine (sic) Bootleg Series volumes to date which Dylan had then put into his live set could be counted on one hand, and still leave room for a raised digit to the rest.

In the case of Tell Tale Signs, the sixth such installment, issued in the fall of 2008, this made even less sense because here was a set—issued in one-, two-and three-disc versions—entirely concerned with material recorded between 1989 and 2006. On here were the likes of ‘Tell Ol’ Bill,’ ‘Dreamin’ of You,’ ‘Marchin’ to the City,’ ‘Can’t Escape from You,’ ‘Cross the Green Mountain’ and ‘Red River Shore,’ all originals recorded in the past eleven years and evidently rated enough by their author to either donate them to film soundtracks or rework them in the hope they might yet work out fine—as he had with at least five songs left over from Oh Mercy (four of which featured on TTS in new-found configurations). Perhaps for the first time since the debut volume in the series back in 1991, The Bootleg Series was fulfilling the same brief as the one Springsteen spoke of in relation to his own Tracks set: ‘It’s the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you.’

The 2008 set was probably the best received of the series since the overhyped issue of the Manchester ’66 show ten years earlier—if one discounts the howls of indignation at Sony’s unmitigated gall for charging an extra $130 for the ‘deluxe’ three-CD version. Produced and compiled by Jeff Rosen, the set included outtakes from every album from this period save Under the Red Sky, which was steadfastly ignored (though a fascinating Oh Mercy prototype for ‘TV Talkin’ Song’ was at one point under consideration), and ‘Love and Theft’, where it was felt that the best takes ended up utilized. (The era was represented instead by disappointing latter-day concert versions of ‘High Water’ and ‘Lonesome Day Blues.’) The set also hoovered up most of the recent one-off originals donated to film soundtracks (excepting only ‘Waiting for You’), ‘Things Have Changed’ being represented by an early live version, after the engineer failed to find the ‘New Orleans’ alternate they recorded in the studio.

With so much material having not even been bootlegged before—and with the set having such a contemporary feel—Tell Tale Signs was almost like a new Dylan studio album. Indeed, the single-CD version, which provided fans with a non-stop parade of discarded ‘diamonds,’ stood comfortably alongside any of the studio albums of the era (a view echoed by the All Music Guide reviewer, Thom Jurek, who noted that it ‘feels like a new Bob Dylan record, not only for the astonishing freshness of the material, but also for the … organic feeling of everything here’). Only Q were churlish enough to claim (incorrectly) that ‘nothing here is essential.’

But there was also the usual taunting of so-called experts in the notes that accompanied the set, with carefully cropped tape logs threatening, but never quite managing, to reveal something of the process by which an album as lauded—and flawed—as Time Out of Mind had come about. The forces of obfuscation were partly held at bay by an essential supplement to the set, an exemplary cover feature in Uncut coinciding with the release that corralled the thoughts of more studio collaborators from the last twenty years than anyone had previously managed; relating their recollections specifically to highlights of the set like the stunning alternate ‘Someday Baby’ and the solo ‘Most of the Time.’

Once again, recently released artifacts were shown to be the tip of an artistic iceberg; and many a well-argued theory conceived in the cloistered confines of academia was found wanting. And in an era when the number of published volumes with (pseudo-)academic credentials had begun that transition from trickle to flood, this was becoming an issue. The arena had been left largely to Dylan fans turned would-be authorities for the past thirty years, culminating in a second revised edition of Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man in 2000 that was a cool seven hundred pages longer than on its 1972 debut, and in which the footnotes vied with the text for the larger word count; but still managed to say less than Todd Harvey’s compact, 180-page The Formative Dylan (2001).

It took until 2002 for the first major broadside to be fired across these Bobcats’ bow. Do You, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors, a collection edited by Professor of English Neil Corcoran, with its Anglocentric list of (fifteen) contributors, was chock-full of poets and professors, though only the Scottish professor Aidan Day had any track record as a Dylan critic/commentator. Some of the contributors were even a little uncomfortable at the idea of writing about such a peerless peer. Simon Armitage, that most media-savvy of modern poetasters, quickly distanced himself from other contributors (and any critical acumen) in the paragraph he provided for Corcoran’s proposal:

I’m not autistically obsessive about Bob Dylan in the way that some of my colleagues are. It’s the baby-boom generation that seem most fascinated by him for whatever reason, turning up to innumerable crap concerts year after year, paying homage. I’m too young ever to have fancied Bob Dylan or to have fancied being Bob Dylan, and on the rare occasions I do stand in front of the mirror air-guitaring and mouthing the words of a song, it’s usually … some obscure collective of skinny, northern, white drug-addicts … [So] I want to say why and how a poet can admire a man, without being absolutely convinced about the content of his verses. Let’s not forget that if Bob Dylan had sounded like a drowning cat and looked like a monkey’s arse (the way he looks and sounds today, perhaps) we wouldn’t still be listening to Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited.

The following year a somewhat more esteemed gatekeeper to the portals of academia and ‘Dylan defender’ finally delivered his own five-hundred-page retort to the doubters, garnering a surprising number of hostile reviews for his trouble. The ex-Cambridge professor Christopher Ricks, a genuine giant in his field and author of definitive critiques of Keats and Tennyson, had been writing about Dylan since the late seventies, but had always held back from fully engaging with literary critics on the thorny matter of Dylan’s merits as a poet.

Ricks, who could be unsparing himself when a novice dared enter ‘his’ field, found himself all too often outside his comfort or knowledge zone. Dylan’s Visions of Sin, for all its insights, was a concept hung on an ill-fitting frame that might have worked when dealing with self-consciously literary authors, but was never going to bridge the gulf between a populist performing artist and the kind of poet who left every scrap of paper from his wastebaskets to posterity’s preservers. Smelling the blood of an English dean of letters, some American critics were particularly unkind to the resultant book, with James Wolcott’s New Republic review going straight to the head of the class for this devastating denial of Ricks’s entire thesis: ‘Shortchanging biography and chronology to paw over Dylan thematically, purring over fine craftsmanship and suggestive allusions … Ricks ignores the larger odyssey of Dylan as seeker and seer, where his true importance lies.’

Something, though, was happening in academia because yet more professors and poets had been commandeered for one American mainstream publisher’s retort to Corcoran’s 2002 collection. Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (2004), edited by a young academic on the faculty of Long Island University, Ben Hedin, even reutilized Princeton professor Sean Wilentz’s essay on ‘Love and Theft’ from Corcoran’s volume (making it the third place it had appeared), in what was an almost exclusively American collection of critics, academics, poets and Dylan ‘experts’ (Michael Gray and myself were the only ones ushered across this great divide). For now, the muted reception from paying punters that greeted collections like Corcoran’s and Hedin’s served to send those with unfinished submissions back to their laptops. The demise of the last of the more academically inclined Dylanzines, Judas, in 2006, further narrowed any forum for more academic pieces.

But the universities soon moved in to fill the void. In March 2007, the University of Minneapolis staged a full three-day conference on Dylan, to coincide with the arrival in town of the Experience exhibition of Dylan memorabilia and manuscripts that had been doing the rounds since 2005, drawing most of its more interesting artifacts from the Morgan Library’s recently acquired George Hecksher collection. The Minneapolis conference, which later produced its own nicely illustrated anthology of talks (Highway 61 Revisited), benefited from its proximity to Dylan’s birthplace and youthful home. The most interesting talks of the weekend would come from two local historians who provided a fuller account of those childhood years. The published versions of their talks even included an unearthly photo of a pumped-up, pompadoured Bobby Zimmerman on stage with the Golden Chords at the Winter Frolic Contest. Predictably, too much of the remainder of the conference was given over to a series of rather narrow-ranging talks based on minimal original research, by research students who had just discovered a point of view. But it was still a landmark event. From now on, it seemed Dylan was destined to be taken seriously in any place where infinity could be put on trial.

And in the same year as the Minneapolis conference, an equally displaced form of validation for Dylan’s art was taking place in a small city in Germany—and this event was scheduled to run for three solid months. On October 28, 2007 an exhibition opened at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz of Dylan paintings, entitled The Drawn Blank Series. Featuring some 170 watercolor and gouache paintings, these works, according to the catalog, ‘are based on motifs which Dylan drew, mainly in pencil and charcoal, during the period from 1989 to 1992, while on tour.’ The truth was stranger than that. These ‘paintings’ weren’t ‘based’ on the 92 drawings he’d published in 1994 as Drawn Blank. Rather, they were the self-same drawings, which he’d recently painted in. And there were 170 of them because he’d painted some in a number of different ways. The director of the museum, Ingrid Moessinger, had been so well informed about Dylan’s work that she didn’t know of Drawn Blank’s existence until she attended the Experience exhibition at the Morgan Library in 2005, after which she ‘went straight out and bought my own copy and immediately began to track down the originals.’

Tracking down the originals proved more than a little problematic—they didn’t seem to exist. The original drawings included in that tasteful little volume seemed to have gone missing. So they digitally scanned all the prints in the book, enlarging the resultant images before transferring them onto heavy paper ready for reworking. Dylan then experimented with treating individual images with a variety of colors, producing a series of limited-edition prints of the resultant ‘paintings’ and providing the ‘originals’ to the museum in Chemnitz. Though he had no direct contact with the museum or curator, he took the pragmatic view that if they expressed genuine interest, then he was happy for them to show the work. He didn’t particularly care that it was an out-of-the-way place. In fact, that would make it easier to bear if—as he expected—the larger art world ignored or condemned the work he now put on display. What was clear was that Dylan still felt his earlier book of drawings had been treated with a certain disdain by this world in which he was a novice, if not a stranger:

Bob Dylan: The critics didn’t want to review [Drawn Blank]. The publisher told me they couldn’t get past the idea of another singer who dabbled. You know, like [I was] David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney … No one from the singing profession was going to be taken seriously by the art world, I was told, but that was OK. I wasn’t expecting anything … to happen. It’s not like the drawings were revolutionary. They weren’t going to change anyone’s way of thinking. [2008]

In truth, Dylan had done very little to ensure that the original Drawn Blank stood a chance in the marketplace, giving one brief interview about the book, arranging no exhibition to coincide with its publication, nor embracing the world of signed, limited-edition prints and a worldwide network of galleries ever willing to hawk them. It was a mistake it took his old friend Debbie Gold’s intervention, and introduction of a Dylan-loving New York art dealer to the office, to correct. When, predictably, the Chemnitz exhibition drew record-breaking crowds, and ran out of prints in the first few weeks, while reprinting German and English editions of the lavish, full-color 300-page catalog before the year was out, it became clear that whatever the critics might think, there was a large audience of punters with deep pockets who were willing to dig the depths to own even a signed print of the man’s work.

When, in June 2008, a couple of dozen British galleries exhibited their own series of prints—at a mouth-watering £40,000 for the set of twelve—the whole run sold out within a day. By now, Dylan had awoken to another untapped source of revenue and a gratifying willingness from certain quarters to treat him as some sort of serious painter; and this time he was prepared to meet the media interest halfway, agreeing to an interview with The Times’s John Preston that would coincide with the Halcyon Gallery in London presenting its own, edited version of the Chemnitz exhibition. In their conversation he painted an appropriately colorful version of how Drawn Blank came about:

Bob Dylan: [The editor at Random House] had seen some of my sketches somewhere and asked if I’d like to do a whole book … ‘Just deal with the material to hand, whatever that is. And do it however you want’ … Then they gave me a drawing book, I took it away with me and turned it back in again, a full three years later. [2008]

Here he was again, selflessly responding to the interest of others—gamely trying to fulfill the expectations of yet another third party preying on his artistry. It was an account that bore about as much relationship to the truth as Chronicles. Drawn Blank was the product of a long-abiding ambition to be viewed as a ‘proper’ artist, fulfilling a yearning that had been there since high school, if we are to believe the book’s self-penned introduction in which he claimed to have had a ‘drawing instructor in high school [who] lectured and demonstrated continuously.’ (One suspects the school in question was run by Norman Raeben; and the year was 1974, not 1954.) At the time of its 1994 publication, he was determined to represent these drawings as representative only of what he saw with his own two eyes: ‘I don’t concoct drawings out of my head. It’s all out there somewhere and that’s the only way I can work or get any satisfaction out of doing it.’ Fifteen years later, he was still asserting this ‘real life’ aspect to his visual work, even if he now felt like he was living among the ruins of Pompeii:

Bob Dylan: I just draw what’s interesting to me, and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can take a bowl of fruit and turn it into a life and death drama. Women are power figures, so I depict them that way. I can find people to paint in mobile home communities. I could paint bourgeois people too. I’m not trying to make social comment or fulfill somebody’s vision. [2009]

But when it came to painting and drawing he was a lot less sure he wanted to risk a caustic reception for what he produced than he was with his very public music-making. Hence the ringing silence between 1970 and 1994, after he initially placed a handful of paintings in some very public places. Having happily given Sing Out an original painting to use on the cover of its October 1968 issue, he then painted the Band a cover for their seminal Music from Big Pink, following up with his own Self Portrait across the front of that infamous, sprawling double album the following year. It seems he had found a new avenue of expression in the backwoods of upstate New York. But there the public presentation of such work ended for a very long time, perhaps because of the incomprehension that greeted not only the music on his second double album but the portrait itself. He later wrote about that 1970 painting, for a 1991 anthology of record-album art, in a way that indicated he didn’t feel he had pulled it off:

Staring at the blank canvas for a while encouraged me to blindfoldedly make a picture that would paste all the songs together between the sleeves. it didn’t take a whole lot of strokes to compleat the face. art lovers claimed it was primitive & maybe it was if not having any formal art school training makes it so. my painting style which was under-developed at the time had more to do with allowing my eye instead of my mind to regulate my senses … [but] it wasn’t my purpose to paint my own picture.

Nonetheless, for a long time it was portraits, self-or otherwise, that were the main focus of his brushmanship. The only known painting of the Woodstock period to have ever apparently gone under the hammer was a Rubenesque portrait of his wife, lounging naked on a chaise longue (it rather reminds one of the immortal exchange in Tony Hancock’s The Rebel when the aspiring painter says, ‘This is how I see women,’ and his landlady replies, ‘Oh you poor man’). And in 1985, when Dylan allowed a photographer to snap him in his home studio in Malibu alongside his current paintings, all of the dozen or so canvases propped up against the wall or on his easel were portraits—one of which looked like Muhammad Ali. The others were largely unknown figures, with large-breasted females just as fulsomely evident as in the pages of Drawn Blank. One piece of film evidence, showing him sketching a pen-drawing of Christopher Sykes during the 1986 Omnibus interview, showed that he could capture something in a person’s features with genuine facility, even when high as a pigeon. Whether this made him the next Chagall, however, remained open to question.

Chagall was apparently the painter whom he had first tried to emulate. Dylan had hit upon Chagall in his usual hit-and-miss manner, after befriending a local painter in Woodstock called Bruce Dorfman. One of the mere handful of genuine coups in Sounes’s Dylan biography, Dorfman revealed how Dylan turned up at his studio one day with an art book reproducing Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute. He said that he wanted to do something in that style, and Dorfman, showing remarkable restraint, replied, ‘Are you sure this is where you want to start?’

Yet start here he did, only to rediscover there really was no success like failure. Persevering under Dorfman’s non-judgmental tutelage, he brought art books of Monet and Van Gogh with similar results: ‘A mess.’ Until one day he appeared with another book in his hand, a Marc Chagall book. ‘This is the one that worked,’ recalled Dorfman. ‘It was perfect, because you had all these multilayered images—things flying, things walking, clocks flying, rabbits with green faces. It was all there. Chagall was it. He made the connection.’ Dylan began making a canvas clearly inspired by Chagall’s style, but with images more related to ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ Shortly after this breakthrough of sorts, Dylan found out that the Guggenheim was doing an exhibition of paintings by Marc Chagall and Odilon Redon. He went along, not in the company of Dorfman but of the poet Michael McClure, who later remembered that ‘Bob wouldn’t look at the Redons. He had eyes for nothing but the Chagall. Chagall was the meaningful world to him.’

It is surprising then that Dylan fails to namecheck Chagall as a major influence in any of his recent interviews, though he vividly recalled an exhibition of Gauguin at the Museum of Modern Art: ‘I found I could stand in front of any one of them for as long as I’d sit at the movies, yet not get tired on my feet. I’d lose all sense of time.’ Gauguin was also one of four painters who, in a 2008 admission, ‘properly had an impact on me … in my twenties.’ The others were Matisse, Derain, and Monet.

Nor did Chagall find a place in Chronicles, where Dylan instead found room to laud the likes of Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, Braque and Bonnard, while claiming that this ‘new world of art was opening up my mind,’ thanks to artistic girlfriend Suze. He also claimed that it was at this point, 1962–3, that he ‘began to make some of my own drawings … I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew … empty cigarette boxes … I noticed that it purified the experience of my eye and I would make drawings of my own for years to come.’

By the time Drawn Blank appeared, some three decades later, he had backtracked far enough to discover that in art, as in music, the Old Masters had much to say to him. In the one interview he gave at the time of Drawn Blank’s publication, for Newsweek, he claimed his favorite painters were ‘people like Donatello … Caravaggio … Titian.’ While it would appear his personal tastes continued to be in a state of flux, by 2009 he was prepared to state that his two favorite painters were Rembrandt (‘because it’s rough, crude and beautiful’) and Caravaggio (‘I’d probably go a hundred miles for a chance to see a Caravaggio painting’); but Picasso, whose impact he’d always aspired to emulate, according to Chronicles, he now gave short shrift: ‘I don’t feel Picasso’s painting like I feel the other work [I] just mentioned.’

By 2009, he had started to feel more comfortable talking about his own, and others’, art, having been reassured by a couple of important art directors that what he was doing did have merit, and should not be hidden away (he was also suggesting that his watercolors might run deeper, telling Preston, ‘What I release to the public and what I keep for myself are two different things’). Slowly overcoming any discomfiture, he admitted to Bill Flanagan that he had ‘always drawn and painted, but up until recently, nobody’s taken an interest … Now I’m scrambling to keep up. I’ve been commissioned to do paintings and they want me to work with iron and lead.’

The commission he was referring to was for an exhibition at the Royal Museum in Copenhagen, an altogether more prestigious, not to say high-profile, location than the quaint little museum in Chemnitz. And this time there was new work—not merely reworkings of earlier drawings. Running from early September 2010 to January 2011, The Brazil Series consisted of large acrylic canvases with angular, skewed perspectives, painted in rich, vibrant colors; if not obviously South American in theme.

Both the Copenhagen museum director and the New York Museum of Modern Art’s curator, John Elderfield, had been working on this show. The highly respected Elderfield had originally been brought up to Dylan’s New York office by the New York art dealer-exhibitor Gold had introduced to Rosen back in 1999, after Dylan had apparently expressed doubt about the quality of his artwork, concerned as to whether it warranted public exhibition. Elderfield looked at a selection of the work and assured them it was a worthwhile project. As a result both he and his Danish counterpart were invited to meet Dylan in person, leading to extensive studio sessions in Santa Monica, where the budding artist was surprisingly open and forthcoming about his view of the art. However, the one thing Dylan was adamant about from the very start was that the work should not be seen, or interpreted, or compared to the music. (He was presumably unhappy about a couple of essays included in the Drawn Blank Series catalog produced for the German exhibition, in which the visual work was constantly, not to say tendentiously, connected to his recorded output.)

Quite how Dylan would pull this off when the level of interest in his visual work was a direct product of his importance as a poet-performer, he wasn’t about to explain. But he was certainly going to some pains to present the work as done ‘without affectation or self-reference, to provide some kind of panoramic view of the world as I was seeing it.’ Once again, he was the self-styled primitivist, someone who hadn’t ‘trained in any academy where you learn how to do something in the style of Degas or Van Gogh, or how to copy Da Vinci … [So] if there’s anything [there], it’s just by accident and instinctive … If it pleases the eye of the beholder … there’s no more to it than that, to my mind.’ If he hadn’t been saying much the same thing about his recorded work for the past forty years, one might almost have believed him.

If Dylan owed a moral debt to his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who had first inspired him to explore the visual world, it would appear that his version of memoir-writing had in turn inspired her to try and capture those more innocent times from her unique vantage point, at the side and/or in the arms of its key chronicler. That, and the $150,000 advance editor Gerry Howard at Doubleday was providing as further incentive to revisit their star-crossed relationship. The book when it appeared in 2008, A Freewheelin’ Time, barely skimmed this well-worn surface. Having been taught by a master never to overanalyze, Suze barely pauses to smell the coffeehouses in her helter-skelter dash through the first half of the sixties, save when she reserves nearly a quarter of a memoir marketed as being about her relationship with Dylan—complete with a copycat cover from Don Hunstein’s Freewheelin’ photo shoot—recounting a trip to Cuba made some time after they broke up.

Perhaps the editor should have read previous interviews with the heavy-headed gal—and there was no shortage of them—before signing her up. After all, she had only recently told David Hajdu, ‘[Bob and I] were very similar … We were both not very verbal. The way we understood each other—there was something,’ hardly the most articulate summation of a great love affair. Her yearning for a relationship of equals, already impossible by the time she sailed to Italy in June 1962, was apparent from another statement she gave his most recent biographer: ‘You know he’s just a guy, and you hope that he’s just going to go back [to being his old self], but it’s hard. It made me crazy. I couldn’t stand the idea of being called “his chick.” It was good to get away.’

The longing, after the initial rush of mutual attraction, seems to have been largely one-way, and for once it was in her direction; as the couple of letters Dylan sent her in Italy reproduced in the book make abundantly clear. And the fact that she had now begun to sell off highly personal items Dylan had given to her—including a hand-inscribed art book (Painting in Italy from the Origins to the Thirteenth Century) he had given her on her twentieth birthday, along with an early Valentine’s Day card (inscribed ‘Love, love, Money, Booze, I’d swap ’m all to be with youse, love love me Bob’)—suggested she either needed the money real bad or could no longer care less. Dylan, to his credit, gave her carte blanche to quote whatever she wanted from such mementos; but it seems she felt she had more to hide than he did.

It also seems that for all her appreciation of art, Suze had never taken kindly to the idea of being a true artist’s muse. It was a role subsequent muses seemed more willing to embrace, Baez duly admitting that she ‘didn’t mind any way he might have used me, or the idea of me, or anything like that.’ But then, he stopped making the subjects of his songs self-apparent about the time Suze threw him out for good.

There certainly seemed to be an increasing distance between the figures who featured in his twenty-first-century songs and any personal journey towards the Son. And one way to accentuate that not so tight connection was to write them around someone else’s narrative journey. So it was that in the fall of 2008, Dylan (and an old friend) began putting together a handful of new songs for a film that the director Olivier Dahan was making, hoping to capitalize on the unexpected success of his biopic of Edith Piaf’s life, La Vie En Rose. According to Dylan, Dahan was keen to get a whole soundtrack’s worth of songs from the man, not just a title track. And Dylan was delighted to find a director who ‘was so audacious! Usually you get asked to do, like, one song, and it’s at the end of the movie. But ten songs? Dahan wanted to put these songs throughout the movie and find different reasons for them. I just kind of gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing.’

As it turned out, he didn’t. In the end, Dahan’s disjointed film (My Own Love Song), despite a stellar cast that included Renée Zellweger and Forest Whitaker, never even warranted a US domestic release. Thankfully, by the time it appeared, the songs had already been transmuted into a natural successor to Modern Times, marking another notch off the Sony contract. The film had merely proved a necessary inspiration to get Dylan writing again—much as Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid had back in November 1972.

His starting point, by his own admission, was the song ‘Life Is Hard’: ‘The only thing [Dahan] needed for sure was a ballad for the main character to sing towards the end of the movie. And that’s the song “Life Is Hard”.’ After that, he felt he needed some help with the lyrics and so, for the first time since Desire, a Dylan album had a co-lyricist on much of it. However, despite a lyrical association dating back to at least 1987, Dylan seemed surprisingly coy about publicizing the nature of his collaboration with ex-Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.

Only after the advance CDs had gone out, and the press release was prepared, was it generally revealed that nine of the ten songs on his 45th studio album had been co-written. Nor was Dylan particularly forthcoming about what Hunter had brought to the process, merely describing him as someone who has ‘got a way with words, and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.’ Given that Hunter’s pedigree, such as it was, had been founded on a handful of songs written nearly four decades earlier (three of them penned in a single inspired day in London in 1970), and that Dylan had already deconstructed the best of those—’Black Muddy River,’ ‘Deal’ and ‘Friend of the Devil’ all receiving new life when freed from the Dead’s clammy grip on the Never Ending Tour—it was hard to see how two songwriting amnesiacs’ heads were better than one.

On the evidence of the resultant album, Together Through Life, they were not. ‘This Dream of You,’ a perfect Piaf pastiche, accordion et al., is the one song on Together Through Life written entirely by Dylan—and it is one of the best. Its opening line, ‘How long can I stay in this nowhere café,’ has the jump on all the other opening lines, while he attacks the seemingly clichéd title with a once-reliable cleaver: ‘All I have and all I know is this dream of you which keeps me living on.’ Yet at no point is there an obvious change in Dylan’s lyrical approach from recent albums, save for a slightly diminished use of the light-fingered lift. The one time he overtly used someone else’s song as a springboard for his own—Billy Joe Shaver’s ‘Ain’t No God in Mexico,’ a clear template for ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’—he openly acknowledged the debt to historian Douglas Brinkley.

He was clearly in a generous mood, sharing his publishing on the album not only with Hunter, whose account had little need of replenishment, but with the estate of Willie Dixon, to whom he gave a share of ‘My Wife’s Hometown’ for copping the essential feel of Muddy Waters’s Chess recording of ‘Just Make Love to Me,’ credited to Dixon. With such a great title, and strong roots in those Chicagoan after-hours, one might have expected Dylan to raise his game on this one. Instead, he seemed faintly dismissive of the result, insisting, ‘The only person it could matter to gets a kick out of it,’ and that the song was ‘a tribute, not a death chant.’ Nor did he seem especially keen to play the song in performance (it would take some six months from the album’s release before he gave ‘My Wife’s Hometown’ the treatment).

But the album still had its moments—discreetly distributed across the ten tracks. The opening and closing cuts, ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothin” and ‘It’s All Good,’ both contained not just the feel of ‘a road trip from Kansas City to New Orleans,’ akin to the Dahan movie they were intended to imbue, but aspects of a musical odyssey that ventured all the way from Tex-Mex to Cajun. And there was one stand-out track, midpoint, the telltale signature tune, ‘Forgetful Heart.’ Writing a song about numbness—’Forgetful heart, you lost your power of recall’—results in Dylan’s most heartfelt vocal on the whole album, and an arrangement that for once doesn’t sound stuck on as an afterthought. Even the washed-out vocal is a perfect fit for its beguilingly world-weary sentiments.

If the instruments here don’t sound as pasted on as in the rest of the album, Dylan’s decision to supplement his touring misfits with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and Los Lobos accordionist David Hidalgo suggested he always had a more textured sound in mind. However, he was still down on the idea of letting as great a guitarist as Campbell cut loose, insisting, ‘Soloing is not a big part of my records … Nobody buys them to hear solos. What I try to do is to make sure that the instrumental sections are dynamic and are extensions of the overall feeling of the song.’

At least such a cross-section of styles seemed to reach back to something as musically experimental as New Morning. Nor was this the only point of comparison one could draw between these two albums. Like that forty-year-old false dawn, Together Through Life was a hit-and-miss affair that seemed more of an end than a beginning; even if Dylan claimed that ‘the songs on Modern Times brought my repertoire up to date,’ obviating any need for ‘these songs … to cover the same ground.’

And like New Morning, Dylan’s voice was breaking up all over the place. Back then, he had been nursing a bad cold through most of the sessions. This time, he simply couldn’t any longer disguise the systematic sandpapering he’d given his vocal cords over twenty years of solid touring in unsuitable arenas with inadequate sound equipment. And though the West Coast engineer David Bianco did what he could to close-mike the voice, hoping intimacy might serve as a substitute for expressiveness, he was no substitute for Chris Shaw—or three years’ less performance-induced punishment. At least any enforced jollity it shared with its stylistic predecessor was stripped bare on the album closer, ‘It’s All Good,’ in which Dylan produces from beneath its candy-coated surface a verbal razor blade; and again the croak of a world-weary wanderer perfectly suits its setting.

Not surprisingly, having reached a place where he wasn’t about to bend his music to reviewers’ whims—and having stayed there for a dozen years or more—the reception for Together Through Life was about as mixed as its contents. If the ever-critical Robert Christgau was among those who realized that ‘the singer isn’t up to tenderness and the accordion gets annoying,’ he also somehow found ‘the first two tracks … standards in the making, the last two tracks … prophetic and mean.’ The New York Times’s Ben Ratliff was not so convinced, believing that ‘very little on Together Through Life seems destined for his repertory’s long haul.’ No one, it seemed, could agree which songs worked best, even those inclined to give the man the benefit of the doubt. The No Ripcord critic, Alan Shulman, was merely grateful that although it ‘sounds like our greatest living songwriter [is] coasting a bit, [it] is a whole lot better than not giving a shit (Self Portrait).’

Little did Mr. Shulman know that by the time Together Through Life appeared in late April 2009, Dylan had already recorded his sixth album of covers, and it was very much a return to Self Portrait territory. Indeed, it was an album that tested the bounds of any critical goodwill recently accumulated as no album had done since that 1970 own goal. It also proved that no spoof Dylan album can ever quite match the real thing. Back in 1975, in its glorious heyday, the NME ran one of its great sendups, a review of a lost Bob Dylan Christmas album called Snow Over Interstate 80 he had allegedly recorded between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. This truly incredible artifact was deliciously described by NME’s team of Teazers thus:

The third track is the most bizarre on the record. Would you believe ‘Frosty The Snowman’ in the style of the Ronettes on Phil Spector’s Christmas album with The Zim giving a three year advance preview on his Nashville Skyline voice? Fantastic, but true. Dylan drawls out the lyrics, and at one memorable juncture after yelling ‘… and two eyes made out of co-a-l’ adds a spontaneous whoop of ‘believe me mama’. The production credit for ‘Frosty’ is mysteriously given to one ‘Delmore Nis Won’, which, according to more than one reliable source, was Phil Spector and Brian Wilson working in uneasy harness at Dylan’s personal and adamant insistence. The first side closes with a massed female chorale of dubious pitch singing ‘I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas’ against an almost mournful background of strings, with an occasional overdub of some lazy slide guitar, sounding suspiciously like early Ry Cooder. The chorale was apparently made up of youthful Greenwich Village folkies, including (according to some sources) the anonymous and bespectacled eighteen year old Patti Smith, and the Warhol model Edie Sedgwick.

As of April 2009, Dylan had decided that no NME journo was gonna outgun this master of the put-on. In that month, he set out to record his own Christmas album, as if it was still the late fifties, and another Bing Crosby Christmas TV special was in need of a special guest. If New Morning had been all but completed before the Self Portrait reviews were in, he was going to reverse the process this time, and see who dared ask of a Christmas album, What is this shit? Just to make the most hard-nosed critic think twice, he even announced that all proceeds from said album would be going to a charity that provided Christmas dinners for the homeless, a laudable gesture that placed him firmly in the tradition of Guthrie’s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ (‘Here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief’).

Once again, the man who was rarely known to make a foolish move left fans and critics alike questioning both his motive/s and the meaning underlying such a hokey gesture. But one suspects this was no mere whim on his part. The idea of doing a Christmas album may not go as far back as the NME ‘story,’ but he had evidently made a start on one at the arduous Infidels sessions, during which he broke into versions of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.’ He had also clearly been a recipient and fan of Eddie G.’s Christmas compilation tapes through the late eighties, culminating with him rubber-stamping the official release of Christmas Party with Eddie G. in 1990. In 2001, he even gave his own project a dry run of sorts, running down a few Christmas songs during the sound checks on the fall US tour (at least two of which were recorded for a possible live album). So when he and his band convened again in LA that April, it was by no means certain that a Dylan Christmas album would be a clunker. As he observed on its release, ‘These songs are part of my life, just like folk songs. You [just] have to play them straight.’

One also has to pick songs cut according to one’s cloth cords; and in Dylan’s case, this did not mean ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing’ or ‘O Come All Ye Faithful,’ both of which he murders mercilessly (in the latter’s case, in Latin first, and then in English). Of the four traditional carols sprinkled across the fifteen-song set, ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ is the only one that really works, albeit in a this-side-of-mawkishness, Self Portrait-like way. Bill Flanagan even commented to Dylan that it sounded like the performance of a true believer, to which Dylan unambiguously responded, ‘Well, I am.’ Which raises the question, why did he not do an entire album of traditional Christmas songs, with maybe a ‘Christmas Island’ (a song he last recorded in January 1963) lobbed in for good measure?

Instead, the album came across as part Eddie G. tape (all three opening cuts appeared in some guise on the 1990 CD), and part nostalgia for the Christmases he grew up with in the frozen north, a setting he effortlessly evoked in picture-postcard fashion when prompted to talk about those times now: ‘Plenty of snow, jingle bells, Christmas carolers going from house to house, sleighs in the streets, town bells ringing, nativity bells.’ Despite the absurdity underlying the whole idea, he also refrained from injecting some much-needed humor into the exercise, though it had been more than evident in the Christmas 2006 episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour show, which featured the likes of the Bellrays’ ‘Poor Old Rudolph,’ Red Simpson’s ‘Truckin’ Trees for Christmas,’ Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Santa Claus’ (‘Here’s Sonny Boy with his hands in his baby’s dresser drawer, and you wouldn’t believe what he’s trying to find!’), and best of all, Kay Martin & Her Body Guards’ ‘I Want a Casting Couch for Christmas,’ a song he felt was ‘skat[ing] dangerously close to … a single entendre.’

But as he had already asserted, he believed ‘you have to play them straight,’ and play ’em straight he did. There was just no getting around the fact that Christmas in the Heart—good cause or not—was still the bastard son of Down in the Groove, Dylan and Self Portrait, not Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. The more cynically minded even wondered if it was another contractual filler, as Dylan sought to run down the clock on his Sony contract, as he had done before when he wanted to consider his options and/or Sony was not treating him with sufficient respect. The reviewers couldn’t quite bring themselves to get righteous with this dubious excuse for an album—even the querulous Q described it as ‘alternating between the laughable and [the] listenable’—but there was no mistaking the indifference that greeted its release from all save the hard core of fans, for whom even Down in the Groove had its good points.

At least Dylan had underlined where his own heart was—and it was firmly in the fifties, a time ‘before the sexual revolution, huge sound systems, techno-pop.’ And he was hardly the first artist, or man, to believe as he approached his seventieth year—after soldiering on for the past decade without the one constant in any man’s life, his mother, Beattie, who had died in 2000, aged eighty-five—that everything was going to Hades in a handbasket. The feeling wasn’t entirely new:

Bob Dylan: What’s dear to me are the Fifties, ’cause that’s when I grew up … Knife sharpeners would come down the street, and the coal man too, and every once in a while a wagon would come through town with a gorilla in a cage or, I remember, a mummy under glass … It was a very itinerant place—no interstate highways yet, just country roads everywhere. There was an innocence about it all, and I don’t recall anything bad ever happening. That was the Fifties, the last period of time I remember as being idyllic. [1997]

He had been terser, if no less nostalgic, two years earlier, when he confided in a Newsweek reporter, ‘I’m just rooted back there in the ’50s, and what’s got me this far keeps me going.’ And though he had long ago reconciled himself to the fact that you can’t go home again, his 2009 description of Duluth still conveys an almost Proustian nostalgia for what was, but never more could be: ‘I like the way the hills tumble to the waterfront and the way the wind blows around the grain elevators. The train yards go on forever too. It’s old-age industrial, that’s what it is. You’ll see it from the top of the hill for miles and miles before you get there.’

He held a similarly rose-tinted view of the music from that period. Even the artists who managed to have long and productive careers were defined by their work in this ‘idyllic’ period. Thus, when he was asked at this time what he thought of the Elvis he saw in the seventies (and claimed he didn’t), he expressed a wish that he had seen ‘the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life … [But] that Elvis … had left the building.’ He meant the Elvis recorded by Sam Phillips for the Sun label—the same label that a year later started releasing the seminal output of a young Johnny Cash. Again, Dylan was in no doubt which Cash recordings he would lay upon others, given half a chance: ‘I tell people if they are interested that they should listen to Johnny on his Sun records and reject all that notorious low-grade stuff he did in his later years. It can’t hold a candlelight to the frightening depth of the man you hear on his early records.’

Even the mighty Skip James, as elemental an artist as ever crossed Dylan’s path, was found wanting when he returned from a three-decade recording hiatus in the early sixties, to be introduced to the same adoring folk festival crowds that acclaimed a young Dylan as their spokesman. Dylan now convinced himself he could hear a key difference between the young and old James: ‘If you listen to the records he made in the Sixties, when they rediscovered him, you find that there’s something missing. And what’s missing is that interconnected thread of the structure of the songs.’

So it should come as no great surprise that, at least some of the time, he should have started to view his own career in a similar light. But he clearly took one English journalist aback in 1997, just as critics were talking about another creative renaissance, when, on being asked whether it was ‘disabling creatively to have people say your best work is behind you,’ he responded, ‘Not really, because for the most part I … feel that way myself.’ The Never Ending Tour sets certainly seemed to bear this out, as three decades (and counting) after he recorded the last of his great sixties albums (John Wesley Harding), he still gave those songs the lion’s share of the shows. But if he now struggled to join together all the ‘interconnected thread of the structure of the songs,’ he never doubted—or not in a quarter of a century he hadn’t—that this is what he should (still) be doing:

Bob Dylan: Critics might be uncomfortable with me [working so much]. Maybe they can’t figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do. Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want … My music wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early. [2009]

Even this ‘ideal’ of touring until he dropped, which he fitfully advocated, seemed to stem from a romantic attachment to youthful experience—going back to those ‘first week[s] in New York … [and] somebody who has come to the end of one road, [and] knows there’s another road.’ Because in those first couple of weeks not only did Dylan visit one institutionalized hero, Woody Guthrie, but he also caught the last performances, private and public, of Woody’s most faithful sidekick, Cisco Houston.

By the time Dylan metaphorically doffed his Huck Finn cap ‘to Cisco and Sonny, and Lead Belly, too,’ in the first original he drew from this milieu (‘Song to Woody’), he already knew Cisco, like Woody, was dying—and sooner, too. In Chronicles he eulogizes the twin experiences of seeing Houston the performer—‘even though he was a hair’s breadth away from death, you suspected nothing’—and meeting the man, ‘You knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it’. Over four pages (pp. 63–66) he describes—somewhat imaginatively—the party ‘Camilla Adams’ arranged for Houston’s New York friends to say goodbye to the great man. A number of Dylan’s contemporaries later informed his first biographer that the young cub seemed ‘especially drawn to Cisco Houston … and part of the attraction was that Cisco Houston was dying.’

It should not be surprising that Dylan would begin to see himself as the last man standing when one considers who were his true precursors in American traditional song. Lead Belly was long dead, Woody might as well have been, and Cisco was about done gone. But it was only much later that he began to develop the idea that tradition was all done; and that singer-songwriters, who were a different breed altogether, broke the chain. He preferred not to dwell on the fact that there was only ever one bridge that spanned the two genres, and it had been dynamited one day in July 1965, when the undisputed inheritor of the Guthrie mantle turned his back on folk music, stepping through the rubble to climb up rough-hewn banks of rock.

By 2001, when he had fully reimmersed himself in that original stream, he insisted to a spellbound Mikal Gilmore, ‘Folk music is where it all starts and in many way ends. If … you don’t feel historically tied to it, then what you’re doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era … It helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening.’ He had said much the same thing to the former rock critic Dave Marsh backstage at the Supper Club in November 1993, telling him Springsteen and his ilk had missed something—’They weren’t there to see the end of the traditional people. But I was.’ (If Springsteen’s response was The Seeger Sessions (2006), he rather proved Dylan’s point.)

It would, however, be wildly inaccurate to suggest that Dylan’s fixation with the dead and the dying began (or ended) with Guthrie and Houston. There is an abiding identification with those who came and went that has run throughout his whole life. If ‘part of the attraction was that Cisco Houston was dying,’ he was by no means alone. The same could also be said about Guthrie. Or be applied with equal force to Hank Williams, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. The young Dylan was always self-consciously catching the last rays of someone else’s dying sun, beginning with Hank Williams, whose death on January 1, 1953 passed him by, but not for long. According to his younger brother David, in conversation with Shelton, the young Bobby developed ‘a preoccupation with death, out of Hank Williams.’ And according to his own chronicle, ‘Hearing about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud.’

From the first he associated songs and singers with death. Hence a first album recorded at the age of twenty which had six songs with death in the title and/or their denouement. ‘The only true valid death you can feel today’ is how Dylan described the traditional ballads in 1966. For a while there he was just fearful that he hadn’t done what he needed to do. Hence the appeal of Johnson in particular, of whom he said in 1995: ‘Robert Johnson only made one record. His body of work was just one record. Yet there’s no praise or esteem high enough for the body of work he represents … There are people who put out forty or fifty records and don’t do what he did.’ And still death kept following, almost tracking him down once or twice. But not quite. By the time he was sixty he finally found the time to reflect:

Q: Do you think about death often?
Bob Dylan: I wouldn’t say often, but … when people who are close to me die. [2001]

That list is long. Off the top of my head it includes Paul Clayton, Richard Fariña, Brian Jones, Phil Ochs, Howard Alk, Richard Manuel, Jerry Garcia, Victor Maymudes, Johnny Cash, Larry Kegan. His father and mother. But this is also a man who had been writing various versions of his own epitaph since he was nineteen, when he wrote a song predicting he would not make twenty-one.1 Here was someone who, at a 2001 press conference, when asked if the Never Ending Tour had a preordained end, responded, ‘It is bound to end. The thing that links us all, the one thing we have in common, is our mortality’—as if mortality and an end to touring were somehow synonymous.

The side projects, the paintings, the films, the books, and whatever else occupies his still-raging mind, might not merely be designed to stave off that contagion of boredom, but also those last thoughts on life and life only. No matter. The troubled troubadour is still raging gloriously, albeit intermittently, resisting the impulse to surrender to old age. Sometimes the old impulse to walk away—one he has given in to just twice, in 1967 and 1982—shows its once-familiar face. After all, as he told Jonathan Lethem shortly after his sixty-fifth birthday, if he had one ambition left it was this: ‘I always wanted to stop when I was on top. I didn’t want to fade away. I didn’t want to be a has-been.’ Yet he keeps on keepin’ on, still determined to go tell it on the mountain. A man on a mission. Maybe it’s because he feels a certain obligation to the ghosts of Guthrie, Sonny and Cisco, and Lead Belly, too. Because, as he recently volunteered in print, ‘I don’t think you’ll hear what I do ever again.’

The box arrived today. Actually, they both arrived: the prototypes for Sony’s collected CDs box and collected LPs box; but he barely paused at the former. It was the latter that interested him—every one of his albums, like pretty maidens all in a row. He spread them out across the floor, and just stood there surrounded by all those record sleeves. If his mama could see him now …

It was quite a body of work. All the way from ‘You’re No Good’ to ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On.’ He pulled a record out of its sleeve at random, felt that familiar static charge off the vinyl—Blonde on Blonde—side one, track two, ‘Pledging My Time.’ It had been a while since he’d played this one. But he remembered just how it went; wild mercury in its veins. And then another, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’—he just knew this was a first take. It just felt like it. What about something recent—‘Nettie Moore’? Now does that sound like someone who has lost his way? No sirree.

He hummed along until the world went black before his eyes.

1 See my discussion of ‘One-Eyed Jacks’ in Revolution in the Air, pp. 37–40.