Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
—Oscar Wilde, 1887
In the beginning was Scaduto. It was 1971. For five long years Bob Dylan had maintained a public profile that Howard Hughes would have been proud of. Anthony Scaduto’s was the first serious biography of the man, at a time when there was little information about his roots, his early life and his dreams of fame. It dutifully recorded his small-town youth in Hibbing, his year in Minneapolis and his early days in New York. By 1965 Dylan had outgrown the former friends Scaduto had talked to, and in the final section of his book Scaduto’s previously racy style, bereft of any major sources except Dylan’s own rewriting of his history in cagey interviews with the author, dissipated into song analysis and speculation.
It was another fifteen years before the publication of the second serious Dylan biography. In that time Dylan had reached the peak of his commercial success, released perhaps his most perfect album, converted to born-again Christianity and embarked on a series of tours all exceeding in scope his mid-sixties touring activities. On September 29, 1986—the twenty-fifth anniversary of his famous original endorsement of Dylan in the New York Times—Robert Shelton published his own, long-awaited biography of his old friend.
Shelton’s plans for a book had been first mentioned in the summer of 1966. The volume had been two decades in the making. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the level of expectation, it proved a profound disappointment. He barely advanced the story beyond Dylan’s fabled 1966 motorcycle accident, and much of the chunky tome was filled with pat song analysis and cuttings-file outtakes. Though he filled important gaps in Scaduto’s narrative of the early years, Shelton did Dylan a great disservice by interring him in the period he had already spent twenty years trying to live down.
Shelton’s book also generated another pretender to the title of serious Dylan biographer. In the fall of 1988 Bob Spitz, author of a previous book on the 1969 Woodstock Festival, published a biography as expansive as Shelton’s and as racy as Scaduto’s. Yet, despite conducting many original interviews, Spitz did not advance Dylan’s story either. His interviewees were mostly the familiar names used by Scaduto and Shelton, and his Goldmanesque approach, excruciating prose style, dubious sense of Dylan’s history and—yet again—virtual exclusion of Dylan’s post-accident career resulted in what one reviewer described appositely as ‘a thick, petrified, one-pound hunk of wood-fibre.’
My own first attempt to correct this chronological imbalance and to focus on the man’s creative output, the original Behind the Shades, written very much as a riposte to Spitz, appeared on Dylan’s fiftieth birthday in 1991, and was then heavily revised for his sixtieth in 2001; appearing shortly before another graduate of the Spitz School of Gossipography produced the latest Dylan-inspired doorstopper. Howard Sounes’s surprisingly well-received Down the Highway managed to out-Spitz Spitz in his wholesale appropriation of gossip disguised as insight, written in a similarly excruciating journalese.
Now Bob Dylan is seventy. It is forty-five years since he fell off his motorcycle in Woodstock. Yet the history of those forty-five years continues to remain in the shadow cast by those pre-accident years. Three-quarters of this book is devoted to Dylan’s post-accident career. It is my intent to show the full sweep of his life to date, and his post-accident years actually represent four-fifths of his entire recording output.
Of course, Dylan’s rise to fame is an important part of his story and the first section of Behind the Shades deals fully with the well-documented pre-accident years. Though Scaduto and Shelton have given good coverage to this period, I have tried to explore a particular thread that I find weaving in and out of Scaduto and Shelton, but rarely overtly: what made Dylan so different from his contemporaries in Hibbing, in Minneapolis, in Greenwich Village and among the pop music icons of the mid-sixties? Why did he continue to grow when others, similarly regarded, stagnated?
The ability constantly to reinvent who Bob Dylan was, and is, remains the primary characteristic of his art. It is the way he unleashes new works. The process may be subtler now, but it endures. In the early and mid-sixties it actually seemed as if Dylan had no control over his chameleon changes, they proceeded at such a frantic pace. It is likely that Dylan never really knew in those days how close he was to the precipice.
How Dylan has coped with the legacy of those amphetamine years is an equally remarkable story. Like another ‘would-be genius,’ Orson Welles, he is generally thought to have created his masterpiece, the Blonde on Blonde double album, before he was even twenty-five, and then spent the next forty-five years twisting in the wind, determined to assert himself as an abidingly creative artist. But, unlike Welles, he did manage to convince critics that he had surpassed that youthful masterpiece with the remarkable Blood on the Tracks, and he continued to come close to replicating said trick even after his so-named religious period. Which is a story in and of itself.
If the motorcycle accident represents an obvious demarcation point in Dylan’s career, his religious conversion has been the other major break with his past. His post-conversion career has been detailed in a total of thirty pages by both Spitz and Shelton, while Sounes covers the second ‘half’ of a forty-year career in barely a hundred of his 400-plus pages. All three do a grave injustice to this major part of Dylan’s ever-changing career. Though much of this period reads as a catalog of missed chances and poor judgment, the last decade has seen a very personal battle to construct a worldview that retains his faith in both God and humanity—a struggle which has still led to its fair share of great Dylan songs (and, lest we forget, three consecutive number one albums). Yet if the story in part two of Behind the Shades in no way parallels Orson Welles’s post-Kane career, the narrative in parts three and four is rather similar with its repeated hints of revival, the promise of masterpieces often unfulfilled, or rendered minor by lack of discipline or the neophobic impulses of others.
Dylan’s perennial reinventions of himself led me to structure this book around each new guise that he has taken on. In most cases, a chapter revolves around a major work or tour introducing a new Dylan (e.g. Another Side, Blood on the Tracks, Renaldo and Clara, the Rolling Thunder tours, Chronicles). It is a convenient format to use but it is only a convenience; perhaps the dominant colour in my patchwork, but there shall (or should) be more besides.
His career could as easily be divided by his geography. Certain chapters fit neatly into the geographic notion, coinciding with artistic periods as well. Thus his 1960 apprenticeship in Minneapolis marks an obvious divide. His fleeing New York for Durango, and finally settling in Malibu, again marked an important change; while his ‘retreat’ (1966–9) is often referred to as his Woodstock Period (a slight misnomer, given that he had been spending most of his free time there since 1964). Entire albums have been the product of Dylan’s geography. Almost all of Another Side was written in Greece in May 1964; The Basement Tapes was written and recorded in Woodstock; New Morning was the first product of his return to New York City at the end of 1969; Blood on the Tracks was largely composed during a summer on his Minnesota farm, as was Street-Legal. Time Out of Mind was apparently largely written during one particularly bleak Midwest winter.
A credible biography is a bringing together of such strands. It draws from all and distils down to a point of view. With a living artist the picture can never be complete. This book, even in its third incarnation, can only be a signpost along the way. Dylan also presents a difficult subject because he has trusted people and they have repaid him accordingly. Many of the most important people in his life have refused to talk about their relationship with him; and some never will, now. The voices of his wife Sara Dylan, his ex-manager the late Albert Grossman and confidants Victor Maymudes and Bobby Neuwirth are absent from this book (and its rivals). Fortunately, most of his important musical collaborators have been less recalcitrant.
Dylan himself cooperated with both Scaduto and Shelton in the composition of their books, freely giving interviews and in Shelton’s case suggesting people he should contact. Yet in both cases there was a price to pay. Dylan, like most biographical subjects, is not looking for an accurate portrayal. To quote Orson Welles, ‘I don’t want any description of me to be accurate, I want it to be flattering. I don’t think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully, not in print anyway.’ Though neither biography could be described as authorized, Dylan exerted his influence upon both. Inevitably this led to a slightly sanitized portrait of the man, particularly in Shelton’s book. Spitz and his twenty-first-century doppelgänger, Sounes, predictably went to the other extreme and chronicled each and every tale of anyone who had a self-aggrandizing recollection, a chip on their shoulder and a grudge to bear.
As for Dylan’s own contribution herein, it is not the voice of a man presenting an authorized portrait of himself, save perhaps in the few instances where I have drawn from his comments to Cameron Crowe in the Biograph booklet or gleaned the odd upfront line from his own 2004 memoir, Chronicles. Other quotes have been selected from over two hundred interviews he has given in the last fifty years, from raps he has given at concerts in his more gregarious days, from bio-poems he has written. It is one of the great myths of Dylan lore that his interviews are invariably a stream of put-ons and put-downs. In fact at certain points in his life, notably in 1978 and 1985, he has been very keen to talk about his past in a surprisingly frank and honest manner. Readers will find Dylan’s voice represented here on a far greater scale than in previous biographies, but without a concomitant personal influence upon the finished product.
Of course, as I am forever reminded, I have never actually met the man around whom I have spun so many of my musings. And if one has not met one’s biographical subject, how—the subtext goes—can one hope to know him, let alone explain or reveal him to unknowing eyes? (Well, that’s every Shakespeare biography on the scrapheap.) It remains a surprisingly pervasive view that firsthand acquaintance should take precedence over critical judgment, historical perspective, and a thirst for making sense of the whole picture. Would Sara Dylan, even if she could assuredly put the intimate in biography, be capable of writing something that gave a sense of her former husband’s importance? And what about the self-publicity machine known as Susan Ross, an ex-girlfriend from the late eighties, who in 1997 wrote, in her pitch to publishers for a ‘revealing memoir’ of the man:
Since none of the previous authors have spent time with him or even knew him, they are hard-pressed to draw accurate conclusions about Dylan. Their information is so speculative and limited, at best, that even in recent books, none of them mention (or know) that Dylan has been married three times or has eight children. None of these authors know why and how he married his wives, whether they were pregnant at the time, what his feelings on abortion are, and whether he married for love or because his accountant said alimony is tax-deductible.
Not only is Ms. Ross quite unaware of the difference between a memoir and a biography, she is also oblivious to the fact that Marie is his adopted daughter, and that Dylan has only seven children. As for Dylan’s views on abortion, one suspects that they changed between the time he cajoled his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo into having one in 1963 and when Kurt Loeder questioned him about the subject in 1984, at a time when he had started a second family. Rotolo herself passes over this traumatic event in less than a single page in her recent memoir of her relationship with Dylan, A Freewheelin’ Time (2008). Indeed, discernibly less is revealed by Rotolo’s firsthand account than she had already shared in interviews with Scaduto, Shelton and Spitz.
Which somewhat dismantles Ross’s grand assumption, one that presupposes that all the people I have interviewed about Dylan, and others whose interviews with and about Dylan I have assimilated and judiciously integrated, have shown themselves to have insights about the man above and beyond anything I myself might be able to construct. It presupposes that the man who wrote the songs is the man I might meet in a bar one windswept night when he feels like baring his soul and I feel like listening—voilà, Interview with an Icon.
I have preferred to try and deconstruct the intimate, ‘unknowable’ relationship between the artist and the man by assimilating this vast body of performance art, all the while relying on the firsthand, verbatim recollections of as many voices as were willing to share their thoughts (more than 250 souls). Their perspectives on the relationship between the creative act and the creator necessarily shaped mine, but not, I trust, at the expense of my own take. The more perceptive ‘insiders,’ like the late Cesar Diaz, who spent five years in almost daily proximity to Dylan, invariably raised their own questions with insights like:
I think the greatest masterpiece he has ever pulled off is the fact that he can make people believe that part of him is involved in the writing of those songs. To me each song is a play, a script and he’ll be that guy from the song for that moment but [then] he’ll change back to Bob. People make the mistake to think that he’s the guy that sings ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’ [But] the guy that wrote [that song] only existed for that moment, for that righteous thought. It took me a while to realize that. But he actually convinces you that yes, it is me who is talking to you, and I’m being sincere about it … He is able to convince you that it is him at that point when he is singing the song when in reality he’s just singing a song and just playing. So he can never answer questions [like], ‘How do you feel when you sing “Forever Young”?’ He cannot put himself in that position. He already did once when he wrote the song.
This is a devastating denial of those who equate the artist with the man, but it also has the authentic ring of truth (to invoke Wilde again, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth’). But then, the man known to Cesar Diaz between 1988 and 1993 was certainly not the man who wrote either ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” or ‘Forever Young.’ That Diaz should pick, as an example of a ‘righteous thought,’ a song of which Dylan told Tony Glover, as the first draft sat at his typewriter, ‘It seems to be what people want,’ suggests he isn’t always the one that ‘convince[s] you that it is him’ even in the moment that the thought is sprung. Which is perhaps why I have separated my own thoughts about Dylan’s 600-plus songs (now published in two equally large volumes, as Revolution in the Air and Still on the Road, plug, plug) from my portrait of the artist as a man.
Although Cesar’s voice, the voice of a man who has ‘nothing left to lose’, echoes through all that is to come, as one especially loaded question—is Dylan only/ever ‘that guy from the song for that moment … for that righteous thought’?—it is a perspective I constantly challenge. Because the man I’m writing about is as mercurial as they come. Peter Guralnick addresses this whole question in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the second volume of his Elvis Presley biography, Careless Love—endorsed on the jacket by Dylan himself—and smartly concludes, ‘At some point, you simply have to believe that by immersing yourself in the subject you have earned your own perspective.’
Guralnick, by his own admission, ‘spent eleven years with Elvis,’ writing and researching his two volumes. In my case it is twice as long, and this is the second time I’ve reevaluated what I wrote the last time around. The curve of Dylan’s career—in my hands, at least—does not resemble the parabolic symmetry of Guralnick’s Elvis. Things are rarely so neat—certainly not in Dylan’s universe. Though my own revisit affords the reader both ‘whitewashed golden calf’ and ‘incendiary atomic musical firebrand loner who conquered the western world’ (which was Dylan’s own assessment of Guralnick’s Elvis), here the former could include the Nashville years (1969–70), and the latter, his work in the seventies just as much as his fabled rise in the mid-sixties. I am also less inclined to see Dylan as the hapless instrument of forces beyond his control.
As of 2004, Dylan has begun to offer his own literary version of his past. Worryingly, the ‘first’ volume of Chronicles suggests he may no longer even be able to divide the word of truth (see chapter 43). But then, Dylan has always delighted in taking in other chroniclers. Shelton showed a willing credulity when Dylan spun his now-famous yarn about living as a rentboy when he first came to New York:
I shucked everybody when I came to New York. I played cute … I have a friend … He’s a junkie now. We came to New York together … We hung out on 43rd St., and hustled for two months … I got the ride here in December 1960. I came down to the Village in February … And I had the guitar. I didn’t have any place to stay, but it was easy for me. People took me in
It is one of my favorite Dylan yarns, for a couple of reasons. One, the idea of this nineteen-year-old schmuck from nowheresville hanging out on 43rd (I thought it was 53rd, but gabba gabba hey), hustling, is too beautiful for words. Two, that those who bought into the story wanted to buy into it; and Dylan knew he was telling them what they wanted to hear. (Shelton was not alone. Dylan also told proximate versions to the Australian poet Adrian Rawlins and to sidekick Victor Maymudes around the same time—in 1966, when he presumably hit upon it—and evidently convinced them it was so. Maymudes told the tale as the unvarnished truth to one of Dylan’s girlfriends in 1987; Rawlins insisted on its veracity to me in 1994.)
It so happens that the story tells us an awful lot about Dylan—more than any ‘truthful’ account he might have imparted about his early days in New York. It reveals a fixation with Arthur Rimbaud—whose famed conceit le dérèglement de tous les sens he was living 24/7 in 1966—so strong that this ‘thief of fire’ appropriated the legend of young Arthur’s rentboy subsistence on arrival in Paris into his own mythopoeic biography. Not so much I is another, as Another is I.
Bruce Langhorne: I think that Dylan’s relations with people are poor. I think that he has integrity about his art, and I respect him for that, [but] Dylan and I never hung out and got drunk or high together.
Bob Dylan: Like most famous people, I just want to be left alone. [1997]
It is twenty years since I began this odyssey. So, am I still writing about the same man? Is the auteur of Together Through Life and/or co-auteur of Masked and Anonymous the very person who in 1980, at a show at the Warfield in San Francisco, told fans the parable of Lead Belly who changed musical styles but ‘didn’t change—he was the same man!’ After all, the one aspect of Dylan’s personal life that seems to have sporadically threatened to reveal a different Dylan since 1990 is the ‘midlife crisis’ that in the eighties and early nineties again led the man to indulge in polygamy, duplicity and some druggy decision-making.
Can it really be the author of ‘Love Minus Zero,’ ‘I Want You’ and ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ who, in this period, composed a series of monologues in song from a narrator for whom relationships had become little more than a series of transitory assignations with strange women, developing a vocabulary of intimacy that worked on a personal level (just because), but was hard to credit in song? Songs like ‘Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,’ ‘I’ll Remember You,’ ‘Emotionally Yours,’ ‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again,’ ‘Under Your Spell,’ ‘What Was It You Wanted’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’ seemed disturbingly prosaic depictions of the kinds of conversations that Susan Ross and ‘Britta Lee Shain’ depicted in memoir manuscripts, as well as the type of dialogue enacted in a number of man/woman scenes in Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous.
I have previously accused the latter-day Dylan of ‘romantic attachments to women unworthy of the moniker Muse.’ There remains a crucial difference between Sara and the likes of Susan Ross entirely separate from the intensity of Dylan’s feelings—they come on opposite sides of the divide provided by his religious conversion, one that seems to have come about in large measure because of the divorce. Dylan once told Britta Lee Shain, ‘I knew [the divorce] was my fault … I knew I’d done wrong. You see there’s just women you have to fuck because they demand it.’ This comment may be a poor excuse for infidelity, but it suggests that he had always felt himself to be in the grip of what Paul Williams, attempting to nail the ‘true’ cause of Dylan’s Christian conversion in What Happened?, called ‘the power of Woman’:
Dylan has always believed, not unreasonably, in the power of Woman. When he finally lost faith in the ability of women to save him (and he seems to have explored the matter very thoroughly, in and out of marriage, in the years 1974 through ’78), his need for an alternative grew very great indeed, and he found what people in our culture most often find in the same circumstances: the uncritical hospitality of Jesus Christ.
It took just a single year for the reappearance of the Earth Mother in the magnificent ‘Caribbean Wind,’ with her ‘bells in her braids / [that] hung to her toes,’ reaffirmed a matter of months later in ‘Need a Woman,’ in which he again asked for ‘a woman / just to be my Queen.’ If the struggle with his own demons soon overtook him again, it was at the expense of the romantic quest that had sustained his work in the seventies. And so, in a remarkable 1984 rewrite of his archetypal ‘quest’ song, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ he is no longer searching for ‘Her’ at song’s end, he is ‘walking towards the Son / Trying to stay out of the joint.’ Quite a change for a man who once envisaged he might be hung as a thief. Even when the songs dried up in the early nineties, he kept focused on a path to enlightenment that saw women as distractions along the way, until finally on Time Out of Mind he announced, ‘I’m sick of love / but I’m in the thick of it.’ This is a huge sea-change in worldview. (He ends up mocking his former self, and those impulses, in one of his finest latter-day songs, 2009’s ‘Forgetful Heart.’)
Unfortunately, for much of the Never Ending Tour—which had barely shifted into first gear when I wrote the first version of this biography in 1990—Dylan has seemed as much at a loss in the company of his fellow men as in the company of women. Having previously relied on the intellectual stimulation of men of ideas, he has increasingly removed himself from the kind of confidant who used to challenge him intellectually or musically. Increasingly used to getting his own way—as people in five-star goldfish bowls tend to—he has denied himself the friction that friendship on an equal footing brings. When a friend of Shain’s asked Gary Shafner what he did for Dylan, the right-hand man showed he was under no illusion, replying, ‘Paid friend, I guess.’ Maybe by the mid-eighties Dylan had concluded these were the only friends he could rely on:
Cesar Diaz: So many people wanted to get so close to him … People don’t understand that they cannot throw themselves on Bob, he’s not that kinda guy. He’s not that warm a person … There’s all this philosophy that goes behind the whole Dylan thing that a lot of people don’t understand, ’cause they’ve never had the opportunity to say, ‘Wow, he’s totally different in real life than I would ever have imagined.’ You only see it by being there day after day after day. When it’s a beautiful day and you say, ‘Bob, it’s a beautiful day, it’s great, let’s go out for a walk.’ [Dylan accent] ‘No, it’s not a nice day. It sucks.’ … You go, ‘OK. The sky’s purple, it’s not blue. See you later. I’m going for a walk.’ ‘Er, no, wait for me.’
It seems even he finds it difficult to detach his real self from his iconic status. As Stephanie Buffington told me, ‘He speaks of himself in the third person.’ Such psychological armor is undoubtedly necessary when making work as uncompromising as Dylan’s in a medium where compromise is usually the main message. And that mental toughness has always been there. As Suze Rotolo put it, ‘He just won’t accept anybody’s point of view about himself … It’s somehow all too negative, too pessimistic.’
And yet, in his younger days, it was possible to pierce the armor, and when that happened, some internal change was prone to spark the next artistic rebirth, the reinvention of self that presupposed some ongoing personal development; a moment like the one the painter David Oppenheim caught in the spring of 1975 when he ‘got him to understand that he was completely mad, [and] he would grow pale in the face, and that made me feel good because I identified with the person that I thought he was in those moments of inner understanding.’
The contrast between Dylan, Un Autre Bob and Just Bob has inspired its fair share of pithy aphorisms, of which perhaps Woodstock café-owner Bernard Paturel’s ‘There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round’ comes closest to hitting the mark. Dylan himself clearly feels he has yet to be revealed, saying about the endeavors of my kind, ‘They usually interview people who know me or think they know me or barely know me, but … it’s [still] like reading about somebody else that never existed.’ Yet in Chronicles he addresses stories found in Scaduto, Shelton, Sounes or an earlier … Shades, and concocts versions even less believable, or credible.
What gives? As he once wisecracked to his then-secretary, Naomi Saltzman, who was being bugged by his first biographer, ‘Tell Scaduto as long as he’s talked to everybody who knows everything about me, he doesn’t need me to tell him about me.’ And those who do know him best agree that there are so many more layers to Dylan than those of his contemporaries who have invested all their personalities in their fame:
Mel Howard: There are many people whom you spend time with, and the more time you spend with them the less enigmatic, charismatic and powerful they seem, but with Dylan one’s respect and even awe, if anything, increased. I’ve worked with some of the biggest—Redford, Streisand—and Dylan’s genius and charisma transcends that of any of them.
And Dylan would like to keep the mystery going, something he hinted at in an interview with Spin’s Scott Cohen in 1985. When Cohen asked him who he would like to interview himself, the list he came up with was a fascinating one—Hank Williams, Apollinaire, Joseph of Arimathea, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Mohammed, Paul the Apostle—but even more fascinating was the general comment that came afterwards: ‘I’d like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind, who left people for ages to do nothing but speculate.’
Few would disagree that Dylan’s post-accident career increasingly seems like one ‘great unsolved mess,’ containing as it does both his greatest writing (The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and Blood on the Tracks; those discarded eighties masterpieces, ‘Caribbean Wind,’ ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ ‘New Danville Girl’ and ‘Dignity’; the magnetic songs of mortality that pepper his last four all-original albums) and work unregenerately abject (Self Portrait, Dylan, much of Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove, Christmas in the Heart). If he had so much to live up to, and to live down, perhaps his greatest achievement has been to never surrender to the impulse for nostalgia in his work, something one suspects he will resist to his last dying breath:
Cesar Diaz: They try to pin him down with this aren’t you like an icon, the voice of your generation? See, if he accepted that title then he would lock himself into a certain time and period and he could never get himself out of it because … that was the best that he could ever do and he will never do anything else. But by denying it he can go on and keep reinventing himself. There’s always the hope that there will be something else better than that. But people try to give you titles all the time. Aren’t you so and so that did so and so? … They always talk about the past because of course it’s all they know about you. But they don’t realize that they are trapping you in a certain time and period that already happened.
Such is the price of fame. It is a price Dylan has always been reluctant to pay. He even seems to have half-hoped that after the motorcycle accident, he could somehow walk away from his brilliant past. Moving to Woodstock full-time, to Fire Island, back to the Village, to Arizona, to Durango and finally to LA, he tried his best not to succumb to the unreality of his life to come. But surrender to it he did. By the time he entered his fifties, he realized that no number of Self Portraits, no ramshackle tours, or displays of petulance to interviewers, biographers or fans was going to ultimately detonate his iconic status, they would only further inter his reputation in a mythical past of others’ choosing.
On one of the last occasions they met, he told Allen Ginsberg that fame was something that had no redeeming features. By then, he had been living the life for over thirty years. What that life is like, on a daily basis, no outsider can possibly imagine. As to its effect on one’s art (and not just Dylan’s), Cesar Diaz put it in a single-sentence nutshell—‘How can anyone live like that, and remain in true form and be the same?’ It is a conundrum no one working in the age of the cult of personality can avoid addressing.
When he delivered his pub parable on the permanent outsider in the 1986 Getting to Dylan documentary (see page 601), Dylan was probably alluding to an actual event. He may even have had in mind an incident from 1971, when he was attempting to live that normal family life in the West Village, and turned up at a party with his friend David Amram and his wife:
David Amram: One time we went to the Village, [me,] Sara and him and we were looking through the window and I said, ‘Man, I’m glad to be with you guys, this looks like a pretty weird scene.’ It was mostly middle-aged …they were older people, very well dressed, beautiful Village town house, everybody drinking cocktails, and I was sorta trying to read everybody’s body language, and [they] looked like a bunch of really tense people … not what you call going to the Village hanging out, just relaxing, sitting on the floor, drinking a glass of wine and rapping, the usual scenes we enjoyed. And Bob said, ‘I don’t know what kind of a scene it is, but after I’ve been there it’s gonna change.’ And he laughed. So we walked in there and all these successful, established people—when they suddenly saw Bob Dylan walk in—completely freaked out and became like gawking high-school students. They didn’t mob him, everybody got silent. It was like the Pope had arrived, it was amazing, it blew my mind. Bob was just really quiet and then after a while he’d just act so natural everyone cooled out a little bit. I said, ‘My God, man, what it must be like to have to deal with that all the time.’
Dylan ultimately decided, probably for the sake of his then-young children, to settle for the uniquely Californian version of fame, something that has perhaps wreaked more damage on his art than anyone may ever know. And yet his choice, back in 1973, to place himself within the secure confines of the Malibu colony of stargazers was oh so understandable. As his attorney told the judge in his divorce case, as a preamble to a legal request to have the records of the case sealed:
David Braun: When people know where he is, his garbage is sifted and examined regularly; groups appear in front of his house on his birthday. Fans constantly try to reach him to talk to him, to touch him and to see him. Recently, the sheriff had to be called to remove a girl from the driveway of his home; afterwards she sprayed black paint all over his windows. A disturbed person has been trying to reach Mr. Dylan through me and is threatening to harm himself if he is unsuccessful. As a result of this and much, much more, Mr. Dylan has been required to engage twenty-four-hour guards about his property to prevent trespassers and protect the privacy of himself and his family … In my twenty-two years’ experience of representing famous personages no other personality has attracted such attention, nor created such a demand for information about his personal affairs.
Dylan has also chosen to develop ways of testing those who work closely with him, something that seems to have been innate even in the young Bob, who played similar games even when he was only a boy or just a nobody. Though the game has been refined over the years, as new variants spring to mind, Dylan still revels in the role of game master. In order to participate in the proceedings, insiders must first interpret whether a request is a request, an order or a test, as sidekick Arthur Rosato learnt some eighteen months after becoming a Dylan employee on the second Rolling Thunder tour:
Arthur Rosato: He’s laying on his bed in the studio down in Santa Monica and he’s talking about the sound company that I picked. It was the one that Neil Diamond used. I knew Neil Diamond’s production manager and he said, ‘Well, [if] you wanna check out his system, come on up to Seattle.’ So I flew up with Neil and his band in his private plane and [the system] was really nice … Bob goes, ‘You just picked them because they flew you up in their plane.’ I just went off. I’m looking down, I’m pointing at him … He’s falling back further into the pillow, [going,] ‘Okay, okay.’ I could see he was just being a brat. But he tests people to see what they’ll do … We didn’t play that game too often … [But] he’ll do that to a lot of people. He’ll say something just to see where they go with it. On many occasions people will just run out and do it.
Dylan evidently remains conflicted as to how he should act when required to play this Somebody he has become. When he was arrested for looking like a vagrant a couple of years back, he seems to have positively enjoyed the experience of being a complete unknown to some young bimbo with a badge just six weeks after topping the US album charts. Others have suggested part of the appeal to him of the large numbers of well-endowed young black women that he dated in the eighties was that they had not the remotest clue who he was, nor were they greatly impressed when they found out. And it is not likely a coincidence that the first intelligible line in his last film, Masked and Anonymous, should be ‘Are you humble before God?’ just as a Nipponese version of ‘My Back Pages’ crashes in over the speakers. Here, after all, is one of the most famous artists in the world who has spent the last thirty-one years writing song after song about the loneliness and despair of the sinner in an increasingly Godless world. And still, most commentators act as if his ‘religious’ period were some short-lived aberration; indeed, as if it ended some decades ago.
He has continued talking the talk, but they ain’t listening. Even if he seemingly abandoned the search for a commonality of faith after the general incomprehension that greeted songs of real communion, like ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ ‘City of Gold’ and ‘In the Summertime,’ he remained convinced that the night would soon come falling from the sky. And even as the apocalyptic strain in his eighties work became fused with a very personal sense of imminent mortality on two ‘comeback’ LPs issued eight years apart, Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind, so he began to feel comfortable reintroducing gospel songs into his repertoire, some that he wrote himself for his own gospel trilogy (1979–81), others which had lit his way spiritually and musically from the very first time he felt the spirit in him, i.e. 1960:
Bob Dylan: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists … I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs. [1997]
His latter-day performances of songs from the ‘lexicon’ suggest—to me, anyway—someone who yearns to return to the simple embrace of his original Born Again faith. Of the coupla dozen covers added to the repertoire since 1999, the likes of ‘Halleluiah, I’m Ready to Go,’ ‘Somebody Touched Me,’ ‘Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,’ ‘I Am the Man Thomas’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ testify to both a yearning for release and an abiding faith in Christ’s promise of redemption. It is as if, having aspired to be Hank Williams, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, Joseph Conrad and John the Baptist, he has finally come to realize that after one strips away all the layers of artifice, the artistic personae, the man inside really has ‘no secrets to conceal.’ The person(a) who stalks the handful of greater later songs—‘Ain’t Talkin’,’ ‘Someday Baby,’ ‘Sugar Baby,’ ‘Nettie Moore,’ ‘Things Have Changed’—has seen it all, and gives not a fig for the judgment of others. In that, at least, Dylan has stayed true to his path, and continued ‘walking towards the Son.’ It remains a journey worthy of the chronicling, even as the odyssey continues.
—Clinton Heylin