Wicked Messenger

There’s an element in Sinclair’s criticism that still rings uncomfortably true. The people in Springsteen’s audiences have very rarely been the people he was singing about. His early dramatis personae did owe more to West Side Story than to autobiographical realities. But that didn’t preclude Springsteen from using these inherited types to express his own feelings of loneliness and defeat, elation and camaraderie, or his audience from responding to them. His outlaws, rejects and stragglers, populating a vividly imagined landscape largely ignored by mainstream entertainers, gave form to hungers and frustrations difficult to name but nonetheless real in a society that relentlessly celebrated success.

From the beginning Springsteen demonstrated a most un-Dylanlike warmth and capacity for empathy. Like many others, he worked his way through music to politics. It was only after his first flush of big-time success in the mid-seventies that he began to read seriously about his society and its history. In particular, he explored the Vietnam War, during which he’d come of age, and its impact on working-class Americans. On its release in 1984, “Born in the USA”’s bitter, grunt’s eye view of the war challenged the morning-in-America jingoism of the Reagan presidency. That didn’t stop Reagan trying to claim the song for his crusade. Of course, Reagan’s advisers hadn’t done their homework; a quick glance at the lyrics makes it plain that this is a song about how a nation betrayed its own children by sending them off to kill and die in a foreign war. But Reagan’s team were able to mistake this national nightmare for a national dream because the rousing rock chorus could be interpreted that way. The packaging of the album—stars and stripes to the fore—also facilitated the mishearing. In a nationalist environment, the song’s dissonance was lost. And it wasn’t just Reagan. For more than a few of Springsteen’s fans, the song is a sing-along, air-punching anthem. The singer has tried to reclaim “Born in the USA” by performing it solo with acoustic guitar. His bare-bones presentation of the lyrics is an effort to combat the regressive listening that Adorno claimed would make any real revolt within popular music impossible.

As he’s grown older, Springsteen has presented his cast of working-class waifs and strays, hard-drivers, abandoned mothers, and small-time criminals with greater realism and less romance. But throughout his work, he’s tended to understand these people not as members of a class spanning nations, not as strugglers within a system, but as an American tribe, indeed, as the real American tribe.

A late-blooming interest in Woody Guthrie, combined with anonymous, exploratory journeys through the United States, led in 1995 to The Ghost of Tom Joad, a mainly solo and acoustic album. In some ways, it was as bold a shift in tone, and as commercially unpredictable, as any of Dylan’s prodigious sixties leaps. These were topical songs and they registered an unmistakable protest against the current order. But they were neither strident nor satirical. (Unlike Dylan, Springsteen rarely mixes humor with serious material.) The melodies are delicate and Springsteen approaches them gingerly. The massed electric guitars, booming rhythms, and theatrical gestures that filled stadiums coast-to-coast were replaced, for the moment, by a subdued, lone voice that demanded a focus on the words and the tales they told.

These were tales of globalization. The protagonists were migrant laborers and victims of deindustrialization, the multiethnic successors of Guthrie’s dust bowl refugees. Springsteen’s album was a realistic and humane response to a mighty event: the influx of workers from across the Third World that has transformed U.S. society in recent decades. The heroes in these songs struggle against a vast, inhuman and often inscrutable economic order. By attending to the details of their survival mechanisms, material and psychic, Springsteen opens up an alien experience to his listeners. He also portrays xenophobia as a self-defeating reflex. Whether you’re born in the USA, in Vietnam, or in Latin America, you’re a victim of the same world-embracing system. In The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen aligned himself with the Guthrie of “Deportees” and the Dylan of “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” He seemed to be reaching out beyond the confines of social patriotism.

The Ghost of Tom Joad seemed a belated vindication of some of the long-standing claims made by Springsteen admirers. He was at last fulfilling his role as a working-class troubadour, a dissenting voice of conscience, honesty, and compassion. In 2000, Springsteen made good on his promise to stand witness “wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy” in “(American Skin) Forty-One Shots,” whose subject was the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by New York City police. The song bravely reminded listeners that no matter how much they’d like to deny it, racism remained a defining quality of American experience. “It ain’t no secret my friend / you can get killed just for living in your American skin.” The lyrics provoked a degree of hostility to which Springsteen was unaccustomed. Neither the NYPD nor the New York Post were pleased. At concerts it became clear that some of Bruce’s devoted fans felt the same way.² In a letter to a local newspaper, Springsteen responded to the controversy in a half-bewildered tone. To him, the song was just another one of “the questions” he’d been asking throughout his career. “As Americans, who are we? What kind of country do we live in, do we want to live in? I always assume there’s an audience out there willing to think deeply about the ideas in the work I do. It’s one of the things that keeps me probably closer to the heart of what we’re about—we ‘Americans.’”³ Springsteen’s decision to place scare-quotes around the national denominator indicated that in the wake of the Diallo killing, and the new globalized world order he’d written about in Tom Joad, he felt he was dealing with a problematic category.

This tentative awareness seems to have evaporated in The Rising, Springsteen’s rapid response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. Although this proved to be one of his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums, in the long run it may be remembered as one of his weakest. The Rising has stirring and tender moments but few songs that amount to more than the sum of their parts. Much of it sounds like a routine run-through of familiar E Street Band moods. Distressingly, it marks a retreat, after Tom Joad, to the safe ground of social patriotism. The songs preserve the brief-lived mood of empathy and solidarity that followed the destruction in New York. They evoke the anonymous, unpretentious heroism of the firefighters, the office workers trapped in the collapsing towers, and the friends and loved ones they left behind. Throughout there is a sense that this huge cataclysm has shown the rituals of ordinary life to be both precious and fragile. But there is little indication that this atrocity may carry other meanings and implications. There is no history, no context. The outside world exists solely in a passing reference to Allah and the singing of Asif Ali Khan in the background on “Worlds Apart.” In “Lonesome Day,” Springsteen sings: “House is on fire, viper’s in the grass, / A little revenge and this too shall pass . . .” but he leaves this territory largely unexplored, settling instead for gestures of affirmation that seem to float away in an insubstantial ether.

The “rising” Springsteen celebrates is not a popular insurrection but an outpouring of community feeling, and by implication an occasion for Americans to unite. The songs are hymns to national resilience in the face of devastating trauma. Though undoubtedly sincere, and free of the vindictive jingoism that marked other responses to 9/11 (including Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll”), The Rising panders to its audience—clearly conceived by Springsteen as an exclusively American one, despite his vast European following. And in doing so, it dramatically highlights the gap between Springsteen and Dylan, whose approach, whatever the politics involved, has always been more confrontational. As a picture of a people “rising” to a historic challenge, the album is worse than inadequate. For part of that “rising” was the war on terror and its spawn, the war on Iraq. And there is scarcely a hint of that reality on the album. As an exercise in lowest common denominator nationalism, it fails to do justice to its immense subject matter, and that is an artistic as well as a political shortcoming. Its vision is one-dimensional, uninflected by irony or self-doubt, personal or collective.

In the autumn of 2004, Springsteen abandoned a long-held, non-partisan posture to campaign for John Kerry. His appearances generated more excitement and his speeches carried more conviction than the candidate’s. Revealingly, he sought to deploy the ideology of social patriotism against the incumbent:

As a songwriter, I’ve been writing about America for thirty years: Who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for. I believe our American government has drifted too far from American values. . . . “One Nation Indivisible” and “United We Stand” can’t be empty slogans but need to remain guiding principles of our public policy. . . . Senator Kerry, since he was a young man, has shown us by having the courage to face America’s hard truths, both the good and the bad, that that’s where we find a deeper patriotism, we find a more complete view of who we are; we find a more authentic experience as citizens . . . the country we carry in our hearts is waiting. . . .

Springsteen’s willingness to put himself on the line for his beliefs was entirely admirable. And no doubt his calls for “a deeper patriotism” moved the voters he spoke to. But the sentimental rhetoric of national unity was symptomatic of a strategy long employed to little effect on the American Left. In the aftermath of the election result, commentators were quick to invert Springsteen’s paradigm: they claimed the vote showed that it was George Bush who spoke for the authentic America, depicted as congenitally illiberal and intolerant. At their election night celebration in Washington, the Republicans even burst into a lusty rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Of course, they skipped over the verse attacking private property, but the fact that they could purloin the song at all testified once again to the inherent ambiguities of social patriotism.

“America” remains a dangerous construct and one that ill serves those Americans for whom Springsteen wishes to speak. In the end, it limits and indeed undermines a genuinely radical and uncompromising humanism. Reclamation or reappropriation of “America” has been at the heart of liberal and left strategies in the U.S. for many decades, but surely, in light of the rise of an aggressive new American empire, shameless in its claims on global power, rooted in popular xenophobia, the long-running attempt to sugarcoat left-wing dissent by wrapping it in the American flag must be reckoned a failure. After all, “you don’t count the dead / When God’s on your side.”

The Rising embraced the prevailing national mood and was lionized by the U.S. media. In contrast, Steve Earle’s Jerusalem challenged that mood and as a result received rougher treatment. “John Walker’s Blues,” in particular, was denounced by some as treasonous (the New York Post headlined its report on the song “Twisted Ballad Honors Talirat”). But as an artistic response to 9/11, the album was deeper in every respect. It was not only more politically acute, but less musically predictable; where The Rising is soporific, Jerusalem is alive with nervous energy. It rocks as well as rants.

Earle’s career trajectory is an anomalous one. Unlike Dylan and Springsteen, who had produced much of their definitive and most popular work by their early thirties, Earle blossomed on the far side of forty. When he first emerged in the mid-eighties with “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road,” he was feted as Nashville’s answer to Springsteen, a hard-rocking balladeer with a social conscience. Commercial and critical success, however, was accompanied by personal crisis. Heroin addiction and a prison sentence led to a hiatus in the early nineties. But after a painful process of self-reconstruction, Earle returned with a string of major albums. Like Dylan in his youth, Earle in his middle age seems blessed with a gift for song, and he’s made up for lost time, composing song after song, recording, performing, writing and agitating. He’s a distinctive stylist with a strong personality who nonetheless moves easily from genre to genre, mood to mood. He dips into folk, country, blues, bluegrass, punk, grunge, reggae, psychedelia, and even hints of “world music”—with a disregard for musical categories that seems to come naturally to a man reared on Highway 61 Revisited.

Earle has penned a series of haunting songs about prison and the death-penalty, influenced by early Dylan and, behind him, Harry Smith’s Anthology (resurrecting Dock Boggs on “The Truth”). He’s also created songs of hesitant self-renewal, lost loves and irrepressible erotic hopes, instant classics that manage to blend hard-earned wisdom with self-deprecation. He’s wry, righteous and raucous, but also tender and melancholy. In Earle’s mature work, the fusion of Nashville and Greenwich Village that Dylan and Gram Parsons first essayed has been given new life and depth.

In “Christmas in Washington,” written following Clinton’s re-election in 1996, Earle surveyed the sorry state of the union and declared that what was needed was a reawakened radicalism, embodied in the spirit of America’s greatest musical champion of working class politics:

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow

Where Dylan embraced Guthrie as a model of personal authenticity, Earle calls out to him across the decades as the voice of an oppositional movement that needs to be renewed. As a song-writer, Earle has proved himself a faithful disciple of Guthrie not only in his commitment to left-wing politics but even more in his determination to use his art to discomfit the rich and powerful and console the oppressed. In Jerusalem, he fulfilled that task with a collection of songs which, though varied in subject matter, style and mood, spring from a conviction that the crisis of the hour required the utmost honesty from him as an artist and a citizen. This was no time to pander to America’s delusions.

In “Ashes to Ashes,” Earle kicked off the album like an Old Testament prophet (or Shelley in “Ozymandias”), reminding his fellow citizens that “every tower ever built tumbles / No matter how strong, no matter how tall.” As he invokes the destruction of the dinosaurs—the giant powers of the past—it’s impossible to miss the echoes of 9/11:

The sky gave way and death rained down
And made a terrible sound
There was fire everywhere and nothing was spared

Superpower illusions of invulnerability and omnipotence lie shattered, “twisted and covered in rust .” The arrogant are humbled. What could be farther from the social patriotism of The Rising than this stark declaration of America’s impermanence? What’s more, Earle suggests that America is being punished for its presumption: “I’m the next big thing/ and the gift that I bring/ comes directly from God/ so there ain’t no holdin’ me down . . . “ In “Ashes to Ashes,” you can hear the apocalyptic Guthrie of “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” as well as the Dylan of “All Along the Watchtower,” but with the hard gaze that belongs especially to Earle’s maturity. It was exactly what the country did not want to hear at this moment of trauma, and therefore a fulfilment of the prophetic duty to “speak truth to power.”

Really, this was the song that should have alarmed the guardians of American exceptionalism, but that honour fell to the more flagrantly topical “John Walker’s Blues,” in which Earle projected himself into the heart and mind of the 20-year-old California Taliban captured in Afghanistan. The U.S. media had demonized the confused young man as the embodiment of America’s enemies, without and within. In response, Earle imaginatively recreated Walker’s personal journey and endowed his tragedy with dignity and humanity.

The intake of breath that attended Dylan’s declaration of kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald was reproduced on a much wider scale in response to Earle’s song. But in Earle’s case, the offence was politically informed, purposeful and sustained. Walker is described as “just an American boy” and his journey as a typically American search for identity and authenticity, a reaction to the emptiness of the MTV society. The designated enemy has turned out to be one of us.

In embracing that enemy, Earle daringly reached across national boundaries at the very moment that those boundaries were being policed with even greater vigilance than usual. He also reached across musical boundaries, insinuating Koranic chanting into his country rock ballad. Earle’s careworn growl climbs the ascending notes of the spare Middle-Eastern style melody, which is underpinned by an electrically-produced drone, evoking—and modernizing—the drone that unites early American folk with the traditional musics of Asia and Africa.

Nashville radio hosts lambasted him as psychopathic traitor, a self-hating American. Yet the irony was that the song, like Earle’s work as a whole, was deeply rooted in American musical traditions. In addition to being a self-confessed “borderline Marxist,” Earle is a master of musical “Americana”—the rich spectrum of North American folk, country, rock, blues and bluegrass, whose resonance extends far beyond America’s shores. As Earle himself would insist, he’s a faithful son of Hank Williams as well as Woody Guthrie. “John Walker’s Blues” is true to the country traditions in which the individual is trapped or tormented by remote forces, in which the drama of personal survival is played out against a bleak, unforgiving landscape. He locates the left-wing politics in the classic Nashville territory of loneliness, heartache and loss. “John Walker’s Blues” is an outlaw ballad, but to its credit far less romanticized than either Guthrie’s or Dylan’s exercises in the genre. Earle’s outlaw is deluded and defeated—but so is the society that produced him, then judged and jailed him.

Earle and others who demurred from the mood of national unity celebrated in The Rising were accused of cynicism, an accusation more justly targeted at those who sought to exploit that mood to promote policies serving their own economic self-interest. The title-track of Jerusalem is in fact a stirring protest against cynicism, the artfully and relentlessly propagated belief that injustice must be accepted as a fact of life:

I woke up this mornin’ and none of the news was
good
And death machines were rumblin’ ’cross the
ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always
been that way
And there was nothin’ anyone could do or say
And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find
That I believe that one fine day all the children of
Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

The beauty of “Jerusalem” is its refusal to give way to hopelessness, which Earle portrays as a self-betrayal, a submission to the powers-that-be. And in this he shares common ground with the Dylan of “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” and “When the Ship Comes In,” enriched and made more credible by the experience of years. (“And the words that are used for to get the ship confused/ Will not be understood as they’re spoken.”) In “Jerusalem,” Earle, like the young Dylan, portrays the violence of the public world invading his inner life (“the storm comes rumblin’ in/ and I can’t lay me down/ the drums are drummin’ again/ and I can’t stand the sound”), but he remains defiantly utopian; he insists that peace is possible in the middle east, that one day “there’ll be no barricades, there’ll be no wire or walls” and argues that the greatest obstacle to peace is the belief that war is endemic in human nature—the denial of the our own capacity to act to change the world. And that makes Jerusalem, as an album, a truer and more enduring affirmation than anything Springsteen offered on The Rising.

Earle’s songs are enriched by an internationalism rare among the U.S. liberal intelligentsia. “Frankly, I’ve never worn red, white and blue that well,” he merrily admits. Crucially, he’s an internationalist with a Texas accent, working in an accessible idiom, as unashamed of his American roots as he is angry at America’s rulers. Those roots were put down during his teenage years, in the 1960s, and his song-writing has long been haunted by the avoidable tragedy of Vietnam. He’s covered the Chambers Brother’s epochal “Time Has Come Today” and the Burritos’ paean to draft dodging, “My Uncle,” as well as The Beatles’ “Revolution” and Dylan’s “My Back Pages”—two of the great repudiations of 60s radicalism—remaining loyal to the lyrics in all their reactionary glory.

In the late 80s, Earle and his band toured with Dylan for four months. After thirty days opening for the reclusive, tight-lipped master in venues across the country, Earle was informed that Dylan had a problem with his language on stage. “Well, what do you mean?” Steve asked. “He thinks you say ‘fuck’ too much,” he was told. Earle paused, then replied: “Well, fuck him.” Two nights later, Dylan suddenly materialized, said, “Steve, you’re doing a great job,” then disappeared.

In 1974, Dylan and The Band returned to the road. Among the old favorites they performed was “It’s Alright Ma.” When Dylan sang the line “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,” the crowd roared. Nixon was in the midst of his Watergate ordeal and would resign that summer. It was a kind of vindication for those who had opposed him and his war policies. And the tour itself was something of a vindication for Dylan and The Band. In contrast to 1966, they were playing to vast arenas packed with adoring, uncritical fans. But the music was among the worst either Dylan or The Band ever made. It was the first sixties revival tour, a package dreamed up by businessmen. The tension between audience and performer had gone slack. The confrontation with the new had been replaced by the comforts of the familiar.

Dylan’s forays into politics in the years since the sixties have been sporadic. In “George Jackson” in 1971 and the epic “Hurricane” of 1976, he once again paid homage to the martyrs of institutional racism. In 1974, he appeared at a benefit organized by Phil Ochs for the victims of the U.S. sponsored coup in Chile. (It was to be Ochs’s last political intervention.)

The next year, Dylan released Blood On The Tracks, his most substantial achievement of the seventies and perhaps his most thematically coherent album. After a long silence, he had rediscovered his voice—in the pain of a ruptured marriage and the irresolvable conflict between his desire for safety and his hunger for freedom. The album includes recollections of a more hopeful time (“There was music in the cafés at night / And revolution in the air”), but has little to say about the contemporary public sphere, except to imply that it is a morass (with a nod to Woody Guthrie): “Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” Ginsberg called it a “rhyme that took in the whole nation.”⁴ Dylan then hit the road again with the Rolling Thunder Review, a more sparky and experimental outing than the wooden tour with the Band. He assembled a cast of performers reflecting his various influences and life phases (Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGuinn). But amid the theatrical self-revelation, Dylan himself appeared on stage wearing white face paint.

In 1979, Dylan embraced Christian fundamentalism. For many fans who’d stuck with him through previous changes, this was the final fall from grace. Nonetheless, his first Christian album, Slow Train Coming, outsold all his previous releases. His writing and singing skills were sharp as ever. The vision they served, however, was bleakly judgmental. In this, of course, the work of the Christian period follows a familiar Dylan vein. The apocalyptic Manichaeism of “Gotta Serve Somebody” can also be heard in “When The Ship Comes In.” What’s missing is any hint of generosity, any sympathy for human vulnerability. The search for the authentic had led to submission to a higher power. The prophet of freedom had surrendered to dogma and dour fatalism, like Wordsworth in his Sonnets in Praise of Capital Punishment (to be fair, Dylan’s evangelical songs are far more palatable than Wordsworth’s Tory verse).

Dylan’s religious conversion put him once again in the vanguard—of a reactionary backlash. The years 1979 and 1980 ushered in the era of Thatcher and Reagan. On Slow Train, Dylan inveighed against “All that foreign oil controlling American soil . . . Sheiks walkin’ around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings / Deciding America’s future . . .” But even as right-wing Christian politics became a force in the land, Dylan’s visible commitment to Christianity waned. In 1983, he returned to topical song with the overtly social patriotic and protectionist “Union Sundown” and the bewildered Zionist apologia, “Neighborhood Bully,” a defense of Israel’s airstrike on an Iraqi nuclear facility. He also recorded, but did not release, “Julius and Ethel,” a tribute to the Rosenbergs, Communists executed for espionage in 1953 despite the best efforts of the ECLC. Dylan had not forgotten the old Left.

Another, far more remarkable song recorded at those 1983 sessions and not released was “Blind Willie McTell.” This is less a tribute to the sweet-toned minstrel who composed “Statesboro Blues” than an invocation of the historical experience behind the blues as a whole—and a meditation on its meaning in our times. It’s also a testament to the enduring importance of African-American struggle and song in Dylan’s inner landscape. In a series of images both compact and multidimensional, he takes us on a journey through history: slavery ships, plantations burning, chain gangs yelling, “charcoal gypsy maidens” who “can strut their feathers well,” the poverty-stricken twenties beau with “bootleg whiskey in his hand.” In the final verse, Dylan muses bleakly:

In 1985, Dylan appeared at the Live Aid concert for Ethiopian famine relief. At the time, pundits were quick to suggest that this event might represent a new outpouring of social consciousness among both pop musicians and their audience. So it seemed natural that Dylan, still more associated with the sprit of protest than any other artist, should feature prominently. Musically, his performance was a shambles. Politically, it was as perverse as his outburst at the ECLC in 1963. He played “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” then told the huge global television audience:

I’d just like to say that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could just take a little bit of it—maybe one or two million maybe—and use it, to pay the mortgages [that] some of the farmers here owe the banks.⁵

Though this remark inspired Willie Nelson to launch Farm Aid, it annoyed nearly everyone else. Bob Geldof, the principal motivator of the event, said Dylan’s comment displayed “a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.” Dylan tried to explain his views to Mikal Gilmore:

It’s almost like guilt money. Some guy halfway around the world is starving so, okay, put ten bucks in the barrel, then you can feel you don’t have to have a guilty conscience about it. Obviously, on some levels it does help, but as far as any sweeping movement to destroy hunger and poverty, I don’t see that happening.⁶

The Live Aid fiasco was quintessential Dylan. His statement was tactless and convoluted and at the same time symptomatic of his abiding awareness of homegrown poverty. He had always been wary of the ease with which we give to abstract victims in remote parts of the world while ignoring suffering in our own midst. Above all, the Live Aid ramble was a response to his own discomfort about the authenticity or otherwise of this charitable but very glamorous event.

Somehow Dylan’s reputation has survived his antics and inconsistencies, as well as the unappeasable hunger of the times for the “new.” As the nineties progressed, he enjoyed a revival in esteem and sales. He produced quirky, enjoyable albums and recast himself as a folk and blues fundamentalist, with a voice rendered authentically gritty by decades of alcohol, tobacco, fame, and money. He was Grammied, Clintoned, and Poped. Even his bootlegs became “Official.” But he remained capable of surprise.

In late Dylan, the cyclical view of history, his taste for little lessons in the vanity of human wishes, is sometimes glib, but when self-interrogation supplants self-pity, he can still create deeply unsettling songs: “Not Dark Yet,” “Things Have Changed,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “High Water,” “Sugar Baby.” These bleak compositions display a social and historical scope that Harry Smith would have recognized and admired.

The journey from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to “Things Have Changed” is undeniably a long and painful one—a lifetime’s worth of bitter experience. But both songs are recognisably the work of the same artist mining the same musical vein. In both, the individual is pitted against overwhelming powers in the midst of an apocalyptic social storm. And both stand as ferocious warnings against the complacency inculcated by consumer culture.

The day after the U.S. and Britain launched their war on Iraq, I headed for the local high street where our antiwar group had agreed we would rendezvous to make our protest. There I found a group of about twenty adults, all very subdued. The war we had done our best to forestall was now a reality. Then from down the street we heard them coming. Shouting, chanting, laughing—there must have been 200 of them, children who had walked out from the nearby secondary school, many no more than twelve or thirteen years old. They carried handmade signs saying Bush and Blair, You Don’t Care, No Blood for Oil, and Make Love Not War. They picked up our antiwar banner, swept past the adults and struck off down the busy street, tying up traffic and pushing leaflets through drivers’ windows. Their ranks were soon swelled by groups from other schools. In the end, I’m told the kids marched all the way to Parliament Square—a four-mile hike.

There were similar events all over Britain. Some newspapers denounced the schoolkids’ protest as the work of outside agitators. Commentators questioned whether these children really understood the complex issues. Surely this was merely a passing fad. (“How much do I know / To speak out of turn / you may say that I’m young / You may say I’m unlearned . . .”) But the young people pricked the conscience of more than a few adults. We had been told that now the war had started, the debate was over; these kids refused to worship the accomplished fact.

Masked and Anonymous, the feature film released to critical derision in 2003, is set in a vaguely sketched military-corporate dictatorship, a society plagued by poverty, guerrilla war, state terror and media manipulation. Dylan plays a legendary singer-songwriter named Jack Fate, who is sprung from jail in order to play a benefit concert on network television. The benefit is said to be to “help the real victims of this revolution”—but no one knows exactly who these victims are, what cause the revolution is supposed to advance or whose interests the concert really serves.

Strikingly, Masked and Anonymous revisits the big political themes of Dylan’s most ambitious work of the 60s: the corruption of money and state-power, the cycle of rebellion and betrayal, the use and abuse of spectacle, the complicity and impotence of the artist-witness. It’s a muddled parable of insurgency and counter-insurgency, of authenticity and appropriation. The film’s title is taken from a monologue delivered by an animal wrangler (played by Val Kilmer) in which he compares human beings unfavourably to other species: “Human beings alone with their secrets, masked and anonymous, no one truly knows them.” It’s a paradoxical title because Dylan here plays a character clearly based on himself, performs his own songs with his own band, speaks lines from a script which he authored (under pseudonyms) and which repeatedly evokes his own career, the legends surrounding it and the cultural reference points of the 1960s (the benefit concert is described as a combination of “Woodstock, Altamont, the Beatles at Shay, Live Aid and Elvis’s comeback”). For an artist who harps on about his need for privacy and his unknowability, who for decades has treated his personal cult with disdain, it’s extraordinarily self-referential.

Artistically, however, the film is inert. None of the action, none of the relationships seem real. Both plot and characters are contrived in pursuit of an allegory that never takes on a life of its own. As a story-teller, Dylan is an anecdotalist or a balladeer; he works in archetypes and subjectivities, and those are difficult to reconcile with the naturalism of the feature film genre. The dialogue is stilted and portentous. For all its self-reference, Masked and Anonymous feels remote and impersonal. There’s an emotional emptiness at its core, epitomized by Dylan’s affect-less face, which throughout the film remains, indeed, imperturbably masked and curiously anonymous.

Only the music communicates. The film kicks off with an energetic cover of “My Back Pages” by a Japanese rock band and ends with a heart-felt, late-career Dylan rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In the middle, he and his band perform a sweetly mournful version of “Dixie” and a ten-year-old black girl sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” unaccompanied. There’s a doom-laden “Down in the Flood” and Articolo 31’s witty, rhythmic re-mix of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But just what is “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the dogged white supremacist resistance to the civil rights movement, doing in this list? At first glance it seems a typically perverse Dylan whim, a gesture thrown in to wrong-foot his audience. But while it is certainly that, it is also—like most Dylan perversities—more than that. The song was written on the eve of the civil war by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a white man who performed in blackface. Dylan’s interest in minstrelsy had already been evinced in “Love and Theft,” whose title he borrowed from a book on the minstrel tradition by Eric Lott. It also crops up at the climax of Masked and Anonymous when Jack Fate is visited by the ghost of an old-time minstrel star (played by Ed Harris in blackface) who explains how he paid a price for speaking out against the dictatorship: “I was the only one in a position to say anything. Everybody else was too scared. I had a show. I had a forum. So I spoke out . . . they said it was an accident . . . suicide . . .” It’s strange to find the minstrel cast as a truth-telling martyr, since minstrelsy is all about wearing a mask, about exploiting someone else’s identity. It’s the ultimate inauthenticity, especially in the context of film preoccupied with a genre (rock ’n’ roll) and a career (Dylan’s) haunted by a deeply problematic relationship between white and black. Yet minstrelsy is also about pretending to be something you’re not in order to express how you really feel; the mask is not only protective, it’s expressive, a paradox to which Dylan’s whole career bears witness, from the days when he first adopted his Woody Guthrie persona.

In the film, Dylan plays “Dixie” to a multi-racial audience that listens in sober silence before bursting into appreciative applause. As he performs it, the song is a lament for something lost, for the passing of a world more innocent, more homely, more authentic than our own. It’s a haunting tune, yet there’s no denying that it also carries on its back the weight of the ugliest realities of U.S. history; it cannot be rendered historically innocent (as Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist discovered when he sang it at a lawyers’ conference in 2000). Here another paradox emerges. Emmett was not a southerner; he supported the north in the civil war and was dismayed to find his song adopted by the enemy, an experience that may have resonated with Dylan.

One of the core themes of Masked and Anonymous is precisely the way in which songs can be made to serve purposes other than those for which they were created. The network presents Jack Fate with a play-list that is an anthology of 50s and 60s anthems of rebellion: the Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man,” the Beatles’ “Revolution,” the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Lieber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” Neil Young’s “Ohio,” Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” MC₅’s “Kick Out the Jams,” and Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Revolution and Won’t Get Fooled Again are, of course, openly cynical about those who preach and profit from revolt—and therefore as much an intrinsic part of the era as the songs which celebrate revolt. The playlist is another reminder of the ease with which rebellion can be packaged and sold back to the masses, the propensity of the corporate establishment to appropriate its apparent antagonists. As the decades have passed, it seems harder than ever to live outside the law and stay honest.

The artist’s nemeses in Masked and Anonymous include promoters, politicians and especially the media, personified in the film by a character named Tom Friend, a sneering, cynical journalist played by Jeff Bridges and described as “a leech, a bleeder, a two-faced monster, a spy.” In a remarkable diatribe—one of the film’s few gripping passages—Friend peppers a non-responsive Jack Fate with unanswered, unanswerable questions about the 1960s.

Friend then throws Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” in Dylan’s face as if it were a rebuke: “What was he saying, Jack? What was that all about? Revolution? . . . You could hear tears in every note he played, saying love me, love me. I’m not a traitor, I’m a native son . . . you could hear that cry around the world.” All this seems anything but “masked and anonymous,” yet it also remains impenetrable; the questions hang in the air, a challenge to both Dylan and his audience. What cannot be doubted, however, is that the entire passage is powerful testimony to Dylan’s own sense of his complex and inextricable linkage to the riptides of the 60s.

That linkage is also evoked by one of the film’s few tender moments, the solo performance of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by the little girl referred to only as “Mrs Brown’s daughter.” She sings the lyric with solemnity and no trace of cynicism, and is listened to in silent, reflective reverence. It’s a touching rendition, evoking the fragility as well as the endurance of our hopes for ourselves and our society. The decades seem to have stripped the song of its brashness and endowed it with a deeper nuance. Irritatingly, Dylan nearly kills the scene by over-dubbing a commentary: “All of us are trying to kill time, but when all’s said and done, time kills us”—a specimen of Dylan’s defensive banality at its worst.

In the denouement, Jeff Bridges’ journalist is killed and Jack Fate, wrongly blamed for the crime, is taken away in handcuffs. As he sits bemused in the back of the police van, we hear Dylan’s voice on the soundtrack: “I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.” At which point I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the audience muttering, “Yeah, Bob, and it shows.”

So Jack Fate ends up, despite himself, as some kind of martyr—not to the truth but to the impossibility of telling it, to the absurdity and amorality of the universe. It’s a narcissistic, repetitious “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” spun out over two hours, and suggests inadvertently that Dylan never did find his way out of that late 60s impasse.

Among the many jack-in-the-box surprises of Dylan’s career, not many surpass Chronicles, Volume I, the memoir he published in 2004. Finally, after four decades, the literary and narrative flair evident in the songs found its way on to the printed page, and with a warmth entirely absent from Masked and Anonymous. Chronicles is both frank and evasive, credible and preposterous. It’s Dylan in full, by turns artfully disguised and startlingly naked, achingly romantic and flatly desolate. The book is rich with remembrance of a lost past but also haunted—traumatized—by a sense of rupture with that past.

Chronicles sheds much light on the young Dylan’s relationship to his era, and in so doing confirms, ironically, something Dylan frequently denies: that there was indeed an umbilical link between his art and the world into which it was born. However, it should no more be relied on as a source of undisputed fact than Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s “autobiographical fiction.” In structure and style, Chronicles echoes the earlier book, though its mood and preoccupations are different. Instead of the bright light, sharp outlines and vast skies of Bound for Glory, Chronicles is full of smoky, jumbled interiors. Where the master’s book is open-hearted, righteously indignant and happily engaged with a teeming world, the disciple’s is ruminative, introspective, often equivocal and in the end painfully lonely. Of course, Guthrie was thirty when he published Bound for Glory whereas Dylan was sixty-three when Chronicles came out. Nonetheless, Chronicles, like Bound for Glory, is the tale of a young artist’s formation, the making of a folksinger.

The narrative meanders and digresses. The sequence of events is sometimes confused (the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 is quickly followed by the rise of feminism, which most people would place fifteen years later). But Dylan’s sense of place is as acute as his sense of time is vague. The bulk of the book is a meditation on New York at the dawn of the 60s, evoked in a prose that is both vernacular and ornate, hypersensitive to the décor of a room, a change in the weather, the pitch of a voice. This is the flickering urban landscape of “Visions of Johanna,” with “all kinds of characters looking for the inner heat” mingling in cluttered Greenwich Village apartments: “Beaux Arts lamps, carved boudoir chairs, couches in plush velvet—heavy andirons connected with chains by the fireplace . . . ” New York in Dylan’s memory is “cold, muffled, mysterious, the capitol of the world,” a city of epiphanies: “I passed a horsedrawn wagon full of covered flowers, all under a plastic wrap, no driver in sight. The city was full of stuff like that . . . snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline . . . a cellar tavern where John Wilkes Booth, the American Brutus, used to drink. I’d been in there once and saw his ghost in the mirror—an ill spirit.”

There’s an elegiac tone, as if Dylan is in mourning for a unique historical moment, and even more for the young singer from Minnesota, his love of music, his driving ambition, his openness to life and friendship, his naïve doubts and unreflective self-confidence—soon to be lost forever under the avalanche of celebrity. “It wasn’t love or money that I was looking for,” he recalls. “I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity.” Yet he concedes that at this stage he “didn’t have too much of an identity.” The young Dylan appears in this book as a cipher, groping instinctively towards a grand destiny that also turns out to be a harrowing tragedy.

The Greenwich Village folk-set he’d sneered at in “Positively Fourth Street” is recreated in affectionate detail, a “lost paradise” of intense personalities and moment-by-moment revelations. Alongside the vivid recollections of the folk milieu, there runs a celebration of folk music and a reiterated affirmation of the folk aesthetic. Again and again, Dylan counterposes the richness of folk to the superficiality of the mass culture pumped out by the commercial media:

What I was playing at the time were hard-lipped folk-songs with fire and brimstone servings, and you didn’t need to take polls to know that they didn’t match up with anything on the radio. . . . What I was into was the traditional stuff with a capital T and it was as far away from the mondo teeno scene as you could get.

Folk is presented as the embodiment of a timeless wisdom counterposed to the ephemera of a modern world that “had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn’t seduced by it.” Chronicles brims with Dylan’s distaste for modernity: “Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better.” Dylan contrasts this “wasted world and totally mechanised” with “a parallel universe . . . with more archaic principles and values . . . a culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . landlords and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys.” Part of the appeal of this parallel universe was that it was experienced as a secret realm, a domain reserved for initiates:

You had to go find it. It didn’t come served on a paper plate. Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it . . . songs to me were more important than light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

In Chronicles (as in Dylan’s albums of the 90s), folk reemerges as a touchstone of authenticity. But it is also enduring testimony to the cyclical nature of history, the vanity of human endeavour and the irreducibility of life’s mysteries. “It was always the same pattern,” he says; societies emerge, flourish, and decline (but “I had no idea which of these stages America was in”). Chronicles is riddled with the fatalistic aphorisms that are the hallmark of late Dylan, sometimes wearyingly so:

Don’t give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness. Don’t give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us. Let’s get down to brass tacks. There isn’t any moral order. You can forget that. Morality has nothing in common with politics. It’s not there to transgress. It’s either high ground or low ground. This is the way the world is and nothing’s gonna change it. It’s a crazy, mixed up world and you have to look it right in the eye.

For all the unvarnished directness of the writing, Chronicles is full of feints and dodges; it’s a tease as well as a revelation. Dylan remains coy on many topics and the lacunae are gaping. There’s nothing about the 1963 March on Washington or the Tom Paine award or Newport ’65 or Manchester in 1966. Nothing about drugs or sex. Nothing about his fundamentalist Christian phase or about his Jewishness—except a cryptic story about how people kept leaving his high school bands because he didn’t have the right “family connections.” He mentions his wife on two occasions, but doesn’t explain that these were actually two different wives. When he catches a screening of the movie, The Mighty Quinn, featuring Denzel Washington as a detective, he comments: “Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song.”

As ever, it’s unwise to take Dylan’s claims about himself at face value. For example, there seems to be no evidence of the actual existence of the bohemian couple, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, whom Dylan sketches in detail. They may be composites or even outright inventions⁷ but they play a critical role in Dylan’s narrative. The gun-toting Ray’s romantically reactionary view of the South and the Civil War is set against Dave Van Ronk’s “Marxist view” that “it was one big battle between two rival economic systems.” In Chronicles there’s scarcely more than a passing reference to the civil rights movement but pages about the civil war. Dylan portrays himself researching the period on microfilm and uncovering a lasting truth:

It’s all one long funeral song. . . . Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.

Like “Dixie” in Masked and Anonymous, the civil war episode in Chronicles serves to disorient the audience, to suggest that what seems new is in fact ancient. But here as elsewhere in the book Dylan seems to be revising his past to reconcile it to his current world view. There’s no doubt that the recoil from modernity has always been a deep reflex in Dylan and that folk music did indeed appear to him as the embodiment of primeval mysteries. But the young man who wrote “Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “With God on Our Side,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”—and indeed “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It’s Alright Ma”—was a poet of urgency who would have found the fatalism of the later Dylan entirely too pat. As so often in the past, Dylan’s characterization of the politics of his early days is disingenuous: “I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix. . . .” Maybe, but this “primitive” also dissected the political psychology of the fall-out shelter craze in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” and lambasted the anticommunist right (at that time incarnated in Goldwater) in “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

Despite the insistence on the cyclical nature of history, the book presents the early 60s as a social turning-point. Dylan repeatedly refers to his own inchoate sense of the mounting crisis under the complacent exterior of the American mainstream: “The 50s culture was like a judge in his last days on the bench. It was about to go. Within ten years time it would struggle to rise and then come crashing to the floor.” Dylan also emphasises his own newness: “What I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrase and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before.” In Chronicles, Dylan can’t seem to make up his mind whether nothing changes ever or whether, some time in the sixties, everything changed forever and nothing can be the same again. Chronicles is filled with forebodings of events to come, the sense that the sixties were to unfold as social tragedy, that once again America was to find itself on the cross. But as the book pursues its erratic journey through the past, it seems to be Dylan himself who is wriggling on the cross.

In the middle of Chronicles, he interrupts his tender memoir of New York in 1960-61 to leap forward in time, offering an unexpected and at first puzzling excursion into two other, lesser known junctures of his career. These curious chapters are titled “New Morning” and “Oh Mercy” and at first glance appear to concern the background of the making of these two albums, which few would place among Dylan’s best. Yet there’s a surprise hidden in these chapters, for they tell stories most artists don’t like to tell, stories of artistic failure. They are studies in alienation, frustration and compromise.

“The New Morning” chapter is framed by Dylan’s encounter with the elderly poet, Archibald MacLeish, who asks him to compose songs for a play he’s written. Dylan respects the poet but cannot communicate with him. Indeed, he seems to have lost the ability to communicate with anyone. Here Dylan evokes the vertiginous terror of the transformation that had overtaken his life since his days as an innocent unknown in Greenwich Village. Dylan was not merely famous; he was famous as “the voice of a generation,” and he hated it.

He learns the hard way that “privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.” People “would stare at me when they saw me, like they’d stare at a shrunken head or a giant jungle rat.” He’s appalled at an Esquire cover featuring a monster with four faces: JFK, Malcolm X, Castro and himself: “What the hell was that supposed to mean?” The aggrieved, sometimes appalled tone of these passages suggests that the wounds still smart, that Dylan is still reeling from the trauma of having his self stolen from him—at a time in his life when he had barely begun to know that self. “It would have driven anybody mad,” he observes. “There aren’t any rules to cover an emergency of this kind.” And no models to follow: Woody Guthrie could not show him the way through this dark wood. Dylan could no longer recognize himself in the mirror of other people. “I really was never any more than what I was,” he keeps insisting (forty years later), “a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

His anger at the media blends with his anger at the movement and his fans. In Chronicles, they appear indistinguishable. He devises a strategy to escape his tormentors—changing his image and style “in hopes to demolish my identity.” He decides to “send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train—create some different impressions.” But it doesn’t work. His efforts to recover himself fail. This is a self-portrait of the artist at an impasse. All that’s left of his personality is his desire to flee the burden the world has imposed on him. And that makes it impossible for him to write:

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed.

He fails to complete the songs for MacLeish because the play “was conveying some everlasting truth, but . . . truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house.” So the half finished tunes end up on the album known as New Morning. “Maybe there were some good songs in the grooves and maybe there weren’t—who knows? But there weren’t the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head.”

This sense of incompleteness haunts the following chapter, “Oh Mercy,” which dwells on a career crisis of the late 80s. Of his performances in those days Dylan admits: “The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass . . . my own songs had become strangers to me.” What follows is curious. After stumbling across an unnamed singer in a small jazz bar, he discovers (or perhaps rediscovers) a new (or perhaps very old) musical system which he describes over several pages and to which he attributes an artistic metamorphosis. He says it as “a style of playing based on an odd instead of even numbered system. . . . I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number three is more metaphysically powerful than the number two, but it is.” Over the years, Dylan has repeatedly flirted with pop mysticism (such as Tarot cards and the I Ching). This wary-eyed sceptic seems at times extraordinarily credulous. His refusal to believe in anything for very long goes hand in hand with a willingness to believe, momentarily, in almost anything. But by the time one gets to the claim that the virtue of the system is that it enables Dylan to sing “without fatigue” and also without “emotion,” one begins to suspect a Dylan put-on, a trap for over-earnest critics.

Even more enigmatic is the ensuing episode, in which Dylan heads for New Orleans to make an album with producer Daniel Lanois. He adores New Orleans (“chronic melancholia hanging from the trees . . . great place to be intimate or do nothing”) but is frustrated by his inability to communicate with Lanois, and significantly by his inability to meet Lanois’ expectations:

Off and on during the time we were cutting Series of Dreams, he’d say to me something like, “We need songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Girl from the North Country,’ or ‘With God On Our Side.’” He began nagging at me just about every other day, that we could sure use some songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn’t have anything like those songs.

Later, Dylan returns to the theme:

I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs he wanted, like “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” “Gates of Eden,” but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the sprits. I had it once, and once was enough.

So, despite there being, allegedly, nothing new under the sun, “circumstances never repeat themselves.” History, after all, is not entirely cyclical. Crucially, if indirectly, Dylan here acknowledges the historical steel that binds his 60s masterpieces to the rapidly changing social environment in which they were forged. What’s moving in Dylan’s tale of his relationship with Lanois is the artist’s sense of diminishment. He feels overawed by his early achievements and, like the middle-aged Wordsworth, mourns the loss of his erstwhile “power and dominion over the spirits.” Chronicles is preoccupied with the ebb and flow of Dylan’s creative energies but makes clear that to Dylan himself these tides remain mysterious.

The book concludes with Dylan “standing in the gateway,” living with Suze Rotolo in an apartment in West 4th Street, on the brink of his breakthrough as a song-writer. In the final pages, there’s a curious, inconclusive anecdote in which he describes a conflict over his contract between producer John Hammond and agent Albert Grossman—standing in here, it seems, for art and commerce, principle and opportunism. Although Dylan suggests that his heart was always with Hammond (“There was no way I’d go against him for Grossman, not in a million years”), the reality appears to have been more of a muddle. So the book’s conclusion finds Dylan on the brink not only of artistic self-realization but also of a self-betrayal, an entry into the public gaze that turns out to be an experience of loss and disorientation. “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years time a shit storm would be unleashed.”

Chronicles is haunted by this moment of rupture. The musical magpie who stole from everyone was to have his own self purloined, ripped from his grasp even as he was creating it. His inner world was invaded; he became a prisoner of others’ definitions. Reading the book one feels that Dylan never fully recovered from this trauma. It aches with the pathos of Dylan’s life. He mourns for that transient moment when self and world freely and creatively interacted (before they became irretrievably antagonistic), for a bohemian oasis that was both experimental (unlike his home life in Hibbing) and innocent (unlike the hyped-up late 60s counterculture) and for the young man he was then, lost forever behind the fault-line of celebrity. His memoir is entirely silent about the critical time-span (1962-67) during which the rupture occurred. He circles the wound, touches it gingerly, finds it’s still tender, then shuffles away. He exposes it, then covers it up.

This rupture generated Dylan’s greatest music and is in some ways its subject—a subject to which he seems to return compulsively, in both his songs and occasional public statements. He keeps trying avenues of escape but they all lead back to the same crisis—the crisis embodied in his arc of development from 1962-67, that historical and personal moment that remains for Dylan (on the evidence of Masked and Anonymous and Chronicles) both beginning and end.

Buried in the sometimes rambling anecdotage of Chronicles is an eerie, tight-lipped, squint-eyed reference to one of the stand-out episodes in Bound for Glory. It’s 1970 and Dylan, besieged by the counterculture, takes refuge in (of all places) the Rainbow Room in mid-Manhattan, which he describes as safely off “the hip circuit” and presumably the last place Dylan would be expected to turn up (but nonetheless a public place). To add to the unreality of the scene, the performer on that evening turns out to be Frank Sinatra Jr., a dull replica of a singular artist, whom, nonetheless, Dylan hails as an authentic: there was “nothing faked or put-on or ritzy about him,” Dylan says, “there was a legitimacy about what he did, and he knew who he was,” which, at that moment, is more than Dylan can say for himself. Sinatra Jr. tells Dylan about his father’s support for civil rights and how he “had always fought for the underdog—that his father felt like one himself.” But then Frank Jr. adds, without explanation: “How do you think it would make you feel . . . to find out that the underdog had turned out to be a son of a bitch?” At which point Dylan gazes out “the wall of windows” and comments enigmatically: “You could see the spectacular city view. From sixty floors up, it was a different world.”

In the cognate passage in Bound for Glory Guthrie is being told how he should be costumed as a hillbilly or a Pierrot, when his attention wanders: “I let my eyes drift out the window and down sixty-five stories where the town of old New York was standing up living and breathing and cussing and laughing down yonder across that long island. . . .”⁸ It had been thirty years since Guthrie had sung: “Well this Rainbow Room’s a funny place ta play / Its a long way’s from here to th’ USA.” Now Dylan inhabited a world where the boundaries between the authentic and the inauthentic had become hopelessly obscured. There could be no escape from the Rainbow Room, no hope of rooting oneself in that unvarnished, un-slicked up, un-calculating world that Guthrie celebrated and Dylan hungered for. Dylan narrates this bizarre anecdote with a straight-face (his “nothing is revealed” posture) but as the ironies multiply, the reader is left with a sense of sorrowful emptiness; it’s an admission that Dylan himself cannot find a way out of the conundrum of celebrity. The chasm between Bound for Glory and Chronicles seems unbridgeable.

Dylan has long complained about people like me, who presume to decode his mystery. He sees us as part of that army of noisy intruders trespassing on his private domain. But the complaint might easily be reversed. Dylan has burrowed into our flesh and lodged in our minds. For four of my five decades, his words, images, tunes have been swimming through my head, rising up from the depths at unexpected moments. The electric violin on desolation row. The pill box hat that balances on her head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine. Breadcrumb sins. People who read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall. The Englishman who said fab. The ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face. The orphan crying like a fire in the sun. Her Jamaican rum and when she did come. The hard rain forever falling. The answer forever blowin’ . . .

Dylan continues to stir my emotions and stimulate my intellect, to console, inspire and challenge me. And I continue to challenge him, to query and refuse and refute, “to argue and to judge,” but not, I hope, harshly or unfairly. Which makes me only one of many engaged in a lifelong inner dialogue with this man we’ve never met, a fact that Dylan himself would like to wish away, but is the greatest testimony to the enduring power of his art. Somehow I’m still catching up with Dylan, still digesting the lessons of the 60s. There are few artists I feel so intimate with—and whom I’m so driven to contest. Even as I embrace his art and his voice, I want to tell him what he’s overlooked, where he’s gone wrong, why I cannot accept his conclusions. In this contest there’s no resolution, no victory or defeat. I can’t imagine anything less Dylanesque than abject submission to his greatness; those Dylan fans who approach his work in uncritical reverence seem to me to have missed its true prophetic challenge.

In his great music of the 60s, Dylan rebelled against the neat compartmentalization of the aesthetic, political and personal. In subsequent decades, he seemed at times to yearn for the safety of the categories he had shattered. Yet his constant insistence that he is merely a singer of songs betrays an unease. Dylan himself has repeatedly testified to the life-changing power of song, one of the simplest yet most mysterious of art-forms. As his mentor Harry Smith illustrated in his Anthology fifty years ago, songs are both the products of the society that gave them birth and capable of surviving beyond that society. So whether Dylan likes it or not, being “merely” a singer of songs—songs that speak to their time and then outlast it—is a daunting vocation.

“He not busy being born is busy dying” was always a demanding wisdom. As Dylan himself made clear in the 1960s, it was never just a matter of changing your style or donning a new mask or adopting a ready-made new identity. He has often seemed to want to set that wisdom aside; after all, if there really is nothing new under the sun, if history is cyclic, then the injunction to keep being born loses its force. Yet Dylan couldn’t stop himself from setting out again and again on a quest for renewal. The restlessness that marked Dylan from the outset and runs through his entire career has its sources not only in his own psyche but in the historical conjuncture from which his work sprang. His point of departure admitted no ultimate safe harbour.

The regurgitation of the 60s as a set of cultural commodities that can be carried in the pocket like songs on an iPod betrays the lessons the era actually has to teach us, the lessons embedded in Dylan’s music: that the sources of resistance are unpredictable, that struggles unfold according to a contradictory logic, that history refuses to conform to anyone’s preconceived scenarios. In a world dominated by multinational corporations and the overweening power of a single nation-state, his protest against the commodification of human experience, his intransigent defence of his (and our) irreducible, awkward humanity, feels more urgent and pertinent than ever.

We live in a media-saturated age in which hugely potent but remote social forces seek to exploit our every emotional vibration, and anyone who thinks they’re immune is dreaming. In that context, the artist who created “Chimes of Freedom,” “It’s Alright Ma,” “Gates of Eden,” “Desolation Row,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “The Wicked Messenger” speaks to us from out of the maelstrom of the 1960s with a heightened intensity. In the society of the spectacle, his insight that witnesses are accomplices remains precious. As I watched the U.S. and Britain lay waste to Fallujah on my television screen while daily life continued uninterrupted around me, I thought of “Clothesline Saga,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “How many times can a man turn his head/ pretending he just doesn’t see?” I also thought of “When The Ship Comes In” and how one day “like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.” I’ve been waiting a long time for that day but I remain persuaded, despite setbacks, that it’s worth the wait, and the struggle. And Dylan’s music has helped me not only survive but negotiate that wait and that struggle.

In his greatest work of the 60s, Dylan articulates the abiding dilemma of life under consumer capitalism: how you can truly own yourself in a world where everything appears as a commodity for purchase. He seeks relentlessly to escape that dilemma, but never quite succeeds. Dylan’s work of the 60s is permeated by yearnings for authenticity and autonomy. Though much mocked and deeply problematic, these yearnings remain indispensable—and profoundly threatening to a social order in which huge resources are devoted to what Noam Chomsky calls “the manufacture of consent.” The self-ownership of which Dylan’s 60s songs speak is antithetical to the egoistic consumerism propagated by the neo-liberal economic order. It’s tougher, more demanding, because the kind of freedom that lies at its heart is not the freedom to buy what you like but the freedom to become, to generate yourself in a world that wants to fix you like a butterfly in a glass case. It’s a course of both vertiginous terror and delirious joy and it promises no neat conclusion. There’s no point of rest. Unless, of course, one succumbs to the death-in-life of Mr. Jones or the superhuman crew. The revolt against categories turns out to be internal as well as external, spiritual as well as political, and never-ending.

In September 2004, Secret Service agents were dispatched to a high school in Boulder, Colorado, to investigate a threat against the president’s life. They were acting on complaints made by the mother of a student who claimed on a local radio talk show that her daughter had heard a local band performing in a talent show sing: “George Bush, I hope that you die, and your death will come soon” and “I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead.” Apparently, the band’s cover of “Masters of War” (plus the fact that at one time it had dubbed itself “Tali-band”) was enough to spur federal officials into action. In the era of the war on terror, it seems Dylan’s song retains an essential edge of danger.

At a frighteningly tender age, Dylan discovered that the hardest yet most reliable wisdom—the precarious wisdom of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—is fleeting. Even as we try to formulate it, it slips through the fingers, because none of us can quite absorb our own impermanence. That’s why the highway is for gamblers. And who can blame Dylan that at times he grew weary of risk-taking and took shelter in banality and conservatism?

Dylan’s 60s music has been packaged and repackaged, along with its era, but it eludes the death grip of academia and the banality of the corporate media. It still exudes the spirit and the pain of human liberation. It still asks demanding questions of anyone who wants to change society—or just survive within it as a free human being. “There must be some way out of here.” Dylan may never have found it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t help the rest of us on the journey.