NOTHING MUCH WAS EXPECTED OF INTERSTATE 88, THE TOUR inaugurated on 7 June 1988 out in the golden west. To begin with, it seemed that nothing much would be delivered. The Pavilion amphitheatre in the city of Concord, in San Francisco’s suburban East Bay, though designed by Frank Gehry and prestigious enough, was just another oversized open-air entertainment space. Given the choices available to him, it was not the most appropriate or intriguing venue Dylan could have picked to commence a run of 71 concerts in the United States and Canada that summer. For one thing, the appeal of his name alone could no longer fill the wide and open expanses of a place like the Pavilion.
What was the average casual fan entitled to expect, in any case? In Europe in 1987 Dylan had too often crashed and burned amid those pseudo-mythic temples in flames. Any Californian observer who had read reports of the four shows at London’s Wembley Arena would have noted only insinuating tales of an artist in bad shape and, as most reviews insisted, wretched voice. Once again, the omens were poor. None of the 6,000 or so people who saw Dylan return to work after his vacation with the Traveling Wilburys – at a venue capable of containing 12,500 – could have expected something historic. Quite how historic remains a matter of dispute, not least if the artist is offering an opinion. In his version, nothing particularly unusual happened at the Pavilion, or in its long aftermath, not at his behest. He had pulled himself together, that was all.
Second on the bill that evening were The Alarm, a briefly popular, well-meaning Welsh band who might just have been mistaken for The Clash on a bad day if there was plenty of static on the radio and you weren’t listening too hard. Who knows who chose them, big hair and big pretensions, for the tour? The Alarm were better suited to providing the introductory bombast for U2, as they had done in 1983, but such was the price Dylan fans had to pay for the stadium-rock experience. If nothing else – and truly there was precious little else – the support act provided a handy illustration of the nature of the decade in which the artist had been cast adrift.
Given all that had gone before, these were not popular music’s finest hours. Another of heavy metal’s Monsters of Rock tours was soaking up the middle-American youth dollar when Dylan took the stage at Concord. Michael Jackson was, it seemed, everywhere that year. George Michael had commenced his campaign for hearts, minds and sundries that very week with the single ‘I Want Your Sex’, an introduction to what would become the year’s most successful album. If the aim was to fill stadiums, the high-end competition was Guns N’ Roses. As ever, the charts tell their story.
Dylan might have been the agent of his own artistic decline in the trough of this low, dishonest decade. He might have made some very foolish moves. But how, in truth, was he supposed to react in such an environment? By courting slow, sure artistic death as a nostalgia act? By accepting that his moment in the spotlight was long gone? It amounted to a further series of questions. Did he still know what he wanted? Did he still care? Did he still know how to achieve what he wanted? For most listeners, Down in the Groove, released just a week before the Concord show, was providing dispiriting answers.
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Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, Dylan would sit down with David Gates of Newsweek in a hotel room in Santa Monica, California, for an interview designed to publicise the album Time Out of Mind. In the course of the conversation the singer would make a couple of statements that were frank by most standards, far less by the infinitely pliant standards of the entertainment business.
Those who had judged him finished and done by 1987 had not been far off the mark. ‘I’d kind of reached the end of the line,’ Dylan would tell Gates. ‘Whatever I had started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.’
As he told the tale, the performer had been left with very little choice. Decadence, carelessness, bad habits and cynicism have been adduced often enough by critics, friendly or hostile, to explain Dylan during this late ’80s period. In his own recollection, something more profound was going on. The inability to write much of anything, easily or often, was by then well established. But as Dylan told Gates, he had lost even the ability to perform his songs. A decade on, he mimicked and relived his dread: ‘I can’t remember what it means, does it mean – is it just a bunch of words? Maybe it’s like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense.’
Later, in his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would return to the memory of the burned-out relic of 1960s folk-rock – a term he had always despised – who found himself empty and wrecked in the middle of the ’80s. This erstwhile ‘troubadour’ – a word he had once found comical – was heading for cultural oblivion. Above all, as the book would record, he had nothing much left to say.
Only rarely does self-doubt go deeper. Nothing had remained of that old ’60s swagger, that instinctive certainty, the knowledge that one song would thread itself seamlessly to the next whenever he chose. More than Dylan’s confidence had disappeared by the end of 1987. A decade later, the remembered emotion sounded like nothing so much as the despair of a man who had gone blind by stages.
Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead had managed to coax Dylan back to a kind of life, for a while at least, but the respite had been no cure. As represented on the miserable Dylan & the Dead album, those half-dozen stadium appearances in July 1987 had demonstrated only that the foremost songwriter of his generation could get up on a stage, if needs must, and remember some of the words. The performances had been dire; rumours questioning the star’s physical condition had circulated. As often as not, great songs had been shorn of verses and meaning while the Dead treated their eternally faithful fans to the usual grimly predictable minor-league rock.
As he told the story to Gates, Dylan’s luck turned at last on a foggy, windy night while he peered at an audience spread across the damp cobblestones of the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Switzerland. He would return to the tale several times in subsequent interviews. Deep-dyed fans would meanwhile give the anecdote a pseudo-religious tint by talking, in all apparent seriousness, about an epiphany. Whatever happened, it mattered to Dylan the storyteller. Locarno became part of his personal mythology, the moment when the long withdrawing tide began to turn.
It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was me thinking it. I’m determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not. And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. And I noticed that all the people out there – I was used to them looking at the girl singers, they were good-looking girls, you know? And like I say, I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But when that happened, nobody was looking at the girls any more. They were looking at the main mike. After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.
So it came to pass. Doubters might struggle to find much of a difference between minor bootlegs such as Locarno 1987 and snatched recordings of the following night’s show such as Paris, France. Only a minority in the Wembley Arena left the building at the tour’s end convinced that Dylan had redeemed himself. Connoisseurs of the numerous illicit Temples in Flames recordings can point to fine performances, here and there, both before and after the ‘epiphany’. It is also self-evidently the case that we only have Dylan’s word for this life-changing Locarno experience, this moment of understanding. He believed, in any case, that words of defiance and resolution had come unbidden into his head, as though from nowhere, and he believed in what they meant. As he knew better than most, faith is a powerful thing.
Recasting the story for the benefit of Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore at the end of 2001, Dylan said: ‘That night in Switzerland it all just came to me. All of a sudden I could sing anything. There might’ve been a time when I was going to quit or retire, but the next day it was like, “I can’t really retire now because I really haven’t done anything yet”, you know? I want to see where this will lead me, because now I can control it all. Before, I wasn’t controlling it. I was just being swept by the wind, this way or that way.’1
All that remained was to persuade disillusioned audiences to believe it too. A Bob Dylan who could still sing ‘anything’? Proof of the proposition would not be the work of moments. The 1980s had produced a mountain of lousy reviews for which amends were required. One of the decade’s many glib formulations was as applicable to Dylan as it was to any beleaguered politician: he had a credibility problem, a big one. Just ‘to go out and play these songs’ would not be enough.
Whatever took place in Switzerland, the alleged Locarno incident became a declaration of faith. It has been used since by fans to explain everything about Dylan the dedicated, even obsessive, public performer. The phenomenon known as the Never-Ending Tour, 2,480 concerts in 24 years as of the end of 2012, is always said to have begun in California on 7 June 1988, and is always explained by what happened to the artist in Switzerland. There remains the sense, nevertheless, that a few things are missing from the story.
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On paper, the 13-song Concord set list does not these days seem like anything out of the ordinary for a Dylan show. A little brief at 70 minutes, perhaps, certainly when compared with the concerts of ‘66 and ‘76, and with concerts since, but that’s of no account: with this artist, only quality is supposed to matter. Dylan opened with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and closed with ‘Maggie’s Farm’ for an encore. He gave the crowd ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, second to last. Along the way there was a fair enough résumé of his career, from the first album’s traditional ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ through ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ to ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ from Blood on the Tracks and God’s own ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. Most of the choices were not startling. The American Civil War ‘Irish’ ballad ‘Lakes of Ponchartrain’ – Creole would be a better description – made for an interesting preface to ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ in an acoustic sequence. It introduced, or rather reintroduced, traditional music to the concerts: thereafter one obscure piece or another would feature in the set. But the rest of the songs performed at Concord would have been familiar to anyone who knew anything about Dylan.
The first real surprise had come, in fact, when he took the stage. The girl singers, the star accompanists, the instrumental paraphernalia and the rest of the supporting cast were gone. Aside from an appearance by Neil Young – barely audible on the recording – it was just Dylan and three musicians. The intention, like the musical setting, was stark. For the first time in years, he was leaving himself with no place to hide.
He was meanwhile refusing to employ his famous harmonica while granting the first public performances to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. That was worth noting. But the important fact, faintly astonishing in 1988, was that Dylan was audibly performing as though he cared, as though his songs meant something once more. Whatever the excuses made for the Temple in Flames ‘scorched earth’ approach – and some of those are elaborate – this new demeanour amounted to an acknowledgement of how low he had sunk. Now he was a serious performer again.
It didn’t make for a flawless first show. Dylan’s rehabilitation had barely begun. Equally, Concord’s implicit manifesto was no guarantee that every performance would be unimpeachable in the years ahead: anything but. In Sacramento two nights later the tour’s next stop saw another half-empty amphitheatre and a set drastically curtailed for reasons only Dylan could explain. Press reviews were poor, in the main, perhaps because journalists had closed their minds instead of opening their eyes and ears. Nevertheless, Dylan still gave them a certain amount of ammunition, not least with his perverse decision to perform one fairly new song from Down in the Groove, the lamentable ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, amid the purest products of the songwriter’s art. Assembled for Hearts of Fire, that gutted turkey of a movie, and inserted between ‘Girl From the North Country’ and ‘Just Like a Woman’, a song that counted as close to the least in Dylan’s canon did no more than remind listeners of how good a writer he once had been.
It was a minor detail. The recording says that the crowd, though sparse, was enthusiastic. The Sacramento audience had reason. Dylan’s trio of musicians had begun to carve a little piece of legend for themselves. G.E. Smith, guitarist and bandleader from TV’s Saturday Night Live satire show, was intuitive, empathetic and sure of himself. The artist had meanwhile found in Kenny Aaronson (bass) and Christopher Parker (drums) a rhythm section that would never let him down, no matter what might transpire. A lot could yet transpire, but Dylan had made his choices. What remained to be seen was their effect, if any, on his writing, the core of his art.
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Devotees of the tour-without-end don’t necessarily see things that way. They are avid, year upon year, for word of a new song being performed somewhere in the world, but their fascination with a cultural phenomenon has as much to do with the supposedly ever-changing manner of Dylan’s renditions as it has to do with a body of recorded work. For these believers, the public stage is the true locus of his art. The appearance of another Bob Dylan album is, in a strange way, secondary. Predictably, the artist doesn’t see things that way. He despises the idea that he is adrift, like some musical Ancient Mariner, on a never-ending voyage, but he also rejects the claim that he is forever rearranging his songs. In 2006, he said as much to the writer Jonathan Lethem.2
I’ve heard it said, you’ve probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. The arrangements don’t change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that’s all. You can’t change the arrangement night after night – it’s impossible.
Undaunted, some of his fans possess hundreds of bootleg concert recordings. In legend, a few have collections numbering in the thousands, of show after show after show. The inner circle of adherents think nothing of crossing America, Europe, or the ocean between to follow Dylan from place to place when he tours. They have seen the ‘nightly ritual’ dozens of times and have never tired of him, despite all his failures and provocations. At venues across the world this fraternity, by now old friends, will gather. Set lists from far-flung cities circulate among them, each one pored over for evidence of ‘revealing’ choices (or a veteran singer’s whims).
So in Brittany on 22 July 2012, he performed ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ for the first and only time in 86 shows that year? He did ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Under the Red Sky’ only once in the entire tour? Fascinating; tell me more. These days, internet databases, Dylan’s own not least, keep track of such important facts. Those for whom the statistical record is better than a hobby find nothing peculiar in the endless pursuit of details. They are less likely to remember that Dylan endured booing at Brittany’s Festival Vieilles Charrues in Carhaix from a section of the crowd apparently demanding more modern (or more intelligible) entertainment. Committed fans do not long discuss the fact that Tour 2012 – ‘Don’t You Dare Miss It’, as the poster said – went through some rough patches.
The art-in-progress failed to sell out at most stops along the way, even in the United States. In a few places, concerts were cancelled, apparently because of a lack of local interest. Media critics were meanwhile, it is fair to say, divided. Some things had not changed since 1988.
Of a performance at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent on 30 June 2012, the reviewer from London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Somehow between the magic of his fantastic songs, the liquid groove of his superb band, the mysterious charisma of the legend himself and the will of the crowd to enjoy the moment, something strange and truly spectacular happens, a thrilling performance that nobody, perhaps not even the man at its centre, can really explain.’ Elsewhere it was recorded that in Toronto that November, ‘The 71-year-old Dylan spent the bulk of [the show] seated behind a piano at stage right, barking, braying and hoarking [sic] unintelligible linguistic formations into the microphone and banging out ill-disciplined boogie-woogie licks on the keys.’3
At Concord in 1988 Dylan was making his stand, fending off retirement, and attempting to save his career. A quarter of a century on, even those who found his ruined voice ridiculous had given up asking why he refused to quit. Were his overheads so high and his record sales so low that he needed to keep going, night after night? Surely songwriting royalties, his songwriting royalties above all, would maintain him in comfort and style?
It seemed that the Dylan who had once been able to transform himself in an instant, to astonish with the speed of his changes, was chained to an idea. He could protest all he liked that his working habits were misrepresented. For the media, for his audience, he was the man on the never-ending tour.
His exasperated response has become familiar since he advised readers of the sleeve notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong album to avoid becoming ‘bewildered by the Never-Ending Tour chatter’. That particular tour had ended, he wrote, ‘in ‘91 with the departure of guitarist G.E. Smith’. Since then, Dylan has treated interviewers to variations on the theme of ‘Playing is a job. My trade’ (to Sweden’s Aftonbladet in 1997), or to discourses on longevity in the performing arts. A typical example of the latter appeared in Rolling Stone in May 2009.4
You never heard about Oral Roberts and Billy Graham being on some Never Ending Preacher Tour. Does anybody ever call Henry Ford a Never Ending Car Builder? Is Rupert Murdoch a Never Ending Media Tycoon? What about Donald Trump? Does anybody say he has a Never Ending Quest to build buildings? Picasso painted well into his 90s. And Paul Newman raced cars in his 70s. Anybody ever say that Duke Ellington was on a Never Ending Bandstand Tour? But critics apply a different standard to me for some reason. But we’re living in an age of breaking everything down into simplistic terms, aren’t we? These days, people are lucky to have a job. Any job. So critics might be uncomfortable with me. Maybe they can’t figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do.
The intensity of this rebuttal suggested a man who was sick and tired of being buried under still another pile of legend. There was also a hint, however, of something like fear, fear of retirement, fear of the road’s end, fear of having to decide what else he might do with himself. He wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight.
Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire. People who have jobs on an assembly line, or are doing some kind of drudgery work, they might be thinking of retiring every day. Every man should learn a trade. It’s different than a job. My music wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early.
This otherwise unimpeachable defence overlooks the fact that the speaker had spent the best part of eight years (1966 to 1974) staying as far away from the public stage as possible. Even when he was performing in the years before and afterwards, the former ‘song and dance man’ did not talk about his work in terms of a trade or a vocation. And what did Dylan mean, exactly, by claiming that his music ‘wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early’? It sounded as though he was lashed to the wheel, forbidden by the music itself to alter course. At the time of the interview he was 67, about to turn 68, and well beyond the usual age for early retirement.
He won’t allow the adjective ‘never-ending’ to be attached to his concert schedule and yet he describes his annual peregrinations as a task to which he is bound. He has millions of miles under his belt. After a quarter of a century a map of Dylan’s travels across the continents would probably resemble a chart of the planet’s prevailing winds and ceaseless tides. As 2013 began, plans were being laid for his return to Japan and Australia. For those who track Dylan in perpetual motion, the fun quiz game in the twenty-first century is to name a city he has not yet visited. For all that, the idea that he is forbidden from retiring by the demands of art is, at best, an appropriately poetic conceit.
He doesn’t have to do this. Sometimes he sounds as though he has neither a desire nor a taste for it, but he certainly has the wealth and the opportunities to allow him to take up any other pursuit he might fancy. Yet touring is what he does. More precisely, it seems that today, after everything, Bob Dylan only truly exists through and within public performances. He has been known to make a virtue of the fact. But when yet another innocent dope of a journalist tells this Ancient Mariner that his voyage is unending, he recoils. Just when did Dylan shoot the albatross?
Neither did he label his touring schedule ‘never-ending’ nor once conspire in the elaborate accompanying mythology. That much is true. As Michael Gray has demonstrated in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), it was a helpful journalist for Q magazine who turned a question about tours into a printed statement by his subject.5 All that Dylan said in an interview on Rhode Island in October of 1989 was, ‘Oh, it’s all the same tour.’ From a single casual remark an edifice of speculation and theory has been constructed. Yet even while knowing full well that Dylan detests and rejects the adjective, journalists, authors and diehard fans still refuse to relinquish their Never-Ending Tour. Sometimes a legend is too good to waste.
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In 1988, the featured artist and his band picked up speed soon enough. Even as he struggled to sell records, Dylan began to acquire a new reputation as a concert performer. His choices from his vast catalogue of songs became more eclectic. For those who remembered Dylan the folk singer – and for plenty of those who did not – the traditional pieces performed with only Smith as an accompanist provided another source of fascination. Reviewing one show towards the end of the tour, Michael Gray would observe that ‘Dylan’s avid alignment with such material, for the first time in more than two decades, holds out tantalising possibilities as to where he might land next time he jumps’.6 In the meantime, shows grew longer, the critics warmer. At the end of July, Edna Gundersen of USA Today was writing of the tour as ‘the sleeper hit of the season’ and quoting Rolling Stone magazine’s welcome for the performer’s ‘extraordinary no-frills rock & roll’.7 At Berkeley, on the third night, Dylan enjoyed the first of several triumphs. Soon enough, the tour was being extended.
The emerging argument in the artist’s defence was that, with his vast stock of songs, record sales no longer really mattered. He began to make the point himself: he was a performer, first and foremost. His real work happened on stage. The recordings were sketches, at best, mere glimpses of the art attempted and frustrated in the alienating confines of the cursed recording studio. Only in performance could the songs be fully realised. Before July was out, Dylan was telling USA Today’s readers:
Touring is part of playing. Anybody can sit in the studio and make records, but that’s unrealistic and they can’t possibly be a meaningful performer. You have to do it night after night to understand what it’s all about.
Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, as the tours rolled on endlessly, he was sticking to his theme, explaining to the New York Times that ‘A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing’.
I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be disappointed in daily life. But the cure-all for all that is to get on the stage, and that’s why performers do it. But in saying that, I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity. I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.8
Such claims were plausible, for a while, but they failed to answer every question. Was the occasional reworking of old material a true substitute for creativity, for a lost songwriting gift? If his records didn’t sell, what size of an audience was he entitled to expect? In the notes for World Gone Wrong Dylan would write of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’. It would be a necessary step, perhaps. The album and its predecessor, 1992’s Good As I Been to You, would represent a reimmersion in the original sources of his music. In some sense, Dylan would repeat the course of study he had undertaken back in Greenwich Village, in his early days. But how could the wandering life of a touring performer allow him to ‘go forward’ if it involved nothing more than the endless reshuffling of his back pages? That didn’t seem feasible. After all, World Gone Wrong would appear almost at the mid-point of a seven-year creative intermission in which Dylan released not a single new, self-written song. His habit of performing ancient folk and blues tunes during his concerts no doubt had a salutary effect, but it did not count as any kind of substitute for original work.
Still, for a star down on his luck in 1988 a small band was relatively cheap to run and easy, if the only issue was music, to lead. Freeing himself from the paraphernalia of previous years also forced Dylan once again to pay real heed to the songs he was performing. Sacking the backing vocalists (wife included) forced everyone’s attention, not least his own, back to the person whose name was on the tickets, big and bold. It also helped that the artist had reached the point at which, ironically enough, his choices carried few risks. Since his critical stock was on the floor when he took to the stage in Concord on 7 June, Dylan was in one sense liberated. Nothing was expected of him. It therefore didn’t much matter what he did.
The beginnings of a like process, the first glimmerings, might have been at work in the part of his brain where songs began. They would be slow to emerge, but after the crushing failures of his recent albums there was, perversely, nothing to inhibit them. The intense pressure always to perform as a writer had been all but guaranteed to leave Dylan making elaborate excuses for failure when potency deserted him. But after Down in the Groove, how much worse could things become? Defeat was, weirdly, an opportunity. He had been written off so thoroughly it hardly mattered what he wrote. Finally he had been freed of that crushing ‘legend’, the great and forever matchless Bob Dylan. There was something to be said for burning bridges.
The artist certainly understood the logic. He had applied it himself to excuse the Self Portrait album when that odd, disconcerting work was derided after its release in 1970. In one of the stories he had told back then, the project was presented as a deliberately self-destructive act. It had been intended, supposedly, to free him from the burden of expectations. An entire double album sacrificed just to correct a few misperceptions? You don’t have to believe the tale to grasp that, by the middle of 1988, fate and a bunch of shoddy releases had indeed left Dylan with next to nothing by way of reputation and with nothing left to lose. It was entirely logical for a voice in his head to say, ‘What the hell.’
The contrary version can be found in Chronicles: Volume One.9 By his own account, Dylan had stopped even thinking of himself as a writer of songs. By 1988, supposedly, he had no desire to pursue the art. He had written enough and had nothing more to prove. In his recollection, he had reached the point at which he no longer expected to write another song. Somehow, nevertheless, he did just that. Typically, Dylan’s book fails to explain just what changed or why the change took place. By the beginning of March 1989 this artist, the one who had been planning his retirement, would have enough material for another album, with plenty to spare. And plenty to waste.
You could just as well believe, of course, that once again bits of song simply began to come to him, as so often before, as if from out of the air. He had no other explanation for his creativity. By and large, he did not attempt to tamper with the mystery, to force himself or force the process. Nevertheless, after he and his three-piece band had rolled across the republic between June and October in 1988 to end up with a final triumph on their hands during a four-night stand at Radio City Music Hall in New York – causing a regiment of critics to perform a smart if inelegant about-face – he might just have begun to dare to dream again. Clearly, he had begun to scribble.
In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would describe writing perhaps 20 songs while he recovered from his hand injury. He would say they had come very easily in the end, but he would not bother to explain the reasons for this sudden upsurge from what had seemed a long-dry well. Chronicles is elusive by design. The sole piece of dating evidence given in the text is a reference to the presidential election of 1988 as a possible background to a song called ‘Political World’. That scarcely narrows the range of possibilities. The last Dylan concert of the year took place on 19 October; the nation chose George H.W. Bush in preference to Michael Dukakis on 8 November. In other words, the artist started writing when the year was almost at an end. Though he regarded the first song that came to him as a kind of reawakening, like the first sign of a dreaming patient emerging from deep sedation, the author was not exactly punctilious in documenting such matters.
Equally, it is not known when Dylan decided that the bruises inflicted after Down in the Groove had healed sufficiently for him to risk a return to the studio. It is not known, though it involves a decent guess, if all the praise he had won for the tour known as Interstate 88 restored his confidence after so many dismal years. A lot isn’t known. For facts, we can mention the release of Dylan & the Dead in February 1989, an event that rendered any thought of an album drawn from his more recent concert work impossible, more’s the pity. We can remember, too, that it wasn’t remotely feasible for this recording artist just to stop recording. In order to tour he needed product, preferably product of some small merit, to keep himself in the public eye. He also had an obligation, as ever, to Columbia. Despite all the later talk of a planned retirement, Dylan had accepted a new contract from the company just as it was being taken over by the Japanese conglomerate Sony. Thanks presumably to fans of his collaborators, Dylan & the Dead would not fail as catastrophically as Real Live, but it would get no higher than 37 on the American chart. Like it or not, a degree of commercial pressure remained a fact of life for anyone, legendary or not, who hoped to sell concert tickets. Finally, there is the fact that over dinner one night the U2 singer Bono had recommended the producer Daniel Lanois to Dylan.
He had watched this 37-year-old Canadian at work in New Orleans with the soul-singing Neville Brothers when the tour reached the city towards the end of September. Dylan had liked what he heard. It seems he had also enjoyed the kind of ambience Lanois tried to create when he was recording. It was not quite the Woodstock basement, but it was based on the semi-subversive idea that technology should come to the artist, not the other way around. In essence, Lanois championed a sophisticated version of the kind of mobile recording set-up that Dylan had tried and failed to provide for himself while making Street-Legal at Rundown in Santa Monica. The mock-domestic setting the producer offered in New Orleans with his ‘Studio on the Move’ was vastly preferable to the usual music-industry padded cells that had given the artist the horrors for years. Perhaps this time Dylan could make an album that actually sounded the way he wanted it to sound. If, that is, he knew what he wanted.
In Dylan’s eyes, Lanois also had the advantage of being a musician, not unsuccessful, in his own right. Furthermore, the Quebecker was an advocate of ‘atmosphere’, of the inherent worth of a great performance over anyone’s arbitrary notion of technical perfection. He detested the practice of separating the control console from the musicians. He liked ‘organic’ sound, ambient reverb and big, natural drum noises. Lanois would call the sound he created for Oh Mercy ‘swampy’. If it meant anything, the word would recognise the fact that there was no point in trying to turn a Bob Dylan album into an audiophile’s dream. That was no reason, equally, to allow it to sound, as certain of the artist’s albums had sounded, like a cheap radio heard through a mattress. Lanois took a great many pains to make his recordings sound ‘natural’.
Dylan would tell the story of the making of Oh Mercy in Chronicles: Volume One. It would be a puzzling narrative, one that would not accord in every last particular with other accounts. It would describe the artist’s state of mind scrupulously, however. Here was a man who hesitated to begin work when he arrived in New Orleans, keeping Lanois and everyone else waiting. Here, too, was a Dylan who had a notebook full of songs, just for a change, but no real opinion, none he could articulate, about how they should sound, or any clear thoughts about the kind of album he wanted to make. As it transpired, he liked the idea of working with Lanois in New Orleans better than he liked the reality. A process that should have gone smoothly became, in Dylan’s later telling, a slow, difficult and fraught business. He wanted to believe he had left the aggravations of album-making behind, but before long his relations with Lanois grew tense as the two failed to agree over issues large and small. A friendship survived, but it was tested severely. Such circumstances were never conducive to clearheaded decision-making on Dylan’s part.
During the first couple of weeks of recording he was as difficult as only he could be, rejecting every last thing attempted by the producer and his trusted local musicians. Dylan sat around strumming his guitar while Lanois struggled, temper fraying, to get any sort of useful contribution out of him. To those present, it wasn’t clear why or if this artist even wanted to make an album. As Mark Howard, the engineer, would remember, ‘there came this one point when Dan [Lanois] finally had a freak-out. He just wanted Dylan to smarten up. It became . . . not a yelling match, but uncomfortable.’ The artist nevertheless imposed his will in ways that could seem arbitrary, selfish, or designed just to show who was in charge. Dylan was a veteran of studio power struggles, though why he should have set out from the start to make life impossible for the producer he had chosen, a lauded professional who had accepted the job having heard only fragments of a few songs, is inexplicable. The legend’s aim seemed to be, in any case, to inflict as much inconvenience as he could on those around him, as though to test their obedience. Lanois, more than a little star-struck, was ready to put up with almost anything for the sake of a Dylan album. ‘Bob had a rule,’ he would recall. ‘We only recorded at night. I think he’s right about that: the body is ready to accommodate a certain tempo at night-time. I think it’s something to do with the pushing and pulling of the moon. At night-time we’re ready to be more mysterious and dark. Oh Mercy’s about that.’10
So it began, yet again, the making of an album that should have been great. As with Infidels, the artist embarked on the production of a body of work that these days can only be appreciated if you take account of the songs Dylan chose – wilfully, perversely – to leave aside from the album he would release for sale. Oh Mercy would still turn out to be a very good set. It would return Dylan to that state of grace called critical favour, at least for a time. But once again it would leave anyone who cared about his art to put together a home-assembly kit from bootlegs and Bootleg Series releases. It remains the only way to get a clear idea of what was achieved in March and April 1989. Either Dylan was still refusing to put everything he had into a single album, or his understanding of what he was doing was a secret he didn’t care to reveal. In either event, he would seem like an artist with a peculiar ambivalence towards his work. For him, it seemed, even the best of his songs remained disposable and replaceable. That attitude relied on the conviction that there were plenty more where those came from. The songwriter who had barely survived a long spell on short rations would behave, in short, as though a brief season of plenty could never end.
Dylan has never been straightforward about his understanding of his gifts, perhaps because his relationship with them is complicated, perhaps because the relationship has changed over the years. He takes an expert interest in the craft of songwriting, as you might expect, yet in Chronicles can be found describing himself as utterly bereft of interest in writing before, all of a sudden, he began to write the Oh Mercy songs. He has often denied being a disciplined writer, the kind who clocks in dutifully at a desk each day. In some of his descriptions of his art he truly does jot down notes that could as easily come to nothing as form the makings of a song. Equally, in some phases of his career – before recording Highway 61 Revisited or prior to Blood on the Tracks – he has indeed sat down and done his best to fill a notebook. At other times he has embarked on albums with little better than a handful of scraps at his disposal.
The fragments of songs Lanois heard before the recording sessions that became Oh Mercy were accompanied by plaintive-sounding questions from the writer. Did the producer think this or that bit of verse and basic piano melody could make a song? Clearly, Dylan didn’t know. You are inclined to believe him, then, when he denies having much understanding of his own talent. Sometimes songs just come. He accepts or refuses the power of an idea according to his mood. That kind of claim makes his gift sound like a fragile thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The inference remains, therefore, that if Dylan can’t tell whether a fragment has the makings of a song he is liable to be a poor judge of the finished product.
The largest crime he committed during the making of Oh Mercy was the omission of a song entitled ‘Series of Dreams’, closely followed by the decision to drop another work called ‘Dignity’. A third piece, ‘Born in Time’, would turn up on a subsequent Dylan album, but in a rendering that would sound undistinguished when set beside the track discarded from Oh Mercy. When the magnificent Tell Tale Signs, volume eight in the Bootleg Series, appeared in October 2008 with its outtakes and ‘previously unreleased’ tracks, anyone with an interest in Dylan could just about piece together the work that might have been. It would cost the fan the price of two albums, the second running to three discs if you felt extravagant, for the privilege. In effect, though Oh Mercy still contained songs of rare quality, songs such as ‘Most of the Time’, ‘What Was it You Wanted’ and ‘Ring Them Bells’, it had been deprived of 30 per cent of its power.
The grievous loss was ‘Series of Dreams’, a song unlike any that Dylan had produced before, one that proved he was no extinct creative volcano and vindicated the Lanois method. By the artist’s standards the skeletal lyrics were nothing special, yet the song truly did manage to capture the haunting power of a dream. Furthermore, it was a vivid illustration of a theme that had long underpinned Dylan’s work and thought, less a question of ‘What’s truly real?’ than an enquiry into our ability ever to experience reality as anything more than a succession of overlapping dreams. On one reading, the speaker in the song could simply be describing what seemed to go on in his head while he slept. In one dream
. . . numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb
Yet these dreams, twisted one within the other, might also be happening in a dream-like reality. Lanois has drums that pound like an insistent question as the singer in the first verse describes himself thinking about his series of dreams, but then saying that the thinking itself, about nothing ‘specific’, also felt ‘Like a dream, when someone wakes up and screams’. In this human condition, as Dylan observes, there is ‘no exit in any direction’ and no way to break out: ‘the cards are no good that you’re holding / Unless they’re from another world.’
So brilliant was the track, Dylan clearly had no choice – or so the jaundiced listener is left to conclude – but to leave it off the album. The best of the songs that survived his veto – and the best are very good – were enhanced by that ‘swampy’ Lanois production, a design for the album’s overall sound that seemed to manipulate light, shade and ambient temperature within the verses. Some still find the producer’s method too fussy, the results contrived and artificial, but it suited Dylan’s words. ‘What Was It You Wanted’ sounded sepulchral; the lovely ‘Shooting Star’ felt elegiac; ‘Most of the Time’ was in its essence nocturnal. So much could be taken for granted, you might think, as part of a producer’s job. Yet Lanois and his musicians complemented Dylan’s lyrics in their arrangements and playing with an assurance that no one else had achieved, the artist least of all in his attempts to manage his recording sessions, in a very long time.
In parts, Oh Mercy would have a kind of Southern Gothic quality. The mysterious if melodramatic ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’, the tale of a Bible-quoting stranger with whom a woman disappears leaving no explanation or clue, showed that Dylan had not lost his interest in punishment and sin. ‘Most of the Time’, the stoical confessions of a man no better than ‘halfway content’, sounded like evidence that age had begun to take its toll on a writer approaching his 48th birthday. The title ‘What Good Am I?’ spoke for itself: one writer, at least, was not impressed by Bob Dylan. ‘What Was it You Wanted’, solemn as a walk in a graveyard, was the artist at his most icily dismissive, and his most commanding.
What was it you wanted
I ain’t keeping score
Are you the same person
That was here before?
Yet still he lacked the crucial ability to make important decisions and get them right. Worse, indecision only made Dylan stubborn. With his unparalleled record of achievement, who was to tell him he was wrong? He was not, in any case, some gauche teen idol to be commanded by a producer; all the power was his. Lanois had been granted as much of a say as anyone Dylan had worked with since Jerry Wexler during the Slow Train Coming sessions, but when push came to shove only one person called the shots. By all accounts, Lanois argued hard for ‘Series of Dreams’. It was the one song above all others he hoped to protect from the artist’s reckless self-censorship. The producer was proud of his contribution to the track, in each of its several incarnations, and rightly so. He had understood instantly that Dylan was embarked on a new kind of writing. Lanois had sensed the possibilities and had struggled to bring them to fruition. As far as he was concerned, Oh Mercy could and should have been the start of something. In the end, Dylan was once more the chief obstacle to what could have been one of the finest of Bob Dylan albums. He still managed to emerge with an album that was pretty fair. Above all, it was no Down in the Groove.
Rolling Stone would decide that ‘Oh Mercy explores moral concerns and matters of the heart with a depth and seriousness Dylan has not demonstrated since Desire’.11 The habit of measuring the artist against a yardstick he himself had shaped was, as ever, near pointless, but it at least served to affirm the truth that there was some flame of creative life left in him. Oh Mercy would reach number 30 on the American chart, a showing that was both indifferent and far better than anything Down in the Groove had managed. British buyers meanwhile placed the new album at number six, a more reasonable verdict. If still another comeback was required, Oh Mercy was surely a start.
*
In May 1989, Dylan once again toured Europe. Afterwards, he set running the tale of the never-ending odyssey by playing on in America from July until September. That autumn he reorganised his management, giving the job of handling his concert bookings to one Jeff Kramer in Los Angeles and responsibility for his New York office to another Jeff named Rosen. Dylan also turned up, incongruously, at a telethon in LA for Chabad-Lubavitch, scaring up a whole new flock of ‘rumours’, which is to say guesses, about the nature of his religious beliefs. In the spring of 1990, meanwhile, he busied himself once again with the largely pointless if lucrative Traveling Wilburys project. Roy Orbison had died suddenly during the previous December. The ageing ad hoc celebrity boy band were deprived of a guiding spirit, but the survivors pressed on regardless. They were rewarded, if that’s the word, with a flaccid little album that would come nowhere near to matching the sales of its predecessor.
Amid all this, with plans being laid for a year of touring that would encompass 92 shows, the artist was attempting to make another album of his own. This time the fashionable Was brothers, David and Don, joined the list of music industry Dylan fans who thought they could master the job of producing his work. The brothers hired the likes of Al Kooper and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan as the core of a top-heavy if illustrious musical crew. George Harrison, Elton John, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby and other famous names put in appearances in the studio, but the added scattering of glitter did nothing to improve Under the Red Sky. After the album’s release in September, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice would decide to ‘rate’ the album more highly than Oh Mercy, apparently because the new set showed ‘post-punk’ tendencies, whatever those might be, but most attentive reviewers would be as dismissive as most record-buyers. Dylan’s downward slide would resume: 38 in America, number 13 in Britain. With one good leftover from Oh Mercy, a fine mock children’s song that gave the album its title and one terrific track inserted to compensate the diehards, Under the Red Sky would get what it deserved in the marketplace. Loyal buyers deserved some small recompense, in whatever shape or form, for a set that began with a thing called ‘Wiggle Wiggle’.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle in your boots and shoes
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, you got nothing to lose
A piece of fun? Just a nonsense song for the sake of it? Those are comforting thoughts, no doubt. Instead, a track that has pole position in any contest to find the worst thing Dylan ever recorded sounds like a demonstration of his contempt for his industry, for his work and for the album-making process. To choose the ‘Wiggle’ horror as the album’s opening number smacked of something more than carelessness. With this, so it seemed, the artist was defying enemies and allies alike. Along with a second-best version of the marvellous ‘Born in Time’, the song called ‘Handy Dandy’ was the compensation, a piece in which Dylan described and adopted a fascinating, funny and devilish persona, part gangster, part Cotton Club bandleader, part demonic presence. It was, in essence, a recasting of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with a few rough grains of the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ from 1963 thrown in, but none the worse for that. Dylan at least sounded as if he was briefly happy in his work. For the rest, it was an ill-written album, one from which plenty of ‘analysis’ could be derived, but precious little real listening pleasure. For what it’s worth, Dylan himself has never had good things to say about Under the Red Sky.
He went back on the road as though going on the run. Performance now truly did seem to be the entire point of this artist’s existence. In January, after the first sessions for the album, he had made a dash for Brazil, France and England, finishing up with six long-remembered nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Once Under the Red Sky and the last Traveling Wilburys sessions were complete, he was gone again, to Canada and the northern United States. In midsummer he could be found at any European festival anyone cared to name. By August he was hitting the homeland once more and still touring – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – by the middle of November. The idea that Dylan was doing all of this to promote an album he disliked and the public disdained was laughable. Whatever the reality of the ‘Locarno epiphany’, that mythologised moment of truth, it was obvious that he could not or would not stop performing. Another trait was becoming plain. Some shows could be incandescently brilliant, others utterly risible. Those who bought tickets for a Dylan concert were given no guarantee as to the version of the artist liable to turn up.
So much was becoming common knowledge within his industry. What was not yet known was the significance of Under the Red Sky, an album that would remain ‘underrated’ for very good reasons. Of itself, that needn’t have mattered. Dylan’s lyrical gift had ebbed since Oh Mercy, but he had still managed to come up with ten original songs for the Red Sky project. He had made poor albums often enough before, in any case, and hauled himself out of the pit. There was nothing to say he wouldn’t recover again. His riposte to those who had gathered for his wake after Down in the Groove had been robust enough, after all. The several failures of Under the Red Sky would surely be forgotten in time. What no one knew was that those were to be the last songs, good or bad, that Dylan would write and record in seven years.
*
It was as though he went underground. No one still hoped to hear this artist voice any sort of comment on the nation’s affairs, or ever again reset the compass for popular music, but the absence of his songs would become almost disorienting for those who had followed his career. The lacuna would have no precedent. Dylan had endured a savage writer’s block before and survived. He had suffered ‘amnesia’ like an actual neurological wound. In the early 1970s he had struggled long and hard to find creative alternatives to the miraculous, unforced spontaneity of the ’60s. But even the hiatus between New Morning’s release in October 1970 and the Planet Waves ‘comeback’ of January ’74 had not been wholly barren. There had not been much writing to underpin the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack in July 1973, but ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ had still counted as a lot better than nothing. What began after Under the Red Sky was a crisis of a different order, one that seemed only to deepen when Dylan talked amiably, expertly, about the art of songwriting to Paul Zollo of SongTalk magazine in April 1991, or when he claimed to a journalist in April 1994 to have ‘a bunch of papers and notes and things lying around. Only time is going to tell when those things come out.’12 Year after year, nothing would ‘come out’. If a couple of sparse albums of old folk and blues tunes were meanwhile to be Dylan’s oblique judgement on modern times, the statement made would prove hard to decipher. Beyond those enigmatic offerings he would fall silent as a recording artist, as though one part of him had ceased to exist.
Instead, he would be out there somewhere, ceaselessly in motion, entirely public and utterly inscrutable, somehow barely visible under all the blazing stage lights. You could catch him if his tour came to your town – and there was always a good chance of that – but save for an outbreak of strangeness, a performance of the Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ or Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’, it would become hard to describe what he was doing or why. Witnesses at some of his shows would begin to claim that he wasn’t necessarily sober during every performance. One city would report that the concert was dire, another that their Dylan had been magnificent. In part, the tale of the never-ending tour would be born of the self-evident fact that for fans there would be nothing else to go on during seven lean years. An entire aesthetic would be devised, one that persists to this day, to justify the claim that Dylan’s creativity survived and thrived in the stark, undeniable absence of new songs.
The America he traversed in the early 1990s had decided to remain conservative. The Iran-Contra scandal, the fascinating tale of the Reagan White House flogging missiles to Iranian hostage-takers in order to fund murderous Nicaraguan insurgents, had not harmed the Republican cause in the slightest during the 1988 election. Barely half the electorate had bothered to vote, but George H.W. Bush had still put the Democrats and his opponent, Michael Dukakis, to disorderly flight. By 1990, some 15 per cent of Americans were still failing to graduate from high school, yet that was exactly the percentage of their fellow citizens who had been smitten by ‘home computing’. An alliterative mouthful, the World Wide Web, was about to go public while conservative commentators fretted over porn, public morality and the subversive habit they called political correctness. Inspired by Robert Bly’s book Iron John a few stout men were off in the woods hunting for masculinity while a few others were being handcuffed for crimes committed in the Wall Street undergrowth. In Iraq, a place that could be found on most maps, a former American ally named Saddam Hussein would spend the summer of 1990 preparing to invade a kingdom built on oilfields called Kuwait. The United States had not been in a real war for a while.
In 1990 and 1991, nevertheless, a Bob Dylan fan was plotting to remove Bush from the Oval Office. The connection between Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and the old New Left as the artist once had known it was remote, by no accident, but a lot of things had changed. The breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had seen the Soviet regime begin to unravel like a threadbare banner. On the day after Christmas in 1991 the USSR would be gone, formally and for good. Republicans would claim most of the credit on Reagan’s behalf, and even allow a little of it to Bush, but at first they would fail to notice that much of their self-declared purpose and a lot of their rabble-rousing opportunities had disappeared with the Russian reds. A short war over Kuwait had done Bush’s opinion-poll ratings a power of good in the early part of 1991, but suddenly the ground was shifting, all but unnoticed, under Republican feet. If there was no longer a need to fear the nuclear war that had sometimes seemed inevitable when Reagan was in charge, what need was there for a war party addicted to defence spending? Political territory that had seemed secure for conservatives was put at risk while the evil empire folded and the economy struggled. A Democrat who represented youth, change, hope and other non-specific virtues while tending to the concerns of middle America might be in with a shout: such was Clinton’s insight, even if his own party needed a lot of convincing.
This candidate was certainly young enough. Dylan’s junior by five years, Clinton was the first presidential contender in the artist’s career who did not regard him as the perplexing voice of a coming generation. In 1991, Dylan would be 50, no one’s idea of the voice of youth, rebellious or otherwise. Yet what was Clinton if not proudly, even aggressively youthful, though ‘moderate’ in all things (save his sexual behaviour)? He could command a stage and inspire a crowd as well as any famous singer. Clinton was, after all, a performer first and last. He had a genius for it. He also knew what he was talking about, down to the last abstruse detail, but he could speak as though talking personally to each and every member of an audience. The candidate had charisma, ‘voice of a generation’ charisma.
Against this master politician planted firmly on the centre ground a new strain of conservatism was beginning to organise even as Bush luxuriated in his poll ratings after the first Gulf war. Right-wingers of this variety hated Clinton’s guts. They hated him most of all simply because he was brilliant. Their loathing became frantic when it became obvious in the summer of 1992 that this Democrat was dangerous, that he could win and go on winning. Conservatives turned on Bush, the traitor in the Oval Office with his effete talk of common ground, but their real impulse was a fear of losing power. The ’80s had been a good time to be rich and right wing. That was – wasn’t it? – the American way of life, to be defended at all costs. Clinton was no more left wing than he was celibate, of course, but that didn’t matter. There was the risk that he would preside over the return of ungodly liberalism if his party gained control of the government. While Dylan turned the corner into middle age, old battle lines were being redrawn. A fact was rapidly becoming a cliché. Amid Clinton’s victories in the 1990s the country would divide evenly and, it seemed, beyond hope of reconciliation into the so-called 50 – 50 nation. Where would an artist stand in that kind of American landscape? Dylan the songwriter would be silent for years on end, as though lost in a fog, but reality would find him in the end. The present, as he would realise, begins in the past.
*
Those who track the artist’s activities have a job on their hands when they list, tabulate, annotate, adumbrate and otherwise pore over the first half of the ’90s. Unless you have the philosophical serenity of a data-entry clerk, it must be tedious work. Tour after tour after tour, musician following musician, one-night stand following one-night stand in city after city, country after country: the bare historical facts of places and dates are not, of themselves, enthralling. Whatever the level of art created, the statistical record of the unending tour is the opposite of fascinating reading. Eleven musicians were on retainers from Dylan between the summer of 1988 and the autumn of 1992. Some of them were crucial to his performances; not one played a significant role in his life. He worked almost ceaselessly. It left the rest of his existence all but empty of incident.
In August 1990, his marriage to Carolyn Dennis had ended. Since the final dissolution in 1992 she has barely said a word about the relationship and nothing about the reasons for the split. In 2001, provoked finally by revelations in the Howard Sounes biography Down the Highway that a child had been born and a wedding had taken place, Dennis did release a brief statement. Plainly unhappy that her privacy had been breached, she said: ‘To portray Bob as hiding his daughter is just malicious and ridiculous. That is something he would never do. Bob has been a wonderful, active father to Desiree.’ Dennis went on to explain that she and Dylan had taken advantage of a California law that allowed them to seal their marriage certificate from public scrutiny. ‘Bob and I made a choice,’ the singer said, ‘to keep our marriage a private matter for a simple reason – to give our daughter a normal childhood.’ Finally, in an attempt to kill off a persistent piece of speculation over Dylan’s motives for his ceaseless travels, Dennis added: ‘To say I got a huge settlement that forced Bob to do concert tours is fictitious, irresponsible and hurtful.’
In the first three years of the 1990s he put on an average of 95 shows annually during those tours, taking his music to all corners of North America, to Europe, to Central and South America, and to Oceania. It didn’t leave much time for a marriage, or for anything else. For most of the period there was room only for bad habits and peculiar incidents. In February 1991, for example, the organisers of the Grammy Awards had the actor Jack Nicholson present Dylan with one of those obituaries disguised as a ‘lifetime achievement’ prize at a ceremony in New York. First he sang ‘Masters of War’ very badly just as American troops were preparing to retake Kuwait. Then he gave a strange, halting little acceptance speech to the audience at Radio City Music Hall. ‘My daddy,’ Dylan said, ‘he didn’t leave me too much.’
You know, he was a very simple man and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he told me was this . . . [Here Dylan allowed himself a lengthy pause while some in the crowd laughed.] He said, ‘You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.’
It was the statement of a man who considered himself to be a Jew: Dylan was paraphrasing a passage from a nineteenth-century rabbinical text.13 It was no joke, either; despite the laughter of a puzzled audience, he didn’t joke about his father or rabbinical texts. Why he would also have considered himself to be ‘defiled’ is, however, as puzzling as his reasons for sharing his guilt with an audience full of rich, sleek and bewildered music-industry types. Perhaps a reported case of flu had left him in poor spirits. Equally, it might be that spirits of another sort had given him an existential hangover.
Life on the road was hardly likely to have rendered Dylan pure in body and mind. The shows he had given just days before in Scotland, Ireland and in London had left even hardcore fans shocked by his demeanour and his grisly performances. Reviewers were writing openly that the star appeared to be drunk. In the Guardian, Michael Gray had observed that at the start of the first show in Glasgow Dylan ‘shuffled onstage wearing a tartan jacket and looking like he’d had a drink’.14 Another who was there would report that the next night’s burlesque was no more reassuring. The artist ‘certainly seemed to be the worse for alcohol at the second Glasgow show, dropping his guitar a couple of times and wandering off stage during “Positively 4th Street”, leaving his astonished band to continue without him’.15
These were not isolated incidents. All the credibility Dylan had accumulated with his return to touring was being dissipated by a drunk and an unrehearsed group of confused musicians who were sometimes worse while sober than the boss deep in his cups. In London, people walked out. Those who stuck around, real fans almost by definition, had the disconcerting (not to say unsatisfactory) experience of being unable to recognise the songs Dylan thought he was singing. The Grammy Awards audience reported the same technical difficulty. These were not ‘creative reworkings’, not deliberate attempts to reawaken interest in familiar pieces by demolishing preconceptions. These were atrocities.
If there was anything to the claim that this artist denned himself in performance, that his real art was the product of the concert stage, both the singer and the songs were being denied. Had the story ended there, as many thought it might, Dylan would be remembered as just another superstar casualty in the Elvis Presley memorial ward. As it was, Joe Queenan, writing in Spy magazine, would describe the figure who appeared at the televised Grammy awards.
If any of the tens of millions watching had not already realised that Bob Dylan, poet, wit, heart-rending vocalist, hipster, scourge, had turned into Bob Dylan, somewhat pathetic kook – well, now they knew.16
So he felt ‘defiled’. So the question becomes: why carry on disgusting and destroying himself? In his book, Sounes asserts that Dylan was in need of cash because of his divorce. His recent albums had certainly sold badly and he had nothing new, nor even the hope of something new, to offer Columbia. It makes no sense, however, to believe that an individual with Dylan’s instinct for survival would annihilate himself in public once and for all. He had a precious asset, in any case. That he allowed the asset to be exploited just at the moment he was supposedly in dire need is probably an encouragement to cynics, but a few facts are worth bearing in mind. One is that the reports of drunkenness sound nothing like a superstar’s decadence. Alcohol might have crept up on Dylan, but the worst of his behaviour coincided with the aftermath of a divorce and the misery that tends to accompany such an event. He wasn’t in a mess because he was on the road. He was in a mess when he happened to be on the road. Second, even if he allowed Columbia to issue choice parts of his back catalogue at an opportune moment, he wasn’t quite out of a job as a performer. He didn’t quit that job, either, even when all his previous Bob Dylans were supplying the record company with revenue and his alimony had long been covered. Drunk or sober, Dylan wasn’t forced out onto the road.
The next premature obituary arrived, in any case, around a month after the weird affair at Radio City Music Hall. It was welcomed by all save a rueful few capable of making comparisons between the Dylan who had stumbled insensibly around British concert stages and the writer represented by The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. The worst that could be said of the compendium was that it laboured under a title better suited to a dusty manuscript folio hidden in library stacks than to one of the great achievements in modern art. Bootleg collectors deprived of their bragging rights would quibble, of course, over the choices made. Many fans would meanwhile wonder about the implicit comment made by this box set on the status of Blood on the Tracks and Infidels. Finally listeners were given the chance to encounter ‘Blind Willie McTell’, or to hear a drastically different account of ‘Idiot Wind’, but that only deepened the mystery of the original albums. There would be frustration, too, that despite the appearance at long last of ‘I Shall Be Released’, the basement tapes were still being denied proper representation. The 58 tracks did not tell the whole story about any period in Dylan’s career. The story they did tell, one only hinted at by the Biograph release, was a tale of startling, enduring achievement that dwarfed Down in the Groove and Under the Red Sky. In fact, it made them look ridiculous.
That might have played on Dylan’s mind, whether he needed the money or not, while the box set was in preparation. On the one hand, Volumes 1–3 was testimony to 30 years of matchless work. No songwriter of Dylan’s or any generation ran it close. On the other hand, this piece of the historical record stopped, much as he had stopped, in 1989, with a debatable remix of the marvellous ‘Series of Dreams’. Even if he had thought to extend this collection, what could he have offered to represent the rest of his labours in the 1980s and 1990s? A ‘Brownsville Girl’, a ‘Born in Time’, or a ‘Handy Dandy’? Add all those and a few others together and you would have a fine album. Count it as the fruits of better than a decade, without the malformed Infidels and the botched Oh Mercy, and it looks like slim pickings. Besides, in March 1991 the 58 tracks on the box set only served to remind Dylan and the world that he had ceased to write anything at all. He showed no signs of resuming the old, addictive habit. Talking to Paul Zollo in April, he would not mention Volumes 1–3. Sounding wistful, the artist would say, however, ‘It’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.’17
If so, it helps if you can stay one step ahead of the obituarists. Dylan was having no luck with that. In April and May he trekked up and down America’s east coast; in June he was in mainland Europe for more amplified debacles. Some of these shows were legendarily awful. The only undefiled virtue to which Dylan could still lay claim was his pride. Perhaps the advent of his 50th birthday, the one he said meant nothing to him, had registered after all. Perhaps he simply grew tired of humiliation and self-disgust. Perhaps the sense that he had polluted his talent was truly profound. It might be easier to believe that the old, thrown tenacity, the bloody-minded stubbornness that had seen him through so many crises, began to reassert itself. He had never knuckled under easily.
Whatever the truth, at some point in the second half of the year, as he travelled America’s highways once more, Dylan found the ability to stay sober for longer. He stayed straight long enough, at least, to give paying customers a glimpse of what they sought. Bootlegs say that late in 1991 the public began once again to get what they had paid for. More than a few of the shows were very good. The only thing Dylan could not offer these people in Texas, Indiana or Ohio was a new song.
There was a contract he had yet to fulfil, with two albums owing, whatever the blockage in his creative plumbing. As 1992 began, Dylan had to solve the problem of supplying Columbia with something while knowing he possessed nothing, nothing at all, of his own. All he could do, therefore, was make a record of other people’s music, but he knew that strategy was risky. Much as he enjoyed covering the songs of others, and as often as the practice had spurred him back to writing in the past, Dylan had never managed to create a successful album as the interpreter of his favourite tunes. Self Portrait, that brave but ill-served experiment, had given him one of the worst moments of his young life. Down in the Groove had not been saved from critical perdition by his variations on themes supplied by other hands. Nevertheless, one fact seems to have made Dylan pause and think straight.
In some of his worst, least coherent concerts the only redeeming moments had come while he performed his brief ‘acoustic’ interludes. In the better shows, as his thirst subsided, Dylan’s explorations of traditional songs had become more than a gesture to a few of the old folk devotees dotted around the halls. These songs were his assertion of faith and belief in something that could never be denied. Trail of the Buffalo’, ‘Golden Vanity’, ‘Two Soldiers’, ‘Roving Gambler’, above all ‘Barbara Allen’, that early love from Dylan’s youth: these and others like them were the songs he understood best and could still perform as well as anyone.
The irony was profound, even poetic. The artist who had once been given so much grief by the guardians of tradition in Greenwich Village would seek his redemption in traditional song. His decision as it formed was also a kind of confession. Whatever else Dylan had made of himself as a writer and performer, whoever he had been or had seemed to be, folk and blues still formed the core of his identity as a musician and as a person. The great revolutionary hadn’t really changed at all. There was wisdom in the old songs, things that could be trusted, a sense both of history and of mystery. This music was life as he understood it.
The beginnings of an insight came to him just as Bill Clinton was spinning glib, comforting tales to the American people. Dylan would make his first attempt to record some of the older songs on 3 June, when the newly confirmed Democratic Party nominee was on a popular TV show playing a bad if exuberant ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on his saxophone. When Clinton accepted the nomination as candidate at his party’s convention in New York in July, he would tell delegates that he had in mind a ‘new covenant’ with America’s people. Dylan sought only a new contract with himself.
Simplicity would be achieved amid complications. First, irrespective of any theories over his motives, Dylan was committed to play plenty of concerts. There would be 92 of those, appropriately enough, in ‘92, but they would be scattered across the planet. The artist’s first task in March and April was to show Australia and New Zealand that reports of his living death as a performer were not to be trusted. Then there were engagements on the American west coast to be fulfilled. Europe, then Canada, then another swing through the American Midwest – with no fewer than five nights amid his old Minneapolis haunts – would follow. Dylan would thereafter perform on the east coast of his country before finishing up in November, as had become almost traditional, with a run of dates in Florida. Even amid the insanity of 1966, when he had flown from concert to concert in a ramshackle old jet while trying to write and record Blonde on Blonde before setting out to conquer an obdurate world, he had never tried to make an album under these conditions.
First Dylan somehow found time for sessions in Chicago. Less than a fortnight after finishing up a spring tour of the western states in Las Vegas, of all benighted places, he was working with David Bromberg and a disparate group of musicians at the Acme Recording Studio. The two men had known one another for better than a couple of decades. Bromberg, one of those musicians with a seeming ability to play just about anything, had contributed to Self Portrait and New Morning. As he remembered years later, he had been performing at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village one February night when Dylan and Neil Young came in. According to what Bromberg was told, ‘Neil had said to Bob’ that a collaboration would be an idea worth considering. At Acme, with a full band, a horn section, fiddle and mandolin players, he and Dylan worked on perhaps 30 songs. What’s striking is that the selection would not necessarily have appealed in every respect to a folk or blues purist. A couple of the numbers were Bromberg’s songs, several others were songs he had made his own. ‘Lady Came from Baltimore’ was a very well-known piece by Tim Hardin, a writer Dylan admired greatly who had died after a long-postponed heroin overdose in 1980. For one track, described as a ‘contemporary Christian’ piece, an entire gospel choir was brought in; for another a zydeco accordion player was hired. Plenty of traditional songs, blues of various vintages, country songs and folk tunes were attempted. But the aim was certainly not to recreate a Dylan performance from the Gaslight Cafe circa 1962.
Reputedly, the artist had driven to Chicago in ‘a truck’, though the description is unlikely to be an exact match for the vehicle. He is also said to have yet again sought a ‘live’ sound. From what has emerged of the tapes, it’s hard to tell whether his wish was granted. By all accounts, nevertheless, these were productive sessions and enough was achieved, in Bromberg’s telling, for an album he believed was worth the effort. Dylan didn’t agree. He was due to play festivals in Europe, starting in Sweden on 26 June, and decided to leave the mixing work to his producer. If that was the case, an album was close to completion. But as Bromberg would explain in 2008:
He left me to mix things and he told me before he left, ‘I’ve usually been on every mix I’ve done, but I trust you. Go ahead and mix it.’ And I think I did a bad job. I didn’t understand what he wanted . . . When he came back and listened to it, he said, ‘That’s awful. Go back and listen to the roughs.’ I went back and listened to the rough mix and I saw what he was talking about, but he had lost interest. . . It’s unfortunate that we didn’t get to mix it together because it might have come out.18
Two tracks from the Chicago sessions, ‘Duncan and Brady’ and ‘Miss the Mississippi’, would be made available in 2008 to anyone prepared to buy the three-disc version of the Bootleg Series release Tell Tale Signs. Those recordings fail to make it clear why Dylan would be so dissatisfied with what was done at Acme, but Bromberg probably guessed right: the artist lost interest. For whatever reason, what could have been his best attempt at an album of cover versions had failed to enthuse him, or at least had failed to enthuse him for long.
In July, having concluded his touring business for the moment at the Jazz à Juan festival amid the whispering pines of the French Riviera, Dylan retreated to his Malibu garage, where there was room enough to spare for a modest home studio. In Europe, he had continued his practice of featuring traditional songs such as ‘The Roving Blade’ and ‘The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore’ in his sets. (The latter, performed at Dunkirk on 30 June, would also turn up on Tell Tale Signs.) Back in California, he proceeded to delve far deeper into this heritage than he had been prepared to attempt in Chicago. In one version of events, the initial plan was simply to supplement the recordings he had made with Bromberg. That notion seems to have been discarded quickly. Dylan also forgot any idea of covering contemporary songs. He reverted, in effect, to being a hardcore, uncompromising folk musician. In his own terms, he became a purist.
Good As I Been to You could give the impression that it was recorded at the kind of speed that was customary in the days when Dylan first entered a recording studio. Columbia would certainly make the claim that a disconcertingly ragged-sounding set had been captured in single takes, but that was far from the case. While the engineer, Micajah Ryan, might have been guilty of exaggeration when he said that after the sessions began ‘I didn’t get back to my family until a couple of months later’ – Dylan was on stage in Toronto by 17 August – the technician saw enough of the artist at work on Good As I Been to You and the companion piece World Gone Wrong to dispel any belief that there was busking going on. Dylan would ‘come in each day with at least a couple of songs to work on’, the engineer would remember. ‘He’d do several takes in every key and tempo imaginable; speeding up or slowing down, making it higher or lower in pitch until he felt he got it.’ Ryan would also state that it was the album’s producer, Debbie Gold, who had ‘convinced Dylan to record with just acoustic guitar and vocals’.
Generally described as a ‘long-standing friend’ of the artist, this music industry professional clearly enjoyed his trust. Having been hired as a teenager in 1975 by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia after the guitarist was impressed by her work at Philadelphia’s Tower Theatre, Gold had also served on Bruce Springsteen’s immense 1978 tour to promote his Darkness on the Edge of Town album. She had first worked for Dylan as ‘production co-ordinator’ on Shot of Love, presumably having met him through the Dead, given that he had been a friend of Garcia since 1972. Dylan valued her, it seems, because she was honest and failed to keep her opinions to herself. She for one – and she might have been the only one – was not intimidated by the legend. According to Ryan, the artist
consulted Debbie on every take. He trusted her and I got the feeling that was unusual for him. She was never afraid to tell him the truth, and, boy, was she persistent, often convincing him to stay with a song long after he seemed to lose interest in it.19
If that was the case, Gold could probably count herself Dylan’s most successful producer since John Hammond. Unlike Bromberg, she was not prepared to allow this reborn folk singer to ‘lose interest’. Equally, if Gold had seen the artist at work during Shot of Love she probably had a fair idea of where the source of certain problems might lie. The suggestion that it was ‘unusual’ for Dylan to deal with someone he could trust might explain a number of things about his ’80s albums. How many of those fine, lamented songs were discarded because he had no faith in the pliant opinions of those around him?
As it was, not one of the old songs Dylan had performed on his tours made it to Good As I Been to You. Nor did he have to perform the mundane task of learning the songs he did perform: he knew them all. The memory that once had allowed him to recall ‘hundreds’ of Woody Guthrie numbers was intact in an artist who only a few years before had been incapable of remembering his own lines. Dylan responded viscerally to those aged, often anonymous songs of love, betrayal, revenge and loss. Above all, it seems, he responded to stories, to narrative. For him, emblematic and symbolic tales had always been at the heart of folk. The songs endured, decade after decade and century after century, precisely because of what they had to say about an unalterable human condition. That was why he would talk about them as somehow beyond time, as ancient as myth, as modern as the nightly news. The album kicked off with ‘Frankie & Albert’, for example, in an arrangement that owed everything to the version Mississippi John Hurt had first recorded for Okeh Records in 1928. The story told in the song had been unfolding for centuries – though the specific killing has been located in St Louis in 1899 – and it was probably unfolding somewhere, in one doleful form or another, even while Dylan was recording his album.
For him, it was as much a matter of human continuity as of human history. His ‘Blackjack Davey’ is the descendant of a ballad that was being sung in the Scottish Borders before Robert Burns began to scribble. Dylan’s ‘Hard Times’ – Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’, to be exact – is sepia-tinted antebellum America, but its sentiments in the face of brutal poverty are as contemporary as any. ‘Arthur McBride’ has its origins in Ireland, probably at around the time of the Napoleonic wars, yet is still a better protest against militarism’s deceits than most. Even ‘Froggie Went a-Courtin”, a song that should have been destroyed by banal performances long ago, has its roots in sixteenth-century Scotland and has endured despite everything the ages have contrived. Dylan probably wouldn’t use a phrase like ‘eternal verities’ to describe his work on the album, but those are at the heart of Good As I Been to You.
The artist was also asserting that all tradition, no matter how ancient its roots, exists in the present, informs the present and shapes the present. In fact, folk music could serve as a metaphor for the perpetuation of all of humankind’s vices and virtues. The mechanism of folk ‘transmission’, of ‘folkways’, the handing down of songs to be reshaped by each successive generation, could as easily be applied to the truths contained within the songs as to any ‘folk process’. There is more to it, equally, than a William Faulkner line that has become a truism in American discourse. In a novel cross-bred with a play, he wrote: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’20 Dylan’s album says that the entity called folk music, a kind of collective unconscious, somehow knows this and has always known it. Folk exists, despite everything, because of that knowledge.
Dylan would go back to the well within ten months. World Gone Wrong would draw deep, once again, on the songs that had called him to the fountainhead of American music from the moment he first heard Lead Belly in 1959 and exclaimed to a friend, ‘This is the thing, this is the thing!’21 Perhaps because it leaned more on the country blues and on songs necessarily less ancient than before, World Gone Wrong would seem more immediately accessible than its predecessor, both murkier and wittier, more obviously like the Bob Dylan with whom album-buyers – those who remained loyal, at any rate – were familiar. Yet the second set would do less well than the first, perhaps because the novelty of hearing the artist with just his guitar and harmonica had worn off, perhaps because too many reviewers found too much to say about ‘production’. Neither collection would sell in significant quantities. In sales terms, these brave and unflinching albums would languish with Down in the Groove.
Dylan placated a lot of critics, however, chiefly by giving them a lot of high-flown things to say – as above – about folk tradition and such. On World Gone Wrong he offered up a Blind Willie McTell song, ‘Broke Down Engine’, as though to make an explicit connection with his own ‘Blind Willie McTell’, newly liberated with The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1–3. The artist’s decision to make these albums of ‘traditional’ material would cause a good deal of semi-scholarly comment. Any number of issues, some of them fascinating, would be raised for those with a discursive turn of mind. That was the real risk in the exercise: Dylan would yet again be discussed for what he seemed to signify, rather than listened to for what the songs said. No one ever managed to say quite enough about his version of ‘Delia’, another turn-of-the-century tale of death and loss in which the past haunts the present. Its refrain – ‘All the friends I ever had are gone’ – is like a living and continuing memory, one of those links with universal meaning that can’t be severed.
Conventionally, Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong are taken to mark Dylan’s reawakening from an artistic coma. Convention has the right idea, but it overlooks the fact that the best part of four long years would pass before any of the lessons learned from the making of a pair of albums were applied. Those much-admired World Gone Wrong notes, those defiant boasts of ‘revival, getting a new lease on life’, of not seeking ‘immortality thru public acclaim’, of going against ‘cultural policy’, of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, made nothing happen. Instead, close to four years would be filled with a Greatest Hits Volume 3 that would contain only one modest hit, with an MTV Unplugged that would fail to assert itself as the live album it should have been, and with still another Best of. The Dylan who found his roots in his garage studio would not begin to flourish, not for a very long time, thanks only to Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong.
They did not inspire him to write. Musically, perhaps personally, they enforced a conservative view of art and existence. In that sense, at least, Dylan did not decide ‘to go forward’. Henceforth, as though to confuse semanticists, everything that mattered to him would lie in the past. Even when he found a way to write again, all of Dylan’s reality would be historical reality. In one sense, he would surrender to a truth that had been obvious since the end of the ’60s. As much as anyone, as much as Blind Willie McTell or a Border ballad, ‘Bob Dylan’, too, was becoming a part of tradition.
The artist might have owned the copyright, but in reality ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” were already in the public domain. The fact marked an end, finally, to the promise of modernity, perhaps even of Modernism, as the ’60s had understood that promise. The idea, albeit the fictive idea, that pop music must always be new was finished. Instead, with Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, Dylan played his part in formulating the ground rules for what was becoming known as Americana, nostalgia’s niche market. He could and did scorn the term, but the implications would be hard to ignore. Embrace ancestral ‘roots’ and, one way or another, you neglect progeny. While belief in the possibility of progressive politics was withering in America amid Clinton’s sunny opportunism, music was turning its back on the future. Pop’s key word had once been ‘tomorrow’, but that was yesterday. In recording Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, Dylan was leading the way, but this time he was leading the retreat towards the reliable past.
He had not solved the old Greenwich Village conundrum, the one posed by all the old and implacable guardians of purity. Tradition was essential; tradition was life; but dogged traditionalism could crush the life from art. One way or another, in any case, none of it made a practical difference to Dylan’s own career in 1992 and 1993. Whatever else has been said about his reimmersion in the wellsprings of his music, the fact remains that close to four years would pass before he managed to record a single new song in his own name.
Something else had been made obvious by Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. It had already been noticeable in some of the cold, rumbling echoes of Oh Mercy. His voice was going, if it had not already gone. The range and fluidity of that once-extraordinary instrument was reduced drastically on Good As I Been to You and on its successor album. By 1993, Caruso’s ghost had nothing more to fear when it came to hitting notes or holding them. The endless touring, the ritual nightly fight to perform his kinds of song, had done truly fearful damage to Dylan’s most distinctive instrument. Sometimes the noises coming from his throat resembled the echoes of a scouring storm in a dry canyon, sometimes the sound of ice cracking, sometimes of weary, rusted girders parting. Sometimes, against the odds, it all still worked wonderfully well; sometimes nothing worked. He tried to pick songs and arrangements of songs that did not exceed his diminishing capacities, but tour by tour he was losing ground. Smoking and hard liquor had done him no good, of course, but the effects of so many shows were proving to be brutal. There would be speculation in due course about emphysema and any other substance-related, attenuating condition you could name. To some ears the vocal changes were so sudden there had to be a complicated explanation, whether exotic or sinister. The likeliest truth remains that an untrained singer with an uncompromising style had failed to take elementary precautions and pushed his equipment beyond its limits. As the years passed, guesses would neither matter nor help. Dylan’s voice had always been part of his art. From the beginning, one part of the fundamental meaning of any Bob Dylan song had been in its delivery. By the early 1990s, some of that art was already forfeit.
Just before Good As I Been to You appeared, Columbia came up with another obituary. The 30th Anniversary Celebration, staged on 16 October 1992 at Madison Square Garden in New York, was a little casual as to dates – the first album had appeared in March 1962 – but lavish in its use of celebrity names. Some parts of a long evening were a lot of fun. Lou Reed’s knowing performance of ‘Foot of Pride’, that song dropped from Infidels, compensated for several of the witless acts of fealty committed on the Garden’s stage. It was oddly cheering, meanwhile, to see the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem return with ‘When the Ship Comes In’. George Harrison’s choice of ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ at least showed some imagination. For all that, this was a record-company ‘tribute’ with top-dollar ticket prices and a pay-per-view TV audience. It served only to invite a question: was Dylan so far gone as to require obsequious last rites? He had the wit, while performing only a brief, three-song set, to look wholly uninterested in the entire affair.
*
His own concerts continued, show after show, year after year. There are useful databases listing every last one. Collate the lists with each season’s bootleg efforts and you can access a record of the deterioration in Dylan’s once-exquisite voice, if that’s your taste. There are good things recorded amid the debris, but there is a lot of debris. There is also a clear sense that by 1993 and 1994 Dylan was simply going through the motions once again. The shock and awe provided by Interstate 88 were long gone.
Surveying all of this you can also note, with a certain wonderment, that by the autumn of 1993 the artist could be found touring with Santana, a band so dull they seemed to make an entire art form out of the many possibilities of tedium. In reality, Dylan needed that tasteful entertainment-industry noise because he could no longer hope to draw big crowds on his own behalf. He would repeat the trick as the decade wore on, touring South America with the Rolling Stones, or offering counter-culture vaudeville to the heartland with Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. Most tellingly, Dylan would end the decade trailing around arenas with Paul Simon, an artist towards whom he had long exhibited a certain ambivalence, let’s say.
This spectacle would take place, it should be remembered, even after the artist had won back the cold, tiny hearts of the reviewing fraternity with a lauded album of his very own songs. Whatever the financial imperatives – could any still remain, could he still need the money? – touring would become an end-without-end in itself. While indecent quantities of semi-creative writing would be expended on the meaning and significance of the never-ceasing concert phenomenon, the damage to Dylan’s vocal folds would be profound.
In November 1993, he took what might have been his last chance to record a late-period concert album that could have stood the test of time. The idea, it seems, was for a TV special that would capture Dylan in the kind of ‘intimate’ setting he said he liked best. To that end, he booked an upmarket, velvet-draped, ‘retro’ Manhattan venue called The Supper Club, hired a TV crew and digital recording gear – all of this was coming from his own pocket – rehearsed hard and played four shows over two nights. It was, no doubt, his last remaining alternative to an album of original songs, given that Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong had not exactly raced up the lower slopes of the charts, but bootlegs say the artist was vindicated. Some of his performances at The Supper Club were far better than anything he had managed on stage in 1993; some were the best things he had done since his voice began to disappear.
The fact that only bootlegs of the full shows can be had – the newer, ‘soundboard’ versions are excellent – tells the rest of the story. In January 1994, having seen the last of a large amount of his cash, Dylan scrapped the whole project. No explanation was given. A single track, a marvellous rendition of Oh Mercy’s ‘Ring Them Bells’, would appear, predictably, on 2008’s Tell Tale Signs. But as with the Bromberg sessions in Chicago, another chance to put a respectable face on Dylan’s career in the 1990s was let slip for reasons only he understood.
A year later, Dylan and his band were to be found participating in an MTV Unplugged exercise. The artist had wanted to perform a set consisting of only traditional songs, but the cable pop-loop channel, having no interest in anyone’s cultural roots, insisted on ‘hits’. Dylan obeyed and produced a fair enough set that sold surprisingly well, almost gracing the top 20 in America and touching number 10 in Britain. For all that, it was just another interlude in the perennial round of tours upon tours. By 1994, even diehards were finding those pretty dull. The younger crowd that Dylan had set out to convert with Interstate 88 were turning up, it seemed, out of simple curiosity. Hordes of them had been present in August for Woodstock ‘94, the self-conscious, not to say money-conscious, attempt to reproduce the famous 1969 festival in New York State that multitudes of their parents had embraced and Dylan – that year’s Dylan – had despised. On this occasion, mercifully, young America witnessed the artist at something like his best, but such miracles were becoming rare. As a rule, the performances were no longer catastrophic. They were simply nothing out of the ordinary. Special pleading offered in elaborate justification for all the ceaseless tours had become implausible.
Dylan pressed on, as though convinced that stubborn determination would get him to where he wanted to be, wherever that was. At the end of 1993 he had been granted a new contract by Sony, the Japanese corporate behemoth by then in possession of the Columbia brand. This time Dylan had signed up for no fewer than ten albums. No one seems to have raised the delicate question. Greatest Hits Volume 3 and MTV Unplugged were all very well – though the former would in fact do very badly – but how did the artist intend to fulfil the rest of the contract? There would be a glut of repackaged Dylan material on the market in the years ahead, but his willingness to make a blind bet on his vestigial writing skills counts as remarkable. Whether he truly needed the money, or simply wanted the money – there are two schools of cynical thought - he was living beyond his artistic means.
*
Some of those wedded to the idea of the never-ending tour – or N.E.T., as initiates persist in calling the phenomenon – do a fine line in theoretical constructs. Some elect to believe that the concerts have more to do with Dylan’s art than any piece of plastic, that his songs are not held in a single moment, or locked into any one recorded version. (The word ‘version’ is itself often called in evidence.) Some further contend, in a properly post-postmodern way, that what an artist might intend by a song or a performance is neither here nor there.
This last argument becomes authentically comical when Dylan rejects the idea of a never-ending tour and derides even the phrase, as he has done many times. The statement (of fact, as far as he is concerned) is simply ignored. There is an N.E.T., whether he likes it or not. Reality as Dylan understands it is a minor detail within the great art event. What he says he is doing on stage is but one part, not an especially important part, of the never-ending deconstruction. In that exercise, as the reliable joke goes, the only thing we know for sure about Bob Dylan is that his name isn’t Bob Dylan.
He has no voting privileges, even if we agree on who ‘he’ might think he is. The audience will have their own ideas, based on their own experiences, of what is taking place and what it might mean (especially if they have trouble making out the words). The insight can be refined to serve the claim that Bob Dylan, in numerous manifestations, is merely a ‘text’ to be interpreted through an understanding of what might be going on during performances. Both meaning and identity, say the fruits of one low-hanging branch of critical theory, are neither fixed – given the subject, this is handy indeed – nor stable phenomena. Jacques Derrida, the loquacious French ‘post-structuralist’ philosopher, has a lot to answer for, in short (but you can take him at his theoretical word that any written remark of his is not to be trusted).22
No matter. This version of chatter became fashionable among those who wrote about Dylan, by no coincidence, at a time when he was doing a lot of touring and no writing worth the name. He and his never-ending performance schedule suited interlocking postmodernist theories only too well. Biographical approaches, the treatment of songs as literary objects, the artist’s intent: these could be rejected or denied ‘authority’. If ‘Bob Dylan’ had no fixed identity and persisted in ‘reinterpreting’ his songs out of all recognition, what remained but performed art, forever mutable, forever in flux? As Michael Gray wrote, perhaps a little wearily, a quaint notion of ‘anti-text’, as it might be called, ‘has become the main cliché of Dylanology in the 1980s and 1990s. . . Dylan’s constant “reinterpretation” of his work in performance is insisted upon as showing – and actually as itself arguing – that there is no finished text of any individual song.’23
Gray’s fatigue, if such it was, is understandable. As a matter of mere biographical fact, Dylan doesn’t ‘reinterpret’ his songs constantly. Often enough, you wish he would, but he denies doing any such thing and he’s right. He has sometimes revised his lyrics, as poets do, and more often tried to freshen up his musical arrangements, as musicians will. He has expressed dissatisfaction with his albums and on occasion has described his recorded songs as ‘blueprints’.24 His attempts to improve on the originals are therefore unsurprising. In any case, he was never one to attempt to reproduce a recording. That’s traditional, and no big deal.
To state the obvious, you cannot ‘reinterpret’ anything unless there is a text prepared for reinterpretation. In Dylan’s case, that will be found on an album somewhere. It is original, fixed (remixing aside) and enduring. The same argument applies to the rejection of biographical approaches and to the claim, useful to certain kinds of critic, that authorship is mostly incidental to art. The problems of biography are familiar and ancient. Facts are slippery, people lie, impressions conflict, memories fade, witnesses are unreliable, most interpretations differ, editorial choices are made: and so what? To leap from these self-evident truths to the claim that any description of a life is irrelevant to a piece of art neglects the obvious: someone did the work, at a certain place, under certain circumstances, for certain reasons. Life, as a song would soon enough mention, is hard.
The attempt to relegate reality to footnotes can have some amusing consequences. So it is that in a truly illuminating book, Lee Marshall’s Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (2007), you can find a consideration of the biographical approach and why it has been rejected by certain writers, followed by this statement: ‘Dylan himself has criticised those who offer biographical readings of his songs.’25 Who has done this criticising? What do we know about this critic and why should it matter? You could repeat the questions when the issue of the author and his irrelevant intentions is raised. You could return to the table and lay down a couple of chips when the claim is made that meaning and identity are never ‘stable’. Dylan’s identities – not roles, not masks, not aliases – have come and gone throughout his life. So much is true and such has been his abiding problem. That has nothing to do with meaning. Meaning remains available.
The belief that concerts without end offer the only authentic insights into Dylan’s art has also led to assaults on anyone who spends time treating the songs as literary works. Granted, the lit-crit approach has its problems. It gets bogged down, inevitably, in spurious debates over whether a songwriter who sings his works and messes around with text and delivery can be a poet. (The better question is to ask what poetry is made of and where the argument lies.) But the rebuttal remains: in the beginning, there was a piece of work, written down, revised and rewritten before it was performed. Someone made that. Once the song was recorded it became a text, with an author who was not ‘privileged’ but still, you can be sure, picking up an author’s royalties. Even the endless arguments over ‘folk process’ do not alter the truth that a person who calls himself Bob Dylan makes Bob Dylan songs before any of the art-in-performance can even begin.
Sometimes the performances have been vile: there’s that small detail. If the artist on occasion disdains to play in the same key as his musicians, critical theory might be superfluous. Naturally, tour devotees have their answers ready. Marshall writes, disarmingly, that ‘Fans of the N.E.T. do not attend multiple shows because the performances are consistently magnificent’. Instead, these tours ‘create an environment in which special moments can occur’.26 Those ‘outside of the N.E.T. cocoon’ – a revealing word – might not grasp the logic of this, but once you escape ‘the tyranny of recording’ things become easier. So the recorded songs that drew people to Dylan in the first place become secondary to the communal experience of those inside the cocoon. On a good night.
A bystander might wonder how Dylan gets away with this. A truly thoughtful bystander might then wonder why it is that Dylan, alone among performers, gets away with selling tickets, decade after decade, to a coterie that does not expect him necessarily to be any good. The sheer weight of intellectual effort to understand his work and career has something to do with it, no doubt. The apparent artistic worth of songs whose authorship is, apparently, scarcely important might be another factor. But as Michael Gray has also observed, ‘never-ending-text theory’ can be damned convenient for a writer who is blocked solid.27
Such was Dylan’s chronic condition for most of the 1990s. What’s fascinating, as a banal biographical detail, is that he persisted with his never-ending tours even as his literary gifts returned, as time and age encroached, as his shredded voice made a nightly mockery of his poetry – an irony rendered as performance art, then – and as his relationship with history, his own history and the history of his country, was altered.
In 1995, Dylan put on 116 shows in Europe and America. In 1996, he roused himself for just 84 concerts. One of those, for which the press received no invites, was staged in an improvised ‘nightclub’ created within the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of February ‘96. The writer who thought up a famous line about money preferring expletives to straight talk performed at the Biltmore, in a voice without complaint, before 250 of the guests of Nomura Securities International Inc., the American arm of a transnational high in the empyrean of international finance. Clearly, an author’s intentions had no bearing on any art created that night. For those who trade in financial instruments, it was a $300,000 expense. He opened with ‘Jokerman’.
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Far from the realms of redundant theory, Dylan was making crateloads of money. Howard Sounes arrives at the slightly improbable gross figure of $35 million as the artist’s annual earnings from his tours in the mid-’90s, implying $350,000 nightly and every show a sell-out, but the point stands.28 Even after the crew, the bodyguards, the dependants, the musicians, the functionaries, the management, the accountants, the promoters, the motels, the taxes, the office staff, the transport, the broken guitar strings and all of Mr Dylan’s domestic utility bills had been accounted for, a lot remained. Much of that was earmarked, it seems, for a property portfolio that by mid-1998 would embrace 17 ‘substantial’ pieces of real estate around the world.29 The artist had begun to seem avid for what his brand could earn.
In October 1996, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” could be heard advertising a Canadian internet bank. In the years to come corporate offers – for the benefit of Apple Inc., for Victoria’s Secret lingerie, for the Cadillac Escalade ‘luxury sport utility vehicle’ – would not be resisted. ‘The Times’ had already been sold off once, early in 1994, to the tax-efficient accountants at Coopers & Lybrand for the purposes of company self-congratulation before Bank of Montreal was given its bite of the ethical cherry. Perhaps this was Dylan’s idea of subversive social comment. Perhaps he was confirming the death of the author, as demanded by semiotic theory. Or perhaps he just wanted the money. What can be said for certain is that he more closely resembled the CEO of a multimedia enterprise than the person who in 1985 had told Cameron Crowe that rock music had become ‘a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing’.
You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so and Maxwell House Coffee must be OK because Ray Charles is singing about it. Everybody’s singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something. In the beginning it wasn’t anything like that, had nothing to do with pantyhose and perfume and barbecue sauce . . .30
Later in the interview, Dylan had told the journalist: ‘I’m not selling breakfast cereal, or razor blades or whatever.’ In 2009, nevertheless, he would sell a brutally mashed-up version of his heartfelt song ‘Forever Young’ not to Coke but to Pepsi – slogan: ‘Every generation refreshes the world’ – for a Superbowl half-time advertising spot. Things go better, it transpires, with Bob.
The biographical approach, lacking rigour, allows for ideas such as presentiment. On 19 November 1995, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Dylan could be found singing ‘Restless Farewell’, a song he had not performed in public since 1964. The number was a request. The person doing the requesting, so it is said, was Frank Sinatra himself on the occasion of a ‘star-studded’ 80th birthday event in the great singer’s honour. His knowledge of Dylan’s back catalogue had not been noted previously.
The artist, on the other hand, had always admired Sinatra, Bing Crosby, the late Presley and the rest of the old-style crooners and balladeers who could always hit all the notes. At the Shrine, Dylan sang sincerely and well. He finished up with an infinitely modest and infinitely deferential ‘Happy birthday, Mr Frank!’
So one possible future was glimpsed, perhaps, by the artist who had once written ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. The way things were going, he too was destined to wind up inside the museum, a national treasure, while his posterity went on trial. Dylan was at risk of becoming the author of his own obituary as, unstoppably, the years slipped away.