CHAPTER ELEVEN

Things Have Changed

ACUTE PULMONARY HISTOPLASMOSIS IS ABOUT AS MUCH FUN AS IT sounds. Europeans don’t often run the risk of acquiring the ailment, but in parts of America, especially around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the fungal histoplasmosis infection is common enough, generally because of bird or bat droppings in the soil and the microscopic spores the crap generates. Inhale the spores and you might get sick. If you are unlucky, you might get very sick. Dylan was unlucky.

After he was hospitalised on 25 May 1997, the severity of his illness was explained by a delay in the diagnosis. That’s entirely possible. He had complained of chest pains and inadvertently set running the tale that a heart attack had occurred. Instead, struggling for breath, he was enduring pericarditis, a painful swelling of the fibrous sac around the organ. Since a formal diagnosis of histoplasmosis can often take weeks, during which the fungus is cultured in the lab, the delay wasn’t necessarily surprising. If properly treated with antibiotics, the infection is rarely fatal, but what soon became known as Dylan’s ‘brush with death’ was unusually nasty.1 Histoplasmosis ‘ranges from the totally asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness through acute and chronic pulmonary forms’ to (it says here) ‘a severe disseminated involvement primarily of the reticuloendothelial system [by which foreign particles are otherwise cleared from the blood] which may spread to the heart, central nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, and other organs’.2

In plain language, while most people have no symptoms, or very mild symptoms, Dylan was at the upper end of the unpleasantness scale. Pericarditis in such cases tends to afflict the very young, the elderly, or those who have a compromised immune system. The artist had just turned 56 when he was hospitalised in Los Angeles. He was no kid, but hardly ancient. He was released after just a week, though concerts scheduled for Britain, Ireland and Switzerland in June were cancelled. Yet even by August, when he had returned to touring in the United States, the Dylan who spoke to Edna Gundersen of USA Today was not exactly back to his old self.

I’m doing as good as I can under the circumstances. I’m still taking medication three times a day. Sometimes it makes me a little light-headed and dizzy. And I need to sleep a lot. I did get the doctor’s OK to do this tour. I guess I’ll make it through . . . I don’t have the energy I usually have, so I have to save it all to perform. Outside of that, I’m doing as well as I can.3

Dylan also admitted that he had been off his feet for six weeks, barely able even to walk. ‘When I got out of the hospital, I could hardly walk around my yard,’ he told Gundersen. ‘I had to stay in bed and sleep all the time. I guess it’s a slow process of recuperation.’ Clearly, it had been no minor affliction. At another moment in the interview, Dylan told the journalist that the sheer pain of pericarditis ‘stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out.’ Given such consequences, you wouldn’t wish a delayed diagnosis on anyone. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to wonder about the shape Dylan’s immune system was in before he fell sick. Constrictive pericarditis, it seems, is usually a complication of viral infections, less frequently of influenza, rheumatic fever, HIV or tuberculosis. Even for the experts, reasons can be hard to name. Dylan’s brief statement on leaving hospital had made a lot of people smile, but caused a few to wonder. ‘I’m just glad to be feeling better,’ he had said. ‘I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.’

*

Presley’s sequinned shade might have been amused to hear that Dylan had contemplated the final curtain after recording his first album of new songs in seven years. Had he taken his last bow, the crepuscular mood of Time Out of Mind would alone have been enough to keep believers in presentiment and grim fate talking long after the event. Since his histoplasmosis had intervened between the recording and release of the longest piece of work he had produced since Blonde on Blonde – the vinyl version would be a double album – these songs ‘about death’ gave a lot of people the wrong idea.

Some reviewers were certain Dylan had received his intimations of mortality, looked up the number for the King’s celestial direct line, and recorded Time Out of Mind as an acknowledgement of how fragile life can be. Who writes songs with titles such as ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’ if he hasn’t had his interview with the Reaper? Where histoplasmosis was concerned, those who jumped to conclusions landed badly. The coincidence of illness and songs of melancholic fatalism was arresting, but coincidence it remained. Still, the album that inaugurated the most thrilling of all Dylan’s recurring comebacks was not a work designed to spread sunshine and happy thoughts. The author himself would call Time Out of Mind ‘spooky’. It was as good a one-word description as any. Dylan used the word, he would say, ‘because I feel spooky. I don’t feel in tune with anything.’4

If thoughts of death had inspired the album, however, they might have had less to do with the artist’s inevitable fate than with the passing of Jerry Garcia on 9 August 1995. The guitarist had barely turned 53 when years of drug abuse and obesity shut down his worn body and distressed mind while he was residing, appropriately or not, in a rehab clinic. Dylan, ever attuned to the larger meaning of loss, had been badly shaken. In a press statement he had said that Garcia ‘wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he will ever know’. In point of fact, the guitarist had been the younger man by better than a year.

Garcia’s Grateful Dead, it is worth observing, had been famous, or infamous, for their own ‘endless tour’, that gesture against changing times, fashion, common sense and a cynical age. They had defied every problem, personal and professional, just to keep on keeping on. The band toured because the band toured, year after year. Much good it had done Garcia. Music had not been his salvation. Despite Dylan’s eulogy, 30 years on the road had taken the guitarist nowhere in particular save on a version of life’s fated journey. That must have been a thought for the artist to ponder. In an album full of songs of aimless movement, of endless walking, of travel without purpose or end, of images of sickness, love and death, Time Out of Mind would place a higher final value on stoicism than on any other human virtue. It would be droll in places, but only, it seemed, because humanity’s vanity in the face of futility was comical. Dylan’s writing began again, at a best guess, just a few weeks or months after Garcia’s death.

I was born here and I’ll die here

Against my will

I know it look’s like I’m moving,

But I’m standing still

Every nerve in my body

Is so vacant and numb

I can’t even remember what it was

I came here to get away from

Interviewing the artist for a Newsweek cover story after the album’s release, the second, third and fourth things David Gates saw fit to notice were ‘the white hairs among the curls, the two days’ worth of stubble and the 30 years’ worth of lines’.5 The first thing mentioned was a face still capable of spooling through the cycles of inscrutability. The message of the piece was that, despite ‘a near-fatal illness and a near-terminal career slump’, the artist – whose attitude towards ‘the media’ had been poisoned by a ‘hatchet job’ interview with the selfsame magazine in 1963 – was still a figure of cultural importance. It was as though by 1997 a collective decision had been taken that it was necessary for Dylan to matter again. Another comeback was required after all the derision and near-contempt. Time Out of Mind was being greeted with sheer, exultant relief even before Gates sat down with his questions ready in a fine hotel by the Los Angeles shore. Several critics had been extravagant in their praise for the album.

Early in the interview, Dylan made a remark that would attract a lot of attention from those still trying to work out where he stood on issues of faith and belief. He would return to the theme several times in other encounters with journalists. Speaking to Gates, it sounded as though he was attempting to explain the album – and therefore to explain himself – by calling a halt to questions about God. Instead, inadvertently or not, Dylan simply confused matters.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest On a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ – that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

It seemed to explain everything and yet it explained nothing at all. Dylan was not prepared to give allegiance to a particular creed, but that was hardly news. In fact, any half-attentive listener to Time Out of Mind would be left wondering about the lazy claim, persistent still in 1997, that he had long before returned to ‘secular’ music. He might have sounded world-weary; he might have seemed obsessed with mortality and the passing of time; but his album was another deeply religious piece of work. ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ was unambiguous, but there were plain declarations of faith scattered everywhere throughout the recordings, obvious enough even for those who cared nothing for the ‘biographical approach’. Thus: ‘I know God is my shield and He won’t lead me astray’ (‘Til I Fell in Love With You’). Thus: ‘I know the mercy of God must be near’ (‘Standing in the Doorway’). Thus: ‘It’s mighty funny, the end of time has just begun’ (‘Can’t Wait’).

As with Dylan’s born-again albums, there was nothing about any of this that sounded remotely like joy. Equally, there was nothing that didn’t sit easily with messianic Judaism. The only way to argue otherwise is by dismissing any possibility that the songs contain autobiographical content while simultaneously ignoring the artist’s previous declarations on God and related topics. Time Out of Mind might have marked the start of one last, startling resurgence in Dylan’s creativity, but religious faith endured. His ‘late period’ work, as remarkable as anything he had achieved, would be at least as devout as the charmless proselytising songs of 1979–81. Time Out of Mind was filled, as the writer would tell the New York Times, ‘with the dread realities of life’.6 He would employ the adjective with care. Dread can mean fear, in the usual usage, but it also has an older sense, meaning awe. For a man in a certain frame of mind, it could mean two things at once.

*

Dylan had begun to write again, so it appears, while snowed up at his Minnesota farm during the winter of 1995–6. What isn’t clear is what spurred him to begin to write then and there, or caused him to write in a new way. In his own mind, as he would tell the story, he had given up on the art. The need had disappeared. No song demanded to be written, no creative urge was so overwhelming it could not be denied. The death of Jerry Garcia and his own darkening mood, one that caused Dylan to seem to shun most of the normal forms of human contact, are therefore only partial, proximate explanations for the Time Out of Mind songs. There had been plenty of other trials in his personal life that might have caused him to pick up pencil, his second divorce and some very public drunken misery above all, but nothing had forced new work. Suddenly the songwriting began again, just like that, despite all the long, arid years. Perhaps, for these things happen, Dylan enjoyed a kind of spontaneous remission in which his gift was restored miraculously to health. Perhaps the belief that he was running out of time provided inspiration. It might also be that sheer necessity forced him back to work.

He could tell Edna Gundersen that it ‘mortifies me to even think that I am a celebrity’, that losing anonymity ‘short-circuits your creative powers’. True enough, no doubt, but these were problems that went with the territory of stardom, a landscape he understood as well as anyone.7 The parallel fact was that unless he chose to retire entirely, unless he decided to give up performing along with writing, Dylan had a choice. Either he could come up with something new, or he could become the fading star of a touring nostalgia show, ‘reinterpretations’ and all. One way or another, he was running out of road.

Dylan had done his two albums of old folk and blues songs. He had failed, for whatever reason, to extract anything he wanted to use from fine performances at The Supper Club. The greatest-hits packages could arrive at intervals (and with increasing frequency) in the hope that the eyes and ears of still another generation might be caught, but that was a game of diminishing returns. Unless he could record a new album, ‘Bob Dylan’ would become a performer represented only by the marvels of the Bootleg Series, those tell-tale signs of an encroaching history, and by concerts dependent on the old songs, each performance appropriated the instant it happened by real bootleggers. The shows meanwhile varied horribly in quality and they catered, too often, to a self-selecting niche audience.

One myth of the unending tour rests on Dylan’s declared intention to find himself new customers who did not wish simply to gawk at the legend and demand the old hits as they thought they remembered them. In the 1990s, his concert crowd were often younger, it’s true, than the fans attracted by most of his peers. For better or worse, he also managed to inherit a choice collection of Deadheads after Jerry Garda’s passing. Nevertheless, a great many among the college-age generation were still turning out at Bob Dylan shows just to see what all the fuss had once been about. Without new songs it was not, as marketing folk say, a sustainable strategy. That left only the problem of actually writing and recording those new works. It was one thing to decide what had to be done, quite another to carry it off.

By Dylan’s own account – one account, at any rate – none of the above bears any resemblance to the truth. In 2006, he would tell the novelist Jonathan Lethem blithely that Time Out of Mind had come about almost against his will. Someone had pointed a loaded cheque book at him. The album wasn’t personal, just business. And seven wasted years of his artistic life had been his choice. Dylan would say:

They gave me another contract, which I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to record anymore, I didn’t see any point to it. But, lo and behold, they made me an offer and it was hard to refuse. I’d worked with Lanois before, and I thought he might be able to bring that magic to this record. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try.’8

In another version of events, he showed some songs to Daniel Lanois in June 1996. I had the songs for a while,’ Dylan would say, ‘and I was reluctant to record them, because I didn’t want to come out with a contemporary-sounding record.’9 Contrary to the suggestion that he had written the album while on the farm, in this interview the artist would claim that the Time Out of Mind works had been assembled on the road, enabling him to run through material with the band and ‘hear it right’. In all probability, lyrics were drafted in Minnesota and refined in rehearsals and at soundchecks. There had also been at least one informal recording session before Lanois was called in. Thereafter a lot of serious rewriting would take place while the album was being made at the Criteria studios in Miami, Florida, in January 1997.

Talking to the Irish Times in October, just after the album’s release, the producer would remark, perhaps a little disingenuously, that Dylan had ‘slowed down writing for a while, then came back at it with a vengeance’. Lanois would also remember that ‘when we first got together he didn’t play me any songs; he read me the songs. He read twelve lyrics back-to-back for an hour and it was like listening to someone reading a book. Then later, in the studio, he modified the lyrics.’ Nevertheless, Dylan would tell USA Today: ‘There was no pressure on me to write these songs. There was no one breathing down my neck to make this record.’ The album had just ‘happened when I had the time’.10 So much for the contract offer that couldn’t be refused, then.

In one way, the euphoric reviews and the Grammy awards it earned – Album of the Year, ‘Best Contemporary Folk Album’, ‘Best Male Rock Vocal Performance’ – did Time Out of Mind a disservice. They gave the appearance that an album containing greatness was itself, in the round, a great piece of work. Where Dylan was concerned, people were beginning to hear what they wanted to hear. Lustre was granted to some mediocre tracks simply because of the refulgent things around them on the album, because Dylan was ‘back’, because all was somehow right with the world. The acclaim was also a distraction. As it transpired, seven years of silence as a writer had taught the artist nothing useful about assembling a collection of diverse songs and resolving any contradictions, thematic or musical, that might exist between them. Time Out of Mind was not, by a dirt-road country mile, the album it should have been. By 1997, the statement had so many antecedents it was becoming either redundant, annoying, or the only insight worth possessing. In due course the set would be better understood than it was on first hearing, thanks partly to the bootleggers and thanks, belatedly, to Dylan’s own Bootleg Series. That would not solve all the proliferating riddles. Perceptions of this artist were becoming peculiar, dislocated in time, dependent on who heard what and when they heard it. The Bob Dylan story had acquired a set of conflicting time schemes and a host of complicated themes.

*

Think back. There was the artist of public record who had first sung into John Hammond’s microphone on a couple of cold November days in 1962 and gone on to create a catalogue of available works of which, in studio-made album form, Time Out of Mind was the 30th. There was the artist who had disrupted every media narrative with his unpredictability and his tendency to mock anyone who tried to understand what he was about. There was the artist whose work had been chopped and diced – seasoned, too – a thousand times over according to the tastes, intuitions and prejudices of those who ‘interpreted’ and understood his work in a myriad ways. There was the artist whose glorious past had been locked in synchronous step with his difficult present since the release of Biograph in 1985.

Then there was the semi-secret artist, the one who existed in parallel dimensions, supposedly, alongside the public works. Bootleg Dylan, off-the-record Dylan – for some, ‘the real Dylan’ – had been haunting art and artist ever since word of the basement tapes first got out in the summer of 1968. His own Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 had only added another couple of lengths of rope to the big, tangled Gordian ball. One mass of people heard a Dylan song every now and then and sometimes bought an album if he didn’t sound too weird. Another tribe were plain Bob Dylan fans who bought most of the records most of the time. A third group, small but growing, were ever-present. These fans possessed, so they believed, a larger idea of what this artist had done thanks to all the recordings he had failed to complete or failed to release. Finally, welcome at every party, there were assiduous scholars representing the meta-universe of criticism in which significance always trumped a mere song. A few of these were folk whose fluid sense of reality had long since gone down the drain, such was their need to confuse private obsessions with Dylan’s utterances. By 1997, in short, things had become messy.

Dylan had done more for bootleggers and the idea of bootlegging than any other performer. This had not been his choice, but a few faintly absurd beliefs about the prophetic voice of a generation had got out of hand long before the ’60s were done. In essence, those beliefs had become specimens of the irrational urge for ‘alternatives’ that had turned Carlos Castañeda into a bestseller, seen gurus taken seriously, or caused millions to decide they were born again. Crudely put, the ramshackle argument went as follows. If Bob Dylan was a true poet, insightful and prophetic, privy to an understanding denied to all others, everything he said, did or put on tape was, by definition, a big deal. Everything.

The fact that the prophet denied this nonsense, or just made his professional, creative choices, right or wrong, was neither here nor there. ‘Bob Dylan’ did not belong to Bob Dylan. A.J. Weberman’s somewhat sinister and mostly comical ‘Dylan Liberation Front’ had been founded at the start of the 1970s thanks entirely to this circle-jerk consensus. It was cult thinking, if thinking is the word, but it was not much worse than some of the never-ending tour chatter, or those postmodern critical fads that allow no houseroom to the idea of authorship. Great White Wonder, first of the bootlegs, had justified itself in the summer of 1969 with the implicit claim that ‘Bob Dylan’ was too important to be impeded by some mere breadhead superstar just because he wrote, recorded and imagined he owned the art. That he gained not a penny piece from his ‘liberation’ while counter-culture entrepreneurs did very nicely was a detail beneath consideration. That he was being denied any say in the fate of his work was barely considered. This art belonged to all. Theft was an act of love.

The number of Dylan bootlegs is impossible to estimate. Plenty were available before he began to tour relentlessly in 1988. Since then, judging by list upon endless list of titles, he has been honoured by illicit taping far more often than anyone else in the music business. That statement has been made often enough. Few pause to ask just why it should be true when there are plenty of rock stars vastly more popular than this artist. Yet if Dylan opens his mouth on a public stage, recordings will circulate within hours or days. Things will ‘leak’ from his offices; tapes will ‘appear’ whenever he enters a recording studio. In one madcap conspiracy theory the wily genius is complicit in all of this, giving his tacit permission to the bootleggers just to advance the sales of his own Bootleg Series and perpetuate all the legends he claims to despise. No one needs to enlarge bootlegging’s excuses to that extent. The security measures imposed by his management would shame the CIA. Through it all the convenient idea persists that Dylan’s art is not his own, that no creative choice over this track or that truly matters, that no album is ever complete just because he says so.

The fans who cannot resist bootlegs – let’s call that a motes and beams discussion – not only deny Dylan ownership and earnings in his work, they deny him an artist’s right to decide when a recording is complete, good enough or not good enough, a piece he will claim in Bob Dylan’s name or reject. To be a writer in such a circumstance must be tricky. For a writer who cultivates mystique as a matter of personal psychological need, the tape thief hovering always at his shoulder must be an unabating royal pain. Yet what leaves every argument stalled is that bootleggers have been dead right from the start about one thing. You can’t begin to see the scale of his achievement unless you know about the songs that were left off Dylan’s ‘official’ albums. Such is the implicit justification, after all, for his own Bootleg Series.

Time Out of Mind was no different from albums that had gone before. Some of the people who had worked on the project were dismayed, to say the least, by the choices Dylan made. Most listeners, informed by bootlegs or the Bootleg Series, arrive at the same view. The chorus sounds: what was he thinking? What gets forgotten is the small truth that if Bob Dylan was like everyone in the chorus he would not be Bob Dylan. The frequently heard claim that he has ‘borrowed’ too often from the works of others faces a similar objection. Which song has he not improved in the process? So why then shouldn’t he know better when it comes to his own albums than those who write big books and couldn’t find the light switch in a recording studio? Still, scribblers and fans demur.

To complicate matters further (yet again), some of the bootleggers had acquired the sheen of professionalism and entrepreneurial gall by 1997. In certain offerings they were doing a better job of representing the artist and the art than his planet-crushing Japanese media contract-owners were managing. In 1995, conspicuously, the person-behind-the-people at an outfit calling itself Scorpio had answered Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 with an impertinent thing entitled The Genuine Bootleg Series. Along with some taunting images of macaws on your discs, you got three CDs full of outtakes and live recordings that in some important respects made the Dylan-Columbia release seem a little grudging.

Much of the material had been bootlegged before, but this package was high-quality contraband for a general audience. There were some fascinating photographs and a wealth of documentary information. Each and every stage in Dylan’s career was sampled, with the totality presented in an expensive-looking ‘glossy full-color’ box. So here was the other ‘Blind Willie McTell’, here was ‘New Danville Girl’ and a chance to hear the version of ‘Hurricane’ pulled from Desire by a record company’s fretful lawyers. The quality of the sound was mostly impeccable: some serious work had been done. Then, in 1997, Genuine Bootleg Series volume two appeared. Remarkably, it was even better than its predecessor, embracing the likes of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ from Carnegie Hall in 1963, a lovely ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ from the Isle of Wight Festival, and the always-preferable ‘Born in Time’ from the Oh Mercy sessions. This was no longer exotica and trivia for obsessed and obsessive collectors. An alternative version of Dylan’s reality was arguing against him. His history was being written and rewritten while his back was turned.

*

It might sound odd, even mean-spirited, to say that Time Out of Mind was the best album he had made in years, yet nowhere near as good as many people wanted to believe. Nevertheless, that still feels like the truth of the matter. Songs such as ‘Dirt Road Blues’ and ‘Million Miles’ are routine, if that, and. not much more than padding. ‘Cold Irons Bound’, as a matter of personal taste, is a tough song to like or respect, a piece of overproduced melodrama that seems utterly discrepant on this album. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid thing to their sentimental hearts: the cover versions explain the problem. “Til I Fell in Love With You’ and ‘Can’t Wait’ might have amounted to something had they been handled differently, but in neither case was much achieved with them, either by Dylan or Lanois.

That leaves five tracks from an album of eleven songs. It also leaves two songs better than most of the rest that the artist declined to share with his public. Of the five, two or three can probably be called great, one can be called interesting, and one is best described as fascinating but, put kindly, a little problematic. In other words, there are what critics like to call difficulties with this album, despite the garlands and awards, despite its great songs, despite its importance in restoring Dylan’s gifts and his claim to public attention. On its release, Time Out of Mind had the benefit of being compared with its immediate predecessors, some truly miserable specimens among them, not with those ’60s and mid-’70s albums that were the artist’s transformative contributions to the canon. The praise for Time Out of Mind amounted to a suspension of historical judgement. A few second thoughts would soon prove that the decade he refused to call his own still had prior claim on Dylan’s artistic posterity. Five very fine songs, a couple of them better than fine, was a hell of a lot more than he had managed on a single album since Blood on the Tracks and Desire, of course. Anyone who found Time Out of Mind ‘disappointing’ on first hearing was employing a very strange yardstick. Nevertheless, the work done in 11 days in January 1997 remained a start, a very good start, not the last word in every argument over Dylan’s rehabilitation.

The first issue is straightforward: how much better would Time Out of Mind have seemed had ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Red River Shore’ been included? Four songs were discarded from the fifteen recorded for the album, but these two mattered most. Anyone who has heard any of the several versions of the pair will struggle to understand what was going through Dylan’s head. These are works of real literary cunning, both in their deployment of folk ancestry and in their use of narrative personae. On these songs, Dylan speaks in several voices: his own, that of his characters, that of everyman. The titles, by no accident, are plain invocations of an American past, one of the Mississippi Delta under the old apartheid when sometimes a black man’s only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the other of a West that might be a backdrop to the 1948 Howard Hawks film Red River (though the song and the movie have no clear relationship), or just a fable set anywhere along the enormous length of a Mississippi tributary, the Red River of the South (though there are plenty of other Red Rivers). Dylan’s collagist methods have been well researched, from the old blues in the refrain of ‘Mississippi’ to the folk commonplaces that are rearranged and reilluminated, like old mnemonic epithets, all the way through ‘Red River Shore’. A preoccupation with ‘borrowings’ is beside the point, however. Dylan is justifying the claim he began to make decades before: the folk tradition, in style and substance, contains universal truths.

Both songs can be read – as you are obliged to say of all the artist’s best songs – in a multiplicity of ways. Most obviously these are tales of love lost, of the girl from the river’s banks who can never be found again, of the woman who is told, ‘I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too.’ These are also, unmistakably, songs drenched in a sense of resignation, of choices exhausted. In ‘Mississippi’, Dylan sings of the inevitable acceptance of life’s realities. He also manages to add what might be a sly reference to the cycles of his own career:

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay

You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way

‘Red River Shore’ contains much the same sort of thought:

Well, we’re living in the shadows of a fading past

Trapped in the fires of time

I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody

And to stay out of the life of crime

There is something more, however, that is held in common by this pair of great songs. It is fairly well disguised. It had become Dylan’s habit not to sound this particular horn after he quit his gospel ways. Nevertheless, there are parts of ‘Red River Shore’ and of ‘Mississippi’ that only make sense if these two songs of men on life’s journey are considered in terms of religion. Even given Dylan’s taste for the poetic non sequitur, both songs contain verses that at first seem oddly out of place. The penultimate verse of ‘Red River Shore’ is plain enough in itself. But then you ask: what is that doing in this love song?

Now I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago

A man full of sorrow and strife

That if someone around him died and was dead

He knew how to bring ‘em on back to life

‘Mississippi’ is less overt, but one of its verses sticks out, both in terms of its quality and its placing within what is, at its plainest, a song of love gone astray. We have already heard that ‘the devil’s in the alley / Mule’s kickin’ in the stall’. Then:

Well, my ship’s been split to splinters

And it’s sinking fast

I’m drownin’ in the poison

Got no future, got no past

A metaphor, then. Even if a Mississippi riverboat founders, or if a ship is wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, no one is left drowning in the kind of poison that eradicates an identity. Dylan is talking about the Ship of Faith and/or the old allegory of the Ship of Fools, another version of life’s journey. That the writer probably means the former rather than the latter seems clear enough from the next couplet. ‘Drownin’ in the poison’ or not, he sings:

But my heart is not weary,

It’s light and it’s free

I’ve got nothin’ but affection

For all those who’ve sailed with me

For once, the cliché will do: most writers would have sold their nearest and dearest for these two songs. Either Dylan let his weariness get the better of him when he failed to realise the works to his satisfaction – it wouldn’t have been the first time – or he failed to hear what everyone else can hear. One argument goes in his favour, for all that. Given all the versions since issued of these songs, it is perfectly clear that their inclusion in any form would have caused the whole album to sound entirely different, certainly less cohesive. The ‘swampy’, layered production that seemed to be the only bag of tricks Lanois had to offer would have made no sense for ‘Red River Shore’ and done little justice to ‘Mississippi’. Had Dylan got the kind of sound design he thought he was getting – ‘like an old record you put on a record player’, as he told a French journalist in October – the two songs would have been perfect.11 Instead, an album in which ‘Red River Shore’ sat anywhere near ‘Cold Irons Bound’ or ‘Make You Feel My Love’ would have sounded ridiculous. Yet if that was the case, why did an artist perfectly capable of getting his own way not put the songs before the producer’s tastes?

One answer, perhaps, is that he had been deferring to others for too long. As soon as someone promised Dylan the latest thing in production any ancient-sounding songs became obstacles. This was paradoxical, given that the sound he wanted on Time Out of Mind was old and gramophone-like. Besides, it wasn’t Lanois who insisted on dropping the better tracks and keeping the likes of ‘Make You Feel My Love’. Not until Dylan despaired of the professionals and began to produce his own sessions would he begin to find a solution to these problems. The fact remains that substantial parts of a long album were flawed in their execution. Dylan realised as much, or came to the realisation in due course. In 2001, talking about Time Out of Mind, he would say:

Repeatedly I’d find myself compromising on this to get to that. As a result, though it held together as a collection of songs, that album sounds to me a little off. There’s a sense of some wheels going this way, some wheels going that, but ‘Hey, we’re just about getting there.’12

Sometimes he got there. ‘Not Dark Yet’ is unquestionably one of the great Dylan songs. Lanois served it well too, to be fair. Had this been played to despairing fans hearing Knocked Out Loaded or Down in the Groove for the first time, it would have been hard to distinguish relief from gratitude. Above all others, this Time Out of Mind song gave rise to the conviction that Dylan was meditating on age, mortality and regret. There is, if nothing else, that key statement: ‘time is running away’. In this dark night of the soul, you conclude, the artist’s faith is less sure than in other songs. Faith persists, but the singer is in a place where he can’t ‘even hear a murmur of a prayer’. Then, inevitably, you wonder: why? At the time of the album’s release, even after the histoplasmosis scare had distracted the world’s attention, the evidence of the lyrics seemed to say that Dylan had been in a bleak mood long before he was hospitalised. Because he had lost dear friends? Because he had been overtaken, not for the first time, by ennui? Neither possibility quite explains this song. Equally, there are odd things going on throughout Time Out of Mind that do not quite serve the age-and-mortality thesis.

There is a risk, in any case, in assuming that a song such as ‘Not Dark Yet’ is necessarily autobiographical. Dylan has contradicted himself often enough down the years when the subject of self-portraits has come up. Sometimes he has warned journalists against taking personal pronouns too seriously, reminding them of the nature of art and the liberty imagination needs and demands. At other moments he has said that the songs are ‘always’ about him. Then he has placed a thick layer of ambiguity over what he might mean by ‘about’. In 2001, nevertheless, he would dismiss the idea that Time Out of Mind, undeniably sombre as it was, amounted to a glimpse of his innermost thoughts as he entered the last stretch of middle age.

People say the record deals with mortality – my mortality, for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say, ‘It deals with my mortality’ – you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way . . ,13

It’s a fair point. Would ‘Not Dark Yet’ be any less of an achievement if it failed to fit a biographical narrative? Part of the profound appeal of the song is that it contends with the second fundamental fact of every existence. The theme is by definition universal. Bob Dylan will die one day? Who won’t? One essential part of his gift as an artist, present from the very start, has been his understanding of the dangers of confessional writing. The crude appetite for the ‘true story’ diminishes art, artist and audience. This writer had spotted the risk of autobiographical banality many years before. All those ‘interpretations’ telling us that the majestic ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is ‘about’ Dylan dropping acid didn’t just insult the intelligence of the writer, they insulted his song. That had been one reason for a habit of self-concealment.

Still, no writer is immune to circumstance. No artist is wholly, coldly impersonal, supremely dispassionate. The prevailing mood of Time Out of Mind is dark. It turns, too, on particular images. Its better songs –this song above all – tend to come at the close of day. These works have their own weather, thundery or wet, and their own cheerless landscape. Then there is the weird, wired, dislocated mood familiar to insomniacs, when sleep won’t come or is resisted, and there’s nothing to do but walk and think the thoughts that will allow no rest. In song after song on this album the voice is that of a man who is exhausted and ill. Always, inexorably, time is passing.

You can pick out these motifs, if that’s the adequate word, easily enough. Thus ‘Love Sick’: night, walking, air full of thunder, ‘the clouds are weeping’, ‘I hear the clock tick’. The sickness might be more than emotional: ‘you destroyed me with a smile / While I was sleeping’.

Thus ‘Standing in the Doorway’: another night, still walking, time playing tricks, he’s ‘sick in the head’ and worse, contemplating the final mortal moment at which ‘the flesh falls off my face’. Thus ‘Million Miles’: ‘voices in the night’, he’s ‘drifting in and out of dreamless sleep’ and risking psychic infection from ‘every mind-polluting word’. Thus ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’: still another hot night, more thunder, more walking before the struggle to sleep in an effort to ‘relive my dreams’.

Thus ‘Can’t Wait’: ‘it’s way past midnight’, ‘the air burns’, skies are grey, ‘things disintegrate’, his mind is a ‘lonely graveyard’ and he knows he won’t be ‘spared this fate’. Thus “Til I Fell in Love With You’: night again, ‘my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense’, beyond healing save for a redemptive human touch, expecting rain, wondering if he’ll still be ‘among the living’ when the next night comes, and showing symptoms that sound all too real:

Junk is piling up, taking up space

My eyes feel like they’re falling off my face

Sweat falling down, I’m staring at the floor

I’m thinking about that girl who won’t be back no more

The effect, inevitably, is cumulative, but it is also specific in its details. Weather, walking and sickness are either key metaphors or a poet’s plain reports from the ravaged front lines of body and mind. Love and women have failed him, or betrayed him, at every step of the way and nothing else remains. ‘Not Dark Yet’ is at the heart of all of this. The song is retrospective: it happens after all struggles have ceased. The last darkness hasn’t quite arrived, but the body is shutting down, every nerve ‘vacant and numb’. For this speaker, the end is close. Dylan had every right to say that none of this had much to do, in truthful essence, with him. On the other hand, the average listener is entitled to wonder what it was that put the writer in this frame of mind.

The best of the rest of the songs, by personal choice, are ‘Standing in the Doorway’, ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ and ‘Love Sick’. They are variations, inevitably, on the theme. The first renders inner desolation as film noir, the tough guy vigilant in the doorway but weeping inside, with lines such as

Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you

It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow

Or

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t

But not tonight and it won’t be here

‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ reaches the same viewpoint – for almost all of these songs reach that viewpoint – but the style this time is Dylan’s version of a spiritual. He takes the standard, even stereotypical idea of the sinner who must make his peace with God before it’s too late, but he transforms it into another kind of statement. This protagonist has suffered the trials of Job. At the song’s end he will be left to wonder ‘if everything is as hollow as it seems’. In the Hebrew Bible Job asks the fundamental existential question ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’ only to discover that God isn’t answerable to His creation. The song yields an equivalent truth: ‘When you think that you lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more.’ Faith guarantees nothing in this world. Hence the unmissable – because Dylan doesn’t mean you to miss it – adaptation of Woody Guthrie’s adapted ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’:

Some trains don’t pull no gamblers

No midnight ramblers, like they did before

‘Love Sick’ comes across as Gothic R&B. Perhaps only Dylan would have chosen to open his first album of original music in seven years with the line ‘I’m walking through streets that are dead’, but why bother to pretend that 73 minutes of jolly noise lie ahead? Two things are then apparent. One seems trivial, but cannot be accidental. This, the opening to the latest comeback album, is entitled ‘Love Sick’, not ‘Lovesick’. The condition alluded to is not the fey pining of romantic convention. This is love as a physical affliction, an enervating venereal assault that has left its victim sick to his soul, attracted and yet repulsed by his desires, first declaring ‘I wish I’d never met you’ before surrendering at the last: ‘I’d give anything to be with you.’ Few songs in the pop field with the word love in their titles sound anything like this.

The second striking aspect is a matter of writing style. It marks out the entire album as something new in Dylan’s work. He had been struggling against his glorious youthful eloquence since 1967’s John Wesley Harding. It seems he came to distrust his effortless ability to forge those chains of flashing images. In ‘Love Sick’, as with the rest of Time Out of Mind’s best songs, he is rigorous with his language. In places it is spare-to-skeletal. Equally, given several accounts of the rewriting Dylan did in the studio, even when it meant returning to a song that had already been recorded, we can assume that the album contains few casual remarks. Even the clichés are intentional. ‘Love Sick’ is written, with great precision, to echo the rhythms of a man walking the streets. Its minimal melody pulses as though to match his breathing. All the while the song’s end rhymes and internal rhymes circle like the speaker’s thoughts, caught in their obsessive loops. ‘Love Sick’ is one of Dylan’s works that can cause you to forget what is being said while you wonder at the sheer craft that allows it to be said.

Then there is ‘Highlands’, conventionally ‘the longest song Dylan ever recorded’. That’s perfectly true, but what of it? The tendency to invest a piece with significance simply because the writer is demanding more of your time than usual is a strange quirk among Dylan’s fans and critics. It’s akin to saying that if an airport novel is as long as War and Peace it must be as important as War and Peace. ‘Highlands’ is not Dylan’s sixteen-and-a-half-minute masterpiece. Ironically, in fact, its qualities have nothing to do with its vast length and everything to do with its smallest details. The problems arise, meanwhile, because Dylan attempts the difficult feat of welding two contrasting songs into one, or rather of interrupting one song with a comic (mostly comic) dialogue ‘bridge’. A lot of people have found the result enchanting or intriguing. This writer is less enthusiastic. ‘Highlands’ is more often a piece to be admired rather than enjoyed.

The compensations, and they are numerous, are in those details. One, obvious enough, is to hear Dylan pay his respects to Robert Burns, one ballad-maker (and borrower) to another, by adapting ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’. Here is the ‘folk process’ with a vengeance. Dylan’s ‘Highlands’ lifts one of the most famous lines by the Scottish poet, despite the fact – surely not because of the fact? – that it was the one line in the famous song that Burns himself didn’t write when he was rescuing the fragments of a culture almost destroyed by imperial England. As the Scot’s note to the song had it: ‘The first half stanza is old, the rest is mine.’ In other words, the key line ‘My heart’s in the Highlands’ came from an old thing called ‘The Strong Walls of Deny’ (itself in part derived from a song called ‘Boys of Kilkenny’). So Dylan is borrowing a borrowed fragment from a poet who not only adapted older works but felt he had a patriotic duty to do so in order to preserve relics. If rescue often involved stripping multiple sources for spare parts and adding a Gaelic melody just because it seemed to fit, Burns didn’t care. In fact, he would not even have understood the problem. He was a greater poet than any of the anonymous peasants from whom he borrowed. That statement might have made for a few arguments in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. As to the grand question of folk ‘authenticity’, Burns was in no sense a Highlander. His song of 1790 begins:

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here

My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer,

A-chasing the wild deer and following the roe

My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go

Dylan commences, to his own adapted melody:

Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair

Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air

Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow

Well my heart’s in the Highlands

I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Fantasy? If not strictly of the Scottish variety, bluebells certainly blaze in gloomy Highland woods in May. A pedant could protest, however, that the coastal city of Aberdeen is a good distance from the mountains. That’s certainly true. So is Dylan letting his romantic imagination run wild just to provide images of purity to contrast with the rest of his blackly comical talking blues? No doubt. But Aberdeenshire’s main rivers, the Don and the Dee, do in fact rise in the Highlands, the latter at a great height in the western Cairngorms. Equally, though a later line in the song invoking ‘the beautiful lake of the black swan’ might have been created just to achieve a rhyme with ‘break of dawn’, there are a couple of Aberdeenshire lochs where black swans are sometimes seen. With Dylan, you never quite know. We do know, however, that late in 2006 the artist and his brother David spent a reported £2 million buying a mansion called Aultmore House near Nethy Bridge in the Cairngorms foothills. Nethy Bridge is known, for what it’s worth, as ‘the village in the forest’. In the right season there are bluebells in the woods. There’s honeysuckle, too, at other times.

Dylan might have made some good guesses, then. It is a fact, on the other hand, that in his earliest days in Greenwich Village he was well acquainted with the Scottish traditional singer Jean Redpath. She arrived in New York in March 1961 and sang at Gerde’s Folk City to great acclaim. She also won one of those precious rave reviews from the New York Times that could launch a career back then. Redpath, it should be added, is the world’s best-known interpreter of the songs of Robert Burns. She has recorded at least 180 of them.

You could speculate a little more. The first play by the Armenian American writer William Saroyan was a comedy entitled My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939). Aside from the presence of a octogenarian Scottish ham actor and escapee from an old folks’ home by the name of Jasper MacGregor, it has more to do with a poverty-stricken self-styled poet and his Armenian family struggling to survive in Fresno, California, in 1914 than it has to do with Burns. Nevertheless, the play takes its title from the song for much the same reason that Dylan and the Scottish poet saw fit to borrow a line: for an idea of a lost but remembered Eden, far from the squalor of present reality. The point of this kind of borrowing is the fact that the words appropriated are familiar to the audience. Was the artist familiar with Saroyan’s work? It would be surprising if a literate person of Dylan’s generation was ignorant of a writer who influenced the Beats and was furiously prolific, if by then unfashionable, throughout the ‘50s and ’60s. As to the little play, there is no way of knowing, though Dylan is full of surprises where literature is concerned. At one point in Saroyan’s comedy, in any case, a character remarks, ‘In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.’ Time Out of Mind says much the same thing. Time had become Dylan’s chief preoccupation.

‘Highlands’ begins among the mountains and streams. Then the singer awakens from his bad dreams to ‘the same old page / Same ol’ rat race / Life in the same ol’ cage’.

I don’t want nothing from anyone,

Ain’t that much to take

Wouldn’t know the difference

Between a real blonde and a fake

Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery

I wish someone would come

And push back the clock for me

All is phoney and time is running away. While someone is yelling at him to turn the music down – the music of Neil Young, in Dylan’s little joke – the speaker’s mind drifts back again to a place where the heavens take their cue from the old spiritual in ‘Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low’. Along the way, Dylan gives a brief nod to another poet. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ was first published in 1939, just months after the death of W.B. Yeats. It ends:

Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Dylan sings:

If I had a conscience, well, I just might blow my top

What would I do with it anyway?

Maybe take it to the pawn shop

Most writers would settle happily for the oppositions Dylan has set up in the first third of the song. On the one hand are those (apparently) imagined idyllic Highlands, the ‘Only place left to go’; on the other, raw and alienating urban life. Here’s heaven against daily hell. Perhaps, indeed, it’s the actual paradise of Dylan’s faith set against his miserable mortal existence. After all, these Highlands are a place the singer can only get to ‘one step at a time’. This is more than enough, surely, for a song with which to end an album imbued throughout with ‘dread realities’? Dylan isn’t satisfied.

The seven verses of what is sometimes called ‘the restaurant scene’ interrupt and disrupt ‘Highlands’. They involve a dialogue between the singer and a waitress in a near-empty joint somewhere in Boston. In part, they are Dylan’s reflections, very funny reflections too, on art, the artist and the audience. It is almost as though he is pausing mid-song to tell you about songwriting. Or rather, to explain why he can’t tell you much about songwriting.

She knows he’s an artist, a visual artist, and demands a portrait. He has no drawing book; she says – for what is art really worth? – that a napkin will do. As blues innuendo demands, he can’t locate his pencil, but when she helps him out and he draws her picture she’s disgusted: ‘That don’t look a thing like me!’ By this point in his life Dylan had spent years listening to mockery of his ‘incomprehensible’ songs and impossible voice. Relentlessly, the conversation switches to books. She decides that he ‘don’t read women authors’. We can take this to mean that the songwriter has idealised or despised women but never truly understood them. He disagrees and in the best pure joke in the song bathetically names Erica Jong, the self-appointed authority on female sexual desire, as one author he knows something about. The artist and his entirely unimpressed audience have failed to establish any sort of contact. When her back is turned, he slips away.

By the song’s end, his Highlands are the hills of the Scottish Borders. Dylan is taking his geography from a confused reading of a couple of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, or glimpsing a landscape from the back of a limousine as it returns from the north of Scotland. Back in Boston, crossing the street, ‘Talking to myself in monologue’, wishing he could trade places with the young, he knows himself to be ageing. Dylan might deny it, but if ‘Highlands’ had anything at all to do with his life – the restaurant scene has a strong flavour of a superstar’s reality those intimations of mortality are everywhere. Before he’s ‘Over the hills and far away’, following a songline far older than his own country, the penultimate verse is plain enough. If it is even slightly autobiographical, the critics Dylan would dismiss, the ones who talked about age and a sense of mortality, perhaps had a point.

The sun is beginning to shine on me

But it’s not like the sun that used to be

The party’s over and there’s less and less to say

I got new eyes

Everything looks far away

‘Highlands’ might be structurally unsound, but give Dylan credit. To begin an album with ‘Love Sick’ and close it with a sixteen-and-a-half minute song after so long a silence was audacious. Time Out of Mind was brave as well as bold. Dylan had not hesitated to follow his art wherever it led, however dark and forbidding the destination. He had not pandered to anyone. Greil Marcus, reviewing the album for the San Francisco Chronicle, said as much: This is as bleak and blasted as any work a major artist in any field – and by major artist I mean an artist with something, a reputation, an audience, to lose – has offered in ages.’14 A writer who had followed Dylan’s career from the very beginning was taken aback, observing: ‘At first the music is shocking in its bitterness, in its refusal of comfort or kindness.’ Though it no doubt suited a few of his theses, the critic went on to say something that was equally important. ‘Verbal, melodic, and rhythmic signatures from ancient blues and folk songs fit into the songs on Time Out of Mind,’ he wrote, ‘as naturally, seemingly as inevitably, as breaths.’ In case anyone had missed the point about ‘the reappearance of the forgotten past in an empty present’, there was also the fact that Dylan had induced Columbia to revive its 1920s ‘Viva-Tonal Recording’ label for his album, a label that had once been reserved for ‘race’ records and poor-white country music.

‘Learning to go forward by turning back the clock,’ Dylan had written in his World Cone Wrong notes. Like everyone else, Marcus had only glimpsed what the artist was about. It was not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, or a retreat into older ways of making music in an effort to revive his interest and career. Time Out of Mind was not, in any case, quite as obviously ‘ancient’ as the reviewer meant his readers to believe. Lanois would be criticised by other writers for too often creating an ambience that was anything but natural. Nevertheless, with a sense of mortality comes a sense of history. Dylan had seen the future often enough, generally when he was busy inventing it, and it didn’t work. All the clues to his present, and to America’s present, were in the past. If that was where enduring reality was to be found, that was where Dylan was heading.

*

Bill Clinton had won his second presidential election with decisive ease on 5 November 1996. In January 1997, while Dylan was still deep in the struggle for Time Out of Mind in the Criteria studio in Miami, the 42nd president took the oath of office once again. That was when his troubles really began.

Trouble had followed Clinton doggedly for years, like some personal weather front forever threatening a catastrophic deluge. He seemed to have a talent for turning triumphs into squalid disasters before always managing, always at the last, somehow to beat the odds and the rap. Sex was his abiding problem. Clinton had a seemingly incorrigible taste for adulterous sex and a knack for the lies that are the soundtrack to philandering. The other small blight on his presidency was that America’s conservatives detested him viscerally. Their loathing was awesome, even pathological, an animus less political than wholly personal. The politics was mostly trivial. Having shed any pretence of progressive intent after a couple of rough years in office, Clinton’s team had huddled defensively around the centre ground, making a virtue of the vice of ‘triangulation’ – in effect, campaigning against friends and enemies alike to avoid seeming partisan – and eschewing anything with a hint of ideology or risk. To the new breed of media Republicans, shouting into microphones, hectoring their readers, spreading tales of Clinton’s crimes without number, none of that mattered. They had a vendetta going. With a passion that approached obsession, they hated this Democrat because they feared his political gifts. They wanted him destroyed. In a truly tawdry scandal that erupted almost exactly a year after his second inauguration, Clinton’s enemies thought they had him.

At times it seemed he was giving them all the help they needed. His wife, Hillary, would blame a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ for all the woes of the first family. There would be evidence enough for the claim. First amendment rights had long made America fecund ground for the propagation of outrageous libels. Clinton, as though driven by a secret need to be caught and condemned, acted as though he was only too happy to oblige his antagonists. Yet he broke no law save when lying under oath about his private and legal, if unsavoury, affairs, above all his casual liaison with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. His real crime was to hand too much material to stand-up comedians, for nothing else of importance could be made to stick. When compared with Nixon, he was constitutional small fry. Yet it was Bill Clinton who would become the first American president since the unlamented Andrew Johnson in 1868 to face impeachment proceedings for providing ‘perjurious, false and misleading testimony’ to a grand jury.

This was a peculiar moment in American politics. It meant that something fundamental had changed. There was poison in the air and vitriol in every argument. The rest of the democratic world looked on amazed as its self-proclaimed leader, ‘the essential nation’, embarked on a virtual civil war over a head of state’s problems with his marriage vows. That morality American-style was merely an excuse was well understood. But an excuse for what, exactly? The hysteria and hatred seemed to speak of a profound instability within society. Dylan would record a song for a movie just after Clinton’s impeachment. ‘People are crazy,’ the refrain would say, ‘and times are strange.’

Despite everything, as his admirers still recall, Clinton would leave office with the highest approval ratings of any president since the Second World War. One sign of strange times was that his enemies would simply ignore the fact. Clinton was more popular during his second term, amid the blizzard of scandal, than during his first. If a 61 per cent Gallup average rating for his second period in office bore any resemblance to reality, millions of Americans who voted against him in the presidential election were still prepared to say he had done a good job.15 On 23–24 January, one week after the Lewinsky scandal broke, 58 per cent of those polled said they approved of the job Clinton was doing. Thereafter, his popularity increased. On 19 December 1998, while the House of Representatives was voting to impeach their president on charges of perjury and the obstruction of justice, his approval rating rose to 73 per cent. Not only did the vast majority of Americans refuse to care about Clinton’s private sexual behaviour, they objected to anyone trying to make an issue out of his failings.

Instead, they were grateful to him. Clinton had disappointed liberals systematically, but middle America chose to see existence through the bright prism of the economy. Three weeks after the second inaugural the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed above 7,000 for the first time in its history. With a couple of blips along the way, it went on rising. In May 1997, unemployment fell below 5 per cent for the first time since 1973. To Bill Clinton’s 266,489,999 fellow Americans, such facts trumped any sexual impropriety. In that year, 81.7 per cent could declare that they had completed high school; 23.6 per cent had finished four years of college. They had 212 million motor vehicles and 192 million firearms between them, but possession of the latter, confined to 25 per cent of adults, was in decline. True, 13.8 per cent of Americans, fully 36.4 million souls, were still living below the poverty line, but the country had seen worse. Most had not seen better times since the 1960s. ‘Slick Willie’ Clinton, glib and grinning, soulful when required, solemn when the occasion demanded, happy to be all things to all the voters he could convince, was delivering.16

Conservative loathing for the President of the United States would not abate. The more popular he grew, the more the right fumed and raved. It didn’t matter what the opinion polls said. One America, with one idea of the country’s nature and purpose, held the other in contempt. The feeling had been growing for a while. Before long the belief would become a cliché. Politically, culturally, socially, by geography and sometimes by ethnicity, the republic had become divided against itself. What one of his aides would call ‘the Clinton wars’ were the public expression of a deeper truth.17 He was the symbol, the lightning rod, simultaneously a sworn enemy and the people’s champion.

In himself, this president was a kind of parable. The man from Hope, Arkansas – a town that might have been created for a campaign slogan – could seem like the embodiment of the old dream that encouraged every kid from a modest, difficult background to aim for the White House. In the right light, he could look like the last best hope (indeed) of ’60s liberalism. But he had a bad habit of betraying those who believed in him most. Morally, his outlines were as blurred as a silvery fog. Personally and politically, he was a mass of contradictions, both idealistic and cynically expedient, inspirational and capable of producing a deep disillusionment.

Even the apple of prosperity Clinton gave to the American people had a worm at its heart. A lot of cheap, dangerous credit had bought his popularity. When in November 1999 his signature brought an end to the Glass–Steagall Act that had hindered banks from playing roulette with depositors’ money, consequences followed. One was the near collapse in 2008 of the entire banking system, with it the economy of the western world. Clinton achieved federal budget surpluses, it is true, but private individuals were borrowing all they could and spending all they could. When the banks were ‘liberated’, with his enthusiastic support, a disaster was set in train. Like the president’s affairs, the ’90s were only good while they lasted.

It was an apt moment, whether he realised it or not, for Dylan to have his mind filled with the music of the 1920s and 1930s. The truth about what was to befall America in the twenty-first century could be found, had anyone bothered to wonder at the end of the ’90s, in those bygone eras. That music was the story of how the people had behaved in hard times.

*

Dylan didn’t pause for long after finishing his album. By the second week in February 1997 he was back on tour for a round of concerts in Japan. Unless you have an unnatural taste for endless lists of the which-songs-were-played-where variety, the narrative for this and most of the following few years becomes predictable, not to say tedious. The known story of a life involves some public events, some private matters, an interview here and there and the wait, generally a long one, for an album of new work while Dylan toured on and ever on. In 1997, his shows would scarcely differ in format or style from the shows of 1996. Even after recovering from his encounter with histoplasmosis Dylan would sometimes seem exhausted on stage – during several concerts in August he was forced to sit down between songs – but nothing, so it seemed, would keep him from girdling the planet to play his shows.

Back in the real world, his contemporaries were disappearing, one by one. By default, and by dint of sheer, stubborn perseverance, a 56-year-old Dylan was becoming a grand old man. He was to issue a lot of brief obituaries and sing numerous songs in tribute to the dead in 1997 and in the years after. The pop world he had transformed a generation before had made a virtue of transience, of always moving on, of forever discarding its brief past for the sake of an alluring, insistent future. By the ’90s, the remaining pioneers, hucksters, wounded saints and one-hit wonders of the 1960s were discovering what transient really means. Richard Manuel and Jerry Garcia had already quit the field. On 5 April another private matter intruded when Dylan was told that Allen Ginsberg had died at his home in Greenwich Village of liver cancer and its complications.

Perhaps America’s bravest post-war poet, if not its best, the older man had managed to be both besotted with Dylan and one of the most alert, dispassionate observers of the Dylan phenomenon. Ginsberg had been a profound inspiration for the artist long before their first meeting at a party above a Village bookshop late in December 1963. At minimum, much of what Dylan wrote in the mid-1960s would have been very different had he never read Howl and Kaddish. Not many hours after Ginsberg’s death, the set list for a concert in Moncton, New Brunswick, was altered. That night, Dylan performed ‘Desolation Row’. After it was done, he told the audience: ‘A friend of mine passed away, I guess this morning. That was one of his favourite songs. Poet, Allen Ginsberg.’

Unlike others, that poet had never lost his faith in the possibility of radical change. He had been carried away, ecstatically so, by what he supposed to be the mind-altering epochal significance of the Rolling Thunder Revue. For all his nonsense, Ginsberg had never surrendered his devout belief that Dylan was a revolutionary force. There had been a reason, equally, why the poet had been given the role of ‘The Father’ in Renaldo and Clara. As to art, Ginsberg saw in Dylan the embodiment of what he called ‘poetry-music’, the essence of each recombined in a way that was both ancient and modern. There was an irony in the fact that one man had personified the counter-culture even as the other was rejecting its grandiose claims and messy thinking, but that had never tainted their friendship. The artist had owed a lot to Ginsberg.

With his Buddhist friend gone, Dylan added another creed to his collection by making an appearance at Italy’s 23rd National Eucharist Congress in Bologna on 27 September, three days before Time Out of Mind was released. The event was a Catholic ‘youth festival’ involving two less-than-youthful men and some 300,000 young Italians. Pope John Paul II oversaw events from a throne above the stage, or rather called the shots (though apparently half-asleep for much of the time), while a nervous-looking Dylan offered up ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. Then the artist climbed the staircase, removed his cowboy hat, kissed the pope’s ring and exchanged a few private words, prophet to pontiff. Finally, John Paul did as all good pastors must and took ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, that most ambiguous of songs, as the basis for an unambiguous sermon. The pope said to Italy’s young Catholics: ‘You asked me: how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? I answer you: just one. One only.’ You get the gist. Then Dylan finished up with ‘Forever Young’.

There are only two possible explanations for his motives in accepting the engagement. They are not mutually contradictory; quite the reverse. One is that Dylan was not entertaining a dozing pontiff as a charitable gesture. By all accounts, a fee of several hundred thousand dollars was secured from those arranging the show for all those Italian kids. A second explanation is that it did not trouble Dylan in the slightest to sing for a pope who took a dim view of contraception, abortion, gay marriage, left-wing priests and several other things of this world. It is worth mentioning, however, that John Paul had established formal relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel just four years before the Bologna congress. For Dylan, that might have counted for something. Whatever the reasons, this strangest of all his performances was another reminder that any naive souls still hankering after the subversive, mercurial and politically progressive artist of years long gone needed to reset their preconceptions once and for all.

In London, a week later, he would tell Mojo magazine that Bologna had been a ‘great show’. Asked if he was involved in ‘world affairs’, however, Dylan would once again reply, ‘No, I can’t really say that I am.’ Despite histoplasmosis, he was about to face a final run of 32 American dates in a concert schedule that would total 94 performances by the time 1997 was done. In the year ahead, Dylan would surpass even his accountants’ expectations by fulfilling no fewer than 110 engagements across the planet. Yet in talking to journalists he persisted in giving the impression that none of it had much to do with him, or with his wishes. If this was a man bent upon perpetual art-in-performance, he seemed to have no good idea of what his motives might be. Not for the first time or the last, his remarks gave credence to the suspicion that the grand artistic ritual of the alleged tour without end had become aimless, a tedious commercial venture. As he sometimes liked to claim, it was just a job.

I don’t know why people talk about never-ending, because I don’t really consider myself on tour. We just go out and play a certain amount of shows every year, so it isn’t really a tour. It could stop any time. Part of me doesn’t want to do it all. Part of me would just like to be done with it all.18

Roughly a year earlier he had been nominated, finally, for the Nobel Prize in Literature due to be awarded in 1997. Though Dylan laughed off the whole idea when any journalist asked for his reaction, even pretending to be ignorant of what the Nobel signified, it was the beginning of a contest over the nature of literary art that would persist (with ample opportunity for laughter) into the twenty-first century. Allen Ginsberg, stalwart as ever, had written in support of the claim being made on Dylan’s behalf, calling him ‘a major American Bard & minstrel of the XX Century, whose words have influenced many generations throughout the world’. The artist deserved his Nobel, according to Ginsberg, ‘in recognition of his mighty and universal powers’. Professor Gordon Ball had made the formal nomination, stating: ‘In our modern era Bob Dylan has returned poetry to its primordial transmission by human breath and body . . . in his musical verse he has revived the traditions of bard, minstrel, and troubadour.’19

Nice try. The 1997 prize went instead to the Italian playwright Dario Fo. He was not a popular choice among litterateurs, ironically enough, because the keepers of high culture regarded him as a performance artist rather than a real writer. The Nobel committee recognised this difficulty in their press release announcing the award. It was full of high-flown verbiage about ‘texts’ that were ‘always open for creative additions and dislocations, continually encouraging the actors to improvise, which means that the audience is activated in a remarkable way’. Dylan’s better-read fans could and would take encouragement from that. A playwright whose work depended on performance rather than the printed page? Surely one more obstacle to their candidate’s elevation had been removed.

It might seem like a neat if inadvertent touch, meanwhile, to have had the nomination go forward when finally there was a Dylan album capable of backing up the claims being made for his art. In reality, Time Out of Mind arrived in the stores just a week before the Nobel selectors announced their winner on 7 October. There is therefore the grisly if entertaining possibility that a bunch of nonplussed eminent Swedes believed they were being asked to judge the creator of Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove. In any case, Dylan’s backers hadn’t thought the problem through. Understandably, they took it for granted that everyone had heard of, and heard, their candidate. He is certainly well-respected in Scandinavia, where English-speakers are commonplace. But what was the committee being asked to judge? Printed lyrics in place of their sacred ‘texts’? A group of recordings containing things that sucked along with things that were sublime? And where stood the vaunted Dylan of evolving live performance whose audience ‘is activated in a remarkable way’ (on a good night)?

The persistent belief that the artist’s never-ending candidacy is the victim of snobbery and prejudice towards popular culture, not to mention towards Americans, is probably well founded. Other factors should not be ignored. It is less a question of whether purblind Swedish professors can understand Dylan’s work than of explaining what it is they are being asked to understand. Plenty of reluctant witnesses to his career have had that problem down the years. Calling him an artist is easy. Stating the nature of the art is a trickier task. Ginsberg’s ‘poetry-music’ had been a good stab at a definition, but it was not a complete description.

In January 1998, Dylan did a few shows with Van Morrison. In February, he dispatched another note of condolence and praise, this time to a funeral mass in Jackson, Tennessee. Carl Perkins, peer to Elvis, writer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, had died of throat cancer, aged just 65. Dylan’s note read: ‘He really stood for freedom. That whole sound stood for all degrees of freedom. It would just jump off the turntable. We wanted to go where that was happening.’ If there is an art to writing such things, Dylan was becoming adept.

March found him in South America, taking the money (presumably very good money) and swallowing whatever pride was involved in serving as an opening act for the Rolling Stones. In May, as though to prove that finding a new, younger audience was not at all times his priority, he was performing concerts jointly with Joni Mitchell. That month he also found another set of fine and sincere words for the recently deceased Frank Sinatra. None of this activity was of any real significance. As in the aftermath of Oh Mercy, Dylan seemed already to have decided that a creative renaissance could wait. Room had been found in his concerts for songs from Time Out of Mind, but if he was eager to write more, he showed no urgent sign of desire. Patently, making albums was an afterthought.

While Dylan marked fully ten years back on the road and took less-than-onerous superstar gigs with fellow artists of a certain age, October provided a thunderous, bracing echo from his past. It also offered a rebuttal to the never-ending chatter about a never-ending tour. If brevity was the criterion, a title like The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert deserved no prizes. In every other respect the double CD was, as legend and all the real bootlegs had long said, impeccable. Anyone who bought this when it went on sale on 13 October and then caught Dylan’s show in a town called Duluth, Minnesota, just nine days later was invited to contrast and compare. The tour that took the artist to the city of his birth saw some pretty fair performances along the way. It had nothing to compare with a slice of the historical record as it pertained to the events of 17 May 1966.

Dylan would tell interviewers, reasonably enough, that he could no longer be the person who had given that Manchester show, or write those songs, or occupy that near-impossible role, or endure the killing pressures once imposed on a young man not yet 25. All his complaints and explanations were fair. They nevertheless invited the question: who could he be, then, and what could he do as the century approached its end? Time Out of Mind had provided the beginnings of an answer. Yet as the months and the tours came and went he seemed to have no interest in pursuing a conclusion.

In 1999, he would give 119 public performances, breaking his own record once again. Four dozen of these ‘arena experiences’ would be shared with Paul Simon, for reasons probably best explained by the prices the two legends felt entitled to charge. They would not ask for an arm and a leg at every stop along the way while one short man alternated with a shorter man – Dylan won that contest, just for a change – in opening or closing the show. Some customers would get away with surrendering just the contents of a wallet with a couple of fingers attached, depending on what the local nostalgia market would bear. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a loyal fan of one or other star would contemplate a top price of $75; in Camden, New Jersey, the costliest ticket would be $100. A fan in Concord, California, who wanted the best seat in the house could expect to pay $127.50, while in Vegas the top-end entry fee was $150. At Madison Square Garden, New Yorkers who refused to settle for less than the finest accommodation would pay $123. To put this in context, the most expensive ticket for an Eric Clapton show at the Garden two years later would be $80. The highest price demanded by U2 during their blockbusting 2001 tour would be $130.

Money aside, it is hard to identify the purpose and point of the joint-tour exercise. For the most part, predictably, dedicated Dylan fans would enthuse over his performances – though bootlegs say these were nothing special – and pay little attention to Simon. Even those wholly enamoured of the artist would become just a little sceptical, however, about this particular detour on the endless highway. One fan, having attended six shows in a week, would remark after the last night at the Jones Beach Amphitheatre in Wantagh, New York, on 31 July that though the concerts had been ‘very good’ it was all ‘kinda uneventful’.20 Seth Rogovoy, journalist and prolific writer on Dylan, would open a review of a show in Albany, New York, with these words:

Lightning didn’t strike nor did fireworks ignite when Sixties icons Bob Dylan and Paul Simon joined forces on a handful of songs at the Pepsi Arena on Tuesday night. In fact, what on paper might have seemed like a stroke of promotional genius – putting the two folk-rock visionaries together for the first time in their careers for a barnstorming tour of the nation – turned out to be anti-climactic from the get-go.21

Rogovoy, another finding few flaws in Dylan’s own performances, would finish up by remarking that the concert was a failed attempt to produce ‘something new and unique’. Presumably that was not the aim. Nevertheless, when the usual story says that the artist was in the throes of a creative renaissance by the end of the ’90s, it is worth bearing in mind how he chose actually to spend his time. Time Out of Mind and all the publicity engendered by the latest ‘comeback’ were causing a renewed interest in Dylan and his works by the century’s end. The album had sold a million copies. Yet for most of the time this artist reborn was just playing the arena circuit, spinning on a wheel.

The spring of 1999 had seen him return to Europe for the 11th year in succession; the next dozen years would be no different. It would matter greatly to handfuls of devoted people, no doubt, to know who had joined or left the ‘Never Ending Tour Band’, which musician had stayed the course and which one could tolerate the experience the least. In the bigger scheme of things all the theories and tales did not alter the fact that the tours were a poor substitute for creative work. Yet the odd fact remains that Dylan would revive his reputation as a recording artist, and do so emphatically, while treating the making of albums as little more than a necessary chore. The income from concerts meant that he would no longer be in thrall to the despised studio. He could play live and tell some journalists that it was his first and only love, his artistic reality, his whole existence. Others would be told that he could take it or leave it. Did he notice, then, that a big part of his usual crowd were the same people, night after night, following him from venue to venue?

On 10 December 1999, Rick Danko died in his sleep of heart failure, aged 56 and a day. The weight, his own physical weight, had proved too much after a lot of booze and a lot of drugs. The singer and bass player – or trombonist, or fiddle player – who had helped Dylan to write ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and harmonised with him during several of the songs on the basement tapes, had been in poor shape for a while. He had last played briefly with Dylan in August 1997, when the artist’s tour halted for a concert in Connecticut. Danko had been the Band member who in 1967 spotted that a big pink house in the middle of 100 acres was available in Saugerties, New York. By the late ’90s he and Garth Hudson, the last men standing, had been reduced to travelling from little show to little show in a motorhome. Levon Helm, who had found better things to do with himself, would forever maintain that Danko had worked himself to death because he had never received his fair share of money from The Last Waltz and other Band ventures.

In the summer of 1999, the little town of Hibbing, Minnesota, had begun to lay plans for a new exhibit in its public library. The municipality already had a museum dedicated to its claim to fame as the birthplace of the Greyhound bus line. The Hibbing Historical Society also had a museum to call its own. By the century’s end, nevertheless, the need was felt to recognise another piece of local history. The Zimmerman kid, still remembered by a few older residents, was to be memorialised while he yet lived. Meanwhile, the news that his beloved mother had been diagnosed with cancer would remind Dylan that time and mortality could not be denied. Beatty Zimmerman would die on 27 January 2000 at the age of 84.

*

In 1999 there had been one moment of clarity in a fog of concerts. That summer, tempted by Hollywood, Dylan had gone into a New York studio for a day and turned out a recording of a song called ‘Things Have Changed’. Typically, it was better than at least half the stuff on Time Out of Mind, a cynical song from the world’s end that also somehow managed to make sense within the context of the movie for which it had been designed. It made some sense of the era, too. For a change, the film, entitled Wonder Boys, would also be a pretty fair effort. ‘Things Have Changed’ would win Dylan an Academy Award.

Film music had come to his attention, no doubt because it paid very well. The piece he wrote for Wonder Boys cannot be dismissed cynically, however. It is as sharp and penetrating a sketch of human vanity as anything he ever created. The song, compelling proof that he could still write when the need arose, also contains another of those fragments of evidence, if such was still required, that Dylan’s fascination with an apocalyptic ending for humankind had not been extinguished. ‘If the Bible is right,’ as he sang, ‘the world will explode.’ The real point offered in this work is that the speaker, or the artist, couldn’t care less.

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

‘Things Have Changed’ might also have contained a hint that not only could Dylan still manage a new song at short notice, but that, amid another lengthy pause between albums, there might be more to come. In point of fact, there is no evidence that he was not writing all the while. His problems with writer’s block are well-enough established. The paucity of new songs between 1969’s Nashville Skyline and 1974’s Planet Waves, from an artist who had spent most of the ’60s in a ferment of creativity, had been impossible to ignore. The seven lean years between Under the Red Sky and Time Out of Mind told their own story. The long silences between albums during Dylan’s later years are a different matter. If he was making excellent money out on the road, felt no creative need to make yet another album and despised the recording process, it makes sense to believe him if he says a piece of work was done when he ‘had the time’. No doubt his record company had some say in the matter, but in 2000 Sony would make do with no fewer than three compilation albums titled, almost comically, as a Best of. . . Vol 2; a Very Best of; and an Essential Bob Dylan. As though to mock every sceptic and critic, the last of these would do very well indeed, in due course being ‘certified platinum’ in America, Britain and Australia and as a ‘gold’ record elsewhere.

Touring continued regardless. In 2000, while the American market was assaulted once more, Europe got two separate visits from Dylan. In February 2001 he was off to Japan arid Australia once more, pausing along the way to accept his ‘best original song’ Oscar by satellite link from Sydney. The year would end with the death of George Harrison, the Beatle of whom Dylan had been most fond. That much was plain from the statement in which the artist made his farewells. Touchingly, it was written as though to suit the beliefs and the character of the deceased. Of Harrison, Dylan said:

He was a giant, a great, great soul, with all of the humanity, all of the wit and humour, all the wisdom, the spirituality, the common sense of a man and compassion for people. He inspired love and had the strength of a hundred men. He was like the sun, the flowers and the moon and we will miss him enormously. The world is a profoundly emptier place without him.

That year it became known that Dylan had indeed returned to the recording studios. He was finishing work in May at Clinton Recording in Manhattan, in fact, when he reached the age of 60. When had he ever imagined that birthday? It would not prevent journalist after journalist asking a man in his 60s what he thought about the ’60s. Yet in July, astoundingly, it transpired that despite every denial he might have been thinking about that confused and intoxicating decade himself.

In Italy, during a press conference held at the De La Ville InterContinental Roma Hotel to publicise the release of his new music, Dylan remarked, it seems out of the blue, that he was working on a book to ‘be published in an article form, but as a book, a book of articles, because they’re ongoing’. At first he said that this was ‘as much as it is at the moment’. When pressed about ‘articles’, however, Dylan went on:

Oh, I think that with this type of writing I was just trying to find the right way to get into it, rather than making it some kind of self-serving story of my particular past. If it seems to happen that way, it’s actually dissimilar in a lot of ways. I can do it because I’m a famous person, so I use that fame, because a lot of the things I might write about other people know about anyway. So with a person like myself, the process of doing it this way works.

I mean, I’m not really making a real attempt to do this. I just do it in my spare time.22

*

‘Love and Theft’ keeps the promise made by Time Out of Mind. With this album it becomes possible to talk seriously of a Dylan who was not only renewed but, at 60, reborn creatively. Here all the claims made for his late period are not only plausible but undeniable. Only controversy over his methods – charges of plagiarism, bluntly – would stain the achievement, at least for nature’s tenacious pedants. Most of those charges were and remain specious, trivial, irrelevant to the great mass of listeners and born of a profound ignorance of artistic method, far less of ‘folk process’, but they have clung to Dylan ever since ‘Love and Theft’ appeared. In fact, the hunt for evidence against the accused has become a tiny, if furiously busy, cottage industry. Where once it was a critic’s delight to cite those among the quick and the dead who could be named as a Dylan ‘influence’ or somehow just associated with his themes and manner – Keatsian, Rimbaldien, Poe-like and the rest – in the twenty-first century the game has become one of spot-the-pilfering. The always-implied justification is that with this album Dylan began to adopt an underhand method by which to eke out a waning creativity. Some hasten to add that they just knew it all along. Given his free and easy manner with other people’s material down the years, not least his old habit of claiming as his own that which was ‘traditional’, this doesn’t cause many presses to be stopped. But these days, if you believe those who are most vehement, the issue is more serious, less excusable, sometimes inexplicable. Plagiarism, a word liable to cause every writer since Chaucer to look shifty, is the subtext of ‘Love and Theft’.

Dylan knew it, too. He got his mockery in first: hence those quotation marks around his title; hence his title. Others might prefer collage, cut-and-paste, modernist technique, a sophisticated system of allusion and invocation, or a statement about a form of writing that makes no bones over how inspiration and tradition really work. The fact remains that the artist was perfectly self-aware. Grant him this much, then: it is an unusual thief who advertises his theft. Dylan took his title wholesale from a book and stuck it between quotation marks.

The book itself, Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993), is a sophisticated analysis of the cultural transactions down the decades between African Americans and a white world. It does not for an instant deny the thefts from black artists that have formed the basis of much of white American culture, but it spends a great deal of time unravelling the complicated impulses in its title’s first word. Dylan knew all about that. His joke, a sly and brilliant joke, was to acknowledge everything, all the music that had made him, by stealing the very name of Lott’s book. For some of his most dogged pursuers that wouldn’t do. To them it would seem like a fancy, postmodern excuse for plagiarism and a piece of misdirection to boot. In their indictment, Dylan was admitting to a lesser crime in order to conceal truly heinous offences.

If you knew none of this, ‘Love and Theft’ could give many years of unalloyed pleasure. If you knew it all, down to every last musical ‘quotation’ and lyrical ‘allusion’, would it matter? Those who can’t grasp why this is one of Dylan’s finest albums, who have quaint ideas about originality and imagine that literary art must function like a variety of (respectable) journalism, miss not only the pleasure of the thing, but fail to see how Dylan’s ‘plagiarism’ functions within his larger purpose. If part of your aim is to examine and revivify your country’s history, what else would you bring to bear if not historical materials? If, meanwhile, you come to terms with the idea of found art and the resetting of found materials for poetic effect, the charge of plagiarism is almost puerile. In Dylan’s method things old and new echo within the landscape created, as they do in memory, as they do in the real world of which we hear so much. Things overlap and interconnect, change meaning in juxtaposition, acquire a significance they would not otherwise possess. When Dylan does it, some pretty good tracks also become available.

Take the following verse from ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. Is it possible, do you think, that Dylan stole those two characters? Never mind. Assiduous textual detectives, those who seem to believe that all true art is entirely pristine and wholly original, would track the first pair of lines to a Civil War poet called Timrod. The lit dicks would not make quite as much fuss over the second pair, or explain how those lines function in relation to the lines that precede them.

Well a childish dream is a deathless need

And a noble truth is a sacred dream

My pretty baby, she’s lookin’ around

She’s wearin’ a multi-thousand dollar gown

Some lines are borrowed, but the result is wholly original. Robert Burns pulled this trick time and again. Elsewhere Dylan might quote F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby – nothing minor, just the unmissable ‘You can’t repeat the past’ – or a Japanese memoir. In ‘Lonesome Day Blues’, for one example, there’s a big portion of Mark Twain. There are jokes, too, from the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Conceivably, there are also classical allusions. But then, the classics themselves are stuffed with allusions. In this variety of critical argument, a big point is being missed.

To get the sound he wanted, finally, the artist – ‘Jack Frost’, for his purposes – produced the album himself. The sound he secured is the first and most obvious clue to the relationship between ‘Love and Theft’ and American history. Dylan had indeed moved forward by turning back the clock. Using his touring band for the first time – having grasped finally that people who played with him every other night knew his little ways better than any expensive session crew – the album resembled an aural scrapbook of the pre-history of pop. Its reference points were the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. None of the songs shout masterpiece; that wasn’t the point. In an odd way, the album was all the better for it. Dylan’s greatest works, the big songs, have a habit of diminishing everything around them. With ‘Love and Theft’ the listener is granted an apparently relaxed, sunny suite of songs in the vernacular, full of little jokes – some even have punchlines – and eccentricities. This is one of those rare things, a loveable Dylan album.

The loose (very loose) literary equivalent to Dylan’s structural method might be William Faulkner’s tales of Yoknapatawpha County. The songs are not interlinked, not explicitly, but journey almost from scene to scene. Even the darker pieces are somehow smoothed out to fit the overall pattern. So the great ‘Mississippi’ is revived, but here it sounds nothing like the versions attempted for Time Out of Mind. With ‘Love and Theft’ Dylan also finds a style that suits his ever-diminishing voice. The 60-year-old sounds even older, in places, than his age should allow. At all times he sounds as though his first album in the twenty-first century is being broadcast from some Alabama radio station in the late 1940s with Hank Williams and Bukka White hanging around outside.

As observed, ‘Love and Theft’ is saturated in ‘influences’. There’s plenty of blues, some of it so familiar and obvious Dylan was all but pleading with listeners to notice what he was doing. If on one song he sings ‘it’s all in vain’ and on another ‘I believe I’ll dust my broom’, he is making the most overt reference possible to Robert Johnson. You can discover the blues even in song titles such as ‘Lonesome Day’ or ‘Po’ Boy’. If most of his audience has meanwhile never heard of Charley Patton, to whom ‘High Water’ is dedicated, what does it matter? The blues and what the blues has signified in American history is a main tributary for ‘Love and Theft’. The African American experience is what truly matters in ‘High Water’, not the fact that Dylan quotes from an ancient song called ‘The Cuckoo’ that he used to sing back in the Gaslight club in 1962.

High water risin’, six inches ’bove my head

Coffins droppin’ in the street

Like balloons made out of lead

Water pourin’ into Vicksburg

Don’t know what I’m going to do

‘Don’t reach out for me,’ she said

‘Can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?’

It’s rough out there

High water everywhere

The idea that Dylan was supposed to cite every source, confess to every appropriation and submit to being treated as a desiccated folklorist was absurd. Worse, it was banal. Yet to read some subsequent comment, confess was exactly what he was supposed to do. If he was reassembling found art with this album, a perfectly respectable technique was involved. This was not the young Dylan who had passed off melodies and more as his own. This was not the master thief, the sponge. This was a conscious (and self-conscious) artist. The distinction would escape several people whose only apparent desire is to have the artist document every last facet of his life and work. And then apologise.

The sunny mood of ‘Love and Theft’ is deceptive, of course. The songs in this album have as their trademark the sting in the tail, the jab that seems to come from nowhere. They are once again driven by religion, but also by the curious conviction, as in ‘Things Have Changed’, that resigned acceptance of this world means the singer no longer has to care about anything much. On this album, it’s almost a side issue. Above all, these are stories, fables, episodes from what Greil Marcus identifies as the ‘old, weird America’. One fine joke in this album is that despite all the literary allusions every voice is the voice of the common people. Irrespective of anything the songs might have to say, Dylan was making the claim that America exists in its voices and its music, in cultural geneaology, in tradition as it evolves and mutates. His critics crawled all over the thefts and forgot about the love.

*

No one in Mahattan bought ‘Love and Theft’ on the day of its release. New York had other things to worry about on 11 September 2001. The coincidence was grim, but grim coincidence it remained. Unlike so many others in his trade, Dylan did not rush to write a song, patriotic or otherwise, about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His views about what any piece of art was worth amid a cataclysm were well developed. Besides, his creativity had long before lost the reflexive speed needed for so-called ‘topical songwriting’. In any case, ‘9/11’, as it soon became known, seemed existential rather than just another pressing issue of the day. By another brutal coincidence, Dylan’s old boyhood friend Larry Kegan, comrade of the Herzl summer camp and beyond, had succumbed to a heart attack on the day America was assaulted. Death happened, as life happened, without politics or poetry. Musicians could only make music. Dylan kept going.