IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST 2002, FANS ATTENDING A DYLAN SHOW at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York State, were treated to a novel piece of entertainment just before the artist and his band took the stage. It was almost sunset on the tenth night of that year’s summer tour of the United States and Canada. For those stuck on the idea, it was concert number 1,440 of the everlasting road trip. It was also just another show. As Aaron Copeland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ played, the voice of Al Santos, Dylan’s road manager, boomed out over the fairgrounds in a perfect stentorian parody of every cornball stage announcement ever made. It might as well have been Ed McMahon opening the old Tonight show with his ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counter-culture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned make-up in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’80s, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!
The introduction would be retained for a decade to come. In due course, it would be adapted slightly to make sardonic mention of ‘Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan’, but the joke would survive. It was a good joke, given that it was mostly true. What made it funnier was that Dylan had not invented this baroque spiel. It had been taken, more or less wholesale, from an article that had appeared in the Buffalo News less than a week before. Fully 40 years before that, the artist had been in the middle of recording The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with no possible idea of the fate that awaited him. In 2002, he was making a nonsense of those who still made a nonsense of his life and times. And mocking himself, too, trading cliché for cliché. If they wanted a caricature, they could have a caricature. A joke is as good a place to hide as any.
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Dave Van Ronk, mentor-in-chief in the Village all those decades before, had died earlier in the year at the age of 65. He had never left the district. At the end of June 2004 the City of New York would rename the little street where he had lived near Sheridan Square in honour of the blues player. A lot of old friends would show up for the ceremony. Dylan, who no longer stood around on street corners listening to speeches, would be touring in Europe, as usual.
He had spent many nights sleeping on a couch in Van Ronk’s West 15th Street apartment during his first year in the city. Later he had repaid the hospitality by stealing his host’s arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ for the sake of the Bob Dylan album. Van Ronk had meant to record the piece himself. Relations had become strained for a while, less because of the betrayal than because of what the theft – unambiguous, on that occasion – had seemed to reveal. Craft and career, art and its imperatives, had mattered more than friendship. Van Ronk, self-styled Trotskyist, had never been capable of the ruthlessness an entertainer needs if his desire is a big name or big money. Dylan would remember the older man fondly in Chronicles.
In his American concerts early in 2002 the artist had opened, as often as not, with the old murder ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’, a song that had appeared as the first track on Van Ronk’s first album, Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues and a Spiritual, in 1959. By coincidence or choice, Dylan had performed the ballad in Charleston, West Virginia, on the night after his old friend’s death on 10 February. Given all that he had learned, absorbed and borrowed from a Greenwich Village autodidact, you could count the performance as a perfect example of the eternal folk process. The song belonged to no one save the singer of the moment. Unless he made it his own, of course.
All Dylan did was play. It was as though he was working his way through the population centres of the developed world one by one. In Europe, there was still some glamour attached to his appearances in London, Paris or Zurich, but in the heartland a Bob Dylan show was commonplace by 2002. He came and went with the seasons; sometimes fair, sometimes foul. Most of the fans who saw him year after year, or who travelled from place to place to witness multiple performances, had become as tolerant of Dylan’s failures as they were eager for a memorable night. They took their chances. This show might be bad, but tomorrow’s might become part of the enveloping legend. Few other performers, if any, had achieved this kind of relationship with their audiences. Judging by online fan chatter, some of the most devoted even found a strange connoisseur’s fascination in seeing Dylan perform badly, as though it only made the next triumph sweeter. This audience, the initiates within the cocoon, were as much a part of the never-ending phenomenon as the artist. Arguably, since they clung to the name despite all his scorn, the tour belonged to them, not to him.
Nevertheless, year after year, in city after city, there would be walkouts at Dylan’s shows. Those who refused the contract, who expected to hear an artist who resembled his recorded work, believed they were entitled to more than pot luck for the price of a ticket. Sometimes they had a case. It was one thing to reject the idea that the artist should repeat himself, another to use the legend of perpetual creativity to excuse substandard shows. Those aficionados who defended Dylan at all costs – for he rarely bothered – were still taking refuge in the ‘reinvention’ argument when he was doing no such thing, when the performances sucked, when he seemed tired, surly, or simply uninterested. In 2002, amid 77 shows in North America and 29 in Europe, no one was entitled to expect perfection every night. Equally, no concert-goer should have been naive enough still to believe that Dylan, of all people, would attempt to reproduce note for note some track he had recorded in 1965 or 1975. But even in a year when he was putting on good shows with a good band – and 2002 often resembled such a year; London had seen at least one very fine performance – there was a sense of mechanical repetitiveness about the tours. Dylan would sometimes answer journalists who asked why he worked so hard by pointing to some other musician – Willie Nelson and B.B. King were favourites – who toured constantly and did more concerts in a year than he ever contemplated. It was true enough. He has never come close to matching the 250 to 300 dates King was fulfilling annually well into his 70s. But no journalist seems ever to have asked the follow-up questions. Was that the sort of revered, mummified figure he wanted to become? If so, why?
It led him to strange places for unexplained reasons. The Erie County Fair, ‘America’s Fair’, was one such. Essentially an agricultural show with a carnival and other entertainments attached, the event saw Dylan and his band playing to a racetrack grandstand in western New York State. Even the hardcore fans didn’t think it was anything special as a concert. All agreed that it was a bizarre place to be watching this artist in action. The best you could say is that a racetrack on a hot night made a change from another carbuncular sports arena custom-built to shrivel the soul. Almost a year had passed since the release of ‘Love and Theft’. Another four years would elapse before a new Bob Dylan album emerged.
In the meantime, reports concerning the artist had begun to appear in the Hollywood movie papers just after Dave Van Ronk’s death. They said Dylan was in ‘discussions’ over a possible starring role in a picture that might be called Masked and Anonymous. It seemed someone still believed he could be turned into an actor. Someone certainly seemed to believe, at any rate, that his name remained potent enough to get a film project off the ground and attract the sorts of talent who could turn cachet into cash.
There was a little more to it than that. In fact, there was a lot more to it. No one was wooing Dylan for this piece of work, nor was he being tempted with big money. He was one of the co-writers, a moving force behind the entire picture. The itch he had felt before attempting Renaldo and Clara needed to be scratched again. Dylan was in the mood to make a statement. Yet on 8 June the Hollywood Reporter would confirm that Angela Bassett had been added to the cast and state:
Written by Rene Fontaine and Sergy Petrov, Masked is based on the unpublished short story ‘Los Vientos del Destino’, written by Enrique Morales. It follows the story of Dylan’s character, Jack Fate, a wandering troubadour brought out of prison by his former manager for one last concert, a charity benefit. Bassett would [sic] play Mistress, who has a past with Fate. The cast also includes Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Penelope Cruz, and Jeff Bridges.
In Paris, a hapless and actual Enrique Morales was obliged to point out that whichever way los vientos del destino (the winds of fate) were blowing, they were not coming from his vicinity. The Italian-Argentinian actor, playwright, director and teacher knew nothing about any such ‘short story’, or any such movie project. The Hollywood Reporter had not bothered to ask questions, meanwhile, about Rene and Sergy/ Sergei, the unheralded writing team who were to put words into the mouth of the Dylan oracle. ‘Petrov’ was the artist himself, of course. ‘Fontaine’ was Larry Charles, formerly a sitcom writer best known for his contributions to Seinfeld. He was to direct the picture, despite the fact that his only previous experience in such a role had been with the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The star of Masked and Anonymous would need no encouragement in that regard.
So: Jack Fate? The echoes of Renaldo and Clara, its ‘Father’, ‘Son’, ‘Woman in White’ and the rest, were not reassuring. Sometimes, especially those times when movie cameras were present, Dylan’s sense of ambiguity deserted him. It could be pointed out, rightly, that Masked and Anonymous is allegorical. It could also be observed that Hollywood, as though to prove poetic justice yet exists, doesn’t get allegory. Reviewers reared on its cheesy diet also seem to have trouble digesting that kind of art-house conceit. So it would prove. Dylan’s decision to give himself so pretentious a fictional name while speaking in aphorisms would all but subvert any points he wanted to make about attitudes towards performers and fame.
Wearing a black fender-fold cowboy hat, red-striped trousers and a pencil moustache that made him look like an anaemic Vincent Price or a gnarled Cisco Houston, he gave the second of two shows at London’s Docklands Arena on 12 May. On 2 July, principal photography began in Los Angeles for what would become Masked and Anonymous. By that time the cast list had begun to resemble an agent’s address book. In addition to those already mentioned who were prepared to work for ‘scale’ (union rates) on Dylan’s behalf, John Goodman had agreed to take on the central role of Uncle Sweetheart, venal former manager to Fate, the washed-up rock legend. The list of other notables for whom parts were somehow found included Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Ed Harris, Bruce Dern and Cheech Marin. A lot would be asked of the script assembled by Rene and Sergei. Enough dialogue to go around would be one requirement.
Masked and Anonymous is undeniably a strange film. At its centre is a star who does a fine basilisk stare, but very little of what is otherwise known as acting. It seems we are supposed simply to know that this is Bob Dylan, one gigantic performance in his own right, and adjust our assumptions accordingly. If that was the idea, it doesn’t work. In the usual Hollywood parlance, Dylan is meant to carry the film. Instead, he too often resembles a diffident presence, the approximate locus for something or someone the real actors can talk at. In scene after scene, the cliché ‘less is more’ is taken to its illogical conclusion.
Around Dylan/Jack Fate turns a plot that is not often detained by the need for exposition or explanations and a bunch of characters whose purpose, half the time, seems to be to engage the semi-absent hero in psychotic-Socratic exchanges. A lot of the dialogue is cryptic; much of it wears its presumed profundity like a ball and chain. Kinder critics and the distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, would attempt to suggest that part of the effect being attempted was to create dramatic correlatives to Dylan’s songs. No one seems to have thought that one through. Those songs are in essence monologues; the speaker is not interrogated. Most movies, in contrast, are driven by their dialogue, by interplay and exchange. The expedient of allowing Fate to address us in voice-over is a sign, as some film purists will always insist, of cinematic failure.
That said, Masked and Anonymous is awash with ideas, good and bad. The picture offers a lot to talk about and analyse. Whether it returns the same investment in terms of viewing pleasure is, let’s say, disputable. The idea of Bob Dylan and what that might mean is much in evidence. There are countless jokes for fans and students of the music business. There is an entire character, Tom Friend (Bridges) – another blunt-edged joke of a name – whose purpose for much of the time is to illustrate Dylan’s misfortunes at the hands of dishonest journalists (especially those who are obsessed with the ’60s). This is supposed to lead us, it seems, into an argument over truth, reality and art. Instead, it gives the appearance of a star demanding attention by complaining about all the attention.
And yet the thing is fascinating. It has levels the way an M.C. Escher architectural fantasy has levels. If the measure of a piece of art is that it repays attention, Masked and Anonymous is worth a lot of attention. Its effects are cumulative, its ambitions large. Les Enfants du Paradis it is not, but the contrast between a contained theatrical world and life’s bigger stage, between conscious performance and a world full of lies, disguises and political performances – masked and anonymous, in short – is very effective. Some of the music, if not all, is terrific.
Uncle Sweetheart (Goodman) has pulled Fate from a Mexican jail for the sake of a TV benefit – supposedly for the poor and needy, as ever – with Sweetheart as the beneficiary. In a dilapidated, ramshackle America torn apart by economic failure and an incipient civil war, it’s every hustler, demagogue and thief for himself. On the way to the gig, Fate pauses to visit his dying father, who happens to be the dictatorial ‘President’, one who is about to be overthrown by Edmundo (Rourke), the next caudillo in line. Democracy is a thing of the past. Such is one subtext in search of a plot.
In fact, it might be the most interesting theme of all. Dylan the scriptwriter has cast his eyes beyond the ‘Clinton wars’ and America’s sense of infinite entitlement to peace and prosperity. He has packed one corner of his film with allusions to one great Civil War – an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the ghost of a blackface minstrel turn up, ‘Dixie’ is played – and asked himself why another conflagration is out of the question. Death squads roam the land; TV executives go armed; peonage has returned; corruption is commonplace. When a little girl (Tinashe Kachingwe) sings ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” for Fate’s sake, there is a world of poignancy in the moment. The truth is in the eyes of all the grown men who are listening: the times have changed, but for the hellish worst, not for the better.
The film seems to say that the United States is deluding itself, that infernal forces are never far from its bright, complacent surface. All that’s required for understanding, as Fate explains before the closing titles, is an altered perspective. In short, though the country is never named, Dylan imagines the end of America. This time the prophet ventures a prophecy. Once he preached of apocalypse and end times; this is a glimpse of what he meant.
Masked and Anonymous is not the typical all-American dystopia. It could be set in anyone’s future and is not, in any case, remotely ‘futuristic’. The misery of daily life could be unfolding in one of those Third World countries to which all ‘low intensity’ wars are supposed to be confined. But one memorable and moving slow panning shot offers a dismal vista of a recognisable contemporary Los Angeles. On the soundtrack Dylan sings his ‘Blind Willie McTell’: ‘See the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, “This land is condemned.”’ All ambiguities aside, the artist has not been as ‘political’ as this in many years.
He also has something to say about religion, art, dreams, friendship, families and lies. What makes the film complicated – what makes it impossible as a Hollywood production – is that Dylan is not trying to say just one, two or half a dozen things. He also seems be insisting that the things he is trying to convey cannot be isolated, one from the other. As writing, the film is tightly woven. Contrary to what would be said by critics who understood only the standard Hollywood three-act brain-killer, it is not without structure. It is certainly not ‘formless’.
Some of the allusions to Shakespeare make you wonder, for example, if Fate, Sweetheart, the TV producer Nina Veronica (Lange) and the rest are not just actors in a play within a play. Oscar Vogel, the ghost of the blackface minstrel who opened his mouth once too often – Vogel is the German word for bird – makes the obvious statement: ‘The whole world is a stage.’ The Bob Dylan we think we know is meanwhile both a performer and a performance. In one of its aspects that performance is mistaken for reality. In another sense it has been reality, one reality, ever since Robert Zimmerman adopted a fictitious name. In this stretch of celluloid, Bob Dylan plays a Bob Dylan figure. He plays himself as a character forever playing himself. If the movie confused some people, that was no accident.
It is equally possible to ask whether the outside world of civil wars, death squads and murderous politicians in Masked and Anonymous is not just another of history’s hellish perpetual re-enactments. Edmundo, the President, the insurgents and counter-insurgents could as well be players in some Elizabethan drama of regicide and betrayal done in modern dress. You can have a third bite at the cherry by wondering how much of what is going on is happening in and through the mind of Fate. The film’s closing sequence sees him being driven back to his prison. Dylan’s immobile face is held for almost a minute and half, resigned or accepting, in essence disinterested, while the voice-over says, ‘I was always a singer and maybe no more than that.’ His last words are: ‘Seen from a fair garden, everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau, and you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I tried to stop figuring everything out a long time ago.’ The film all but invites you to come up with your own guesses as to what it was he had once tried to understand.
When it was released in July 2003, the film did not impress many reviewers. No one should have been too surprised. Yet again, Dylan had made a piece of cinema that required too much thought and too many explanations. His non-acting, even in a movie that justified passivity and a few non sequiturs, did not make for the kind of sense the critics wanted to understand. Most agreed that the star was a mumbler, wooden, taciturn to a fault – all too true, unfortunately – who had indulged in yet another of his well-known ego trips. Thanks to Renaldo and Clara, Dylan was never again going to catch a break in the world of movies. It was also said, reasonably enough, that too many of the big names who had queued for a chance to be in the picture had been reduced to cameo performances. So Val Kilmer turned up as an animal trainer apropos of nothing, it seemed, beyond an incoherent speech on the fate of species and because he was Val Kilmer. Equally, the possibility that tiny roles were sometimes crucial was not considered by busy reviewers. A common reaction to Ed Harris playing the ghost of Vogel the blackface minstrel was expressed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s man in the free seats. ‘Why? I don’t know,’ said the critic helpfully. ‘It’s best to not think about it.’1 The picture might have made a bit more sense had the cineaste bothered to do his job.
A ‘lot of long-winded gobbledygook’, said the Los Angeles Times. Proof ‘that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another’, observed the Boston Globe. ‘An incomprehensible Bob Dylan vanity project that is not only nearly impossible to sit through, but embarrasses a long list of stars who lined up to work for scale opposite the legendary musician,’ judged the New York Post. ‘Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle . . . comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing,’ concluded the Washington Post. An ‘unholy, incoherent mess’, said the New York Times.
The New Yorker made an effort, its critic deciding that the picture was ‘knowing without always being knowledgeable, darkly humorous, full of wisdom both faux and real, and genuinely mysterious’. Ann Hornaday gave the Washington Post’s second opinion on its own review, granting that Masked and Anonymous was ‘uneven’, but nevertheless judging the picture to be ‘a fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerising pop culture curio’.2 These pleas in mitigation did nothing to alter the damning verdict. As a commercial proposition, the movie was dead within days.
What was interesting, in a ghoulish sort of way, was the extent to which Dylan was held in contempt or attacked just for being Bob Dylan. Some people had grown very weary of the legend. The Village Voice, for one example, warned those liable to be guided by its opinions that the movie was ‘first and foremost a trash-can monument’ to the ‘ageing coolness’ of this ‘pop Mahatma’.3 The hostile reviews had one other thing in common. The political content of Masked and Anonymous was dismissed or just ignored. Here was Dylan, for a miracle, addressing politics and a possible American future and no one wanted to know. It seems that radical views had gone out of style since his first adventures in ideology. Perhaps if he had made the picture a few years later, when the truth about warmongering conspiracies was known to all, when banks were brought to their knees and capitalism trembled, the critics might have been a little more attentive.
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On 3 August 2002, of all the festivals in all the world, Dylan performed at Newport. The event at which he had made his name in 1963 and made some enemies in ’65 was as much a part of the received narrative of his career as the 1962 Fender Stratocaster with a three-tone sunburst finish that, back in olden times, had infuriated those with an inflexible idea of how folk music was supposed to sound. Thirty-seven years later, the organic-fruit-juice-vending sponsors were calling it the Apple & Eve Newport Folk Festival. In the late afternoon of a ferociously hot day, Dylan opened with a traditional song, ‘Roving Gambler’. He didn’t do so to make a point about ironies, but simply because it had become his habit. He had outlasted all the arguments.
In fact, many of the critics and fans who had listened hard to Time Out of Mind and ‘Love and Theft’, who had pored over all the verses, unpicked the quotation-collages and tracked down every fragment of borrowed melody, said he had become the keeper of tradition’s flame, the archivist of the American experience. The idea was already in danger of becoming a cliché. Reviewing ‘Love and Theft’ in the New York Times, Greil Marcus had remarked that Dylan’s new music opened up a window in time.4 That was no more strictly true than the accusations of betrayal in 1965 had been wholly true. But it contained truth enough. Dylan was not quite the last person in his country still capable of remembering a few things about the republic’s history. He was hardly alone among performers in trying to pierce the veil of cultural amnesia. Americana, a term he would mistrust until he claimed it nonchalantly for his 2013 Americanarama tour, had been thriving without his help during the 1990s. Somehow, for all that, Dylan’s explorations hinted at a bigger statement than anything that could be contained in a revivalist pastiche. Walt Whitman was being invoked increasingly often by admirers. The artist, it was asserted, was finding a way to articulate a sense of the past in the present, alive and active. He too had become part of the American tradition, lodged in the collective memory he was mapping.
Dylan returned to Newport less than a fortnight after the death of Alan Lomax, the left-wing folklorist who had been among those shouting loudest for less volume back in the middle of the ’60s. The artist had chosen to forget about that. On being ‘inducted’ to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York in January 1988, Dylan had picked out the folk-song collector – along with Little Richard, no less – for special thanks. During a show in Vienna, Virginia, in August 1997, Dylan had once more expressed his gratitude to the ‘father of world music’. The artist would also make respectful mentions of Lomax in the pages of Chronicles, as though all the fuss of 1965 had never happened.
There was an odd sense in which that was almost true. By 2002, the three albums of rococo R&B and opaque verses that had forged Dylan’s reputation in the middle years of the ’60s looked increasingly like aberrations, however brilliant they might have been in conception and execution. Journalists writing about him were still talking of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde in terms of ‘rock and roll’. He had said often enough, correctly but in vain, that the term had never been descriptive of his music. The other truth was that those three monumental albums did not represent the dominant strains in his art. Strange as it sounds, they had been a phase.
By the end of his life, Lomax had long since come to terms with popular music, though he never lost his contempt for homogenised mass culture. Dylan had travelled in the opposite direction. His thanks from the stage at the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna in 1997, just after singing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, had included the following statement: ‘Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan.’ That had been as explicit as the artist ever gets, even if it overlooked the fact that the Lomax version of love and theft had sometimes involved dubious methods, not least a tendency on the collector’s part to behave like a condescending patron towards black performers. Dylan had always talked of folk song in terms of mystery and secret knowledge. In thousands of field recordings, in Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), in The Land Where the Blues Began (1993) and in many other publications besides, Lomax had spent 70 years making the connections that had helped others to solve the riddles. He had helped white boys to sing the blues, at any rate. Dylan’s twenty-first-century approach was more sophisticated. As with borrowed words and phrases, he laid himself open to the charge that he had built a career by appropriating the creations of overlooked or anonymous artists. In his defence was the fact that he had, in essence, perpetuated tradition more surely than any other performer. So dominant was he in the art of American song, it was hard to say where tradition ended and Dylan began. His late recordings were meditations on that truth.
Still, when he returned to the stage in Newport after 37 years it seemed to most members of a huge audience that he had been taking his ethnomusicological researches a little too far. Either that or he had landed a job playing third villain from the left in a particularly bad western. The big white Stetson was in place, but there the resemblance to any known Bob Dylan ended. His hair was shoulder length, straight and unkempt. He wore a beard that looked as though it had been drawn on by an impish child. What made this all the more bizarre was that some fans knew he had looked entirely different, which is to say more or less normal, during the previous night’s show in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Newport, Dylan made no attempt to explain himself. As was often the case, he said not a word to the crowd, but carried on as though nothing whatever was amiss. His eccentricities had long been proverbial; this – the weird hair like a stringy curtain around his head, the billy goat beard-thing – invited diagnosis. When photographs got out, a small frenzy would ensue among those who worry over What It All Means.
It meant that Dylan had been shooting a video for a new song called ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. The mystery lay in the fact that he had not bothered to take even ten minutes to remove a silly wig and a fake beard before going on stage. Perhaps it was his oblique comment on expectations and the return to Newport. Perhaps he thought it was funny. When a Rolling Stone journalist asked a couple of years later, ‘What was up with the wig and fake beard?’ Dylan’s answer almost gave the game away. ‘Is that me who you saw up there?’ he asked.5 Perhaps he just liked the look, or the idea that photographs of what seemed to be late-period Howard Hughes in a cowboy hat would certainly find their way around the world. He didn’t look much better in the video, but at least the get-up was appropriate to the subject.
Behind all the nonsense, typically, lay one of his finest songs. That the piece would be relegated for better than five years to the soundtrack album for a failed Civil War movie called Gods and Generals is almost too predictable to be worth stating. It was the kind of perverse decision that had also become typical. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, a majestic threnody for those who fell in the war between the states, vindicated Dylan’s literary borrowing habit. It confirmed, too, that his attempts to address a century and a half of American history, to contain its strands and contradictions within his work, were not whims.
Ted Turner, the billionaire ‘media mogul’ and founder of CNN, had financed Gods and Generals with tens of millions of dollars from his own pocket. The exact number of millions is open to dispute. By the time the picture was released in February 2003, an original budget of $56 million had grown to what the Los Angeles Times understood to be $90 million; others said anywhere between $60 million and $80 million. In the end, this ‘prequel’ to the movie Gettysburg took just $12.9 million at the box office. Some of the many critics who dismissed the epic as mannered, verbose and far too long would think the receipts generous. One result was that Dylan, apparently intent on a second career as a composer of songs for films, would sacrifice one of his most affecting statements to a risible piece of Southern ancestor worship. Thanks to Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006, the eighth volume in the Bootleg Series, the song survives and still manages to say more about America’s Civil War in just over eight minutes than Gods and Generals achieved in three hours and forty-nine minutes.
It’s a song without a chorus, dolorous as a funeral march, couched in a fair facsimile of the language of the period, religious yet clear-eyed, and streaked through with the found poetry of historical truth. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ also manages to be a movie song that is cinematic in its own right. The work is complete and self-contained. It has no need of the picture’s thunderous battle re-enactment scenes, or of promotional videos of famous singers in fright wigs. From verse to verse it moves across ‘the ravaged land’ with a more penetrating gaze than any feature film.
Across the green mountain
I slept by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up
Out of the sea
Swept through the land of The rich and the free
Dylan’s method is immediately apparent. ‘Heaven blazing in my head’ has been connected by several critics, rightly, to the W.B. Yeats of ‘Lapis Lazuli’, he who speaks of ‘Heaven blazing into the head’. What’s often forgotten is the connection Dylan is making. The next line of the Irishman’s 1938 poem follows a punctuating colon with ‘Tragedy wrought to its uttermost’. In the succeeding verse there is the line ‘Old civilisations put to the sword’, then ‘All things fall and are built again’. This being Dylan, meanwhile, the thing emerging from the sea and a monstrous dream no doubt originate in Revelation 13:1: ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’ This being Dylan, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ formulation, ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’, is shorn of bombast. The ‘land of the rich and free’ has lost its prosperity and liberty to carnage and the beast within. Blasphemy will meanwhile reappear in the song ‘on every tongue’, as though to say that the conflict itself is blasphemous. Yet ‘virtue lives / and cannot be forgot’.
The wonder of the piece is the quantity of imagery Dylan manages to condense. An entire nineteenth-century notion of sacrifice on the ‘altar’ of war, of the ‘good’ Christian death for one’s country, is caught in a few bare lines. Then the entire scene of a coming battle, with all its bathetic pretensions to honour and gentlemanly conduct before the slaughter, is laid out in 20 words.
Altars are burning
with flames far and wide
the foe has crossed over
from the other side
They tip their caps
from the top of the hill
You can feel them come
More brave blood to spill
Throughout the song, Dylan sticks to his brief. Gods and Generals was an attempt both to tell the story of a decisive period in the Civil War and to portray General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the insanely devout hero of the Confederacy. The song, like the movie, intends to give an idea of vast loss on both sides, but for much of the time, inevitably, its perspective is Southern. Jackson was shot three times by the pickets of his own rebel army towards the end of the battle of Chancellorsville early in May 1863. After an arm was amputated, pneumonia set in and he died of its complications. The South greeted the loss of a brilliantly audacious general with a keening panic. Some historians of the struggle argue, in fact, that Jackson’s death was the war’s turning point. Without his aid, Robert E. Lee was unable to beat the odds at the battle of Gettysburg a few weeks later. After that, it is claimed, the Confederacy’s defeat was inevitable. Dylan’s song takes no interest in any of this. By contrasting veneration and banal, bloody reality, he gives instead a working definition of war’s infinite stupidity.
Close the eyes
of our captain
Peace may he know
His long night is done
The great leader is laid low
He was ready to fall
He was quick to defend
Killed outright he was
by his own men
‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ has the gravitas of a hymnal, the brooding undertones of a graveside eulogy. Dylan’s abraded voice becomes the only conceivable instrument for this kind of mourning. His touring band provide still more evidence, meanwhile, that he has no need to draft in big-name session players. The violin of Larry Campbell and the organ of Benmont Tench are the only counterpoints the lyrics require. Within the words the restless shades of nineteenth-century American poetry move at a steady, ponderous pace. Dylan’s reliable Henry Timrod is there, with both a line from a verse and an echo of the rhetorical style of the poem ‘Charleston’. In part, that reads:
Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,
Walk grave and thoughtful men,
Whose hands may one day wield the patriot’s blade
As lightly as the pen.
Herman Melville’s poem ‘Running the Batteries’ has been heard in Dylan’s song; Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ has been adduced; part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Killed at the Ford’ could almost have been one of the verses in the song.
Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill . . .
Anyone who fails to see the point of the allusions and borrowings, who prefers hunt-the-plagiarist and elects to ‘deconstruct’ a piece of art as though it were a clockwork toy fit only to be taken apart, will find plenty to work with in ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. This is Dylan:
A letter to mother
Came today
‘Gunshot wound to the breast’
Is what it did say
‘But he’ll be better soon
He’s in a hospital bed’
But he’ll never be better
He’s already dead
This is Whitman (from ‘Come Up From the Fields, Father’):
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Again, Dylan’s ability to edit and condense is startling. Whitman goes on for two more verses before reaching the point:
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor maybe needs to be better,
that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already . . .
Dylan’s source is obvious enough, then. What’s worth remembering is that while he intermingles unassuaged grief from both sides of a warring nation – his ‘Captain’ could as well be Lincoln as Jackson – he fuses the poetry of North and South, Whitman and Timrod. Dylan also traces a cultural continuity. His lines ‘Stars fell over Alabama / I saw each star’ are, aptly, a luminous evocation of extinguished Southern lives. But they are also adapted from a 1930s jazz song, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. That tune, in turn, borrowed its title from a book describing a never-forgotten Leonid meteor shower over the state in 1833. The past is in the present; the present is somehow within the past. By its tone the song seems to say, meanwhile, that the war between the states has never truly ended. Grief has never been forgotten; the reasons for grief and enmity have yet to be addressed; nothing is healed. Modern America was born of this conflict and modern America, as Dylan knew perfectly well, remains a house divided against itself.
Finally, there are those verses which, though no doubt unearthed from someone’s prose, become purest Dylan. They leave you to wonder what all the charges of plagiarism can truly mean. So the merest hint from an old jazz song becomes a verse remarkable for its concision and precision. The writer does not have to state all that has been lost. There is a world of mourning in a few words:
Stars fell over Alabama
I saw each star
You’re walking in dreams
Whoever you are
Chilled are the skies
Keen is the frost
The ground’s froze hard
And the morning is lost
*
The government of the United States was threatening war while Dylan was recording ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. George W. Bush, the latest president, did not mean to be deterred from his ambitions for a conflict in the Middle East, least of all by the facts. An elaborate plot to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for the sake of a strategic incursion was in train. The fiction of an Iraqi dictator’s weapons of mass destruction was being spun out across the media, all outlets. If he cared, Dylan got still more points for prescience: People are crazy and times are strange . . .
Another movie song, the ancient-sounding one that had plenty to say about futility and loss, had made no comment about the manner in which wars are sometimes contrived, or about the kind of people who fix things so that others do the dying. That had been the younger Dylan’s style. But the older man still knew, as he had known in his youth, that politicians will lie reflexively to achieve their ends. That understanding had never disappeared from Dylan’s thinking and he had not relinquished every right to an opinion. ‘Summer Days’ on the ‘Love and Theft’ album had offered a sour, minor joke:
Politician got on his jogging shoes
He must be running for office, got no time to lose
He been suckin’ the blood out of the genius of generosity
The adventure known simply as ‘Iraq’ would be constructed upon a mound of calculated deceits and do America no credit in the world. Americans themselves would find much of it shameful and most of it troubling. Many citizens of allied countries would feel the same. Worst of all, the war when it came in March 2003 would see all the old ideas of duty, honour and country despoiled by cynics once again. Dylan – patriotic enough and certainly no pacifist – had said all he needed to say in “Cross the Green Mountain’ about the terrible things done in virtue’s name. Interviewed in the autumn of 2001, he had tried to make a distinction between being simply ‘anti-war’ – impossible for a supporter of the State of Israel – and his abiding distrust of those who ‘manipulated’ patriotism.
Take ‘Masters of War’. Every time I sing it, someone writes that it’s an anti-war song. I’m not a pacifist. I don’t think I’ve ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it’s about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in this country. I believe strongly in everyone’s right to defend themselves by every means necessary . . .
I think something changed in the country around 1966 or so. You’ll have to look at the history books to really sort it out, but there are people who manipulated the Vietnam war. They were traitors to America, whoever they were. It was the beginning of the corporate take-over of America.6
The one-word debacle called Iraq would be a sharp lesson for those still prepared to learn. The notion that there could be untrammelled American power in a ‘unipolar’ world would be refuted. Grandiose boasts of ‘the second American century’ would come apart like cheap cement amid a welter of excuses. The claim that democratic ‘values’ could be pressed on peoples whose desire for liberation was taken for granted would dissolve in the keen light of reality. Meanwhile, the ‘corporate take-over’ would be extended to the very business of war-making as private enterprises made fortunes from Pentagon contracts, much as fortunes had been made during the Civil War. In Iraq, the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower’s nightmare, would emerge defiantly from the shadows. Yet when the official lies became too obvious to ignore, trust in America’s government would be shaken once again. For the last superpower and for those still attempting to redeem history, Vietnam above all, Iraq would become a bloody mess. Dylan gazed upon all of this with the eyes of one who regarded war as fallen mankind’s perpetual condition. Bloody Chancellorsville or irradiated Fallujah: the only real difference was that in the modern atrocity Americans were not killing one another.
You cannot assemble an opinion on Dylan’s behalf just from the evidence of his public statements. He has had decades in which to master the arts of evasion and self-contradiction. You must go to the art instead. He appears always to say that it is beside the point for some mere singer to pontificate, that poetry, as W.H. Auden insisted, ‘makes nothing happen’. All the wars meanwhile say that humankind isn’t altered in the slightest by art, however passionate, however moving, however true. That had been the youngster’s insight in the ’60s. Protest songs made people feel better about themselves, but they didn’t truly change anything. The cities of the western world would erupt in protest against the Iraq conspiracy. Brave songs would be sung and brave words spoken, but the military machine would roll on regardless. Besides, if you cleave to Revelation, as Dylan does, your belief in immutable prophecy is liable to make everything else seem like trivia. But.
The coincidences that saw this artist writing Masked and Anonymous and ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ within the same brief span allow for the sketching of a rough composite picture of part of Dylan’s thinking. The idea of a war in the Middle East no doubt revived a few of his high-definition apocalyptic fantasies. Nevertheless, his movie said he had a precise idea of the forces at work within his country. His movie song said he had understood what becomes of essential humanity when it is exposed to pitiless warfare. Together, two overlooked works testified to the fact that, despite everything, he was clear-eyed and undeceived. Radical, too.
*
In October 2002, as though for the hell of it, Dylan’s performances in concert began to amount to something again. Whether this was because he had taken to playing the electric piano on stage, or because he had begun to tackle other people’s songs more often than before, there was a vitality to the shows, first on the American west coast and then in the east, that had not been evident in years. Renditions of works by Warren Zevon, who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, became a speciality. Dylan had not known the writer of ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ and ‘Werewolves of London’ especially well. He had played a little harmonica at a Zevon session in 1987, but did not claim to be a friend. Nevertheless, it seems the artist felt compelled to honour a dying man whose work he admired by performing his songs, often three in a night, at show after show.
As more than one Dylan fan noticed, he took pains to get his performances right when works that were not his own fell into his care. Amid all the exculpatory talk of ‘reinvention’, few had paused to ask how many times the feat could be attempted or accomplished with Dylan songs that were 30 and 40 years old. This would be his 15th year out on the road in a touring programme that had been interrupted just once, unavoidably, by the histoplasmosis infection scare. What was left to be squeezed from ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or ‘It’s Alright, Ma’? So it was that on 19 October the crowd at San Diego State University heard not only Zevon’s ‘Mutineer’ but Van Morrison’s ‘Carrying a Torch’, Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’, Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ and, remarkably, a version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’. Arguably, the last of these was the best of the lot. Dylan was testing himself with songs he didn’t know inside out, asleep or awake, in every conceivable improvised variant reading. It did him a power of good to sing what others had written.
For all that, the exercise also served to prove that he was once again in need of new material. Each of the songs of ‘Love and Theft’ had by this point been performed in concert, with varying degrees of success. Dylan was meanwhile turning to a few of his less-obvious older pieces to keep the customers satisfied. But if the tour never-ending had truly won him a new audience, the customers seemed strangely content with the same core set of the same old songs from the ’60s at show upon show. Perhaps, in the main, they were the same old customers. Still there was no sign of a new album. It seemed that Dylan could happily produce work if there was a Hollywood cheque attached, but could not be galvanised by any other means.
The consolation for fans late in 2002 was the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue. It was a very fine double CD set that nevertheless managed to annoy a few people by giving only a partial and misleading account of a typical revue concert. The album, a memento of idealism and high passion long gone, was nevertheless the best Dylan had to offer. For all his complaints about bootleggers, the appeal of ‘rare and unreleased’ recordings was his sole commercial proposition in the absence of new work. The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 would sell in respectable quantities, neither a golden goose nor a turkey.
In January 2003, Masked and Anonymous received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and went to meet its maker. Dylan was at risk, not for the first time, of becoming a world-famous cult figure. He toured Australia and New Zealand once again, went through the Southern American states in April and May, covered most of the rest of the country in July and August, reached Europe in October . . . And so on. If touring was not just a job, it looked very like one. On 12 September, after a good deal of hard living and the loss of his beloved and stalwart wife June, Johnny Cash died in Nashville at the age of 71. Dylan prepared still another of his eulogies. This one was longer and more heartfelt than most.
Cash, he wrote, ‘was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him’. Dylan remembered how his friend had sent a letter of support in the mid-’60s when the dogmatic editors of Sing Out! were ‘chastising me for the direction my music was going’. At that point, he and Cash had not actually met, but ‘the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.’ Johnny Cash, said Dylan,
is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty. If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses.
These were honourable sentiments. Dylan’s affection and respect for Cash had deep roots. Those who admired either or both of these men could ingest a little of their essential nobility vicariously from the artist’s words. A touching moment, then. It was slightly difficult, however, not to notice the disjunction sundering the Dylan who wrote so movingly of those ‘various lost causes of the human soul’ from the Dylan who materialised in Italy, handy and undeniably dandy, in January 2004. The ghost of John Cash had not brought this individual to his senses.
Dylan was in Venice to stand around in a rented palazzo for a couple of days, more or less alive and apparently in person, to shoot a minute-long commercial for the Victoria’s Secret lingerie company. The song sold for the occasion, along with the artist’s services, was ‘Love Sick’. The first self-evident fact, therefore, was that not a soul involved in the exercise save the writer could have listened to the track beforehand. The existential significance of undergarments is not, even at a stretch, one of its themes. Was this Dylan’s private joke? Hardly. He was there for the cheque.
As a provocation, as an art event staged with subversive intent to wring some comedy from commerce, it might have engendered all sorts of scholarly chatter. Instead, there was the sight being prepared for American TV audiences of a 62-year-old Dylan and a model almost 40 years his junior posing their way through a series of meaningful looks and sultry stares. She wore angels’ wings and examples of the company’s products; he wore his best rueful old devil empty face. Skin crawled on five continents. Even Salvador Dali, who had not been called Avida Dollars for nothing, spun gently in his unquiet grave. But what was a poor boy to do? Victoria’s Secret had thrown in an offer to sell a $10 Dylan compilation ‘exclusively’ at their outlets.
The online magazine Slate gave the artist a headline precisely as crass as his behaviour. ‘Tangled Up in Boobs’, it said. The Wall Street Journal, on most mornings predatory capitalism’s handmaiden, reported that it was all ‘part of a move to bring Mr Dylan’s music to new audiences’. Quote: ‘A moustachioed Mr Dylan, 62-years-old, appears in a new television ad for the sexy chain’s “Angels” line while models cavort to a remixed version of his 1997 song “Love Sick”.’7 The problem with all of this, dispassionately, for anyone who cared even slightly, was not that the artist had sold himself, but that he had sold the song. Slate invited its readers to ask themselves ‘why Bob Dylan, respected counter-cultural artist, would choose to sell panties’. The sole available answer was straightforward: he got paid.
Questioned by Rolling Stone later in the year, the artist would attempt a familiar trick and affect oblivious ignorance of the whole affair. As with all inconvenient events in his life, it somehow had nothing to do with him. ‘Was I not supposed to do that?’ he asked the journalist innocently. Why, he hadn’t even seen the ad.
I wish I would have seen it. Maybe I’d have something to say about it. I don’t see that kind of stuff. That’s all for other people to see and make up what they will.8
In any terms, by anyone’s biographical method, it counts as another puzzle. The Dylan who had written Masked and Anonymous, who had recorded ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, who had paid homage to the integrity of Johnny Cash and done a few other useful things in his time, was taking the cheque – grabbing the cheque – to play an aged roué in some adman’s wipe-clean fantasy while Ms Adriana Lima looked celestial in underwear, feathers and his handmade cowboy hat. Everything Dylan owned was his to sell, but he was forcing the ethical issue. If he didn’t care, why should anyone else? It seemed that every ounce of his famous mystique, every last fragment of the latest self-determined identity, had become a commodity. One excruciating thought was that the entire Victoria’s Secret debacle had happened just because it appealed to the vanity of an ageing man. The other explanation, more plausible by the year, was that anyone could hire Bob Dylan if the money was right. The money, it seemed, was of consuming importance.
It made no sense. Those who had claimed that he toured because of alimony commitments were as erratic in their arithmetic as the Dylan who tried to pretend – talking to his old Village friend Izzy Young in Stockholm in October 2003 – that he worked just because ‘I have 14 grandchildren!’ Thousands of singers, actual thousands, had covered his songs. Lennon and McCartney aside, no one could match Dylan’s music publishing empire. Having bought off Albert Grossman’s estate, he owned everything he had ever written save the titles in which Sara had a share. Thanks to the Bootleg Series and a reliable back catalogue, meanwhile, his albums and ‘greatest-hits’ packages still turned a pretty fair profit. Those 100 or so shows a year still delivered a multimillion-dollar gross, season after season. Yet he would betray a great Bob Dylan song, and make himself seem like a sleazy ancient mask for hire, just for the money? Yes, he would.
It counts as one context for his late renaissance. The identity being defended in the first years of the twenty-first century was paradoxical. He was least true to himself in the moment he truly did bring it all back home as a writer. In parallel with any art he might be creating ran a money-making juggernaut to which he was at all times subservient. No one ever said a genius is obliged to be likeable, but the best excuse loyal fans could manage for the grisly Victoria’s Secret affair was that old Bob was ‘just having fun’. Few among his less-slavish admirers were able to share the pleasure. Dylan had called his own enduring integrity into question. His right to assail anyone had been rendered suspect, let’s say, by a single minute of the softest soft porn.
In March, as though the younger artist was mocking his older self across the decades, another volume in the Bootleg Series, volume six, was released. This was the Halloween concert from New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1964, the one with the joke about the singer wearing his Bob Dylan mask. The album, bootlegged for years, had an eleven and a half minute version of ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ on its first disc. You could play it while waiting for the Victoria’s Secret ad to come on. On the other hand, if you happened to have bought a ticket for the show at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory on the night Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall was released, you could catch the 62-year-old’s contemporary version. The words didn’t alter much: ‘Advertising signs they con / You into thinking you’re the one / That can do what’s never been done.’ Live 1964 also contained several examples of what had once been called protest songs from a 23-year-old who was getting ready to move beyond that kind of thing. Adventures in the advertising industry had been no part of his plans.
In June, just before a couple of shows in Glasgow, Dylan found his way to St Andrews, the little university town and golf resort on Scotland’s east coast. He had agreed to accept the degree of doctor of music, honoris causa, from an ancient institution that had only recently shed a reputation for disdaining anything smacking of modernity in literature. On the other hand, as usual, Dylan was being honoured for his work in the field of music, not poetry, but he donned his robe with no obvious reluctance. He had a soft spot for Scotland, as the laureation (big speech) recognised. That was delivered by Professor Neil Corcoran – of the department of English, not music – who managed to say most of the right things without collapsing into the usual clichés. The professor, a fan with scholarly credentials, had organised the whole affair. On a wet Scottish day, he captured the essence of Dylan better than a lot of the big books.
Bob Dylan’s life as writer and singer has the aspect of vocation, of calling, and his is an art of the most venturesome risk and the most patient endurance. He’s spent a lifetime applying himself to such long-sanctioned forms of art as folk, blues, country, and rock music. And, partly by transfusing them with various kinds of poetic art, he’s reinvented them so radically that he’s moved everything on to a place it had never expected to go and left the deepest imprint on human consciousness. Many members of my generation can’t separate a sense of our own identity from his music and lyrics. He’s been for us an extension of consciousness – a way of growing up, and a way of growing more alive. And his work acts like that for succeeding generations too . . .9
It was, as these things go, a nice affair. It also marked another aspect of Dylan’s life in his late pomp. The honours were coming thick and fast. A surly reviewer could still observe that ‘his voice hovers between that of a shrill housewife and Yoda, and he teeters around the stage with the elegance of the Elephant Man’, but within what had once been known as the establishment it no longer mattered.10 Dylan had been certified as a figure of substance and significance, in part because a ’60s generation had taken charge of the prize-giving machinery. He was about to justify their faith, but not, to the evident delight of purely literary types, with songs alone. Those still waiting for a new album could pass the time reading.
Chronicles: Volume One was published on 4 October, Lyrics 1962-2001 a week later. Dylan meanwhile submitted to a round of interviews with what were still known as major publications to explain himself as an author. As an offering to the reading public, Chronicles would scarcely need the help. The book with the biblical title would sell in quantities sufficient to justify any publisher’s hyperbole. Simon & Schuster’s main task was to print enough copies. Inducing Dylan to explain what had caused him to attempt the work after so many years spent refusing to explain himself was, predictably, a trickier matter.
John Preston of the Sunday Telegraph was told: ‘In part, I guess I wanted to set the record straight.’ For contrast, Edna Gundersen of USA Today was informed: ‘I wasn’t trying to explain anything to anybody.’ David Gates of Newsweek heard, in a third version, that something resembling serendipity had guided the author. ‘It’s like I had a full deck and I cut the cards and whatever you see you go with that,’ Dylan said. ‘I realise there’s a great gap in it.’11
The author told Preston, in all apparent seriousness, that he had been ‘determined to write a book that no one could misinterpret’. He had found the writing ‘quite an emotional experience in places’, but had also discovered the bitter truth about the ‘tedious process’ of making books. To Gundersen, he confessed that ‘I was just trying to charm my way through it, really’, but he insisted that in no sense was the book ‘an open confession’. Gates was another who heard that the splendid isolation of authorship was not ‘that splendid’. In this round of interviews a few semi-secrets were revealed. Dylan admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that in the 1980s ‘I was just above a club act’. Close to two years before an album existed to substantiate the claim, Austin Scaggs of Rolling Stone heard that new songs were being written: ‘I have a bunch of them. I do.’12 For all that, none of the journalists who were invited to these meet-the-author sessions seems to have come to grips with a simple question: why a book?
After the laudatory reviews began to arrive, the idea would gain ground that Chronicles was just another Dylan performance, albeit one of his finest. When the close, forensic reading commenced the book would come to be viewed either as a sustained exercise in appropriation and worse, or as a kind of postmodern parody of autobiography. Most of these approaches still seem fantastically over-complicated. Who gains when literature is treated like evidence extracted under oath? To regard Chronicles as a piece of documentary reportage to be challenged and rebutted at every turn was to show a certain honed talent for missing the point. What got overlooked was a perverse fact: you could doubt Dylan and still believe him.
You could doubt the author’s understanding of what was taking place when he told John Preston that in the process of writing his memory, to his surprise, ‘seemed to unlock’, allowing him to visualise people, clothing and furnished rooms from days long gone. You could doubt that he remembered conversations word for word. You could certainly doubt that he got all his facts right. It was not a question of decrying Dylan’s veracity (saints preserve us). Doubts arose from common reality. After four long decades memories that seem brilliantly clear are still liable to be deceptive. Certainty, the sense of recovered truth, is no guarantee of anything.
Dylan’s description of memories being unlocked, of a book that ‘took on a life of its own’ as he wrote, was akin to Marcel Proust’s celebrated account in Swann’s Way (1913) of ‘involuntary memory’. This was the instinct set free on the instant, supposedly, that the novelist dipped a little cake into his tea. In modern psychological theory, the speculation runs that memories awakened in such a manner set off a chain reaction, much as Dylan described the experience during the writing of Chronicles. For his part, Proust got better than 3,000 pages out of this ‘chaining effect’ as one remembrance led to another. Yet In Search of Lost Time is, avowedly and triumphantly, a work of fiction. No one ever said that every vivid memory the writer described was factually accurate.
Dylan might have believed that every last word in his book (even the borrowed, embedded words) involved the honest truth. Belief wasn’t relevant. Read Proust attentively and you discover him describing the sheer effort he made to remember the past after the cake was dunked in the tea; the process was not spontaneous. Read about Proust and you find that the memorialised madeleine started out, in a 1910 draft of Swann’s Way, as biscottes.13 If the great novelist dithered over his memories of bakery products, what else can be trusted? Some of the techniques Dylan employed for his book suggest he understood perfectly well that memory is never a simple, dispassionate recording device. The one thing he failed to remember clearly, nevertheless, was his motive for putting the truth down on paper.
There is a lot of truth in Chronicles. Some is the kind you can check – this place, that event, those characters – and some derives from the ineffable coherence of art. In one important sense Dylan made it all true. The boys (always boys) in the literary forensics labs can run all the tests they like. The artist had been investigating the way past and present entwine long before he sat down to write. History might be the dream and nightmare from which we cannot awaken, but in this regard Dylan tends to side with Gatsby. You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can. Proust did it; our artist did it in the pages of his Chronicles. If he had not, he would have been overwhelmed by his own history.
That was piling up, year upon year. In 2005, while Dylan toured with Willie Nelson, or pulled together another song for another movie (an interesting song called ‘Tell Ol’ Bill’, a picture with some integrity entitled North Country), the artist’s management were hard at work. The project would turn out to be the grandest monument yet. Filmed interviews for what would become a three-and-a-half-hour documentary had been going on, without publicity, for the best part of a decade. In 2000, Dylan had talked at length to his manager, Jeff Rosen, under the camera’s quizzical eye. Yet after the finished work was broadcast in two parts in the United States and Britain in the last week of September, the subject would pretend to know little about it and care less.
‘I’ve never seen it,’ he would tell an interviewer in 2009. ‘Well, a lot of that footage was gathered up from the ’60s. So I’d seen that and I thought that was like looking at a different character. But it certainly was powerful. And I don’t, or can’t, do that anymore.’14 His management, his name, his office, his music, his life: nothing to do with Bob Dylan, apparently. Presumably the fact that the film omitted all mention of certain topics – drug use, say, or a first marriage – was also none of his doing. It was as though he could only support an identity through periodic denials. Somehow the rejection of every previous self was a perverse affirmation of who Dylan thought he was. For all that, No Direction Home, ‘A Martin Scorsese Picture’, was a landmark.
It was not without a few problems, however. For one thing, the famous director’s chief contribution seemed to be to truncate the filmed performances fans wanted most to see. Above all, the startling long-lost colour footage shot on 17 May 1966 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall was cut short, apparently for the sake of ‘dramatic effect’ and some by-the-numbers film-school editing. The viewer was granted the infamous ‘Judas’ moment, but just a taste of the music that ensued. Once a fan had recovered from the astonishment of seeing a visual record of the fabled incident, a certain resentment followed. Given the dramatic structure of the entire documentary, with Dylan accelerating towards an almighty psychological crash, the miserly use of footage from Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester seemed self-defeating.
Scorsese had been brought in to make sense of all the material, new and archival, that Rosen had compiled. In exchange, the director had been allowed to put his million-dollar brand on the finished picture, though his actual role was in essence supervisory. Scorsese shaped the narrative, the ‘Bob Dylan story’, with great skill, but it was Rosen who asked the crucial questions. Inevitably, many choices were then made. The decision to end the film in 1966 was in one sense obvious, in another sense too obvious. That’s how the story of Dylan’s life and career is always told, but in No Direction Home it had the effect of locking the artist into an era, an era of which he tends to speak with a well-rehearsed disdain. Anyone coming to Dylan’s work for the first time thanks to the documentary would have received a sample of the ‘voice of a generation’ legend and little else. The only dissenting, gently sceptical voice to be heard was that of the artist himself. Some of his contemporaries, it’s true, were fascinating. Suze Rotolo, consenting to a very rare interview, was refreshingly dispassionate. Joan Baez was nicely acerbic. But everything was fashioned to preserve the orthodox view of the ‘poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll’, the one parodied in all those Al Santos stage introductions.
That said, Scorsese brought an unerring sense of period to the work. His depiction of Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota’s North Country – crucially, his use of Dylan’s own memories of childhood – was a marvel. Arguably, the viewer got a better idea of a man’s sense of himself from those early sequences than from any other part of the film. Scorsese also managed to document the tumults of the ’60s, the struggles and the rupture with all that had gone before, in a way that avoided most of the clichés. As a documentary record of a period, Dylan or no Dylan, No Direction Home was a corrective to a lot of glib pseudo-historical chatter. If Britain was swinging in the ’60s you wouldn’t guess it from the dreary scenes of a glum brown world captured in this film.
As Michael Gray, suitably indignant, puts it in his Dylan Encyclopedia, the documentary gives only a minimal account of one part of its subject’s musical education. The desultory treatment of the blues, that crucial formative influence, is indeed ‘scandalous’.15 The misjudgement on Scorsese’s part spoke of a willingness to accept without argument the old ‘folk singer’ label and ignore the complicated roots of Dylan’s affections and art. This director, of all directors, should have known better. But then, you could also observe that the documentary does not delve deeply or often into its subject’s literary background. If Dylan is the near-unique product of musical circumstances – he and Elvis had that much in common – the same could be said of his development as a writer. That he is very well-read is well known, but he is well read in unusual ways. No Direction Home does not begin to explain what this autodidact made of himself when he began to make verses.
The film remains a wonderful piece of work. Its release raised Dylan to the American pantheon while reminding you that despite everything, the honours and the awards, the veneration and the three and a half hours of airtime, he remained discrepant. Somehow he still didn’t fit with the larger culture, high or low. That might have been one reason for his importance, of course. Nevertheless, though no one has admitted as much, least of all the figure at the centre of it all, the release of No Direction Home on the heels of Chronicles looked like an attempt to reclaim Dylan’s history. Or rather, to shape and control perceptions of that history. A memoir that was not a memoir, a biographical film with just one contestable version of a life, above all the old illusion of a figure forever slipping off into the shadows: along with the Bootleg Series, these were offered as the approved, official record. Any idea that Dylan had at last decided to confess all was spectacularly wide of the mark.
Even the movie’s ‘soundtrack’ album was no sort of soundtrack, though none the worse for that. Instead, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack was another large trove of treasures, with a couple of outtakes apiece from Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde to surprise even the most avid of bootleg collectors. The point was control, control of the past as it loomed over the present, control of reputation, work and image. Dylan knew everything there was to know about the myth of Bob Dylan.
Product continued to appear, each release a seeming exercise in coming to terms with historical memory, the problem of a vast ‘legacy’ and the demands of the bottom line. So it was that in August 2005 Columbia released Live at the Gaslight 1962, an artefact from the beginning of recorded time. Since this album captured the coffee house singer in the last days before fame’s hurricane, someone thought it clever to strike an ‘exclusive’ distribution deal with the Starbucks beverage chain. Depressingly, revealingly, this kind of thing had become standard practice for the 64-year-old artist. As though to balance the historical accounts, still another Best of was issued for the American market in November. Providing the sleeve notes, the author and TV executive Bill Flanagan had the good grace to call the unremarkable release ‘a sampler for new listeners . . . a starting point’. There was no other excuse. Those listeners might have been better advised to begin, meanwhile, with Live at Carnegie Hall, a promotional ‘EP’ or mini-album that also appeared in November.
Quite why Columbia/Sony chose to release just half a dozen tracks when they had the full 19-song concert recording in their possession was, as ever, baffling. The show Dylan gave on 26 October 1963 had been taped in preparation for an In Concert album that was abandoned for unexplained reasons. Two tracks had since turned up on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 and two on the No Direction Home soundtrack. This Carnegie Hall made use of the artwork designed for In Concert decades before, but it amounted to another ‘sampler’. As a response to the bootleggers, it was close to useless, even if the handful of tracks did demonstrate just how powerful a performer the young Dylan had been. Predictably, an illicit double CD set of the full 1963 show entitled Unravelled Tales would appear in the summer of 2008.
*
February 2006 found him back in the studios in New York. This time, finally, he was at work on his own behalf. Whether he knew it or not, Dylan was about to make his most successful album since Desire 20 years before. All the attention earned by Chronicles and No Direction Home, all the journalism expended since Time Out of Mind on the alluring theme of the impossible creative renaissance: all of that was about to pay off handsomely. As any number of reviewers around the world would soon confirm, the artist was about to complete his late-period trilogy with a masterpiece. Someone should have told the artist.
The point is less trivial than it seems. Dylan’s recorded work is classified persistently in terms of ‘trilogies’ even when he denies having any such notion. As with the tour that never ends, helpful critics tell the artist what he has done when their favourite theory has been no part, so he says, of his intentions. So the three albums that appeared like lightning flashes between March 1965 and May 1966 are described as a trilogy when the differences between the works, thematic and musical, are obvious. Nothing on Bringing It All Back Home would sit easily on Blonde on Blonde, but that detail is ignored. Similarly, the albums made while Dylan was in the throes of Christian evangelical belief get called his ‘gospel trilogy’, despite the fact that Shot of Love pays attention only intermittently to the obsessions of Saved. Neither album involves gospel music in the proper sense, in any case, but that too is forgotten. To some ears, ‘trilogy’ sounds irresistibly impressive. The evidence says Dylan doesn’t think that way.
He certainly did not think that way about the album he would call Modern Times. It was not intended to complete a design commenced with Time Out of Mind because there had been no such design. Talking to the novelist Jonathan Lethem late in the summer, the artist would ‘demur’ at the word trilogy.
Time Out of Mind was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner. But by the time I made ‘Love and Theft’ I was out of the corner. On this record, I ain’t nowhere, you can’t find me anywhere, because I’m way gone from the corner. I would think more of ‘Love and Theft’ as the beginning of a trilogy, if there’s going to be a trilogy . . . If I decide I want to go back into the studio.16
In other words, he had paid no attention to the idea before it was put to him. By 2006, the attempt to give his work the formal unity of a trilogy, to ascribe to it a fixed set of themes, ideas and interests, was in danger of becoming another of the labels he had always detested. The truth of the work was at risk of being submerged by the latest clichés. Chief among those was the one that confused Dylan with a historical figure just because he wasn’t getting any younger and because he was fascinated with origins and roots, sometimes as ends in themselves, sometimes as explanations for modern times. He was being consigned to the archives while he yet lived. In 2006, the New York Times would call him ‘an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear, where he finds clues to eternal truths in both the blues and the Bible’.17 The description would be fair enough, but it would carry a noxious whiff of obituary, as though better voiced in the past tense. The idea that history could and should be deployed for a modern purpose was being lost. The specific idea that an older America mired in hard times might have something to say to the country after 9/11 was being missed entirely. Instead, too often, the artist was being treated as a revered antique.
A kind of unthinking cultural nationalism was also beginning to emerge. By 2006, Dylan was being described as one of those great, quintessential Americans, a maker of culture and history, a figure who seemed to contain the country’s whole spirit and character. Again, this was not too far from the haphazard truth. He approached the idea of America much as Whitman, Twain, or Scott Fitzgerald had approached it. But he was also a living, working performer in the twenty-first century, with all that implied, not some exhibit trapped inside the museum of collective memory. As Dylan aged, the urge to treat him as a national monument, the last American hero, was becoming a little perilous for his art.
You can take it, then, that he did not name his album Modern Times for nothing. He had been called Chaplinesque often enough in his youth; one of the allusions made by the album’s title was therefore plain. Chaplin’s 1936 comedy had mocked the modernising pretensions of capitalism and satirised its dehumanising effects. First and foremost, it was a movie about exploitation. The running gag was that industrialisation was crazy and liable to drive people crazy. Modern times were bad for the human race. One of Dylan’s responses would come in language of a kind he had never before employed.
There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad
The artist’s interest in the buying power of the proletariat had not been noted hitherto. On the other hand, Dylan was straightforwardly correct: real wages for American workers had been in steady decline for years while wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The verse quoted is not one he has been accused of stealing, a fact that is interesting for its own sake. By 2006, the obsession with plagiarism among those who watched over Dylan meant that much of his work, the work for which no handy antecedents could be found, was being neglected. What was being said in the songs was being ignored studiously. ‘Borrowing’ had become the only topic when it ought to have been a footnote. The statement made by ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ and by the rest of the album was not unimportant, after all.
Praised extravagantly as it was, Modern Times would turn out to be a victim of some truly purblind scholarship. Even now, the album tends to be discussed in terms of what it owes to ancient blues, old popular songs, or poetry. What Dylan did with his sources somehow becomes a secondary issue, perhaps because he did complicated things with found materials. It is a lot easier to investigate alleged thefts from Henry Timrod, Robert Johnson, or Bing Crosby – Dylan is nothing if not eclectic – than it is to talk about an artist’s belief in biblical prophecy and the precarious lives of the downtrodden poor. Some seemed to think the title Modern Times was merely whimsical. In reality, it signifies a deeply political piece of work by an author still inclined to believe that these times are the end times. He might have sneered endlessly at party hacks, but he had not stopped thinking about power and powerlessness.
Politics in the plain sense is far from dominant on the album, of course, but here and there Dylan could pass for Jim Casy, the faithless preacher of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, oppressed by sex, righteousness and justice. Yet ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ – number two because the country singer Merle Haggard had used the title first – is more than just a series of oblique observations on current affairs and tough economic times. It ranges across the country’s history, speaks the biblical language of revolution straight from Dylan’s old song ‘When the Ship Comes In’, displays a real empathy with poverty’s victims, takes a detour by way of classical literature, and yet remains rooted in twenty-first-century realities:
Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means
If you say that Dylan is full of surprises you have said nothing at all. This is the writer who ‘rejected politics’? Nevertheless, all those years of muttering that party politics is meaningless, fraudulent or the work of the Devil led a lot of listeners to assume, even when the contrary evidence was plain, that he took no interest in the woes of this world. All of the people in the songs of Modern Times are common folk, distressed, spooked, confused and oppressed. They struggle with life and faith, but their suffering is no accident. As often as not, bad things have been done to them. A lot of vengeance is plotted on this album, even when the rhymes are outrageous.
Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages
‘Love and Theft’ had a light heart; Modern Times wears the organ bloody and ragged on its sleeve. The album exists in a smoky twilight, out on dusty roads, in bare rooms. It contains the nagging sense of ending, perhaps for America, perhaps for the world. Hence that odd line in ‘Workingman’s Blues’, ‘I can see for myself that the sun is sinking.’ It is as though the speaker has just noticed the approaching darkness for the first time.
The producer, this ‘Jack Frost’, knew his business. When he told journalists that doing the job himself simply saved a lot of time and ‘rigmarole’, Dylan was being too modest. Modern Times was solid evidence for the claim that some of his previous albums had been ruined by eager industry pros convinced they understood the needs of his music better than he ever could. Even if they did not justify his erratic decision-making, the new recordings were proof that the artist could achieve the sound he wanted without anyone’s help. ‘I know my form of music better than anyone else would,’ as Dylan put it in 2009.18 It was just a pity that it had taken him so long to grasp this self-evident fact. Modern Times sounded wonderful.
The opening track, ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, all but painted a picture. However the effect was achieved, it was like listening to some supernatural roadhouse band crowded onto a tiny, ill-lit stage in the early hours with a singer who sounded as though he was facing his last night on earth. This, though, was rockabilly, ‘primitive’ rock and roll, a source code invested with the spirit of Carl Perkins and carried by two guitar players (Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman) performing as though they have just heard Chuck Berry for the first time. Meanwhile, the vocalist – there is no other word for it – declaims.
I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love
I think it will fit me like a glove
I want some real good woman to do just what I say
Everybody got to wonder
What’s the matter with this cruel world today
In due course it would be pointed out that Dylan had slipped in a reference to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’) and that there were other lines from the Roman poet’s works scattered throughout the album. A snatch of Virgil’s Aeneid had already turned up in ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ on ‘Love and Theft’. In New Zealand, the poet Cliff Fell would write in the Nelson Mail in October of his amazement on discovering several lines from Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Black Sea Letters’) in the songs of Modern Times.19 In most cases, the correspondences were exact, dead ringers in fact. For example, the seventh verse of ‘Workingman’s Blues’ has the lines ‘No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you.’ In the translation used by Fell, Tristia (2.52) runs: ‘My cause is better: no one can claim that I ever took up arms against you.’ Scott Warmuth would duly add to the tally of Ovidian echoes and Richard Thomas, professor of classics at Harvard, would contribute half a dozen more.20
This would be interesting, just as the citations derived from the works of Berry, Bing Crosby, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Timrod, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Stanley Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins and others besides would be interesting. Whether the discoveries could be called significant was another question. If the desire was simply to run up an indictment of Dylan for theft, the game was as banal as ever, founded in ignorance. On the other hand, anyone who wanted to ask why the artist was laying claim to a near-spiritual connection with Ovid, old and sick, exiled to Tomis on the war-torn edge of the empire (and therefore of civilisation) by a ruler’s inscrutable whim, was entering fascinating territory. What Dylan had done mattered far less than why he had done it.
Cut off from the world, family and friends, Ovid believed that exile had destroyed him as a poet. In his Metamorphoses he had described the ages of humankind as golden, silver, bronze and iron. The last of these – faithless, savage, lost to truth – was for Ovid his modern times. Dylan was borrowing these lines for a specific poetic purpose. By the time he made Modern Times he almost certainly knew that every last example of ‘intertextuality’ would be netted and pinned to someone’s tray of specimens. Cliff Fell, who believed the ‘homage’ to Ovid was something to celebrate rather than bemoan, probably put it best. Dylan, he wrote, had ‘cast the songs as a modern lament, in the mask of a new Ovid, a kind of modern exile in the modern world’. Fell used the handy word bricoleur and pointed out what should have been obvious: ‘Ovid, himself, stole lines and stories from Homer, as did Virgil. And Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole ideas and lines from Virgil and Ovid. It goes on. It’s a part of the poetic process.’
For whatever reason, that process was not well understood. As David Kinney would observe in a New York Times op-ed piece in 2012: ‘For the past decade, a great debate has been boiling about the authenticity of Mr Dylan’s work.’21 Out in the ‘blogosphere’, where Joni Mitchell’s blunt allegation of plagiarism had raised temperatures, the pot had boiled over. The media’s headlines would meanwhile arrive clad in protective question marks, but their very ambivalence would be suggestive. ‘Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?’, said one. ‘Is Bob Dylan a Phony?’ ran another.22 The witless charge of simple plagiarism, like the demand that Dylan should have named all his many sources, ran up against a familiar but fundamental question. Who else could have shaped all of those found materials into these songs?
Even ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, at first hearing the most blatantly imitative and derivative track on Modern Times, is intended to be understood as the artist’s contribution to a piece of blues heritage held in common by a host of musicians. Dylan made no attempt to disguise what he was doing. Listeners might think of it as a familiar Muddy Waters tune – he had the hit and took the credit – but old McKinley Morganfield also ‘stole’ the song. The sole issue of real substance arose when anyone asked if one rich man deserved every cent of the royalties from an album whose credits announced, ‘All songs written and composed by Bob Dylan.’ Still, if plagiarism is defined as ‘passing off’, what does the artist’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ have in common, in meaning and intention, with Crosby’s ‘When the Blue of Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’? A melody has been adapted; the lyrics are worlds, universes, apart.
The artist’s ‘Spirit on the Water’ sounds at every turn like something you’ve heard before. We can take that to be Dylan’s intended effect. It’s western swing; it has stride piano, a walking bass, some lines you could sing in church and some you certainly would not. But you need hear neither the voice nor a rather pretty harmonica break to know that this could be no one else but Dylan. Nor is this one of those ‘American songbook’ exercises that seem to attract unthinking praise as often as this artist has attracted suspicion. All the borrowings littering the album are mere cues, musical and rhetorical. Dylan’s way with words is utterly distinctive.
I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can’t go to paradise no more
I killed a man back there
Is that last line an allusion to Johnny Cash and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’)? Or does Dylan get to it by way of a hundred murder ballads, country laments and blues songs? The Cash song was itself based on a movie and a stolen melody, but who still knows or cares? One of the great achievements of Modern Times springs from the artist’s refusal to give a damn for arguments over method. He knows that songwriters, songmakers, have always operated in the manner he has adopted. They faced less scrutiny than Bob Dylan, but that’s another story. His lovely ‘Nettie Moore’ shares a title and a few words with a nineteenth-century song. It takes a cliché – ‘They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don’t think it will’ – from ‘Moonshiner’, a traditional piece he had performed in his days in the Village. Numerous blues singers had also found the line irresistible. But the ‘Nettie Moore’ of Modern Times bears no resemblance whatever to its sources. In any sense that matters, it’s a new song. With its antique language intended to evoke a sense of lost time, it exists for the sake of the last line of its chorus:
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o’er
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there’s no one here that’s left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
The fact that Modern Times amounts to a full-spectrum analysis of pre-modern American music would be noticed by all. Every style that went into the making of popular song, and therefore of the country’s native culture, was there. Dylan would be applauded for his range of reference, the ease with which he made it all seem his own, the fact that he understood what tradition involved. Any comparison with Presley as a one-man pop-music melting pot, fusing every influence, was justified by the album. It would sometimes be forgotten, however, that Dylan’s pursuit of pre-rock and roll styles was not a species of nostalgia or some antiquarian hobby. The concerns of Modern Times are eternal and therefore contemporary. The final track, ‘Ain’t Talkin”, stands out from the rest as the summation of everything the album has been about: faith and the loss of faith, failure, the urge to vengeance, hard times and injustice. Still the pilgrim keeps on walking. No single verse gives an adequate idea of the whole. It is enough to say that while critics prepared to celebrate the triumphant conclusion to a so-called trilogy, Dylan ended the album with words that were as bleak as they were unflinching.
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
Up the road around the bend
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
In the last outback, at the world’s end
Cliff Fell yielded to no one, it seems, in his admiration for what Dylan had achieved. He did make one point, however: ‘Section 13 of Tristia begins with Ovid sending greetings from “his outback” and section 14 speaks of Ovid’s wife being known “to the world’s end”.’23 In terms of poetic method, this was fascinating, but of no greater consequence than that. It should have given pause, nevertheless, to anyone still inclined to treat Dylan’s lyrics as specimens of purest autobiography.
When the album was released at the end of August it would go straight to number one in America and in several other countries. At 65, Dylan would achieve the curious feat of being recognised as the oldest performer ever to have topped the US album charts. But that was apt. Though a few critics carped that Modern Times did not justify all the fuss, or argued that the artist was being lauded less for the music than for his improbable longevity, it was impossible to maintain that he had failed to achieve his ‘renaissance’. It was hard, too, to ignore the fact that Dylan had re-emerged with a new kind of songwriting, writing less flamboyant than it had been once upon a time, but more acute and more considered. Allied to his innate talent was the kind of editorial intelligence required to make sense of all those sources. Words, his own or borrowed, no longer spilled from him in torrents, but the songs were none the worse for that. Some of them stood comparison with his greatest works of the 1960s. It would soon be possible to argue, in fact, that some among them might prove more enduring than the magical songs of his youth. As to quality, this listener holds to the belief that there are six truly terrific pieces of work in the ten tracks of Modern Times. Very few albums, in any period, achieve that kind of ratio. As it happens, most of those are Bob Dylan albums. He had not merely recovered creatively. By the end of 2006 it was clear that as a writer he was as good as he had ever been, and in some respects better. If the charge ran that he was assembling and arranging fragments, they were glittering fragments turned into a glittering whole. These too were compositions.
All that was truly lost, never to be recovered, was the voice, once his chief instrument. In Modern Times, as in Love and Theft, Dylan employed several stylistic tricks – elisions, stresses, slurs, abrupt pauses – to distract attention from the fact that there were notes he would never hit again. Sometimes he achieved remarkable effects. Sometimes, in fact, there were things emerging from those corroded pipes – ‘Nettie Moore’ is one good example – of which the young Dylan, always desperate to sound older than his years, had never dreamed. Vocally, nevertheless, the artist was covering his losses as best he could. Somehow the fact made the success of Modern Times seem all the more remarkable. Dylan wasn’t raging against the dying of the light. He was treating the diminution of his powers as just another creative problem to be solved. Jonathan Lethem put it well when describing his meeting with the artist just before the album’s release.
What we do understand, if we’re listening, is that we’re three albums into a Dylan renaissance that’s sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out . . .24
In staking his claim to the deep soil of American music, Dylan ceased to be a figure beyond the mainstream. At the start of the twenty-first century he was reordering the criteria by which both music and literature were understood, much as he had once ‘put an end’ to Tin Pan Alley. He would never be conscripted by the academies, but he was being accepted, even embraced, by the arbiters of what was important. Hence all the awards, hence all that ‘cultural nationalism’. There was no longer a qualm over describing him as the most significant artistic figure, or perhaps just the most significant American, of his age. Having been down and almost out, having been reduced – having reduced himself – to a performer barely one thin cut above a club act, he had confounded friends and enemies alike. No one, in any field, had come back in this manner before. He had defied age, time and, above all, every prowling, mocking ghost that had ever borne the name Bob Dylan.
*
Just before his 65th birthday, he had consented to become a disc jockey. The deal had been done with the XM Satellite Radio subscription service in December 2005, but the first broadcast from Studio B in the fabled Abernathy Building (which didn’t exist) was not heard until 3 May 2006. Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan would become one of the most quixotic and charming episodes – or rather, 100 episodes – in his career. Who couldn’t love a DJ who followed Jimi Hendrix and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ with Judy Garland? Who, save those who ran radio by computer program and the hokum of market research, could not warm to someone who fashioned his broadcasts around off-the-wall ‘themes’? ‘Mother’, ‘Jail’, ‘Flowers’, ‘the Devil’, ‘Dogs’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Luck’: only when an unavoidable event such as Christmas intruded did the host deviate from his plan of having no plan.
The first show, for no immediately obvious reason, was entitled ‘Weather’. Eighteen tracks, dating from 1928 and the Carter Family to Hendrix in ’67, pursued the topic of meteorological events wherever it happened to lead. Dylan seemed to enjoy every minute. After all those years and all those concerts spent saying absolutely nothing to his audiences – ‘Nobody gives a shit how you’re doin’ tonight in Cleveland’ – he turned out to be a natural broadcaster. The kid who once listened avidly in the small hours to 50,000-watt clear-channel stations for music ‘blastin’ in from Shreveport’ had become an older gentleman with the freedom to play any record that took his fancy. As a youth he had listened out for Muddy Waters. The first record played on the first Theme Time was Waters and ‘Blow Wind Blow’.
Dylan was often wickedly funny in these weekly broadcasts. Most people knew about the wit; he was famous for that. Few had been exposed to the artist as a shameless stand-up, purveyor of sensationally bad jokes and sheer whimsy. Yet on tour, if in a good mood, he had been known to crack some awful gags. In the days when he was using back-up singers he had on occasion introduced the women as ‘my ex-wife, my next wife, my girlfriend and my fiancée’. The drummer George Receli had once been described as ‘probably the best drummer . . . on the stage’. If Dylan was feeling particularly jolly, no joke was too juvenile. Thus, to the good folks of Wisconsin’s metropolis: ‘Nice to be here. One of my early girlfriends was from Milwaukee. She was an artist. She gave me the brush-off.’ Between records, Theme Time could involve an hour or more of this sort of drollery interspersed with poetry readings, ancient jingles, cocktail recipes, fake calls and invented emails, advice on divorce and any odd if unreliable fact Dylan’s researchers had managed to dig up. There would be speculation, inevitably, that he was working to a script supplied by the TV writer and producer Eddie Gorodetsky, from whose vast collection many of the deeply obscure tracks broadcast on the show were taken. Theme Time rarely sounded as though it had been scripted.
Only Dylan, you thought, could have uttered the irrefutable statement, ‘Few things go together as well as country and western music and crazy people.’ Only he could have spoofed his listeners – and be taken seriously by some of them, journalists included – by claiming he was thinking of hiring out his sandblasted voice to the makers of satellite navigation systems. ‘I think it would be good if you’re looking for directions,’ Dylan muttered on the ‘Street Maps’ show, ‘and you heard my voice saying something like, “Take a left at the next street . . . No, a right . . . You know what, just go straight.” I probably shouldn’t do it because whichever way I go I always end up at the same place . . . on Lonely Avenue.’
The first show began with the voice of the actor Ellen Barkin as the somewhat-mysterious ‘Lady in Red’. ‘It’s night-time in the big city,’ she said, exhaling each word. ‘Rain is falling. Fog rolls in from the waterfront. A night-shift nurse smokes the last cigarette in her pack . . . It’s Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan.’ Barkin and the DJ would keep this glorious nonsense going for the best part of three years. The introductions would vary a little from week to week, but the parody of long-gone radio links would remain a beloved vignette within the show. Episode ten, ‘Summer’, commenced with ‘It’s nighttime in the big city. Angry prostitutes fight over a street corner. A man gets drunk and shaves off his moustache.’ Show 13, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’, began: ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A guilty man goes home to his wife. It’s time to make the doughnuts.’ The introduction to the two-hour episode broadcast for Christmas and New Year in 2006 might count as Barkin’s finest moment. ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A department store Santa sneaks a sip of gin. Mistletoe makes an old man sad. Eight reindeer land on the roof of the Abernathy Building.’
In dull reality, Dylan recorded the show in his spare moments while touring the world. When the first episode went out he was nowhere near Washington DC, where the temporaneous Abernathy Building was alleged to be situated, but out on the road between Davidson, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. When the ninth show was aired, Dylan was performing in Bournemouth on England’s south coast. During the next broadcast he was in transit between Clermont-Ferrand in France and Cap Roig in Spain. It made no difference to the fiction of the nodding night owl in Studio B who seemed to say whatever came into his addled head while playing records no other station would recognise, far less touch.
Amid the entertainment, the show offered an unimpeachable musical education. Whether the tracks were picked by Dylan, Gorodetsky or by some collaborative process was neither here nor there. When Episode 14, ‘The Devil’, opened with Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ it wasn’t hard to guess who had made the selection. The DJ played a lot of his well-known favourites and took the listener on an inimitable journey through the history of American popular culture. It was another way, more playful than his albums, of explaining a country’s past. When Theme Time was picked up by the BBC and Ireland’s Phantom FM in 2007 it was in recognition of the fact that something unique in broadcasting had been achieved by the ever-eccentric host and his omniscient producer. Something very funny, too.
During an early show entitled ‘Father’, Dylan reported: ‘We got an email from Johnny Depp from Paris, France. He wants to know “Who was the father of modern communism?” Well, Johnny, Karl Marx was the father of modern communism. He also fathered seven children.’ Apropos of the Tom Waits song ‘On the Nickel’, the host said: ‘Waits has a raspy, gravelly singing voice, described by one fan as like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razorblades after not sleeping for three days. Or as I like to put it, beautiful.’ At one point during the 2006 Christmas broadcast, Dylan sent out his idea of season’s greetings: ‘To all of our friends listening in behind bars, we know you made mistakes, we’re sorry you have to be there, but Merry Christmas to all of you, from all of us here at Theme Time Radio Hour.’ When the theme was ‘Flowers’, the host began: ‘Tonight we’re going to be talking about the most beautiful things on earth, the fine-smelling, colourful, bee-tempting world of flowers – the Bougainvillea, the Passion Flower, the Butterfly Cleradendron, the Angel’s Trumpets, the Firecracker plant. We’re going to be talking about Rosa rugosa, the Angel Face, All That Jazz, the Double Delight . . .’ So it went on, plant after plant, the names no doubt plucked from the internet by a researcher, yet turned into a weirdly hypnotic Dylan performance.
If Theme Time ever had a serious point – the proposition is open to question – it might have had something to do with the DJ’s belief in music’s deeper meaning and importance, in the galvanic force that had once propelled him unstoppably out of Hibbing, Minnesota. No one knew better than Dylan that music could change lives; no one believed more sincerely that something important was being lost from the culture. When he grumbled about modern recording technology and its failure to capture the pure truth of a performance, he might as well have been bewailing the decline and fall of the West. It made him sound like a crusty reactionary, but Dylan believed he was defending something precious, something irreplaceable. So for three years the essence poured forth from the Abernathy Building of his mind: Muddy Waters and Buddy Holly; Ray Charles and George Jones; Van Morrison and Charlie Parker; Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson. There was an implicit question in all of this: why did no one else ever play these things? Amid it all, the artist did what he did best: he told stories to strangers. That said, only Dylan could have illustrated the theme of ‘Birds’ with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ followed by Al Jolson singing ‘When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’.
*
He bobbed. In addition to recording an album and launching his radio show, Dylan gave 98 concerts in the United States and Europe in 2006. Modern Times was released on 29 August and its songs soon began to appear on set lists for performances on the West Coast. Despite all his talk about quitting the recording studios, Dylan was quick to embrace the new material. Clearly, the idea that he could go on playing the same old songs ‘forever’ was no longer self-evident.25 In February 2007, though he declined to put in an appearance at the event, the artist was given another pair of Grammy awards thanks to Modern Times. It brought the running total of those honours to ten. In May of the year, he reached the age of 66 in the briefest of breaks in a touring schedule that saw him return to Australia and New Zealand amid the usual campaigns in North America and Europe.
Grammy awards or not, the shows continued to divide audiences. While the success of the album attracted new crowds, walkouts were still being reported. By any normal standards, Dylan’s voice was beyond any hope of recovery. Despite his complaints, the detested recording studio offered the protections and second chances that were unavailable in the middle of a ball park. As ever, those who were prepared to grant Dylan licence in all things didn’t seem to care. Often enough they could persuade themselves they had witnessed something truly remarkable – ‘historic’, ‘awesome’ and the rest – when the recorded evidence said they were deluded. For the casual customer or the fan returning to Dylan after years of indifference, the game of name-that-song was too often infuriating. Another, more thoughtful section of the audience had meanwhile arrived at a new reason to bear with the artist. There might not be another chance, they told themselves, to see Bob Dylan perform.
It was not yet dark. By any decent estimate, in fact, the artist was hardly classifiable as old. Modern Times had displayed an unmistakable vitality. It hadn’t felt like any sort of valediction. Nevertheless, a lot of reviewers began to wonder how much useful life was left in the performing artist when his voice was utterly ravaged and his interest in the job at hand often seemed slight. His band was professionalism itself, on stage or in the studio. Millions of people were still fascinated by his work, past and present, and by the mutations of what they took to be his personality. Books, the endless infernal books of study, criticism and reportage, continued to appear. But the concerts and the bootlegs that materialised after almost every show continued to raise the question of whether Dylan remained viable as a live performer. His voice, it was observed, was far more reliable at the start of a tour than at its end. That voice needed to be rested, but in the concert season – generally from March or April until the middle of November – he allowed it no respite. Doubts were raised constantly and Dylan ignored every one of them. For him, it seems, the good nights eradicated every memory of the bad. In 2006, just after the release of Modern Times, he could be found exulting that his band were ‘the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man’. He could be heard talking of the shows as though performance was an obligation, a kind of vocation, but he gave no hint of reservations about his fitness for the task. That wasn’t his way. Every word he spoke gave credence to the belief that these tours would never end.
You do care, you care in a big way, otherwise you wouldn’t be there. But it’s a different kind of connection. It’s not a light thing . . . It’s alive every night, or it feels alive every night. . . It becomes risky. I mean, you risk your life to play music, if you’re doing it in the right way.26
In the same conversation, Dylan made an odd remark about writing the songs for Modern Times in a ‘trance-like, hypnotic state’ and of questioning himself as he wrote: ‘This is how I feel? Why do I feel like that? And who’s the me that feels this way?’ It was the old and perennial enquiry: who’s the me? A man in his middle 60s was still posing the question. No one had provided him with an answer.
The belief that Dylan simply ‘reinvented’ himself periodically was wearing very thin. The notion that his career was best represented by a series of masks didn’t seem so credible after a religious fervour that had been only too real. The talk of continual reinvention had always been a little glib. How does a person manage such a thing and keep any kind of grip on reality? The equivalent idea that Dylan dealt in riddles, that his entire body of work was some giant puzzle full of clues to be unravelled, was another test of credulity. It was one thing to argue, as Scott Warmuth was arguing, that a single text such as Chronicles was best understood as a precision-made enigma, but even that clever thesis ignored the life lived, the life described. However he had come into existence, this ‘Bob Dylan’ was not just an evolving piece of art or a self-created conundrum. There was a person in there. That character continued to intrigue a lot of people.
The movie I’m Not There was less an attempt to solve the mystery than to depict it. When shooting began in Montreal at the end of July 2006, six actors were on hand to give life to aspects of the artist in his several manifestations. In one sense, the picture’s director, Todd Haynes, was employing some of the known, multiple Dylans much as the artist had done. In the film-maker’s hands they became devices for asking questions of the audience. The result was vastly entertaining for fans, with some fine performances (and some not so fine) from the cast, but it was a little way short of the greatest movie ever made. The film was a biopic that attempted to fuse several contending biographies into one while leaving room for myths, legends and whatever illumination there was to be had from an eclectic selection of Dylan songs. It made for a crowded two hours and fifteen minutes. Haynes tried to get the contents of Dylan’s imagination onto the screen alongside the public record of the artist’s career, some suggestive fictions and a meditation on the nature of identity. Masked and Anonymous had already seemed to prove that film probably wasn’t the best medium for this kind of effort, but Haynes had other ideas.
He had lots of ideas. The most eye-catching was to have Dylan in his mid-’60s pomp played, and played brilliantly, by Cate Blanchett. Her performance became an exquisite act of impersonation, one that said more about identity than anything in the script. The film’s title, lifted from one of the venerable basement tapes songs Dylan refused to take seriously, was another unambiguous statement. The subject of the film was as elusive as any final judgement on the subject. (The track proved to be elusive, too. Neither Columbia nor the artist’s management possessed the tape. It had been loaned to Neil Young years before and somehow forgotten. The writer truly didn’t care about his song.) Nevertheless, the picture would remain a challenge, as they say, for mainstream audiences. A movie about a person who could be present and absent simultaneously, known to millions and yet somehow unknowable, essentially impersonal yet capable of making audiences feel as though he had touched each one of them personally: what could go wrong?
When I’m Not There was released in November 2007 most of the movie critics would rise to the occasion with more agility than they had summoned for Masked and Anonymous. The idea of having six actors attempt different aspects of a single person wouldn’t bother the reviewers too much. A messy, confusing western sequence involving Richard Gere as ‘Billy the Kid’, an alias for Dylan’s Alias in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, would be tolerated because Blanchett’s hypnotic acting was going on, so to speak, next door. Even the idea of having a young African American (Marcus Carl Franklin) represent ‘Woody Guthrie’ would fail to test hard-working journalists unduly. It made a kind of sense. Much of the film made plenty of sense, in fact, but only if one key condition was fulfilled: you had to know something, ideally any number of things, about Bob Dylan. A fan would not have blinked to hear the character called ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ (Ben Whishaw) answer questions with verbatim quotations from interviews Dylan had given down the years. The uninitiated were liable to wonder what was going on and ask why some nineteenth-century French poet was being subjected to intense official interrogation in what looked like the middle of the 1960s.
In due course, the artist would give the picture what passed for his seal of approval. Talking to Rolling Stone in 2012, Dylan would at first say, ‘I don’t know anything about that movie. All I know is they licensed about 30 of my songs for it.’ Pressed, he would concede that I’m Not There was ‘all right’. He seemed slightly impressed by the fact that Haynes had appeared not to care whether his picture was understood or not. Asked about the film’s investigations into ‘phases and identities’, however, Dylan resorted to his usual answer: ‘I don’t see myself that way. But what does it matter? It’s only a movie.’27
The director had told a writer from the New York Times magazine that Dylan’s ‘refusal to be fixed as a single self in a single voice [was] a key to his freedom. And he somehow escaped this process of being frozen into one fixed person.’28 For all the movie’s stratagems, that ‘somehow’ would form the basis of a question left unanswered by I’m Not There. Yet as brave tries go, the film was among the bravest. Haynes was asking the audience to submit to a piece of cinema much as they would submit to Dylan’s music. The film, effectively six short films yoked together, was an attempt to reproduce a phenomenon rather than describe a life. As the director had said to the New York Times: What would it be like to be in that moment when it was new and dangerous and different? You have to do a kind of trick almost to get people back to where Dylan did what he did, or Mozart did what he did.’
Haynes had been trying to put his disconcerting movie together for years. As far back as the summer of 2000 he had been invited to send a single-page proposal to the artist by way of Dylan’s ‘representative’, Jeff Rosen. The invitation had been extended with the advice that there should be no mention whatever in the pitch of the word genius. The phrase ‘voice of a generation’ had also been placed beyond bounds. The text had commenced with the old Rimbaud ‘I is another’ quotation. Haynes had written of making a film ‘in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced’.
The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces – old men, young men, women, children – each standing in for spaces in a single life. [A seventh, Chaplin-type character was cut from the script.]
Dylan had known a little bit more about the picture beforehand, then, than his recollection of a request to license some songs would suggest. On the other hand, he had made no effort to become involved in the production. The first serious attempt to fictionalise his life directly was complicated enough without that kind of contest between perceived realities. I’m Not There would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and gain Blanchett an Oscar nomination, but fail at the box office. As Richard Goldstein observed in a doleful article in The Nation in 2006, Dylan was ‘cruising towards sainthood’ among those who subscribed to the cult. ‘We’re witnessing a consecration,’ said the writer. The artist had acquired ‘enduring status as a fetish’ irrespective, it was argued, of the quality of the music.29 Haynes had made his picture as a fan, apparently forgetting that the cult was not universal. A lot of non-aligned movie-goers would decide that I’m Not There offered a challenge they didn’t care to meet.
In a notebook, the director had jotted down his ‘governing concepts/ themes’ for the film. The notes had read: ‘America obsessed with authenticity/ authenticity the perfect costume/ America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.’ The result, as Blanchett described it, was an impenetrable script ‘completely and utterly inside Todd’s brain’. Haynes would tell the New York Times that his movie was ‘intimate and panoramic, the story of a personality and a nation’. One of the director’s friends added, for the journalist’s benefit, that ‘it’s no less than a history of American conscience and American soul . . . It’s a movie about Bob Dylan as the President of America.’
*
In 2008, that job would become available. In fact, a candidate had declared himself on 10 February 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, picking his spot outside the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln once had stood to notify an interest in the position of head of state. Barack Hussein Obama didn’t have a stovepipe hat, or a fund of tall tales. He was 45, personable and articulate, a rising orator among Democrats, highly intelligent and, some said, effortlessly and ineffably cool. Amid an eclectic collection, he kept 30 Bob Dylan songs on his iPod. He wasn’t white.
That aside, Obama was another ail-American politician whose time was almost upon him. Few realised as much on a cold February day. It was not a perception the former junior senator intended to foster when he told a boisterous crowd about his ‘different kind of politics’. Obama had written a couple of very successful books, one with the word dreams in its title, a second, newly published, invoking audacity and hope.30 Those words would play a big part in the nomination campaign he would win against the odds, and in the presidential race he would win easily. In a country tired of war and George W. Bush, Obama would portray himself as the personification of faith in the idea, whatever it meant, of ‘change’. He would also create expectations that were impossible to fulfil, even for a candidate who meant every word he said.
According to reporters from the Washington Post, Obama had declared in a statement before the announcement of his candidacy that he would emphasise ‘traditional Democratic goals such as lowering healthcare costs, providing college-tuition assistance and developing new energy sources. He only briefly mentioned the Iraq war, the issue that could well drive the 2008 election.’31 The new candidate said, in fact, that America was ‘mired in a tragic and costly war that should never have been waged’. By 2007, his was not an unpopular position.
The Bush administration was persisting with its attempts to portray the Iraq incursion as a victory-in-the-making for liberty and democracy. Even among conservatives, few were still falling for that. According to Gallup polling in July 2007, only 29 per cent of Americans could be found to approve of the way their president was doing his job.32 Bush’s ratings would sink lower still before he was done. Despite a ‘surge’ involving an additional 30,000 troops in the second half of the year, 2007 would inflict a bloody toll, with 899 American lives lost. According to surveys conducted by the Associated Press, 18,610 Iraqi ‘non-insurgents’ would also perish. The news agency’s figure would be a conservative estimate for the year, but since the occupiers chose not to keep records of civilian deaths it stood as an entry in history’s ledger. Here were modern times, just like the old Vietnam times.
In Springfield, Obama had invoked Lincoln shamelessly. The young black candidate possessed the oratorical gifts to make the association sound plausible, at least for those who wanted most to believe that ‘there is power in hope’. The possibility that hope could be disappointed was a thought not fit for a modern political campaign. Thanking his audience for turning out on a freezing day, Obama had said:
It’s humbling, but in my heart I know you didn’t come here just for me. You came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that’s shut you out, that’s told you to settle, that’s divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what’s possible, building that more perfect union.
The Periclean triplets had been sonorous – Dylan knew all about that kind of rhetoric – but manipulative. Like all inspirational poetry, they made nothing happen. Anaphora, the trick of repeating a phrase at the start of successive statements, had been a device favoured both by Lincoln and by Martin Luther King. Obama’s fine words had also had the effect of seeming to address an issue without once naming that issue. He wasn’t white. Nevertheless, that Saturday in February he had stood where the liberator of black slaves once had stood, claiming Lincoln’s mantle and sounding very like King. The symbolism had been deliberate yet deliberately vague.
By 2007, Dylan had seen 11 men occupy the Oval Office. He had even met a couple of them. But he had also performed on 28 August 1963, during the Great March on Washington. He had sung ‘When the Ship Comes In’ before a quarter of a million people, most of them black, who had marched that day ‘for jobs and freedom’. Dylan had listened while King preached of his dream of human, social and racial justice. The artist had done more for civil rights, for a brief while, than most white entertainers. He had made a career from the legacy of the blues and married a black woman for love. He had drawn a cordon around himself for protection against politicians and their slogans, but he had never lost his political intelligence or, more importantly, his gift for empathy. Still, Dylan must have wondered what would become of Barack Obama in twenty-first-century America. Election results might say in due course that the civil-rights movement had won its victory with the election of a black citizen to the White House. The unremitting hatred of Obama from an unreconciled portion of the nation would say something else entirely. As president, the black lawyer would turn out to be the least radical of Democrats, with a near-suicidal instinct for compromise, a willingness to indulge the military, a tendency to betray ‘hope’ whenever its meek head appeared, and a strange need to appease Wall Street. It would make no difference to his enemies. Obama would inspire in them an attempt to ‘reclaim America’ from the upstart and his supporters. Sometimes the diehards would make the democratic process sound like an irrelevance. As the artist would describe the state of the nation just before the 2012 election:
This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity and it will hold any nation back, or any neighborhood back. Or anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery - that if [whites] had their way, they would still be under the yoke. And they can’t pretend they don’t know that.33
Dylan would take to the young, black and eloquent candidate. Judging by the news coverage, the fact that the artist was even prepared to say so counted as a surprise, but the reaction was naive. His distrust of machine politics ran very deep, but so did his understanding of American history. Besides, Obama was not the average politician. Dylan, by his lights, had plenty to say. Interviewed by The Times in the summer of 2008, he would remark:
Well, you know, right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up . . . Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out.
Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to . . . You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.34
On election night in 2008, Dylan and his band were playing at the University of Minnesota, the college to which he had given a few rare moments of his precious time almost half a century before. Perhaps that memory influenced what became the closest thing the artist had given to a political endorsement in many a year.
Tony [Garnier, Dylan’s bass player] likes to think it’s a brand-new time right now. An age of light. Me, I was born in 1941. That’s the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. Well, I been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are gonna change now.
A year later, talking of his new president as ‘Barack’, Dylan would come up with a dizzying, near-poetic description of his reasons for being ‘intrigued’ by the black man who seemed to have fulfilled Martin Luther King’s fervent hopes. The artist, that insatiable reader, had come across Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father. True to art, Dylan had responded first to the story. In the interview, a history lesson followed. What had ‘struck him’ about Obama?
Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real.
First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas, though, but with deep roots. You know, like ‘Kansas bloody Kansas’. John Brown the Insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, guerrillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace.
And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot-type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean, it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that, though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey, except in reverse.35
In the years to come, Dylan would resist every attempt to persuade him to offer anything as banal as a real celebrity endorsement. In 2012, a Rolling Stone journalist would put his tortured head against a metaphorical brick wall in a doomed effort to extract a statement from the artist. Of Obama, Dylan would concede only, ‘I like him.’36 This citizen would do things in his own way. On a Monday night in November in Madison, Wisconsin, just after an Obama rally in the city and just before voters were due to pass judgement on the president’s hopes for a second term, the usual ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ encore was interrupted.
Thank you everybody. We tried to play good tonight, after the president was here today. You know, we just had to do something after that. It’s hard to follow that. I think he’s still the president, I think he’s still gonna be the president. . . Yeah, we know. . . You know, the media’s not fooling anybody. It’s probably gonna be a landslide.
A renewal of his all-knowing roving prophet’s licence was assured when Dylan predicted the result in a race that had left pollsters and pundits floundering. Most of them were still maintaining that the contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, was far too close to call. On the following day, the artist activated the Facebook account he had hitherto ignored to repeat his statements and ensure that no one had misunderstood him.
In Madison, the audience would cheer Dylan’s prognostications. In contrast, the ‘white nationalist’ fascists of Stormfront would commence an online discussion under the rubric ‘Jew Bob Dylan Predicts Obama Landslide’. That wasn’t even the half of it. The artist steered clear of party politics: this much was known. But in picking out the black candidate with the ‘interesting background’ in 2008, and by sticking with Obama in 2012, he had placed himself on one side of a deep divide. The loathing that had engulfed Bill Clinton was as nothing to the passions aroused in one part of the American soul by the sight of a black man in the White House. The more the president’s opponents denied that their contempt had anything to do with race, the more obvious the motivating force became. In coded terms mystifying to the average European, some tried to accuse the commander-in-chief of ‘socialism’, but the tactic was a feeble distraction. Certain things didn’t change, even if civic America had a horror of ‘the race issue’. Each halting discussion was hedged around with euphemisms. Yet as the votes of minorities flooded in for Obama and swept away the complacency of a white conservative world, the reaction was furious, transparent and ugly. For Dylan, some old memories must have been awakened. Half a century had passed since he had performed ‘When the Ship Comes In’ beneath the shadow of Lincoln’s marble memorial, but the path picked out by the March on Washington and Obama’s election still went by some old, dark and muddy roads.
The statistical evidence would arrive in due course. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an ingenious Harvard economics scholar pursuing his PhD, would set aside what dishonest people told the pollsters and look, first, at their Google searches and the language they used, then at how the votes fell. In March 2013, the researcher would publish a paper to show that ‘Continuing racial animus in the United States appears to have cost Obama roughly four percentage points of the national popular vote in both 2008 and 2012’. What’s more, the black man ‘lost substantially more votes from racial animus . . . than he gained from his race’.37 Publishing in the Journal of Politics, meanwhile, an assistant professor at Brown University on Rhode Island named Michael Tesler would assert that the sight of a black president had produced the effect, in one grim sense ironic, of reawakening ‘old-fashioned racism’ – the biological ‘superiority’ kind – in a non-trivial portion of the electorate.38
In 2008, Obama’s campaign would be approaching its end just as capitalism in America and around the world seemed to fall apart. Dylan’s ‘Workingman’s Blues’ would turn out to have been more prescient than most economists. The baby boomers were hitting their 60s as all the familiar American dreams of prosperity passing between the generations began to unravel. A historic national debt that had been condemned by Obama in 2007 when it stood at $9 trillion would explode after 2008. Families whose real median income had fallen by 3 per cent between 2000 and 2004 (in ‘the good times’) were about to be crushed as the bills came in for Wall Street’s sins.39 A few, a very few, were immune to dread: the phenomenon began to be noticed. According to estimates published by Forbes.com in September 2007, the 25 richest people in the country, few of whom made or built things for a living, had a collective ‘net worth’ of $490.8 billion.
The crisis caused by banking’s robber barons would be international. In terms of jobs lost and national wealth destroyed, some European countries would suffer more profoundly than the United States. Nevertheless, in Dylan’s country, in the country whose collective memory he tried to preserve in his songs, the psychological scars ran deep. Obama would be entitled to claim credit for relative success in propping up the system and coping with the slump, but he would receive few thanks, least of all from Republicans who began to talk as though debt had nothing to do with bankers and everything to do with minimal welfare spending. For Dylan, modern times must have contained innumerable echoes of the past. But that was how history functioned, or so he had long believed.
His imagination had first been set aflame by the songs of Woody Guthrie, quintessential witness to the Great Depression. In many places in America, and for much the same reasons as in the 1930s, the old sour smell of hard times had returned. For all that, the parallels were not exact. Dylan’s awakening had come late in the gaudy 1950s when the country was still rich, powerful and generally admired around the world. Just before the banking crash of 2008 the Pew Global Attitudes Project was reporting that, thanks chiefly to Bush, the United States was mistrusted abroad if it was not despised. By then, the reaction to the exercise of military power had spread far beyond Muslim countries. In Germany, for one example, ‘favourable attitudes’ towards America had slipped from 78 per cent in 2000 to 37 per cent in 2007. Among the British, those most reliable of allies, the equivalent figures were 83 per cent and 56 per cent.40
Like some mythical island lost in a peculiar fog, America seemed to be drifting off from the rest of the world. There was no longer a consensus over the values being disputed or defended. It was not just a question of military might and its uses. One finding by the Pew researchers might have struck Dylan and his compatriots as odd, for example, but in Europe it seemed to explain a great deal. A majority of Americans (58 per cent) believed their country was ‘not religious enough’. Among the Europeans, American religiosity was regarded as a defining problem. As one result, the hope promised by Obama and his election victory on 4 November 2008 was greeted with frank relief in Europe and beyond. Millions chose to believe that somehow America had come to its senses. No one could quite say what they meant by that, however.
As pandemics of optimism go, this one would prove brief. During his 2008 campaign Obama had promised to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba where America was holding numerous ‘detainees’ without charge or trial amid its war on terror. When the president then failed to keep his word, and continued to fail to keep his word, ‘liberals’ and assorted supportive believers began to suffer doubts. When Obama then seemed reluctant to do much more than lecture those responsible for the banking crisis, the idea that he embodied change started to look a little implausible. Fear of Romney, the Republican alternative, would win the president his re-election in 2012, but that victory would serve only to conceal a larger crisis, political and moral, within the administration. Dylan and many others would discover that ‘redefining the nature of politics from the ground up’ had not meant much more than presidential business as usual.
In May 2013, Obama would give a speech to explain that he meant to alter ‘what has been a global war into a more targeted assault on terrorist groups threatening the United States’.41 He would say that he also intended to ‘curtail the use of drones’, the robotic airborne devices that had become the vehicles for his presidential ‘signature assassinations’. George Bush had ordered 52 of those drone attacks. By 2013, Obama had selected personally the targets for 318 assaults, most aimed at individuals and groups in Pakistan. By mid-2011, according to one study, 385 civilians, 160 children among them, had died thanks to these remotely controlled weapons.42 Four American citizens had also been assassinated by their president, his ‘kill orders’ and his drones. To many, there was no moral justification for any of this. Nevertheless, in his May address at the National Defense University in Washington DC, Obama would still feel able to invoke the theological doctrine of the just war.
A lawyer’s training would be of little use to the commander-in-chief when it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service had been victimising his opponents in the right-wing Tea Party movement, or when it was disclosed that his justice department had been seizing the telephone records of Associated Press journalists. Even progressive sorts, specialists in disillusionment, would find it hard to explain how their liberty-loving candidate had turned into a president bent on extending the arm of the state into every corner of life. Yet if May 2013 would come to feel like the cruellest month for Obama’s fans, June would be worse. On this president’s watch, the headlines would say, the National Security Agency had been given licence to spy upon the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans. ‘Prism’, as this vast attempt at digital martial law was called, collected data from every major telephone, internet and GPS network in public use. The charge would be one of mass covert surveillance with the thinnest of legal justifications. As even the liberal media would notice, it went against every ethical and constitutional principle that Obama, the liberator, had ever espoused. He had never said, ‘Yes we can . . . hack your phone.’
Dylan had written ‘Masters of War’ as his response to Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industry complex. Half a century later, he had spoken up, if haltingly, for the young black president who was going to change everything. Instead, the artist had given his backing to an architect of what was better described as the national security-industrial complex. By 2013, according to one estimate by budgetary analysts, ‘defence’ in its various manifestations would be costing America $931 billion a year, a sum approaching 25 per cent of all federal spending.43 The young singer who had once turned his back on political idealism and fine-sounding hypocrites might have been right all along.