IN OCTOBER 2007, DYLAN WAS GIVEN THE PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD, an honour created in the name of the heir to the Spanish throne. The artist was staging a concert in Omaha, Nebraska, and unable to show up in the city of Oviedo for his diploma, medallion, 50,000-euro cheque and a fine piece of Joan Miró sculpture. Once again, Dylan’s excuse was reasonable. Just finding the time to pick up all the awards on offer was becoming a problem. August institutions around the world seemed to be competing to burden the artist with their superlatives. Aside from sometimes saying politely how very honoured he was, Dylan had no real response to these grand affairs. He was proud, no doubt, to be taken so seriously, proud that the boy who had once been patronised in dingy coffee houses for his out-of-tune guitar and his Guthrie impersonations was being exalted after half a century of work. But there was something odd, nevertheless, in the spectacle of Bob Dylan becoming canonical. Some of the orotund citations sounded like obituaries. Some of them seemed to have been written by people who had not heard many of the songs.
As 2008 began, Episode 62 of Theme Time Radio was broadcast. The languid Lady in Red was her familiar self: ‘It’s night-time in the big city. Temptation is on every corner. A man rents a hotel room under an assumed name.’ The show’s theme on 2 January was ‘Number One’, or as Dylan put it: ‘For the next 60 minutes, we’re gonna be talking about one-horse towns, one-track minds, one-armed bandits, one false move, one in a million, one too many, one way or another, one brick shy of a load, and one and only. So stay here one and all and listen to songs on a singular subject, that subject being . . . number one.’ After playing ‘I’m the One Who Loves You’, a 1963 track by The Impressions, Dylan allowed himself another of his little jokes. ‘The Impressions had Curtis Mayfield at the helm,’ said the host. ‘Curtis was a triple treat. He wrote the songs, he played guitar on the songs, he sang on the songs.’
A month later, the Theme Time theme was ‘Mail’. As Dylan explained to his listeners, this involved ‘love letters, pen pals, going postal, ransom notes, letters to Dear John and Dear Abby, Miss Lonelyhearts . . . We’ll be returning things to sender, and we’ll be telling you that your cheque’s in the mail.’ In his case, the next cheque was never far away. The early shows of the year would take Dylan to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Later he would be in Canada, then back in Europe. In the summer, the artist would criss-cross America once more before finishing up back in Canada. The European leg of the annual trek was a little more interesting than usual. In June, audiences in Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Croatia were granted their first encounters with the legend. Even tiny Andorra, a speck on the maps, was not forgotten. Dylan’s booking agents were exhausting the land masses still untouched by their artist.
He would manage 98 concerts in 2008, a modest enough achievement by his standards. On the other hand, James Brown had thought nothing of putting his Revue through 330 one-nighters in a year. Charles Dickens, star of the Manchester Free Trade Hall and other tough venues, had once given 129 of his scintillating readings in a few brief months on the road. Harry Houdini had picked his locks in every vaudeville house in America and traversed the continent of Europe. Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show had kept going for a quarter of a century and done their stuff, their version of equine Americana, for all the crowned heads. Frank Sinatra had retired at the age of 55 and staged comebacks often, many said too often, as his great voice diminished and his memory ebbed away. There were meanwhile many thousands of honest performers, as Dylan knew well enough, who had never made a record and would never make a record. Cash on the nail aside, performance was a kind of addiction, satisfying a need that could not be met in any other manner. It was a way of life and it, too, was enmeshed in tradition. Performance was a part of an artist’s contract with the public. For all his complaints, for all his ambivalence and his contradictory explanations, it seemed that Dylan still felt a need to stand before an audience.
He ploughed on, for better or worse, when some of the younger stars in his business were making no apologies for miming on stage to pre-recorded backing tracks. Their audiences wanted spectacle and music that sounded exactly like the downloaded noises in their headphones. Why risk screwing up? Dylan risked it year in and year out. At some point, therefore, he deserved to be taken at his word. Performance, he argued, was central to his artistic being. Why then would he do anything else? The trouble was that this artist’s public performances were sometimes bad and often, at this point, no better than dull. Only rarely did the shows reveal anything new about the songs. The desire to be on stage was less an artistic imperative than an end in itself.
By 2008, it was inconceivable that the annual tours were being staged to meet a financial need. He didn’t put on all those concerts, as most of his surviving contemporaries put on concerts, just to plug a new piece of product or to celebrate some so-called reunion. He didn’t do it for the sake of critical appreciation. Despite all the complicated theories, he wasn’t out there, in country after country, simply to remake his songs or reinvent his art. No one needed to go all the way to Andorra to mess around with a melody. The judgement remains, nevertheless, that while the obdurate spirit was only too willing, the voice was weak and growing weaker. On any estimate not clouded by the conviction that Dylan could do no wrong, he had not staged an interesting tour in five years. Even the shop-worn claim that each attempt to reconfigure a melody or switch a few words in a lyric counted as a creative act no longer held up. Sometimes it seemed like a game, a mere distraction from the fact that in reality Dylan had nothing much else to offer. Yet still he needed to be Bob Dylan, showing himself to the world.
In April 2008, the author of Chronicles would find himself on the receiving end of a ‘special’ Pulitzer Prize. This one was for his impact on popular music and American culture. Mention was also made of ‘poetic power’. His son Jesse collected the citation on Dylan’s behalf, but amid general applause a few doubts were raised. The artist was the first ‘rock musician’ to be honoured with a prize meant for writers and journalists, yet the Pulitzer people had failed to give him the award for poetry, or to select his prose work for attention. John Coltrane, too, had been given a posthumous ‘special citation’, not the music prize. Writing in the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff wondered how many people were ‘ambivalent, or even uneasy, and fretted that the grizzled troubadour’s authenticity was being co-opted’. The journalist contended that ‘Dylan aficionados’ were ‘apprehensive’ and called in aid the novelist Jonathan Lethem as one of those ‘who see the Pulitzer as another chapter in [Dylan’s] complicated history with the establishment, an ongoing dance of distancings and détentes’.1 Clearly, the artist had no such qualms.
In the following month, Suze Rotolo would publish her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. The smiling girl on the second album’s cover had kept a resolute near-silence for decades, but having been misrepresented so often by strangers she had decided it was her turn to tell a few stories. Her relationship with Dylan had been brief enough, three years at the most, and as nothing to the forty-year marriage Rotolo had enjoyed with the film editor Enzo Bartoccioli, but no reviewer of her book would pause over those facts. Such was the way Dylan’s supereminence warped reality around anyone touched by the nimbus. Encroaching fame had been one reason for the failure of the affair, his juvenile selfishness aside, after Rotolo had refused to surrender her independence to the impossible demands of his career. Her book was more than a collection of superstar anecdotes, but it too was caught still in Dylan’s orbit, what with its title and its cover image taken from that famous Freewheelin’ photo-shoot on Jones Street, near the little apartment they had shared at 161 West 4th Street before the storm carried him away. Despite her best efforts, one brief episode had cast its shadow over Rotolo’s entire life. So how could anyone hope to live with this man? And where, as a human being, did that leave him?
Like Dave Van Ronk, Rotolo had never left the Village. She would tell one interviewer that she and Dylan had kept in ‘occasional’ touch over the years, but that was all.2 Respect for their shared history had endured and he had made no attempt to interfere with her book. Nevertheless, she knew and he knew that the things his audiences wanted from songs such as ‘Don’t Think Twice’ were long lost in the deep past. Only the legends remained, but the legends were all-consuming. For decades, Suze had been an artist, teacher and activist in her own right, but when she died of lung cancer on 25 February 2011, obituaries would be published around the world for a single reason. That Rotolo had taught Dylan a little about politics and poetry and introduced him to the habit of sketching during a short romance in a bygone decade counted for more than a life well lived. Once upon a time, for a brief while, Suze had been privy to a handful of the secrets of which ‘Bob Dylan’ was composed. For most of those who would mark a woman’s death, nothing else would really matter. But then, she is not remembered in these pages for any other reason. Dylan would offer no public response to her book or, when the moment came, to a former lover’s passing.
At some point between 7 September and 23 October, between the ending of one tour in Santa Barbara, California, and the resumption of performances in Victoria, British Columbia, he went back into the studios yet again. Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters in Malibu was about as close to home as Dylan could get, but the circumstances in which an album came about were as odd as any in his long recording career. With a certain impertinence, the French film director Olivier Dahan, fresh from the Oscar-winning success of La Vie en Rose, had asked the artist to contribute not one but ‘ten or more’ songs to a new picture to be called My Own Love Song. As he would tell the writer Douglas Brinkley, Dylan didn’t quite know what to make of this Gallic gall.
At first this was unthinkable. I mean, I didn’t know what he was actually saying. [In faux French accent] ‘Could you write uh, ten, twelve songs?’ Ya know? I said, ‘Yeah, really? Is this guy serious?’ But he was so audacious! Usually you get asked to do, like, one song, and it’s at the end of the movie. But ten songs? Dahan wanted to put these songs throughout the movie and find different reasons for them. I just kind of gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing.3
Dylan would call on the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter for help with all but one of the songs on what became Together Through Life. Once again, a collaborative effort would be treated as though it was all the artist’s own work. While Dylan was in the studio, meanwhile, another installment in the Bootleg Series appeared that made the need for a co-writer seem faintly ludicrous. The set called Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 was volume eight in the never-ending project and the most striking chapter in what amounted to a counter-factual history of Dylan’s career. It was also, in any one of three released forms, a remarkable album in its own right. Those who talked of trilogies forgot to take this large piece of work into account. It was, as it remains, easily the equal of Modern Times and ‘Love and Theft’. There is a good case for saying that, whether as a single, double or horribly overpriced three-disc set, it was better than either of those albums.
In part, nevertheless, it was another episode in the old story. Here were the works, sometimes in several forms, that Dylan had elected to discard or neglect. Here finally was ‘Red River Shore’ twice over. Here was ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, two tracks from the 1992 sessions with David Bromberg, the better attempts (three of them) at ‘Mississippi’ and a taste, albeit just one track, from the shows at the Supper Club in New York in 1993. Critics, it is fair to say, were delighted and perplexed, irritated and approving. Most of the irritation would arise from the fact that someone, whether within Columbia or the artist’s management, had let greed’s mask slip. While the two-CD Tell Tale Signs would be sold at a normal sort of price - $18.99 in America, £10 or so in Britain – the fans devoted enough to want the three-disc ‘deluxe edition’, with its flimsy book and a two-track piece of ‘bonus’ vinyl, would have to find $129.99 or its equivalent in their local currency. Most fans were furious. Even the diehards understood that they were being exploited simply because of their willingness to buy anything with Dylan’s name attached. These were the people most likely to covet the ‘deluxe’ package, after all, and these were the people being gouged. For some, the price seemed to mark what the artist really thought of his most devoted admirers.
The chance offered late in October by the Hohner musical instrument company to purchase a ludicrous limited edition ‘complete set of seven Marine Band harmonicas in the natural keys of C, G, D, F, A, B, and E which have been played and hand-signed by Bob Dylan’ was taken as an insult added to injury, even by those with no aspirations to attempt a tune. Neither wit nor elegance was involved in this joke. Yet in the summer of 2013 bobdylan.com was still offering the ‘Bob Dylan Signature Series Harmonica’, gold-plated reed plate and all, for $120. Should anyone have desired the ‘Individually Hand-Signed Harp in a Carved Ebony Box’, the price given was $5,000. For those interested in owning the full seven-harmonica set, one of only twenty-five known to ‘exist worldwide’, with each instrument guaranteed to have felt the warm breath of the artist himself, the tab was $25,000.
Tell Tale Signs was a mesmerising piece of art with a lot to say about the human condition. By 2008, the marketing effort for the Dylan brand also said something unmistakable about human nature. Fans who had stuck with the artist for four decades found the realisation hard to take. Those struggling to balance the poetry with the price tags found it impossible to explain. Yet the obvious explanation was probably the right explanation. Tell Tale Signs contained a couple of versions of the song called ‘Dignity’, the Oh Mercy piece that Dylan had failed to record to his satisfaction in New Orleans in 1989. Two lines run:
I went down where the vultures feed
I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need
The last Theme Time, broadcast on 15 April 2009, also carried a whiff of corporate manoeuvring, coming as it did after XM Satellite Radio fell under new ownership. The reasons for the show being brought to an end were never made clear, though it had probably run its course in any case. The final theme, naturally enough, was ‘Goodbye’. Dylan said: ‘It’s one thing to make an entrance, it’s another thing entirely to get out alive. So for the next hour we’ll be checking all the exits, finding our way outta here . . . And this show might run a little long this week, but that’s OK. What are they gonna do, fire me?’ He was approaching the age of 68, but all the familiar talk of packing things in, of giving up on recording or touring or meeting the demands of the expanding Bob Dylan corporate enterprise, had disappeared. Like some monarch without an heir, he had no intention of abdicating. His life had become a bizarre mixture of high art and low commerce, of thoughtful statements on the state of man and the modern world interspersed with textbook examples of the kind of behaviour that gives stardom its disreputable name.
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Together Through Life would turn out to be a big hit. Most critics would esteem it less highly than Modern Times, but most album buyers would pay no mind to another round of media feuilletons describing the writers’ long, personal and fraught relationships with the slippery art of Bob Dylan. Among reviewers there was a sense that the creative renaissance thesis had run its course. They had worked the idea almost to death, after all, without coming to terms with what it might truly signify. Memories of the depths to which the artist once had descended were beginning to dissipate. By May 2009 he was rich, famous, legendary, garlanded with awards and with his name on an album that had charged up the charts to number one in America, Britain and a host of other countries. According to the weird logic of music journalism, Dylan was therefore fair game for reviewers prepared to hit all the notes on the gamut between level-headed and empty-headed. One even managed to say that while the album offered ‘many great things’ it was ‘rendered underwhelming’ simply by the fact that some of the writer’s peers had praised it too highly.4
Together Through Life contained fewer appropriations, borrowings and obvious thefts than hitherto. This reduced the opportunities for learned prosecutorial statements on the difference between intertextuality and dishonesty. On this album, Dylan sounded both droll and righteously angry. That tested critical systems in which a reviewer’s little printed stars were supposed to be worth a thousand words. Self-evidently, the artist had taken some 1950s Chicago blues standards for his templates and reworked songs associated with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Otis Rush and the like. Then the Tejano accordion of David Hidalgo, leader of the Chicano band Los Lobos, had been featured prominently, inevitably lending a Southern, borderland ambience to the songs. In Dylan’s poetic universe, borders are the places where things fall apart, where rules and laws break down and madness looms. Those presentiments ran through every track on Together Through Life.
Even the songs which sounded affable drew on the belief that in the modern world social order is precarious. The title of the first track, ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothin”, was another borrowing from Ovid in his exile. The next song was the scarcely ambiguous ‘Life is Hard’. ‘If You Ever Go to Houston’, its melody and chorus lifted wholesale from the traditional ‘Midnight Special’ that Lead Belly had made his own, seemed jolly enough until you gave some attention to the words. The speaker, this eternal tipsy wanderer, was not cheerful.
I know these streets
I’ve been here before
I nearly got killed here
During the Mexican war
Similarly, ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’ seemed almost optimistic when set beside some of the album’s other offerings. It appeared to be a raffish love song, testimony to the enduring emotions apparently implied by the album’s title. ‘Life is for love,’ Dylan sang, welding clichés together, ‘and they say that love is blind.’ The next verse said something else entirely.
Well now what’s the use in dreamin’?
You got better things to do
Dreams never did work for me anyway
Even when they did come true
If a single song characterised Dylan’s mood on Together Through Life it was the final track, the mocking, defiant, contemptuous ‘It’s All Good’, a cliché transformed into an indictment. It would be fascinating to know who actually composed each line of this lyric, but the artist performed the whole as his own. Those who still assumed that he had put ‘topical song’ behind him long before would have some difficulty explaining this rackety number.
People in the country, people on the land
Some of them so sick, they can hardly stand
Everybody would move away if they could
It’s hard to believe, but it’s all good
The widow’s cry, the orphan’s plea
Everywhere you look, more misery
Come along with me, babe, I wish you would
You know what I’m sayin’. It’s all good
For the most part, the album worked well, flagging only when Dylan allowed his readings of the blues to become a little perfunctory, as in the pointless ‘Shake Shake Mama’, or the truly tiresome ‘Jolene’. At its best, Together Through Life possessed both an aura and a swagger that the artist had not displayed for a long time. The issue of authorship would not be resolved, least of all by Dylan, but certain of the best lines were invested with his familiar tone, even when he was leaning on a favourite writer such as Edgar Allen Poe. In ‘Forgetful Heart’, for example, there was the brief but lovely conclusion ‘The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door’. In ‘I Feel a Change Comin’ On’, meanwhile, Dylan (or Hunter) came up with a brilliant, gnomic verse that so delighted the country singer named he emblazoned it across his website.
I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver
And I’m reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I got the blood of the land in my voice
One dim-witted listener (this one) spent a week convinced that Dylan was making reference to the blood of the Lamb, though why it would be in his voice was never obvious. On the other hand, ‘blood of the land’, whatever it might mean, has no clear connection with country singers. There might be something involving Joyce, ‘blood and ouns’ and Ireland, but that’s a stretch. Dylan mentioned the novelist in Chronicles only to say that as a youth he had failed to make much headway with the prose. He recited the Joyce poem ‘Sleep now, O sleep now’ during Episode 28 (‘Sleep’) of Theme Time, but he recited a lot of poetry on the show. The Dubliner was a gifted piano player with a deep interest in music. Any help? On the other hand, ‘Joyce’ is one of the better rhymes for ‘voice’.
As is often the case when Dylan offers a non sequitur, it doesn’t seem to matter much. The performance imposes its own logic. One large part of his gift has always been the ability to turn statements whose meanings are private (or mysterious even to him) into a kind of sense beyond sense. There is nothing accidental about how the effect is achieved. As David Hidalgo would remember the Together Through Life sessions, Dylan ‘was always rewriting the lyrics’. Robert Hunter seems to have played no part in this procedure. The idea that the artist had taken on a collaborator because he was once again stuck for words is therefore nonsensical. In the studio, as the songs were shaped and reshaped, the only writer was Dylan. As Hidalgo would describe the process, ‘he has, you know, 20 verses that he’s got laid out, and he’ll pick and choose and rewrite while he’s going. It’s amazing to watch him work.’5
In the end, Olivier Dahan got more Bob Dylan music for his wayward Renee Zellweger road movie than he could have dreamed possible. In addition to five tracks from the album, the artist came up with sixteen bits and pieces of incidental music and allowed cover versions of older songs such as ‘What Good Am I? and ‘Precious Angel’ to be used. On his own behalf, meanwhile, Dylan turned Together Through Life into a memorable oddity, a set that was vivid, energetic and, unmistakably, an old man’s album. In this case, the aged individual was dismayed by the world yet furiously defiant of all it could throw at him. Dylan was ageing on his own terms. In an account of an interview given in Paris to promote the album, he was described as a kind of tenacious anachronism, out of step with the times and proud of the fact.
Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Dylan seems to have the [Great] American Songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web – anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual. . . If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube.6
It was a slight exaggeration, but not too far wide of the mark. He who had once sailed effortlessly into a future only he could discern had put down his anchors. On the other hand, Together Through Life could make even Dylan’s eccentricities sound rational. There were plenty of those. In May, just after the album’s release, he was in the fair city of Liverpool for a show. To the evident astonishment of the National Trust, keepers of the modest house called Mendips in Woolton where John Lennon had been raised by his Aunt Mimi, one of the 14 curious tourists paying £16 for a bus trip and tour could claim to have known the dead Beatle personally. ‘He spent ages going through photo albums and was thrilled at all the memorabilia,’ reported a representative of the trust.7 Dylan had been spotted previously at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, but this excursion to Mendips and to Strawberry Fields was odd even by the artist’s standards. There he was, a performer who claimed to be sceptical of fame and fans, goggling at ‘memorabilia’ like a true prying fanatic. The artist who had asserted that there is no difference between nostalgia and death might even have seemed a little wistful. At least no one in Liverpool tried to arrest him for it.
That honour would fall to Officer Kristie Buble in Long Branch, New Jersey, in July. The ‘eccentric-looking old man’ was causing no trouble as he strolled around in the rain on a summer’s day. On the other hand, the officer was only 22 and unfamiliar with the names and faces of people who were famous long before she was born. As Buble would tell ABC news: ‘I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something.’ Locals had reported ‘an old scruffy man acting suspiciously’. The young cop would confirm that detail, more or less. ‘He was acting very suspicious,’ she would say. ‘Not delusional, just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything.’ The suspect had no useful ID on him. When Buble therefore took him back to his hotel to investigate his paperwork, she felt it necessary to call her precinct to ‘check who Bob Dylan was’. After the laughter down the line from the station house had subsidised, the artist was free to go about his business.
Journalists who thought they knew their man tried to turn a guess into a weird ‘fact’ by deciding that he had been wandering around looking for the house in which Bruce Springsteen had written Born to Run. Asked about the incident in an interview three years later, Dylan’s explanation was mundane: he had simply gone for a walk. ‘I guess in that neck of the woods they’re not used to seeing people walking in the rain,’ he said. ‘I was the only one on the street.’8 His ID was missing simply because ‘I wear so many changes of clothes all the time.’ Dylan’s mistake, if that’s the word, had been to forget that in a country obsessed with crime no one could act as though it was still 1958 in Hibbing, Minn. But even his run-in with Officer Buble was not the strangest episode in 2009 for one globally famous complete unknown.
Towards the end of the summer, a rumour began to circulate within the Dylan-watching fraternity to the effect that he was recording again. Given his limited productivity in the twenty-first century, this was a surprise in itself. As ever, speculation and amateur investigations commenced. When the facts were established, they were treated by some earnest fans as a worse betrayal than a $129 price tag for a box set. A Christmas album: how could Dylan even contemplate such a surrender to the worst kind of crass commercialism, far less carry it through?
He could and he did, much to the benefit of the charities Feeding America and Crisis in the UK, to whom all the album’s royalties were directed. Christmas in the Heart, a seasonal affair played (almost) entirely straight, was a gift to anyone who enjoyed the holiday and retained a sense of humour. It was no great surprise to discover that a lot of Dylan fans were lacking in that department. Quite what they had made of Theme Time Radio was therefore anyone’s guess. How they squared Dylan’s complicated religious affiliations with the discovery that, where Christmas was concerned, he was a middle-of-the-road Middle American who loved the entire affair is also likely to remain mysterious. But why would he not cherish the festival? The birth of his messiah was of no small importance to the artist.
Christmas in the Heart – by David Hidalgo’s account entirely Dylan’s idea – did not labour that point when it appeared in October. Religiosity was notable by its absence. Equally, there was little of his usual sardonic bite to the artist’s treatments of standards and carols. Even when he cut loose with ‘Must Be Santa’, filming a truly demented video to accompany the track, he seemed to be evoking, not mocking, the polka bands of his Minnesota childhood. A few would remember that the song had once been a hit for Mitch Miller, the professionally bland Columbia producer who had led the old school’s chorus of contempt for ‘Hammond’s folly’ back in Dylan’s early days, but that had nothing to do with the spirit of the track, or of the album.
On the internet, nevertheless, scandalised fans reacted as though the artist had contrived another Self Portrait (as though that would have been a bad idea). Not for the first time, many missed the point. Not for the first or the last time, their reluctance to accept that Dylan was entitled to autonomy, or just to his whims, was striking. Elvis had made Christmas albums; Springsteen had done Christmas songs: where was the by-law forbidding a wistful messianic Jew with a taste for tales of the apocalypse from participating in an all-American tradition? That such recordings, good or bad, were meanwhile as traditional as anything contrived by ‘folk process’ was a truth some fans were never likely to concede. Christmas in the Heart was fun: wholly innocent, daft and incongruous, but fun. It would get nowhere near to number one in America, but number 23 was a sight better than the result achieved by Under the Red Sky. And those charities, granted royalties in perpetuity, would benefit for many years to come.
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On 9 February 2010, Dylan was back in the White House, this time to perform – he had never played the hall before – during a concert entitled ‘Songs of the Civil Rights Movement’. He sang ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” in a gentle, piano-backed version with an unusual air of quiet pride and even, though he claimed to despise the emotion, of nostalgia. An old man stood for a few minutes in a young man’s shoes. A veteran, voice cracking and striving, sang the words of a beginner for the sake of an African American president. It was an affecting moment, but it was also a reminder of just how much time had slipped away. In the second decade of the twenty-first century Dylan remained a modern artist, perhaps the most modern of them all, but he was also becoming a piece of history. There was no way to escape the contradictions lodged in that truth.
Early in the summer, undaunted, he found a few more fresh pastures. Touring took him to Greece, Bulgaria, the republic that called itself Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and the Slovak Republic. In most of these concerts the artist who had made his earliest marks during the worst of the Cold War’s paranoia was bringing his music to formerly Communist countries for the first time. It made for an odd disjunction. In America and western Europe people were still turning up at Dylan concerts just to complain that he sounded nothing like his records. In Bucharest and Sofia, Skopje and Zagreb, they were trying to match the image of the aged man on stage with the tale of the most significant artistic figure in half a century, Just to complicate matters further, he gave them ‘Jolene’, trivial and dull, as an encore.
Past and present were entangled. Bob Dylan, every last one of him, existed in a weird continuum. Each new instalment in the Bootleg Series – new for many, ancient for the artist – imposed its echoes on his existence, his image and his reputation. At every turn, all those previous Dylans infiltrated his life. The question of identity, personal and artistic, was more complicated than anything Todd Haynes had imagined when he was writing I’m Not There. Bob Dylan seemed to exist at numerous points in time simultaneously.
In September 2010, an exhibition of the 40 canvases he called the ‘Brazil Series’ opened at the National Gallery of Denmark. In October, another volume in the Bootleg Series, one entitled The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964, made its appearance. Anyone who knew nothing about the makers of these works would have had problems connecting one with the other. No amount of learned argument over ‘pictorial’ songs and narrative paintings – and there would be plenty of that until the uproar over the Asia Series commenced – solved this puzzle. Brutally, you could observe that the rough, mud-hued canvases shown in Denmark lacked clarity, drama and any real instinct for composition. That wasn’t often said about Bob Dylan songs, even the minor pieces taped at the start of the ’60s just to satisfy the youth’s publishers. Yet something more than lost time or a gulf in technique separated the two collections. The young singer getting his work down as fast as he could scribble the verses might have amounted to little more than a found identity, a personality assembled or imposed by circumstance. His songs, even the earliest, had chiselled out the contours of individuality with a madcap intensity. The 69-year-old painter displayed no personality of any kind. His canvases were less dispassionate than disengaged, less objective than inert. If Dylan had put his heart and soul into these images, evidence for the sacrifice was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that was what had attracted him to painting in the first place.
The Copenhagen exhibition, though spared a fuss over plagiarism, was given what is known among polite critics as a mixed reception. Which is to say that those who staged the show at the Statens Museum for Kunst spoke proudly of their achievement and highly of their artist. The Danish press, on the other hand, were less than kind. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, the gallery’s curator, Kasper Monrad, reckoned that Dylan’s work had ‘ties to a figurative tradition that has remained vibrant up through the twentieth century’. The ‘painterly mode’ identified was meanwhile placed in line of descent ‘from French modernist painting of the 1920s’. John Elderfield, the Englishman who had served as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and who would become Dylan’s ambassador in the world of high-end galleries, wrote about ‘the imperatives of his visual imagination as it travels back and forth across the borderline between painting and song’.9 The names of famous artists, Matisse chief among them, were thrown around. Judging by press comment, the critics must have looked at different pictures entirely.
According to agency reports, the daily Berlingske Tidende said: ‘When we talk about music, Bob Dylan is one of the great Picassos of the twentieth century, but this is not the case for his painting.’ The newspaper also believed that the Statens Museum had staged the exhibition ‘not because his canvases are good, but because he is Bob Dylan’. The financial journal Boersen was also unhappy with the national gallery for putting ‘financial interest ahead of artistic judgement’, knowing that the name would be a draw regardless of the quality of the work. In Information, an art history specialist named Peter Brix Soendergaard offered the opinion that ‘Bob Dylan paints like any other amateur, using a rather oafish figurative style. He is what we used to call a Sunday painter.’10
In conspicuous contrast, bad reviews for The Witmark Demos were hard to find. Sales were pretty satisfactory too, taking Dylan to number 12 on the American chart. It was as though critics had forgotten just how good the young singer had been. That said, the 47 tracks possessed a ragged, unquenchable vitality that would have deserved success at any time. Among the juvenilia were sketches of some of the works – ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Times They Are a-Changin’ and ‘Tambourine Man’ among them – from which agreeable Albert Grossman had for years extracted fully 50 per cent of Dylan’s publishing earnings. The fact did not diminish the quality, or the sense of remembered and imagined excitement, of the Witmark set. Even those who knew the performances well enough from bootlegs were startled by the freshness after more than 40 years of the refurbished recordings. Once again, the Bootleg Series was demonstrating the extent and durability of Dylan’s achievement. The claim that he was an artist bigger than any era was becoming hard, if not impossible, to dispute. He had outlived many of his contemporaries and outlasted them all.
The beginning of 2011 brought news that he was, in his own mind, a long way from done. Anyone who signs a six-book deal with his seventieth birthday approaching either has ambitions for longevity, or no interest in the issue of age. Dylan’s claims in 2006 that he was contemplating a second Chronicles volume were in any case confirmed. But half a dozen books? It seemed that the Proustian knack, once acquired, can become a habit. As it transpired, the artist had signed with Simon & Schuster to provide not one but two more books in the vein of Chronicles. A third book would ‘reportedly’ comprise samples of the wit and wisdom of Theme Time Radio Hour’s DJ, but details of the other promised volumes were not disclosed. That might have been just as well. No news report was indelicate enough to make much of the fact that almost seven years had elapsed between the appearance of Chronicles: Volume One and the signing of the six-book agreement. At that rate, the third book was liable to arrive as the author celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday. Asked in September 2012 if there would even be a second volume, Dylan’s first reply was ‘Oh, let’s hope so’.11 He then said that he was ‘always working on parts of it’, that he didn’t mind the writing, but found making time for rereading difficult. By the middle of 2013, in any case, there was no sign of Chronicles: Volume Two.
He was an author, then, and he was a figurative artist. He was a stage performer and a living historical project. He was the recipient of more awards than you could fit into a U-Haul trailer, a movie composer for hire, available for acting jobs, radio, documentaries and TV advertising. He would blow briefly into very expensive harmonicas for sale and resale. He could be hired for the most select private engagements. In short, the making and recording of albums was just one line of work among many. The revenue stream it represented was a minor tributary, even if the flow had increased slightly since the appearance of Modern Times. But then, no one still produced records pell-mell, year in and year out, as they had in the 1960s. The few remaining conglomerates no longer wanted product in that kind of quantity. A specialist back-catalogue line such as the Bootleg Series, with no recording costs at stake and a guaranteed market of willing buyers, was a welcome exception. The fact remained that albums had ceased to be the cornerstones of Dylan’s business plan. They mattered only as works of art, for whatever that was worth.
In this, he was no different from other stars of popular music in the early twenty-first century. There was no money to speak of in album sales, or so they said. The big bucks, the customary rewards, were to be had from the concert circuit: hence the extraordinary ticket prices being charged by the acts making their laser-lit homes in gigantic arenas.12 By the time Michael Jackson died of a self-inflicted heart attack in June 2009 he had sold 100 million records and blown hundreds of millions of dollars on toys and trash. At the end, his intended solution to his fantastically complicated financial problems was a scheme to stage no fewer than 50 concerts in succession at London’s 20,000-seat O2 Arena. According to promoters, Jackson would have made £5 million a show. Dylan had never been in that league. Equally, there was no sign that he had ever squandered his earnings in the style of the screwed-up maker of Thriller. (If anything, the artist had a certain reputation for being ‘careful’ with cash.) Yet the detail overlooked in all the award citations straining for eloquence with their talk of poetry and culture was that Dylan’s most profound gift had long been a secondary concern. When he felt moved to make an album he would apply himself, most of the time, with the same concentration he had brought to the task in his greatest days. But art was no longer his main business. Those who wrote the big books or argued over allusive imagery too often forgot an obvious truth.
Nothing interrupted the tours. Time that could not be spared for prose revisions could always be found for those. At the beginning of April, Dylan set off on a month-long trip to the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. He began with another new country, known to most as Taiwan, known to itself as the Republic of China. No one in the western media was troubled by this choice of destination. In contrast, the artist’s next stop three days later, in another Chinese republic, the vast empire that claimed to be in the sole possession of its people, would set off one of those miniature typhoons of controversy that seemed to engulf Dylan periodically. Most of those involved, not least the artist himself, would miss the point of the argument entirely.
According to some press reports – reports Dylan would later dismiss convincingly – shows in Beijing and Shanghai had been cancelled during the previous April after permission was refused by China’s Ministry of Culture. The Guardian, acting on information from Taiwanese promoters Brokers Brothers Herald, had said that the ministry ‘appeared wary of Dylan’s past as an icon of the counter-culture movement’.13 Yet on 6 April 2011, there he was on stage at the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing. This time The Guardian reported that the artist was ‘singing to the culture ministry’s tune’. In a story that was part report and part review, datelined on the night of the show, the paper ran an unsourced quote stating that the performance was ‘strictly according to an approved programme’. In other words, Dylan had allowed himself to be censored. If the story was true, he had agreed not to perform songs deemed provocative by an oppressive one-party regime. Worse, as the tale told by the Guardian and others stressed, this surrender had taken place in the week in which the admired dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been locked up.
The paranoia of the ‘Communists’ controlling totalitarian capitalism in China was not the world’s biggest secret. They had censored the Rolling Stones (who, typically, had lost no sleep over that). They had refused entry to the ‘unsuitable’ Oasis. They had been furious, supposedly, when in 2008 the Icelandic singer Björk had shouted (or muttered, depending on who you believed) ‘Tibet! Tibet!’ during a song called ‘Declare Independence’. In November 2012, Elton John would be visited by police in Beijing after he announced that his show in the city was dedicated ‘to the spirit and talent of Ai Weiwei’. In March 2013, the veteran German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk would be denied a visa because, according to Agence France-Presse, they had agreed to participate in a Free Tibet benefit in Washington a decade before. The regime had long made its views on the liberties it would allow to performers very clear. ‘Paltry and few’ just about covered it.
Had Dylan submitted to these controls? The Los Angeles Times, with a correspondent on the spot, reported that ‘at a time when many other American performers would have been banned from China’, the concert at the Workers’ Gymnasium ‘omitted Dylan’s most famous ballads of dissent’. The newspaper also stated as fact that the artist’s ‘set list had to be sanctioned beforehand by the Ministry of Culture’. In this version, the demand that Dylan should ‘conduct the performance strictly according to the approved programme’ had been part of the ‘formal invitation’ to play in China. This was going on ‘in the midst of a crackdown on Chinese intellectuals, activists and artists in which dozens of people have been arrested or investigated’. The story filed by the correspondent for the Washington Post made much the same points. The concert was ‘devoid of any numbers that might carry even the whiff, it said, ‘of anti-government overtones’. Dylan had played ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in Taiwan, but dropped them for the show in China’s capital. ‘There was no “Times They Are a-Changin’” in Beijing,’ reported the Post. ‘And definitely no “Chimes of Freedom”.’14
Across the West, comment followed. Conspicuous among the artist’s critics was Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who began her op-ed piece with an unequivocal statement: ‘Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.’ For Dowd, his long-standing refusal to engage with America’s impeccably democratic politics was not worth mentioning. The failure to perform certain songs in the heart of totalitarian darkness was ‘a whole new kind of sell-out’. As the columnist put it:
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of ‘Hurricane’, his song about ‘the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done’. He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.15
The fact that Dylan had not performed ‘Hurricane’ on any stage since the days of the Rolling Thunder Revue in the middle of the 1970s slipped Dowd’s mind, as did the fact that he had given a rendering of ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ in Beijing, though not in Taiwan. That piece of evidence was also overlooked by most of those who seemed as intent on dictating the artist’s set list as any Chinese bureaucrat. For that matter, the country with the somewhat famous wall, the one built to keep nervous autocrats safe, had also heard ‘All Along the Watchtower’. In a New Yorker blog, Sean Wilentz waded in on Dylan’s behalf. To the professor, it was all just like the bad old ’60s days when the artist was arraigned by purblind leftists for failing to do his progressive duty. Wilentz argued that there was plenty of subversion, if few slogans, in some of the recent work Dylan had performed in China. The old nonsense yet prevailed: ‘He is not allowed to be an artist, he must be an agitator. And he can only be an agitator if he sings particular songs.’ Wilentz added:
Depending on whatever agreement he made with them, I’d argue Dylan made a fool of the Chinese authorities, while getting paid in the bargain. He certainly made a fool of Maureen Dowd – or she has made a fool of herself.16
Just for a change, Dylan decided to speak for himself. Clearly, the charge that he had been pushed around by a few dour men in suits had rankled. Presumably an artist who had stood up to censorious lawyers for The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 needed no lectures on how to handle the People’s Republic of China. Dylan, to be fair, was just setting the record straight, more or less. In a statement headed ‘To My Fans and Followers’ published on bobdylan.com on 13 May, he said there had been no shows planned for China in 2010; therefore, ‘we were never denied permission to play in China’. The whole tale had been ‘drummed up by a Chinese promoter’. Then Dylan denied that there had been a lot of empty seats at the Beijing show and rebutted claims that the audience were mostly foreigners. (The majority of press reports in fact said that there were some vacant seats and a significant minority, though still a minority, of non-Chinese in the crowd.) Then the artist stated:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous three months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
Set lists had indeed been demanded, then, and duly provided. On the other hand, there remained the demonstrable fact that Dylan had been altering his nightly programme to suit his mood for decades, no matter the venue, no matter the country. ‘Desolation Row’, one of the two songs that supposedly ‘disappeared’ in Beijing according to the Washington Post, reappeared in Shanghai. Were the censors less vigilant in China’s most populous city? ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, allegedly ‘dropped’ in China, was also omitted during each of nine subsequent concerts in Australia. Were the totalitarians of Oz at work? Dylan was entitled to be taken at his word. In Beijing, ‘we played all the songs that we intended to ploy’.
And so what? Amid all the arguments over censorship, sell-outs, the songs he could have played and the songs he should have played, no one asked an obvious question of Dylan. What was he doing in China in the first place? What possessed him to believe that a police state like that – if there is a police state ‘like that’ – was just another place to play, another region to be conquered, another patch on the map to be checked from the list while the box-office take was calculated? For Dowd and certain other journalists it would have been enough if Dylan had taken all the Chinese money he could scoop up just as long as ‘a statement’ was made. Rhetoric was the issue, not the fact of doing business with a regime with an unspeakable human-rights record.
In 1985, Dylan had signed up for a campaign called Artists United Against Apartheid alongside Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, U2, Gil Scott-Heron, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, Pete Townsend and many more besides. Their chief object had been to make a campaign record called ‘Sun City’, a track declaring their refusal to perform at that all-white resort while apartheid remained. Dylan had added his voice. So why was China different? His statement didn’t say. Much of the criticism the artist attracted over the Beijing show was simplistic; Wilentz was right about that. But in the commotion over the failure to sing some journalist’s favourite protest songs the moral choice involved in agreeing to appear in China was ignored. One commentator (this one, it so happens) had no interest in the choice of material, but wrote: ‘The point in dismissing politics is to grant freedom from every politician. Had you happened to be called Dylan, and written “Chimes of Freedom”, and then found yourself in the middle of Totalitarian Central, that might resonate.’17 Dylan, it was argued, had donated a little of his credibility to an obnoxious regime just by his presence in the Workers’ Gymnasium. For once, the songs were not the issue.
*
On 24 May 2011, he reached the age of 70 and induced another spasm of media interest around the world. Some writers wondered what had become of their youth, some their idealism. Many contemplated a world gone wrong with the failure of the counter-culture, even if the artist had never subscribed to that confused and confusing notion. There were a multitude of assessments, reassessments, reminiscences and profiles amid the celebrations. It was a rare publication that had nothing to say. (This writer’s drop in the ocean: ‘Bob Dylan’s real triumph at 70? He’s a twenty-first-century artist and the central American poet of his age. I should probably wish him happy birthday, but the old miscreant wouldn’t thank me.’18) There was also general wonderment that Dylan was still around to rack up his three score and ten, what with one thing and another. That the survivor remained ‘relevant’ in a world that was losing its collective attention span as fast as it was losing its ozone layer counted as another miracle. In the end, most agreed that the grand puzzle set by the artist and his career endured. Some wondered, reasonably enough, if the man could endure as an artist for very much longer.
Taking a break after his return from New Zealand at the end of April, Dylan was not foolish enough to be standing on a public stage when his birthday moment arrived. The celebrations would not spare him the Asia Series fiasco in September, in any case, or free him from the attentions of the plagiarism industry. The more his achievements were proclaimed, the greater the effort became, so it seemed, to cut him down to size, to make him fit, to render him comprehensible within someone’s idea of religion or politics, history or literature. On 4 November, he was playing in Stockholm when an anniversary more significant than his birthday was reached. According to the stakhanovite work done by Olof Björner, this was show number 2,382 in the unending tour.19 It also marked fully 50 years to the day (or night) since Dylan had given a real concert, his first, at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York City. He had measured out his life in songs. For him there had been no other existence, no existence in any normal sense, for better than half a century. The art of songmaking and all it had brought him, good and bad, had shaped those many identities, those serial lives. The all-consuming habit of art had consumed each life one by one. Dylan had never ‘reinvented’ himself, adopted roles, or put on ‘masks’ to bewitch, deceive or confound. Those appearances had been the effects of 50 years and more of writing songs, of following where the songs led. A detestation of the recording studio had altered nothing. There had never been a choice in the matter. When 2012 arrived it was time to make another album. All other bits and pieces aside, this would be number 35.
Dylan went to work at Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters in January and continued to work until March. In July, Columbia would announce that an album of ‘ten new and original Bob Dylan songs’ – an interesting form of words – was scheduled for release on 11 September. It would be called Tempest. On the internet, the reaction would be instantaneous, as though someone had pushed a starter button. For months, the hum of online chatter would be almost audible. A one-word title would produce a chain reaction of speculation ending in the conclusion that this must surely be Dylan’s last album. Tempest, ran the thinking: just like Shakespeare’s play (not quite). Just like Shakespeare’s last play (not exactly). Just like the play in which Shakespeare made his farewell to his art and to the stage (not if you prefer one of a dozen other interpretations of the drama). In due course, our artist would become a little peeved at being pensioned off in this manner. First, however, he had a real farewell to make.
We can probably guess that a collection of Dylan’s valedictory messages for friends and heroes was not among the volumes he promised to Simon & Schuster. Nevertheless, taken together these notes of acquiescence to age and mortality would make for interesting reading. His remembrances might be the closest anyone gets to the unguarded Dylan, the ‘real’ Dylan. There are no riddles in his eulogies. When Levon Helm, singer and drummer with The Band, was taken by cancer on 19 April after almost 14 years of intermittent struggle, Dylan’s response was released within hours. He was in Belo Horizonte in Brazil, on the third stop of a tour through South and Central America, but he caught the essence of a friendship in a few words. He even sounded a little lonely.
He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.
At the end of May, one leg of the now-familiar spin around the globe completed, Dylan paused in Washington DC to suffer the distress – or so it appeared – of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama. It might have counted as his nation’s highest civilian honour, but the artist looked as though he was being fitted for a noose. His dark glasses reflected the East Room of the White House back upon itself and kept his thoughts, if any, penned within. The rest of Dylan’s face, both drawn and blank, seemed only to hint that if he could be anywhere else he would be back out on the road, or just – for how often had he expressed the hope? – left alone at home. But where was that exactly? Sometimes he said that he could make his home wherever he happened to be. At times he even spoke like a song. In reality, he had European festival engagements to complete over the summer.
‘Reportedly’, ‘apparently’, ‘reputedly’ – for not a word of it had been confirmed – arthritis in his hands would once again prevent him from attempting the guitar. Another tale said that a bad back made the weight of a solid-body instrument too much to bear. Dylan’s age was beyond concealment. No one who wrote about his concerts forgot to mention the passage of time, what it had done, what had been won and lost. Yet he seemed spry enough at the first show, part of the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, as he laughed and joked with his band, or postured, sometimes comically, through songs whose broken bones and gleaming entrails were scattered across the stage. Reviews were favourable, for the most part, but even the writers who still found something spellbinding about a performance by this artist had to couch their praise in strange language. For example, the critic from the Daily Telegraph, invariably supportive, first observed: ‘At 71, the great troubadour is still out there, presenting his works of genius in weird, garbled, sometimes barely recognisable forms, for reasons that nobody can really understand but himself.’ But then:
Dylan delivers his highly charged lyrics with three-note melodies that don’t necessarily bear much resemblance to the originals, chopped up into short rhythmic phrases that frequently seem to baffle his own band, who watch him like hawks throughout, looking for clues and cues.
And then again:
Somehow between the magic of his fantastic songs, the liquid groove of his superb band, the mysterious charisma of the legend himself and the will of the crowd to enjoy the moment, something strange and truly spectacular happens, a thrilling performance that nobody, perhaps not even the man at its centre, can really explain.20
Others present failed to detect this supernatural event. That, though, had become the way of things. The stratagems Dylan had been forced to adopt to compensate for the disintegration of his voice had grown ever more elaborate, ever more extreme, inventive or preposterous according to taste. To say this divided audiences is like saying that some people are colour-blind and some are not. But which was which, in this case? At Carhaix in Brittany, three weeks after Hop Farm, the booing and the heckling directed at Dylan was impossible to ignore. The racket raised questions. Should those who saw merit in everything he did just have told themselves that it was ever thus, that it was worse in ’66? Or should they have grasped that loyalty had become blind (or deaf)? By the summer of 2012, those who stuck by Dylan tended to say, almost blandly, that anyone who didn’t get it should go elsewhere and find something else to misunderstand. As an answer, it felt incomplete. The artist was about to release an album that would become still another of his big twenty-first-century hits. The praise from reviewers would be as lavish as any he had ever received. Yet a lot of people who would buy and admire Tempest would still emerge baffled from many of his shows. That counted as strange to everyone save those inside the cocoon.
*
Tempest is one of the finest things he has ever done: add it to the list. At this stage in the game the stock of superlatives is almost exhausted. Most of the things said in praise of Dylan have been said many times before. That’s a problem, if it matters, for the reviewer’s trade. The habit of asserting that album A is the ‘best since’ album B might do for a five-year pop career, but not for a career more than half a century long, one tangled up in arguments that often have nothing to do with music. In the case of Tempest the ‘best since’ yardstick would be extended, regardless, even unto Blonde on Blonde. You would be better off talking instead of Picasso in his final years of raging turmoil, remaking Old Masters obsessively, mocking death, locked in a futile combat with age and libido. You will not have said much about Dylan’s album, but you will have located the territory.
Tempest is a work of grim relish and flamboyant recklessness. Dylan has spent most of his long career seeming not to give a damn what anyone thinks, but with this set the contempt for restraint is ostentatious. Whether the issue is artistic method, politics, age, truth, women, religion, or a profound desire for revenge against allcomers, this Dylan doesn’t care what you think. He’s pretty sure that God doesn’t care, either. The world represented in the ballad-stories and movie-stories of Tempest contains little for your comfort, nothing for your enlightenment. Even the album’s one, uncertain eulogy, the song for John Lennon that was perhaps inspired by Dylan’s strange visit to Aunt Mimi’s house in Liverpool, all but says, ‘So it goes.’ Tempest is an album, as the old oath has it, of blood and thunder. In these songs the skies darken and the corpses pile up thanks to betrayal, fate, or because the artist is offering to do the job himself. Those who chose to see Dylan as Shakespeare’s Prospero got the wrong character. Lear would have been a better fit.
Besides, as the exasperated artist took pains to point out to Rolling Stone, Shakespeare’s enchanted castaway play has the definite article in its title. The difference might be no more than a nuance, but for Dylan it mattered: ‘The name of my record is just plain Tempest.’21 There was nothing plain about the contents. Even the opening track, ‘Duquesne Whistle’, is another of those tricks of misdirection at which the artist had long been adept.
It opens with the sunny, gentle sounds of what could be an old western swing band reaching the end of a number, as though we have just tuned in to some local Texas radio station back in the ’40s. That’s one clue to this album: amid the rockabilly, folk, blues and country most of the music is drawn from a time before there was the sound of someone called Bob Dylan. Then the song proper kicks in. It’s a train song, a jolly-sounding uptempo piece that could be in the lineage of all the old gospel train songs pointing down the track to redemption. But there’s something a little off here. Why is the train’s whistle blowing ‘like the sky’s gonna blow apart’ when the voice the singer says he can hear ‘must be the mother of our Lord’? Why, if that’s what is in his head, would the whistle sound ‘like it’s gonna kill me dead’? Dylan isn’t telling, but this jaunty roadhouse number is utterly deceitful. Even its promotional video would attract a little spurious controversy for a scene of notable mock brutality amid a scenario that had nothing whatever to do with trains of any description. In his ritual Rolling Stone interview to mark the album’s release, Dylan would manage to explain everything and nothing.
Tempest was like all the rest of them: the songs just fall together. It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration – to pull that off ten times with the same thread – than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.22
So: anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense? Dylan is describing both his method and the moral universe of the songs. The two are connected, in any case. It has nothing to do with God’s presence or absence; the artist continues to testify, here and there, to his faith. But one subtext of Tempest – in the title song it becomes explicit – is that anyone expecting explanations from the deity is wasting time and effort.
Several of the album’s songs tell stories; all are fabulistic in one way or another. A couple of the longest pieces, ‘Scarlet Town’ and the title track, are modelled explicitly on the old, endless folk ballads, shot through with supernatural mystery, that had once entranced the young Dylan. Indeed, ‘Barbara Allen’, the Scottish ballad he had sung at the Gaslight in the Village back in 1962, begins ‘In Scarlet Town where I was born’. ‘Roll On, John’, the song for Lennon, is constructed like a movie, opening on the murder scene before tracing moments in the victim’s life and work in a series of flashbacks. The death ballad ‘Tin Angel’ is meanwhile a hybrid of folk and film. Its immediate ancestry lies in the song ‘Love Henry’ that Dylan had performed on World Gone Wrong, but its origins stretch all the way back to one of the Child ballads first known in old Scotland. The tale of love, infidelity and murder – in which by the end bodies are actually piled up – could nevertheless be taken from a bloody western movie. That said, even a song such as ‘Pay in Blood’, which sounds like nothing so much as one of Dylan’s mid-’60s revenge songs, is a parable of a people enslaved – in biblical bondage, perhaps – rather than just the artist’s curse on those he happens to despise. Though the works sound utterly dissimilar, the nearest thing there is to Tempest in Dylan’s back catalogue is, in fact, the fable-laden John Wesley Harding.
Needless to say, the comparisons are anything but exact. For one thing, the obsession with enemies is harder to detect in the older album; for another, Harding’s treatment of women involves none of the sheer malevolence that recurs in Tempest. What Dylan intends by these themes is hard to puzzle out. Who are these ‘foes’? Is he serious when he gives free rein to vitriolic misogyny? By the time he made this album he had spent half a century picking fights in song. He had also been accused, often enough, of sexism as an artist and as an individual. ‘When the Ship Comes In’ from 1964 was a mock-biblical call to class war; ‘Positively 4th Street’ from the following year was a young man settling scores on his own behalf. As for his attitude towards women, pick an album. Dylan’s inability to see beyond his precious Madonna/whore caricatures has been criticised for decades. For many tastes, it has created odd undertones, let’s say, even in some of his best and loveliest songs. But something more is going on in Tempest.
You got too many lovers
waiting at the wall
If I had a thousand tongues
I couldn’t count them all
‘Narrow Way’
Set ‘em up Joe, play ‘Walkin’ the Floor’
Play it for my flat-chested junkie whore
‘Scarlet Town’
You got the same eyes that your mother does
If only you could prove who your father was
Someone must’ve slipped a drug in your wine
You gulped it down and you crossed the line
‘Pay in Blood’
I can dress up your wounds
With a blood-clotted rag
I ain’t afraid to make love
To a bitch or a hag
‘Early Roman Kings’
Had Dylan been a hip-hop act – and in another time and place, who knows? – the denunciations would have come thick and fast. It is a fact, nevertheless, that violent language is thrown in all directions in most of the Tempest songs. It is also worth remembering that in these moods, for better or worse, the artist isn’t seeking approval. More importantly, the picking out of a handful of words here and there obscures the fact that statements function differently within different songs, that sometimes they act as a counterpoint to an entirely different sentiment, often within the space of a few lines. The raw accusation of fantastic promiscuity in ‘Narrow Way’, for example, takes us to an odd refrain: ‘If I can’t work up to you, / You’ll surely have to work down to me someday.’ The cheap insult has come from a man who thinks better of her than he thinks of himself. Another couplet manages the same effect. It is vicious by any measure – ‘Your father left you, your mother too / Even death has washed its hands of you’ – but it reaches that same refrain. Similarly, the poor ‘flat-chested junkie whore’ of ‘Scarlet Town’ is followed directly by that marvellous song’s marvellous conclusion:
I’m staying up late, I’m making amends
While we smile, all heaven descends
If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime
All things are beautiful in their time
The yellow and the brown
It’s all right there in front of you
In Scarlet Town
Here and there in the songs you can hear Dylan, or the speaker, trying to come to terms with his perceptions of women and womanhood. He responds to what he takes to be different aspects of femininity, for good or ill. So much is recognised in a verse in ‘Soon After Midnight’ that manages to toy with the whore/Madonna cliché and introduce a mythical note with a nod to Elizabethan poetry and Edmund Spenser:
Charlotte’s a harlot
Dresses in scarlet
Mary dresses in green
It’s soon after midnight
And I’ve got a date with the Fairy Queen
Perhaps only this artist could meanwhile combine lechery and sanctity in the same verse. Once again, the song is ‘Narrow Way’:
I’ve got a heavy stacked woman
With a smile on her face
And she has crowned
My soul with grace
The lines from ‘Pay in Blood’ and ‘Early Roman Kings’, in brutal contrast, are hurled at enemies, at parasites and the makers of slaves, no matter the gender. In neither song does the singer intend to mind his language in the presence of ‘foes’. Dylan is at war. He has a lot of enemies. He treats them all badly. Again, however, they are not the same enemies in every context. In one song the singer is ‘armed to the hilt’, in another he threatens to drag a man’s corpse ‘through the mud’. But there is a difference between vengeance, rebellion and honour.
Night after night, day after day
They strip your useless hopes away
The more I take the more I give
The more I die the more I live
I got something in my pocket make your eyeballs swim
I got dogs could tear you limb from limb
I’m circlin’ around the southern zone
I pay in blood, but not my own
‘Pay in Blood’
In Scarlet Town, you fight your father’s foes
Up on the hill, a chilly wind blows
You fight ’em on high and you fight ’em down in
You fight ’em with whiskey, morphine and gin
‘Scarlet Town’
‘Early Roman Kings’ is a prime example of Dylan’s ability almost to hear history as a series of echoes. Interviewed by Rolling Stone, he was clear about how his understanding had affected the writing of Tempest, far less forthcoming, as ever, about any specific conclusions he was prepared to identify or share with a journalist:
The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries.23
‘Early Roman Kings’ therefore treats its imperial figures as mere gangsters in ‘Their sharkskin suits / Bow ties and buttons / High top boots’. Historically, it makes for a neat connection: ancient Rome’s rulers, with their clans and casual murders, were like nothing so much as the Mafia. But Dylan’s ‘kings’ are also America’s nineteenth-century robber barons ‘Blazin’ the rails / Nailed in their coffins / In top hats and tails’. They are, too, the slouching figures of organised crime, heading for ‘a Sicilian court’. They are the bankers, the lawyers, the politicians, the corrupt ruling elite of modern life. If Dylan calls them the kings of old Rome he is saying that, when power and money are at stake, nothing important ever changes.
They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’re lecherous and treacherous
Hell-bent for leather
Each of ’em bigger
Than all them put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearing fancy gold rings
All the women goin’ crazy
For the early Roman kings
Dylan’s hyper-awareness of history as an active presence has been one of the distinguishing features of his ‘late period’. It explains many, if not all, of his acts of alleged plagiarism. But as interesting as the awareness of the past is the use to which he has put his understanding. Rarely does he content himself with just the facts. For him, everything has a mythical dimension. The past is a dream state, sometimes the nightmare, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, ‘from which I am trying to awake’. ‘Narrow Way’, far from the best song on the album, has yet another extraordinary verse.
Ever since the British burned the White House down
There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town
I saw you drinking from an empty cup
I saw you buried and I saw you dug up
The album’s most obvious point of contact with history is in its title song, ‘the Titanic song’. Yet again, the sheer length of a work would guarantee the attention of reviewers ever quick to assume that if Dylan was taking 45 verses to say something it must, almost by definition, be something important. ‘Tempest’ in fact competes for the title as the least of the album’s songs, ‘epic’ or not, and length has nothing much to do with its flaws. Too many of the verses are redundant, several are clumsily written and the song does not count, for this listener at least, as a musical treat. ‘Tempest’ is too self-conscious, even obvious, as an excursion into folk tradition. Talking to Rolling Stone, Dylan was entirely aware, as always, of his musical antecedents.
If you’re a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the Titanic, because that’s the bar you have to pass.24
In part, Dylan was explaining the fact that his work begins with an almost straight lift from ‘The Titanic’, a Carter Family song from the early 1950s. Before that there had been Lead Belly’s song of the same name, one that Huddie had chosen to call his own. Before that there had been Titanic songs by the dozen, some reputedly composed within days or weeks of the great ship’s sinking in 1912. What interested musicologists for long enough was that many of the early performers were black, despite the fact that the only non-white passenger allowed on the vessel had been a French Haitian with a white wife. African American singers, Lead Belly not least, took a certain grim satisfaction in the disaster as retribution for racism. Some chose to detect a divine judgement. In his The American Songbag (1927), in a note to a version he called ‘De Titanic’, Carl Sandburg asserted that ‘Negro troops sang the song crossing the submarine zone and in the trenches overseas’.25 In other words, there was a sardonic black song in circulation within five or six years of the tragedy. Equally, it has been claimed that the Titanic song group drew on African American folk tradition and a ballad describing the sinking of a long-forgotten Mississippi river-steamer.26 Dylan knew a lot about these things, but neither his borrowings from the Carter Family, nor his several shameless references to James Cameron’s risible 1997 Titanic movie, greatly aided an interminable song. To these ears ‘Tempest’ comes perilously close in places to sounding like something poor William McGonagall might have cherished.
It is a ship-of-fools song, an allegory. While the watchman sleeps and catastrophe approaches, humanity goes about its petty business. When disaster strikes, people show themselves for what they are, good or bad. Dylan’s point, the repeated theological note struck throughout the album, is that none of it sways an indifferent God whose purposes are not to be judged by His creation. One oddity is that an iceberg is never mentioned, perhaps because the writer thought there was no need to state the obvious. On the other hand, Dylan calls his song ‘Tempest’ while history relates that RMS Titanic met her fate on a clear, calm night. The artist gets to the burden of his tale, in any case, in three verses rather than forty-five. Yet again, Dylan’s favourite scriptural thriller justifies all.
In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best
They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
Of the judgement of God’s hand
The phrase ‘dark illumination’ probably does not count as Dylan’s finest moment, just as ‘Roll On, John’ is a long way short of his finest song. Would so many reviewers have found it quite so affecting if its subject had not been quite so famous and so beloved? Dylan quotes Lennon songs – no problems over ‘attribution’, then – and throws in some of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Because Lennon was fond of Blake? Because there was both primal ferocity and gentle beauty contained within the former Beatle? Because it’s a jungle out there? But then, long delayed mourning aside, the song’s motives are not clear. You are given the uneasy sense, in fact, that this is a communion between superstars, those burdened souls. A long album would still have run for over an hour if Dylan had decided against this song. As it is, what with the near-fourteen minutes of the title piece and this seven-and-a-half-minute eulogy, Tempest’s concluding passages feel like a long haul.
Miraculously, the album is not greatly diminished on that account. ‘Pay in Blood’, ‘Scarlet Town’, ‘Long and Wasted Years’, ‘Early Roman Kings’ and ‘Soon After Midnight’ more than prove that ‘late Dylan’ lacks nothing whatever in fire, power and poetry. The touring band, once again the studio band, are exemplary. Dylan’s eroded rock formation of a voice sounds wonderful, which is to say right, and once again the producer, this cool Jack Frost, has done a better job in producing a Bob Dylan album than most others have managed. If the artist had chosen to drown his books and break the spell with Tempest, disavowing Shakespeare all the while, it would have been a fitting ending. But there was no sign of any such intention.
*
He was on the road again in April and the first half of June. Touring took up most of July, all of August and the first half of September. In October, Mark Knopfler joined him on the trail for the first of 33 North American concerts. Read cold, the reviews seemed to depend on who was doing the writing. The critics who had observed Dylan for years allowed a benefit to every doubt. The New York Times sent the vastly experienced Jon Pareles to the reopening of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, at the beginning of September. ‘A current Dylan concert is always a matter of shifting expectations,’ he wrote.
At first his voice sounds impossibly ramshackle, just a fogbound rasp. But soon, at least on a good night, his wilful phrasing and conversational nuances come through. While he has – for decades – rearranged many of his songs so that only the words are immediately recognizable, his musical choices aren’t exactly arbitrary. They lead listeners, and Mr Dylan as well, to grapple with the songs anew.
The Times man conceded, nevertheless, that the artist was not ‘courting new fans with anything that’s easily appealing. Nowadays Mr Dylan is singing, and cackling, to loyalists.’ In Vancouver in October the Sun reported that two types of fan had been in evidence, one ‘completely enchanted’, the other ‘fairly disappointed’ by the performer’s ‘mumble-jumble rambling style’. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called one concert in the city an ‘unimpeachable’ 15-song display of the artist’s work. But the critic added: ‘Way up in the Hollywood Bowl’s cheap seats on Friday, it was hard to tell whether the guy with the gutter-nasal voice was actually Dylan or a monster with indigestion.’ The Chicago Tribune’s veteran Greg Kot stuck, meanwhile, with the fable of reinvention that had seemed to explain everything once upon a time. ‘He treats his songs as portable, mutable works in progress – forever subject to change,’ wrote Kot. It was therefore impossible to write the artist off or ‘embalm’ him in his own history.27
Perhaps so. Perhaps, in a weird way, it no longer really mattered. If he still wanted to play and if people still wanted to pay, that was a matter for the artist and his audience. All the possible explanations for touring became irrelevant, in any case, as the 25th continuous year of concerts began. On 1 May 2013, according to bjorner.com (also unstoppable), Charlotte, North Carolina, saw show number 2,500 on the unending pilgrimage. As this is being written, the annual European tour is being announced. So here he goes again: Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, France, Luxembourg. Then three nights in Glasgow in November? You never know. You can tell for certain, though, which city will draw most attention. His sense of history – or is it humour? – is intact. In 2013, Dylan means to finish up with three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. That’s almost where we came in.
*
In his interview with Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone in September 2012, Dylan said one of the strangest things he has ever said. It could all be explained – survival, belief, the ability that ‘allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it’ – by transfiguration. Or as the artist said to the writer, ‘I’m not like you, am I?’
Since Dylan had been expounding on his perfectly truthful Chronicles tale about a character named Bobby Zimmerman, the Hell’s Angel dead thanks to his own stupidity at the start of the ’60s, Gilmore wanted to know if they were talking not about transfiguration but about the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis. (You suspect the journalist also wanted desperately to ask if Dylan was kidding.) The artist denied it, though he seemed a little unsure, suspiciously so, about his terms, far less his theology. He certainly affected not to realise that by claiming transfiguration he was placing himself among the Old Testament prophets – finally – and the mother of God, and the Christ Himself. In the usual version, we humans get our transfiguration, if we’re lucky, only in the life eternal. The artist’s real point seemed to be that Gilmore was asking his questions of a person who ‘doesn’t exist’. Dylan went on: ‘But people make that mistake about me all the time.’
He doesn’t exist; the truth sets him apart. In some strange, beguiling sense, there is no Bob Dylan. After all those lives, all those incarnations, all the years under so much scrutiny, you can just about see why it might make sense to him. Perhaps it also imparts a truth about poor human existence to the rest of us.
Transfiguration does not explain art. An artist’s gift might amount, though, to a kind of transfiguration. If there is truth in art, each and every Bob Dylan might count as a product of the imagination, with Robert Allen Zimmerman its first page and its first canvas, not invented but made real, time and again, time out of mind, like a folk tale told and retold. The tale is American, of course, and probably the oldest story of them all.
Chants of the prairies;
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea;
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota;
Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless to vivify all.28