IN 1975, FOR ALL THAT THE WORLD KNEW, THE SUCCESS OF Blood on the Tracks had replenished Dylan’s self-confidence. Certain of the reviewers had hedged their bets, or grumbled vacuously over ‘production’, but half a million copies of the album had been sold within three weeks of its release. Critics changed their tunes soon enough. By the summer of the year it appeared that Dylan’s old, weird amnesia had been banished for good. Not only had he created a record to surpass Planet Waves easily, he had done something inimitably new, once again, with the songwriter’s art.
The cascading popularity of FM radio in the mid-1970s, with its so-called ‘integrity programming’ and its allegiance to ‘album-oriented rock’, was perfectly timed for the newly ‘mature’ artist. The length of a track was no impediment to the free-format AOR stations and the hippy DJs who refused to treat music as the next best thing to ambient noise. Ambitious recordings were no longer being chopped in half routinely, as had been the fate of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, for the sake of airplay. Songs from Blood on the Tracks that would never have been granted a hearing as singles by traditional stations – even ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ only made it, just, to 31 in America – were given reverent attention. Each play demonstrated that Dylan was as powerful a writer as he had ever been. Surely he no longer had reason to fear the permanent loss of his creative faculties? He would choose a strange way to prove it.
While the likes of Patti Smith and Bette Midler congregated (and squabbled) at The Other End, while Bobby Neuwirth resumed his duties as courtier and master of ceremonies, Dylan began to wonder what might be made of all the talent that was gathering around him each night. The bass player Rob Stoner came to his attention, as did a teenaged multi-instrumentalist named David Mansfield. Mick Ronson, formerly the guitarist with David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, came to call. Neuwirth was by now using his own club performances as de facto auditions for Dylan. The guitar player Steven Soles was invited along; the Texan who called himself T-Bone Burnett, another guitar player, arrived in town at Neuwirth’s behest for ‘more fun than the law allows’.1
Watching Ramblin’ Jack Elliott perform on the first Thursday night in July would even prompt Dylan to give the dutifully awestruck club crowd a fine performance of an entirely new song called ‘Abandoned Love’. Known for long enough as ‘St John the Evangelist’ thanks to a verse that the writer, typically, would later discard, the remarkable piece – in this performance, at any rate – would do Ramblin’ Jack’s own set no favours. As ever, that amiable man would raise no objections. Soon enough, under the guise of guest appearances during performances by Neuwirth, the artist was performing regularly.
Patti Smith, with whom he developed an affinity and a friendship in this period, had only just begun to complete the long transition from fringe performance poet to bandleader. She had yet to release an album when Dylan saw her perform her own ‘Redondo Beach’, a soon to be famous version of Them’s ‘Gloria’, and the old Stones hit ‘Time Is On My Side’ at the end of June. He was taken with Smith in large part because of her honesty, her humour and her utter fearlessness as a performer. Though she would decline an invitation to sign up as cabin boy on Dylan’s next voyage, she was given a better insight into his thinking than most of his old New York friends and colleagues. A 1975 feature in the short-lived New Times captured a moment: ‘She and Bob Dylan sit at the top of tile stairs at a hush-hush Greenwich Village party, trading whispers like two schoolboys.’ Smith would recall the conversation. Dylan ‘had been in hiding for so long’, she would tell Barry Miles in 1977.
And he was working out this Rolling Thunder thing – he was thinking about improvisation, about extending himself language-wise. In the talks that we had there was something that he admired about me that was difficult to comprehend then, but that’s what we were talking about. That’s what we were talking about on the stairway . . .2
‘This Rolling Thunder thing’, when it came to fruition at the end of October, would involve transporting the human contents of an idealized Greenwich Village club around the small towns, colleges, theatres and arenas of the Eastern Seaboard. It would attempt to rekindle the bohemian fantasy that had been the young Dylan’s first inspiration. Rolling Thunder would assert an idea of what music and performance were for in a straightforward rejection of everything the imperial progress of Tour 74 had come to represent. It would be, in one sense, a last attempt to expose the figure of ‘Bob Dylan’ to scrutiny by the man who bore the name.
The 31 shows in Rolling Thunder’s first incarnation would amount to a kind of erratic developing essay on identity, on disguises, on human contact. The concerts would also be, by turns, pretentious, acute, self-indulgent and enthralling. Rolling Thunder would become a piece of theatre, a radical artistic gesture, a travelling circus, a movable movie set, a gypsy caravan and the realisation, intermittently, of a superstar’s old dream of creative emancipation. That was the general idea, at any rate.
Perhaps Dylan could just hit the road with a bunch of friends and allies, roll from town to town, play wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and be free at last of the entertainment industry’s assumptions and diktats. There was only one way to find out. Strangely enough, the artist who had scorned the counter-culture and all its otiose free-form rhetoric was about to launch an enterprise that seemed, at least in its first phase, to be the culmination of every misty-eyed ’60s hope. Romantic chatter, from participants and the media, would hang over the tour like a cloud of peculiarly fragrant smoke.
As Joan Baez later informed Rolling Stone’s dogged reporting team, the Rolling Thunder thing would be an ‘offbeat, underground, weird medicine show’. Roger McGuinn, formerly of the Byrds and also along for the ride, would contribute the inspired opinion that ‘this tour is like better than tripping out’. The poet and Dylan votary Allen Ginsberg, never knowingly undersold as a snake-oil salesman for blind optimism, would proclaim on behalf of the 100-strong expeditionary force that ‘We have, once again, embarked on a voyage to reclaim America’.3 First, in a gesture that counts as typically perverse, the artist found himself a writing partner.
Dylan had never before felt the need for a collaborator. He had worked with the prowling ghosts of the long-dead often enough in adapting or appropriating old songs. Richard Manuel of The Band had provided the melody for ‘Tears of Rage’ during the recording of the basement tapes, just as the group’s Rick Danko had contributed to ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’. Refusing credit for his contribution, Dylan had helped McGuinn out on ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ – with an opening couplet and a half scribbled on a napkin – for the soundtrack to the 1969 film. He had also part-written the banal ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ with George Harrison at Woodstock late in 1968. Before the release of The Basement Tapes, however, none of these works had been allowed anywhere near a Bob Dylan album. Amid the composition of hundreds of songs, he had never sought a full-time writing partner. Dylan flew solo: the persona was well established and intrinsic, or so it seemed, to his art. How could there be equal billing when he had no equals?
Jacques Levy, six years Dylan’s senior, was nothing if not a resourceful character. A trained clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst – useful skills, perhaps, in the entertainment business – he had already acquired a certain reputation as the director chosen by critic-impresario Kenneth Tynan to launch the witless ‘erotic revue’ Oh! Calcutta! on Broadway in 1969. With a musical based on Peer Gynt in mind, Levy had then done some writing with McGuinn, the best-known example being ‘Chestnut Mare’, an enduring piece whose precise relationship with Ibsen’s poem-play remains to be explained. Later in life, the dramaturge would become a professor of English and drama at a college in upper New York State. On his death in 2004 an obituary notice in the New York Times would describe him as a ‘lovable, brilliant, irascible, inspiring, principled rebel hipster, charismatic sweetheart of a man’. When he bumped into a famous acquaintance one summer day in lower Manhattan in 1975, Levy was presented with a proposition: would he care to help Bob Dylan out with some songs?
In another version of the story, the two met at The Other End, having been introduced previously by McGuinn. During their conversation, so it seems, Dylan suggested a collaboration. At Levy’s loft apartment, just around the corner on LaGuardia Place, they then set to work on a half-finished song named ‘Isis’. Who then wrote what as the pair worked through the night is very far from clear.
Dylan’s motives are equally obscure. Interviewed by Bill Flanagan early in 1985 for the book Written in My Soul (1986), the artist was asked why he had not persisted instead with ‘what you’d tapped into with Blood on the Tracks’. The answer:
I guess I never intended to keep that going. It was an experiment that came off. I had a few weeks in the summer when I wrote the songs. I wrote all the songs for Blood on the Tracks in about a month and then I recorded them and stepped back out of that place where I was when I wrote them and went back to whatever I was doing before. Sometimes you’ll get what you can out of these things, but you can’t stay there. Co-writer. That was probably an album where I didn’t have anything and I wasn’t even thinking about making a record. I think I ran into Jacques downtown and we went off and just wrote some songs.
‘I didn’t have anything’: was that truly the case? He had written ‘Abandoned Love’, after all, such as it then was, and composed a better song during his trip to the south of France in late spring. In each version of the tale of his first efforts with Levy, ‘Isis’ was already begun. Equally, Dylan’s typically casual assertion that ‘we went off and just wrote some songs’ did not quite match Levy’s memory. He would tell the writer and editor John Bauldie that the pressure on the pair during the writing process was ‘tremendous’.4 Dylan was not just messing around.
Nevertheless, the fact that in this of all years he felt the need for a co-writer is hardly insignificant. It is as though the masterpiece that was Blood on the Tracks had drained him in some peculiar way, or that the effort had been so singular it was impossible to repeat. Dylan, having ‘stepped back out of that place’, might have felt no desire, if that’s the word, to accept the further emotional consequences of the Raeben method. Blood, his artistic life’s blood, had been the only word for the experience. In any case, and contrary to public appearances, he was not quite as certain of his restored gifts as he might have seemed.
Consider the claims Dylan would make about the insights gleaned from his art teacher in 1974. In April of 1978, the journal Rock Express would learn that he had understood how to explore ‘all the different selves that were in there’. In November of the same year, Rolling Stone would be told of an artist who had managed at last ‘to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously’. By helping Dylan to put mind, hand and eye together, Raeben, it was asserted, had given him conscious control of unconscious impulses. What had become of all that when the new songwriting partners were trading lines for unreliable topical songs, or sketching out their corny verse fictions? Collaboration involves an inevitable, if partial, surrender of artistic identity. The Dylan of Blood on the Tracks had disappeared, or had been suppressed. Perhaps he was too much to bear.
In the second half of July 1975 Dylan would fill an album of songs with Levy’s help. Certain of the recordings would become, as they remain, much admired. For all that, it is open to question whether Dylan’s songwriting was enhanced by the partnership. A better question might involve asking why this singular intelligence felt in any need of support, and why a supposedly reborn writer would seek out a passing supplier of words. The artist who embarks upon such an arrangement has either made a calculation involving the sum and its parts, or he is none too sure of himself.
Each of the songs created by Dylan and Levy, first in New York and then at the artist’s house on Lily Pond Lane in the village of East Hampton, out on the Long Island shore, are treated still as works by the former. A couple of the pieces are held by some fans to be among the most significant of all ‘Bob Dylan’ songs. No one, it seems, thinks twice about it, as though Dylan’s imprimatur is as close to authorship as makes no difference. Nevertheless, in another interview with Flanagan, this time a 2009 promotional effort arranged and published by his own bobdylan.com, the artist would state flatly that Levy ‘wrote the words’ for at least one song. ‘I just sing it,’ Dylan would maintain of the piece entitled ‘Joey’. It was his way of abdicating responsibility for an item of verse reportage that succeeded artistically but came up short – and not for the first time in Dylan’s career – journalistically.
When the album Desire emerged in January of 1976, only two of its nine songs would be wholly in the artist’s name. Ginsberg, contributing stray thoughts in fervid sleeve-note jottings, would not linger long over the question of authorship, or whether such a thing mattered. In the poet’s ecstatic prose, these were ‘Dylan’s Redemption Songs! If he can do it we can do it. America can do it.’ Levy had a 35 per cent copyright share, by contract, in those seven featured works, but the appraiser from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics found only ‘the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ‘50s & early ’60s . . . poet alone at microphone reciting-singing surreal-history love text ending in giant “YEAH!” when minstrel gives his heart away & says he wants to stay. Dylan will stay here with us!’
And so, relentlessly, on. Ginsberg knew all about Levy. Neither the poet of Kaddish nor anyone else could calculate the division of labour in the writing of the lyrics for Desire, but the assumption of sole authorship by a lone genius persisted. Precisely because Ginsberg knew all about Levy, however, he was obliged at length to concede that a ‘Half-month was spent solitary on Long Island with theatrist Jacques Levy working on song facts phrases & rhymes, sharing information seriousness’. The seer, jotting down notes, did not explain how Dylan could have spent his time both ‘solitary’ and in intense collaboration.
So who wrote the songs? Or rather, who contributed which idea, and wrote which part, if the artist with his name on the album could later all but disown ‘Joey’, or if the ‘theatrical’ opening to ‘Hurricane’ was not, in fact, wholly his doing? Ginsberg would describe another track, accurately enough, as ‘a short novel in verse, old-fashioned Dylan surrealist mind-jump inventions line by line, except D. says he’s reading Joseph Conrad storyteller’. So where was Levy in the making of ‘Black Diamond Bay’, the best of all the jointly written songs to emerge from Desire?
Submitting amiably to questions from fans on a ‘social news and entertainment’ website late in 2012, Levy’s son Julien, still to be born at the time of the collaboration, gave a partial account of his father’s side of the story.5 It did not entirely clarify matters.
The writing process I think worked in some version of Dylan spitting out things he’d been working on on guitar or piano, and my dad would spit out whatever struck him as a response to the music. Or maybe they had a plan, and my father would jot down lyrics and they’d refine it with music, bit by bit, adding here, subtracting there – chiselling away at it until it was a fully-realised song.
Julien Levy then suggested that even the song ‘Isis’, a set of verses that has received scrutiny inordinate by most standards, far less by the standards of those who pan for their gold in Dylan’s streams of consciousness, was strictly a co-production, right down to its venerated first line. Levy also maintained that, in his father’s view, there was rather less to the piece, vaunted symbolism and all, than met the ear.
Dylan invited my dad over to work on some songs, my dad showed up, they got to work. Dylan said he had a little piano thing he had been working on and he started banging out those first piano chords to ‘Isis’. My dad just spat out, ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May . . .’ and Dylan loved it, so they just kept going with it like that, creating this story until it reached a conclusion. By the time it was done, Dylan loved it, and was so excited that he ran downstairs to the local bar and read the lyrics out to whoever was just sitting there. It was on the strength of that that they decided to keep writing together.
My dad always talked about how there was no special symbolic meaning behind any of the images in ‘Isis’, that it was just a fun, adventurous kind of cowboy story.
The ‘local bar’ was undoubtedly The Other End. That apart, Julien Levy’s account of his father’s recollections casts a cool light – amid much affection for Dylan – over the figure of the artist in this moment. Here’s our excited poet, rushing off to regale the drinking classes with his latest molten verses. Here’s the overlooked collaborator, who has been the catalyst for the process from its first line, maintaining after the fact that nothing more than a fun cowboy story had been achieved. Jacques Levy also told the journalist Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman that the ‘Isis’ melody was at first ‘almost a dirge’.6 It would not be much improved when the artist decided to enter the recording studio.
In his account of the Rolling Thunder tour from its gestation to the end of its first phase, Sloman quoted Levy to the effect that writing with Dylan was ‘a totally co-operative venture’ and that it was ‘impossible to remember’ who had contributed which line to a song. Nevertheless, it is a notable fact that after the end of 1978 the co-written works would disappear entirely from Dylan’s concert repertoire for the best part of a decade. Talking to Paul Zollo from the magazine SongTalk in the spring of 1991 – though the interview would not be published until the winter issue – the artist failed to shed much light on the matter.
We both were pretty much lyricists. Yeah, very panoramic songs because, you know, after one of my lines, one of his lines would come out. Writing with Jacques wasn’t difficult. It was trying just to get it down. It just didn’t stop. Lyrically.
Between fits of knowing laughter, Dylan would further observe that ‘Isis’ was ‘a story that meant something’ to Levy. ‘Yeah. It just seemed to take on a life of its own, as another view of history.’ In this interview Dylan made it clear that the song so often treated as a personal statement, the song he would sometimes announce from the stage as being ‘about marriage’, was nothing of the kind. His memory of the writing instead turned on the need to prevent a piece that could have gone ‘just about any way it wanted to go’ from getting ‘too close’. He was asked the obvious question: too close to whom? Answer: ‘Too close to me or him.’7 The lingering implication was that such a risk had been averted, both for the artist and for the writing partner to whom a cowboy story had ‘meant something’.
Desire remains a perplexing thing because it has no settled style, because a distinctive authorial voice is hard to spot, and because Dylan claims or refuses credit for authorship as and when it suits him. In pop music, generally speaking, the last detail is of no importance: songs are written to order, to suit the artist or the occasion. In terms of art, in terms of poetry, in terms of certain songs to which several varieties of symbolic and personal importance have been ascribed, it amounts to a puzzle. At moments throughout the Rolling Thunder adventure Dylan would present himself in terms of a theatrical conceit that would one day become familiar. Here he was, ‘live and in person’, yet also, physically, masked and anonymous, that hideously famous ‘Bob Dylan’ face shielded sometimes by strange plastic armour, or painted ghostly white. So was he making the words of Jacques Levy merely seem to be his own? If so, a lot of fan-babble since has been ill-advised.
One warm afternoon in late June or early July, meanwhile, a 25-year-old violinist with extravagantly long hair and a feigned gypsy look who went by the name Scarlet Rivera was stepping out of her Lower East Side apartment, instrument case in hand. She was planning to visit a friend before commencing rehearsals with what People magazine would later understand to be ‘an obscure 10-piece Latin band that paid her $100 a week’.
‘Then this car comes up and cuts me off,’ Rivera (born Donna Shea in the Romani heartlands of Chicago) would tell the magazine early in the following year. ‘Some ugly green car. The guy driving asked me if I really knew how to play the violin.’ The violinist couldn’t make out the face, but recognised a famous profile. ‘Actually he had this woman next to him ask me. He asked her to ask me for my ‘phone number, but I told her to tell him that I didn’t give out my number to somebody stopping me on the street.’
‘Come downtown and rehearse with me,’ Dylan then reportedly said. ‘I’m heading uptown,’ Rivera replied before roguishly demanding a ride to her destination. Once she was inside the car, Dylan turned downtown. Nevertheless, the two got on well, it seems, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at his rented rehearsal studio, playing songs of his that she had never before heard.
One was entitled Isis’, another was called ‘One More Cup of Coffee’, a third ‘Mozambique’. Dylan was no longer likely to say that he ‘didn’t have anything’ in the way of songs. ‘One More Cup’ was, in fact, all his own work, written in May of 1975 as he reached his 34th birthday during that desolate and debauched stay with David Oppenheim in the south of France. Dylan would tell Paul Zollo in the spring of 1991 that he had been inspired by a visit to a ‘gypsy’ festival, but that ‘the verses came from someplace else’. It was a place, no doubt, where marriages end. ‘No gratitude or love,’ said the parable’s first verse. ‘Your loyalty is not to me / But to the stars above.’
Dylan’s tale involves a few arresting coincidences. One is that the festival – in reality a religious pilgrimage – takes place in the small tourist town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, amid the marshes and lagoons of the Camargue, each 24 May. That date, it will be recalled, is Dylan’s birthday. The object of veneration among the thousands of Romani people who gather, moreover, is the statue of their adopted saint. They know her as Sainte Sara, Sara e Kali, ‘Sara the Black’. The name alone would have possessed a special resonance for Dylan. Each May, the saint’s effigy is carried from its shrine to the Mediterranean shore in a re-enactment of what one legend says was her arrival in Gaul, perhaps as a black Egyptian maidservant to one of the Three Marys – Magdalene, Salome, Jacobe – who had sailed from Alexandria after the crucifixion of Jesus with their uncle, Joseph of Arimathea.
All of this must have worked on Dylan’s imagination as he stood where Hemingway and Picasso had stood before him, contemplating another birthday and his estrangement from his own Sara. Her name, it seemed, had mystical associations that he would soon enough enlarge and explore. Sara e Kali, a saint not recognised by the Church of Rome, would meanwhile find herself in the service of the gods mumbo and jumbo thanks to the blasphemous ‘theory’ that she served not only Mary Magdalene but the offspring of Christ supposedly born in Gaul.8 A more interesting fact is that the Manouches, as the French know the Romani, had their origins in the Indian subcontinent, that the rituals for Sara e Kali relate to the worship of the Hindu goddess Kali, and that they have a common linguistic root in the name: Kali, from kāla, meaning blackness, time, death and change. Thus: ‘One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go / To the valley below.’ Whether Dylan knew all this ethnographic detail or not – his songs concerning his wife suggest he had more than an inkling – he had been deserted, as he believed, by a woman associated with a goddess.
The glimpse of Rivera’s affected ‘gypsy’ style as she walked a New York street was serendipitous, then, but almost guaranteed to engage Dylan’s attention. The musical flavouring that her fiddle would give to Desire was, equally, more than just an experiment or an artist’s whim. The journalists who would style the Rolling Thunder Revue a ‘gypsy caravan’ got closer to the contents of Dylan’s imagination than they realised. He had met the Romani ‘king’ in the Camargue. The aged personage had never heard of the singer, but the possessor of, allegedly, 12 wives and 100 children had been another unwitting contributor to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. After they had rehearsed, Rivera, for one, understood that Dylan was ready to record, and perhaps to perform. Whatever the collaboration with Levy involved, however it bridged the gulf between partners, intentions and abilities, the process was beginning to bear fruit. The crop would vary in quality somewhat.
If a larger plan was emerging, meanwhile, it amounted to this: yet again Dylan would trust to instinct and to luck. Auditioning musicians found on the street was hardly standard practice. Picking co-writers on the basis of chance meetings on corners or in Greenwich Village bars was not risk-free. Recruiting a band and a supporting cast from club-dwellers and drinking pals was surely tempting fate. To do all this with no apparent thought for the roles to be filled, the cost involved, the structure of the performances to be given, the personnel to be managed, the music to be made or the compatibility of those being hired was nuts. It was exactly what Dylan did, nevertheless, in the summer and autumn of 1975, with only charisma, ample funds and a couple of ideas to sustain him. His break for artistic freedom would become a gargantuan and costly undertaking. Then again, making money from the Rolling Thunder notion was his second thought, not his first.
He might well have felt the need for help with his writing in such a circumstance. Levy meanwhile seems to have had no qualms about his fitness for the work, or over his right to be treated as a partner, with that 35 per cent share – since he wrote none of the music – in the songs produced.9 Nevertheless, if Dylan had misplaced some of his self-assurance at the end of the ’60s and the start of the 70s, he had not lost his habit of assuming that anything he cared to attempt would come good in the end, somehow or other. Not for the first time or the last, he was ready to take a risk.
Whether Dylan’s troupe of friends, acquaintances, hired hands and hangers-on understood his logic is less certain. Suddenly the ascetic self-discipline that had characterised the making of Blood on the Tracks was gone. It was as though he needed the change for the sake of his rest. Equally, you could find prior evidence for a recurring pattern in Dylan’s behaviour to explain his improvisations in mid-1975. He had been this way before, veering from the hard, painstaking graft of The Times They Are a-Changin’ in the second half of 1963 to the drunken, album-in-a-night exercise that was Another Side of Bob Dylan on 9 June 1964. Later he had switched, suddenly and without warning, from the bacchanalian improvisations with The Band in the spring and drowsy summer of 1967 to the austere, sculpted delicacy of John Wesley Harding towards the end of that year. It amounted almost to a personality trait: tension and release, tension and release. Besides, who could have borne a career forever on the raw edge of existence, devoted only to the universe of Blood on the Tracks?
In the summer of 1975, Dylan’s planning might as well have been based, as perhaps it was, on the opaque Chinese wisdom of the I Ching and its cosmic bar codes. One discarded version of the song ‘Idiot Wind’ certainly made explicit reference to the oldest of self-help manuals. By the summer, Dylan was improvising, trusting to luck and fate, whatever they represented. It caused him no intellectual problems; quite the reverse. Even before God made His appearance at stage right, the artist was as susceptible on occasion to esoteric waffle as the next counter-culture survivor, despite his advertised aversion to all things hippy. Within a couple of years he would be explaining to a reporter from Rolling Stone, for one example, that Jesus had taken on ‘the bad karma of all the people he healed’.10 His own sleeve note for the Desire album – written as though to prove that the world can never have too many Allen Ginsberg impersonators – would announce that Dylan had ‘A WHOLE LOT OF KARMA TO BURN’. This time, Indian religions would take the fall for his understanding, if any, of causality and eternity. In practice, he was rolling the dice.
As Rolling Thunder coalesced around him, mere ancient wisecracks seemed to have become his creative strategy. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine,’ he had said back in 1965, dictating still another entry in pop culture’s dictionary of quotations. ‘It’s like I accept him; does he accept me?’ Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, his interlocutors from the New York Post, had been further informed that ‘Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.’ In 1975, Dylan’s album and his tour would test this seductive, risky theory to its limits.
General confusion became a characteristic of this phase in his career, and of the Rolling Thunder carnival. The roadshow was intended as some sort of statement, but what was said meant different things to different participants. Dylan would take inspiration, some of the time, from a pair of French movies. One was Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), the other François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), otherwise known as Shoot the Piano Player. The young playwright Sam Shepard, a former lover of Patti Smith hired by Dylan to ‘work on a proposed film with the Rolling Thunder Revue’ by ‘providing dialogue on the spot’ – though that idea ‘very quickly dissolved into the background’ – would be questioned specifically about his knowledge of the works when he arrived amid tour rehearsals in October.11
Both pictures are, to summarise grotesquely, studies in performance, revolving around ideas of acting, disguise and identity. Carné’s piece of romantic ‘poetic realism’, written by the poet Jacques Prévert – of whom Dylan was well aware – involved the tale of four men in pursuit of the same beautiful woman. One man was an actor, one a mime artist, one a master criminal, and the fourth, it is generally supposed, the allegorical representation of Nazi occupation in the person of a villainous aristocrat. You could equally describe the four as aspects of human desire. Only the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, was entirely pure in heart, his whitened face an unblemished canvas. Whatever else he took from Carne’s romance – interconnected relationships, unattainable love – Dylan would seize on that idea.
In fact, he took a great deal more. In this instance, the artist would not be shy about his influences. Carné, still a very-much-alive 69-year-old when Dylan’s troupe began to shoot over 100 hours of film for what became Renaldo and Clara, would be reminded, if he cared, that there is no copyright in ideas. Whiteface? Check. ‘Woman in White’, a flower motif, certain resonant passages of dialogue, the old contrast between performance and backstage reality, the actual and the imagined? Dylan overlooked very little. On the other hand, he would not attempt to conceal the fact. The only small details he would miss, according to most critics of Renaldo and Clara, were Carne’s cinematic daring, his lyricism, his staging, his ability to inspire magical performances and his self-knowledge.
Shoot the Piano Player is a crime story, in the main, but it too turns on the erasure of identity. As depicted by Charles Aznavour, the piano player is another figure attempting to escape from his past. Who is he exactly? ‘Bob Dylan’ liked that kind of question. Beneath the gangster movie plot, the picture veers abruptly between tragedy and farce, at one minute sedate, the next furiously paced. There is an improvisational quality, too, in Piano Player that must have appealed to Dylan, not least given Patti Smith’s comments on the origins of Rolling Thunder and her claim that he was ‘thinking about improvisation’. Though Shepard’s job would amount to nothing important, he was not misinformed. Not content with preparing for an album and plotting a tour, Dylan had a movie in mind. Obviously, Bob Dylan would be its star, but someone else would pretend to play ‘Bob Dylan’.
*
Saigon had fallen – or been liberated – in the last days of April amid humiliating scenes of panic. The overloaded choppers had staggered from the compound of the Defense Attaché Office and the roof of the US embassy while the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front closed in. Military radio had played Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, oblivious to any and all symbolism, as a signal to Americans that the evacuations had begun and that it was time finally to leave.
Before the end, President Gerald Ford, broom to Nixon’s dust, had ordered the evacuation of 2,000 orphans, a mere handful of the tens of thousands of children set adrift from their homes and parents, Caucasian, black or Asian, during the upheavals of America’s longest war. Over 100,000 Vietnamese adults – civilian employees, common-law wives, dependants, the rich and formerly powerful – had also managed to escape, but many more desperate people had been abandoned as the US withdrew its last representatives. Reprisals and massacres had been feared before the helicopters had scurried away. There had been a concern, too, that the people of the city would turn against their former protectors once it became clear that the Americans were deserting the country. The last US Marines had left the embassy just before 8 a.m. on 30 April.
What had it all been worth? Even the question soon began to sound banal. Vietnam had dominated the lives of Dylan’s generation. It had defined and divided them, for or against, for better than a decade, with eight miserable years of fighting at its heart. Combat deaths, at a minimum 47,000, had almost matched the number of American dead on the battlefields of the First World War and easily exceeded the total of those killed in action in Korea. In one manner or another, 58,000 young Americans had died in South East Asia and over 300,000 had been wounded. It would take years for America to come to terms with Vietnam, far less to honour the fallen. Returning veterans felt they were spurned, at best ignored. In 1975, many of them believed that their country didn’t want to know about them, what they had done, or why – willing or not – they had done it. Suddenly the country seemed to be repressing every memory.
Three million had served; a million and a half had seen combat. For all that, the entire military might of the US had failed against a small and often primitive nationalist movement, a ‘fourth-rate power’ in the hubristic words of Henry Kissinger. Too often, the psychological effects on those young Americans who otherwise survived were profound, indelible. It took a distinct collective effort to set their experiences and their memories aside. That, nevertheless, became the burden of the veterans’ complaints while the politicians pretended to draw their strategic lessons.
The larger effect, the abiding effect, was a wholesale loss of faith in government. Until they began to hear and believe that amends could somehow be made for Vietnam through still more military power and preparedness, Americans doubted their leaders. If you got your news from rock and roll, as so many young men in combat had got their news, Dylan’s doubting songs and his spurning of politics could seem like good, simple common sense.
By 1975, in any case, the erstwhile New Left was old news. In January, an attempt by the remnants of the Weather Underground to bomb the Department of State building had been a last gesture by one fragment of a fractured movement. Perversely, radicalism had seemed to draw its only strength from Vietnam. With the war’s end, people drifted away from left politics, new or old. Feminism seemed more relevant and more valuable to many women. Environmentalism struck others as a more important cause than any. The escapism implicit in ‘alternative lifestyles’ seemed more attractive to a lot of people than street protests. Radicalism survived, of course, but it became diffuse. By 1975, the self-contradictory appeal of single-issue politics was everywhere. This was the audience for whom the 34-year-old Dylan was making a record and preparing a tour.
*
The first recording session for Desire was held on 14 July, just before Dylan and Levy retreated to quaint but filthy-rich East Hampton on Long Island’s South Shore to resume their songwriting workshop. The session at Columbia’s New York studios was a fruitless affair, at best a testing of the waters. Nothing would be kept for the album. Instead, a trivial and slightly unpleasant Dylan-Levy joke at the expense of the lesbian radical-feminist novelist Rita Mae Brown – ‘How’d you ever get that way?’ – took up a large part of a long night. For reasons best known to himself, the artist would persist with the ‘comic’ song ‘Rita May’ [sic], but a reported seven attempts to achieve a usable recording on the 14th pointed to a problem. A later version of the track would wind up as the ignored B-side to a flop single at the end of 1976, but the song’s sole claim to anyone’s attention was in demonstrating that the writing partnership was successful only fitfully. More than once during the collaboration, whether at Levy’s urging or because he had nothing better to offer, the artist would lower his standards. Some of the results would end up on Desire.12
Dylan’s explanation for the absolute failure of a night’s work had less to do with the songs than with the music. Rivera, the borrowed band of the Traffic founder Dave Mason, sundry backing singers and some fine session players had been unable to give him the sound he wanted. Disappointment and frustration, it is sometimes asserted, then caused Dylan to think seriously about assembling his own ensemble. Given that Rolling Thunder was already sounding in his head, however, it was all but inevitable that he would have to get around to picking a few musicians. And why stop at a few?
Several unsuccessful attempts were also made on that first night to capture the song that would become known as ‘Joey’. Dylan might later seek to distance himself from the work, but here was another problematic aspect to the writing partnership. Levy, naturally enough, had his own interests and enthusiasms. One of those arose from an indulgent view of the blood-spattered wiseguys and cynical goodfellas of organised crime in New York City. In the figure of the gangster Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo, Levy detected – presumably by ignoring every readily available documented fact – a kind of folk hero. Dylan, always a sucker for a righteous outlaw, went along with it; most New Yorkers who knew anything about the Mob would be less forgiving. As romantic fiction, the song would have required no justification. As a presentation of historical truth, involving a recently dead hoodlum with whom Levy had been acquainted, it was less dubious than laughable. This would be pointed out forcefully.
Dylan should in any case have known better. He understood the multiple complications of topical song. They had caused him to quit the public-comment game, after all, with an undisguised relief. Back in 1963–4, his ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ had achieved emotional truth at the expense of several facts. With ‘Joey’ he and Levy would sentimentalise reality, as pop music does, and make a cartoon cliché of Italian American life. Was that worth a memorable chorus? The finished version of ‘Joey’ remains one of the better musical things on Desire, but its tangential relationship with truth, its fake mythology and synthetic emotions, were echoed in some fairly dismal writing, certainly on Levy’s part. As one couplet has it, ‘Sister Jacqueline and Carmela and mother Mary all did weep / I heard his best friend Frankie say, “He ain’t dead, he’s just asleep.”’ Any self-respecting director of a real gangster movie would have dumped that last piece of dialogue. Creative-writing tutors would have winced in honest collective pain, meanwhile, at the B-minus fake-archaic ‘all did weep’.
The fact that Dylan-Levy, joined at the tediously hip, were also turning out material as risible as ‘Rita May’ should have alerted the artist to the risks he was running. No one else was likely to care. For fans and acolytes, a Bob Dylan song was a Bob Dylan song, a nonpareil beyond all categories. Only the artist could take responsibility. Instead, he and Levy would in one instance produce what they regarded as a piece worth keeping after playing an aimless word game. It seems the contest was to see who could find the most rhymes for Mozambique. Magnifique – as an example of professional writing technique – the song was not. Undaunted, Dylan took the resultant effort into the recording studio.
A fundamental question would thereafter be set aside by most fans when Desire topped the American charts and lingered there for fully five weeks. Were the results of these cooperative songwriting ventures actually much good? Levy’s vaunted theatrical instincts and Dylan’s taste for the ‘cinematic’ would be – and still are – much discussed. A hit is a hit, meanwhile, but the texture of the verses themselves, the lines, couplets, images and rhymes, would too often slip through the critical net. Even in its best moments, the writing on the album is rarely startling and never audacious in the quicksilver manner Dylan had once made his own. Sometimes the lyrics read and sound like sentiment-by-committee, imagery-by-numbers.
Dylan, so often the victim of the authorial fallacy, invited a difficulty never predicted by practitioners of literature’s numbing less-than New Criticism. The personal pronouns in his songs were no guarantee, he said to us, that the writing was ever an exercise in autobiography. What happened, then, when ‘Bob Dylan’ took the stage to sing ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May’ if the line, pronoun and all, had been cooked up by someone else entirely? What happened to the strange, free-standing consciousness that had been Dylan’s conspicuous gift to popular music? His songs – another pronoun – didn’t come from a Tin Pan Alley production line: such had been the pledge from the start of his first assault on an industry. Now here he was in 1975, knocking out tunes with an off-Broadway talent-for-hire, yet performing as though each couplet, good or bad, was his. All of the acknowledged Dylan-Levy compositions appear in the former’s Lyrics: 1962 – 2001 (2004). They are each registered for copyright purposes by one of Dylan’s publishing companies. The big book, well worth study for all its flaws, is a testament to the long, enduring career of an unexampled talent. The song index alone runs to a dozen pages and would be longer by far if the book was brought up to date. But the writing of Desire complicates arguments over art and the artist.
If Dylan had needed no help to compose the great songs of the 1960s, or of Blood on the Tracks, where stood the co-authored mock-ups, the hollow exercises in rhetoric and role-playing, for which Jacques Levy claimed co-paternity? Had the songs been better, no one would bother to ask. Despite the multitude of fans who will hear not a word against it, Desire is what is sometimes called a patchy affair.
A fortnight after his first attempt to secure useful recordings, Dylan was back in the studio, supposedly in search of a ‘bigger sound’. He organised this quest, if organised is the word, as though throwing an after-hours party, seeming to gather up everyone and anyone who came to mind or happened to be around. The predictable result was a shambles as twenty-one musicians, six guitar players among them (not including the artist), tried to sort themselves out. Production, in the traditional manner, even in the casual manner favoured by Dylan’s old mentor John Hammond, was absent. A luckless Columbia staff man by the name of Don DeVito was granted a producer’s responsibilities but precious little executive power in Studio E. No one, least of all Dylan, was in control. Eric Clapton, always a staunch admirer of the artist and no stranger to the foibles of superstars – he had patented a few notable idiosyncrasies of his own – was among the baffled guests who could not believe what was going on, or what was supposed to be going on.
Dylan’s old, deep-rooted refusal to pay heed to the realities and demands of the recording process all but destroyed the sessions of 28 and 29 July as ingenious engineers struggled to find space on their 16-track machines for the competing demands of so many instruments and vocalists. The feat could have been accomplished – the Beatles had mastered bigger problems with far less sophisticated equipment – but that would have required more effort than Dylan, addicted to spontaneity, convinced that the best music somehow just happened, was prepared to expend. This heroic delusion would hamper his efforts to record his songs for many years to come.
The artist could claim, rightly enough, that some of his best music had been produced during lightning raids on the studios. Bringing It All Back Home had required only three days of his time in 1965; John Wesley Harding had needed just as little effort in 1967. Blood on the Tracks might have cost Dylan the equivalent of a full week in 1974, but that was due only to the second thoughts that had caused him to remake the record. He didn’t like to hang around. He did not believe, in any case, that recording captured the reality of music – an unhelpful prejudice if you made your living by selling records – but previous triumphs thanks to ‘spontaneity’ would blind him to his self-created problems. The first serious sessions for Desire were prime examples.
As predicted, times were changing. Pink Floyd had been lavishing six months of work in 1975 (for whatever reason) on the album Wish You Were Here. Queen’s preposterous ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had required three weeks of labour and, notoriously, 180 overdubs on a single brief passage of music before taking its place on that year’s A Night at the Opera, an album thereafter touted, as though the fact was a badge of honour, as the most expensive collection of tunes anyone had then assembled. Dylan’s dissent from this obnoxious orthodoxy was well known and honourable but not necessarily useful. In London that summer a scruffy sort with I Hate’ scribbled on his ragged Pink Floyd T-shirt was about to join a motley crew called the Sex Pistols. John Lydon and his comrades would mock the decadence of the music industry and its 180 overdubs something rotten. But that little incident wouldn’t help Dylan to get a record made. Of the forty-five takes captured on 28 and 29 July, only one song attempted, entitled ‘Romance in Durango’, would make it to the album.13
As ever, he got there in the end. Having wasted his own and everyone else’s time, Dylan listened to reason – articulated, it seems, by the bass player Rob Stoner – and stood down most of his army of helpers. After the chaos, the album the artist would release was finished soon enough, but he persisted to the end with minor songs. One was a Dylan-Levy piece entitled ‘Catfish’, dedicated to a star baseball player who bore the nickname, a track that seemed to have been destined from the start for the netherworld of strictly limited interest. Another song, written by Dylan alone, was called ‘Golden Loom’. With a better melody it might have repaid attention, but the writer appears to have lost interest soon enough. Both tracks would turn up on 1991’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1 – 3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961 – 1991 as mere curiosities. Nine songs, fifty-six minutes of recorded music, remained from the sessions to become Desire. It was, for the first time in a long time, a near self-explanatory title.
*
From its first assertive notes to its conclusion eight minutes and thirty-two seconds later, ‘Hurricane’ is a thrilling thing. If facts are of no interest, the song fulfils every dream of justice and vindication ever nurtured because of Bob Dylan. Scarlet Rivera’s violin soars like an exultation for the downtrodden; the drums hammer like a mob at the door; the artist sings as though now, finally, he is interested neither in irony nor in the concealment to be had from ambiguity. He wants to tell you a story, a true story.
The fiddle is ‘slightly off-key’, of course, say people who don’t often listen to fiddles, or attempt to imagine what might be involved in accompanying Bob Dylan. Life’s fact-checkers, meanwhile, cannot vouch for the narrative’s every last word, to say the very least. Some claims made on behalf of a boxer imprisoned for almost two decades for his part in a triple murder are simply wrong. Certain omissions by Dylan-Levy from ‘the story of the Hurricane’, Rubin Carter, amount to shoddy journalism. But these objections are born of hindsight and also omit certain truths. At first hearing, Desire’s long opening track was astonishing, a triumph of compressed narrative, of vernacular writing, of sheer polemical intensity. Despite every off-handed rebuttal, every denial of interest for long years on end, here was Dylan back with a protest song, with an inescapably political song.
You could bear in mind, of course, that he had never ceased to be a political being. The refusal of a spokesman’s role, the rejection of ideological conscription by ’60s types who wanted only slogans and anthems, was not the same as refusing to think politically. As a performer who owed everything to black music, and as a human being, Dylan had never ceased to despise racism. Nor had he ever lost his non-theoretical aversion to injustice generally. Like Woody Guthrie, his first and last hero, Dylan’s instinct was always to back the individual against anyone’s version of the system. Numerous songs written after he ‘quit politics’ – from ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ to ‘I Shall Be Released’ to ‘Idiot Wind’, to name only three – could be set on repeat play to prove it.
‘Hurricane’ was explicit, however. The song was rooted in reality and in recent history. Its only precedent in Dylan’s post-’60s career was ‘George Jackson’, and ‘Hurricane’ was better, melodically if not lyrically, than the 1971 song. Until certain doubts began to creep in, ‘the story of the Hurricane’ sounded like a flawless, righteous indictment of racist policing and a corrupt legal system. The important fact, the fact that unites the songs written for Jackson and Carter, was that racial bigotry had not evaporated from American life with the civil-rights movement. By the mid-1970s, too many had chosen to overlook this truth. The artist and his co-writer had not.
Dylan and Levy had both taken an interest in Rubin Carter and his campaign against conviction. Dylan, like a number of people in the public eye, had been sent a copy of the boxer’s book The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472 (1973). The very subtitle would be disputed by those who pointed out that when Carter was arrested he was in no sense first in contention for ‘the middleweight crown’. Where a bloody triple homicide was concerned, the detail was trivial. In the ‘acknowledgements’ to his book, the fighter had written from the notorious Rahway State Prison in east New Jersey of ‘the corrupt and vindictive officials who played their roles to a T in this tightly woven drama to bury me alive’. He had Dylan’s attention, you must suspect, from page one.
The story goes like this. In the early hours of 17 June 1966 two armed men entered the nondescript Lafayette Bar and Grill on East 18th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, Rubin Carter’s home town. Without ceremony, the pair opened fire. A bartender and a 60-year-old male customer died instantly; a female customer would die of an embolism four weeks later thanks to multiple wounds. A second male customer, Willie Marins, 42, survived the attack, despite being shot in the head while standing by the pool table. He and the 51-year-old female witness Hazel Tanis would tell the police that the gunmen were black. Neither witness would identify Rubin Carter or his co-accused, John Artis.
On the night of the killings, the intimidating, shaven-headed boxer, nicknamed ‘Hurricane’ thanks to his ferocious fighting style, was 29 years old. His once-promising career, encompassing 27 wins in 40 fights, 19 by knockout, was fading. He had gained his shot at that middleweight crown at the end of 1964 and had lost in Philadelphia on a unanimous decision. In May of 1965, he had endured the hiding of his life at the hands of the Nigerian Dick Tiger, as Carter himself confessed, in the smoky haze of New York’s Madison Square Garden. In five fights before the shootings in 1966, the Hurricane had lost twice, won twice (against lowly opponents), and registered a draw. When the murders happened, his title hopes were gone.
It is also fair to say that Rubin Carter had not been a model citizen. Dylan-Levy would overlook the fact in their song, just as Dylan had failed to mention the six hostages who died during George Jackson’s attempt to escape from San Quentin Prison in California in 1971. As with the dead radical, however, it was always possible to argue that Rubin Carter had been the victim of hellish circumstances, and that every circumstance had been a consequence likely to befall any black man in a white world. Such was the consistent view of the author of The Sixteenth Round. ‘In Paterson,’ as Dylan would sing, ‘that’s just the way things go.’
In his later career, Carter would emerge as an eloquent campaigner for penal reform and human rights. In Canada, for a dozen years after 1993, he was executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, given credit for addressing several miscarriages of justice. On the occasion of his second autobiography, Nelson Mandela would contribute a foreword testifying that the former boxer’s ‘rich heart is now alive in love, compassion and understanding’.14 So who could truly say which was the real Hurricane, or decide which parts of the biographical record were relevant to the paramount claim that he was ‘falsely tried’ and wrongly convicted in a ‘pig-circus’?
Still, facts are facts. Carter was in a reformatory for assault and robbery by the time he was 14. He was kicked out of the army in 1956, marked down as ‘undesirable’ after four court-martial proceedings. He was afterwards a mugger capable of serious black-on-black violence and the owner, it is alleged, of a fearsome temper. Before the Lafayette killings, he had spent 11 of his 29 years in confinement. The suggestion that before the slaughter he was militant for civil rights, ‘a revolutionary bum’ in the words of the song, is also disputed. There is nothing in Carter’s books, nor in the annals of civil rights, to support the claim that in 1966 he had a functioning political bone in his body. Nevertheless, interviewed by Penthouse magazine for the edition of September 1975, the Hurricane would assert:
I’m not in jail for committing murder. I’m in jail partly because I’m a black man in America, where the powers that be will only allow a black man to be an entertainer or a criminal. While I was free on the streets – with whatever limited freedom I had on the streets – as a prizefighter, I was characterised as an entertainer. As long as I stayed within that role, within that prizefighting ring, as long as that was my Mecca and I didn’t step out into the civic affairs of this country, I was acceptable. But when I didn’t want to see people brutalized any longer – and when I’d speak out against that brutality, no matter who committed the brutality, black people or white people – I was harassed for my beliefs. I committed no crime; actually the crime was committed against me.
In The Sixteenth Round, Carter would admit, perhaps boast, that in childhood he had taken to fighting ‘like a duck takes to water’.15 He would also confess to having knifed a man repeatedly – in self-defence against a predatory paedophile, he said – and to having been classified as a juvenile delinquent. Nevertheless, there was room enough in his text for accusations against cops and judges for fomenting ‘prefabricated lies to tear me down’. In Carter’s account of his early years, he had adhered only ‘to the first law of nature – self-preservation’.16
It was a description of an unjust world that might have been made to appeal to Dylan’s quixotic faith in nature’s outlaws, those individuals forced to defend themselves against the real criminals, the ones who never get caught and never go to jail. A superstar’s reflexive romantic bias didn’t mean the boxer was guilty of a multiple killing staged – or so the cops quickly persuaded themselves – in instant revenge for the murder of a black bartender in a place called the Waltz Inn. It didn’t make Rubin Carter innocent, either.
A minor criminal called Alfred ‘Al’ Bello had been a couple of blocks away from the Lafayette Bar ‘prowlin’ around’ with burglary on his mind on the night of the shootings. Bello would later testify that as he drew near to the dive – supposedly in search of a pack of cigarettes – he almost ran into a pair of black males. One was armed with a shotgun, one with a pistol, and both were laughing. Bello said he took to his heels as the men got into a white car.
The petty crook was nevertheless one of the first to reach the murder scene, along with a woman named Patricia Graham (later Patricia ‘Patty’ Valentine) who lived above the bar and grill. She also told the cops she had seen a couple of black men climbing into a white car, a Dodge Polara, before driving north. A second neighbour, Ronald Ruggiero, heard the shots and later said that as he looked from his window he saw Al Bello running westwards on Paterson’s Lafayette Street in the direction of 16th Street. The description of the car given by Bello and Valentine would change at Carter’s second trial.
Nevertheless, Carter’s car was, supposedly, a match for the getaway vehicle. Having been pulled over once that night and allowed to proceed because a third man, John ‘Bucks’ Royster, had been with them, Hurricane and Artis were stopped for a second time and taken to the murder scene. This took place within half an hour of the shootings. No fingerprints were taken; no tests were made for gunshot residue; no one who had witnessed the events surrounding the killings identified the pair. When Rubin Carter was hauled to Paterson’s St Joseph’s hospital, a horribly wounded Willie Marins, blinded in one eye, indicated that the boxer was not one of his assailants. A cop then found a shotgun shell and a .32 calibre round in Carter’s car. Both items were later declared, wrongly, to be compatible with the murder weapons. The officer who made the find waited the best part of a week before turning in his evidence. Artis and Rubin, having passed polygraph tests, had meanwhile been released.
Months later, Bello told the police – and why the delay? – that he had not been alone while sniffing around a sheet-metal works for a burglary opportunity. An individual named Arthur Dexter Bradley had acted as his accomplice. This pair then proceeded to identify Carter as one of the armed men they had seen outside the bar. Bello meanwhile identified 19-year-old Artis. Inevitably, Carter and his companion were arrested and indicted.
In May of 1967, what Dylan-Levy would describe, correctly, as ‘the all-white jury’ found the accused guilty, but declined to recommend the electric chair. In 1974, after Carter had sued his way out of a state psychiatric hospital thanks to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, Bello and Bradley, located by the New York Times, suddenly claimed they had been cajoled and bribed into lying. This time they said they had not seen Carter and Artis near the Lafayette Bar. It was then that the Hurricane sent Dylan a copy of The Sixteenth Round. In May of 1975, the artist paid a visit to the fighter in prison. After taking notes and talking with Carter for hours, Dylan seems to have promised to write a song.
In late October of that year, just before ‘Hurricane’ was released as a single, he told the ever-attentive Rolling Stone of his conviction that Carter’s ‘philosophy’ and his ‘were running on the same road, and you don’t meet too many people like that, that you just kinda know are on the same path as you are, mentally’. The remark would be quoted for years to come in arguments over Dylan’s involvement in the case.17 Of more interest, as a measure of his attitude and belief, were a couple of the things that Dylan said next. He made large claims.
I never doubted him for a moment. He’s just not a killer, not that kind of a man. You’re talking about a different type of person. I mean, he’s not gonna walk into a bar and start shooting. He’s not the guy. I don’t know how anybody in their right mind is gonna think he was guilty of something like that.
Then:
There’s an injustice that’s been done and you know that Rubin’s gonna get out. There’s no doubt about that, but the fact is that it can happen to anybody. We have to be confronted with that; people from the top to the bottom, they should be aware that it can happen to anybody, at any time.
Dylan and Levy were not the only ones to be moved and angered by Carter’s tale. In 1975, the fighters Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, no strangers to racism, would speak out fiercely in the Hurricane’s defence. Ali, in his second spell as heavyweight champion of the world, would dedicate his contest against Ron Lyle in May to the Hurricane. The champion thereafter became co-chairman of the Hurricane Defense Fund, established to aid Carter with his legal costs. In September of 1975, Ali led a march to City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, to publicise Rubin’s cause. Other prominent people – the writer Norman Mailer, the actor Burt Reynolds, the singers Harry Belafonte and Johnny Cash among them – signed up to the national committee of the Hurricane Trust Fund.18 The veteran Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, the author of The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), had meanwhile begun to research the case after being commissioned in 1974 to write a magazine article.
In the summer of 1975, aged 66, failing in his powers but fascinated by the town, Algren would even move to Paterson in an attempt to understand the murders. As the poet and playwright Joe Pintauro would later remember, this ‘dedication to the lost cause of clearing the boxer Hurricane Carter from a murder rap . . . drained Nelson’s energy and emptied his pockets. The Hurricane Carter case turned into a quicksand of unresolvable complexities and Hurricane was never cleared. After years of effort, Algren finally converted his commitment into material for his novel The Devil’s Stocking, but by then he had grown old and tired.’19
The novel was published posthumously in 1983, but Algren’s weariness was understandable. The case was a horrible tangle of claim and counterclaim. Thanks to recantations, undisclosed deals between prosecution and witnesses, and to apparent lying by Bello and Bradley, the new trial that had been denied to Carter in 1974 was granted. In March of 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had withheld the tape of an interview with Bello proving he had been promised leniency for his misdoings in return for testimony. Hurricane and Artis were freed on bail, with most of the bail money posted by Muhammad Ali. The New Jersey prosecutor soon re-indicted the pair.20
In November 1976, after Bello yet again changed his mind and again claimed to have seen Hurricane and Artis near the Lafayette, the boxer was convicted for a second time. The judge had allowed testimony describing angry black people gathering outside the Waltz Inn after the shooting – by a white man – of the black bartender on the evening before the Lafayette murders. The prosecution claim that revenge had been the motive for the killings was therefore deemed to have been supported. Neither Bob Dylan songs nor famous novelists were of any help. Rubin Carter’s conviction was not overturned finally until 1985.
The last decision did not mean, contrary to what Nelson Mandela would choose to believe, that the boxer had spent ‘twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit’. It did not mean, as Dylan would sing, that the Hurricane was an innocent man. Prosecutors could have tried his case for a third time, but declined to make the attempt. The final ruling said only that ‘grave constitutional violations’ of the petitioner’s rights had occurred. Some chose to describe those abuses as ‘technicalities’, but a 1988 attempt by New Jersey’s prosecutors to have the case reviewed was thrown out by the United States Supreme Court. Bello, a confessed alcoholic, was in any case the sole remaining witness who had placed Hurricane and Artis at the murder scene. Whatever the truth, innocence – or guilt – was not established and Carter has made no attempt in the years since his release to obtain redress from the authorities. He has also continued to insist that he played no part in the killings.
Down the years Dylan-Levy have been accused, variously, of naivety, of the worst excesses of radical chic, of promoting a liberal conspiracy theory, and of inspiring a disputable Hollywood film, The Hurricane (1999). The last part is true. On its release, Norman Jewison’s movie was deemed particularly egregious by observers of the fight game for suggesting that Carter had only lost his middleweight title bout against Joey Giardello in 1964 because of racial bias among the judges. Even Rubin didn’t make that claim.
Meanwhile, a piece of dialogue in the song, supposedly an exchange between Bello and Patty Graham/Valentine, was said by the latter never to have happened. The claim that Carter was ‘far away in another part of town’ when the killings took place is disproven by his own alibi, placing him in a bar called the Nite Spot just a few blocks away. The general charge of racism is meanwhile hindered by the fact that the jury in the second trial contained two black members, and by the fact that the case was examined on behalf of the state of New Jersey by a black legislator who found the claim unjustified. Racist language attributed in the song to police officers was never documented.
Equally, the idea that Carter spent his spare time placidly riding horses, as the song describes, ‘where the trout streams flow and the air is nice’ cuts no ice with those who recall a frequenter of the Nite Spot and similar louche joints. Finally, there was a report carried by the UPI press agency on 8 June 1976. It began: ‘A woman [Carolyn Kelley, who had persuaded Ali to take an interest in the case] who was instrumental in the movement to win Rubin “Hurricane” Carter a new trial charged from her hospital bed Monday she was beaten by the former boxer at a Maryland hotel.’ Carter denied the claim and no indictments were issued.
In the Dylan-Levy song, a story is told that leaves no room for ambiguity. Dylan’s music strikes its chorus, time after time, like the sound of cell doors slamming shut. In 1975, the artist was immune to doubt, electing to begin what would be one of his bestselling albums with eight and a half minutes of livid rage and righteous denunciation. Under his direction, the first phase of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour would become, in large part, a campaign to secure Rubin Carter’s release. ‘Hurricane’ would be played at every show along the way. So what if Dylan was utterly wrong?
‘Topical song’ contains this curious dichotomy: it claims the status of historical truth and art simultaneously. Artists who weave poetry from facts have long wrestled with the ensuing paradoxes. Was Macbeth a weak and murderous usurper, or was the real man as pious and peaceable a King of Alba as a ruler could be a thousand years back? Perhaps it doesn’t matter much to an audience struggling with the complexities of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. If, on the other hand, you have co-written a hot-off-the-presses documentary song asserting that a blameless man has fallen victim to a sickness in your society, facts count. They count because you say they count. When racism and heinous murders are at issue, those facts are everything. That is part, an intrinsic part, of your story. But if other facts then say that no final judgement in the case of the Hurricane was ever possible, what remains?
*
Dylan’s instincts should never be underestimated. One fact concerning the song ‘Hurricane’ was not in dispute in 1975. Whatever happened at the Lafayette Bar and Grill, whoever was guilty or innocent, the Dylan-Levy account was only too plausible. That was the essence of the song’s power. In 1966, and for many years afterwards, Paterson was a melting-pot town with more than its share of ethnic tensions.21 The Lafayette was alleged, meanwhile, to have been a home-from-home for white racists. That might have made it a target for a revenge attack at 2.30 a.m. on a June night, but it also helped to explain the world inhabited by black men such as Rubin Carter.
One author of ‘Hurricane’ might say that injustice could ‘happen to anybody’, but it wasn’t quite true. Details within the verses were used at the time, as they are used still on certain websites, to dispute a bigger argument about law, race and power.22 Dylan and Levy took the figure of Carter and used what they knew about the case – and there was more than just ‘poetic licence’ involved – to say something about America. Was the Hurricane an early victim of racial profiling? In his case, the jury (no joke intended) is still out. The song nevertheless posed a question: what kind of country is it that allows ethnic identity to become a standard tool of criminology, of law enforcement, and of penal procedure? One answer: a country that considers itself white. Dylan-Levy’s news was not always welcome news, therefore. That might explain why the flaws and failures of their song were seized upon with such zeal. But facts, as mentioned, are facts.
The General Social Survey (GSS) is a remarkable American project. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has been harvesting flecks of data from every aspect of daily existence to compile this ever-changing portrait of the nation. In 1972–3, when Rubin Carter was deep in the fight to overturn his conviction, the GSS disclosed encouraging news. As it turned out, only 3 per cent of Americans still believed that whites should have ‘first chance’ at a job; only 13 per cent endorsed racially segregated schools.
This was considered progress, but not all of the findings could be viewed in the same rosy light. As the authors of a 2009 paper from the Harvard Kennedy School put it, ‘just 1 in 4 (25 per cent) said that they would not vote for a qualified black presidential candidate nominated by their own party’.23 ‘Just’ might stand, no doubt, as a plausible statistical measure in the social sciences. The paper further recorded that in the early 1970s ‘only a third of Northern whites endorsed the idea that whites have the right to keep blacks out of their neighborhood, compared to 53 per cent of Southern whites’. Clearly, the word ‘only’ must also carry greater weight with sociologists than with some of us.
The Harvard paper continued: ‘Fully 86 per cent of white respondents rejected school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation. Only about a quarter of white respondents thought the government was spending “too much” on assisting blacks, but most felt that such spending was already at the right level. Third, in 1972 74 per cent of whites nationwide agreed that “blacks should not push themselves” where they are not wanted.’
A few statements could be rephrased. You could as well say, for example, that at the beginning of the 1970s one in four Americans – from a survey involving all ethnic groups – thought too much money was being spent for the benefit of the recent descendants of slaves. Three Americans in every four were averse to black self-assertion, or if ‘push themselves’ means anything – to political action by black people. Equally, ‘fewer than 15 per cent of whites nationwide’ – not just in the South, in other words – still hankered after a racist education system. The ‘idea that whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods’ enjoyed the support of 40 per cent of the population in 1972. In 1973, laws to prohibit racial discrimination by people selling their homes were still being opposed by 65 per cent of whites.
The authors of the Harvard paper, alert to the claim that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 had brought America to a ‘post-racial’ moment, also noted that in the year of his first triumph ‘a nontrivial proportion of whites nationwide, 28 per cent, still support an individual homeowner’s right to discriminate on the basis of race when selling a home, and even nearly 1 in 4 highly-educated Northern whites adopt this position’. The manifold assumptions behind the tiny comparative word ‘even’ could justify an entire field for study.
When Rubin Carter was publishing his first book and fighting his courtroom battles, the ‘86 per cent of white respondents’ opposed to the use of school buses in the battle against segregation found their cause célèbre in the city of Boston. Efforts there to enforce the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 by moving children to shared classrooms were met with protests and riots. Thanks to busing, one black lawyer was attacked with the sharp end of a flagstaff bearing the Stars and Stripes; vengeful black teenagers then put a white man into a coma. The General Social Survey had already identified the roots of the argument. Most white people were sufficiently progressive as to abhor outright segregation in schooling. They welcomed black faces among their children. But not too many black faces.
Dylan-Levy had not plucked a glamorous controversy from the air, then, or manufactured a conflict to suit their unexamined Village-liberal attitudes. The so-called ‘incarceration boom’, the disproportionate jailing of young African American men, began in the mid-1970s. The General Social Survey meanwhile did not, and does not, see fit to gather data from anyone detained in a penal institution. So who really knew about the reality?
Even before mandatory sentencing – ‘three strikes and you’re out’ – blacks made up 41 per cent of inmates in state or federal prisons in 1970, at a time when African Americans were 11.1 per cent of the general population.24 The comparable figures as the twenty-first century began would be 72.7 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. In seizing on the case of the Hurricane, Dylan-Levy had seized on a bigger truth. Carter, right or wrong, was emblematic of the fact that, despite all the civil-rights struggles to which Dylan had once given his clamant songs, something foul was going on. In ‘Hurricane’ the familiar prophetic voice told of a society in which, by the century’s end, one in five black men in their 30s who lacked a college education would instead have a prison record.25
Does any of that count as an excuse for error by writers declaiming on issues of truth and justice? Dylan would be forced to re-record his ‘Hurricane’ – the result was a marked improvement – after Columbia’s lawyers fretted that Bello and Bradley might sue over the unsubstantiated claim that they had ‘robbed the bodies’ at the Lafayette. In 1982, Dylan-Levy would also be on the receiving end of a complaint under the heading ‘Patricia Ann Valentine, Plaintiff-Appellant v. CBS Inc. D/B/a Columbia Records, Bob Dylan A/K/a Robert Zimmerman, Jacques Levy and Warner Bros. Publications Inc.’. ‘D/B/a’ stands for ‘doing business as’, but neither at first hearing nor on appeal would the courts do business with Miss Patty Valentine’s claim for redress because, she said, of ‘common law defamation, invasion of privacy, and unauthorized publication of her name in violation of a Florida statute’. She had not been named in the song, as she alleged, as a party to a conspiracy.
Instead, back in reality, ‘all the criminals in their coats and ties / Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise’. Dylan had placed himself back in the arena of political argument, where beliefs too often pass for facts and facts are always open to interpretation. Even critics of ‘Hurricane’ accept that if Dylan-Levy had presented audiences with a piece of pop fiction, something akin to Elvis Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto’ or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, applause would have been universal. The song spoke of truths about America that were hard to dispute.
On its own terms, in contrast, the piece drew its electrifying charge from the fact that it concerned the fate of a real man. There was, in any case, a bigger fact. Whatever the errors committed by Dylan-Levy, the Hurricane was never shown to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The very worst that could be said might be covered, instead, by the old Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’. The legal ‘technicalities’ that saw him freed existed for a reason, as Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey made clear when he set aside the convictions of Carter and Artis in November 1985.26
In his judgment, Sarokin observed that the prosecution had been ‘predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure’. Throwing out the revenge theory, attacking the suppression of evidence, dismissing the reliability of Bello ‘after his unbelievable series of recantations and recantations of his recantations’, the judge said: ‘This court is convinced that a conviction which rests upon racial stereotypes, fears and prejudices violates rights too fundamental to permit deference to stand in the way of the relief sought.’ Sarokin also shredded the state’s claim that the ammunition allegedly discovered in Carter’s vehicle matched the murder weapons. He noted that police had tried and failed to halt an actual white getaway car on the night in question. Freeing Carter, the judge went on to say that ‘to permit a conviction to be urged based upon such factors, or to permit a conviction to stand having utilised such factors, diminishes our fundamental constitutional rights’.
So Dylan-Levy got some facts wrong. They were not quite as unreliable, it transpires, as those paid to administer and enforce the law in New Jersey in the aftermath of the Lafayette killings. The fact that the septuagenarian Rubin Carter is ‘not innocent’ in 2013 is somehow enough, for some amateur criminologists, to convict a man time and again in their virtual courts, and to condemn a song. This might be what Dylan-Levy had in mind when they wrote of being ‘ashamed to live in a land / Where justice is a game’.
In his own book on the Carter case, the late Paul B. Wice, a professor of political science at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, wrote that it ‘shows what can happen when police and prosecutors do not act professionally, critical witnesses lie, and the justice system is unwilling to correct its errors or admit its mistakes’.27 Perhaps it also shows what a songwriter, sometimes, is for. In ‘Hurricane’, the old, mistrusted idea that poetry is truth was illuminated to glorious effect. Rubin Carter was not always the best of black men. That didn’t make him a guilty black man.
*
On the Desire album, ‘Hurricane’ is followed instantly by ‘Isis’. It makes for an uncomfortable contrast. You have to muster a certain tolerance for a labouring melody to indulge the song that supposedly ‘meant something’ (or other) to Jacques Levy. Here’s one occasion when Scarlet Rivera’s plangent fiddle amounts to little more than exotic colouring, a tinting of the dull negative, mere tone. You must then summon patience towards symbolism, if it truly exists, for symbolism’s sake. Then, sometimes, you must remember to ask why you cared about Bob Dylan to begin with. With ‘Isis’, collaboration brought out his worst – which is to say most portentous – side. Compare this piece of mock-epic verse with ‘Shelter from the Storm’ from Blood on the Tracks and you see why two pairs of hands were less capable than one. ‘Isis’ has the feel of something manufactured from New Age bric-a-brac.
The song is peculiarly of its time. In the mid-’70s, notoriously, all manner of hocus-pocus masquerading as esoteric wisdom was being granted shelf space. A blockage in the counter-culture’s intellectual plumbing, long predictable, would cause Dylan-Levy’s fable of tomb raiders, mysterious hidden treasure, a ‘mystical child’ and Mexican-type pyramids – icy ones, too – to be taken very seriously. Stuff was backing up everywhere. Deliver a fun cowboy story that could be taken as the description of a numinous ‘quest’ way out west and the fans of Carlos Castañeda’s visionary hokum would be on you like stoned coyotes.
Whether the Peruvian American’s adventures in shamanism and ready-to-wear enlightenment ever took place is a subject for continuing debate among those who still care. The pertinent fact, according to the always reliable internet, is that his 11 books would sell 28 million copies in 17 languages, and that stacks of those were bought, read and believed in the 1970s. The Castañeda phenomenon, one marker of the intellectual mutations afflicting the remnant counter-culture, was peculiar but far from unusual. While middle America was panicking over fuel shortages amid the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, while rationing was being introduced and gas stations were running dry, those who fancied themselves as seekers after truth were on an intellectual vacation. In the aftermath of the crisis, automobile sales fell in America for the first time in decades. The economy stagnated amid crazy inflation – hitting 12.3 per cent by the end of 1974 – while the aptly named ‘misery index’ (inflation plus unemployment) rose ever upwards. Many people, some of them boasting an education, looked for alternative ways to exist, think and believe. Sometimes it seemed as though any alternative would do.
You could take your pick: religions of every variety, ancient or newly hatched; primal therapy for your childhood trauma; crystals for your delinquent chakras; the I Ching and Tarot cards – Dylan dabbled with both – to plug you into the collective unconscious. You could be healed by colours, or by channelled ‘energy’, or be brought to instant cosmic consciousness by one of the frequent flyers from a passing UFO. The presence of those visitors among us had been demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, by Erich von Däniken in his wildly popular book Chariots of the Gods? (1968). By the middle of the 1970s, the volume was well on its way to selling 63 million copies around the world. In 1977, Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind would make many millions of dollars from the wishful thinking of the selfsame, ready-made audience. Other questing souls were poring over the mistranslated ‘prophecies’ of Nostradamus, or taking up with the Scientologists, or seeking out the signs and wonders promised by the evangelical communes of the burgeoning Jesus movement. The last of these developments, the latest of America’s recurring religious revivals, would acquire a significance for Dylan before long.
In the meantime, he was singing in ‘Isis’ of a treasure-seeker crossing the wastelands to ‘the pyramids all embedded in ice’. Out in communal America, in the ‘intentional communities’ springing up haphazardly in the backwoods and desert regions, a belief in pyramid power –another miracle founded on infallible ‘energy’ – was already well established. ‘Seeking’, just as in the Dylan-Levy tale, was also in vogue. The counter-culture was turning inwards, prodded by a growing band of shrinks, seers, saints and mountebanks. It was all a long way from the civil-rights struggle and political engagement. The spiritual fashions of the 1970s could be taken as evidence of a deep disenchantment: those heading for the communes would not have disagreed. In place of a generation’s refusal to believe in their elders or in governments, there was a willingness to believe just about anything. Whether thanks to Levy’s influence or to Dylan’s own foggy understanding of what was afoot, ‘Isis’ played to a certain crowd.
It was of no moment that plenty of people were trading in this stuff, in music and in print. By 1975, parts of the pop world were being crushed beneath the weight of ‘wisdom’ as the oxymoronic expression ‘New Age thinking’ passed into the language. The depressing thing about ‘Isis’ was and is the fact that Dylan fell for it, or seemed to fall for it. There had been signs before – on John Wesley Harding, on New Morning – but here was his spiritual side exposed for all to see. It counted, fittingly enough, as an omen. With this piece he then persuaded others to take his apparent seriousness seriously. No doubt he half-believed it himself.
None of this should mean that ‘Isis’ is necessarily a bad song, of course. Mysticism and allegory are old news in literature; poetry is not verifiable scientifically. On the album, nevertheless, these mannered verses and this piece of music seem only to stifle the power of ‘Hurricane’. Perhaps it is simply the jolting difference between the secular ballad written for Rubin Carter amid his real plight in a real prison cell and a windy tale set to a mythographic cliché. Perhaps it is just that even now the ‘Isis’ melody seems forced, lacking in conviction, dull.
On the Rolling Thunder tour Dylan was capable of transforming this song ‘about marriage’ in his performances, at least if the Montreal footage from the film Renaldo and Clara is to be trusted.28 Dispensing with his guitar, wielding his harmonica like a personal weapon, speeding the song’s tempo, prowling around the stage and singing as well as he had ever done, Dylan turned the fake-mystical western without much of a tune into something memorable and, by its lights, authentic. For all that, the film of a venomously precise performance in early December serves only to demonstrate the weaknesses of the studio version recorded in New York on 31 July. On stage, Dylan’s sheer driven energy helped to distract attention from what could not be concealed on the album.
So what kind of famous song – more particularly, what kind of Bob Dylan song – is this? Why Isis? Why give the female lead in this little cowboy story the name of an Egyptian deity if, in the Levy version, there was no symbolic intent? Interrogating the theatre director during the Rolling Thunder tour, Larry Sloman would try to call in evidence the sensationally inept Jesus-meets-Isis D.H. Lawrence tale The Man Who Died (1929).29 (Specimen: ‘He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.’ The fantasy ends with the actually immortal observation that ‘Tomorrow is another day’.) Levy would not entertain the suggestion of a relationship. The song, he claimed, had nothing to do with an Egyptian goddess. Those pyramids had been introduced, supposedly, only as a substitute for the Grand Teton mountain range. The locale for ‘Isis’ was therefore ‘the hills somewhere in Wyoming or something’. The story had arisen, said the trained psychotherapist gamely, only because of some sort of unconscious connection. Despite his presumed expertise in such matters, Levy did not speculate on the nature of the connection.
In June of 1985, during a syndicated satellite radio interview, Dylan persisted with the transparent conceit that ‘Isis’ was as much a mystery to him as it was to anyone. A caller was told that he had written the song with another person, that ‘I think half the verses were mine and half the verses were his’. Somehow, ‘it just sort of ended up being what it was. I really don’t know too much in depth what it would mean.’30 If the junior writing partner was misinformed, then, or if he had failed somehow to notice that his co-author might possibly have chosen his strange song title for a reason, where was Dylan heading with this stuff? God-wards, more or less.
In old Egypt, Isis was, as another song might have put it, a friend to the poor. Slaves and sinners enjoyed her patronage. She was the mother goddess, a protector of children and of the dead. Her vast wings afforded shelter and her ‘lap’ was identified with the throne of the kingdom. She taught mortal women how to grind corn and weave; she taught people how to combat illness and how to marry. She was the sister and consort of Osiris, the creator of civilisations, later the ruler of the underworld. Cults of Isis have persisted to the present day, some of them exotic enough to be at home in certain parts of California, but she is not often identified with Sara Dylan.
In his vastly influential The Golden Bough (1890–1915), the Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer writes of Isis-worship developing from the fertility cult of ‘a rustic Corn-Mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains’ to the religion of ‘the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial and mysterious sanctity’.31 Only a short leap was required after Christianity’s appearance, it seems, to transport prospective worshippers from Isis to the matching cult of the Madonna. Dylan would follow.
The American Joseph Campbell, pioneer of comparative mythology and propounder of the belief that myth is central to all human society, drew heavily on Frazer’s work, and from Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, for his claim that storytelling has followed a pattern – ‘the hero’s journey’ – in almost every culture and at almost every point in history. Campbell called it ‘the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story’.32 In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) he traced fully 17 stages in this ‘monomyth’, during which the heroic sort is called to adventure, meets his mentor and experiences an ineffable ‘threshold passage’. So far, so ‘Isis’.
Thereafter, as though trapped in a mythopoetic board game – or, indeed, stuck inside the average Hollywood action movie – the hero has to find his allies and guides, face ordeals, resist temptations, brave enemies, have his dark night of the soul, survive a final, truly big test, and win the boon he was after to begin with. Then he returns, celebrating, resurrected and fit for his place in society. This is, after a fashion, the Dylan-Levy song.
In Primitive Mythology (1959), the first volume in a tetralogy he would entitle The Masks of God, Campbell would observe that Isis and Osiris, siblings and spouses, were born ‘during the sacred interval of those five supplementary days’ that fell between one 360-day Egyptian calendric year and the next. The ‘five intercalated days . . . were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe’.33 So: ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May’? So: ‘things would be different the next time [my italics] we wed’? If that was the idea, Dylan-Levy were adrift with their Egyptology. The five added days in the ancient calendar did not fall anywhere near the month we know as May.
Nevertheless, in Occidental Mythology (1964) Joseph Campbell would identify Isis – along with Venus-Aphrodite, Cybele, Ishtar and others besides – as a version of the pre-Christian ‘Mother of God’.34 As in Primitive Mythology, she was recalled as ‘the natural mother of all things’, ‘adored throughout the world’. This was the ‘Isis of Ten Thousand Names’. Involve her in a song ‘about marriage’, therefore, and you have stepped just a little way beyond the usual romantic clichés.
Campbell’s influence was approaching its height in the 1970s: Primitive Mythology alone went through 11 reprints during the decade. No one had yet paid serious notice to the fact that his ‘hero’s journey’ template appeared to exclude ordinary mortal women almost entirely, or that a host of modern, post-Enlightenment narratives have nothing in common with his supposedly universal pattern. On the opening page of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell had written, near ecstatically, that ‘myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation’. In the 1970s, this sounded like a claim worthy of study to those inclined towards New Age mysteries, not least because Campbell would also argue that almost everything important about the species – religion, philosophy, art, science, dreams, ‘social forms’ both primitive and historic – had come boiling forth from ‘the basic, magic ring of myth’. Only later would critics begin to ask what any of this actually meant, or presumed to describe. A claim so gigantic was impossible to support with evidence. Precisely because the claim was so gigantic, however, it caught on.
The Arthurian tale of the Grail quest fits the Campbell mould, but then so does the movie Star Wars (1977), a picture written by George Lucas – typed, at any rate – under the direct and acknowledged influence of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In fact, any number of numbingly predictable three-act Hollywood hero-vehicles still echo the allegedly primal myth, but only because their writers and directors have taken Campbell’s account of man’s journey for, so to speak, gospel. Dylan-Levy’s little tale might therefore seem to be in a direct line of descent from pop culture’s versions of the mythologist’s theories. But what is interesting about ‘Isis’, once you survive its lacklustre melody, is that the song does no such thing. Dylan, Levy, or both together, subvert the entire idea.
Campbell prescribes a meeting with a goddess – the ‘Queen Goddess of the World’, indeed – and sees nothing amiss with casting Woman as Temptress whose lure has to be ‘surpassed’ by the hero. Dylan-Levy seem to subscribe to this notion – ‘What drives me to you is what drives me insane’ – but their story ends with their hero’s return to his Isis. As for the quest’s reward, the treasure and boon: the tomb in the song is empty. As the artist sang: ‘There was no jewels, no nothin’, I felt I’d been had.’ The Dylan-Levy song is close to a parody, in fact, of Campbell’s theory. Their protagonist’s return, having dumped his dead companion ‘down in the hole’ and having ‘said a quick prayer’, does not fit with the allegedly immemorial narrative. In the slightly amended version given in Lyrics: 1962–2001, the relevant verse, by far the best in the song, runs:
She said, ‘Where ya been?’ I said, ‘No place special’
She said, ‘You look different.’ I said, ‘Well, not quite’
She said, ‘You been gone.’ I said, ‘That’s only natural’
She said, ‘You gonna stay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I jes might’
Successful or not, ‘Isis’ showed Dylan to be dabbling with ideas on the border between poetry and religion. Whether of his own volition – he picked the title, after all – or because Levy had given ‘Isis’ its direction with, allegedly, that first line, Dylan was striking out on a new course. However you read the tale, it treats the union of two people as a metaphysical, even sacred bond. In 1975, this was new for Dylan. It went far beyond the more-or-less conventional pieties of ‘Wedding Song’ on Planet Waves. It also aligned the artist, fast approaching the end of his actual marriage, with the credulous transcendentalist wing of his post-’60s generation. Only one outcome was likely.
In fact, Desire provided evidence that he was a lot closer to encountering his God in 1975 than anyone cared to notice at the time. After the throwaway (if only) ‘Mozambique’, a track that probably justified its existence because it involved the only truly uptempo pop song from which a useful recording had been extracted, came ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. The refrain, ‘One more cup of coffee for the road / One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go / To the valley below’, seemed like an obvious enough comment on death and possible resurrection. The next track all but shouted its meaning, yet few bothered to listen.
‘Oh, Sister’, the album’s fifth song, was instead regarded as an attempt – an obtuse and maladroit attempt – to come to grips with emerging feminism. Such it was, in part. As such, it was a big improvement on the entirely witless ‘Rita May’. But Dylan-Levy did more than attempt to address, in a self-serving kind of way, the Women’s Liberation Movement and second-wave feminism in the United States in the 1970s. The authors had awoken late to that, in any case. By 1975, books such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (both 1970) were long established as bestsellers, the visible and vocal expressions of a global upheaval. Dylan, never previously mistaken for a born feminist, was only crashing the party, clumsily, when he sang, ‘Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you?’
In reality, the Dylan-Levy song, if it counted as any sort of serious response to feminism, embodied an ancient sort of paternalism in the joint authors’ treatment of their ‘sister’. As Michael Gray pointed out in his Song & Dance Man III (2000), and more explicitly in his The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), with this piece ‘Dylan’s religious focus is on its way to the conventionally Christian’.35 You could even argue that Dylan and his focus have arrived intact at that righteous position with ‘Oh, Sister’. Then you would find yourself agreeing with Gray’s rueful observation that ‘it’s hard to understand how we could have ignored [this] at the time’.
No one figured Dylan for a believer in 1975. No one wanted to believe it, despite the words coming out of his mouth. Mystical ‘Isis’ was one thing, a reflection, perhaps, of the decade’s spiritual fads and fancies. Christianity? Here it was, nevertheless. Each of the first three verses of ‘Oh, Sister’ ended, respectively, as follows:
Our Father would not like the way that you act
And you must realise the danger . . .
And is our purpose not the same on this earth
To love and follow His direction? . . .
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved . . .
Whatever the definitions of sisterhood and brotherhood, this was paternalism from the biblical source, with Emmylou Harris providing dutiful backing vocals as Rivera’s violin played second fiddle to the preacher. The ‘theory’ that Dylan was instead engaged in a kind of songwriter’s call-and-response with Joan Baez because of something she might have written seems flimsy. When you begin to talk of being ‘mysteriously saved’ you are not raking over old love affairs. Religious or not, the result was twee.
On the album, in another unsettling contrast, the long ballad called ‘Joey’ followed. If ‘Hurricane’ was held to be controversial because of its disputed relationship with the truth, here was real myth-making, though not in the sense understood by Joseph Campbell. The Joseph in this song, ‘Mad Joey’ Gallo, might have been portrayed as a victim of his society and of his times, just like Rubin Carter. Dylan-Levy, or Levy alone, might have been attempting to depict an individual ‘Always on the outside of whatever side there was’, an honourable man seeking only ‘peace and quiet’, hounded by the police and gunned down while trying ‘to protect his family’. The merest brush with the facts of the career of a lifelong vicious mobster dispelled that nonsense. The facts, in any case, were no secret.
Musically, ‘Joey’ strikes a nicely wistful, elegiac note, even if the ‘Little Italy’ accordion might test the patience of a few Italian Americans. Once again, it is possible to assert that if Dylan-Levy had stuck to outright fiction they would have stayed clear of trouble. This piece of Mafia chic was asking for that trouble. Americans, New Yorkers above all, were hardly ignorant of organised crime by the middle of the 1970s. The testimony of the informer Joseph Valachi during the 1963 McClellan Hearings had exposed the existence of the Mob’s ruling ‘Five Families’. Those hearings had led to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations legislation in 1970. The 1972 House Select Committee on Crime had then investigated the connections between gangsters and horse racing. Thanks to the word of another informer, one Joe ‘The Baron’ Barboza, allegations – vigorously denied – had been made against the original superstar, Francis Albert Sinatra. ‘Joey’ said nothing new about hoodlums. Its treatment of bloody reality was the problem.
The fact that Francis Ford Coppola’s film of The Godfather had appeared in 1972, and had brought forth a masterful sequel in 1974, is clearly relevant. Call it an influence. The first film of the eventual trilogy was based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel. That had taken its title, in turn, from an expression first heard publicly during Valachi’s 1963 testimony. There was something to be said, thought author and filmmaker, about honour beyond the law, about bonds of loyalty transcending society’s demands, about working to survive and surviving to work. Dylan-Levy followed along behind. As the latter would tell Larry Sloman, one of the ‘wonderful’ things about the co-written songs of Desire was that they gave Dylan ‘a chance to do some acting’.36
On one reading, Coppola created an allegory of American capitalism. According to several other readings, he romanticised, even glorified, men of unspeakable violence who corrupted everything they touched. A fair verdict might be that the director managed both feats. Where’s the contradiction, after all? The movies are explicit in portraying the corruption and the destruction, physical and moral, to which inevitably corrupted ‘honour’ must lead. Equally, the pictures are fiction: parallels might be drawn and interpretations made, but Coppola and Puzo were free to reject them. Nevertheless, when you cast Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as your stars, Hollywood’s dazzling lustre overwhelms most of the distinctions between light and shade, squalid and heroic.
When you name your song for a real person and employ documented incidents from his career, a burden of proof descends. If you have made your reputation as a truth-teller, meanwhile, responsibilities are unavoidable. Dylan-Levy did not linger much over moral gradations. They made an outlaw hero not from a Billy the Kid, a figure mired in legend, but from an individual who had been shot to pieces – back, elbow, backside – in that clam house on New York’s Mulberry Street in 1972. They (or Levy) even introduced an improbable godfather of their own at Gallo’s grave, come ‘to say one last goodbye to the son that he could not save’.
The real Joey had launched a Mob war and died as a result. Whatever his literary pursuits in prison, whatever his friendships with incarcerated black men (who ‘seemed to understand / What it’s like to be in society with a shackle on your hand’), he was a hit man, an enforcer, a racketeer preying on the weak, and an individual party to certain scenes of mayhem that might well have inspired passages in The Godfather. Gallo read Tolstoy; it didn’t make him a hero.
As though to demonstrate how deluded celebrity folk can be, ‘Joey’ appeared while America was enduring a justified panic over rising crime rates. In 1960, 288,460 crimes of violence had been recorded, 9,110 of them murders. By 1970, the equivalent figures were 738,820 and 16,000; by 1975, still climbing, the numbers said 1,039,710 and 20,510.37 The romanticising of Gallo in such a circumstance was crass. To call ‘Joey’ ‘just a song’, to argue that all artists blur the difference between truth and fiction, to say that art has its prerogatives, does not answer the case for a singer with Dylan’s pedigree, even if he did not contribute a line to the finished piece. The argument would ring hollow, in any case, when in ‘Hurricane’ he was hammering away at the need for unpolluted truth and demanding an end to lies.
In his Village Voice comment on Desire, early in March 1976, Lester Bangs would peel ‘Joey’ apart.38 Otherwise forgiving of outrageous outlaw behaviour (much of it his own), Bangs made the obvious point that certain New York gangsters had been given sufficient cause to ‘blow away’ Joe Gallo. The crook had been the opposite of an innocent man swept along by events. Crazy Lester didn’t care for the song at any price – ‘ponderous, sloppy, numbingly boring’ – or for Dylan, most of the time. Among other things, a writer long disenchanted with his former hero had decreed Blood on the Tracks to be an instrument, variety unspecified, of self-abuse. The artist scrambled most of the big Bangs theories about ‘rock’ and its ineffable potency.
In the Voice, the journalist nevertheless asserted that Gallo had been a wife-beating thug who was fed the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine routinely, by the same suffering wife, after his release from prison. Bangs also managed to speak to Jacques Levy, who appears not to have mentioned that Dylan might have contributed little, if anything, to the lyrics of ‘Joey’. Instead, the co-writer asserted, as if it was news, that, ‘You know, Bob has always had a thing about outlaws.’ Levy then asked if anyone would call John Wesley Harding ‘a small-time hoodlum’ (in point of fact, the real Wes Hardin was a murderous medium-scale hoodlum). Dylan’s collaborator further defended Gallo as no psychopath and, indeed, right on cue, as ‘a victim of society’.
Bangs, for his part, offered the view that Dylan was simply lazy, that Desire was ‘an exploitation record’. In answer to the wholly rhetorical question, ‘What is Dylan thinking?’ relentless Lester got the jump on his own last coma – 30 April 1982, wrong drugs in the wrong order at the wrong Manhattan time in an apartment above a Chinese restaurant – by asserting of the artist that ‘he is not thinking at all’. In the case of ‘Joey’, there was some truth in the statement. The only journalistic trick missed by Bangs involved another simple question. When even the murdering subliterates of the Mafia knew an individual by playful nicknames involving ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’, what hope was there for the usual, folk-type liberal Greenwich Village defence of a poor boy forced to live outside the law?
In Rolling Stone’s review of the album, also in March, Dave Marsh would demonstrate that the once-deferential magazine was no longer awestruck on demand. Reviewers, some of them, were losing patience with Dylan’s presumed right to please himself. Desire had become an odd and confused piece of work. Of ‘Joey’ and the artist, Marsh – who otherwise praised the album highly – wrote that the track was ‘musically seductive’, but argued that
his neatest ellipsis is to avoid all mention of the public execution of Joseph Colombo [the crime family boss survived the execution attempt], which the evidence suggests the Gallo mob ordered. In which case it is hardly relevant that Joey Gallo did not carry a personal weapon [reports of his killing state that he drew a handgun when the attack began] and much more understandable that he himself was gunned down in front of his family. Gallo was an outlaw, in fact, only in the sense that he refused to live by the rules of the Mob . . . Is an intellectual Mafioso really that much more heroic than an unlettered hood? This is elitist sophistry of the worst sort, contemptible even when it comes from an outlaw radlib like Bob Dylan.
Sheer fiction saved the record. Clinton Heylin describes ‘Black Diamond Bay’ as ‘something of a lost gem’, apparently because Dylan has never played the song in concert.39 If the artist pays no attention, why should we? A degree of neglect for the piece might also have arisen from first impressions – everyone’s first impressions – of the Desire album, when any long ballad was liable to wind up becalmed in the wake of ‘Hurricane’. ‘Black Diamond Bay’ was nevertheless a striking piece of art and craft to begin with. It grows in stature with the years.
The song is beset with literary associations, chiefly involving Joseph Conrad, and is weighed down by its apparent debts. Dylan-Levy didn’t just set a few bits of a novel to a tune, but the temptation to justify the artist in terms of literature has often beguiled the citationists who treat all references as cultural price stickers, marks of artistic worth and quality. If Dylan shows that, for a wonder, he has read a serious work or two, he becomes a serious proposition. On the other hand, the parallels between ‘Black Diamond Bay’ and at least one of Conrad’s later books are hard to ignore.
Allen Ginsberg would make the first move in the allusion-hunting game with his Desire sleeve note – presumably based on a conversation with Dylan – exulting in those ‘surrealist mind-jump inventions line by line, except D. says he’s reading Joseph Conrad storyteller’. For whatever reason, some who paid attention to the song then made an erroneous connection with Heart of Darkness (1899). The idea would have been intriguing, save for the fact that the connection doesn’t exist; there is no match. The clear family relationship, in structure, bits of plot and lots of set dressing, is with 1915’s Victory, the finest of Conrad’s pre-modern melodramas. In the book, as in the song, structure is paramount.
You can well believe that the song sprang, in some form, from Dylan’s reading. Its other, better reason to exist was as a continuation of his investigation into the possibilities of metaphysical ballads that began with ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ on Blood on the Tracks. The two songs have a lot in common but several important differences. At eighty-four lines, seven and a half minutes and seven expertly constructed verses long, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ might meanwhile count as another good example of Dylan’s ‘cinematic’ writing, or what Michael Gray has called, accurately enough, his ‘movie-spinning’.40 The description, a self-confessed species of faint praise, overlooks what might be involved in creating a drama that lasts only 450 seconds, with a startling, audacious inversion of perspective at its end. Dylan-Levy got that from Joe Conrad, but its use in the song is a feat of technical daring.
Mercifully, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ owes nothing whatever to anything Joseph Campbell had to say about primal narrative, mythic or otherwise. There is no hero, certainly no epic journey, least of all a spiritual rebirth. Instead, the song owes everything to Conrad’s use in Victory of doubled perspectives, physical and moral, and to the idea of fate, blind and mute, that permeates Blood on the Tracks. In ‘Black Diamond Bay’, good and evil contend; people scurry around on their plots, affairs and petty human errands; the volcano explodes regardless. The End.
Back home, at the song’s actual end, the narration is halted by a new voice, possibly a version of Dylan’s own, as he sits at home alone in LA, drinking beer and ‘Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news’. Nothing much happening; some earthquake somewhere; some flotsam; just ‘another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear’. After the long preceding fin de siècle drama ‘there’s really nothin’ anyone can say’. There is no mystical revelation to be had from this version of the human condition.
Dylan-Levy handle all of this brilliantly. They pinch details from Conrad – period, island, gambling room, a Panama hat – but adapt only fragments of Victory’s plot to get the gist they need. In the novel, a narrative that at first seems realistic, if preposterous, turns out to be nothing of the kind. The reader who sees beyond heroes and devilish villains is given an allegory. In the song, in place of Conrad’s tale of Heyst the ‘forgotten cast-off, the son a disillusioned ‘philosopher’, one who becomes locked in a struggle with an evil hotelier, Schomberg, for the heart and soul of a teenage girl, Lena – performer in a ‘ladies’ orchestra’, no less – we get high, sardonic comedy. Conrad was writing about faith, love, fate and the challenge of evil. Dylan-Levy offer up a tale of human vanity getting what it deserves. One self-involved character, ‘the Greek’, is even trying ineptly to hang himself while the volcano explodes, the lava flows and the island sinks out of existence. This is, if you are that way inclined, very funny.
‘Black Diamond Bay’ has more sheer vivacity than the rest of the songs on Desire combined, ‘Hurricane’ always excepted. If Dylan did not perform it in concert that might have had something to do with the dispassionate, stoic and comical secularism of a piece that makes ‘Isis’ and ‘Oh, Sister’ seem fatuous. Even the stratagems and conceits of high literature are given a kind of comeuppance. Conrad’s genius in Victory was in the management of viewpoint: first that of a sailor, then that of Heyst as teller of the tale, then the perspective of Heyst within himself, then a position within a neutral, authorial denouement. Dylan-Levy cut through it all to leave us with a bored guy drinking beer and watching the news. This, says the song, is how we these days understand ourselves: through a screen, through a background filter, through bland announcements that somewhere far off something might have happened that might have mattered to someone, but not to us.
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
On the remainder of Desire Dylan otherwise indulged his abiding need to play cowboy in a piece called ‘Romance in Durango’ and chose to end the album with a song to his wife. The former track was a (mostly) vigorous piece of writing that would have fitted well enough with the handful of sun-baked verses Dylan had conjured up for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Clinton Heylin, among others, has made the association: the movie had been filmed in the western Mexican state of Durango, after all.41 On the other hand, ‘Romance’, theatrical or ‘cinematic’ according to taste, bears several of Levy’s fingerprints. As the ‘theatrist’ would tell Larry Sloman, ‘I love stories and plots.’ Would Dylan have written of ‘Hoofbeats like castanets on stone’, or had his hero promise that ‘Soon you will be dancing the fandango’? Let’s hope not.
The questions act as another reminder, nevertheless, of the issue of authorship in seven of the works on Desire. Heylin records Levy’s claim that most of the lyrics in ‘Romance in Durango’ were the director’s own work. On the other hand, Michael Gray says that in an ‘utterly marvellous’ piece, with ‘its skilful concentration of language’, Dylan ‘as often before . . . says more with less’.42 So who gets the credit or, if needs be, the blame? With most other songwriting collaborations the issue would not arise. In the old Tin Pan Alley partnerships, above all in the miraculous half-century working relationship between Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a composer operated with a lyricist; the labour was divided. In Dylan-Levy, both participants came up with words, to varying degrees. Since one of the pair was Bob Dylan, a creative singularity, a writer sometimes identified as a poet, authorship is relevant.
Inevitably, Desire gives the sense of an artist who is not always wholly at one with his material. ‘Romance’ feels, for whatever the word is worth, like an example. Dylan has a genuine secondary talent for covering other people’s songs, but this album is an entirely different case. On at least one occasion, by his own account, he provided none of the lyrics. In other cases, such as in the Durango romance, his contribution is said to have been minimal. To this day, nevertheless, everything on Desire is treated, pored over and ‘analysed’, as a product of his strange, personal and individual genius. Shakespeare’s efforts as a script doctor occupy one of literary scholarship’s discrete categories. Pablo Picasso’s intense and intimate relationship with Georges Braque in the moment of Cubism – and Jacques Levy was no Braque – gets its own shelf of monographs. With Desire, everything is held to be Dylan even when the artist makes no such attribution. The mistake is odd, but persistent.
Musically, in any case, ‘Romance in Durango’ was a cliché, a skeletal melody that sounded like a parody of Tejano and exemplified one of the album’s real problems. The artist had not over-exerted himself with these tunes. The record would be a big hit; the Rolling Thunder tour that preceded Desire’s release in the first week of January 1976 would be a wayward triumph. But here, even after Blood on the Tracks, were more signs of a falling away, of a creative decline. Dylan could not manage all of the words. In the studio, he could no longer ride waves of chaos to glory. And he could not invariably contrive, borrow or adapt the melodies he needed to make the most of the lyrics he had assembled on the fly with an eager collaborator. The Dylan who could manage such feats unaided was otherwise engaged.
It tells us something, perhaps, about the part played by Sara Dylan in his existence. It might remind us, too, as we weigh out the hits and misses in an artist’s career, that talent exists within a human life, not in ideal, temperature-controlled isolation. Dylan was heading in strange directions even as he produced another big hit of an album. He was becoming unmoored, adrift, even as he seemed to pull Desire’s last song from his back pocket. There was no doubt, however, about who had written this one.
Dylan’s confederates in the studio were given no hint of the existence of ‘Sara’. He made the recording used on the album in the early hours of 1 August, after six consecutive attempts, while his visiting wife, not forewarned, sat listening. In a manner that could not be matched by anything on Blood on the Tracks, Dylan exposed himself utterly. He seemed to plead for his life.
Jacques Levy would tell Larry Sloman that ‘Sara’ had been written at the house in East Hampton. In On the Road with Bob Dylan, ‘Ratso’ Sloman would describe the night of 31 July/1 August as a quiet session in which a good deal of time was spent listening to playbacks of previous recordings.43 Then, it seems, Dylan turned to his wife, said, ‘This is for you,’ and performed ‘Sara’. As noted, it was not done in the single take pop legend might have required. Nevertheless, the song was greeted by those present, in Sloman’s account, in the kind of silence generally described as ‘stunned’. The only important biographical detail is that Sara Dylan remained ‘impassive’.
What she felt is, as ever, not recorded. The song’s appeal is, intensely, a matter of taste. There are clichés enough within it. But here, equally, are scenes from a marriage, viewed through one man’s tired eyes. Here are family moments, intimate thoughts and deep feelings, private –you might have thought – and personal, offered in a manner that was, for this artist, entirely unprecedented. The song ends with Dylan’s keening words, ‘Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.’
Many fans find ‘Sara’ intensely affecting; a few of us wince. How a notably guarded woman might have felt about having her marriage acted out before strangers in the middle of a New York night tends to be overlooked. Clearly, Dylan was so caught up in his emotions he did not see fit to ask permission – for when did he ever? – for such an exercise. Through all the years of their union he and his wife had made their privacy paramount. Now all of that was cast aside simply because he felt the need.
You could call ‘Sara’ one of the great love songs. You could also call it a piece of sentimentalised emotional blackmail. If Levy was right about the moment of composition, Dylan was springing a surprise he had prepared beforehand. Sara, trapped by the performance, might have had reason for her impassivity. He, bereft, simultaneously acknowledging that the marriage was over yet begging for it to continue, could put his side of the story before millions of people in a Bob Dylan song. She had no such opportunity, even if – though you must doubt it – she had wanted such a thing. The fans who hear only an expression of profound love assume that Sara Dylan must have been deeply moved when first she heard the song. But what was she supposed to say or do? Try again, yet again, to make the marriage work, no doubt. For a short while the song would seem to achieve its purpose, but the recording session remains one of the strangest episodes in Dylan’s career.
The paramount rule of his art had been that plain truth is never to be offered, that enigmas have a value for their own sake. This was, over and above everything, how he worked. Precisely because he had avoided explicit autobiography he had achieved universal meaning. Dylan was a creative ellipsis. Now, suddenly, he was telling the world frankly, among other things, of how his wife had helped to get him off heroin in New York at some point (presumably) in 1965.
I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells
I’d taken the cure and just gotten through
Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel
Writin’ ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you
This, surely, was too close to any bone. Who tells the world such things? Not, or so it had been presumed hitherto, Bob Dylan. We might also remember, however, that ‘Sad-Eyed Lady’ had in fact been written, according to plenty of witnesses, in a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee, on a night in mid-February 1966, when the artist was struggling to put together the album he would call Blonde on Blonde. The cure, one cure at any rate, might well have been endured just as he described, but the writing was done in Tennessee, not in New York. The author had said as much himself on more than one occasion.44 Sara Dylan, recipient of a poet’s adoration, undoubtedly the begetter of that great 1966 song, might well have paused in 1975 to wonder what became of the facts.
*
Fake platinum and spray-painted gold weave their spells. Because Desire went on to be a big hit, because it remains beloved, because Dylan went on to give it a context with the Rolling Thunder tour, it has been granted a free pass in most of the many assessments of his work. Set it beside Blood on the Tracks, however, and treat it song by song. You could call the Desire collection ‘diverse’; you could also call it incoherent. It refuses to settle, thematically or stylistically. Then ask yourself – though this is not much of a guide to anything – about Dylan’s own devotion to the fruits of his collaboration with Jacques Levy.
He has declined to perform four of the album’s nine songs since 1976. ‘Oh, Sister’ made it to 1978 before disappearing from the artist’s concert repertoire. ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ – entirely his own, significantly or not – has popped up intermittently, as has, very rarely, ‘Romance in Durango’. ‘Joey’ was revived briefly in the summer of 1987, largely thanks to the urgings of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, but a handful of live performances in that dismal period served only to prove how very little Dylan could remember of all the words he had not written. The song turned up again, like a freak winter weather event, at a show in Toronto on 14 November 2012, but that was probably just a case of the playful artist keeping his band on their toes.
Desire is not central to his body of work. That might be because of the album’s curious creative origins, or because it evokes memories of public controversy and private misery. Equally, the artist who has always been his own best critic – in hindsight, at any rate – has probably made a judgement. These days, Dylan has well over 600 self-composed songs to choose from when he takes his abraded vocal folds before a microphone on the public stage. The nine songs from Desire do not, generally speaking, meet his specifications. Clearly, he is not attached to them, personally or professionally. Yet in 1975 these songs represented the course he had chosen after the cold, mostly calm perfection of Blood on the Tracks.
Where did it all begin to go wrong for Bob Dylan? Late in 1975, the question would have seemed ridiculous. Surely this was the year, if any, when the tide of genius returned, when every claim ever made about him could be reasserted. The fact remains that after Dylan’s first triumphs in the 1960s doubts had crept in periodically, in waves. Soon enough they would affect the artist himself. Before too many years they would overwhelm him. Perhaps it was inevitable: there is no such thing as an unblemished career save for those who die too soon, or take the Rimbaud route of creative self-annihilation. Knowing what the 1980s and 1990s would bring, it can therefore be asked of Dylan: when and where?
Some would select the long absence from public performance after the motorcycle crash in July of 1966. Others would nominate the supposed nadir of the Self Portrait album four years later. In fact, of course, he recovered from each of those setbacks to demonstrate, whether in the basement tapes or in Blood on the Tracks, that his creativity was intact. From the mid-1970s onwards, however, something began to happen to the man himself, to the interlocking series of personality changes he had accepted as the next best thing to an identity. It was as though he began to lose the signal. His private frequency seemed to disappear in the static.
Perhaps the failure began in a pre-dawn moment on 1 August 1975, just after he had sung his song to his wife. Then, at the last, probably just before 4 a.m., he got a final take he thought was good enough for ‘Isis’, that mystical rumination ‘about marriage’. Then, barring a little overdubbing, he concluded he had made an album from all the studio chaos, the hack collaboration, and the familiar, fragile sandpainting known to him, as to everyone else, as Bob Dylan. Patti Smith barely understood the half of it when she spoke of improvisation. Henceforth, the artist would spend long decades trying to work out why his art had ever truly mattered to him.
*
With Desire complete and its last, discrepant track still echoing in their heads, Dylan and his wife took their children to the Minnesota farm for a holiday. As in ‘Sara’, as in so many troubled marriages, the presence of the youngsters enabled the parents to coexist, or so it seemed, for a while longer. Dylan was nevertheless set on returning to the road, even if his wife’s heart must have faltered at the prospect. Did she protest? There are no facts to be had concerning these private matters; only guesswork is possible. One guess would nevertheless be that any lingering hope of saving the Dylan marriage was not likely to be enhanced by his return to the old, vagrant, insufferable rock and roll lifestyle. It is equally possible – and mere speculation, once again – that each of these people was resigned to the inevitable. A holiday for the sake of the children, the pretence accepted by estranged couples in every age and place, was probably the best that could be managed.
In early September, Dylan summoned a minimal three-piece band – Scarlet Rivera, the bassist Rob Stoner, the drummer Howie Wyeth –for a TV engagement in Chicago. As ever where broadcasting was concerned, the artist’s sole motivation was a sense of personal obligation. He did not do these things because he enjoyed them. To this day, the old man will not countenance the possibility of being seen on the giant Jumbotron screens that are otherwise deemed essential parts of the stadium-rock experience. In 1975, an appearance on The World of John Hammond, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) tribute to his first producer, mentor and teacher, was Dylan’s way of paying a debt.
In the footage he looks about as comfortable as he ever did in a TV studio. The band, given scant notice and little chance to rehearse, are meanwhile learning, as all his musicians have had to learn, that keeping up with the boss demands intuition, quick wits, daring and an ability to improvise. On this night – or rather, in the early hours of the morning – their efforts are not entirely successful. He makes no allowances: none. In one sense, Dylan takes these skilled players for granted. In another sense, he trusts them implicitly. As ever, he thinks it redundant to look ahead before he makes his leaps.
In the WTTW studios in Chicago, on 10 September, ‘Hurricane’, a rewritten ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, and ‘Oh, Sister’ – dedicated to ‘someone out there tonight . . . She knows who she is’ – are performed with a kind of distracted intensity. Dylan, sweating visibly, manages to look pained throughout, as though he should be anywhere but under the TV lights. Somehow, nevertheless, he leaves the viewer with the sense that without his unwilling presence a cold vacuum will be all that remains. In these scraps of footage Dylan reveals himself, yet again, as a necessary artist. The Chicago renditions give no real clue, of course, of what is to come. That would be too easy.