THE CLEVER COMMERCIAL MOVE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO FOLLOW Infidels in short order with another polished, professional and mostly ‘secular’ album, one laying to rest the obnoxious allegation put about by supercilious hacks that Bob Dylan had suffered a midlife creative crisis. In theory, such a task should have posed no serious challenge. Four albums had appeared in just over four years since the release of Slow Train Coming in August 1979. They had ranged from decent to dreadful, but a song such as ‘Jokerman’ demonstrated even to the artist’s worst enemies among the critics that, despite everything, his essential talent was intact. In his born-again moment he had been furiously productive. What hindered Dylan now? There was surely no good reason to doubt that he could deliver product if required. Infidels had meanwhile repaired most of the damage done by Saved and Shot of Love, reaching number twenty in America and number nine in Britain. Columbia had recouped a large part of whatever vast sum they had paid out for a five-album contract. There was a moment to be seized.
It didn’t happen. Some 13 long months would elapse between the appearance of Infidels and a new Dylan album. The artefact when it arrived would amount to little more than a stopgap, a desperately poor one at that. Real Live would seem only to justify the perennial suspicion among fans that cynical performers stick out concert albums when they have nothing better to offer. Dylan’s effort would be treated with the disdain it deserved – even the title would seem lazy – but miserable sales figures would not spur him into action. Evidence for a loss of appetite, interest, will, desire, concentration and creativity would mount. Another seven months would go by after Real Live before Dylan’s twenty-third studio album reached the stores. Celebrations would be muted when they were even audible. All the ground regained with Infidels would be lost, and lost, so it would seem, irretrievably. Even the last of all possible excuses, ‘better than nothing’, would be hard to sustain. And the album called Empire Burlesque would not be the worst of it.
*
For some who remember the period, the 1980s tend to call W.H. Auden’s contemptuous epitaph for the ‘30s to mind. Here was another low, dishonest decade’, its clever hopes soon expired. If the coke habits, booze, ugly fashions, ostentatious wealth and gaudy politics of the few were insufficiently distracting, the ’80s counted for everyone else as a time when it made rational sense to be uncertain and afraid amid global ‘waves of anger and fear’.1 It was a decade that seemed to baffle Dylan even as it all but destroyed him as a writer.
Both America and Britain had acquired right-wing governments as conservative as any they had seen. The absolutist free-market policies promoted by these administrations would make a minority rich and leave the majority to worry about jobs and the uncertainties of a post-industrial world. Both countries had elected leaders, in Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with a marked taste for Cold War rhetoric and an eagerness to risk a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Both leaders liked to preach a stern economic discipline that somehow they failed to practise. While increasing the defence expenditure of the United States by 40 per cent in real terms between 1981 and 1985, Reagan, that enemy of ‘public spending’, was piling up the national debt as though assembling an oozing toxic layer cake. No matter how hard he hacked away at the programmes intended to aid the poor, the Republican president could not balance the books. By the time he left office early in 1989, the debt burden would have almost tripled, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. While the better-off were enjoying his tax cuts and Infidels was being released, the unemployment rate in 1983 for ordinary Americans, according to the official numbers, was touching 10.4 per cent. By borrowing to cover Reagan’s budget deficit, their country had become the biggest debtor the world had seen. Times had indeed changed.
Unabashed neo-liberalism had arrived in the democracies of the West. Country to country, the family resemblance was unmistakable. Trade unions, the public realm, left-idealism under the banner of the bleeding heart, the ‘permissive society’: these were to be prepared for history’s dustbin. To justify an agreeable theory, Thatcher’s British ‘economic miracle’ had torn the vitals out of manufacturing and turned the country into a net importer of goods for the first time. In January 1982, if you believed figures based on ever-changing, politically useful methods of calculation, the average rate of joblessness in the United Kingdom was 12.5 per cent. In the old industrial regions of the country, one in five were out of work. In the most afflicted areas, the figures were still worse as Thatcher prepared to pick a fight with Britain’s coal miners and divide her country utterly. Dylan might have tired of ‘issues’ – though ‘Union Sundown’ had seemed to say otherwise – but he could not ignore the world in which he found himself. He could try, though.
On one reading of events, the advent of Reagan and Thatcher was proof enough that the progressive forces which once had claimed Dylan as a figurehead had failed completely. Not a lot of overcoming had been done by those who liked to sing reassuring anthems. The ‘foes’ mentioned in the youth’s ‘When the Ship Comes In’ when he performed the song at the Washington civil rights march in August 1963 had not chosen to ‘raise their hands / Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands’. Moreover, Reagan and Thatcher were the democratic choices of their peoples, elected and re-elected. The only alternative explanation, still being heard more than 20 years after those early-’60s songs, was that the battle had been lost because Dylan and others besides had deserted the fight. The criticism could have been developed further. By the early ’80s born-again Bob had seemed to forget even the reasons for the conflict. Where morality was concerned, especially the moral failure he defined as sin, that Dylan had been on the side of the conservatives. The single telling fact might be that such insights, if insights they were, had done his art no good.
In music, as in real life, the 1980s were proving to be a charmless decade. If, for argument’s sake, year zero was 1956 and the Big Bang in a small universe the release of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, maximum entropy was achieved within three decades. What began with Elvis Presley at an afternoon recording session on Nashville’s McGavock Street on 10 January in ‘56 was over and done, never to be renewed, when Dylan was releasing Empire Burlesque and preparing the folly he would call Knocked Out Loaded. Presley had brought him to consciousness as a 14-year-old. A decade later Dylan was contending with the hanging judges at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. A decade after that, barely a month before the anniversary of the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ session, he was on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, singing for the freedom of Hurricane Carter. Yet by the time one more decade had elapsed Dylan would be telling a journalist from the Australian TV programme 60 Minutes that he didn’t know much about anything. By the sound of things, he wouldn’t care a great deal either.
In January 1986, the programme’s George Negus would ask the artist if the times had truly changed as once he had predicted. The answer: ‘I don’t know. I’ve no answer.’ Had he believed, then, in the imminence of those great changes when he wrote the song? ‘I would have no way of knowing,’ replied the oracle. His religion, Dylan would claim, ‘has more to do with playing the guitar’. As to possessing anything as risky as an actual opinion about anything at all, the response from this fin de siècle performing artist would be worthy of a suspect under interrogation, or of a coma victim regaining consciousness. ‘I mean,’ he would say, ‘it would be pointless for me to go out and say how I feel about this and how I feel about that.’
One popular theory, attractive because it is impossible to prove, holds that everything Elvis began ended with punk. The rest, including Dylan’s career from the mid-1980s onwards, has been a dull, irrelevant footnote, or a species of nostalgia. The explosive energy of the primeval moment had dissipated by the time the ’80s arrived; the music, as one of the singer-songwriters Dylan permitted said, had ‘died’. So the story goes. But the belief that pop was flawless and unimpeachable once upon a time is founded on a myth. The idea that innovation ended was being mocked by new-school hip hop even as Dylan was turning Infidels into a jigsaw with most of the important pieces missing.
The 1980s were peculiarly decadent, much of the time, for reasons of their own. Some of it had to do with the nature of that low, dishonest decade; some of it had to do with the likes of Dylan and his surviving contemporaries, the odd species known as rock stars, befuddled people with too much money and too little remaining artistic sense. Music was in decline in the middle of the 1980s for the simple and profound reason that those who had once made the great records settled for inferior stuff, even risible stuff. The buying public seemed to have no complaints, after all.
In Britain in 1984 Paul McCartney would score a number one with ‘Pipes of Peace’; Stevie Wonder would do the same with I Just Called to Say I Love You’. Lionel Richie would enjoy a gargantuan British hit with the frankly creepy and musically redundant ‘Hello’. Most of the rest would involve drum machines, Wham! and Duran Duran. If Dylan was in need of a hint, meanwhile, the essential American response in 1984 would be Bruce Springsteen’s vastly successful valediction to the Vietnam generation and their music, Born in the USA. That album would sell more copies, upwards of 15 million of them, than most of Dylan’s releases put together. He had always been a minority taste. In 1984, he seemed determined to stretch the definition of that category to its limits.
In a suddenly conservative world, a subgenus of the self-involved called yuppies occupied a lot of column inches and airtime. Credit and the consumption justified by credit were the new preoccupations of those in work and, as they perceived it, on top of the heap. There was a lot of talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, about individualism and liberty, rather less about communities and freedom. In this era, Reagan and his bosom friend Thatcher shared a taste for moralistic homilies. They seemed to stress that any difficulties in life were due to personal character flaws, or to a society that had lost its ‘values’.
This kind of conservatism could be comical, never more so than in 1987 when a wandering right-wing academic named Allan Bloom would decide that America had boarded the handcart to hell because its colleges had succumbed to relativism and the exotic allure – Thomas Jefferson was not available for comment – of Enlightenment thought. Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, would provide an emblematic cultural moment by picking on music, ‘rock music’ that is, as the reason for young America’s ‘spiritual void’ and the failure of youth to attend to all the things Allan Bloom had to say about the books Allan Bloom had decided were eternally canonical. To read The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 was like spinning a dial and picking up 1957, loud and clear. Rock music, Bloom wrote in the ’80s, ‘has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not eros – but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored’.2 It was, indeed, ‘the beat of sexual intercourse’ and it was helping to lay waste the nation’s intellectual capacities, its capitalism and its democracy. Bloom would have Plato and Nietzsche on his side, whether they knew it or not, but he would make no mention of Bob Dylan. The book was a big success, meanwhile. In its aftermath, as one journal would record, ‘Conservative cultural commentators burst forth from all corners, rhetorical cudgels in hand.’ Their list of pernicious trends ‘was long and varied: political correctness, multi-culturalism, deconstruction, cultural and moral relativism, feminism, rock & roll, television, the legacy of the Sixties . . .’3
That last decade was long over and done, as the artist knew better than most. The 1970s had given him a tantalising encore. In the 1980s, most of the time, he would struggle and fail to find a Bob Dylan adequate to the occasion. That once reliable conveyor belt of identities had ground to a halt. Suddenly his art, what remained of it, had neither purpose nor meaning.
*
So much was evident during a brief, catastrophic European tour, the last Dylan would countenance before the early weeks of 1986. The only apparent motives for this 1984 exercise were the sums of money that could be taken on the gate at big football stadiums and Olympic arenas across the continent. Band introductions aside, Dylan barely spoke a word to the vast crowds. The veteran musical crew assembled by Mick Taylor might have been designed, meanwhile, to illustrate just how redundant this version of ‘rock’ had become. As often as not, the hired hands had no idea what Dylan intended to play on a given night and no understanding of how, if at all, they were supposed to follow his butterfly instincts. For whatever reason, Carlos Santana and his band were hired as one support act; Joan Baez as another. Soon disillusioned, yet again, she failed to stay the course. Later, the experience would be recalled as ‘one of the most demoralising series of events I’ve ever lived through’. Baez would also record how it felt to be groped, it seems for old time’s sake, by an enervated, half-aware superstar whose character she could barely recognise.4
Dylan was knocking out old hits for big money, yet talking, when he deigned to talk, as though he lived for art alone. On 27 June, in a cafe in Madrid, he would tell Mick Brown of England’s Sunday Times that ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now’.5 The next night he would be doing ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and all the other old songs he had begun to regard as perfunctory offerings to those who still thought it a treat to glimpse from several hundred yards’ distance someone who might once have been Bob Dylan. The ‘stadium-rock experience’ was another of those 1980s phenomena to which he had consented. Here was the deified artist, beyond reach and almost beyond sight; here too were the multitudes who would take what they were given. Any belief in the communicative function and power of art and artist was boiled away while the band, the contract labour, played on.
By the time the tour reached the inverted pit of London’s Wembley Stadium on 7 July, Dylan was littering his stage with ‘guest stars’. An honest groundling might have glimpsed Van Morrison, or heard a guitar that might have been played by Eric Clapton. The alert ticket-holder probably noticed that the artist had messed around with the words to ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and, as ever, decided that ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ stood in need of revision. The worth of all this would be revealed when Real Live, with tracks recorded in London, Newcastle and Dublin, was released in November of the year. It is possible, just about, to argue that the album does not represent the better moments of the tour, but it still gives a fair account of the average show in Europe in ‘84. American record-buyers – which is to say non-buyers – would make Real Live the least successful of all of Bob Dylan’s albums. Number 115 on the Billboard chart would be its reward and its requiem.
Back in America, he returned to the studios and began the long, tedious process of casting around for inspiration in the hope that an album would emerge. Songs, suddenly, were coming hard, but that was not the whole story. The fact that Dylan’s very first studio sessions would revolve around material that had found no place on Infidels was revealing. The fact that he tried (and failed) to make something out of ‘Clean-Cut Kid’ rather than ‘Foot of Pride’ or ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is beyond curious. It was as though he no longer understood how a. great song sounded.
The standard excuse for Dylan’s working methods, an excuse he has used often enough in his own defence, is that he does not return to the scene of previous defeats. If a song is deemed a failure, he forgets it and moves on. In Dylan’s telling of the legend, fantastic unheard works float between possible universes. With Empire Burlesque, nevertheless, he would return twice to the Infidels discard pile, consciously and deliberately, yet take an interest only in one fine song and one minor piece. No issue of principle as to the reuse of previous work was at stake, therefore. Dylan nevertheless took an avid interest in some songs and ignored other, better works. It is almost as if he was keeping ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in reserve for the rainiest of days.
That blasphemous suggestion can be heard among fans, now and then. The basic allegation, the conspiracy within the grand conspiracy, is that Dylan’s many outtakes, known to the world of ‘collectors’ almost from the instant a recording console switch is reset, are no accident, that since the Bootleg Series he has salted tracks away for the sake of a secondary, if highly profitable, outlet. This, it is argued, is how he allows himself to think twice, to make amends, and to take no responsibility for what might have gone wrong with all those ‘official’ albums. With the Bootleg Series as a safety net, there is no longer a pressure to get things right first time around. All albums become, in a sense, provisional. A judicious release of outtakes can repair the reputational damage of any number of past failures. A new album can be revised, in effect, almost as soon as it has been released. It is a pleasing idea, but silly. No one wastes material the way Dylan has wasted material, sometimes in moments of dire need, if his calculations are so cold-blooded. Equally, no one has worked as he has worked, amid a virtual posterity, for quite so long.
So: when did discussions truly begin over the creation of the Biograph box set, the one that would be released to the world at the end of October (or the beginning of November) in 1985? When did Dylan, who had failed for years to make anything useful out of the basement tapes, decide to feed on his own corpus? A great deal of work on copyrights and permissions, not to mention a lot of archival labour and audio restoration, must have been undertaken before the ‘unprecedented retrospective’ (and so forth) Biograph collection of five vinyl discs or three CDs gained Columbia’s approval. A certain amount of thought on the artist’s part must also have taken place. The first of the big, lucrative box sets dedicated to a living artist, a concept that would give the music industry a second lease on life, didn’t just happen.
Dylan’s tendency to regard himself and his work as entities existing outside the present moment has never been accidental. Equally, no one begins to curate his own life inadvertently, least of all in the trough of a writer’s despond. Yet the most remarkable sleight of hand conducted by this artist down the years has involved persuading the world (himself included, it sometimes seems) that stuff just happens. Songs somehow get written, albums somehow get made and fame – none of this is Dylan’s doing – somehow descends. Yet by allowing the Biograph set he did not just give permission for still another greatest-hits package. With this little casket he altered his perspective on his own work. In fact, he would alter everyone’s perspective, even when they thought they knew every possible angle. Accepting the past, and with it all those accumulated identities, he could never be the same unencumbered artist again. He would make a fair few bucks from Biograph, though, and go on insisting that none of it was his idea.
In the mid-1980s, no one had yet realised that you could, in essence, flog a bunch of old, near-forgotten stuff to the middle-aged demographic and screw the tape thieves, as it were, to boot. For that matter, you could repackage a career, an artist or an entire self-conscious ‘legendary’ existence. Dylan’s public position was then, as it remains, to disdain all his missing back pages. He still pretends that his hugely lucrative Bootleg Series releases have somehow just materialised while his back was turned. In November 1985, talking to Time magazine about Biograph, he would state:
It wasn’t my idea to put the record out. This record has been suggested in the past, but I guess it just didn’t come together until recently. I think it’s been in the works for like three years. I had very little to do with it. I didn’t choose the songs. A lot of people probably had a hand in it. The record company has the right to do whatever they please with the songs. I didn’t care about what was on the record. I haven’t sat down and listened to it.6
Dylan would go on to boast that if someone had made it ‘worth my while’ a compilation twice the size might have been forthcoming. It could, he said, have contained nothing but his unreleased songs. In a slight if inadvertently truthful slip, however, the line about ‘the record company has the right to do whatever they please’ would be undermined by the artist’s flat statement: ‘I’m the final judge of what goes on and off my records.’ So who had sanctioned the box set? Columbia might have been entitled to another greatest-hits package, but not to Biograph. Like everyone else in his business, Dylan signs contracts. These specify the number and nature of his releases. Sony/Columbia, as the conglomerate is these days more accurately styled, cannot just empty its vaults of his material as it sees fit. To this day, the planning of Bootleg Series releases is subject to continual revision according to choices made, if the record company is to be believed, only by the artist or his representatives. If nothing else, uncertainty and fascinating rumours keep the hardcore fans interested.
Biograph had been in the planning, nevertheless, ‘for like three years’ as of November 1985. So the intention to memorialise Bob Dylan in a lavish if unproven format, if with no more than his tacit consent, had come into existence just after Shot of Love was dying its deserved death. The artist was regarding himself – his life, his writing, his career – as an artefact as early as 1982. To see his monument being erected while he was trying to make a new record, even if he ‘didn’t care’ about the contents of Biograph, must surely have had an inhibiting effect on his writing. The evidence of Dylan’s mid-1980s albums suggests that the effect was near-paralysing. Even today, the continuing archaeological excavations represented by the Bootleg Series must make for an odd existence, like reading your own obituary day after day. ‘Bob Dylan’, that mirror within a mirror, is a work forever in progress for the man who bears the name.
Back in 1985, the accusation that he aimed for a ‘disco’ sound with Empire Burlesque was perhaps the most half-witted of all the criticisms the artist has ever encountered. A lot of things can be done, no doubt, to the accompaniment of a Dylan soundtrack, but dancing has never been one of them. The same was true of the album he made in fits and starts, with a changing cast of musicians, between the summer of 1984 and March 1985. The aim was to achieve what was then a ‘contemporary’ sound with the help of the fashionable engineer and producer Arthur Baker, an individual who had worked, as Dylan was no doubt aware, with Bruce Springsteen. It is not a sound – cluttered, top-heavy, full of manipulated drum machine effects, synthesisers, horns and over-assertive bass lines – that has improved with age. It is as though a template was created before anyone listened to the songs. But then, the album itself can probably be summed up by the fact that its best track, ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’, was in essence a leftover from Infidels.
In this song, as elsewhere on the album, Dylan had begun to incorporate snatches of old movie dialogue into his writing, anticipating techniques he would adopt wholesale in the twenty-first century. Yet while the ventriloquising of hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart works brilliantly in ‘Tight Connection’ – ‘Well, I had to move fast / And I couldn’t with you around my neck’ is lifted almost intact from a picture called Sirocco (1951) – other borrowings are less successful. Songs, it turned out, could not be assembled from found art alone, though criticisms of Dylan’s technique are sometimes based on a deep misunderstanding of what plagiarism means. Who could have resisted ‘I’ll go along with the charade / Until I can think my way out’, even if its source was a less than perfect 1949 Bogart movie called Tokyo foe? If the audience is ignorant of the source, what does it matter? The issue is one of intent and artistic resources. Could a writer be culpable because he lifted a few lines while stuck for ideas, yet innocent of theft if, consciously and artistically, he was trying to create a particular verbal resonance? Dylan would have to deal with that persistent question at a later date.7
Of the rest of the Empire Burlesque songs, or rather the best of the rest, the mesmerising ‘Dark Eyes’ was a simple, acoustic affair, blessedly free of Baker’s ‘production’ and relying on just Dylan’s guitar, his harmonica and his words. Supposedly inspired by a late-night encounter in a hotel lobby, it sounds like a lament for all women who stray in the dark, for the writer himself, and for lost souls everywhere.
Oh, the French girl she’s in paradise
And a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy price
To the falling gods of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet
And passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet
But all I see are dark eyes
Typically, Dylan would discard a thundering version of a song entitled ‘When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky’ that he had recorded with Steve Van Zandt and Roy Bittan of Springsteen’s E Street Band. It would be resurrected – for everything the artist did could now be revised or restored to life – on 1991’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1 – 3. The same luck would not befall another, better and far more important track that emerged, as though from nowhere, during a session in Los Angeles during the second week in December 1984. Written with the playwright Sam Shepard, ‘New Danville Girl’ is one of the most structurally complex narratives ever to bear Dylan’s name. As such, it is also one of the most sophisticated meditations on identity, fate and memory ever attempted in popular song (or in any other art form). All that being the case, it was almost inevitable that the track would not make the Empire Burlesque album. When Dylan later returned to the piece he failed to improve it and used the song, renamed ‘Brownsville Girl’ and still a riveting creation, to pad out a miserably poor album. For now, that’s another story.
The complicated history of Empire Burlesque does not make the album any more interesting unless your taste runs to the analysis of outmoded production techniques. Yet again, like a man calling heads and getting tails a statistically improbable number of times, Dylan had misjudged – and therefore misunderstood – his own best songs. In 1985, he had few enough of those. Too many of the pieces that survived his haphazard culling were probably better read than heard. That was not, presumably, the judgement an artist in need of a hit record wanted to hear. If Empire Burlesque caught a break from the critics when it was released that was mostly because of continuing relief that God remained a backseat driver. As Clinton Heylin has observed, the artist had stripped religious allusions from ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ – Christ’s blood and so forth – when turning the song into ‘Tight Connection to My Heart’.8 Overt religiosity was behind him finally. It might say something about the open-mindedness or otherwise of critics, but any Dylan album without born-again overtones had a head start in the mid-’80s.
Record-buyers would be more pragmatic, raising Empire Burlesque no higher than number 33 in the American chart. British fans, loyal as ever, allowed the album to rise briefly to number seven, but in Dylan’s homeland the public was more perceptive than some of the critics who allowed undimmed hope to be father to their thoughts. At this distance in time it is hard even to understand what Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder thought he was hearing when he wrote of
a blast of real rock & roll, funnelled through a dense, roiling production – custom-chopped-and-channelled by remix wiz Arthur Baker – that affords Dylan more pure street-beat credibility than he has aspired to since . . . well, pick your favourite faraway year. Could there be actual hits hunkering here? Is Dylan ‘back’? Again? One is tempted to trumpet some such tidings.9
History would judge it to be a trumpet solo. For his next trick, in any case, the artist would join the chorus. In January of 1985, whether because of some species of industry peer pressure or a sincere belief in celebrity-endorsed charitable endeavours, an unmistakable voice could be heard peppering an unremarkable if well-meaning singalong called ‘We Are the World’. This was the American response to the Band Aid project launched in Britain a few months earlier by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to succour the oppressed in Ethiopia. USA for Africa, as the American ensemble called itself, involved a large and absurdly ‘diverse’ group of singers and show-business types. Dylan found himself in a Los Angeles studio alongside everyone from Willie Nelson to Ray Charles, Springsteen to Diana Ross, Paul Simon to Kenny Rogers. He delivered his closing chorus with a certain growling gusto, but at the time he seemed not to wonder why a song dedicated to the downtrodden failed to ask about the reasons for their plight. ‘We Are the World’, banal and sentimental, was certainly not a Bob Dylan song, far less a human-rights anthem. On the other hand, it did raise tens of millions of dollars and, presumably, saved some lives.
In the aftermath, Dylan was persuaded to take part in the gigantic transatlantic Live Aid event in July. Of all the mistakes he made in the 1980s, this would be among the worst. It would certainly be the best remembered. The idea was to stage two vast concerts, one at London’s Wembley Stadium, the other in Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, and to link them by satellite with other shows around the planet. In one mark of his continuing eminence in American music, Dylan was asked to close the concert on his side of the Atlantic before the massed ranks of celebrity sympathisers gathered for a rendition of ‘We Are the World’. In theory, there should have been no problem. Anyone who saw Dylan’s performance at the time, or has seen it since, will recognise the ghastly fascination experienced by a TV audience estimated at 1.9 billion as grim reality unfolded.
One idea had been for Dylan to perform ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with the reassembled Peter, Paul and Mary. Whether because the symbolism was too much for him – the trio’s version of his song had long been a mixed blessing – or because his voice was no longer up to the job, the artist took against that proposal. He decided instead that he would perform with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Contrary to appearances in Philadelphia, the three did rehearse before facing the global audience. On stage, however, the Englishmen gave the distinct impression that perhaps they had killed time while waiting to go on by sharing a bottle or two. Dylan, sweating and strained, didn’t look good. His companions looked as though they were lounging in the back room of an after-hours club as time was being called. The improvised sound was pitiful while the artist’s choice of songs was hardly calculated to tug heart strings or open wallets around the world. ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ and ‘When the Ship Comes In’, a pair of songs from his earliest days, were not the sunniest works in Dylan’s repertoire. The inevitable ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ meanwhile failed to suggest that ‘the answer’ had ever involved regiments of rich, self-regarding superstars wheedling cash from common folk for the sake of the starving. The impression given by the louche trio – to be strictly fair, they had been denied the onstage monitors that would have allowed them to hear how they sounded – was not helped when the singer decided to speak. After ‘Hollis Brown’, Dylan said:
I’d just like to say I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million maybe, and use it, say, to pay the . . . pay the mortgages on some of the farms . . . the farmers here owe to the banks.
It was as though there was a near-audible intake of breath from households around the world, followed by a vast global thought bubble. It said: why don’t you find ‘one or two million’ for those farmers? Dylan, so it seemed, had failed even to bother to inform himself of the purpose of the event for which he was supposed to be the inspirational headline act. The little speech was naive, at best, and the effect on what remained of his reputation among the general public was catastrophic. Here, it seemed, was a choice example of just how detached from reality a spoiled emperor of rock could become.
Dylan would redeem himself somewhat, at least in American eyes, by inspiring Willie Nelson to mount the Farm Aid concert later in the year in Champaign, Illinois. The artist would put in a near-sensational performance with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at that event, as though making amends for Philadelphia. When the time came, Dylan would take unusual care with rehearsals and technical matters. The privations being suffered by rural America were real enough and he would more than do his bit. Nevertheless, to many among the enormous TV audience who saw him perform in Philadelphia on 13 July, the verdict was obvious. Bob Dylan was utterly redundant, a dismal and decadent joke who couldn’t even give a respectable performance of one of his oldest and most famous songs.
*
At the beginning of November, Biograph appeared. As though to emphasise the paradox of a living artist’s status as a historical artefact, Columbia staged a big reception at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The triumphs of a bygone era would be celebrated to honour a songwriter who had not enjoyed a hit in a while.
Dylan had meanwhile published a revised edition of his Writings and Drawings (1973). Though this time around he had settled for the arguably less pretentious Lyrics: 1962 – 1985 as his title, there was no denying the irony attending his situation. Aged only 44, the poet of popular song had somehow managed to become both canonical and washed up. His private life remained chaotic, involving several women simultaneously, but that kind of turbulence had not impeded Dylan in the past. Something else, the times or passing time itself, was afflicting him. Interviewed by Cameron Crowe for the booklet that accompanied Biograph, he had said, ‘Actually I’m amazed that I’ve been around this long. Never thought I would be.’ Meanwhile, with nothing much to sell save an inferior album, he was turning up in prestigious publications all across America as the paterfamilias of pop-music art in the ‘rock’ style. Almost without fail, journalists wanted to ask the legend about his legend, or question the myth-maker, as they would call him, about the myth.
Well, people tell me about the myth, you know? Some people are in awe. It doesn’t penetrate me for some reason. I wish it did because then I might be able to use it to some advantage. I mean, there must be some advantage to it. I haven’t been able to figure out what it is as yet. [He laughs.]10
Among other things, the box set, with its earliest tracks dating all the way back to 1962, was a reminder that he had already spent more than half of his entire life in fame’s hot glare. Robert Allen Zimmerman, his legal existence long since eradicated, was barely even a memory. Bob Dylan, his manifestations arrayed like a group portrait on the Biograph track listings, was the only reality the artist could hope for in 1985. Nevertheless, the elegant box set had the effect of turning his life into a historical event even as he tried to live that life. His relationship with time had been altered by what was represented on some pieces of brittle plastic. He was historic and actual, present and gone, this artist with the invented name. Amidst it all, art was deserting him. Whatever else he thought about while he made a play for yet another woman at the Whitney reception – apparently a Susan Ross by name - he must have begun to wonder what would become of Bob Dylan if his writing failed once and for all, if there were no more songs. He had suffered the affliction before and called it ‘the amnesia’. In 1985, as the years piled up behind him, it must have resembled extinction.
Biograph would do exactly as well as Empire Burlesque in the American charts, but reaching number 33 with a box set was vastly more impressive than pulling off the feat with a single album. Given that Biograph went for $30 a pop and involved no recording costs, the artist and his record company did far better out of the old Dylan than the new model. The compilation would also have a far longer shelf life than Empire Burlesque, an album whose reputation has not improved with time. Neither outcome counts as unfair to the works involved. Even granting all the usual fan arguments over what is and what is not represented by Biograph, it illuminates the sheer scale of Dylan’s achievement in 24 years. He was not far wrong when he claimed that he could have filled the box twice over with original but unreleased music. Not one of his contemporaries could have made the same claim. Columbia had not filled Biograph with every last scrap of detritus; anything but. The bulk of the material was familiar, but it set an entire career in a new context. The ‘previously unreleased’ songs served only as a reminder that there was a lot more to Dylan than his hits – the term is used loosely in his case – might have suggested. Others in the music industry whose self-regard would before long cause them to demand an equivalent testimonial had no such abundance of riches stored in the vaults. Rolling Stone’s reviewer would not be far wrong when he referred to the ‘mere ten sides’ contained in Biograph. Within the box, as the magazine’s Tim Holmes would say, was ‘incontrovertible evidence of a continuing explosion of genius’. No one had said that about Empire Burlesque. The single word in the Rolling Stone encomium inviting a quibble was ‘continuing’.
*
On the last day of January 1986, Dylan became a father again. Three days later he went back on tour. The simple facts are eloquent. He was by instinct a family man, but by nature a travelling musician. He loved children, but he was most content, or at his least vulnerable, out on the road. There is plenty of romanticised nonsense in the history of pop, blues, R&B and rock and roll to explain and justify the dichotomy, but Dylan has endured (and deserved) doses of disruptive truth at intervals during his career. As his life with Sara had shown, a faith in domesticity had conquered him more than once. He had surrendered willingly to the idea of a (mostly) normal life, one he had not experienced since childhood. But he had also accepted every promise implicit in the devil’s music and failed, time after time, to honour even the idea of fidelity. By the beginning of 1986 he was at the centre of multiple relationships. By that time, equally, the singer Carolyn Dennis, with whom he had resumed an affair, was about to have his sixth child. The little girl, named Desiree, would subsequently have the kind of ‘secret’ existence best understood by tabloid newspapers fond of seeing the word in 84 point sans bold. The only truly relevant fact is that parenthood had once intruded forcibly on Dylan’s public life and altered his behaviour. In 1986, mother and newborn child remained at home while he flew to New Zealand.11
It would be known as the True Confessions tour. The Farm Aid show had convinced Dylan that he, Tom Petty and Petty’s band were made for one another. That would turn out to be a matter of opinion. They had gone through the motions of rehearsals, but in reality they knocked the performances together by trial and error at the expense of paying customers. The first shows, in Wellington and Auckland, were dire; the opening night in Sydney, Australia, the first in a run of four concerts, might have passed as adequate if the artist had not been Bob Dylan. Rambling chatter to do with Jesus being ‘my hero’ was the new father’s only coherent statement on life as he understood it. A few nights later he was introducing his song for Lenny Bruce by talking about the playwright Tennessee Williams and misunderstood artists generally. In Melbourne on 20 February, Dylan said in a song introduction: ‘We’re in Lonesome Town, learning to forget. Sometimes you got to do that. God knows, there’s enough to remember.’
He could not have known or guessed, but that strange little aside might have passed for a premature epitaph for a friend. When the tour reached Japan, Dylan was informed that Richard Manuel had hanged himself with his belt in the early hours of 4 March in some lousy Florida motel after another lousy gig on the endless highway. The end had come after a performance in an ‘upscale’ joint called, of all things, the Cheek to Cheek Motel, but it had been a long time coming. Manuel had been drinking too much and doing too many bad drugs for too many years. The collapse of The Band after the Last Waltz movie had been his signal to subside, piece by broken piece, into incoherent misery. Long before the end, the sublime falsetto and the writing had been reduced to scrap. Dylan was entitled to remember the piano player and drummer who had provided the melody for ‘Tears of Rage’ back in Woodstock in 1967, but he kept any fury for the lost Band member to himself. There would be no onstage eulogies from the artist, just more chatter about Tennessee Williams. Manuel, born a lost soul, had in any case left no note. There had been nothing left to say. The shy man might have provided his own last words, in any case, on one overlooked song from The Band’s second album: ‘When you awake,’ it went, ‘you will remember everything.’ Sweet Richard had chosen to forget it all.
The Pacific leg of Dylan’s tour was brief enough. On 10 March, back in Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan hall, he was still paying tribute to ‘a guy who died pretty miserably’, but he was still talking about Lenny Bruce, not Richard Manuel. As he had on every night, the artist was still closing the main part of the show with ‘In the Garden’, a defiantly born-again song from Saved. Where religion was concerned, Dylan had reached the point of all but teasing his audiences, as though asking them to guess what he did and did not believe. Introducing this rewrite of the tale of Christ’s betrayal in Tokyo, he had talked yet again about ‘my hero’, but had also said, as though for the avoidance of doubt, ‘I write songs about all kinds of things.’ That wasn’t factually true, not any more. He was not writing any kind of song worth speaking about, far less songs worth recording.
He had always been a high-wire act. For most of his career it had been no sort of test for Dylan to enter the studios with only the bare bones of a handful of songs at his disposal. Nor had his preparedness provided any sort of guide, for him or anyone else, to the quality of the album he was liable to make. In late 1967 he had gone to Nashville with John Wesley Harding written and ready in its entirety. The album had come off beautifully. In a few days in February and March 1966, in contrast, he had kept musicians waiting for ten hours at a time in the same studios while he scribbled away to conjure up the songs for Blonde on Blonde. The result was hardly one of his lesser works. The conditions necessary for Dylan’s gift to function had rarely depended on the external circumstances in his life. If something was amiss within him, on the other hand, no amount of bravado or improvisation could redeem the work. The puzzle of the 1980s and the succession of flawed, misconceived, or simply bad albums Dylan made in that period lies in deciding what ailed him.
A complicated life? There was nothing new in that. In June of 1986 he would marry Carolyn Dennis and attempt, for a while, to straighten out his tangled existence and raise another child. Though he would make extraordinary efforts to keep wife and baby out of the public eye, he was not entirely indifferent to his responsibilities. Bad habits, then? Estranged friends and lovers, Susan Ross in particular, would later make allegations of alcoholism. Other types of possibly illegal behaviour would be, in slippery tabloid parlance, ‘rumoured’. Even if every story was true, each would amount to a small hill of beans besides the existence Dylan had endured in 1966. Blonde on Blonde had emerged from that hell. Two decades later, the only apposite word would be supplied by the French. Ennui would seem to hang over Dylan like a low, dark cloud. He had been too many people, too often. He had lost himself and recovered himself time and again, but the effort had come at a cost. If his work is any guide, it had all become familiar to him and the returns were diminishing. Even resurrection becomes repetitive, after a while: a triumph is a triumph is a triumph. The same formulation can be applied, no doubt, to catastrophe. The first best guess is that in 1986 Dylan was simply bored with his several selves, bored with the duty of creativity, jaded by spectacle, fatigued by the relentless insistence that he could exist only within the fiction of myth and legend. He had seen that movie before, more than once.
The second best guess at the reasons for Dylan’s very bad albums in the 1980s imposes a liability on God. The artist had given his all to those derided born-again albums. From where he stood, he had placed his art in the service of eternal truth and been mocked and spurned for his pains. That must have been disheartening. But Dylan’s faith had also provided him with a precise measure of what mattered in life and what did not. If you happen to believe sincerely in the Book of Revelation and imminent apocalypse, it must be difficult to take the making of an album of popular songs too seriously. Inevitably you must think that such things are, by definition, pretty trivial. If you have meanwhile given every ounce of your commitment to a profound belief and seen belief and commitment alike rejected, you might cease to give much of a damn for critics, audiences, record companies and a pop-music career founded on a burdensome media ‘myth’. The Bible said, in essence, that Bob Dylan, his ego, art and career, didn’t matter much. So why would the artist strain every nerve for the sake of a mere album?
Besides, for all their bleating and behind-the-hand carping, Columbia were never going to drop him. Biograph was the final proof of that. Even if the company never saw another chart-straddling, revolutionary album, Dylan’s back catalogue was by the middle of the ’80s a semiofficial national treasure. That was the whole meaning of the box set. The fact that the artist made no money to speak of for the shareholders counted for little against his intangible but real worth as the final guarantor of Columbia’s pretensions. The bosses might not fall over themselves to promote his latest efforts, but having Dylan on the roster was a prize in itself. Executives who guaranteed his creative freedom could glow in his lustre and congratulate themselves on their discernment. Even when his work failed to justify the fond belief, he represented quality, art, class. He knew it and the suits knew it. The only fly swimming in the soothing ointment was the fact that this shared knowledge bred utter complacency.
Hence the third best guess at Dylan’s dire efforts in the 1980s: he was under no pressure whatever to succeed. None of his superstar fan-friends whispered the harsh truth about his self-evident decline. No corporate automaton asked about the meaning or purpose of the latest piece of crap to emerge from the studios. Journalists could sneer now and then. Fans could grumble at a sloppy concert while the artist, Petty and the Heartbreakers spent half the show sorting themselves out. Record-buyers could decide that the latest instalment of half-realised Dylan nonsense wasn’t worth the price being asked. But all knew, for a certainty, that he had proved them dead wrong several times before. Few wished to be behind the next curve, however he might choose to describe the arc. So Dylan was indulged. For those astonished by his behaviour, his methods and his risible output in the 1980s, it became a kind of incantation to lift all curses. ‘But,’ someone would always say, ‘he’s Bob Dylan.’
It would not be even slightly surprising, therefore, when better than two years of intermittent effort resulted finally, in July 1986, in the piece of crap he would choose to call Knocked Out Loaded.
*
In the aftermath, he would flog the legend almost to death. That was not necessarily a bad idea. If a myth was what was desired, onlookers would be given an education in how such a thing was made and unmade. He would demolish the monument. There was probably no conscious intent involved, but an act of purgation was required. Dylan would have to destroy himself utterly as a performer and as a recording artist before summoning the will, yet again, to start afresh.
He had staged a few recording sessions in California in the spring of 1986, apparently still convinced that a modern album could be made in a week. The old belief in spontaneity persisted, but apathy also exerted its enervating negative energy. The artist had put in a lot of time, by his lights, on Empire Burlesque. He had tried to make his peace with modern technology and modern techniques. Where had it got him? His 24th attempt was, in that favourite phrase, ‘just another album’, of no great importance in the cosmic scheme of things. Most of the tracks recorded at Skyline Studios in Topanga Canyon on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains at the end of April and the beginning of May had been cover versions. There had been no other choice. Dylan had failed to come up with songs of his own that were worth the name. He had messed around instead, so it had seemed, with anything that came to mind, as though hunting for one bright needle of inspiration in a big, rickety haystack.
After close to a month’s worth of sessions, an album, a real album, had failed to materialise. Dylan had done a lot of work to no avail and a fair bit of drinking in the process, though whether for consolation or inspiration’s sake it is impossible to say. In the end, the thing he called Knocked Out Loaded – alcohol did his talking even in the title – had been compiled rather than created. Bits and pieces from previous sessions, leftovers from Empire Burlesque, cover versions: it was, save in one particular, a pitiful affair. Had it not been for an eleven-minute remake of ‘New Danville Girl’ that he called ‘Brownsville Girl’, Knocked Out Loaded would have amounted to twenty-five minutes of residue containing only two poor songs, ‘Driftin’ Too Far From Shore’ and ‘Maybe Someday’, that Dylan had succeeded in writing without help. The two he had contrived with Tom Petty and the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager were equally bad. The best way to describe Knocked Out Loaded is to say that it took either nerve or sheer, demoralised indifference to release the thing. What once would have been unacceptable to the artist was by mid-1986 the best he could manage.
‘Brownsville Girl’ was the only beacon in the gathering darkness. The phenomenon it represented would become another feature of Dylan’s work in the 1980s. No matter how awful the album, there was always something, always a track or two to set you wondering what might have been. You had to be a resolute and determined fan, however, to buy an entire record for the sake of a couple of songs. By this point, most of the artist’s long-lost former admirers were not prepared to be short-changed so outrageously. Knocked Out Loaded would get no higher than number 54 in America. In Britain, where fans had been so reflexively loyal for so long, it became the first of Dylan’s works since 1973’s Dylan, a collection for which he could not be held responsible, to fail to penetrate the top 20. The British had taken Saved and Shot of Love to their trusting hearts, but not this. Those who did bother to purchase Knocked Out Loaded, the thrawn coterie who bought new Bob Dylan albums simply because they were new Bob Dylan albums, spent a long time listening, over and over, to a single track.
By one description, ‘Brownsville Girl’ is a movie within a movie about a movie. It draws a parallel between a life’s faltering memories and half-remembered films. One voice begins by talking about standing in line to see an old Gregory Peck picture, The Gunfighter (1950), and then lurches off into his own disjointed road movie, one in which stories seem to begin and fall apart time and again. Everything is visual, a mental picture: ‘I keep seeing this stuff; ‘I can still see the day’; ‘There was a movie I seen one time’. In the original ‘New Danville Girl’ the idea was deepened, yet perhaps made too obvious, with an explicit evocation of Plato’s analogy of the cave, the philosopher’s account of how we perceive and understand reality, and a reference to people ‘busy talkin’ back and forth to our shadows on the old stone wall’. This is a song, furthermore, ‘about’ the experience of loss that connects the idea of emotional distance with physical distances travelled. Borders (and lines) are crossed. The travelling is meanwhile desperate and apparently aimless. The haunted – and hunted – couple are seen tearing over the Rockies at sunrise, driving all night to San Antonio, heading for Amarillo, in flight from the law in Corpus Christi, parting in New Orleans. All the while, the singer is drawn back to Peck’s movies, to some lost code of honour from a time ‘long before the stars were torn down’.
This recitative, sung only in choruses that seem to intervene in no fixed pattern, is beautifully written and performed, for the only time on Knocked Out Loaded, as though Dylan actually believes in the material. Great lines are scattered throughout the song. Lines such as, ‘Oh, if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.’ Lines such as, ‘The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.’ ‘Brownsville Girl’ is arguably a lesser work than ‘New Danville Girl’, but that is ultimately a matter of disputable opinion. The production, according to taste, can sound overloaded; the backing singers – named the Queens of Rhythm by Dylan – can seem too intrusive. On the other hand, these gospel and soul performers are acting as a chorus in the Greek style: there is a point to their presence. Sometimes their mocking interventions are very funny. Dylan’s own speaking/singing is meanwhile masterly. Wonderful lines in the song only truly make sense when he delivers them. Shepard, as a playwright and scriptwriter, understood as much. At one point in the writing process, it seems, he asked wonderingly how Dylan could possibly perform the enormously long lines of ‘New Danville Girl’. The artist simply told him not to worry about it. In either version, he justifies that confidence.
Who wrote what? As with Desire and Dylan’s collaborations with Jacques Levy, it is impossible to say. Neither writer has spilled those beans. Much of the ambience of ‘Brownsville Girl’ is reminiscent of Shepard’s Motel Chronicles (1982) and of Paris, Texas (1984), the Wim Wenders movie (appropriately enough) partly inspired by the book and co-written by the playwright. Equally, much of the dialogue in the song and its delivery could be no one else but Dylan. That aspect of his art, its sheer inimitability, was what he stood to lose as he drifted rudderless through the 1980s. It would be a long time before he produced anything as fine as ‘Brownsville Girl’ again.
*
He was back on the road with Petty and the Heartbreakers in the summer of ‘86. Knocked Out Loaded appeared and disappeared and no one much cared. The concerts, on the other hand, went pretty well. Dylan’s choices among his songs were odd enough to be intriguing, with everything from ‘Positively 4th Street’ to ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ surfacing alongside ‘In the Garden’ and numerous cover versions, familiar or obscure. The artist seemed to be enjoying himself, too, as though happy to be hiding out in the wide open spaces of anonymous amphitheatres. Dylan was barely a recording artist in any serious sense and had all but ceased to be a songwriter. He had reason to prefer hedonism. By no accident, a favourite encore on the tour was the venerable ‘Let the Good Times Roll’.
In the early autumn of the year he travelled to England to participate in a catastrophe of a movie entitled Hearts of Fire, a drama intended by its director, Richard Marquand, as a ‘study’ of stardom. Instead, it resembled a parody of every lame rock and roll movie cliché ever to stain celluloid, one in which Dylan played a parody of himself as the reclusive veteran superstar ‘Billy Parker’. It soon became clear that his acting had not improved much with the years, but the malformed script was no aid to performance. In America, the feature went, as industry shorthand had it, ‘straight to video’, sparing discerning customers the waste of a night out. Of more immediate importance was the fact that Dylan had agreed to come up with at least four and possibly six new and original songs for the film’s soundtrack. In the event, he managed, barely managed, just two. The best way to describe ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’ and ‘Night After Night’ is to say that they could cause you seriously to doubt that Bob Dylan actually wrote them. The second of the pair begins: ‘Night after night you wander the streets of my mind.’
Towards the end of the Hearts of Fire shoot the artist traded dialogue with a BBC crew for a piece the documentary makers would entitle Getting to Dylan.12 It was a clever title. He had acted out the role of the unapproachable star and made it devilishly hard for his interrogators to get anywhere near him for weeks, finally dragging them all the way to Toronto, where parts of his movie were being shot. They retaliated slyly with the suggestion that some of the things getting to the artist were not necessarily doing him a world of good. At times Dylan seemed to have a bad cold, for example, a condition that came and went unpredictably. At other moments the idea that anyone could get through to him on any real human level, person to person, straight question and straight answer, was mocked by his affectless demeanour while he sat fidgeting in his movie-star trailer. Just as in the mid-’60s, Dylan’s entire effort went into remaining resolutely unforthcoming, but on this occasion his idea of postmodern mockery was to sketch his interviewer, fail to take enquiries about his work seriously, and affect no interest in anything, in general or in particular. The impression given was that it was no affectation.
The first of two encounters for the documentary team had barely begun before Dylan was laying down his perverse rules. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know, I’m not gonna say anything that you’re gonna get any revelations about . . . It’s not gonna happen.’ His songwriting? ‘I just write ‘em.’ Politics? Yet again, Dylan claimed to be baffled by the very meaning of the word. His public? ‘Nobody knows me and I don’t know them.’ By the end, he was resorting to old press-conference tricks from a previous life. ‘Well, gimme an answer,’ he demanded at one point, ‘and I’ll say it.’
Once upon a time, that kind of thing had seemed like a street-smart tease in the face of fatuous enquiries. This time around Dylan looked and sounded as though he truly had no answers, as though jadedness had become pathological. Worse, he behaved as if he was perfectly, coldly content with his condition. At no point did he attempt to explain why this poor, put-upon star, this legend (and so forth) reduced to playing in a second-rate melodrama because his albums no longer sold, was bothering to talk to anyone at all. The fires had been doused.
In February 1987, Dylan turned up in Los Angeles at a Taj Mahal concert, then at a Warren Zevon session where there was a need for a harmonica player. In March, he sang a George Gershwin song, ‘Soon’, at a Brooklyn Academy of Music affair to mark the half-century that had passed since the composer’s death. Dylan was by then four years older than Gershwin had been at his passing. The paradigmatic Jewish musical genius had composed Rhapsody in Blue when he was only 26, An American in Paris before he was 30 and Porgy and Bess when he was just 37. Dylan was not the only dazzling meteor ever sighted in the American firmament. In his short life, Gershwin had not wasted a day and had never succumbed to self-indulgence, to self-pity, or to lethargy. Dylan’s creative inertness had become his public image.
The only important mystery attached to the recording sessions for the work Dylan would call Down in the Groove is why he bothered. It was an album made to fail, predestined, if that’s the word, to have not a prayer. The artist could only have justified this exercise if his intention had been to inform the world that his talent was extinguished. At least 30 musicians were called to the scene of the crime, but not one among them could crack the case. The likes of Mark Knopfler and Sly and Robbie, who knew something about the artist and his methods, could not provide him with a clue. Superstar peers such as Eric Clapton and Jerry Garcia could not revive the corpse. Paul Simonon and Steven Jones, those jobbing punk survivors of The Clash and the Pistols, could shed no light on the mystery. Unlike Knocked Out Loaded, the nadir before the nadir, there would not even be that one song to treasure, that single sliver of hope, in the wreckage named Down in the Groove.
Even Columbia paused over this one. In fact, the company paused for an entire year. Efforts to record the album began in March and ended in June, but the 32 minutes retrieved from the debacle would not see the light until the end of May 1988. Dylan would juggle with what he had during that long hiatus, altering the running order, inserting a couple of previously discarded failures of his own as though throwing damp twigs onto dying embers. It made no important difference. The album would reach number 61 on the American album chart and only get so high because, miraculously, there were still handfuls of customers refusing to believe that Dylan was incapable, finally, of repaying their faith.
It is almost redundant to discuss Down in the Groove, like recycling waste paper for a thesis on waste paper. Of ten tracks, only two were the artist’s own work. One was ‘Death Is Not the End’, the song that buyers of Infidels had been spared for the sound reason that the writer had insulted the memory of his talent before getting around to insulting the audience. It begins:
When you’re sad and when you’re lonely
And you haven’t got a friend
Just remember that death is not the end
The other original piece offered by the world’s greatest songwriter was ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, one of the works he had struggled to contrive for Hearts of Fire. It no more needs to be quoted here than it needed to be recorded. Remarkably, however, neither song is quite as bad as the pair Dylan devised with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead when he was trying to mend the mesh in his shredded net. The artist would come to have a bizarre attachment to the piece called ‘Silvio’, even sanctioning its release as a single in 1988. It seems he liked it. An alternative view is that the track is objectively hateful and infallibly, almost supernaturally irritating. It is redeemed somewhat only by the fact that its companion piece is worse. Officially, Dylan was to blame for just the music, but he was entirely responsible for performing a song called ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’ and putting it on an album. The full measure of what Down in the Groove signified is that he could come up with nothing, nothing at all, better than this piece of stupefying nonsense.
The album’s cover versions are blameless by comparison. The fact that Dylan discarded a couple of those while tinkering with the sequencing has even allowed a few of his blindly loyal fans to misapply the weasel’s favourite word to the entire farrago. Down in the Groove is, apparently, ‘underrated’, a misunderstood and overlooked ‘classic’. One answer to that claim would be this: underrated only by anyone who has heard several hundred other Bob Dylan recordings. The album’s single saving grace is a good performance of the traditional ‘Shenandoah’. There was a clue in that fact, had Dylan been paying attention.
*
His legal contest with the hovering ghost of Albert Grossman, that other reminder of past glories, was dragging towards its end while the flotsam of Down in the Groove was being lashed together. The Bear himself had died of a heart attack on a Concorde flight to London in January 1986, but his widow, Sally, had elected to carry on the fight on behalf of the Grossman estate. In May 1987, Dylan sanctioned an out-of-court settlement that cost him a couple of million dollars but got him what he truly wanted, the publishing rights to his own work. In essence, the deal was a recognition of the familiar distinction between justice and law. Albert’s moral right to own any part of those songs had been as questionable as the percentages he had extracted at every turn from his young client’s earnings. On the other hand, as the settlement in effect recognised, the contracts had been sound enough in law. Grossman had been ruthless, but not stupid. Dylan, trapped all those years later in an era when he was barely able to string a verse together, had won full ownership of the art he had made when songs had flowed from him like prophecies from an entranced oracle. That must have made for a strange moment in the spring of 1987.
His next move was stranger still. Fans of the Grateful Dead were, as they remain, almost as fixedly dedicated as fans of Bob Dylan. Among devotees, for whom the name Deadheads has long seemed apt both as a description and a definition, the band possessed a significance – arrived at through a lot of drugs, a lot more hippie twaddle and a seemingly infinite tolerance for the zero-sum pastime called jamming beyond any music they happened to play. On a good day, that was pedestrian, sometimes achieving the heights of tiresome. On a bad day, what with the drugs, the Dead were inept, relentlessly so. They talked a good song, however, and there is no denying their inexplicable popularity. Some of those stoned Deadheads spent their lives travelling from show to show.
Like everyone else for whom credibility mattered, the band were big Bob Dylan fans. The artist meanwhile counted the band’s guitar player, Jerry Garcia, as a friend. He also had a respect, for reasons best known to himself, for the lyrics of Robert Hunter. None of these facts counted as a sound enough basis for a collaboration. Nor was the money, even the very large amount of money, that Dylan accepted for agreeing to six shows with the Dead collective in the biggest stadiums available in July much of an excuse. We can only presume that he wanted cash quickly to pay off the widow Grossman. That kind of motive is not often worth confusing with artistic inspiration.
There are, as usual, bootleg recordings of the tour rehearsals staged at a place called Club Front in San Rafael, California, in June. Copies of these are often extensive, not to say endless – in such matters, the word ‘complete’ on packaging counts as fair warning – but they have the merit of showing Dylan being nudged into attempting songs he had long ignored. Left to his own devices, he would probably not have considered John Wesley Harding songs such as ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ or ‘The Wicked Messenger’. Equally, for whatever reason, he had never paid attention to the likes of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ or ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’. At San Rafael he was even talked into essaying ‘Joey’, the disputable Desire song he had written with Jacques Levy. That was the good news, all of the good news. From the desultory bootleg recordings can be heard the approaching sounds of a disaster in the making.
In this period the artist had at least one vice in common with his new colleagues. They had always been relaxed in their attitude towards what was good enough for the public, apparently believing that if they were entranced by their ramshackle efforts the customers would feel the same way. A faith that, some of the time at least, things would somehow ‘come together’ on stage was part of the price audiences were expected to pay. By 1987, Dylan had acquired the same view. Add the fact that the Grateful Dead loved his songs but seemed utterly incapable of understanding how the artist achieved a performance, in his better moments, and the script for a real farce was written. Deadheads were numerous; big crowds could be guaranteed. But the alliance was so inherently foolish, its basis so fragile, a humiliation for Dylan was certain.
So it proved. On the inevitable concert bootlegs the following can be heard: one famous songwriter struggling to find the melodic line, never mind the heart, of song after song; one cult band operating below even their modest best; and two acts occupying the same stage who each seem, often enough, to be unaware of the presence of the other. A decent live album might yet have been salvaged. Six big shows would surely have yielded seven tracks fit to be released. In one set of post hoc excuses that claim would be made and Dylan would get the blame for dumping some of the least-bad recordings. The truth is that nothing in the material discarded would have improved the album entitled Dylan & the Dead when it was released finally in February 1989. The critical consensus then would be uncomplicated: if this was the best, God help the rest. Should you ever wish, with malign intent, to deter a prospective young fan from taking an interest in Bob Dylan, play him or her a couple of the San Rafael bootleg tracks, then this dead-and-barely-alive set.
*
Years later, Dylan would say that 1987 was almost the end of him as a performer. He might have been trying to fool the public, but he was not fooling himself. In 2001, John Farley of Time magazine would be told: ‘At that point, I was just going to get out of it and everything that entails.’ Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio would hear in 2004 of how ‘I really didn’t feel like my heart was in it much any more.’13 Perhaps so, but Dylan still crossed the Atlantic to spend September and half of October on tour once again with Tom Petty and his band. During an interview with Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in Jerusalem on the eve of the second concert the artist was observed to be drinking with relentless, practised ease. On stage that night he looked haggard and uncertain in his movements. The concerts were not well received in Israel, though they would improve as the artist dragged himself across Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, back to Italy and Switzerland, then to France and Belgium, and finally to England. But even the improvements would not be to every taste.
Bob Dylan could still justify three nights in Birmingham and four nights at the Wembley Arena. Whether he could still justify himself, or do justice to songs he no longer understood, was another story, a tale growing darker as age and time pressed in upon him. As he would confess in due course in his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One, the songs had become ‘strangers’ to him. Why, in truth, did people continue to turn out for concerts by this performer? Just for a glimpse of what still passed for a legend? And was that enough, in turn, for him?
He had called the tour Temples in Flames, as though passing his own judgement on desecrated monuments. In Locarno in Switzerland on 5 October, while concealing himself among the backing vocalists, he had experienced what he would remember as a strange, daunting moment of self-awareness. Years later, one who was present at one of the Wembley shows would describe Dylan’s performance as ‘an inspired vandalisation, brutal and challenging, a scorched earth triumph, charred and astonishing’, but admit that many other fans were appalled or infuriated by what had been done to the songs.14 In The Observer, the BBC disc jockey John Peel would write: ‘Being an enigma at 20 is fun, being an enigma at 30 shows a lack of imagination, and being an enigma at Dylan’s age is just plain daft. . . From the moment the living legend took to the stage, it was evident that here was business he wanted accomplished with the minimum of effort.’15
He was pulling the temple down around his ears. It might have counted as creative destruction, as an artist’s defiant gesture, but sometimes explanations are no better than rationalisations. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would explain that after the European concerts he had planned a touring schedule with the deliberate intention of alienating his older fans. Somehow they were to be replaced with a younger crowd on the grounds – you can only admire the gall of this rationalising writer – that his traditional audience was no longer up to the task of appreciating his shows. If that was the plan, it would be postponed. As the book tells it, Dylan sustained a ‘freak’ injury that left his hand gashed. The wound is described as serious and painful, injurious to his body and his hopes, but the dates and details are vague.
Early in 1988, Dylan would distract himself for a while as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, a kind of musical club for superstar hobbyists of a certain vintage, as though to prove there was nothing more pressing on his mind than messing around with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Petty and Jeff Lynne. The gang would give themselves silly names – Dylan would be ‘Lucky’, supposedly – and manage to come up with an album full of inoffensive music that would fare far better than any of the artist’s recent works. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 would in fact sell many more copies than any album Dylan had ever made. His chief contribution would be a fairly sharp song, its lyrics a parody of Bruce Springsteen, complete with the appropriate allusions, entitled ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.
It was out on Thunder Road, Tweeter at the wheel
They crashed into paradise, they could hear them tires squeal
The undercover cop pulled up and said everyone of you’s a liar
If you don’t surrender now it’s gonna go down to the wire
The song was adequate, if that was your taste, though clearly the writer did not take it seriously. Why would he? In January 1988 he had been ‘inducted’ into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a big ceremony in New York. Springsteen had given a passionate speech in tribute that had sounded only a little like a requiem. For all his rhetoric and for all his affected disdain, the artist accepted the world’s baubles readily enough. He seemed not to notice that such honours sometimes come at the end of a career.
These things filled up his time. In essence, it was all little better than displacement activity. Dylan’s real problem was that he was going through these motions because he did not know what else to do.