Well, how does it feel?
There's only one person in pop who is not fascinated by the myth of Bob
Dylan - and that's Bob Dylan. Now approaching 60 and with an Oscar in his
grasp, he remains infuriating and elusive. What keeps him keeping on?
SEAN O'HAGAN
mg.co.za
t's not a question of breaking the rules, don't you understand?" the
25-year-old, amphetamine-fuelled, stick thin, impossibly cool Bob Dylan
told his biographer Robert Shelton in 1966. "I don't break rules
because I don't see any rules to break. As far as I'm concerned there
aren't any rules."
As a statement of intent, it was suitably fearless, consummately self-confident
and, as pop history would prove, utterly self-fulfilling. It was also Dylan willing
himself into pop history as the first avatar of a new kind of cool, the first truly
modern pop icon, standing, unchallenged, at the epicentre of a seismic pop
cultural shift, the reverberations of which are still being felt today.
And, back then, of course, Bob Dylan was breaking all the rules, and doing it
with a momentum that was both breathtaking and almost arrogantly casual in
its iconoclasm. He was not a new Elvis Presley, oozing untrammelled sexual
energy, speaking the inchoate language of pure rock and roll. He was
something else entirely; something new, unforeseen: a visionary, a surrealist
of sorts.
"What made you decide to go the rock and roll route?" Nat Hentoff asked him
in a famously suppressed 1966 interview for Playboy. To which Dylan
answered: "Carelessness."
From the start though, as the unlikely self-styled heir to dustbowl balladeer
Woody Guthrie, Dylan was someone who saw the bigger picture, and his
place within it. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, son of a middle-class Jewish
shopkeeper, in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 he grew up in Hibbing, a mining
area already in terminal decline that would later become the setting for songs
like North Country Blues. In 1959 he attended the University of Minnesota,
where he immersed himself in the burgeoning coffee-house folk circuit.
There, he changed his name in homage, he said later, to the western hero
Matt Dillon. By 1962 Dillon had become Dylan, in deference to Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas.
After dropping out of college he lived in Dinkytown, the bohemian quarter of
Minneapolis, and absorbed the heady atmosphere of the time: beat poetry,
radical politics and protest folk. Around this time, too, Dylan started
reinventing his past, passing himself off as a hobo musician in the mould of
his hero, Guthrie. In 1960 he made a pilgrimage to New York, turning up
unannounced at the ailing singer's house. They talked; the baton of history
and tradition was passed, and the following year, on his spartan, eponymous
debut album, Dylan recorded Song To Woody, a farewell song to his mentor.
By 1964 he had triumphed at the Newport Folk Festival, formed a romantic
liaison with Joan Baez, leading light of American musical liberalism, and
recorded The Times They Are a-Changin', an album that pushed him into the
vanguard of the protest folk movement. The following year, though, he
released Another Side of Bob Dylan, which included My Back Pages, another
farewell song, with the refrain, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than
that now". This time he was saying goodbye to the folk genre he had done so
much to revitalise.
In DA Pennebaker's film of his 1965 British tour, Don't Look Back, Dylan is
restless, confined, cool to the point of dismissive of those around him. You
can see Baez shrinking into the background, as a newer, more ruthless Dylan
emerges: a man with a mission to rearrange the contours of the popular song,
to make history by riding roughshod over the past.
Even he, though, could not have anticipated the furore and the scenes of
mixed up confusion that would attend his reinvention as a rock demi-god.
When he walked on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, trailing a hastily
assembled pick-up band and carrying an electric guitar the way some people
carried a gun, nonchalantly but with latent intent, the world of pop shifted on
its axis.
To howls of disapproval and disbelief that were to be echoed across the US
and Britain on his subsequent tour with the Hawks, (soon to become The
Band), Dylan single-highhandedly blasted protest folk, a form he had already
redefined, into oblivion.
In 1965 and 1966 he unleashed a clutch of songs that were nothing short of
revelatory: the jangled-up thrust of Subterranean Homesick Blues; the rolling,
tumbling electric poetry of Like A Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street; the
cryptic, multi-layered allusion of Visions of Johanna. These were brash,
fearless, declamatory songs, that, in their majestic newness, heralded the
birth of the modern rock era and the end of the pop song as a signifier of a
certain kind of teen innocence. This "wild mercury sound", as Dylan would
later describe it, was the sound of the future breaking, confused and
uncertain and unstoppable.
In retrospect we can see how this
new, electric music and strange,
druggy poetry, surging along on the
momentum of discovery, pitched
popular music, lyrically and tonally,
into a brave new world where, to one
degree or another, it has remained ever since. A world where the humble pop
song, until then a vehicle for untainted romance and a certain kind of
inarticulate but potent teen frustration, suddenly became a medium of infinite
possibility. This intense mid-Sixties burst of creativity has remained
unmatched in modern music.
The young Dylan rewrote the rules of pop like no one before or since, and,
one way or another, we have been living with the legacy ever since.
And so, of course, has he.
"Everybody works in the shadow of what they have previously done," he said
in 1989, "but you have to overcome that." More than any other postwar
performer, Bob Dylan has done his best to demolish his own mythology, at
first retreating into blissful domesticity in rural Woodstock in the late Sixties,
then doing his best to simply ignore his iconic standing throughout the
Seventies, then actively dismantling it in the Eighties with certain records that
were so ugly and unlistenable, so perfunctory and perverse, even the most
obsessive Dylanologist - and, believe me, there is no bore like a Dylan bore -
had to shake their head and cover their ears in dismay.
"Bob took his art so low," his one-time accomplice Cesar Diaz once remarked,
"that all he had to do to come back was just to throw out a signal that he was
still alive."
Along the way, too, he has embraced cocaine and booze, Judaism and
born-again Christianity, the latter with a self-righteous fervour that astonished
and alienated all but his most faithful fans. And, latterly, he has toured and
toured, and then toured some more, as if over-familiarity, alongside a wilful
perversity when it comes to the choosing and reinterpreting of his own songs,
might dispel the myth. He has toured so much it made him ill. Then, having
recovered, he has toured some more. If he wasn't playing somewhere on
Sunday night, it was only because he was picking up an Oscar for Best Song
(for Things Have Changed from The Wonder Boys).
It has been that way for the past 10 years or more: a series of ever-changing
performances - Dylan never plays the same song the same way twice - in a
series of depressingly similar, soul-destroying mid-size arenas across the
globe. The Never Ending Tour, he calls it, without a trace of irony.
"A lot of people don't like the road," he said in 1997, "but it's as natural to me
as breathing. It's the only place you can be who you want to be. I don't want to
put on the mask of celebrity. I'd rather just do my work and see it as a trade."
" I don't want to put on the mask of celebrity." Think about that for a moment.
Then think how long Dylan has thought about it. He said it when he was 56 -
30 years after retreating from his initial celebrity (though it was not called that
back then), and after a decade of dogged globetrotting in pursuit of some
ideal of ubiquitous anonymity. He must surely have had John Updike's darkly
prescient remark echoing in his head: "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the
face."
For a while back there, when Dylan shows had reached a nadir of sorts in the
bleak, sleek Eighties, he even took to appearing on stage behind a mask, his
kohl-rimmed eyes staring out of a haggard face caked in pale make-up. I am
a performer, he seemed to be saying, not a myth; an actor, not a celebrity.
And in a way, through sheer force of will, he has hauled himself to a place
that is outside of, or beyond, what we now understand by the word "celebrity".
In his often startling sleeve notes to 1993's World Gone Wrong album - one
of what I would call the great critically misunderstood Bob Dylan albums,
alongside 1969's Nashville Skyline and 1979's Slow Train Coming - he wrote,
apropos of the traditional song, Stack A Lee: "What does the song say
exactly? It says no man gains immortality through public acclaim ... fame is a
trick."
What World Gone Wrong, like many of Dylan's late albums, spoke of most
loudly, though, was his disgust at the world, and the world of pop culture in
particular. Bob Dylan, as he has told us over and over again, in one way or
another, does not fit. Bob Dylan belongs somewhere else: outside of pop,
outside of fame, outside, even, of time as it is now measured in pop terms.
And yet, Bob Dylan lives on in pop, and pop legend: inviolate, iconic and
enduringly mysterious, despite himself.
"I'd rather just do my work and see it as a trade." This, too, is where Dylan is
at right now. His view of his work, and, by extension, of himself, is as wildly out
of step with the broad thrust of contemporary pop culture as his self-styled
"wild mercury sound" was with the prevailing tameness of the pre-electric pop
Sixties. Again, he wills it this way.
Whatever else his trawling through beliefs, styles and traditions, and his
myriad often grotesque re-readings of his own classics may tell us, they
speak most loudly of a sustained restlessness, a refusal to stay put, in
musical terms, but, more importantly, in terms of pop history's idea of him.
He is governed by the true artist's dictum, which, as the poet Paul Muldoon
points out, was best articulated by Yeats's line, "Myself I must remake". Thus,
Dylan keeps on moving, tries his best not to stand still long enough to be
canonised, or reduced - and, in a way, they are the same things - by pop
history and pop tradition as it is defined by a now middle-aged industry intent
on endless, essentially insecure self-aggrandisement.
When Dylan, looking not so much uncomfortable as demoralised, reluctantly
received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1991 Grammys, he held it at
arm's length like a diseased rag and made the most cryptic yet chillingly
apposite short acceptance speech ever: "My daddy once said to me, he said,
'Son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this world that your own
Mother and Father will abandon you. If that happens, God will believe in your
own ability to mend your own ways'."
God will believe in your own ability to mend your ways . That is so effortlessly
Dylanesque, yet so dripping in Biblical resonances, you have to wonder
whether he ad-libbed it or rehearsed it in his head beforehand. Either way, his
response speaks of a profound distaste for the trappings of contemporary
music culture, and a healthy disregard for the protocol of pop's industry-led
celebration of itself.
The late period Dylan, like the early Dylan, but in an altogether different way,
is a moralist. Disgust, though, has replaced righteous anger just as
iconoclasm has long since given way to wilful perversity.
Dylan the contrary first surfaced after his initial flight from fame in 1966.
Riding his beloved motorcycle to the repair shop in Woodstock, he came off
on a corner, was knocked unconscious and taken to hospital wearing a neck
brace. The accident turned out to be not that serious, but the ensuing
year-long silence from Dylan fuelled rumours that he had been seriously hurt,
even disfigured. In his absence, the myth grew accordingly. The chastened
singer, meanwhile, retreated behind the gates of his rambling house in
Woodstock in upstate New York.
He had just completed his gruelling 1966 tour, every electrified performance a
battle of wills with an audience still in thrall to his increasingly labyrinthine, but
reassuringly acoustic, songs; an audience unknowingly resisting the tidal
sway of pop history, who were playing out an age-old drama centring on the
battle between the almost new and the truly, terrifyingly new.
Combative concert performances like the one captured on the now infamous
Manchester Free Trade Hall bootleg, where one irate audience member cries
out "Judas" just before the thunderous intro to Like A Rolling Stone, had left
Dylan and The Band exhausted and demoralised, limping back to America
without the stamina, nor indeed the will, to persevere with their great sonic
adventure.
In Pennebaker's unreleased tour film, Eat the Document, a visibly strung-out
Dylan trades acid one-liners with John Lennon in the back of a limo before
suddenly turning pale and pleading with the driver to take them back to the
hotel. He looks wounded and fragile, panicky and close to breakdown, the
psychic cost of his unparalleled surge of creativity visible in every twitch and
stammer.
Behind Dylan the icon, the arbiter of new cool, behind that mask of seeming
invincibility, there was an uncertain, even desolate individual. "People live with
hope for green trees and beautiful flowers," his first serious girlfriend, Suze
Rotolo, would later say of this time, "but Dylan seems to lack that simple hope,
at least he did from 1964 to 1966. This darkness wasn't new to me, but it
became stronger as the years passed by."
The motorcycle crash, though not serious, seems to have pulled him back
from a bigger abyss. For a while, as the pop world waited for guidance from
its most revered sage, Dylan, approaching 30, found solace in the simple
comforts of home and hearth. Outside, America raged in a fitful war with itself;
the psychedelic era, which he had prefigured as far back as 1965 with Mr
Tambourine Man, came and went while Dylan rediscovered his folk roots and
delved deep into country.
A plushly packaged photographic book, Dylan in Woodstock by Elliot Landy,
surfaced last year: it shows a bucolic family man, his hair and beard trimmed,
his filled-out features smiling mischievously for the camera.
Whether bouncing on a trampoline in his back garden or shopping at the local
store, Dylan, looking like a country rabbi, seems for once utterly content, free
from the weight of his own myth, at one with himself. He has never seemed
anywhere near as content since.
The root of his enduring unhappiness, it would appear, lies in his divorce in
1977 from his long-suffering wife, Sara, mother of five of his children. Their
protracted break-up followed a long, volatile period where Dylan's immersion
in booze, cocaine and a series of casual adulteries fractured the short-lived
calm of the family-centred Woodstock years.
Both 1975's Blood on the Tracks, his last truly great album, and its
successor, Desire (1976), had mapped out his obsessive devotion to Sara
who, even as he let her slip away, exerted an almost mystical hold on him.
She remains an enduring muse, and seems as palpably present on his most
recent album, 1999's Time Out of Mind, as she did on the plaintive lost love
song that bore her name on Desire.
For a while, the void left by Sara's departure was filled by reckless, seemingly
obsessive womanising: he even shacked up briefly with their children's nanny.
By 1979, and the release of Slow Train Coming, it was clear that another
unlikely shift of consciousness had occurred: Dylan had done the unthinkable
and embraced born-again Christianity.
On the subsequent triumvirate of Christian albums, Saved (1980), Shot of
Love (1981) and Infidels (1984), he raged and fulminated against the
wickedness of the world and the folly of those who did not share his
post-conversion world view.
His performances, uneven at the best of times, were now punctuated with long
semi-extemporised, disturbingly self-righteous sermons. The master of irony
and symbolism had, for a time at least, become a born-again bore.
"Happiness is not on my list of priorities," he told a reporter in 1986. "I just
deal with day-to-day things... it's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either
blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, 'Blessed is the man who walketh not
in the counsel of the ungodly'."
And yet sparks of greatness remained. Today, Slow Train Coming has, as the
initial shock of its unfashionable, god-fearing message has faded, come to be
regarded as a powerful if uneasy testament. A God album that manages to
sound as bitter and twisted, and indeed ungodly, as some of his old
spleen-venting songs like Positively 4th Street. On Shot of Love he sang
Every Grain of Sand, a secular song that, for me, stands head and shoulders
in its craft and spare poetry above many of the inflated, symbolist outpourings
like Desolation Row, which always seem, bafflingly, to precipitate those weary
old Is Dylan Better Than Keats? debates that surface from the bowels of
academia every so often.
The late period Dylan, too, has surprised all but the most faithful: 1989's No
Mercy, and 1999's Time Out of Mind, garnered ecstatic reviews, though the
consensual chorus of approval that greeted the latter album, which followed
on his recent health scare and hospitalisation, seemed to suggest a collective
mild hysteria rather than reasoned thinking. Last year's European tour,
though, often approached the revelatory, despite Dylan looking frail and
suddenly old on stage, his gaunt frame in silhouette a cruel echo of the
stick-thin, seemingly immortal Dylan circa 1966.
Thus, he perseveres, changes, yet remains essentially the same: a voyager,
an artist following no one's rules but his own. In a strange but no doubt
conscious way he has become his heroes - the old folk singers and gospel
singers, the itinerant balladeers and bluesmen whose legacy of love songs,
death ballads, spirituals and moral tales he steeped himself in as a teenager
in Hibbing, Minnesota.
The endless touring, the insistence that performance is a job like any other,
that music is essentially a craft that must be practised, honed, forever
reinvented, are old-fashioned ideals. Their currency precedes a time not just
before samplers and digital recordings, but before pop as we know it.
Dylan at 60 seems to be saying what he has always, even at his most
self-destructive, said: that he is part of a longer, deeper lineage, that
encompasses the whole sweep of American music, of American experience as
it was rendered through the ballad, the blues song, and the folk song, as well
as the pop song.
He is bigger than pop, and his music is bigger than any of these generic
terms. In his ragged voice, and in the range of his poetry, from the freeform
surrealism of that iconoclastic mid-Sixties moment when he was young and
fearless, to the busted, frail beauty of a song like the valedictory Not Dark
Yet, you can hear echoes of other American poets like Herman Melville and
Woody Guthrie, Mark Twain and Robert Johnson; you can hear echoes of
America, old and young, innocent and defamed.
And Dylan, in his way, is as unfathomable and indefinable as America itself.
When he was asked by a journalist in 1985 whom he would like to interview,
he plucked, as if from thin air, names like Hank Williams, Apollinaire and Paul
the Apostle.
"I'd like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind,"
he explained, "who left people for ages with nothing to do but speculate."
He could have included himself at the top of that list. As he approaches 60,
one feels that the speculation is only just beginning. In an age where music
has all but surrendered its ability to startle, Dylan remains the template for a
certain, increasingly rare, kind of artistic reinvention: endless, ongoing,
unpredictable. Long may he continue to question our assumptions about the
Bob Dylan we think we know.
-- The Mail&Guardian, April 5, 2001. |
