The Wanderer
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, May 10, 1999.
If you look through what has been written about Bob Dylan in the last thirty-odd years, you notice a desire for him to die off, so that his younger self can assume its mythic place. When he had his famous motorcycle mishap in 1966, at the age of twenty-five, it was assumed that his career had come to a sudden end: rumors had him killed or maimed, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. In 1978, after the fiasco of “Renaldo and Clara,” Dylan’s four-hour art film, the Village Voice said: “I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times….Just the immutable facts.” James Wolcott was unhappy to find him still kicking in 1985: “My God, he sounds as if he could go on grinding out this crap forever.” When Dylan was hospitalized with a chest infection in 1997, newspapers ran practice obituaries: “Bob Dylan, who helped transform pop music more than thirty years ago when he electrified folk music....”; “Bob Dylan, whose bittersweet love songs and politically tinged folk anthems made him an emblem of the nineteen-sixties counterculture....”
I’m at the Puyallup Fair, in the agricultural suburb of Puyallup, Washington, where the attractions include Elmer, a twenty-four-hundred-pound Red Holstein cow; a miniature haunted house ingeniously mounted on the back of a truck; bingo with Hoovers for prizes; and Bob Dylan. He is announced, with cheesy gusto, as “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” He saunters from the shadows in the back of the stage, indistinguishable at first from the rest of the band (a well-honed group consisting of Tony Garnier, Larry Campbell, Bucky Baxter, and David Kemper). He is dressed in a grey-and-black Nashville getup and looks like a lopsided owl. He tries a few cautious Chuck Berry moves, wiggling his eyebrows at no one in particular. He plays five numbers from his most recent album, "Time Out Of Mind"; several hits, among them "Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright" and "Masters of War"; and something unexpected from his five-hundred-song back catalogue — "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." He ends with “Forever Young.” The crowd goes wild.
When I told people that I was going to follow Dylan on the road, I got various bemused reactions. Some were surprised to hear that he still played in public at all. It's easier, perhaps, to picture him in Citizen Kane-like seclusion, glowering at the Bible and listening to the collected works of Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps he does, but he also plays more than a hundred shows every year. Last year, he appeared in Buenos Aires, Nuremberg, Brisbane, Saskatoon, and Bristol, Tennessee, among other places. Starting in June, he will pass through thirty American cities, with Paul Simon in tow. As of this writing, he is in Slovenia.
I have been to ten Dylan concerts in the last year, including a six-day, six-day stretch that took three thousand miles off the life a rental car. The crowds were more diverse than I’d expected: young urban record-collector types, grizzled weirdos, well-dressed ex-hippies, enthusiastic kids in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Deadheads are a big part of Dylan’s audience, and they created odd scenes as they descended on each venue: in Reno, they streamed in a tie-dyed river through the Hilton casino. I asked some of the younger fans how they had become interested in Dylan, since he is not exactly omnipresent on MTV. Most had discovered him, they said, while browsing through their parents' old LPs. One, who had been listening to a 45 r.p.m.-single of "Hurricane,” thought that he should come check out the man behind it. The younger fans didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that Dylan was three times their age. A literate teen-ager asked me, "Do you have to be from Elizabethan England to appreciate Shakespeare?"
Before each show, for some reason, minor-key sonatas and concertos by Mozart were played over the P.A. system. Male Dylanologists explained lyrics to their girlfriends. "Every Dylan song contains eight questions," I heard one saying. Bootleggers fumbled with their equipment: a common method is to attach small microphones to the earpieces of glasses. (Thousands of tapes of Dylan shows are in circulation — the list stretches back to 1958.) Concession stands sold Dylan paraphernalia, including a bumper sticker that read, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there" — a line off of "Time Out Of Mind." A boozy group who sat in front of me at a show in Minnesota seemed to have the Dylan songbook pretty well memorized. The rowdiest of them was shouting out first lines of the songs at the top of his voice, and once, in his excitement, he crashed into the hard plastic seats. He got up again, blood dripping down his chin, and bellowed in my face: "Once upon a time you dressed so fine! God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son!'" Other fans took a cooler view. Before a show in Portland, I chatted with a levelheaded twentysomething guy who plays in a progressive funk group. "Last time I saw him, in '90, it was brutal," he told me. "I hope he doesn't fuck up the songs again. I hear he's better. Even when he's awful, he's sort of great — he's never just mediocre." In Dylan's vicinity, I noticed, everyone italicizes.
Many people had advised me that Dylan makes a mess of the songs. He does change them, and those who come to hear live-action re-enactments of the favorite records of their youth will be disappointed. Dylan sometimes writes new melodies for old songs and sometimes transposes one set of lyrics into the tune of another. He writes a little more every night: I kept hearing fresh bluesy bits of tunes in "Tangled Up in Blue," which was at the center of every set. As a performer he is erratic: his voice sometimes thins into a bleat, he occasionally forgets or jumbles lines, and every so often his guitar yelps wrong notes. But he has a bemused, saturnine ease onstage: even from a few hundred feet away, his squinting stare can give you a start. And he is musically in control. The band's pacing of each song — the unpredictable scampering to and fro over a loosely felt beat, the watch-and-wait atmosphere, the sudden knowing emphasis on one line or one note — is much the same as when Dylan plays alone. You can hear him thinking through the music bar by bar: he has a way of tracing out his chords in winding one-note patterns and bringing them alive. And the basic structures of the songs are unshakable. There are wrong notes, but there is never a wrong chord.
In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms. His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or pure mystification. A new book, entitled "The Bob Dylan Companion,” goes so far as to call him "one of the least talented singers and guitars around." But to hear Dylan live is to realize that he is a musician — of an eccentric and mesmerizing kind. It's hard to define what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his performances cause his songs to mutate, so that no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan's legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances over many decades. The achievement is so large and so confusing that the impulse to disregard all that came after his partial disappearance in 1966 is understandable. It's simpler that way — and cheaper. You need only seven records, instead of forty-three. But Columbia Records, after years of putting out bungled live recordings, is finally beginning to illustrate, in its "Bootleg Series," the entire sweep of Dylan's performing career.
Don DeLillo, in his novel "Great Jones Street," imagined a Dylanesque rock star and said of him, "Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors." But Dylan has survived without becoming a "survivor" — a professional star acting out the role of himself. He has a curious, sub-rosa place in pop culture, seeming to be everywhere and nowhere at once. He is historical enough to be the subject of university seminars, yet he wanders the land playing to beery crowds. The Dylan that people thought they knew — "the voice of a generation" — is going away. So I went searching for whatever might be taking its place. I went to the shows; I listened to the records; I patronized dusty Greenwich Village stores in search of bootlegs; I sought out the Dylanologists who are arguing over his legacy in print. Strange to say, Dylan himself may explain the songs best, by singing them.
At a show in Concord, California, the crowd is dominated by ex- and neo-hippies from Berkeley, twenty miles to the west. Dylan threatens to dampen their enthusiasm by opening with "Gotta Serve Somebody," the snarling gospel single which horrified the counterculture back in 1979. But he works his way back to the sing-along anthem "Blowin' in the Wind." I was sitting near a teenage girl who had first heard Dylan in a class on the sixties and was attending with her history teacher.
Dylan's looming presence in the politics and culture in the sixties is for many a point in his favor: he wrote songs that mattered, he made a difference. For some of us, though, particulary for those who grew up in later, less delirious decades, the sixties connection is a stumbling block. Until a few years ago, when I started listening to Dylan in earnest, I had mentally shelved him as the archetypal sixties leftover, reeking of politics and marijuana. I’d read a story that went something like this: He was born in Minnesota. He came to Greenwich Village. He wrote protest songs. He stopped writing protest songs. He took drugs, "went electric." He was booed. He fell of his motorcycle. He disappeared into a basement. He reappeared and sang country. He got divorced. He converted to Christianity. He converted back to something else. He croaked somewhere behind Stevie Wonder in "We Are The World." And so on. If you’re not in the right age group, the collected bulletins of Dylan's progress read like alumni notes from a school you didn't attend.
The challenge for anyone who considers Dylan more than a lifestyle trendsetter is to define those qualities that have outlasted his boisterous term as the voice of a genration. So far, the informal discipline of Dylanology — founded around 1970, by a man named A. J. Weberman as he fished through Dylan's trash on MacDougal Street — has reached no consensus on the matter. At the moment, there are about a half-dozen luminaries in the field. Greil Marcus, the most formidable of rock critics, connects Dylan with a homegrown, folk-and-blues surrealism that he calls "the old, weird America." Paul Williams, who founded the rock magazine Crawdaddy!, celebrates Dylan as a tireless, generous performer who reimagines his songs at every show. The Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin lavishes attention on the gospel period and the apocalyptic rants that followed in the eighties. Christopher Ricks, a renowned scholar of Milton, Tennyson, Eliot, and Beckett at Boston University, supplies a formalist reading — of Dylan as a pure poet, who thrives on word choice, rhythm, and structured rhyme. In the same spirit, Gordon Ball, a professor of English at the Virginia Military Institute, has nominated Dylan for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Below the main authorities are the amateur Dylanologists: enthusiasts, cranks, editors of fanzines, caretakers of gigantically detailed Internet sites. There is no end to their production. "The Cracked Bells," for instance, is an unreadable book-length guide to Dylan's unreadable book-length poem, "Tarantula." The author, Robin Whiting, writes: "'Tarantula' has six main themes: America, Viet Nam, Aretha, Mexico, Maria, and — the great panacea — Music." I didn't find much about music, but I enjoyed a note about geraniums: "Do geraniums stand for coolness? Insouciance? Moreover, the odour of death?" Aidan Day's "Jokerman," a book on Dylan's lyrics, analyzes some lines from "Visions of Johanna," on "Blonde on Blonde," and finds in them "a reduction of form to primal elements as - in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp's rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting 'LHOOQ' (1919) - even gender difference becomes confused and human contour and feature are erased." The text in question is: "See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the moustache say, ‘Jeeze / I cant find my knees."'
Despite everything that has been written about Dylan, surprisingly little is known for certain about him. Heylin's day-by-day chronology of Dylan's life, for example, is an archly self-cancelling document in which every piece of information points to a larger lack of information. Here are three consecutive entries for the year 1974:
Late April. Dylan attends a concert by Buffy St.Marie at the Bottom Line in New York. He is so impressed he returns the following two nights, and tells her he'd like to record her composition, "Until It's Time for You to Go."
May 6. Dylan runs into Phil Ochs in front of the Chelsea Hotel and they decide to go for a drink together.
May 7. Dylan visits Ochs at his apartment and agrees to perform at the "Friends of Chile" benefit.
What happened during the rest of the first week of May? Where was he going when he ran into Phil Ochs? Dylan's life story sometimes feels as if it has been pieced together from centuries-old manuscripts that were charred in a monastery fire. "Between January and June 1972 there is no evidence that he was in New York at all," Heylin writes in his attempt at a full-scale biography, "Dylan: Behind the Shades." A skeptical Englishman known for a history of American punk, Heylin is at least willing to admit what he doesn't know, and his biography is by far the most readable and reliable of four biographies.
The accumulated files of Dylanology, despite their gaps, give a rough sense of the personality behind the enigma. A thumbnail sketch from a classic 1967 essay by Ellen Willis holds up well: "Friends describe [him] as shy and defensive, hyped up, careless of his health, a bit scared by fame, unmaterialistic but shrewd about money, a professional absorbed in his craft." Stubborn persistence is his main characteristic: although he has often vanished in a funk over the vagaries of his career, he never fails to trudge back with some new twist on his obsessions. He is at odds with the modern world in many ways. "There's enough of everything," he said in a 1991 interview. "There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the light bulb was going too far." I heard an excellent anecdote from a friend who played on a Little League team with Dylan's kids in the late seventies, during the singer's gospel era. When a dog ran onto the field, my friend yelled, "Get that goddman dog off the field!" A familiar voice rasped from the parents' bench, "Ahhh, that was what kind of a dog?"
Joan Didion wrote of Joan Baez that she was a personality before she became a person: the same could be said of Dylan. World fame— not just celebrity fame but intellectual fame, with plaudits from Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin — came to him by the age of twenty-five. The speed of his ascent required some luck, but it was mostly a function of his energy. He skipped heedlessly from one genre to another: folk, blues, country, spirituals. He played at being a political activist, but his best political songs, such as "The Lonesome Death of Hattic Carroll," were the character-driven ones. His early vocal style incorporated pieces of Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John Hurt, Hank Williams, and, not to be forgotten, Johnnie Ray, the oddball fifties crooner who smacked his consonants with unnerving ferocity. Throughout the early sixties, Dylan sought to play rock and roll and electric blues alongside his acoustic material: he had hammered the piano, Little Richard style, in high school, and he longed to resume that kind of noisemaking. He originally planned to have his second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," be part electric and part acoustic, like the later "Bringing It All Back Home." He signaled his intentions by covering 'That's All Right, Mama," Elvis's breakout single, at his first electric session, in October 1962. He was trying frantically to say everything at once.
But he soon discovered that you can be famous for only one thing at a time. The record business and the music press wanted a narrower genius. The electric songs from 1962 didn't fit the image that Columbia wanted to create — Dylan as folk prophet. He gained notoriety chiefly for his civil-rights and antiwar songs, and Columbia advertised him accordingly:
Bob Dylan has walked down many roads. For most of his 22 years he "rode freight trains for kicks and got beat up for laughs, cut grass for quarters and sang for dimes." ...Bob does what a true folk singer is supposed to do — sing about the important ideas and events of the times. ...His new bestselling album (the first was "Bob Dylan") is "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." It features ten of Bob's own compositions, including the sensational hit, "Blowin' in the Wind." Also, songs on subjects ranging from love ("Girl From the North Country") to atomic fall-out ("A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"). Hear it and you'll know why Bob Dylan is the voice of the times.
This ingenious ad copy, which came complete with Dylan's tall tales about his past, informed the press coverage that ensued. Dylan soon became annoyed at the generalizations, and found himself fighting his own publicity: he denied, for example, that "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" depicted a nuclear winter. Even so, he played along with the spirit of the marketing: e later claimed that the song had been a general reaction to the dread of the nuclear age, and to the atmosphere of the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular. In a widely quoted statement, he said, "I wrote that when I didn't figure I'd have enough time left in life;" The song had actually been written at least a month before the Cuban crisis began.
"Hard Rain" was a breakthrough in Dylan's songwriting, but for a different reason. It's a small epic, lasting seven minutes, and yet it lacks any of trace of the blow-by-blow storytelling that sustains the long ballads of the folk-song literature. How does Dylan keep us interested? First, through repetition, and second, through changes that intrude between the first repetition and the last. Almost all of Dylan's songs have a structure of verse-refrain, verse-refrain, and the refrain is almost always a simple-seeming phrase that tolls like a bell: "Tangled up in blue." "You gotta serve somebody." "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." "A hard rain's a gonna fall." In "Hard Rain," the first lines — "Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And where have you been, my darling young one?" — are a nod to the old ballad "Lord Randall," which begins, "Oh, where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son? Oh, where ha' you been, my handsome young man?" Dylan breaks the symmetrical call-and-response of the original: his blue-eyed son answers not with two lines but five. The images — "twelve misty mountains," "six crooked highways," and so forth — carry the flavor of the Book of Revelation, with its insistence on exact numbers of bizarre objects ("I saw seven golden candlesticks"). The song hangs on a musical trick of suspension: E and A chords seesaw hypnotically as the number of answering phrases increases from five to seven and eventually to twelve. In the chorus — "And it's a hard, and it's a hard..." — Dylan grasps for and finally gets the resolution, which in each verse has moved a little farther out of reach. Coming down the mountain of the song, he starts to sound like a prophet.
Many myths of Dylan's sixties career don't hold up under the evidence gathered in Heylin's books and other Dylanological tomes. Dylan's songwriting is said to have been transformed by a plunge into the drug culture, but he had been using drugs on and off since his Minnesota days. He was said to have been inspired by the Beatles to "go electric," but he had sketched out his folk-rock sound as early as 1962. The first electric shows reportedly provoked universal booing, but on the tape of his famous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965, it's difficult to hear boos amid the applause. D. A. Pennebaker, who filmed Dylan's 1966 tour with the Hawks, doesn't recall many confrontations; he says that if there were such incidents the ringleader didn't appear to be greatly bothered by them. "Dylan was having the best time of his life," he said at a recent symposium on Dylan's tour movie "Eat the Document," at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. "He was like a cricket jumping around onstage."
Greil Marcus describes the 1965-66 tours differently — as a war against dark reactionary forces. He quotes Al Kooper's reason for not wanting to follow the tour into Texas: "Look at what they did to JFK down there." Marcus finds special significance in an exchange that took place between Dylan and an audience in Manchester, England, in May 1966. In his book "Invisible Republic," Marcus renders this episode as Dylan's ultimate, shattering encounter with the collected forces of Them:
As if he had been waiting ... a person rises and shouts what he has been silently rehearsing to himself all night. As over and over he has imagined himself doing, he stands up, and stops time. He stops the show: "JUDAS!" Dylan stiffens against the flinch of his own body. "I don't believe you," he says, and the contempt in his voice is absolute. As one listens it turns the echo of the shouter's curse sour, you begin to hear the falseness in it, that loving rehearsal — and yet that same echo has already driven Dylan back — "You're a liar!" he screams hysterically.
When Columbia finally released a CD of the show last year — it had circulated for thirty years on bootlegs — neophytes may have skipped to the end in order to hear the renowned "Judas!" dialogue. They were probably disappointed. What you hear first is an ordinary lull, during which Dylan tunes his guitar. When the shout of "Judas!" comes, the crowd variously laughs, groans, and applauds. The voice from the back yammers on unintelligibly, and others join in. When Dylan responds, he is not screaming hysterically, or, indeed, screaming at all. It's as if he couldn't understand what the lads in the back were hollering and therefore supplied the kind of all-purpose non sequitur that he liked to dish out at press conferences.
Marcus implies that there was a conspiracy among folk purists to silence Dylan: the heckler is said to have been "well informed as to the precise order in which Dylan played his songs." But C. P. Lee, a Manchester Dylanologist, recently took the trouble to write an entire book about the 1966 show, and after its publication a great discovery was made: "Judas" was no Pete Seeger-like elder statesman of folk but instead a confused twenty-year-old university student named Keith Butler. "It was not a premeditated thing," Butler told the English press after coming forward. (He now works at a bank in Toronto.) "I was swept along by the mood, which was chaotic. I was feeling disappointed and angry." In other words, two disparate youth cultures — rock-and-rollers and folkies — were jockeying for control of a spokesman who was declining to give a clear message to either of them. Thirteen years later, after all, the rock generation in turn would feel betrayed by Dylan's gospel songs, and shouts of "Judas!" and "Traitor!" would be thrown at him again. The gospel shows were no less electrifying than the 1966 shows, but they happened not to fit the story of a generation.
As Dylan's tour passed through California, I stopped in to see Marcus, who lives in the Berkeley hills. "The funny thing is that I'm not a Dylan person," he told me. "Many years went by when I didn't care about him at all." For Marcus, as for many of the original followers, Dylan disappeared in the seventies and eighties, brief comebacks excepted. Marcus's Rolling Stone review of the 1970 "Self-Portrait" began with the words, "What is this shit?" Only when Dylan started recording folk and blues covers in the nineties was he restored to Marcus's favor. In "Invisible Republic," which deals with Dylan's basement tapes, Marcus makes compelling side trips into older American music — the shrapnel-voiced Dock Boggs and other comical-sinister backcountry singers who had been collected in Harry Smith's 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." In the eighties, the critic asked to hear "more Dock Boggs" in Dylan's aging voice, and that alchemy more or less happened. Marcus seems to have got inside his subject's mind, and Dylan indicated as much by providing a blurb for the paperback of "Invisible Republic."
But there has to be something missing in a reading of Dylan that skips twenty years of his career. What if, as some think, he reached his peak not with the put-ons and put-downs of the sixties but with the chaotic love songs of the seventies? And what if, as Clinton Heylin suggests, he went even further in the eighties, when he fused the personal and the apocalyptic — "Love-sick Blues" with the Book of Revelation? Lester Bangs wrote in 1981, "If people are going to dismiss or at least laugh at Dylan now as automatically as they once genuflected, then nobody is going to know if he ever makes a good album again. They're not listening now, which just might mean that they weren't really listening then either."
Back on the East Coast, I had tea with Christopher Ricks, the legendary close reader of canonical English poetry and undisguised Dylan obsessive. We met in his sitting room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although he speaks in the clipped tones of a modern English don, he has a way of plunging into the passive-aggressive dynamic of Dylan's emotions. "The words constitute an axis," he said to me. "They do not point in one direction." Dylan says one thing and may mean the opposite. This may seem like irony, but I don't think it is; irony, strictly speaking, requires a reversal of meaning. Dylan can obtain ambiguity simply by repeating a phrase. "Think of 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright,'" Ricks continued, intoning the refrain. "How many times can you tell somebody not to think twice? You can say 'It's all right' over and over. That's comforting — but not 'Don't think twice.' I'd start to think."
I thought of some similarly hazy lines from "Meet Me in the Morning," circa 1974:
See the sun, sinking like a ship
See the sun, sinking like a ship
Ain't that just like my heart, babe
When you kissed my lips?
This tangled metaphor — the sun like a ship, the heart like the sun — can spin in any direction. Is the heart glowing like a sunset? Or is it sinking out of sight? And is the ship going over the horizon, or is it just sinking? The less happy implication is that it is in the nature of ships, and of hearts, to sink.
When others have tried to read Dylan line by line, they have usually chased after outside references. (He mentioned the Bomb! T. S. Eliot! Joan Baez!) Talking about "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," Ricks begins not with the case of William Zantzinger — a wealthy young farmer who caused the death of a black barmaid at a Baltimore ball and got off with a six-month sentence — but with the rhythm of Zantzinger's name: a strong beat followed by a weak one. The whole song, he says, is dominated by the loping, tapering rhythm of the name, from which Dylan removed an unsingable “t”:
William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gathering ...
It produces a feeling of helplessness, the way each line ends in a weak beat, and this seems to be the point: cry all you want, the gentle suffer. The dominant emotion is not political rage but a quavering sympathy for Hattie Carroll, whose race is never mentioned. This song certainly doesn't raise hopes for judicial reform, and it has not gone out of date. In 1991, William Zantzinger was found to have collected rent from tenants who had been living in extreme squalor in houses that he didn't own. This time, the judge handed down sternly an eighteen-month sentence, in a work-release program.
"Now's the time for your tears," Dylan sings at the end. Ricks said to me, "He doesn't underscore it — say, 'Now is the time.' He doesn't exhort you. Maybe you should have cried before, when Hattie died." (Paul Williams thinks the refrain for the preceding verses, "Now ain't the time for your tears," is really sarcastic, and that Dylan is saying, "You can't cry because you're a leftist do-gooder who cares only about the legal ramifications." Another axial moment.) Ricks went on to criticize some of Dylan's more recent performances of "Hattie Carroll," in which he pushes the last line a little: "He doesn't let it speak for itself. He sentimentalizes it, I'm afraid." Here I began to wonder whether the close reader had zoomed in too close. Ricks seemed to be fetishizing the details of a recording, and denying the musician license to expand his songs in performance. Poets print a text: musicians work from a blueprint. I had just seen Dylan sing "Hattie Carroll," in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give. He turned the accompaniment into a steady, sad, acoustic waltz, and he played a lullabylike solo at the center. You were reminded that the "hotel society gathering" was a Spinsters' Ball, whose dance went on before, during, and after the fatal attack on Hattie Carroll. This was an eerie twist on the meaning of the song, and not a sentimental one.
Still, Ricks's writing on Dylan is the best there is. Unlike most rock critics — forty-year-olds talking to ten-year-olds, Dylan has called them — he writes for adults. But he has been slow to publish. He has produced only one major essay, for The Threepenny Review, and he has been mulling for years over a book-length Dylan study. "I don't teach Dylan," he told me. "It's just an obsession." And he writes, half-jokingly, in his Dylan essay, "I need to show that I'm not besotted with the man." Ricks, like Marcus, might not want to be called a "Dylan person." Academics who write about Dylan are labeled eccentrics at best. Academe, which is usually so eager to splash around in the pop-culture pool, rejects Dylan because he's an old white male.
Dylan himself declines the highbrow treatment — though you get the feeling he wouldn't mind picking up that Nobel Prize. Even in the sixties, he said of those who called him a poet, "Genius is a terrible word, a word they think will make me like them." He seems to prefer an audience of teen-age Deadheads in a basketball arena. He may occasionally surprise the kids with moody masterpieces like "Hattie Carroll," "Visions of Johanna," and "Not Dark Yet," or he may teach them a Stanley Brothers bluegrass hymn, but more often he gets them to jump up and down to "Tangled Up in Blue." This way, he packs in the crowds, and he also makes sure that he cannot be pinned down. Every night, whether he is in good or bad form, he says, in effect, "Think again."
I have now followed the Neverending Tour to Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan was born here, in 1941, before moving with his family to the iron-ore town of Hibbing. He has never played in Duluth before. The city is moderately excited at his return. He is front-page news for two days running in the Duluth News-Tribune. Storefronts downtown are adorned with "Welcome Home, Bob" signs. Duluthians are hoping that he will have say something to the city: he did, after all, mention Duluth when he accepted the 1998 Grammy for Record of the Year. ("WOW! DYLAN SAID 'DULUTH'!" ran a local headline.) At the show, a fan tosses onto the stage a paper airplane on which it is written, "Please speak." It lands upside down. Dylan does not speak. The silence is a little chilly; a few words would have made the audience ecstatic. Dylan's defense for this kind of criticism is that public speeches are a no-win situation. If he speaks a few words, people say that he hasn't said enough. If he speaks at length, people think he's lost his mind. In the end, Minnesotans don't seem too miffed by the episode. I ask one local resident the following day whether he's disappointed. "A little," he replies. "But in the paper it said he smiled a lot."
Discussion of Dylan often boils down to that: Please speak. Tell us what it means. But does he need to? He had already given something away, during the ritual acoustic performance of "Tangled Up in Blue." This dense tale of one or two couples fatefully intertwined seems autobiographical: it's easy to guess what Dylan might be thinking when he sings, "When it all came crashing down, I became withdrawn / The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keeping on / Like a bird that flew... " See any number of ridiculous spectacles in Dylan's life. But the lines that he shouted out with extra emphasis came at the end:
Me, I'm still on the road, heading for another joint
We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue.
Suddenly the romance in question seemed to be the long, stormy one between Dylan and his audience. What is the "it" that we're seeing? Perhaps thing that comes between him and us — the music.
"Tangled Up in Blue" is a fantasy on a ground. The current version begins, like the original one on "Blood on the Tracks," with chiming major chords, but the onstage Dylan soon shifts his guitar line onto a different scale, into the blues. Dismantling and rebuilding his song piece by piece, he bends notes down, inverts the melody, spreads out the pitches of the chords, leans on a single note while the chords change around it, stresses the offbeats, overlays a triplet rhythm on a duple one. As the rest of the band holds on straitlaced diatonic harmony and a one-two beat, the song tenses up: opposing scales meet in bittersweet clashes, opposing pulses overlap in a danceable bounce. At some point, the classic radio staple becomes a new animal. By the end, Dylan might be speaking right at you, but you're too wrapped up in the music to notice.
As I went through my Dylan records and tapes, I realized that in many cases I was only half listening to the lyrics — that the music was giving the words their poetic aura. Often, Dylan's strongest verbal images come toward the beginning of a song, and it falls to his musical sense to make something of the rest. In "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," the eleven-minute love song that closes "Blonde on Blonde," Dylan fashions some majestic metaphors to capture the object of his affection — "your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes" — and then, in the second-to-last verse, he clouds over: "They wished you'd accepted the blame for the farm." What farm? What happened to it? Why would she be to blame for it? "Phony false alarm" is the rhyme in the next line, and it doesn't clear things up. The refrain makes another appearance — "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate? / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?" — and by this time you ought to be losing patience with it. What are "warehouse eyes," and how can one leave them? Dylanalogists beat their heads against such questions. But the music makes you forget them. The melody of the refrain — a rising and descending scale, as in "Danny Boy" — is grand to begin with, but in the fifth verse Dylan makes its grander. As the band keep playing the scale, he skates back up to the top D with each syllable. He sings on one note as the rest of the harmony moves around him. It's as if he's surveying the music from a summit. This is a trick as old as music. In Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas," the soprano catches our hearts in the same way as she sings, "Remember me, remember me."
Like Schubert, Cole Porter, and Hank Williams before him, Dylan sharpens the meaning of the lyrics in the mechanics of the music. Take "Mama You Been on My Mind," which was long associated with Joan Baez and finally appeared in Dylan's own voice on the boxed set "The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3." The song begins with a crabbed, somewhat indecipherable image:
Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat and covering
The crossroads I'm standing at
The harmony under these words moves from an E-major chord to a G-sharp seventh and on to C-sharp minor and an F-sharp seventh. It's an awkward series of changes which matches the baroque images on the page. Our eyes and ears go "Huh?" Then the singer seems to shrug off, with a self-deprecating grin, the attempt to poeticize his emotion —
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that
But Mama, you been on my mind
— and the harmony gets easier, too, swaying gently from E major to C-sharp minor and back to E. The meaning changes as the chords change.
Dozens of Dylan songs work in the same way. The disturbing gospel number "In The Garden" shows the agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane by wandering through ten different chords, each one like a betrayal. "Idiot Wind," the centerpiece of "Blood on the Tracks," channels its universal rage — "Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press" — into a single harmonic convulsion: each verse of the G-major song begins with a grinding C-minor chord, which is like a slap to the ear. More often, the chords are mesmerizingly simple. In "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," there are just four of them, but they occur in an unresolved, drooping sequence — a picture of the "long black cloud" that comes down on Billy the Kid.
This is not to say that the music is everything. Dylan does have a fearsome command of the English language. The neat click of the rhymes keeps you interested across all leaps of sense and changes of scene. John Lennon, not long before he died, satirized Dylan as a cynic who rhymed out of a lexicon, but I don't know of a dictionary that would have generated this couplet:
What can I say about Claudette? Ain't seen her since January.
She could be respectably married or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.
Dylan also has a knack for tricky enjambments — lines that seem complete in themselves but are subverted by what follows. These are effects for the ear, not for the eye, and Dylan sells them in performance. There's a tape of him singing "Simple Twist of Fate" in San Francisco in 1980, in which the meaning twirls almost word by word. It's a heavily rewritten version of the "Blood of the Tracks" song, and the last verse starts this way:
People tell me it's a crime
To remember her for too long a time
She should have caught me in my prime
She would have stayed with me
Instead of going back off to sea
And leaving me
Dylan slows down, and we may think that the story is at an end. But it's not.
To med-i-tate...
A grin now creeps into the voice, which had been appropriately wistful before. Dylan's stress on "meditate" tells us that the title phrase is coming round for its final rhyme, but we can't guess how he'll make the leap. His voice fills with pride — pride is one of the great emotions that he can convey — and the tempo picks up again: "Upon! A! Simple! Twist! Of! Fate!"
The peculiar solidity of Dylan's lyrics comes in their easy give-and-take with older songs. He has said that the old traditions of folk, blues, spirituals, and popular ballads are his real religion, and his habit of crossing genres may explain his habit of crossing religions. "I believe," he said two years ago, "in Hank Williams singing 'I Saw the Light.'" Dylan has a viselike memory for lyrics of all sorts, and his favorite method as a songwriter is to take one line from an old song and add one or a dozen of his own. "As I went out one morning," the old song says, and Dylan adds, "To breathe the air around Tom Paine's." "Time Out of Mind" is thrillingly Dylanish because he has returned with a vengeance to the magpie mode of songwriting. Old song: "She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind." Dylan adds: "She set down in writing what was in her mind." Old song: "This train don't pull no gamblers, no midnight ramblers." Dylan says instead: "Some trains don't pull no gamblers, ? No midnight ramblers, like they did before."
"Time Out Of Mind" is the first Dylan record in a while which has reached a mass public, but it has confused the diehard fans. Clinton Heylin, for one, rejects it as a triumph of production over songwriting. It's true that Dylan no longer seems to be writing individual songs: lots of lines could be moved from one song to another, and everything goes under one dreamy, archaic mood. The album manages to skip the whole twentieth century: people ride in buggies, trains discourage gambling, there's no air-conditioning ("It's too hot to sleep"), church bells ring, the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are "turned down low") and, most of the time, the singer is walking. The wistfulness of it all is intense: the singer is in love with a musical past that is gone forever. You picture him leaning late over his favorite records and songbooks, listening, writing, reading, writing. These are songs about the loneliness of listening: you could add to them "Blind Willie McTell," which was recorded in 1983 and appeared on the "Bootleg" boxed set as a kind of fanfare to "Time Out of Mind." "I am gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel," he sang. "No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell."
The melancholy could become crushing, but Dylan doesn't let it. The best of the new songs are inexplicably funny: there's a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatteredness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with the past, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon. And in one song — "Not Dark Yet" — all the flourishes of his songwriting art come together: slow, stately chords, swinging like a pendulum between major and minor; creative tweakings of the past ("There's room enough in the heavens" becomes "There's not even room enough to be anywhere."); prickly aphorisms ("Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain"); and glints of Biblical revelation, not to mention what one Internet expert has identified as a quotation from the Talmud ("I was born here and I'll die here against my will"). If he can't sing some low notes, he gestures toward them with a slide, so that you feel them. As in "Sad-Eyed Lady," Dylan finds a way to intensify the refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." The line keeps creeping up, note by note, in the singer's now limited range. Like Skip James, the cracked genius among Delta Blues singers, Dylan gives a circular form a dire sense of direction.
The sense of arrival in "Not Dark Yet" is enormous. Once again, as Ricks would point out, words turn on their axis and encompass their opposite. The song ends, "I don't even hear a murmur of a prayer / It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." This couldn't be bleaker, could it? Bob Dylan stares into the face of death and decay. But as he sings "murmur of a prayer," he lifts the tune yet another step and does a graceful little turn at the top, creating an altogether new melody. And he slips in a triplet — a slight dancing rhythm that someone else picks up on guitar. As the song winds down, it's not the darkness that lingers but the freshly swaying motion in the music, and that theoretical possibility of a "murmur of a prayer." The man who worships Hank Williams is looking back at "I Saw The Light," a would-be uplifting gospel number that was really filled with terror. "I saw the light, I saw the light / No more darkness, no more night," Hank insisted, in a melody that fell, and you didn't believe him. Bob declares, with a gallant upward turn, "I don't even hear a murmur of a prayer," and you don't believe him either.
Dylan just played the Target Center, in downtown Minneapolis. Toward midnight, walking away from the arena, I see a bus and a truck parked by a curb. A group of techies are loading equipment. There is bright electric light from somewhere — the spotlight of a hand-held TV camera, it turns out. People are standing around, smiling sheepishly, as they do in the presence of someone famous. My heart begins to beat a little faster. A man with thick, tangled hair is standing next to the bus, looking awkward as he signs autographs. It's Lyle Lovett, who has just finished playing on the stage around the corner. I walk back to my hotel.
This episode pointed up for me the embarrassment of fandom. I hadn't requested an interview with Dylan, but I did think for a moment that I might meet him. I felt the bubbling excitement of a fan: I’d been a fan, I suppose, since Dylan's music really hit me, a few years ago, when I was staying in a friend's apartment in Berlin. "Highway 61 Revisited" was one of the few records my friend owned, and after a couple of days, I'd fallen for it: the fiercely funny lyrics, the music that was both common and grand, the whole proud, angry, backward take on life. I've since found that my belated conversion to Dylan matches up all too well with the latest anthropological research into rock fandom. Daniel Cavicchi, in a pioneering study, divides fans into categories out of William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience," noting that one kind of fan undergoes a sudden conversion or "self-surrender," often in a state of isolation or in a foreign land.
Is fandom as foolish as it sometimes feels? Or is it the respect due to the sort of person who used to be called "great"? Americans have always distrusted the concept of greatness, with its clammy Germanic air. Stardom, the cult of youth and wealth, long ago took its place. Dylan may be many things, but he is not a star; he can't control his image in the public eye. At the same time, he doesn't look, act, or sound like any great man that history records. He presents himself as a traveling musical salesman, like B. B. King or Ralph Stanley or Willie Nelson. He is generally unavailable to the media, but he is in no way a recluse, and reclusiveness is traditionally the zone in which American geniuses reside.
America is no country for old men. Pop culture is a pedophile's delight. What to do with a well-worn, middle-aged songwriter who gravitates toward the melancholy and the absurd? An artist, by contemporary definition, is one who displays himself in art, who shares felt emotion and lived experience, who meets and greets the audience. Art becomes Method acting; art, in various senses, becomes pathetic. With Dylan, the emotion has certainly been felt, at one time or another, but it wells up spontaneously in the songs themselves, in the tangle of words and music. Even at his most confessional, he withdraws his personality from the scene — usually by becoming beautifully vague — and lets the music rise. The highest emotion hits late, in the wordless windups of his greatest songs — from "Sad-Eyed Lady" to "Not Dark Yet" — when the band plays through the verse one more time and language sinks into silence.
