Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  In order to gain a deeper understanding of Bob Dylan, we therefore need to draw on the insights of the literature on both stardom and celebrity, as well as the wider literature on popular music. I do not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of this work here, but I do want to emphasise the key elements as it provides the intellectual framework for the rest of this book. The following points are generally applicable to both stardom and celebrity, but they explain the overall system rather than describing specific individuals. To be a star, or a celebrity, it is not necessary to tick all of these boxes (some stars do, but it’s not an entrance requirement), but most stars will cover most of these points, which reflect the most important characteristics of celebrity and stardom in general.

  Stardom is an inherently modern phenomenon Although ‘fame’ existed in pre-modern times, this was mainly associated with either royalty or as posthumous recognition for great achievements. The contemporary ideas of celebrity are a product of mass society and the emergence of a leisure culture since the eighteenth century, the result of deep-rooted ideological factors and technological advancement that accelerated in the twentieth century. The key characteristic of modern celebrity is what Schickel refers to as the ‘illusion of intimacy’,6 the idea that we ‘really know’ those who are famous, even though we have (in the main) never met them.

  Stardom fulfils ideological functions As a modern phenomenon, stardom is intricately bound up with two key ideological pillars of modern society: individualism and democracy. Stars are the ultimate individuals who supposedly become famous because of their unique individuality (their ‘personality’, a word which gains its modern meaning from stardom). At the same time, however, they also highlight the meritocracy of modern society because fame is no longer dependent upon being born into the right family. Anyone can be a star if they work hard enough, are talented enough, or lucky enough.

  Stardom fulfils industrial functions Rojek describes modern celebrity as a marriage of democracy and capitalism.7 One of the reasons that stardom exists is that it provides a means to transform unique personalities into commodities. In all of the media industries, stardom plays a crucial role in their organisational structure as they help control the inherent instability of media markets. Failure rates in media industries are high – around 90 per cent of released records fail to make a profit – and creating stars is one way in which the industries can create a guaranteed audience. I’ll buy Bob Dylan’s next album without knowing what it sounds like because I am a fan. The central activity of a record label is not making records, but creating stars.8

  Stars have a representative function By their very existence, stars always represent the ideals of individualism and democracy, but stars also tend to stand for, or symbolise, something more. It could be that they represent a cultural stereotype – the tortured artist starving in a garret, for example – and therefore serve to reinforce that stereotype. But a star could also represent something more tangible, like Black Power, or a particular geographical region, such as Liverpool. But in all cases, a star ‘always represents something more than him- or herself’.9

  Stars unite subjectivities Because of their representative function, stars bring people together – sometimes literally (for example, Martin Luther King), more often emotionally, uniting people through belonging to a particular group, a particular audience. Some writers see this as a positive thing (for example: Rojek suggests that Sinatra ‘articulate[d] a basis for identification and recognition [that is] the basis for developing collective consciousness’).10 Others see it as potentially dangerous, with Marshall suggesting that ‘the emergence of the celebrity is connected to . . . the strategies employed by various institutions to contain the threat and irrationality of the mass [audience]’.11

  These issues will receive further elaboration during the course of this book.

  Recognising the systemic nature of stardom raises questions over the best way to study it. The biographical approach may pay inadequate attention to sociological factors, but we must be attuned to the individual circumstances as well. Stardom is not just structural, it is also the result of actions by individuals and social groups.12 It does matter what individuals do. Social structures such as meritocracy and consumerism do not just reproduce themselves but are reproduced through the actions of individuals and groups. We therefore need to consider how stardom is reproduced through micro-social interactions (for example, how a particular manager talks to a particular magazine editor), while keeping in mind that stardom is produced within a specific social environment that constrains the ways in which the manager and the magazine editor can act (for example, whether interviewing a particular star could cause controversy and lead to revenue shortfalls).

  If a charge can be laid against me in this book, it is that I have not paid enough attention to this type of micro-interaction. There is very little discussion of the strategies employed by Albert Grossman, Dylan’s first manager, in amplifying Dylan’s early stardom, nor in how Dylan himself manipulated the media in his early days (Robert Shelton’s biography is good on this kind of detail). There is no doubt that Dylan would not have become as big a star as he did without Grossman, so his absence will be notable to some. Similarly, there is little direct discussion about how Dylan’s later stardom has been strategically managed, for example, by Jeff Rosen in determining what recordings are released as part of The Bootleg Series. The lack of emphasis on these issues does not indicate that I think they are unimportant. On the contrary, they are very important, and one of the problems of studying stardom is that, if such management strategies are well executed, then we see only their effects and not their implementation. However, they are not my focus in this book. This project is targeted slightly differently, in that I am looking at how the social meaning of Dylan’s star-image has developed and changed over his career. I am therefore approaching Dylan’s stardom in relatively broad terms. My goal is to provide an overall framework for how Dylan has been understood and interpreted throughout his career, based on ongoing documentary analysis (through my role as a fan) and the broader contextualisation of an academic sociologist. Dylan is a popular text and, as such, is open to many different ‘readings’. Such readings are not random, however, but structured and I want to map out that structure. Social relations are not just micro-social, they are macro-social too. My argument may seem exaggerated at times, but I would hope that most fans would agree with the general drift of my framework.

  This book therefore looks at Dylan’s stardom in more holistic terms. Dylan has been a star for a very long time, and the meaning of his stardom has changed over that period. What affected his emergence and these changes? How was the meaning of his stardom facilitated by particular historical circumstances, and constrained by others? Why did a ‘Bob Dylan’ emerge in the sixties? What impact did his emergence have on others, or on his later stardom? At the same time, however, I have no intention of writing Bob Dylan out of Bob Dylan’s story, of turning him into a powerless individual at the whim of social forces, powerless to prevent the misinterpretation of what he represents. It is certainly true that I will concentrate on the details of Dylan’s life less than conventional biographies of him – this is a necessary counterbalance to accounts that give him too much power – but Dylan has actively negotiated his star-image; in song, in public appearances and performances, in interviews and, recently, in autobiography. This question of Dylan’s agency, of his power to shape his image, is important and features particularly heavily in two chapters which look at times when Dylan has deliberately attempted to reconstruct his star-image – the late sixties and the late eighties.

  My overall argument is that Dylan’s stardom has been closely tied to the idea of ‘rock’. If stars always represent something other than themselves, the marker ‘Bob Dylan’ has often symbolised rock and the restless ideals of sixties youth. How rock itself is conceptualised therefore impacts on Dylan’s own star-image. After the more theoretical introduction (this chapter and chapter
2), the book follows a broadly chronological structure. There are three chapters that deal with the emergence of rock in the sixties and Dylan’s starring role within it. The third of these chapters (chapter 5) is a pivotal one; it discusses how Dylan’s stardom became firmly associated with the ideals of rock even as he attempted to move away from it. Dylan dropping out of the scene at the very moment that rock critics were canonising him as the most important figure in rock had a defining impact on Dylan’s later stardom. The final part of the book (chapters 6–8) concentrates on his later career. Dylan’s career beyond the sixties has received woefully inadequate coverage (for example, Howard Sounes’ biography has 300 pages on the sixties, 107 pages on the seventies, and 98 pages on the eighties and nineties combined). Some of the material in chapter 5 explains this imbalance, but I intend this book to partially rectify it. In particular, I look at how Dylan’s stardom was constructed in such a way that made it difficult for him to shake off his mythical history. This problem was most acute in the 1980s, when Dylan seemed out of place in the remodelled music industry. His way of managing this problem was to begin the ‘Never Ending Tour’, an extraordinary project that successfully redefined his stardom, resulting in a remarkable return to the limelight which began in 1997.

  *The notion of ideology is extremely complex, and contested, but, briefly, I would define it as the ideas and beliefs through which we, individually and socially, make sense of the world. Depending on one’s perspective, this can be an entirely neutral thing or it can be the way through which powerful social groups impose their own belief systems upon less powerful groups.

  2

  STARDOM, AUTHORSHIP AND THE MEANING OF SONGS

  On 31 October 1964, Bob Dylan played a concert at the Philharmonic Hall in New York. He began to play the song ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night)’ with a shrill blast of his harmonica but stopped as his guitar was out of tune. ‘Don’t let that scare ya’, Dylan assured his audience, ‘it’s just Halloween. [pause] I have my Bob Dylan mask on.’ After another short pause he exclaimed, ‘I am mask-erading!’ and giggled, evidently pleased with his pun. Fast forward eleven years to another Halloween concert, the second night of his first Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Without warning, Dylan appeared on stage wearing a plastic Richard Nixon mask, and wore it through the entire first song, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’. Two years later, this performance would feature as the opening to Dylan’s movie Renaldo and Clara in which Dylan played the role of Renaldo while actor Ronnie Hawkins played ‘Bob Dylan’. Dylan’s estranged wife, Sara, played the role of Clara while another actress, Ronnee Blakeley, played ‘Sara Dylan’.

  Dylan evidently likes playing around with the idea of Bob Dylan. This is perhaps unsurprising given his life as a public figure, as a celebrity. One of the major ways that we think about celebrities is through a discrepancy between the ‘public’ celebrity and the ‘private’ individual. Many celebrities have commented that they play up to their celebrity image, acting out that persona – becoming ‘Keith Richards’ – for the public sphere. Still more celebrities have bemoaned the lack of privacy afforded them. Indeed, we may perhaps consider whether celebrities are prohibited from having a ‘private life’ at all. Dylan seemingly understands his own public status this way. In 1986 he stated that ‘I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be’ and when asked who he was the rest of the time, replied ‘myself’.1 There is much written on Dylan that takes this kind of approach. Heylin, for example, argues that the goal of his book is ‘to establish the relationship between [the] artist and the man’2 while Larry David Smith goes further, arguing that ‘Bob Dylan’ is a consistent persona controlled by its creator Robert Zimmerman.3 These books offer evidence for Frith’s contention that the main role of pop biographies is to expose the ‘real’ individual that cannot be heard in their music.4 Frith’s comment, however, points to a further issue – the fact that there is not only the ‘private individual’ and ‘public figure’ to consider, but also a third, external, factor: the work. I said in the first chapter that we must consider Dylan as a star rather than merely a celebrity because he has produced a body of work that in some ways stands apart from him. So how does this work relate to Dylan’s stardom, and vice versa? Discussing film stars, Dyer states that, in general, ‘films have a distinct and privileged place in a star’s image’.5 This is generally true for rock stars also (their music has a privileged place), but things are complicated by the fact that rock stars commonly perform ‘as themselves’. Dyer argues that, in analysing film stars, we must distinguish between authorship of films and authorship of star-image,6 but such a distinction is more problematic when analysing rock stars. Dylan is a star because of his songs just as Jack Nicholson is famous because of his films, but those two uses of ‘his’ mean different things: the actor may add considerable qualities to a film but, in most cases, he does not write the script and, while the actor’s presence in a film is never completely subsumed by the character he is playing, the actor is famous for pretending to be other people. Dylan, on the other hand, became famous for performing songs he had written and the impression is that when he performs these songs he performs as himself. We are thus left with an entanglement of various concepts – private self, artist, singer, writer, star, work – that all coalesce in the figure of a 5 feet 8 inches tall, 65-year-old, Jewish American man. I don’t think these things can ever be disentangled, but in this chapter I want to pull them apart a little, not in order to uncover the ‘real’ Bob Dylan, but to better understand how we think about him, and stars and artists more generally.

  AUTHORSHIP AND SONG MEANING

  Let me begin by raising some familiar issues concerning Dylan as the writer of his own songs. Consider the following lines:

  I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

  And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it

  (‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’)

  In fourteen months I’ve only smiled once and I didn’t do it consciously

  Somebody’s got to find your trail, I guess it must be up to me

  (‘Up To Me’)

  I used to care, but things have changed

  (‘Things Have Changed’)

  Can we ever assume that the ‘I’ is the person Bob Dylan? Do the words offer a glimpse into Bob Dylan’s personality? There are very few songs by Dylan in which he explicitly adopts the voice of a specific character (for example, in ‘North Country Blues’ he takes on the voice of a miner’s widow, while he adopts the character of a dispossessed worker in ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’). The majority of his songs feature an ‘I’ (one even features an ‘I and I’), that could be interpreted as the singer. So who is the I in these songs? Is it the songwriter himself?

  There is certainly a common-sense way in which we take songs as an index of the writer’s innermost self. For example, in Howard Sounes’ biography, he states that Dylan ‘would occasionally open up to girlfriends. But it was in his songs that he really revealed himself’,7 while Paul Williams states that ‘Dylan’s true autobiography, as with any artist, is his work, in which he consciously and unconsciously shares everything that occurs in his inner and outer life’.8 Such an idea is part of the legacy of Romanticism, an ideology of art that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was developed most by poets.* M. H. Abrams’ detailed account of these ideas explains how the determination of a poem’s value shifted fundamentally during this period.9 In pre-Romantic times, art was understood as a mirror reflecting society. A poem was therefore deemed successful if it reflected the world around it. During the latter half of the eighteenth century this radically altered so that poetry came to be understand not as a ‘mirror’ but as a ‘lamp’, illuminating the deepest, most profound emotions of the author. What mattered now was not whether the work was an accurate portrayal of the world but whether it was an honest representation of its creator. These assumptions often colour how we perceive songs; if we assume that
the song offers an insight into the real Bob Dylan, it is only a small jump to assuming that the ‘I’ of a Bob Dylan song must therefore be Dylan. Two albums in particular are prone to this sort of analysis: Blood On The Tracks (1975), which is widely considered to document the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage; and Time Out Of Mind (1997), which is conventionally understood as Dylan reflecting on his ‘brush with death’ earlier that year.* This kind of response, one that uses the author as the frame of reference for the work’s meaning, is criticised by many literary critics. In 1954, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an article called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in which they argued that we can never assume a text means what the author says it means – the text must stand alone. The intentional fallacy is part of a ‘new criticism’ that developed in literary studies from the 1920s and was most influential during the 1950s and 1960s. The central tenet of new criticism is that the only way to understand the meaning of a work is through close textual analysis of the work itself. The work says what it says; the meaning of a work is embedded in the words on the page and thus the new critics rejected any form of interpretation that relied on sources other than the work itself, and they were especially critical of any use of biography to explain what a text meant. Even if we can obtain detailed diary entries, or interview comments (for example, Dylan undertook many interviews in 1977 to try to explain what he was attempting in Renaldo And Clara), we cannot use them to infer any meaning in the text. According to this approach, only the text can show us what it means and we can only find this out through forensic scholarship.