Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  * In April 1968 over 1,000 students forcefully occupied five campus buildings of Columbia College for five days before being forcibly removed by the police; the 1968 Democrat conference in Chicago was subject to anti-war protests that resulted in violent clashes; in May 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the fencing off and destruction of the People’s Park in Berkeley for being a ‘a safe haven for commie sympathizers’, precipitating violent clashes between riot police and protesters attempting to reclaim the park; in May 1970, four students of Kent State University were killed by the Ohio National Guard as a result of on-campus protests against the Vietnam war.

  * Nor is it forced; we now know that Dylan holds country music very dear, though it would have been a surprise in 1969. Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait have both received something of a reappraisal in recent years, as part of the transformation of Dylan’s star-image since 1997.

  * There is an excellent cartoon that aptly demonstrates how the accident has come to be defined as the before/after moment in Dylan’s stardom. The cartoon depicts Dylan flying over the handlebars of his bike, eyes wide open and a thought bubble that says ‘Country Rock!’

  * True Dylan is a play written by Sam Shepard supposedly based on an interview conducted with Dylan. The theme of the play, however, is the authority accorded to stars’ statements in authenticating stardom. During the course of the ‘interview’, the tape recorder (the guarantee of authenticity) breaks and Dylan tells Shepard to just make it up (see Wynands, 2000). Quotes attributed to Dylan in this interview should be treated with caution. Shepard himself had an interest in stardom, and collaborated with Dylan on the song on the same theme, which is discussed in the next chapter.

  * Notably, Keats only achieved fame after his death.

  * The irony is that, by giving him a reason to drop out of the rock scene, the crash quite conceivably saved his life.

  * If the analogy with Christ seems a little far-fetched, it is one which Dylan has utilised. In ‘Shelter From The Storm’, he refers to having his crown of thorns removed, and, in what I consider to be one of the most self-conscious references to his stardom throughout his work, he sings (in ‘In The Garden’) supposedly of Jesus but also of himself: ‘The multitude wanted to make Him king, put a crown upon His head / Why did He slip away to a quiet place instead?’

  6

  DECLINING STARDOM NOSTALGIA AND THE ‘DEATH OF ROCK’

  Whether or not Janne Mäkela is correct to suggest that ‘rock stardom may celebrate the present moment, but the past is built into the present’,1 it is certainly the case for Dylan. Dylan’s mythologised past has been a prominent part of his star-image since at least 1970. During the 1970s, Dylan struggled to not be entirely overshadowed by this past (the release of Blood On The Tracks in 1975 is a pivotal event in this regard, giving critics and fans enough evidence to convince them that he was still a creative force). As the eighties developed, however, wider social changes involving a reconceptualisation of both ‘rock’ and ‘the sixties’ meant that Dylan gradually began to lose the battle with his history. During this period Dylan became understood almost entirely in nostalgic terms and his live shows and public appearances functioned as living reproductions of past glories. This period of Dylan’s career – roughly from 1981 to 1987 – is often portrayed as his mid-life crisis, viewed as precipitated either by his turning forty in 1981 or by his divorce in 1977. While these factors undoubtedly had some impact on Dylan’s creativity, to use them as the central explanation for Dylan’s errant decade would be as incomplete as solely relying upon a biographical reading of a song. In order to understand what happened, we once more need to consider Dylan’s stardom in a broader context, in relation to changes in the music industry as well as broader social developments. This argument becomes more compelling when it is noted that Dylan’s creativity did not falter as much as is commonly believed during these years: while he may not have been as prolific as he was in the sixties and seventies, he still managed to produce some of his greatest songs during this decade – though many of them did not make it into the public arena. We need to investigate Dylan’s public role, his positioning as a star in the 1980s. The question, it seems to me, is not ‘what happened to Dylan’s muse?’ but rather ‘what happened to Dylan’s stardom that so alienated him from his music?’ How did the burden of being Bob Dylan prevent him from doing the things that Bob Dylan was supposedly so good at?

  My argument is that the period in question can be roughly divided into two sections. In the first section, from about 1981 to 1983, Dylan’s stardom is marked by ambiguity and uncertainty. In common with many other sixties rock stars, the question of what ‘Bob Dylan’ stands for cannot be easily answered. This uncertainty can be seen in Dylan’s output at this time, in his lack of public presence and his editorial choices. The second part of this period – roughly 1984 to 1987 – marks a period in which the meaning of ‘Bob Dylan’ is relatively clear. During this period Dylan attains a particular kind of ‘living legend’ status as his star-meaning becomes dominated by his past. This period is characterised by Dylan’s disengagement from his contemporary work – his work is generally competent, but perfunctory, and Dylan displays a seeming unwillingness to challenge media representations of himself.

  One of the features of stardom is how it emphasises particular moments in a star’s biography, events after which the star (or popular music) were never the same again. Within Dylan’s career, his conversion to evangelical Christianity features as just such a moment. The concerts he performed in 1979 and the first half of 1980 featured religious songs exclusively. In between songs, he preached to the crowd and at times was heckled by his audience. This dramatic period of Dylan’s life is often used as a convenient punctuation mark in the Bob Dylan story: before he got religion, he was creative, confident and respected; after he stepped back from his role as a preacher he was confused, had lost his muse and everything went wrong. Such a portrayal masks longer-term trends. As discussed in the previous chapter, Dylan was being portrayed as artistically on the wane even before his conversion (Renaldo And Clara, Street Legal and his 1978 tour had all been fiercely criticised in the US) and, I would suggest, Dylan would still have experienced similar problems in the 1980s even without his conversion. The conversion did have a significant impact on Dylan’s stardom, however. Whatever star-meaning Dylan had during the seventies – as a mature artist, as a chameleon – was significantly eroded by his conversion to Christianity, particularly given that one key meaning of Dylan’s image is that of resistance to pre-defined roles. The most famous image of Dylan is as an iconoclast imploring that his listeners ‘don’t follow leaders’. Thus to be on stage preaching at his audience, telling the listener that ‘you gotta serve somebody’, is fundamentally at odds with his dominant star-image.

  When stars take actions that do not match with the public understanding of the star’s meaning then the public often turns against them (for example, the public turned against Charlie Chaplin during a high-profile paternity case in 1943, at least in part out of tiredness of his espousal of left-wing views).2 In Dylan’s case, this rejection can clearly be seen in his sales figures. While Slow Train Coming was actually one of his best-selling albums, spending twenty-six weeks on the American charts, Saved was the first Bob Dylan album in sixteen years not to make the Top 20.3 It also had wider implications in affecting what ‘Bob Dylan’ could mean in the 1980s. That this occurred just as Western societies were structurally reorganising themselves and experiencing dramatic changes in their belief systems means that certain ways of understanding Bob Dylan become more likely while other possibilities were closed down.

  1981–3 thus represents a period in which the meaning of ‘Bob Dylan’ is unclear. I think it is not unreasonable to suggest that this kind of uncertainty affected Dylan’s output at this time. It would be wrong to make any great claims about Dylan’s state of mind or his artistic consciousness, particularly given that Dylan was likely to be presented as faltering w
hatever he produced, but there were a series of editorial decisions taken by Dylan during the early eighties that suggest that he himself was uncertain of what exactly he was supposed to do and what role he had to play. This period of Dylan’s career can therefore only be understood in terms of Dylan’s stardom, not in terms of a diminishing muse. Dylan was still creating work of a high standard during this period. His songwriting between 1980 and 1984 produced major works such as ‘Caribbean Wind’, ‘Angelina’, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’, ‘Every Grain Of Sand’, ‘Jokerman’, ‘I and I’, ‘Foot Of Pride’, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and ‘New Danville Girl’. Most of these, however, were not released on his albums. Similarly, while there were sublime moments during concerts, his tours from autumn 1981 to summer 1987 were generally workmanlike and uninspired. Yet many reports and recordings from studio sessions and tour rehearsals illustrate a performer very much engaged with his music and performing to a high standard. It was the public side of ‘Bob Dylan’ that was causing Dylan so much trouble at this time. This can be illustrated by the fact that from November 1981 to February 1986 Dylan took only his second – and, to date, last – extended break from touring, punctuated only by a brief European tour in 1984.4 Indeed, during 1982, Dylan gave only one public performance.

  ROCK, POSTMODERNISM AND AUTHORITY

  Stars always exist as something more than just themselves; they represent something other than just an individual. This means, however, that stardom and star meaning are constantly structured by factors outside the star’s control. They are prey to changing social forces more than anonymous individuals. In the last chapter, I discussed how Dylan came to be understood as the ‘leader’ of rock music even as he tried to reject that mantle. This linking of Dylan with rock music had an affect on Dylan, because how ‘rock’ is interpreted and valued will impact on how Dylan is interpreted and valued. In this chapter I want to discuss a range of different processes, both within and without the music industry, that occur in the 1980s and affect the social positioning of rock (as well as a wider reconsideration of ‘the sixties’) to explain the effect they had on Dylan’s stardom. My general argument is that rock’s position in the hierarchy of popular music diminished during this era (the ‘death of rock’ argument) and that, while the death of rock may have been exaggerated, Dylan’s indeterminate star-meaning at this time, the way he became represented as increasingly irrelevant, is one outcome of this. On many levels, Dylan’s stardom represented ‘rock’ – his chameleon nature, his continual moving on, his political conscience, his insistence on referring to women as ‘baby’ – and so as rock’s authority becomes diminished, so too does Dylan’s stardom.

  The first factor that I will discuss in this regard concerns what I am labelling ‘post-survivorism’. The idea of being a ‘survivor’ gained currency throughout the 1970s,5 a notion that probably emerged as a result of the expanding influence of Reich’s psychoanalytic theories that emphasise the release of repressed emotions and desires as the key to happiness.6 Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissim and The Minimalistic Self, discusses how the notion of survival became embedded in popular culture and political debate, such as self-help guides on surviving marriage, or divorce, or just about anything you might face in daily life.7 This notion of survivorism became a key discourse in 1970s rock culture, as one of the central strands of survivorism in America at the time was the idea of having ‘survived the sixties’, both in terms of surviving the political ‘defeat’ of the countercultural movement and in terms of the physical toll that much sixties consumption took on its consumers, most obviously in the deaths of several figureheads such as Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison. Survivorism was clearly a significant discourse for those prominent rock stars who had emerged in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s. Janne Mäkela, for example, discusses how Lennon utilised it in many of his 1970s interviews.8 Mäkela’s conclusion is that ‘the toll that the so-called rock and roll lifestyle had so visibly taken since the late 1960s in fact gave the “rock survivors” special status, some validation in the 1970s’.

  Towards the end of the decade, Dylan also utilised this discourse, portraying himself as a survivor in song. In ‘What Can I Do For You?’, he asserts ‘Well I don’t deserve it, but I sure did make it through’, while his final pre-evangelical album, Street Legal, closes with the lines

  There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived

  If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived

  I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive

  But without you it just doesn’t seem right

  Oh, where are you tonight?

  (‘Where Are You Tonight?

  (Journey Through Dark Heat)’)

  Dylan had certainly had a traumatic seventies, and his private trials had been fought in a very public arena. Several major works of the decade – the albums Blood On The Tracks, Desire and Street Legal, as well as the film Renaldo and Clara present a raw and vulnerable Dylan somehow making it through. In a long essay called ‘Dylan – What Happened?’, Paul Williams argues that Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was actually a response to his personal traumas of the late seventies.9 It seems reasonable to surmise that at the end of the seventies, survivorism played some role in Dylan’s stardom.

  My reason for mentioning survivorism, however, is not to discuss Dylan’s seventies stardom but to question the effect that this had on how he was understood in the 1980s. Mäkela states that the survivor discourse gave sixties rock stars some ‘validation’ during the 1970s, and provided a justification for their continuation as artists. It therefore seems worth asking: What happens when the survivor justification expires? New cultural ideologies that emphasised consumer lifestyles and individual self-sufficiency emerged as part of neo-liberalism and trumped notions of survivorism and collective action. This undoubtedly had an impact on using survivorism as a justification for older rock stars. If their ‘validation’ as survivors was rejected, what other reason did they have for their continuing stardom?

  The weakening of survivorism can be broadly linked to wider arguments regarding the death of rock which developed at the end of the seventies and into the eighties:

  I am now quite sure that the rock era is over. People will go on playing and enjoying rock music, of course (though the label is increasingly vague), but the music business is no longer organized around rock, around the selling of records of a particular sort of musical event to young people. The rock era – born around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Sgt Pepper, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols – turned out to be a by-way in the development of twentieth-century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass-cultural revolution. Rock was a last romantic attempt to preserve ways of music-making – performer as artist, performance as ‘community’ – that had been made obsolete by technology and capital.10

  What does the ‘death of rock’ mean? Just like in discussions of the ‘death of the author’, the argument is not about a physical annihilation – rock has not disappeared. What has been ‘killed’, however, is the authority of the rock ideology as well as the assumption that the values and beliefs of rock culture are those to which all forms of popular music should adhere. Rock emerged within the mainstream but it also took over the mainstream, creating a form of ‘rock imperialism’ in which all forms of music were judged by the standards adopted by rock. The industrial organisation of record labels was dominated by the rock ideology (specific divisions for black musics like soul were frequently marginalised within major labels), while key positions of power within radio and the music press were heavily influenced by those adhering to the rock ideology. Rock was assumed to be synonymous with the mainstream. Following the ‘death of rock’, however, it is argued that the mainstream has fragmented into a variety of different genres with no one genre being considered dominant. There is no longer an imperialism whereby the ideas and standards of one genre are used as
a way of measuring other genres. In this way rock lost its place as the dominant genre of popular music. As Negus explains ‘Punk rock had [supposedly] broken the sequential history of pop. The future was to promise a proliferation of the margins, a carnival of styles, rather than a renewed linear narrative based around the concept of a mainstream and musical tributaries.’11 The reason that punk is used to mark the end point of rock’s hegemony is that punk undermined the notion that rock music could offer a genuinely countercultural challenge to capitalism. As previously argued, rock emerged as a way of sorting mass cultural items (and thus consumers) into a hierarchy, with some granted artistic value and revolutionary potential (‘rock’) and others dismissed as standardised and trivial, wholly implicated by their capitalist production (‘pop’). This particular ideology, however, was undermined by punk in the second half of the seventies because punk made clear its status as constructed chaos, manufactured mayhem. Punk was more concerned with surface than with meaning, with artifice than with naturalism; it showed up the contradiction inherent in the claim that ‘the revolutionaries are on CBS’.* The death of rock does not mean that rock music just disappeared. What did occur, however, is that rock ceased to be something that people followed with passion and commitment and became a ‘lifestyle choice’. This change can be seen in the emergence of a new UK monthly glossy magazine, Q, and the transformation of Rolling Stone into a lifestyle magazine. It can also be seen in the most popular rock stars of the period, such as Phil Collins and Dire Straits. As the key record-buying demographic grew older, rock ceased to be something one believed in but was, rather, something one consumed.