Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  Dylan started the NET in June 1988 and his media presence was high for the next couple of years. Oh Mercy,released in 1989, was considered a great return to form. At the same time, The Travelling Wilburys Volume 1,a collaboration of unassuming superstars (Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison), was one of the year’s surprise hits. 1990 saw the release of the critically-dismissed Under The Red Sky and the Wilburys’ less-impressive follow-up, Volume 3. Dylan periodically appeared in the spotlight in the early nineties: a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 1991 was followed in 1992 by an all-star extravaganza in which an impressive list of celebrities queued up to pay homage to Dylan.

  During the early nineties, Dylan’s already tarnished reputation weakened further and, nostalgia-fests aside, his career became less interesting to the media. Following the disappointment of Under The Red Sky, his album releases were considered less important and his songwriting talents viewed as defunct. Dylan did not release an album of self-penned material between 1990 and 1997. His next two releases – Good As I Been To You in 1992 and World Gone Wrong in 1993 – featured acoustic versions of traditional songs, and no Dylan originals. Almost out of sight, the NET continued unabated.

  Albums and major events

  July 1987 Shows with The Grateful Dead (documented on Dylan And The Dead)

  Sept–Oct 1987 European tour

  October 1987 Hearts Of Fire (movie)

  January 1988 Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame

  May 1988 Down In The Groove

  June 1988 Start of the Never Ending Tour

  October 1988 The Travelling Wilburys Volume One

  September 1989 Oh Mercy

  September 1990 Under The Red Sky

  October 1990 The Travelling Wilburys Volume Three

  February 1991 Receives a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

  October 1992 All-star gala event – ‘Columbia Music Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan’ – held in New York

  November 1992 Good As I Been To You

  October 1993 World Gone Wrong

  August 1994 Appearance at Woodstock 2

  November 1994 Records two shows for MTV’s Unplugged series

  *This was an advertising campaign run by Dylan’s record label in 1970.

  *One possible way of explaining this is to utilise Stephen Scobie’s position that Dylan’s persona is a mixture of prophet and trickster (see Scobie, 2003:26–35). Dylan’s trickster persona would have been more in keeping with postmodern culture’s emphasis on style and surface and if this had been to the fore perhaps he would have been better received at this time (comparable perhaps to how Bowie maintained popularity during the first part of the eighties by adapting different styles). However, around 1980 Dylan was undergoing the most prophetic part of his whole career, which meant he was in conflict with the era’s dominant ideas.

  * There’s another interesting aspect to this: it seems that just about everyone knew about ‘Blind Willie McTell’, even before its release in 1991. Loads of music journalists suggested it as Dylan’s best track of the decade, and I’m guessing that some of them hadn’t even heard it. There’s a bit of journalistic pretentiousness in this, but I would also suggest that it was a reflection on Dylan’s status as an emblem of rock – those critics with an investment in the rock ideology could use it as proof that the rock dream was still alive but it couldn’t be heard. This also goes back to earlier discussions about Dylan’s reputation being respected in the abstract as part of his post-1960s stardom. The existence of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ offered proof that Dylan really is that good but no, actually, you can’t hear it, just believe us. The vitality of Dylan, and therefore rock, was a matter of faith.

  *These changes also contribute to the declining authority of rock and are both a cause and a consequence of broader postmodern trends already discussed. For an interesting account of how all these issues link together, see Frith, 1988.

  * I’m not suggesting that record labels didn’t cash in on Dylan’s work before – they clearly did (releasing Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits in 1967 while Dylan was out of the public eye, for example). Structural changes in the industry mean that it does begin to happen in a more intensive way during the eighties, however.

  * The significant exception to this rule came when Dylan performed to the largest audience of his career. At ‘Live Aid’ we see a performer dominated by his past, but not in control of it. Because of his status, Dylan had been asked to close the whole event. Looking overweight and distracted, Dylan set about murdering three of his most famous protest songs – ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’, ‘When The Ship Comes In’ and ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. There are mitigating circumstances to explain Dylan’s performance that night (his monitors were turned off, and thus Dylan couldn’t hear himself over the thirty-odd celebrities rehearsing their lines for the ensemble finale). Dylan actually achieved something simply by getting through the songs. What appeared on a billion people’s TV screens, however, was a performer who could no longer reproduce past glories. This performance had a major impact on Dylan’s eighties reputation.

  7

  REDEFINING STARDOM: THE NEVER ENDING TOUR

  By the late 1980s, Dylan’s stardom had become frozen by sixties nostalgia. This period is generally considered to be Dylan’s lowest professional ebb. Dylan himself has subsequently presented it this way, describing his inability to connect with his work at this time:

  I’d kind of reached the end of the line. Whatever I’d started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in. You know, like how do I sing this? It just sounds funny. I can’t remember what it means, does it mean – is it just a bunch of words? Maybe it’s like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense. (David Gates interview, 1997)

  He made a similar statement about his intention to quit in 1965 when he was equally struggling with limitations placed upon him by his star-image (which can be clearly seen in the film Don’t Look Back). He reversed that decision upon writing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Dylan attempted to resolve similar problems in the mid–late eighties by initiating the ‘Never Ending Tour’ (NET). Paul Williams argues that just as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ showed Dylan a new way to write, the NET provided Dylan with a new way to perform.1 This is partially true, but what is actually occurring in both 1965 and 1987 is a wilful attempt to redefine his stardom to open up new possibilities for music making.

  Throughout much of this book, I have emphasised how wider social factors constrain a particular star-image and limit the power of the star to shape the public meaning of their stardom. In chapter 5, I discussed how Dylan’s attempts to subvert his star-meaning achieved only limited success because of factors beyond his control. It is important, however, not to over-sociologise; the star still has some power to shape their public meaning although it is less than conventionally presented. While I would argue that ultimately it is the audience that has the power to accept or reject a star’s image, what stars themselves actually do is important for reinforcing or contradicting audience beliefs, for chipping away at the boundaries of their meaning. Certain actions or strategies can have a big impact, positive and negative, in how the audience understands the star.

  The directions taken by Dylan in 1965 and 1988 were not obvious, though we may see them that way with hindsight. Neither were they smooth. The change in direction taken by Dylan in 1965 created a tension between the star and his audience, as witnessed at Newport ’65 and the 1966 world tour. There is a similar tension between star and public during the first half of the NET, during which Dylan is critically dismissed and often ridiculed by both press and fans. However, whereas the earlier conflict has become a defining part of Dylan’s stardom, indicating an artist unwilling to bow to audience pressure, the latter challenge by Dylan to his audience has received inadequate analysis. Indeed, it often seems that people assume he continues the NET – a project which has taken up four-tenths of his working life – because he can’t think of an
ything better to do. My argument is that the NET was a deliberate strategy adopted by Dylan in an attempt to transform his relationship with his audience. He has never explicitly said this (indeed, as I will discuss shortly, he rejects the label ‘the NET’) but, in interviews during the 1990s, he has mentioned specific elements of what I am discussing. Furthermore, I would argue that he has been pretty successful in achieving what he set out to do, and we need to recognise Dylan’s achievement in finding some way out of the problems he faced in the 1980s. Few, if any, of his contemporaries did so, instead either retiring or learning to live with their new star-meaning. That we take his solution to the problem so matter of factly today indicates just how successful Dylan has been in reorienting his star-image. Finally, I would argue that the success of the NET in redefining Dylan’s star-image is a key reason for the critical and commercial success that he has achieved since 1997. I will discuss this in the next chapter. In this one, I want to take a more serious look at the NET and discuss some of the issues it raises.

  But, first, that tricky issue of definition. Dylan branded his new tour the ‘Never Ending Tour’ in a throw-away line during a 1989 interview, and it stuck (in part because it was used on the cover of the magazine). He has subsequently, and repeatedly, disavowed the title including an ‘official statement’ in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong: ‘don’t be bewildered by the Never Ending Tour chatter. there was a Never Ending Tour but it ended in ’91 with the departure of guitarist G. E. Smith. That one’s long gone but there have been many others since then . . . each with their own character and design.’ This has led some to argue that it is inappropriate to use the term analytically (Smith, for example, rather fruitlessly refers to the ‘Never Ending Series of Tours’ (NEST)).2 However, it is worth referring back to the discussion of ‘Masters Of War’ on page 121 explaining how the meaning of Dylan’s stardom is not controlled by Dylan. The NET has become the key way in which Dylan’s later career is understood. It is a label used by fans and media alike. As with the ‘Masters Of War’ example, what Dylan thinks about the label doesn’t matter. I shall, therefore, be calling it the NET. Dylan is right, however, that we should not let the singular label lead us to believe that all the different legs of the NET sound the same, because they don’t. The shows in 2006 sounded much different than those in late 2005, for example. There are, however, particular structural features of the whole enterprise that justify using an overarching name, as it is these structural elements that define what the NET is. These are the subject of this chapter but the different ‘eras’ of the NET do indeed have ‘their own character and design’.

  ‘RECORDING CONSCIOUSNESS’ AND LIVE PERFORMANCE

  To begin this overview of the NET, it is necessary to discuss the role that records and concerts play in the consumption of popular music. When people attend a concert they are not merely going to hear the music. Rather, they are going to engage in a shared experience in which they unite with others to celebrate the important role that this music, indeed music generally, plays in their lives. The music does not necessarily mean the same thing to every person there, but it means something to them all and it is this fact that they celebrate together. The music will have private meaning for people attending the show; this is the music they listened to at university, fell in love to, shared with friends and so on. It will also have a shared generational meaning – this is the music we listened to when we were growing up. And, in some cases, the music (and, indeed, the star) represents some wider social phenomenon, such as ‘the sixties’. In all of these circumstances, what matters is not any inherent aesthetic quality the music holds but, rather, the social meaning that the music has – the meaning of the music is socially, rather than musically, prescribed (I will say more on this later).

  The social embeddedness of musical meaning in the concert ritual brings with it a set of expectations and preconceptions relating to the particular star and their work. If people attending concerts are engaged in a shared celebration of their experience of music then the performed music needs to provide an adequate reference point. This means two things. Firstly, there is an expectation that the artist will play familiar songs – people want the hits they heard on the radio or at college parties; they generally do not want to hear obscure songs or new material not yet released as these provide no frame of reference for sharing their experience of music with others in the audience. Secondly, they want to hear these songs as they remember them, not in an unrecognisable form. Here the role of the record is paramount.

  As explained in chapter 2, ‘the work’ in popular music is not the written score but its recorded performance. And while the notion of a ‘record’ may perhaps have been accepted literally in the 1930s and 1940s – records were an imitation of live performances – by the onset of rock and roll, records were not an imitation of anything but were, rather, the musical event itself.3 The recorded song has come to dominate the idea of ‘music’ since midway through the twentieth century, so much so that there exists what Bennett calls a ‘recording consciousness’ that ‘defines the social reality of popular music’.4 It is the record that defines the popular song and, therefore, it is records that are most significant in defining a star’s image and career.

  The dominance of the record affects live performance. Our appreciation of live music is coloured by our experience of recordings. According to Middleton ‘live performances have to try to approximate the sounds which inhabit [the recording] consciousness. Even when they fail, or it is impracticable, an audience’s collective memory takes over and it “hears” what it cannot hear, in the “sketch” provided by the band.’5 Live performances are generally heard as crude interpretations of the recorded experience, as variations from the record.6 This, I think, has always created a problem for Dylan’s career; I’m reasonably sure that he has always viewed himself as a ‘live performer’ rather than a ‘recording artist’:

  For me, all my albums are just measuring points for wherever I was at a certain period of time. I went into the studio, recorded the songs as good as I could, and left. Basically, realistically, I’m a live performer and want to play onstage for the people and not make records that may sound really good. (Lynne Allen interview, 1978)*

  Dylan’s understanding of recording has always been literal – record what happens in the studio and release the results, and he has never sought to utilise advanced studio technology in the way that, for example, The Beatles did (a revealing comparison: The Beatles spent 129 days of studio time creating the Sergeant Pepper album; Dylan recorded his first fifteen albums, up to and including 1976’s Desire, in just ninety days).7 This approach became a hindrance for Dylan, however, as increasingly sophisticated recording technology seemingly prevented him from realising his ideas quickly. This aspect of Dylan’s recording career is well recognised and provides one explanation for a series of underachieving albums (notably Shot Of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque). There is certainly a discrepancy between Dylan’s creative work and his released records during this period.

  There is a more deep-rooted reason for Dylan’s discomfort in the recording studio, however. He has repeatedly voiced disquiet at the effect that records have not only in freezing a particular moment, but in how they are (and will be) used to construct a particular image about him:

  Interviewer: But that record will be here, if the world is, for a thousand years . . . long after you’re gone, these records will be here and people will listen to them and think . . . well, one thing or another about this guy who made these records four hundred years ago.

  Dylan: Oh, poor me!

  (Dave Herman interview, 1981)

  Records play an extremely significant part in constructing an image of the artist and this is contrary to how Dylan seemingly sees himself. Sixteen years later, he claimed that hearing his own albums was ‘like looking into a lifeless mirror’ (Robert Hilburn interview, 1997). This resonates with something Dylan wrote in 1964:

  do Not create anything, it wil
l be

  misinterpreted. it will not change.

  it will follow you the

  rest of your life.*

  As with my earlier discussions regarding his concern over how culture becomes canonised, Dylan has regularly displayed anxiety that records do exactly the same thing for music, freezing them and robbing them of their social basis, their vitality, their capacity to communicate. Dylan’s stated purpose is to communicate directly to people in performance:

  What I do is more of an immediate thing; to stand up on stage and sing – you get it back immediately. It’s not like writing a book or even making a record. . . . What I do is so immediate it changes the nature, the concept, of art to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s too immediate. It’s like the man who made that painting there [points to painting on wall of hotel room] has no idea we’re sitting here now looking at it or not looking at it or anything. (Neil Spencer interview, 1981)

  For this reason, Dylan has always been interested in songs, rather than records, as songs can be developed and performed live. In 1997, he made repeated reference to the idea that ‘songs [are] just blueprints for what I’d play later on the stage’ (Edna Gunderson interview, 1997). This emphasis on an ongoing creative process rather than a finished object is not unique to Dylan and actually has a long history. Emerson, for example, stated that ‘books are the death of literature. True art is never fixed, but always flowing.’8 The etymology of culture, emerging from words like agriculture and cultivation implies that culture is an action, and it is only during the nineteenth century that culture becomes understood as a thing.9 For artists, the emphasis on culture being a process rather than an object is significant because of an inherent tension from artworks existing in a social formation that attempts to objectify and put a price on everything. Once a cultural idea or expression becomes embodied in a thing, it becomes far more open to commodification. As the purpose of culture has generally been understood as standing against the commodification of all aspects of human life, this creates an unbearable paradox with which both the Romantics and the Modernists struggled: as soon as a work offering a critique of contemporary life is created, it can itself become a commodity. Indeed, Eisenberg suggests that music came to be seen as the most sublime of the arts during the Romantic era precisely because it was the least amenable to commodification10 and while I am not suggesting that Dylan is engaged in the NET as a kind of anti-capitalist protest (on the contrary, there are many examples of Dylan being rather comfortable with the commercialisation of his music), his interest in music as a communicative process rather than an objectified thing stems from the same ideological root.