Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  In terms of Dylan’s reputation, therefore, the critical panning received by Under The Red Sky in 1990 marked another turning point. Coupled with this, the departure of G. E. Smith, the driving force of the first NET band, left the NET rudderless. Many fans consider the first half of 1991 to be the most painful part of the NET, when a Dylan who was clearly drinking heavily led an under-rehearsed, amateurish band, around Europe. The early nineties is a period in which Dylan’s star-status became emaciated. The NET was viewed as the last refuge of a sometimes inspiring, but more often atrocious, performer who could no longer write songs and refused to retire with dignity. To many, he became a laughing stock, a running joke.* The albums he released during this period strengthened the impression of someone with nothing to say. He released two albums of traditional songs featuring just his voice, guitar and harmonica (Good As I Been To You in 1992, and World Gone Wrong in 1993). The third album released during this period was for MTV Unplugged (1995). It is an album unloved by critics and fans alike, deemed to be poor performances of ‘safe’ songs.

  What comes across most from the reviews of the time, however, is a resignation to Dylan’s continuing irrelevance. What is noticeable is not whether albums and shows garnered good or bad reviews but simply how much they were ignored: World Gone Wrong recorded his worst ever chart position, 70, and the logic of the NET made Dylan shows much less of a media event. In the early 1990s, Dylan simply dropped off the critical map. He later claimed that it was this period that enabled him to transform his stardom, to shape his career as he intended:

  In the early ’90s, the media lost track of me, and that was the best thing that could happen. It was crucial, because you can’t achieve greatness under media scrutiny. You’re never allowed to be less than your legend. When the media picked up on me again five or six years later, I’d fully developed into the performer I needed to be and was in a position to go any which way I wanted. The media will never catch up again. Once they let you go, they cannot get you back. It’s metaphysical. And it’s not good enough to retreat. You have to be considered irrelevant. (Edna Gunderson interview, 2004)

  Dylan’s ‘relevance’ returned in 1997, sparked by an event that not even the performer himself could have predicted.

  Snapshot: The soul of previous times

  The NET suffered a temporary hiatus in May 1997 when Dylan was hospitalised due to an attack of pericarditis (an inflammation of the sac around the heart, brought on by an infection called histoplasmosis). It is unlikely that Dylan’s life was ever in serious danger, but this was not known at the time and Dylan’s media profile was suddenly raised as stories of his impending demise ran on TV and in the press. He was released from hospital in June and issued a press statement that included the immortal ‘I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon’. He returned to the stage in August, looking considerably frailer. Within a month, however, he was playing in front of 300,000 people, including the Pope, at the World Eucharist Congress.

  In September 1997, Dylan released Time Out Of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years. It received greater critical acclaim than anything Dylan had produced in the last twenty years and marks the start of a remarkable upturn in Dylan’s reputation. He won three Grammies for Time Out Of Mind, and the last ten years have seen Dylan feted by awards bodies, universities and rock critics. In 2000, he won an Oscar for the song ‘Things Have Changed’, recorded for the movie The Wonder Boys. His next album, 2001’s “Love And Theft” received universally good reviews. In 2003, Dylan wrote and starred in Masked and Anonymous,a movie about an old rock star bailed from prison to play a benefit concert. He released the first volume of an autobiography, Chronicles, in 2004 and, in 2005, featured in No Direction Home,a 4-hour documentary on his early career directed by Martin Scorsese. Critics used these latter two releases as an opportunity to effuse about just how extraordinary Dylan was. In 2006, Dylan began a new career as a DJ, hosting Theme Time Radio Hour on XM satellite radio station, playing an eclectic mix of songs. He also released a new album, Modern Times, which was once more well received. This album has proved one of Dylan’s best-sellers, giving him his first number one album for thirty years.Through all of these years, the NET continued and is now nearing 2,000 shows.

  Albums and major events

  May 1997 Dylan is hospitalised with chest pains

  August 1997 World Eucharist Congress

  September 1997 Time Out Of Mind

  December 1997 Awarded a Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award

  January 1998 Still looking frail, Dylan performs at the Grammy Awards ceremony and wins three awards

  February 2000 Wonder Boys soundtrack (various artists)

  May 2000 Wins the Polar Music prize

  January 2001 Wins Golden Globe Award for ‘Things Have Changed’

  March 2001 Wins Oscar for ‘Things Have Changed’

  September 2001 “Love And Theft”

  July 2003 Masked and Anonymous (film)

  September 2004 Chronicles Volume 1

  September 2005 No Direction Home (documentary)

  May 2006 Theme Time Radio Hour begins

  August 2006 Modern Times

  *I can only say ‘reasonably sure’ because, while there are many comments to this effect in the seventies and beyond, there are no such comments from Dylan during the sixties. Explanations for this emerge from Dylan’s star-image at that time. Gray (2000:839) argues that Dylan’s ‘later’ view ‘replac[es] the previously held Dylan view, which was that each album was a unique step along an unknown road, a deliberate creation under the control of the artist’ but this is more a reflection of Gray’s view of the work than any comments made by Dylan. My view is that, because of his emergence within a folk music aesthetic, Dylan simply took for granted issues that he would later be forced to make explicit. The clearest 1960s examples of the idea that the songs were blueprints for developing in live performance are his radical revisions of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ and ‘One Too Many Mornings’ on his 1966 world tour.

  * Advice For Geraldine On Her Miscellaneous Birthday, included in the concert programme of the 31 October concert at New York Town Hall.

  *It does not entirely emerge from the folk revival as, for example, there was an emphasis upon live performance in jazz as well. Also, while the folk ideology of rock prioritised live performance at the expense of records in the way I am outlining here, it is also important to note that the art ideology prioritised the record, as a self-conscious creation, over the live performance.

  * Most of my statistics in this section come from the incredibly useful, if slightly scary, Olof’s Files (http://www.bjorner.com/bob.htm).

  * Heylin suggests early 1995 is the moment at which the NET succeeded in its aim of exhausting those who were coming to see the legend (2000:687).

  * According to Sounes, Dylan actually tried to join The Dead in 1989 (2001:440–1).

  *I say ‘just’ but this would still be a high figure compared to many other artists.

  *Again, comparison to earlier Dylan tours is instructive. The 1974 tour included 5 songs performed at all 40 shows, and 10 more performed in at least 30 shows. In 1978, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’ all garnered 111 performances each, while 9 other songs topped 100 performances.

  * It’s not always quite this varied; there is likely to be more variation when Dylan plays a series of shows in one town, as he did at Brixton. The first 5 shows of the 2006 summer tour yielded ‘just’ 27 songs.

  * There is, however, a sleight of hand going on here. There exists another way of experiencing the NET, and that is through bootlegs and live concert recordings. Unlike The Grateful Dead, Dylan does not openly condone the recording of his concerts. Virtually all his concerts get recorded, though, and he knows it. Actually, I think he depends on it as a key element of the NET mentality. The aims of the NET in creating a new audience would not be achievable without the prevalence of live
recordings – seeing 5 shows a year is not going to reduce someone’s recording consciousness; hearing 100 recordings of live performances might. Live recordings ride the line between process and product, for what we have is a procession of products aiming to document the ongoing process; each recording only given meaning by all the others that surround it (see L. Marshall, 2005).

  *I am absolutely not suggesting that there should be no investigation of quality within popular culture. There is a tendency for those promoting popular culture to rely upon a populist defence (if people like it, it must be good). This leads to a simple inversion of the mass culture critique and what Jim McGuigan (1992) calls a ‘crisis of qualitative judgement’. We do need to be able to distinguish what is good and bad within popular culture, but the argument here is that we need to develop new forms of criticism that deal with low culture on its own terms. One factor that needs considering is the ‘usefulness’ of the work.

  * Although Dylan’s reputation has recovered since 1997, I do think that this idea of inconsistency and extremes – sometimes breathtakingly good, sometimes breathtakingly awful – is still a significant part of Dylan’s star-image, particularly for people with only a passing interest in music.

  8

  NEVER ENDING STARDOM: DYLAN AFTER TIME OUT OF MIND

  1997 was one of the most important years of Dylan’s career. Two things occured which, together, fundamentally altered the meaning of Dylan’s stardom. These were his period in hospital and the release of Time Out Of Mind. I said in chapter 2 that although literary critics may argue against the biographical interpretation of songs, stardom is in fact a key way in which songs are given meaning and that, while stardom and biography are intertwined, stardom does not depend upon biographical accuracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the release of this album. In ‘reality’ Dylan’s ill health and Time Out Of Mind have little to do with each other – the songs were written in late 1996 and recorded in January and February 1997, while Dylan was not laid low until May. In terms of stardom, however, the two things are fundamentally connected. The illness created an understanding of Dylan, a context, in which these songs were received and interpreted. Once released, the songs on the album reinforced that public impression.

  Time Out Of Mind was a universally lauded album. Conceivably, it received better reviews than any album Dylan has ever released. My argument is that these excellent reviews are not because of the strength of the songwriting. Nor were they merely an expression of relief that he was alive. The key reason for the success of Time Out Of Mind is that the album offers a consistent and coherent sound that was in harmony with Dylan’s contemporary star-image. This occurs primarily through the voice, but it is also present in the sound of the album (hot and claustrophobic) and in the lyrics. Michael Gray offers a good synthesis of the album’s key themes:

  Endless, almost compulsive walking, desolation, lack of a sense of contact with other people; a suffocating sense of the hollowness of everything, and therefore the purposelessness of life; a looking forward to death, alternating with a wish that time was not running out; the conviction that long ago some crucial wrong turning was taken in life, one that meant the loss of true love; the conviction that there is little to say and ever less point to saying it; the exhaustion of feeling, mingled with a passionate sorrow for all this loss.1

  I want to synthesise these further and explain how three key themes linked to the specific star-image Dylan had throughout the early nineties. The first is the emphasis on constant movement, walking in particular. Many of the songs begin with reference to walking (‘I’m walking through streets that are dead’; ‘Gonna walk down that dirt road’; ‘I’m walking through the summer nights’. . .). As Gray points out, this walking seems almost inescapable or compulsive. This certainly marries with the conception of Dylan created by the NET. Transitoriness, the concept of continually ‘moving on’, is a key element of rock culture, and Dylan has always been viewed as a restless character. Since the start of the NET, however, that restlessness has been given a very physical image – that of the itinerant troubadour, the wandering hobo, always heading for another joint, staying in a place long enough to play a show and then moving on. Dylan’s contemporary image is thus one of continual movement, always moving on to the next gig. In 1997, journalist Alan Jackson wrote of ‘a man who exists solely within a spotlight. Someone brought alive again each night on a stage somewhere around the world, but otherwise forever rootless and a willing slave to that never-ending tour’. This image is reinforced through the references to constant, compulsive, walking on Time Out Of Mind.

  The second key theme of Time Out Of Mind is that of having nothing to say. There are repeated references throughout the album to being unable to say the words that would mean something:

  Feel like talking to someone, but I just don’t know who

  (‘Million Miles’)

  Now you can seal up the book and not write any more

  (‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’)

  Well I’m tired of talking, tired of trying to explain

  (‘Til I Fell In Love With You’)

  This clearly ties in with the image of nineties Dylan as someone devoted to performing rather than writing. Dylan made repeated statements during this time that ‘the world don’t need any more songs’ and such statements were affirmed in the release of two albums of old songs, Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong (in 2004, he stated that ‘if I made music for myself, I would only cover old Charley Patton songs’). However, as already mentioned, many critics and fans were reluctant to relinquish the idea of Dylan as a songwriter and were critical of his turn to performing. There is, therefore, a certain irony that Dylan’s argument about the lack of need for new words was only taken seriously by his audience when Dylan makes it in new songs and this illustrates how Dylan can never be entirely successful in transforming his star-image. But, successful or otherwise, the claim in ‘Highlands’ that ‘there’s less and less to say’ fits neatly with the image of Bob Dylan in the 1990s.

  The final key theme of Time Out Of Mind is aging and mortality. Throughout the album, there are references to lost youth, to failing bodies, to a falling of metaphorical darkness. This was the theme most clearly picked up by reviewers and is the one most clearly related to his biographical detail. It is here that star-image and album response directly coalesce. The media were quick to draw links between Dylan’s spell in hospital and the doom-laden nature of this album. Some drew incorrect conclusions that the illness must have prompted the melancholic album. Others didn’t, but even then, some implied that Dylan must somehow have known that something was going to happen. And even those reviews that explicitly highlighted the biographical discrepancy merely served to bring the two things closer together in public consciousness.

  The key to Time Out Of Mind’s critical acceptance was that it presented a coherent image of a singer that matched with the public conceptualisation of Dylan the star. This can partly be seen in the words – there is a thematic coherence to this album – but by far the most significant element of it is in the voice. Songs acquire their meaning through the voice more than through the semantic meaning of the words. Nowhere is this more apparent than on this album. On Time Out Of Mind, Dylan’s voice embodies the key themes of the album. It sounds old; very old; way older than Dylan himself and there is no doubt that this voice was shocking to many listeners:

  The sinister rusted-muffler growl he introduced on Time Out of Mind . . . shocked the world because it didn’t even echo past glories – it was something totally new.2

  This new voice had begun to make an appearance on Good As I Been To You, World Gone Wrong and Unplugged, but very few people heard these records. Time Out Of Mind was one of Dylan’s most successful records, becoming his first platinum album since Slow Train Coming. Most of those buying the album had not heard Dylan singing since at least Oh Mercy, perhaps Infidels, maybe even before that. The voice of Time Out Of Mind bears no relation to what Bob Dyla
n’s voice was supposed to sound like.*

  This is partly because of his age, but there is also no doubt that the NET has had an impact on Dylan’s voice (when he recorded this album, he had played 749 NET shows). With inadequate periods for resting his vocal chords, his range had constricted (since 1997 it has condensed even further), the sound was cracked, gnarly, haggard. Reviews of his recent albums have referred to it as ‘superbly cracked’, a ‘scratchy, cigarette-scarred bark’, and a ‘cruelly muted rasp that sounds as if it must be drawing blood from Dylan’s throat’. It is a voice that sounds as old as Methuselah. But the voice is also astonishingly ‘present’, it has so much texture that one can almost touch it. Williams suggests that listening to Time Out Of Mind is like being in the first few rows of a concert3 and it is the visceral nature of the voice that gives this effect. This voice certainly has a grain, a thick, coarse grain with a natural dignity and beauty: the grain of a 400-year-old oak tree, burning with the bark still on.

  To my mind, the ‘age’ of the voice is fundamental to how Dylan’s star-image has developed since the release of Time Out Of Mind (which I will discuss later). The voice is understood as being able to reveal someone’s true personality. As Frith points out, ‘we assume that we can hear someone’s life in their voice – a life that’s there despite and not because of the singer’s craft’.4 Dylan is now conceived of as old, not middle-aged (perhaps more of a problematic label for rock music) – he was 49 when Under The Red Sky was released, he was 56 going on 70 when Time Out Of Mind came out. Now, age is not an inherent virtue. It can be interpreted in different ways, for example, as representing senility and decrepitude. In this instance, however, Dylan’s age came to stand for wisdom and fortitude. Again, it is the voice that provides this impression – the singer on Time Out Of Mind expresses alienation, desolation, a sense of disconnectedness with the world but in a way that asserts the indomitability of the singer’s inner character. There is strength in the face of resignation. The singer is able to assert his inner strength not so much in the words he speaks but in the authoritative way they are stated. Dylan ‘speaks authentically of having lost any sense of authenticity’.5 This characteristic, this dignity and defiance in the face of age, is a key feature of the NET, and of Dylan’s post-’97 stardom generally.