by Lee Marshall
Since the release of Time Out Of Mind, Dylan has been lauded in a way he hasn’t been since the 1960s. Between 1997 and 2001 he has been feted with awards: the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; a Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award; three Grammies for Time Out Of Mind, including his first major Grammy (album of the year); the Polar Music Prize; a Golden Globe award; and, to his personal delight, an Oscar. He was also nominated for the Nobel prize for literature in each of these years. His work since 1997 – the albums Time Out Of Mind, “Love And Theft” and Modern Times, his autobiography Chronicles, and the documentary No Direction Home – have received rave reviews. “Love And Theft” was the first album in nine years to be given five stars by Rolling Stone. His commercial standing has risen too – all three albums made the Top 10 around the globe, while Modern Times has given Dylan his first US number one album since 1976.
There is clearly an irony in how, despite Dylan’s attempts to reposition himself as a performer rather than a songwriter, it is only with the release of an album of new Dylan songs that he regains critical acclaim. Despite attempting to realign his star-image through the NET, the idea of Dylan as the greatest songwriter of his age is still important. It also illustrates the wider cultural idealisation of originality. This irony doubles back on itself, however, because what Dylan released in 1997 was not ‘original’ in the conventional sense. Instead, it was a deliberate juxtaposition of earlier sources, a patchwork quilt of lines and images from the blues, folk and pop canon. The opening song title, ‘Love Sick’, recalls Hank Williams’ big hit, ‘Lovesick Blues’, while the second song, ‘Dirt Road Blues’, mimics Charley Patton’s ‘Down The Dirt Road Blues’. ‘Smoking a cheap cigar’ from ‘Standing In The Doorway’ is taken from Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Waiting For A Train’. The clouds in ‘Highlands’ are compared to ‘sweet chariots that swing down low’, and so on and on and on. There are musical quotations too: the melody of ‘Make You Feel My Love’ is lifted from ‘You Belong To Me’ while the opening notes of ‘Standing In The Doorway’ bring to mind Elvis Presley’s hit, ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’.* This way of composing continued onto later work, on ‘Things Have Changed’ (‘I’m a worried man with a worried mind’ echoes many blues songs, while ‘Forty Miles Of Bad Road’ was a hit for Duane Eddy) and “Love And Theft” (the line ‘I’ll believe I’ll dust my broom’ (from ‘High Water’) is the title of a common blues song, while Charley Patton recorded a song called ‘High Water Everywhere’; ‘I got love for you, and it’s all in vain’ from ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum’ replicates Robert Johnson’s ‘Love In Vain’. The final line of ‘Sugar Baby’, ‘Look up, look up – seek your Maker – ’fore Gabriel blows his horn’ is actually from Frank Sinatra’s ‘The Lonesome Road’). There was a bit of a media furore when it was discovered that Dylan had borrowed several lines from a Japanese novel, Confessions of a Yakuza, by Junichi Saga, without attribution.* This use of quotation has been discussed by many commentators. It is often discussed as undermining conventional ideas of authorship.6 The use of quotations from other songs also serves to reinforce the central theme of Time Out Of Mind that there is less and less to say, as well as reiterating an earlier Dylan sentiment that ‘It’s all been done before / It’s all been written in the book’ (‘Too Much Of Nothing’).* In this chapter, however, I want to approach the issue from a slightly different angle; to consider how the use of quotations affects the musical experience of time, how they link Dylan to ‘tradition’, and how these dual processes affect Dylan’s star-image. My view is that it is in the relationship between time and tradition that we can find the explanation for Dylan’s remarkable resurgence in status.
‘SITTIN’ ON MY WATCH’: THE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE OF TIME
The most interesting comment I have read about Time Out Of Mind was in an email to Paul Williams that he published in his 2005 book. It states that ‘the album is also like a website full of hypertext links to the history of blues and folk, with lots of references all the way’.7 The reason I find it interesting is that it raises issues about the role that ‘technology’, in its broadest sense, affects how we experience a particular work. To put it another way, how the nature of the work (what kind of ‘vessel’ it is) rather than just its content (what it says) affects how we experience the work.* The emergence of hypertext (HTML), with those hyperlinks so familiar to us on the world wide web will, it has been argued, change the nature of reading. When reading a novel, the reader’s progress is structured by the nature of the work – you read progressively, from the beginning to the end. This imposes a sense of linearity on the act of reading – the author lays down the tracks and you follow them. In this sense, the author is in control of the pace of your experience – slowing you down for a couple of chapters to build suspense, quickening the pace at times of drama. This linearity is structured by the nature of the novel itself – there’s no other way to read it; you can’t read pages randomly. The emergence of HTML, however, has created alternative ways of reading. Rather than being forced to read from beginning to end, the reader can link to something else, to a digression or even to a different webpage. They may never reach the end of the article at all, instead following a series of links to end up at something completely different. This diminishes the power of the author to guide us, and increases the reader’s control over the reading experience. The key issue for my purpose, however, is a decline in the linearity of reading and its replacement by a more, say, expansive kind of reading, one that has more spatial dimensions. What I am interested in is how these changed practices affect our experience of time. With a novel, the author can attempt to impose a set time on how we experience the created universe in the fiction, giving us information when we need it, fast-forwarding a few months or spending many chapters on one day. Simplifying this quite a lot, how time unfolds within a novel is determined by the author. What the author cannot do, however, is structure how this experience of ‘reading time’ matches our experience of real time. Some people read faster than others; you may choose to read an entire novel in a day, or one chapter each night before sleep, and so on. The reader has the power to determine the time in which they experience the novel. This is not the same as our experience of music. Although the pause and shuffle buttons offer some control to the listener, ‘music lives in time, unfolds in time’, it ‘imposes[s] a common time’ on the listener.8 You cannot ‘listen quicker’ – forcing the music to play a bit faster makes it sound funny. When listening to a piece of music, you are in the hands of the composer and/or performer.
Our experience of time in music, however, is not necessarily the same as the ‘actual’ time it takes a piece of music to unfold. Our experience of musical time affects our experience of real time. Philip Tagg, for example, has shown that we tend to think that fast songs last for a shorter time than they actually do, while slow songs seem to last longer.9 The relationship between musical experience and time has been a central preoccupation of modernist and postmodernist classical composers. It has also been a central concern of Bob Dylan. Throughout his career, a key theme of his work has been the indeterminacy of experienced time. More specifically, Dylan has made repeated comments of his desire for songs to ‘stop time’. In 1985, he said that ‘for a moment they stop time. Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stopping time’ (Bill Flanagan interview). So, how can this apparent paradox – using something that intrinsically unfolds within time to provide the illusion that time has stopped – be achieved? The solution is offered by Frith, who asks ‘how long is the present? More specifically, can music extend this? The answer, not so peculiar after all, is that if “the present” is actually defined by a quality of attention, then music does indeed expand the moment, by framing it. And it is precisely this “time attention” which defines musical pleasure.’10
The composer, songwriter or performer must develop strategies for framing the moment that enable the listener to place time out of mind. Dylan has adopted a couple of strate
gies in this regard. In the mid-seventies, particularly on Blood On The Tracks and in Renaldo And Clara, Dylan sought to unify past and future into an intensified present. Dylan said of ‘Tangled Up In Blue’:
I was trying to be somebody in present time while conjuring up a lot of past images . . . What I was trying to do had nothing to do with the characters or what was going on. I was trying to do something that I don’t know if I was prepared to do. I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. (Bill Flanagan interview, 1985)
In the same interview, he also said that ‘Idiot Wind’ ‘was just the concept of putting in images that defy time – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I wanted to make them all connect in some kind of strange way.’ This is a strategy that structures ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, a song that simultaneously looks backwards to before the relationship and projects forwards to the effect of parting as a way of intensifying the pleasure of the present. The extensive use of quotations from other sources on his later albums is another way that Dylan attempts the same kind of process: the use of traditional sources incorporates the past into the present, while the continuity of the tradition ensured by Dylan’s use of these works points to the certain future of this tradition. As Dylan sings on ‘Bye And Bye’, ‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’. This repeats a theme from his sleeve notes to World Gone Wrong, in which he said the songs showed you a way of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, which itself recalls the exclamation on the sleeve of Planet Waves that ‘the ole days are gone / forever and the new ones aint far behind’.
Dylan’s singing style also plays around with the idea of time. His singing can reflect the experience of time described in the lyrics, but also can itself affect the listener’s experience of time and thus intensify the meaning of the words being uttered. Dylan is a master of using his voice to stretch time, almost to the point of uncoupling the vocal from the musical structure to which it is tied. This is what Allen Ginsberg referred to (on the sleevenotes to Desire) as Dylan’s ‘long-vowelled voice’. I shall offer three brief examples. Firstly, on ‘Idiot Wind’, when he sings ‘I waited for you on the running boards while the springtime turned slowly into autumn’, that ‘sl-o-o-w-w-ly’ is stretched out so long as to contain the memory of the entire season as he waits for future to become past. Secondly, on ‘Solid Rock’ the pause in the opening line ‘I’m hanging on . . . to a solid rock’ manages to contain all of the tension of ‘hanging on’, time passing slowly as you fear falling, as well as the future of refuge and relief because of the nature of what the singer is hanging on to. Past danger and future salvation are united in the vocal pause. Finally, on ‘Not Dark Yet’, he sings ‘I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from’. Dylan’s vocal delivery is so drawn out on this long line that you can almost forget what the start of it was by the time you reach the end, the earlier words lost in time.
So, in lyrics and vocals, there are times when Dylan is able to grasp past and future in the present moment. Alfred Schutz argues that this is a necessary feature of musical composition: ‘The composer, by the specific means of his art, has arranged it in such a way that the consciousness of the beholder is led to refer what he actually hears to what he anticipates will follow and also to what he has just been hearing and what he has heard ever since this piece of music began.’11 Schutz refers to this as ‘inner time’. While Dylan has attempted to achieve this lyrically, I do not think it is the most appropriate way to understand how we experience time in Dylan’s music. An alternative way of understanding the experience of musical time is what Kramer calls ‘moment time’. In moment time, the trick is to obliterate past and future so that the listener is only able to focus on the immediate moment. The present moment is expanded to fill our entire perception. Kramer: ‘emphasizes the importance in music of the “now,” an experience of the continuous present. Moment time, that is to say, makes memory impossible (or, the same thing, irrelevant): it does not offer rehearsals of what is to come or rehearings of what has been . . . ’12
The key to achieving moment time is repetition as it reduces the listener’s conception of an unfolding linear ‘narrative’. This, of course, is an inherent paradox, for it means that, as Kramer says, ‘moment time uses the linearity of listening to destroy the linearity of time’.13 Kramer describes his experience of a ‘vastly extended present’ when listening to Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893). The piece consists of four eight-bar phrases repeated 840 times in succession, during which time got
slower and slower, threatening to stop. But then I found myself moving into a different listening mode. I was entering the vertical time of the piece. My present expanded, as I forgot about the music’s past and future. I was no longer bored. And I was no longer frustrated because I had given up expecting. I had left behind my habits of teleological listening. I found myself fascinated with what I was hearing . . . True, my attention did wander and return, but during the periods of attending I found the composition to hold great interest. I became incredibly sensitive to even the smallest performance nuance, to an extent impossible when confronting the high information content of traditional music.14
Dylan works in a popular music rather than high culture and such a test of stamina would prove too much for most of Dylan’s audience. There are, however, certainly some similarities between Satie’s proto-minimalism and Dylan’s music. This is most notable in Dylan’s live performances but, on occasion, he has successfully attained ‘moment time’ on record. Probably the most successful instance is ‘Highlands’, of which Dylan said that it has ‘got that hypnotism that sounds like it would go on forever. And that’s the point. It can go on forever’ (Edna Gunderson interview, 1997). The key to ‘Highlands’ is that nothing changes. The little country-blues riff continues unabated throughout the whole song, there is no bridge, no middle eight, nothing except verse after verse. The music offers no possibility of resolution, no sense of an ending. In this way it is similar to ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ and it is notable that both songs utilise a fade-out. This is not uncommon, of course, but it gives the impression of the band playing the song forever, with the listener merely closing the door to the recording studio (songs in live performance, by contrast, have to reach a definite conclusion). In ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’, however, the introduction of the harmonica signifies that the end of the song is near, implying that the singer has said all he needs to say. ‘Highlands’ offers no signal that things might change. The song itself is about nothing happening (‘Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page’; ‘Every day is the same thing out the door’) and even when something does happen (he meets a waitress) the singer sings it in a way that shows the event as utterly meaningless (reminiscent of ‘Clothes Line Saga’ from The Basement Tapes). The ‘message’ of this song, in lyrics, vocals and music, is that everyday is the same, and everyday nothing happens. The length of the song – 17 minutes, 20 verses, 100 lines – reiterates the point with interest. But the song is far from boring. All I can do here, like Kramer, is record personal experience. I was listening to the song recently, and it seemed like it had been going on forever. I looked at the CD display which informed me that the song had been playing for 3 minutes and 42 seconds, approximately two-thirds the length of ‘Cold Irons Bound’ which had passed in the blink of an eye less than ten minutes earlier.* Time had certainly slowed, but this moment of ‘clocking’ liberated the song, or me. Suddenly, the repetition, the mundanity, was alleviated. The sound of the voice, rather than the meaning of the words, became more important. Dylan’s voice itself offered a kind of solace. It seemed to intone that the relentless sameness didn’t matter, that things won’t change, but don’t worry, things would be alright if you just roll with the absurdities. From this moment on the song intensified as the sound became almost mantra-like. The remaining thirteen and a bit minutes passed far quicker than the first four.
Despite this particular instance being achieved on record, it is Dylan’s performances on stage that offer the clearest example of Dylan working to achieve moment time. One example is the acoustic portions of the 1966 tour, the key to which is the harmonica solos. The solos in 1966 go on forever, or at least seem like they do. They are disproportionate to the length of time taken to enunciate the lyrics (even though there are many times in 1966 when the singing is incredibly drawn out, slowing down time). There are also times when Dylan finds two or three notes on the harp, bending them, stretching them, repeating them over and over. All this has the effect of stopping time, of bringing the listener to a point where there is no conception of the start of this solo and no expectation of its end. It’s as if you’re waiting for a train that doesn’t arrive: you wait and wait and it doesn’t arrive, and then you’ve missed the meeting you were going to anyway and you enter a new time zone in which it doesn’t matter any more.*
The other era in which Dylan has been most successful in ‘stopping time’ is on the NET. The small, repeated phrase, like a minimalist tape loop, is a feature of all aspects of Dylan’s NET performances – vocals, harmonica and guitar. Dylan’s guitar playing has been criticised in recent years – Heylin describes it as ‘like an autistic child with a blade of grass, playing the same riff until the neck snapped’.15 Such comments illustrate the audience demands placed on Dylan by working in a different cultural sphere than Satie (Heylin probably wouldn’t appreciate Pages mystiques) but they also show a lack of appreciation of what Dylan is trying to achieve:
