by Lee Marshall
In interviews since 1997 (indeed, since before then, but people didn’t pay so much attention at the time), Dylan has repeatedly highlighted not just his debt to traditional music but how that traditional music constitutes almost his very being:
Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep On The Sunny Side’. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw The Light’. (Jon Pareles interview, 1997)
Similarly, he claimed that his new songs on Modern Times were ‘my genealogy . . . when I was singing them, they seemed to have an ancient presence’ (Jonathon Lethem interview, 2006). I don’t think this is ironic (of course, I am structured by Dylan’s stardom in how I interpret the statement). What I think I can say to be true is that such statements have not been interpreted as ironic by critics and fans. The use of quotations in his recent albums, and the recent interviews in which he has emphasised traditionality, have affected Dylan’s star-image so that he is now thoroughly wedded to a concept of tradition. Dylan is not interpreted as a contemporary songwriter playing around with the signs and signifiers of musical genres (like, say, Beck). Instead he is conceptualised as a living embodiment of the entire tradition of popular song, as evidenced in the following extracts from reviews of “Love And Theft”:
“Love And Theft” comes on as a musical autobiography that also sounds like a casual, almost accidental, history of the country.
We are whirled into a maelstrom of voices and perspectives, as though Dylan is a human switchboard, directing the babble of history and culture.
The only artist alive who can fully embody the living stream of American folk music in all its diverse currents and muddy depths.
Five years after “Love And Theft”, the reviews of Modern Times offered a similar conception of its creator. One reviewer described him as ‘America’s living, breathing musical unconscious’, while another claimed that his use of ‘American folk forms . . . doesn’t make Dylan less; it makes him more, because he contains all of these songs within himself’. One went even further, asserting that ‘Bob Dylan doesn’t use the blues any more – he is the blues’.
STARDOM, TIMELESSNESS AND IMMORTALITY
In claiming an inherent distance in Dylan’s relationship with tradition, Scobie suggests that the phrase ‘time out of mind’ is double edged because while it suggests continuity (a process existing longer than anyone can remember), it also suggests rupture (the point past which no one can remember). Regarding songs, Scobie suggests that ‘the paradoxical effect of a song’s existing “time out of mind” is to introduce a point of discontinuity into continuity; the loss of origin, the occluding of source, the becoming-anonymous of the author.’30 This can clearly be witnessed in traditional music, in which the authenticity of a song is often asserted by a lack of authorial reference point. I also wonder, however, whether it may not be a useful way into considering some of Dylan’s own songs too. Clearly, the processes are not exactly the same – the fact that these songs can be attributed to a particular author is of great significance to how they, and Dylan, are understood. But we can perhaps draw something of an analogy here; there is some kind of rupture between the performer on stage and the person who wrote the songs. In a sense, the person who wrote the songs is long gone, a myth, part of our cultural memory. The same kind of cultural memory as the blues. To some of us – the new NET audience discussed in the last chapter – that songwriter never existed in our lifetime but exists only in traces of the collective memory that surround us. That songwriter is only as real as Robin Hood, or Beethoven (or, perhaps because of the film footage we have of him in his pomp, as real as John F. Kennedy or Jimi Hendrix). The performer we pay to hear now bears little relation to the guy who supposedly wrote the songs – he doesn’t look the same and he certainly doesn’t sound the same. The singer may be in front of us, but the songwriter is from another lifetime.
The songs, too, seem to have existed for time out of mind (even the new ones sound old!). They have an apparent timelessness, not in the old-fashioned sense of ‘having stood the test of time’, but in the sense that they have been removed from their historical origins, existing in a perpetual present. This is a central strand of the NET and is insufficiently recognised by those who criticise Dylan’s ‘over-reliance on sixties material’. When, in 1997, Dylan was asked if he thought Johnny Cash would get bored singing the same songs night after night, he instantly dismissed the possibility, replying ‘they’re just so automatically perpetual. They always existed and they always will exist. Who would get bored singing those?’31 He has said similar things of his own songs too:
For me the songs are alive. I don’t get bored singing the songs because they have a truth to them. (London press conference, 1997)
When Joan [Baez] and I sing [‘Blowin’ In The Wind’], it’s like an old folk song to me. It never occurs to me that I’m the person who wrote that. (Neil Hickey interview, 1976)
The reason he feels that his songs have this ‘perpetual’ quality is because they are rooted in a particular tradition rather than in a particular historical moment:
There’s a lot of clever people around who write songs. My songs, what makes them different is that there’s a foundation to them. That’s why they’re still around, that’s why my songs are still being performed. It’s not because they’re such great songs. . . . they’re standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that’s what people are hearing. (Jon Pareles interview, 1997)
[Songs are] not worth much if they don’t have permanence. A lot of [my songs] will last. A lot of them won’t. I came to terms with that a long time back. What made my songs different, and still does, is [that] they all came out of the folk music pantheon, and those songs have lasted. So if my songs were written correctly and eloquently, there’s no reason they wouldn’t last. (Edna Gunderson interview, 2004)
It is clear to me that one of the purposes of the NET was, if not to stress the timelessness of the songs to his audience, then to at least be in service to that timelessness, to a tradition of which these songs are a part. ‘The songs are the star of the show, not me’ (Robert Hilburn interview, 2004). In several interviews during the NET, he has reiterated the longevity of the songs. In doing so, however, his aim is not self-aggrandisement but to emphasise the strength of the tradition from which they arise. The NET puts into practice something which Dylan has repeatedly argued throughout his career – that he sings his old songs for their presence and not because of nostalgia. By situating his own songs within a tradition, and thus removing them from the particular historical moment in which they were born, he eliminates the possibility of nostalgia:
For me, none of the songs I’ve written has really dated. . . . People say they’re ‘nostalgia’, but I don’t know what that means really. A Tale of Two Cities was written 100 years ago; is that nostalgia? (Mick Brown interview, 1984)
I’m always trying to stay right square in the moment. I don’t want to get nostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or a person. I think successful people don’t dwell in the past. (Robert Hilburn interview, 2004)
This emphasises the relationship between tradition and the experience of time. It seems odd that a 200-year-old song should not be considered a thing of the past but this is because traditions themselves stop time. They have no beginning and will continue forever. The present moment contains all of its past and all of its future. As T. S. Eliot argues:
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense . . . not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the who
le of the literature of Europe . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.32
By containing the past and the future in the present moment, traditions stop time (Rolling Stone picked up on this in their review of Modern Times, stating that ‘Dylan has captured the sound of tradition as an ever-present’). This means that by being ‘traditional’, an artist is not merely looking back nostalgically but actually existing ‘square in the moment’. As I’ve already discussed, there is also something in the structure of the NET that achieves a similar timelessness. The NET creates a perpetual present, never looking back to the last show, always looking forward to the next. Its past stretches back, if not to a time out of mind, then at least a long way (before some of its audience were born), and it gives the illusion that it will go on forever.
It is worth thinking about the effect of this upon Dylan’s stardom. Like musical time, ‘star time’ also has a chronological dimension – our understanding of a star is never fixed but unfolds in time.33 Dylan’s star-image has conventionally been understood chronologically: the earnest folk singer, the hip ruler of the pop scene, the refined country gentleman, the troubled performer of the Rolling Thunder Revues, the Born Again Christian, and so on. My argument is that the structure of the NET, and the way that the NET and the concept of tradition have shaped Dylan’s stardom have enabled Dylan himself, through his star-image, to become timeless. One of the effects of the NET has been to alter this experience of star time; in effect, to ‘stop’ star time. In becoming so firmly intertwined with tradition, Dylan’s stardom, not just Dylan’s music, has taken on this element of timelessness. He has become, in a curious way, ‘immortal’.
The issue of (im)mortality and reputation is one that has pre-occupied artists since the Romantic era. Dwindling belief in religion meant that death became interpreted as the ultimate end, with no reward in Heaven for earthly achievements. Given they could not rely on the literary market for recognition, Romantic poets thus spent much time considering how they were to be properly appreciated, and a consensus developed that truly great writers would only be appreciated after their deaths (you can imagine how soothing this would be for truly terrible writers too, whose lack of success merely affirmed their own greatness). Indeed, the desire for posthumous glory became one of the primary impulses behind the desire to write as it became understood that ‘the function of writing is to achieve – in the sublime and impossible moment of inscription – immortality, posthumous life, life after death’.34 For the Romantics, it was the criterion of originality that would ensure an artist’s survival, with the author ‘creating the taste’ for his work that only subsequent generations would appreciate. The value placed on the aesthetic radicalism of Dylan’s sixties work is one version of this ideology. Another way of achieving ‘immortality’ through one’s work, however, is to become part of a greater tradition. In this case, the author embeds himself in a greater tradition, both subsuming his self to that tradition while at the same time ensuring his continuation through the reproduction of his work within the tradition, which continues eternally. Again, Eliot offers a subtle appreciation of this, suggesting that, contra Romanticism, ‘the most individual parts of [an artist’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’. This is worth comparing to something Dylan said in 1993, around the time that World Gone Wrong was released:
There was a bunch of us, me included, who got to see all these people close up – people like Son House, Rev Gary Davis and Sleepy John Estes. Just to sit there and be up close and watch them play, you could study what they were doing. Plus a bit of their lives rubbed off on you. Those vibes will carry into you forever, really, so it’s like those people, they’re still here to me. They’re not ghosts of the past or anything. They’re continually here. (Gary Hill interview)
A similar process has happened with Dylan, only while he is still alive. He has, in a sense, stepped outside of his own career and become something else, a living monument to the strength of the tradition. The ‘brush with death’ in 1997 (the second such event of Dylan’s career) plays a significant role in this transformation. I have already discussed the effects that death can have upon an individual star-image. Among other things, the death of a star has a tendency to tidy things up a bit, to place a linear emphasis on the narrative of the star’s history (which is often quite teleological – all elements of a star’s biography are understood to lead to a certain point). Let us for a moment imagine that Bob Dylan had died in 1997. What would have happened? Assuming Time Out Of Mind had been given a posthumous release, then the album would have provided the ‘perfect’ conclusion to the Bob Dylan story. The NET would have been interpreted as a late-in-life meandering caused by a lack of inspiration and writer’s block before, intuitively aware of his impending mortality, he had written one final work of real quality. It would all have been so neat.
But, as he sings in ‘Cold Irons Bound’, ‘some things last longer than you think they will’. Once again, he didn’t die and whereas in 1966 Dylan suffered from the effects that pseudo-mortality had on his stardom, he benefited in 1997. The events of 1997 provided a finishing point to the linear narrative of Dylan’s career. That neatness, that linear packaging that normally occurs after an artist is dead and gone, happens to Dylan in 1997. Even though he doesn’t die, Dylan’s history stops. He has a history, an important one that gives his current status its gravitas, but now he is not making history but encompassing history. The NET’s perpetual present, the timelessness of the songs, the embeddedness within tradition, all work to make Bob Dylan exist outside of history. If you stop time, you cannot exist within time. If you contain all history, you cannot exist within history. That chronological narrative of Dylan’s career offered above – where does it go after ‘Born Again Bob’? Maybe a ‘confused, father-of-rock Bob’ for some of the eighties, and then . . . what? Nothing except the perpetual present of the NET. It is this standing outside of history that I am getting at when suggesting that Dylan’s star-image is now characterised by a kind of immortality.
This ‘immortality’ is something that particularly takes hold after 1997; an effect of the change in star-image generated by Time Out Of Mind rather than being part of the album itself. It can be seen in the response to the two major releases that followed Time Out Of Mind: Greil Marcus suggests ‘Things Have Changed’ incorporates Dylan ‘inhabit[ing] a fictional construct in which he imagines what it would mean to outlive oneself’ while an extremely insightful Robert Christgau reviewed “Love And Theft” by saying ‘if Time Out Of Mind was his death album – it wasn’t, but you know how people talk – this is his immortality album’. That ‘immortality’ comes from his relationship with tradition as another (less insightful) reviewer suggested: ‘Realising his own mortality on Time Out Of Mind, [Dylan] set out to lose himself in the immortality of music itself.’ We can see the same kind of thing in the reviews of Modern Times. One reviewer stated that ‘even in his youth, [Dylan] could tap the spirits of early American music. The difference now is he seems to have joined them on the other side’ while another presented him as ‘an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear’.
In an earlier chapter, I discussed how a process of pseudo-mortality in the late sixties had impacted upon Dylan’s stardom in the seventies and eighties. Since the early seventies, Dylan’s stardom was constrained by the idealised myth of the iconic Dylan of the sixties; his later work always shadowed by the earlier achievements. The ironic thing is that, in 1997, it was the same kind of process that, in some ways, alleviated Dylan’s historical burden. The pseudo-immortality has enabled Dylan to transcend many of the limitations of his earlier stardom. The classifying and rationalising that happe
ns to stars after death provides a structure that gives all the individual images within that career a finite coherence, a way of understanding all of the particular moments as part of a greater whole. Something similar has happened to Dylan. By stepping outside of his stardom’s history, his contemporary stardom is able to hold all of his earlier images in balance. His current persona stands not only as an equal to them all, but as embodying a greater whole.
The ‘tradition’ that Dylan represents is thus not just that of blues or folk music; it is a wider concept that includes the tradition of Dylan’s own history, of ‘the sixties’, as well. I have already discussed how Time Out Of Mind contains many references to traditional songs, but it is notable how many lines on the album echo past Dylan songs. The opening words of the album, ‘I’m walking . . . ’ immediately bring to mind the famous question ‘how many roads must a man walk down?’, but there are more. ‘Tryin’ to get to Heaven before they close the door’ clearly echoes ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ while a line from the same song – ‘When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more’ – holds within it the spectre of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’s ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’. The length and position of ‘Highlands’ draws parallels to ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’. At least one reviewer used a line in ‘Highlands’ to question whether the album was ‘a real Blonde [On Blonde] or a fake’. Stephen Scobie has commented that the vocal pause that follows ‘I’m hangin on’ in ‘Can’t Wait’ is just waiting for the listener to conclude ‘. . . to a solid rock’35 while Paul Williams suggests that the line in the final verse of ‘Highlands’ (‘There’s a way to get there’) is an ‘obviously intentional sequel’ to the opening of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ (‘There must be some way out of here’).36 And so on.*
