Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  At a picnic table outside the Bagelah Delicatessen, Dylan’s attention strayed to the stream of traffic along Pacific Coast Highway. “Personally, I like sound effects records,” he joked. “Sometimes late at night I get a mint julep and sit there and listen to sound effects. I’m surprised more of them aren’t on the charts.” He smiled, pleased with the idea. “If I had my own label, that’s what I’d record.” He once asked a sound effects expert how he produced the sound of a man being executed in the electric chair. Bacon sizzling, said the expert. The sound of breaking bones? Crunching a LifeSaver between the teeth.

  I rehearsed for him some of the old history from his Village days. Remarkably, success in New York came almost instantly. Robert Shelton, the folk music critic of The New York Times (there was such a job then) wrote an admiring review in September 1961, barely 9 months after Dylan’s arrival in the city. John Hammond, the buck-toothed, good-humored aristocrat (his mother was a Vanderbilt) at Columbia Records signed Dylan to a recording contract while the unkempt 20-year-old was still singing for tips in the clubs along MacDougal Street—Café Wha?, the Gaslight, and, nearby on 4th Street, Gerde’s Folk City. The movie-makers Joel and Ethan Coen vividly dramatized that culture in their 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis.

  Hammond was the supernally acute talent scout and record producer who developed such talents as Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Teddy Wilson, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Bruce Springsteen. On November 20 and 22 in the very year of his arrival in New York, Dylan recorded his first album—traditional songs, plus a few of his own. (“Song to Woody,” “Talkin’ New York”) and others credited to Blind Lemon Jefferson (“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”) and Jesse Fuller (“You’re No Good”). The jacket photo showed a baby-faced youth in a fleece-lined jacket and a corduroy cap. The skinny kid who would become the reluctant “spokesman for a generation” and a powerful voice of protest and lamentation was off and running fast.

  Dylan shrugged at the memory.

  “The past—for me it doesn’t exist. For me, there’s the next song, the next poem, the next performance. The bunch of us who came through that time . . .” He paused. “A lot of people don’t know how all this music got here. But the fifties and the sixties were a very high-energy period—right there in the middle of the century. It’s an explosive time in every century. Eighteen-sixty was the Civil War. In seventeen-sixty you had the beginnings of the American Revolution. You might call it the mid-century energy explosion.”

  We talked about mutual friends and acquaintances—Johnny Cash, Alan Lomax, Robert Shelton, David Amram, Israel Young. “There was a lot of space to be born in then,” he said. “The media was onto other things. The only scene was word-of-mouth. You could really breathe back then. You could develop whatever creative interests you had, without categories and definitions. That period lasted about three years. There’s just as much creativity going on now,” he added, but without the centrality and focus that the Village provided.

  A lot of dangerous stuff was happening then as well, I reminded him: amphetamines, hallucinogens, mind-altering and recreational chemicals. When the Beatles and he met for the first time in 1964 at New York’s Delmonico Hotel, Dylan introduced them to marijuana, which they embraced joyfully. Ringo spent part of the evening fearfully stuffing towels under the door lest the hotel staff get a whiff of that historic meeting, and summon the cops.

  “A person’s body chemistry changes every seven years,” Dylan said. “No one on earth is the same now as they were seven years ago, or will be seven years from now. I could become you!” He laughed. “It’s all intended growth. It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to know that if you don’t grow you die. You have to burst out, you have to find the sunlight.” He was silent for a moment. “I think of myself as more than a musician, more than a poet. That’s just what I do. The real self is something more than that.”

  He looked toward the ocean. “My being a Gemini explains a lot,” he said. “It forces me to extremes. I’m never really balanced in the middle. I go from one side to the other and pass through the middle. I’m happy, sad, up, down, in, out, over and under. Up in the sky and down in the depths of the earth.”

  Is it really such a roller-coaster ride, I wondered? If it is, how do you manage to turn out so prodigious a body of work amid such a hubbub of emotion?

  “This is what I do, in this life and in this country. I could be happy being a blacksmith. I would still write and sing. I can’t imagine not doing that. You do what you’re geared for.” He thought that over: “I don’t care if I write. I can say that now. But as soon as the light changes, it’ll be the thing I care about most in the world.” When he’s through with performing he’ll continue to write, Dylan said: “Probably for other people.” Traces of Minnesota remained in Dylan’s speech, the voice well-modulated, the syntax perfect, none of the hobo patois and street vernacular that mark his lyrics. I’d often twinned Dylan and Bobby Fischer in my mind: a pair of reclusive, idiosyncratic Jewish striplings who evolved into genius by the extravagance of their natural powers.

  Songs spewed from Dylan like lava. How many had he written? He had no idea. (The Definitive Bob Dylan Songbook published in 2004 contains 300, some of them forgettable, others classic bits of American pop culture.) He made it look easy, I offered.

  “Are you kidding? Almost anything else is easy except writing songs.” The hard part, he said, is when “the inspiration dies along the way. Then you spend all your time trying to recapture the inspiration.” He shook his head. “You’re talking to a total misfit here.”

  Somewhere along the line, the misfit learned to write lyrics that are taut, imagistic, and memorable.

  . . . take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,

  Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,

  The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,

  Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

  Songwriters like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin “knew what they were doing,” musically, Dylan said. “I write the only way I know how. It’s the best I can do, that’s all.” He felt sure that some of his songs will be rediscovered and examined in the future the way ancient ruins are unearthed by archeologists, and found to have unrecognized historical importance. “Look at the castles and walls of the middle ages. Do you think anybody back then thought those structures were anything special?” The builders were too busy creating them, and using them in their quotidian lives, to care much if they’d endure for thousands of years.

  Many of his idolaters expend talmudic scrutiny on teasing out meanings in his lyrics, I reminded him.

  “If you define what something is, it’s no longer that something,” Dylan answered. “Definition destroys. When you see me performing, I often change the words of my songs because that’s the way I feel at that moment. I have the license to do that. It’s all temporary. There’s nothing definite in this world. It changes too quickly. You’re talking to somebody who doesn’t comprehend the values most people operate under. Greed and lust I can understand. But I can’t understand the values of definition and confinement.”

  He didn’t spend his money the way the Beatles and other rock legends did—no baronial estates, fleets of autos, designer clothes, bodyguards, entourages, private jets. “It’s the way I’ve been brought up,” he answered. “My parents raised me right. I don’t necessarily have a lot of money. I spend a lot of money.”

  He had married Sara Lownds in 1965 and they’d produced four children. He adopted one of hers by a previous marriage. In a hymn to her, he’d written: “Lovin’ you is the one thing I’ll never regret.” His voice on the recording is full of stark yearning and dependency. He pronounces her name “Say-rah”:

  Sara, oh Sara,

  Glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow,

  Sara, oh Sara,

  Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.

  She did leave him. They di
vorced in 1977. What that rupture cost him emotionally and psychically we won’t know precisely because he has never talked about it publicly, nor exploited their relationship for publicity in celebrity magazines. He made one brief allusion to it in a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes while publicizing his book: “She was with me back then through thick and thin, you know? And it just wasn’t the kind of life she had ever envisioned for herself, any more than the kind . . . that I had envisioned for mine.” The clearest clues about his state of mind as the marriage ended are in his album, the angry, bitter, raging Blood on the Tracks.

  I been double crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free,

  I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

  You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above . . .

  Where will he be ten years from today, I wondered.

  “Maybe I’ll be on a sailing ship to the moon.” He laughed. “Write that down.” Dylan had rarely appeared on television, but one live concert was taped and cobbled into a television special, called Hard Rain, for broadcast on NBC. Not until 2005—at the age of 64 and looking every day of it—did he sit for a substantial interview on television: the splendid 3½ hour public broadcasting documentary No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese. By 2006 he had emerged sufficiently from his chrysalis to become a disc jockey on XM Satellite Radio, a career move that would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier. On the weekly show, called Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan, his musical catholicity was on full view: songs by Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland, Slim Harpo. (The New York Times described his commentary: “As DJ . . . he taps America’s musical heritage with words that veer from the logically linear to the abstract.”) Astonishingly, he did commercials for Apple Computer products and Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Beyond that: he teamed up with the choreographer Twyla Tharp for the Broadway musical Bringing It All Back Home, a box-office dud. The prestigious Morgan Library in Manhattan mounted an exhibit in 2006 called “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966,” displaying his manuscripts, letters, handwritten lyrics, instruments, memorabilia, and photographs. Then came Todd Haynes’s fantastical, mythical meditation on Dylanology in the 2007 movie I’m Not There, in which a half-dozen actors (including Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger) played Dylan in his varied aspects. A respected Manhattan art gallery mounted a collection of his paintings in 2011 (he’s rather a good technical artist), which caused a mini-scandal when it turned out that many of the works were close copies of old photographs rather than (as the catalogue claimed) “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape” from his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea. Dylan never bothered to address the charge, and his defenders said it was just one more bit of Dylan whimsy.

  There has been no end of tributes. In 2008, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” After singing at the White House in 2010 to celebrate Black History Month, President Obama (a big fan) awarded Dylan the National Medal of Arts. In 2013: France’s highest prize, the Legion of Honor. He turned 70 in May 2011, and a batch of new books about his life and his endlessly allegorical/metaphorical/enigmatic lyrics hit the bookstalls.

  Dylan finished his sandwich and ordered another for the road.

  “Want to go and sit on the beach for a while?” he asked.

  I bought a six-pack of Coors and we headed back to the car. He slid into the driver’s seat and wheeled out onto the highway. I reminisced about the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963 and 1964. Joan Baez, then a bigger star than Dylan, was his enthusiastic champion in those years, and later his lover. She had often brought him onstage during her own concerts. But in 1965—at the zenith of his popularity—the festival’s most memorable, and now mythical, moment came when Dylan committed the sacrilege of playing electric guitar onstage, enraging the thousands of folk purists in that outdoor setting on the shores of Narragansett Bay. With members of the Paul Butterfield blues band playing behind him, Dylan “went electric,” a sound never before heard at Newport. He screeched, loud and raucous, into the chill Rhode Island night air:

  I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more . . .

  Well, I try my best

  To be just like I am,

  But everybody wants you

  To be just like them . . .

  The startled crowd emitted a torrent of boos and catcalls. I was sitting near the stage. To my left, Alan Lomax—the preeminent American archivist of traditional music—was on his feet shouting angrily and shaking his fist at Dylan. Pete Seeger was so chafed that he wanted to chop the microphone cables to end the ear-shattering din. Dylan, flustered by the crowd’s outrage, fled into the wings. Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul and Mary, the evening’s MC, took the microphone and tried vainly to placate the crowd. The jeers persisted for minutes. Dylan reappeared carrying his acoustic guitar. The crowd fell silent. Alone on stage, he sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

  The lover who just walked out your door

  Has taken all his blankets from the floor.

  The carpet, too, is moving under you

  And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

  By the end of the song, the crowd’s jeers had turned to wild cheering. But unbeknownst to most of the audience, Dylan was reinventing himself once again, right before their eyes. He was announcing that he wouldn’t be hostage to their expectations, that he’d travel his own road and they could come along or not. The era of the Beatles had just dawned; they had made their celebrated appearance on the Ed Sullivan show more than a year earlier. It was time to move on.

  In the car, Dylan said: “I wasn’t hurt or offended by the audience’s reaction. I had played electric guitar in the midwest before I ever went to New York. My mother will tell you that. I didn’t do anything all that remarkable.” If he hadn’t introduced electric guitars at Newport, he said, somebody else would have. (Years later, in Chronicles Volume One, he would explain that “what I did to break away was to take simple folk chord changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before . . . I knew what I was doing . . . and wasn’t going to take a step back or retreat for anybody.”)

  On a previous occasion in 1963 he had refused to compromise. Ed Sullivan invited him to appear on his popular Sunday night variety show. Dylan agreed and said he’d sing “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” his satiric send-up of that radical right-wing guild of eccentrics. Sullivan said OK, but the CBS censors refused to let Dylan perform that song. Rather than knuckle under, he declined to appear and thus forsook television exposure that would have launched him nationwide.

  A few skeptics have suggested that his protest songs of that period (“Masters of War,” “With God on Your [sic] Side,” “Blowin’ in the Wind”) were trendy, marketable tunes written in cold blood to feed the anti-war, pro-civil rights sentiments of the 1960s. (Pravda, the Russian newspaper, had once called him a money-hungry capitalist.)

  Not true, Dylan insisted, navigating a bend in the Pacific Coast Highway. “I wrote them because that’s what I was in the middle of. It swept me up. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ holds up. I felt that song. Whenever Joan [Baez] and I do it, it really is just like an old folk song to me. It never occurs to me that I’m the person who wrote it.” After a moment, he said, “Joan Baez means more to me than a hundred of these singers around today. She’s more powerful. That’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we respond to. She always did it and always will. Power for the species, not just for a select group.” He paused, and then: “I’ve probably said too much about that.”

  But the characterization of himself that irks the most is being called the political and cultural leader, or “voice,” of a generation of protestors and activists.
In 1970, Princeton University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Music; Dylan, still in his twenties, showed up on the campus to accept it. The speaker presenting the doctorate made the tone-deaf mistake of describing him as “the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America.” Dylan later wrote: “Oh, Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless . . . I was so mad I wanted to bite myself.” Instead, he memorialized the occasion in the song “Day of the Locust”:

  I put down my robe, and picked up my diploma,

  Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,

  Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,

  Sure was glad to get out of there alive.

  Later, in 1997, he was one of five people on the Kennedy Center Honors list for “exemplary achievement in the performing arts.” On the nationally televised show, he sat importantly and uneasily in the Presidential box alongside Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Jessye Norman, and Edward Villella. The Center’s publicity handout called him “the voice of a generation,” “the sincerest social activist,” and “perhaps the most influential figure in American popular music in our time.” President Clinton in his remarks declared that Dylan had “captured the mood of a generation. Everything he saw—the pain, the promise, the yearning, the injustice—turned to song. He probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other creative artist. . . . He’s disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful. . . . Thank you Bob Dylan, for a lifetime of stirring the conscience of a nation.” Those words seriously invaded Dylan’s comfort zone. He squirmed visibly in his chair and looked unhappy. (He had performed at Clinton’s first inauguration ball in 1993.) In May 2013, the illustrious American Academy of Arts and Letters inducted him into its ranks, noting that: “For more than 50 years, defying categorization . . . Bob Dylan has probed and prodded our psyches, recording and then changing our world and our lives through poetry made manifest in song.” Dylan responded that he was “extremely honored and very lucky to be included in this great pantheon.”