Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Nevertheless Dylan’s remarks mustered the American musical community in a way that Band Aid and Live Aid had never quite managed. Headed up by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Cougar Mellencamp, Farm Aid was set to climax with a September concert in Champaign, Illinois. Obviously keen to avoid another Live Aid debacle, Dylan decided he needed a band, preferably a well-rehearsed one. He’d already worked with various Heartbreakers, notably keyboard player Benmont Tench, and the fact that his manager Elliott Roberts had recently gone into partnership with Tony Dimitriades, Petty’s manager, made the liaison easier to contemplate. They rehearsed together for a week and successfully closed out Farm Aid. (The event raised barely enough money to pay off one day’s interest on the debts accrued by American farmers; however, it was instrumental in drawing national attention to their plight.)

  * * *

  THE TRUE CONFESSIONS TOUR should not have been the box office hit it was. Dylan’s last U.S. tour, undertaken in 1981, was not a great success. Eschewing all the old favorites, he stuck largely to songs that reflected his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Experience suggests that Your Average Rock Fan can put up with devil worship but tends to draw the line at the old rugged cross.

  Dylan wasn’t being coy about it either; he thumped that bible till the dust reached the rafters. He was shaken by how violently supposedly educated audiences reacted to songs which in his view were simply direct descendants of Masters Of War or I Shall Be Released, not to mention Father Of Night or Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. What did these people think he’d been singing about all these years if it wasn’t moral conflict and the prospect of salvation?

  Dylan puts up a good show of not understanding the extent to which the music industry intercedes in his art. Ask him what draws a million people to buy tickets for this 40-date tour and he’ll profess complete bewilderment. This pretense of ignorance is his strong shield against criticism and pressure. There he is, playing New York City on the very day his new record, Knocked Out Loaded, hits the stores. [Actually, the day after. —Ed.] There he is, playing for the best part of three hours in front of 22,000 people and the assembled brass of his record company and how many tunes does he play from this new release? Not one.

  “Not even a mention,” moans a CBS employee backstage.

  Oh, he found room for Ricky Nelson’s Lonesome Town and ancient gospel corn like That Lucky Old Sun but apparently wasn’t ready to play Brownsville Girl or any of the other tracks that the American press were dutifully hailing as a Return To Form. (He’d probably read the CBS handout calling Brownsville Girl “a masterpiece”; all Bob Dylan songs of more than five minutes duration are “masterpieces”.)

  Bob Dylan has been signed to this record company for more than twenty five years. Twenty five years of advances, options, tour support and artwork approval. He’s been with CBS longer than the vast majority of their employees. He may not sell the amount of product that Michael or Bruce or Barbra or even Journey shift but nevertheless the company President Walter Yetnikoff makes sure he’s there at the Garden with his flexible friend, ready to take Dylan and a party of twenty to a swank East Side restaurant after the show.

  I feel for Yetnikoff. He spends most of his time arguing over video production expenses and Japanese twelve inch single royalties with a succession of private plane-piloting, currency-dealing, Armani-wearing, aluminum briefcase-owning artists and their managers; then twice a year he has to sit down with this smoky old gipsy who isn’t remotely interested in releasing singles, shrivels up at the thought of going on the radio or TV and only ever approves pictures of himself in which his eyes are closed. It can’t be easy.

  (Elliott Roberts discussing possible Italian TV interview with CBS person: “He doesn’t want to do it sitting down with the camera pointing at him and he doesn’t want to do it walking either.” CBS person tries to look understanding.)

  He’s the only artist I’ve ever met who genuinely didn’t seem to care what impression I took away. Mick Jagger wants to be feared, Bruce Springsteen wants to be loved and Sting badly wants to be admired.

  Bob Dylan, ladies and gentlemen, doesn’t give a shit.

  * * *

  EACH NIGHT AROUND SIX he is delivered into Madison Square Garden by camper van. The vehicle pulls up a few yards from his dressing room and out he swings looking like . . . well, rather like a middle-aged Bob Dylan imitator; mirror shades, black leather jacket with white buckskin fringes, black leather trousers, black fingerless gloves and black motorcycle boots. The expression on his face—what you can see of his face—defies you to recognise him. Consequently, all activity in the area freezes as he goes by.

  This is the really poisonous thing about celebrity. When you’re as famous as this every room is occupied by people discussing either your imminent arrival or your recent departure. Your reputation doesn’t simply go before you; it clears the streets, checks the exits, halts the traffic, screams through a bullhorn. Everyone you’re introduced to has read at least one book about you. It must be like being Adrian Mole. [Mole is the fictitious protagonist in a series of books by British writer Sue Townsend. —Ed.]

  Dylan is followed down the corridor by three dark-haired, solemn-beyond-their-years teenagers. They are Jesse, Samuel and Jacob, the three Dylan sons. Jess, the oldest of them at 20, is being tugged along by an animal that appears to have been the product of a brief romance between a Labrador and a bus. “My God,” someone hisses as the creature wheezes past, “the hound is a horse!” A bone is produced. It was probably donated by a camel. This snack is taken into Dylan’s dressing room.

  What’s the dog called? I enquire, as the animal falls upon the bone. (It evidently hasn’t eaten for quarter of an hour.)

  “I’m sorry?” says Dylan.

  “I said ‘What’s the dog’s name?’.”

  “Could you repeat that?” he asks, cupping a hand to his ear.

  “I just wonder whether the dog had a name . . .”

  “Oh, the dog. No. (Pause as we both study the banqueting hound.) No, actually he’s called ‘Late For Dinner’.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No, that dog has a name that is known only to me.”

  Oh. So far so good.

  * * *

  COME INTO THIS DRESSING ROOM.

  (Don’t mind the middle-aged man fidgeting with the scratched acoustic guitar in the corner—he’s just the spokesman for a generation.)

  You know, if I was Bob Dylan I’d ask to be moved. This is neither a big nor a luxurious room. On a table in the corner there are ranks of half-bottles of Jim Beam whisky, one bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and various mixers. The low table in the middle bears a well-wisher’s flowers and a book of Bible stories. The furniture is chipped and battered. A portable clothes rack is being stocked by a tall, red-haired girl called Susie.

  Susie commutes between Dylan and the wider world outside the dressing room. She fetches fresh motorcycle boots from the giant flight case in the corridor, puts the booze on ice, informs him that Time Magazine have been waiting down the corridor for a couple of hours, even tells him what time it is.

  “Is Bobby Womack out there?” he enquires suddenly.

  She looks. Yes he is. (Course he is.)

  “Oh. Listen . . . er . . . oh, forget it. I’m getting ahead of myself . . . er . . .”

  He puts the guitar down, jumps up, disappears into the next door bathroom and expectorates noisily.

  * * *

  OUT IN THE CORRIDOR two men are waiting. They are Richard Marquand and Joe Eszterhas, respectively director and writer of Hearts Of Fire, the film that Dylan starts work on as soon as his tour finishes. [Hepworth later discovered that the man he’d thought was Eszterhas was actually Iain Smith, one of the film’s producers. —Ed.] Marquand, who made Jagged Edge, is one of America’s hottest directors. The film, which purports to be “about stardom and the relationship between Europe and America,” also stars Rupert Everett and Fiona Flanagan, an MTV-bred ingenue who has already made two album
s for Atlantic. It’s Dylan’s first acting role since Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Unless you count Renaldo And Clara. He doesn’t.

  “I don’t know, man. Was that a film?”

  We had Don’t Look Back on British TV a couple of months ago.

  Another grey smile: “I don’t know, man. Half the stuff I do is someone else’s idea.”

  (This is a stock Dylan posture. During our conversation he assures me that the collaboration with Petty, the release of Biograph, the composition of Knocked Out Loaded, his casting in Hearts Of Fire and numerous other ventures were all “someone else’s idea.”)

  “Somebody called me from the William Morris Agency. I just read it and it seemed like I knew that character, whoever it was. It’s a guy who plays oldies shows. I could relate to that. I’ve done all those things really.”

  The challenge of acting doesn’t excite him so much as the prospect of getting to play music: “Marquand says that maybe one of the bands could be Woody and Steve Jordan and somebody that Woody knows. That’d be great.”

  Woody, who has joined Dylan on stage for the last half-dozen numbers throughout the New York engagement, is one of his firmest friends. Although one is known as one of the deeper thinkers of his generation while the other is regarded as a lairy connoisseur of the pleasures of the flesh, they appear to pal down famously, lurching around the dressing room in an unsteady embrace after the show as Ron listens back to his guitar work on the Knocked Out Loaded track Driftin’. Woody knows how to make Dylan laugh in a very elementary way.

  The Stones guitarist is only marginally less puzzled about their friendship than anyone else: “I think we probably get on quite well because I’m quite happy if people don’t particularly want to talk. I’ll just carry on doing what I’m doing until he’s ready.”

  * * *

  IT’S RARE that a year goes by without another thick volume appearing in the tonier kind of bookshop, dedicated to documenting the life and anatomising the work of this obdurate individual. Within the last twelve months we’ve had Wilfrid Mellers’ tortuous musicological analysis, A Darker Shade Of Pale, Jonathan Cott’s seriously glossy picture book, Dylan, and already the presses are rolling out Robert Shelton’s exhaustive memoir, No Direction Home. Bob Dylan gets his fan mail between hard covers.

  All these books are alike in their failure to throw any light on his more oblique songs and their frenzied attempts to read major significance into his throwaways. Groaning with footnotes and thick with references to arcane Middle-Eastern works of philosophy they go in for a dismaying amount of “what Dylan is trying to say here is . . .” analysis. The day will doubtless arrive when we will read the words “what Muddy is trying to say here is that he has at last got his mojo working but can’t as yet get it to work on the object of his desires.”

  The hero of all this literature claims not to be bothered by this scribbling industry: “I just don’t pay any attention to it. Life’s too short, man.”

  You must read the odd one.

  “I try not to but every now and then I come across one of them at somebody’s apartment or something. I was over at someone’s place and there was a book there called Positively Main Street [by Toby Thompson]. I started reading it and it just made me crazed, you know, reading this stuff. On some level I was having a hard time separating me from the person I was reading about, you know what I mean?

  “I was feeling pretty good when I got there and then I read part of it and I just felt like another person; it was like Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”

  What he would make of The Telegraph I can only guess. Here is a magazine devoted exclusively to documenting the life of Robert Allen Zimmerman, a singer from Hibbing, Minnesota.

  This is no cut-and-paste fanzine bashed off on the photocopier while the Inspector Of Taxes is at lunch; this is a perfect-bound, colour-covered, ultra-devotional periodical published from Bury, Lancashire. If magazines are best run by obsessives, The Telegraph is the best. No minutiae is too minute for The Telegraph. Here you can find correspondence dealing with whether Al Kooper or Mike Bloomfield wore the spotted short at the infamous Newport concert and the exact circumstances of Dylan’s meeting his former wife. Was it, as Tangled Up In Blue infers, in “a topless joint” or could that just have meant the Playboy Club? After all, she was married at the time to Victor Lownes . . . [This is incorrect. Dylan’s first wife had not been married to Victor Lownes, an executive at Playboy Enterprises. She had been married to magazine photographer Hans Lownds. —Ed.] The only other place you find fact-fetishism taken to this pitch is among the pages of The Cricketer.

  For the benefit of those who are either impervious to the appeal of Bob Dylan or too young to have known him as anything but the last act at Live Aid, it’s useful to stand back and appreciate the strength of his hold on a lot of people. Bootleg recordings are the true measure of the constancy of an artist’s following. Nobody ever sold Gerry And The Pacemakers bootlegs or Donovan bootlegs or Boomtown Rats bootlegs. Neither do they market illicit recordings of Michael Jackson so it’s not a simple question of fame.

  People buy bootlegs of artists they feel such kinship with that it’s inconceivable that they could ever be disappointed with what they hear. If you were to produce a recording of Bob Dylan boiling a kettle I could find you a few buyers tomorrow. They would file it alongside the rest of their collection: the 1961 recordings of Dylan singing Pastures Of Plenty to Woody Guthrie’s friend’s daughter in a New Jersey motel room; the Washington Civil Rights rally of 1963; his interview with Studs Terkel in Chicago; his Woodstock duets with George Harrison from 1970; his 1975 ansaphone message; his ill-tempered telephone exchanges with A.J. Weberman (“Hey man, why don’t you just get off my back?”); the video of his Isle of Wight press conference from 1969; a matchless, hovering blues called Blind Willie McTell that has become one of his most celebrated songs; the soundchecks from every date of his last world tour; the out-takes, false starts, rough drafts and abandoned masterpieces of half a lifetime.

  No wonder he’s careful about fans.

  “Boy, coming out of the hotel tonight, it was a real zoo. I don’t know who’s a fan. It’s a short word for fanaticism. I’ve always been uncomfortable in a crush of people who were fans of mine. I’ve always felt more comfortable with people who didn’t know me. I can go really most places and nobody will recognise me except people who know who I am. I could just disappear into a crowd unless someone knows who I am and then they’ll point me out to other people and then you suddenly find yourself the centre of all this attention.”

  * * *

  LIKE SO MANY ROCK STARS Dylan is a shy man who’s also an incorrigible show-off. On stage in New York he eschewed all frontal lighting in the sure knowledge that his silhouetted profile alone would be quite sufficient to divert attention from Tom Petty. He only spoke a couple of times, to enquire “anyone out there running for office? No? Good.” before Ballad Of A Thin Man and [to] introduce In The Garden with the words “this is for all the people in gaol [British variant of jail —Ed.], not for doing evil things but for doing good things.”

  How he chooses twenty or so songs from such a repertoire is a mystery; some nights on this tour he’s launched into forgotten favourites with the minimum of warning. But the sad truth is that the only artists who can win in venues like Madison are the people who can pump up their music way beyond life size. Springsteen can handle it. Dylan can’t, shouldn’t even be trying. It’s an undignified way to carry on.

  The audience, who divided equally between old fans along for the nostalgic ride and tanked-up teenagers waiting for that drug song about everybody getting stoned, didn’t seem to be listening much. Petty’s journeyman radio rock covered their needs adequately.

  The star hits stride only intermittently; Hard Rain hammered out with a father’s righteous indignation; In The Garden sufficiently deeply felt to slice its way through the band’s vague shuffle. Positively Fourth Street on the other hand had only curiosity value
. I confessed to not understanding why he still bothered with a song so specifically addressed to a person who’s been out of his life for twenty years.

  “Yes, but so are folk songs. Some of those are a hundred years old but so what?”

  So Positively Fourth Street can bear the same degree of repetition as Wild Mountain Thyme?

  “No . . . I don’t know. On some level maybe. But Wild Mountain Thyme now . . .” He smiles and begins to pick a tune out on the guitar.

  (It isn’t Wild Mountain Thyme. It isn’t anything much.)

  “Do you know the McPeake Family?”

  Afraid not . . .

  “They’re a group from Ireland.”

  So is that what he likes listening to?

  “I like the Egyptian singer Om-Kalsoum. She passed away about fifteen years ago. I bought a record of hers when I was in Jerusalem in 1972. This guy was selling them on the street corner and they were obviously bootleg records.” He laughs and then decides maybe we’d better not say they were bootlegs. (I presume he means pirates, anyway.) “I like Edith Piaf a lot.”

  In an attempt to gradually entice him into the present decade, I enquire about people like Boy George.

  “I thought that was a nice record, that Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?. That and the Chameleon Song. I liked him when he wore that white coat and that black hat and the braids. I don’t know why he ever changed.”

  He’s been on a heroin charge in Britain.

  “He has? Poor Boy George.”

  * * *

  I FIRST HEARD BOB DYLAN’S MUSIC in a school room. Some powerful sophisticated 6th former descended from on high to play us young pups his precious copies of the first four Dylan albums. We’d seen the name as a songwriting credit, read about “protest music” in Disc but we’d no idea what to expect really. I thought you pronounced him Die-lunn.