Dylan on Dylan

by Jeff Burger

  Dylan and Hunter view the world through a similar lens. “Hunter is an old buddy,” Dylan says. “We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there. He’s got a way with words, and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting. I think we’ll be writing a couple of other songs too, for some off-Broadway play.” For guitar, Dylan brought in Mike Campbell (on loan from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). “Mike and I played before lots of times when I was on tour with Tom,” Dylan says. “There was always some part of the show where Mike and myself and [organist] Benmont Tench would play two or three ballads. On my new record I didn’t think he’d have any problem.”

  On Together Through Life, Dylan’s mystic-drifter persona of his recent records has moved from the Mississippi Delta to Houston and the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Brownsville. McAllen. Laredo. El Paso. “You feel things, and you’re not quite sure what you feel,” Dylan says about the region. “But it follows your every move, and you don’t know why. You can’t get out of it. It’s the pressure that’s imposed on us.” The album bottles the feeling of King Ranch country along Highway 77—down toward San Benito, where the water tower reads “Hometown of Freddy Fender.” “Spirited guys from down there,” Dylan believes. “Independent-thinking guys. Texas might have more independent-thinking people than any other state in the country. And it shows in the music. Realistically speaking, that is the same type of music that I heard growing up most nights in Minnesota. The languages were just different. It was sung in Spanish there. But where I came from, it was sung in Polish.”

  The first track of Together Through Life—“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”—is pure Tex-Mex torque. Already getting a lot of radio play, the song conjures up shiny automobiles rumbling across “boulevards of broken cars” through the vast Rio Grande Valley night. No grapefruit trees or warm salt breezes or beef-jerky stands here. You imagine forlorn bank buildings and tiny grain elevators and faded billboard advertisements. The last-chance gas is behind you a good 20 miles. By the second track, “Life Is Hard,” Dylan is wandering past the old schoolyard, looking for strength to fight back the grim tide of old age. A red-brick afterglow lingers in the ballad like in an Edward Hopper painting. A Broadway singer has already recorded a demo of the song; it would be perfect for Dianne Reeves or Norah Jones.

  The third track, “My Wife’s Home Town,” a gloss on the old blues standard “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” echoes the haunting Tom Waits vibe of Mule Variations. Dylan sounds like a phlegmatic Cab Calloway scatting and coughing before the coffin closes. Everything feels condemned. The fiendish specter of suicide is omnipresent: “State gone broke / The county’s dry / Don’t be looking at me with that evil eye.” Dylan even menacingly cackles “a-hah-heh-heh” on the track. “The song is a tribute, not a death chant,” he says. “Deep down, I think that everybody thinks like me sooner or later. They just might not be able to express it.”

  The sense of dislocation continues in the more upbeat “If You Ever Go to Houston.” The long-shot chance of redemption (or at least a good night of fun) is palatable. Dylan and Hunter are tapping into the rootlessness of Houston, which is about to supplant Chicago as the third-largest city in the United States. There is a feeling of operating on the undetected margins of the sprawl. The Dylan-Hunter lyric noticeably references the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 as a remembrance of survival against adversity.

  I ask Dylan about the wave of recent violence reaching up from Mexico into the Southwest borderlands, an area that the Grateful Dead had once happily celebrated in “Mexicali Blues” and other songs. “That’s always been dangerous ground,” he says. “It has a different kind of population than Austin or Dallas or other big cities. Texas is so big. It’s a republic; it’s its own country. The Texas borderlands are like a buffer zone for Mexico and the rest of the States. You get that leftover vibe from northern Mexico, central Mexico, where you have that legacy of Aztec brutality. That’s where they used to slash the hearts out of people, captives and thousands of slaves offered up on bloody altars. On the other hand, you have Cortés and all those conquistadors who were coming out of the Spanish Inquisition-type scene. So I can imagine it got pretty brutal. And I think it’s got a lot of spillover from that time, in our times. I see the violence as some kind of epidemic that has lasted until this day maybe.”

  Not that Dylan isn’t having fun in Together Through Life. In “I Feel a Change Comin’ On,” the wayward stranger gets a little oomph in his stride. Surveying the crazy world, Dylan is hopeful that a new love will fall into his arms. Dreams come and go, Dylan sings, but love is eternal. Every good Dylan album has a first-person line, one that his fans gravitate toward with wild enthusiasm. The winner in Together Through Life is the quip “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver / And I’m reading James Joyce / Some people they tell me / I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice.” Dylanologists will probably have a field day analyzing why he chose to call out Shaver (a hand-maimed Texas guitar-picker who wrote many of Waylon Jennings’ best songs). And why James Joyce? “Waylon played me [Shaver’s] ‘Ain’t No God in Mexico,’ and I don’t know, it was quite good,” Dylan says. “Shaver and David Allen Coe became my favorite guys in that [outlaw] genre. The verse came out of nowhere. No . . . you know something? Subliminally, I can’t say that this is actually true. But I think it was more of a Celtic thing. Tying Billy Joe with James Joyce. I think subliminally or astrologically those two names just wanted to be combined. Those two personalities.” (Maybe it’s just that “Joyce” rhymes with “voice”?)

  Something about the Old West mythologies of gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, political maverick Sam Houston and short-story writer O. Henry appeals to Dylan’s imagination. Like a Western hero, he has given up the sedentary life and chosen the difficult path of his own ideals, made real by noble isolation. “I think you really have to be a Texan to appreciate the vastness of it and the emptiness of it,” Dylan says. “But I’m an honorary Texan.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Well,” he says, “George Bush, when he was governor, gave me a proclamation that says I’m an honorary Texan [holds hand up in pledge, laughs]. As if anybody needed proof. It’s no small thing. I take it as a high honor.”

  While Dylan has praised Obama and rhapsodized about Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, he’s been uncritical of the Bush administration. Almost every American artist has taken a piñata swipe at Bush’s legacy, but Dylan refuses. He instead looks at the Bush years as just another unsurprising incident of dawn-of-man folly. “I read history books just like you do,” Dylan says. “None of those guys are immune to the laws of history. They’re going to go up or down, and they’re going to take their people with them. None of us really knew what was happening in the economy. It changed so quickly into a true nightmare of horror. In another day and age, heads would roll. That’s what would happen. The rot would be cut out. As far as blaming everything on the last president, think of it this way: The same folks who had held him in such high regard came to despise him. Isn’t it funny that they’re the very same people who once loved him? People are fickle. Their loyalty can turn at the drop of a hat.”

  At heart Dylan is an old-fashioned moralist like Shane, who believes in the basic lessons taught by McGuffey’s Readers and the power of a six-shooter. A cowboy-movie aficionado, Dylan considers director John Ford a great American artist. “I like his old films,” Dylan says. “He was a man’s man, and he thought that way. He never had his guard down. Put courage and bravery, redemption and a peculiar mix of agony and ecstasy on the screen in a brilliant dramatic manner. His movies were easy to understand. I like that period of time in American films. I think America has produced the greatest films ever. No other country has ever come close. The great movies that came out of America in the studio system, which a lot of people say is the slavery system, were heroic and visionary, and inspired people in a way that no
other country has ever done. If film is the ultimate art form, then you’ll need to look no further than those films. Art has the ability to transform people’s lives, and they did just that.”

  The word “caustic” takes on a whole new meaning in Together Through Life’s final cut, the sure-to-be-canonical “It’s All Good.” Dylan belittles all those arrogant narcissists who constantly say it’s all good, even when the world crumbles around them. Drums and guitar rumble in a mad-attic rush of grunge blues while Dylan spits out sarcasm with such lines as “Big politicians telling lies / Restaurant kitchen all full of flies / Don’t make a bit of difference / Don’t see why it should . . . it’s all good.” It’s a raucous affair. I ask Dylan if he has ever uttered the slang expression “It’s all good,” even once, himself. “I might have, who knows?” he says with a sidelong, savvy smile. “Maybe if I was joking or something, just like in the song.”

  If there is a guiding spirit to Together Through Life—Dylan’s 33rd studio album—it’s the ghost of Doug Sahm. At age 11, Sahm, a San Antonio native, had already recorded his first song, “A Real American Joe.” By the time he was 13, the Grand Ole Opry offered him a regular gig; his mother disapproved. Eventually, Sahm’s band—the Sir Douglas Quintet—became the Lone Star answer to the Beatles. The cosmic-cowboy sound was born. An impressed Dylan volunteered to sing harmony and play guitar on Sahm’s 1973 Doug Sahm and Band as a sign of outsider solidarity; the album remains a weird, loose-grooving and quirky rock & roll classic. Dylan even wrote the lighthearted song “Wallflower” for it. Bootleg tapes of the Sahm-Dylan sessions now float around the black market. Tejano accordionist Flaco Jiménez anchored that band, Doug Sahm and Friends, back in 1973, just as David Hidalgo is doing with Together Through Life. As late as 1995, Sahm had joined Dylan onstage, in Austin, to play electric guitar on six numbers, including a version of the Grateful Dead’s “Alabama Getaway.” Sahm told the Texas audience that Dylan was a “beautiful friend” whom he loved dearly.

  “Doug was like me, maybe the only figure from that old period of time that I connected with,” Dylan explains. “His was a big soul. He had a hit record, ‘She’s About a Mover,’ and I had a hit record [“Like a Rolling Stone”] at the same time. So we became buddies back then, and we played the same kind of music. We never really broke apart. We always hooked up at certain intervals in our lives . . . here and there from time to time. Like Bloomfield, Doug was once a child prodigy too. He was playing fiddle, steel guitar and maybe even saxophone before he was in his teens. I’d never met anybody that had played onstage with Hank Williams before, let alone someone my own age. Doug had a heavy frequency, and it was in his nerves. It’s like what Charlie Patton says, ‘My God, what solid power.’ I miss Doug. He got caught in the grind. He should still be here.”

  In the pecking order of rock & roll survivors, Dylan sees himself as number two, behind only Chuck Berry. Two songs from the new album—“Jolene” and “Shake Shake Mama”—sound like cuts from Berry’s After School Session. (Another new Dylan song is “Forgetful Heart,” which lyrically touches upon Berry’s “Drifting Heart” off that 1958 album.) A friendship has developed between Dylan and Berry over the years. “Chuck said to me, ‘By God, I hope you live to be 100, and I hope I live forever,’” Dylan says with a laugh. “He said that to me a couple of years ago. In my universe, Chuck is irreplaceable. . . . All that brilliance is still there, and he’s still a force of nature. As long as Chuck Berry’s around, everything’s as it should be. This is a man who has been through it all. The world treated him so nasty. But in the end, it was the world that got beat.”

  When I ask Dylan if he’d ever thought of collaborating on a project with Berry, he laughs. “Chuck Berry?” he says. “The thought is preposterous. Chuck doesn’t need anybody to do anything with or for him. You got to say that at this point in history he’s probably the man. His presence is everywhere, but you never know it. I love Little Richard, but I don’t think he performs as much as Chuck. And he’s certainly not as spontaneous as Chuck. Chuck can perform at the drop of a hat. Well, Little Richard, he can too, actually, but he doesn’t.”

  After a little more talk on Berry, I shift gears to Elvis Presley, who inspired Dylan as a young man. Dylan has quipped that when he first encountered Elvis’ voice as a teenager, it was like “busting out of jail.” For Dylan, the very fact that Elvis had recorded versions of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” remains mind-boggling. Dutifully, as if returning a favor, Dylan recorded Elvis’ hit “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I” during both the Basement Tapes and Self-Portrait sessions.

  But that was about as close as they ever got. “I never met Elvis,” Dylan says. “I never met Elvis, because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favor in the Sixties. He didn’t really come back until, whatever was it, ’68? I know the Beatles went to see him, and he just played with their heads. ’Cause George [Harrison] told me about the scene. And Derek [Taylor], one of the guys who used to work for him. Elvis was truly some sort of American king. His face is even on the Statue of Liberty. And, well, like I said, I wouldn’t quite say he was ridiculed, but close. You see, the music scene had gone past him, and nobody bought his records. Nobody young wanted to listen to him or be like him. Nobody went to see his movies, as far as I know. He just wasn’t in anybody’s mind. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went. Because it seemed like a sorry thing to do. I don’t know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that. I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That’s the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building.”

  Clearly, Dylan wants to make sure he doesn’t flame out like Elvis. Not a minute of his Paris or Amsterdam shows were golden-oldie dial-ins. “All these shows I play are in the zone,” he says. Touring helps Dylan stay focused and fit as a fiddle. Not only are concerts workouts, but all the hustle and bustle of travel keeps him taut and thin. In movement, Dylan believes, man has a chance. Even on the road, boxing remains his primary training exercise. For years, in fact, he had a “professional opponent,” Mouse Strauss, who would ferociously spar with him. “Mouse could walk on his hands across a football field,” Dylan says. “He taught me the pugilistic rudiments back a while ago, maybe 20 or 30 years. That’s not when I started, though. Boxing was a part of the curriculum when I went to high school. Then it was taken out of the school system, I think maybe in ’58. But it was always good for me because it was kind of an individualist thing. You didn’t need to be part of a team. And I liked that.”

  I tell Dylan about a bootleg CD producer Bob Johnston once sent me of him sounding drunk crooning “Yesterday” with Johnny Cash. His eyes open wide. “Me and Johnny would sit around hotel rooms in London and sing all kinds of stuff into a tape recorder,” he says. “As far as I know those tapes have never surfaced anywhere. But they’ve been in a few films here and there. I don’t really remember ‘Yesterday.’” When I ask him if he thinks much about Cash, who died in September 2003, he turns somber.

  “Yeah, I do. I do miss him. But I started missing him 10 years before he actually kicked the bucket.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “You know,” he says, “it’s hard to talk about. I tell people if they are interested that they should listen to Johnny on his Sun records and reject all that notorious low-grade stuff he did in his later years. It can’t hold a candlelight to the frightening depth of the man that you hear on his early records. That’s the only way he should be remembered.”

  Dylan has become our great American poet of drifting, inheriting a baton that was passed
from Walt Whitman to Vachel Lindsay to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ginsberg. It was Sandburg, in fact, who captured Dylan’s imagination. The Illinois populist represented the poetic flip side of his endless fascination with Woody Guthrie. Just as Dylan famously sat at Guthrie’s sickbed in Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, he spontaneously drove with friends from New York to Hendersonville, North Carolina, simply to bang on the screened-in door of his all-seasons hero. It was in early February 1964. Mrs. Sandburg greeted the stoned-out New Yorkers with Appalachian warmth. “I am a poet,” is how Dylan introduced himself to her. “My name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr. Sandburg.” The 86-year-old Sandburg had collected more than 280 ballads in The American Songbag, and Dylan wanted to discuss them. “I had three records out at the time,” Dylan says, laughing at his youthful temerity. “The Times They Are a-Changin’ record was the one I gave him a copy of. Of course he had never heard of me.” After just 20 minutes, Sandburg excused himself. While Dylan felt it was a pleasant exchange, he didn’t get to discuss “I’m a-Ridin’ Old Paint” or “Frankie & Albert” with the bard. I ask Dylan whether it was worth the drive to North Carolina. “Oh, yeah,” Dylan says. “It was worth meeting him. He was the Grand Ol’ Man at the time. I always liked his poetry because it was so simple and poignant. You didn’t need reference books to read him.”