by Alex Ross
As Cage’s celebrity grew, his works became more anarchic and festive. For Theatre Piece, in 1960, Carolyn Brown put a tuba on her head, Cunningham slapped the strings of a piano with a dead fish, and David Tudor made tea. (This is when Brown was reprimanded for playing her part “improperly.”) His lectures became performances, even a kind of surrealist standup comedy. In the midst of Cunningham’s dance piece How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run, Cage sat at a table equipped with a microphone, a bottle of wine, and an ashtray, placidly reading aloud items such as this:
[A] monk was walking along when he came to a lady who was sitting by the path weeping. “What’s the matter?” he said. She said, sobbing, “I have lost my only child.” He hit her over the head and said, “There, that’ll give you something to cry about.”
Later in the decade, Cage incited mass musical mayhem in huge venues such as the 69th Regiment Armory in New York and the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the Armory, for a piece titled Variations VII, Cage and his collaborators manipulated two long table-fuls of devices and dialed up sonic feeds from locations around the city, including the kitchen of Lüchow’s Restaurant, the Times printing presses, the aviary at the zoo, a dog pound, a Con Ed power plant, a Sanitation Department depot, and Terry Riley’s turtle tank. In Urbana-Champaign, six or seven thousand people materialized to hear HPSCHD, a five-hour multimedia onslaught involving harpsichords playing fragments of Mozart and other composers, fifty-one computer-generated tapes tuned to fifty-one different scales, and a mirror ball.
The carnival element persisted to the end. His five Europeras (1985—91) mash together centuries of operatic repertory. (“For two hundred years the Europeans have been sending us their operas,” Cage explained. “Now I’m sending them back.”) But in the music of Cage’s last two decades you sense a paring down of elements and, often, a heightened expressivity, notwithstanding the composer’s rejection of personal expression. The musicologist James Pritchett points out that even Cage’s chanciest works have a personal stamp, because he took such care in selecting their components. The execution varies, yet the performances end up sounding more like one another than like any other piece by Cage or any other music in existence.
A case in point is Ryoanji (1983—85), which takes its name from the famous Zen temple and rock garden in Kyoto. Five solo instruments play a series of slow-moving, ever-sliding musical lines, their shapes derived from tracings of stones. A solo percussionist or ensemble supplies an irregular, halting pulse. The composer is not in full control of what the musicians play, yet he is the principal author of the spare, spacious, meditative music that emerges. Consider also the 1979 electronic composition Roaratorio, Cage’s response to Finnegans Wake. A verbal component, which the composer recorded in a vaguely Irish brogue, consists of words and phrases drawn from Joyce’s novel and arranged in mesostics. Around him swirls a collage of voices, noises, and musical fragments, based on sounds and places mentioned in the novel. Chance comes into play, but Cage has carefully followed the structure of the text. In the final section, the composer-reciter breaks into song, his folkish chant encircled by impressions of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s plaintive final monologue—cries of seagulls, rumbling waters, an intimation of “peace and silence.” It is an uncanny evocation of Joyce’s world.
In his last years, Cage returned to his point of departure—the pointillistic sensibility of the early percussion and prepared-piano works. He released a series of scores that have come to be called “number pieces,” their titles taken from the number of performers required (Four, Seventy-four, and so on). Within a given time bracket, players render notated material at their own pace—usually a single note or a short phrase. The result is music of overlapping drones and airy silences. “After all these years, I’m finally writing beautiful music,” Cage drily commented.
Beautiful but dark. As he grew older, the cheerful existentialist had crises of doubt, intimations of apocalypse. Darkest of all was the installation Lecture on the Weather, which he created for the Bicentennial. Twelve vocalists recite or sing quotations from Thoreau against a backdrop of flashing images and the sounds of wind, rain, and thunder. The proportions of the three sections are about the same as in 4’33”, but nature makes a crueler sound than it did on that August night in 1952. Attached to the piece is a politically tinged preface that echoes, perhaps consciously, Cage’s teenage oration “Other People Think.” It ends thus:
We would do well to give up the notion that we alone can keep the world in line, that only we can solve its problems … Our political structures no longer fit the circumstances of our lives. Outside the bankrupt cities we live in Megalopolis which has no geographical limits. Wilderness is global park. I dedicate this work to the U.S.A. that it may become just another part of the world, no more, no less.
The last room of MACBA’s Anarchy of Silence exhibition was taken up with a 2007 realization of Lecture on the Weather, with John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham among the reciters. I sat for a long time in the gallery, listening to the grim swirl of sound and observing the reactions of visitors. Some poked their heads into the room, shrugged, and moved on. Others seemed transfixed. One young couple sat for a while in the opposite corner, their hands clenched together, their heads bent toward the floor. They looked like the last people on earth.
In July 1992, a mugger made his way into Cage’s apartment, pretending to be a UPS man. After threatening violence, he took money from the composer’s wallet. It was a weird premonition: on August 11, Cage suffered a stroke, and died the following day. I moved to New York a few weeks later, and, as a fledgling music critic, attended various tributes to the late composer, the most memorable being the three-and-a-half-hour Cagemusicircus, at Symphony Space. The afternoon began with Yoko Ono banging out cluster chords on the piano and ended with a quietly intense performance of Cage’s early piece Credo in Us, for piano, two percussionists, and a performer operating a radio or a phonograph. In the final minutes, the hall went dark and light fell on a spot in the middle of the stage. There the audience saw a desk, a lamp, a glass of water, and an empty chair with a gray coat draped over the back.
Cage’s last home was in a top-floor loft at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, in a cast-iron building that once housed the B. Altman store. Cunningham remained in the apartment, and several years ago I was invited there to dinner. Cunningham was, as so many had reported, gentle, taciturn, elusive, and poetic in even his slightest gestures. The two men had their difficulties, but they were joined by a powerful physical and intellectual attraction. (Yet to be published is a birthday mesostic in which Cage pays tribute to Cunningham’s cock and ass.) I listened avidly to Cunningham’s stories of the avant-garde’s pioneer days, but I found myself distracted by noises floating up from the street below. When the couple moved there, in 1979, Cage made his unconditional surrender to noise: certainly, on that corner, there was no such thing as silence. Yet, as I listened, the traffic, the honking, the beeping, the occasional irate curses and drunken shouts seemed somehow changed, enhanced, framed. I couldn’t shake the impression that Cage was still composing the sound of the city.
That block of Chelsea is not as dangerous, or as interesting, as it used to be. When Cage and Cunningham arrived, the major store in the building was the Glassmasters Guild, which sold, among other things, stained-glass models of Sopwith Camel and Piper Cherokee airplanes. Now there is a Container Store. A Bed Bath & Beyond and a T.J.Maxx loom across the street. At the beginning of 2010, the final glimmer of Cagean spirit left the block when Laura Kuhn, the director of the John Cage Trust, removed the last of the couple’s belongings from apartment 5B. At Christmastime, she invited me over again. Several artist friends dropped in as well. Christmas lights were strung up on the wall facing the kitchen. Cunningham had liked the lights, and had let them hang year-round. On July 26, 2009, at the age of ninety, he passed away beneath them.
Toward the end of his life, Cunningham
wrote in his diary, “When one dies with this world in this meltdown, is one missing something grand that will happen?” He wondered whether people could learn to live less wastefully, whether traffic could die down, whether manufacturing could return to Kentucky towns, even whether “the Automat could return.”
Cage and Cunningham’s Manhattan is mostly gone. Real estate greed and political indifference have nearly driven bohemian culture out of Manhattan; “uptown” begins in Battery Park. Cage’s urban collages are almost elegies now; with the mechanization of the radio business, even the piece for twelve radios has probably lost its random charm. But lamentation is not a Cagean mood. If he were alive, he would undoubtedly find a way to pull strange music from the high-end mall that Manhattan has become. He might even have been content to stay in that homogenized patch of lower midtown, where, after a long search, he found his Walden.
“I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves,” Cage said late in life, in an interview with the filmmaker Elliot Caplan. “You know the story of the African prince who went to London, and they played a whole program of music for him, orchestral music, and he said, ‘Why do you always play the same piece over and over?’” Cage laughed, his eyes glittering, his head tilting toward the window. “They never do that on Sixth Avenue.”
PART III
18
I SAW THE LIGHT
FOLLOWING BOB DYLAN
America is no country for old men. Pop culture is a pedophile’s delight. What to do with a well-worn, middle-aged songwriter who gravitates toward the melancholy and the absurd? If you look through what has been written about Bob Dylan in recent decades, you notice a persistent desire for the man to die off, so that his younger self can take its mythic place. When he had his famous motorcycle mishap in 1966, at the age of twenty-five, it was presumed that his career had come to a sudden end: rumors had him killed or maimed, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. In 1978, after the fiasco of Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s four-hour art film, a writer for The Village Voice said, “I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times, the way they did with Hubert [Humphrey], Chaplin, and Adolf Hitler. Just the immutable facts.” Vanity Fair was unhappy to find him still kicking in 1985: “My God, he sounds as if he could go on grinding out this crap for ever.” When Dylan was hospitalized with a chest infection in 1997, newspapers ran practice obituaries: “Bob Dylan, who helped transform pop music more than thirty years ago when he electrified folk music …”; “Bob Dylan, whose bittersweet love songs and politically tinged folk anthems made him an emblem of the 1960s counterculture …”
PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON. I’m at the 1998 Puyallup Fair, in this agricultural suburb of Tacoma, and among the attractions are Elmer, a 2,400-pound Red Holstein cow; a miniature haunted house ingeniously mounted on the back of a truck; bingo with Hoovers for prizes; and Bob Dylan. He is announced, with cheesy gusto, as “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” He saunters from shadows in the back of the stage, indistinguishable at first from the rest of the band (a well-honed group consisting of Tony Garnier, Larry Campbell, Bucky Baxter, and David Kemper). He is dressed in a gray-and-black Nashville getup and looks like a lopsided owl. As the show gets under way, he tries a few cautious strutting and dancing moves, Chuck Berry—style. He plays five numbers from his most recent album, Time Out of Mind; several hits, among them “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “Masters of War”; and something more unexpected from his five-hundred-song back catalogue—“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” He ends with “Forever Young.” The crowd goes wild.
When I told people that I was going to follow Dylan on the road, I got various bemused reactions. Some were surprised to hear that he still played in public at all. It’s easier, perhaps, to picture him in Citizen Kane—like seclusion, glaring at the Bible and listening to the collected works of Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps he does, but he also plays more than a hundred shows every year, crisscrossing the globe and meandering through every corner of the American landscape: big-city stadiums, small-town college gymnasiums, suburban fairgrounds, and rural ballfields.
In the fall of 1998, I went to ten Dylan concerts, including a six-day, six-show stretch that took three thousand miles off the life of a rental car. The crowds were more diverse than I’d expected: young urban record-collector types, grizzled wackos, well-dressed ex-hippies, high-school kids in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Deadheads are a big part of Dylan’s audience, and they created odd scenes as they descended on each venue: in Reno, they streamed in a tie-dyed river through the Hilton casino. I asked some of the younger fans how they had become interested in Dylan, since he wasn’t exactly omnipresent on MTV. Most had discovered him, they said, while browsing through their parents’ old LPs. One kid, who had been listening to a 45-rpm single of “Hurricane,” thought that he should come and check out the man behind it. The younger fans didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that Dylan was three times their age. A literate teenager asked me, “Do you have to be from Elizabethan England to appreciate Shakespeare?”
Before each show, for some reason, minor-key sonatas and concertos by Mozart were played over the P.A. system. Male Dylanologists explained lyrics to their girlfriends. “Every Dylan song contains eight questions,” I heard one saying. Bootleggers fumbled with their equipment: a common method of clandestine recording is to attach small microphones to the earpieces of glasses. (Thousands of tapes of Dylan shows are in circulation—the list stretches back to 1958.) Concession stands sold Dylan paraphernalia, including a bumper sticker that read “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”—a line from Time Out of Mind.
A boozy group of Minnesotans who sat in front of me at a show in Minneapolis seemed to have the Dylan songbook pretty well memorized. The rowdiest of them was shouting out first lines of the songs at the top of his voice, and once, in his excitement, he crashed into the hard plastic seats. He got up again, blood dripping down his chin, and bellowed in my face, “Once upon a time you dressed so fine! God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’” Other fans took a cooler view. Before a show in Portland, I chatted with a levelheaded twentysomething guy who played in a progressive funk group. “Last time I saw him, in ’90, it was brutal,” he told me. “I hope he doesn’t fuck up the songs again. I hear he’s better. Even when he’s awful, he’s sort of great—he’s never just mediocre.” In Dylan’s vicinity, I noticed, everyone italicizes.
Dylan is said to make a mess of the songs. He does change them, and fans who come to hear live reenactments of favorite tracks tend to be disappointed. Dylan sometimes writes new melodies for old songs and he sometimes transposes one set of lyrics into the tune of another. He writes a little more each night: I kept hearing fresh bluesy bits of tunes in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which was at the center of every set. As a performer, he is erratic: his voice has a way of thinning into a bleat, and every so often his guitar yelps wrong notes. But he has a saturnine ease onstage. Even from a hundred feet away, his squinting stare can give you a start. And he is musically in control. The band’s pacing of each song—the unpredictable scampering to and fro over a loosely felt beat, the watch-and-wait atmosphere, the sudden knowing emphasis on one line or one note—is much the same as when Dylan plays solo. You can hear him thinking through the music bar by bar, tracing harmonies in winding figures. The basic structures of the songs remain unshakable. There may be wrong notes, but there is never a wrong chord.
In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms. His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification. A book titled The Bob Dylan Companion goes so far as to call him “one of the least talented singers and guitarists around.” But to hear Dylan live is to realize that he is a musician—of an eccentric and mesmerizing kind. It’s hard to pin down what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his shows cause his songs to mutate, so t
hat no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances, over many decades. The achievement is so large and so confusing that the impulse to ignore all that came after his partial disappearance in 1966 is understandable. It’s simpler that way—and cheaper. You need only seven discs, instead of forty. But Columbia Records, after years of putting out bungled live recordings, is finally beginning to illustrate, in its Bootleg Series, the entire sweep of Dylan’s performing career.
Don DeLillo, in his novel Great Jones Street, imagined a Dylanesque rock star and said of him, “Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors.” But Dylan has survived without becoming a “survivor”—a professional star acting out the role of himself. He has a curious, sub-rosa place in pop culture, seeming to be everywhere and nowhere at once. He is historical enough to be the subject of university seminars, yet he wanders the land playing to tipsy crowds. The Dylan that people thought they knew—“the voice of a generation”—is going away. So I went searching for whatever might be taking its place. I went to the shows; I listened to the records; I patronized dusty Greenwich Village stores in search of bootlegs; I sought out the Dylanologists who are arguing over his legacy in print and on the Internet. Dylan himself may explain the songs best, just by singing them.
