by Alex Ross
CONCORD, CALIFORNIA. The crowd is dominated by ex- and neo-hippies from Berkeley, twenty miles to the west. Dylan threatens to dampen their enthusiasm by opening with “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the snarling gospel single that had horrified the counterculture in 1979. But he works his way back to the sing-along sixties anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I was sitting near a teenage girl who had first heard Dylan in a class on the sixties and was there with her history teacher.
Dylan’s looming presence in the culture of the sixties is for many a point in his favor: he wrote songs that “mattered,” he “made a difference.” For others, particularly for those of us who grew up in later, less delirious decades, the sixties connection can be a stumbling block. Until my late twenties, when I started listening to Dylan in earnest, I had mentally shelved him as the archetypal radical leftover, reeking of politics and marijuana. I’d read a story that went something like this. He was born in Minnesota. He went to Greenwich Village. He wrote protest songs. He stopped writing protest songs. He took drugs, “went electric.” He was booed. He fell off his motorcycle. He disappeared into a basement. He reappeared and sang country. He got divorced. He converted to Christianity. He converted back to something else. He croaked somewhere behind Stevie Wonder in “We Are the World.” And so on. If you’re not in the right age group, the collected bulletins of Dylan’s progress read like alumni notes from a school you didn’t attend.
The challenge for anyone who thinks Dylan is more than a lifestyle trendsetter is to define those qualities that have outlasted his boisterous tenure as the voice of a generation. So far, the informal discipline of Dylanology—founded around 1970, by a man named A. J. Weberman as he fished through Dylan’s trash on MacDougal Street—has reached no consensus on the matter. At the moment, there are about a half-dozen luminaries in the field. The iconic rock critic Greil Marcus connects Dylan with a homegrown, folk-and-blues surrealism. Paul Williams, who founded the rock magazine Crawdaddy! in the sixties, celebrates Dylan as a tireless, generous performer who rewrites his songs at every show. The Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin pays heed to the gospel period and the biblical rants that followed in the eighties. Christopher Ricks, a renowned scholar of Milton, Tennyson, Eliot, and Beckett at Boston University, supplies a formalist reading—of Dylan as a pure poet, who thrives on word choice, rhythm, and structured rhyme. In the same spirit, Gordon Ball, a professor of English at the Virginia Military Institute, has nominated Dylan for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Below the main authorities are the amateur Dylanologists: enthusiasts, editors of fanzines, caretakers of gigantically detailed Internet sites. There is no end to their productions. The Crackled Bells, for instance, is an unreadable book-length guide to Dylan’s unreadable book-length poem Tarantula. The author, Robin Witting, writes, “Tarantula has six main themes: America, Viet Nam, Aretha, Mexico, Maria, and—the great panacea—Music.” I didn’t find much about music, but I enjoyed a note about geraniums: “Do geraniums stand for coolness? Insouciance? Moreover, the odour of death?” Aidan Day’s Jokerman, a book on Dylan’s lyrics, analyzes some lines from “Visions of Johanna,” on Blonde on Blonde, and finds in them “a reduction of form to primal elements as—in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp’s rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)—even gender difference becomes confused and human contour and feature are erased.” The text in question is “See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the moustache say, ‘Jeeze / I can’t find my knees.’”
Despite everything that has been written about Dylan, not a great deal is known about him for certain. Heylin’s chronology of Dylan’s life, for example, is an archly self-canceling document, in that every piece of information points to a larger lack of information. Here are three consecutive entries for the year 1974:
Late April. Dylan attends a concert by Buffy Sainte-Marie at the Bottom Line in New York. He is so impressed he returns the following two nights, and tells her he’d like to record her composition,
“Until It’s Time for You to Go.”
May 6. Dylan runs into Phil Ochs in front of the Chelsea Hotel and they decide to go for a drink together.
May 7. Dylan visits Ochs at his apartment and agrees to perform at the “Friends of Chile” benefit Ochs has arranged at the Felt Forum. Tickets for the show had been selling very disappointingly.
What happened during the rest of the first week of May? Where was he going when he ran into Phil Ochs? Dylan’s life story sometimes feels as if it has been pieced together from centuries-old manuscripts that were charred in a monastery fire. “Between January and June 1972 the only evidence he was in New York at all was a reading he attended by Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky at the Town Hall,” Heylin writes in his attempt at a full-scale biography, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades. A skeptical Englishman who is known for a history of American punk, Heylin is at least willing to admit what he doesn’t know, and his book is the most reliable of several biographies.
The accumulated files of Dylanology, despite their gaps, give a rough sense of the man behind the cipher. A thumbnail sketch from a 1967 essay by Ellen Willis holds up well: “Friends describe [him] as shy and defensive, hyped up, careless of his health, a bit scared by fame, unmaterialistic but shrewd about money, a professional absorbed in his craft.” Stubborn persistence is his main characteristic: although he has often vanished in a funk, he never fails to trudge back with some new twist on his obsessions. He is at odds with the modern world in many ways. “There’s enough of everything,” he said in a 1991 interview. “You name it, there’s enough of it. There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the lightbulb was going too far.” His eccentricity has an everyday quality—he’s the weird neighbor you can never figure out. I heard an excellent anecdote from a friend who played on a Little League team with Dylan’s kids in the late seventies, during the singer’s gospel period. When a dog ran onto the field, my friend yelled, “Get that goddam dog off the field!” A familiar voice rasped from the parents’ bench, “Ahhh, that was what kind of a dog?”
Joan Didion wrote of Joan Baez that she was a personality before she became a person, and the same could be said of Dylan. He was famous before he was twenty-one. World fame—not just celebrity but intellectual renown, plaudits from Allen Ginsiberg, Frank O’Hara, and Philip Larkin—came to him by the age of twenty-five. The speed of his ascent required luck, but it was mostly a function of his energy. He skipped heedlessly from one genre to another: folk, blues, country, spirituals. He played at being a political activist, but his sharpest polemics, such as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” were the character-driven ones. His early vocal style incorporated pieces of Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John Hurt, Hank Williams, and, not to be forgotten, Johnnie Ray, the flaky fifties crooner who smacked his consonants with unnerving ferocity. In the early sixties, Dylan sought to play rock and electric blues alongside his acoustic material: in high school, he’d hammered the piano a la Little Richard, and he longed to resume that kind of noisemaking. He originally planned to have his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, be part electric and part acoustic, like the later Bringing It All Back Home. He signaled his intentions by covering “That’s All Right, Mama,” Elvis’s debut single, at his first electric session, in October 1962. He was trying frantically to say everything at once.
But he soon discovered that you can be famous for only one thing at a time. The record business and the music press required a narrower genius. The electric songs from 1962 didn’t fit the image that Columbia wanted to create—Dylan as folk oracle. He gained notice chiefly for his civil-rights and antiwar material, and Columbia advertised him accordingly:
Bob Dylan has walked down many roads. For most of his 22 years he “rode freight trains for kicks and got beat up for laughs, cut grass for quarters and sang for dimes” … Bob does what a true folk singer is supposed to do—sing about the import
ant ideas and events of the times … His new best-selling album (the first was Bob Dylan) is The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It features ten of Bob’s own compositions, including the sensational hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Also, songs on subjects ranging from love (“Girl From the North Country”) to atomic fall-out (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”). Hear it and you’ll know why Bob Dylan is the voice of the times.
This ingenious ad copy, complete with Dylan’s tall tales about his past, informed the press coverage. Dylan soon became annoyed at the generalizations, and found himself fighting his own publicity; he denied, for example, that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” depicted a nuclear winter. Even so, he played along with the spirit of the marketing: he later claimed that the song had been a general reaction to the dread of the nuclear age, and to the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular. In a widely quoted statement, he said, “I wrote that when I didn’t figure I’d have enough time left in life.” “Hard Rain” had actually been written at least a month before the Cuban crisis began.
“Hard Rain” was a breakthrough in Dylan’s songwriting, but for a different reason. It’s a small epic, lasting seven minutes, and yet it lacks any trace of the blow-by-blow storytelling that sustains the picaresque ballads of the folk literature. How does Dylan keep us interested? One way is through repetition; another is through the changes that come between the first repetition and the last. Almost all of Dylan’s songs have a structure of verse-refrain, verse-refrain, and the refrain is almost always a simple-seeming phrase that tolls like a bell: “Tangled up in blue,” “You gotta serve somebody,” “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
The first lines of “Hard Rain”—“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? / And where have you been, my darling young one?”—are a nod to the old ballad “Lord Randal,” which begins, “Oh, where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? / Oh, where ha’ you been, my handsome young man?” Dylan breaks the symmetrical call-and-response of the original: his blue-eyed son answers not with two lines but with five. The images—“twelve misty mountains,” “six crooked highways,” and so forth—carry the flavor of the book of Revelation, with its insistence on exact numbers of bizarre objects (“I saw seven golden candlesticks”). The song hangs on a musical trick of suspension: E and A chords seesaw hypnotically as the number of answering phrases increases from five to seven and eventually to twelve. In the chorus—“And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard …”—Dylan grasps for and finally gets the resolution, which in each verse has moved a little farther out of reach. Coming down the mountain of the song, he starts to sound like a prophet.
Many myths of Dylan’s sixties career lose credibility in the face of the evidence gathered in Heylin’s books and other Dylanological tomes. Dylan’s songwriting is said to have been transformed by a plunge into the drug culture, but he had been using drugs on and off since his Minnesota days. He was said to have been inspired by the Beatles to “go electric,” but he had sketched out his folk-rock sound as early as 1962. The first electric shows reportedly provoked universal booing, but on the tape of his famous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, in 1965, it’s difficult to hear boos amid the applause. And D. A. Pennebaker, who filmed part of Dylan’s international tour in 1966, recalls that when confrontational scenes developed the ringleader didn’t appear to be greatly bothered by them. “Dylan was having the best time of his life,” Pennebaker said at a symposium on Dylan’s unreleased tour movie Eat the Document, at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. “He was like a cricket jumping around onstage.”
Greil Marcus describes the 1965—66 tours differently—as a war against dark reactionary forces. In his book Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old, Weird America), he quotes Al Kooper’s reason for not wanting to follow the tour into Texas: “Look what they did to JFK down there.” Marcus finds special significance in an exchange that took place between Dylan and the audience in Manchester, England, in May 1966. The moment is rendered as Dylan’s ultimate encounter with the enemy:
As if he had been waiting … a person rises and shouts what he has been silently rehearsing to himself all night. As over and over he has imagined himself doing, he stands up, and stops time. He stops the show:
“JUDAS!”
Dylan stiffens against the flinch of his own body. “I don’t believe you,” he says, and the contempt in his voice is absolute. As one listens it turns the echo of the shouter’s curse sour, you begin to hear the falseness in it, that loving rehearsal—and yet that same echo has already driven Dylan back. “YOU’RE ALIAR!” he screams hysterically.
When Columbia finally released a CD of the show in 1998—it had circulated for thirty years on bootlegs—neophytes may have skipped to the end in order to hear the “Judas!” dialogue. Not everyone will hear what Marcus heard. What you hear first is a lull, during which Dylan tunes his guitar. When the shout of “Judas!” comes, the crowd variously laughs, groans, and applauds. The voice from the back yammers on, and others join in. When Dylan responds, he is not screaming hysterically, or, indeed, screaming at all. He sounds tired and annoyed. It’s as if he couldn’t understand what the lads in the back were hollering and therefore supplied the kind of all-purpose non sequitur that he liked to dish out at press conferences.
Certainly, Dylan encountered a fair amount of venom on his 1966 tour, especially from British folk purists. But he doesn’t seem to have faced a well-organized conspiracy. C. P. Lee, a British Dylanologist, took the trouble to write an entire book about the Manchester show, and in the wake of its publication, in 1998, a great discovery was made: the “Judas” shouter was no Pete Seeger—like elder statesman of folk but, it was claimed, a confused twenty-year-old university student named Keith Butler. Having landed in a job at a Toronto bank, Butler told the British press that his act was not premeditated. “I was very disappointed about what I was hearing,” he said. “But I think what really sent me over the top was when he did those lovely songs—I think it was, er, there were two of them …”
Marcus may not provide a naturalistic account of what went down at the Manchester show, but he does something no less valuable: he captures the dementia that surrounded Dylan in the mid-sixties, when two disparate youth cultures—rock-and-rollers and folkies—jockeyed for control of his supposed message while older generations struggled to comprehend what was going on. Not since Wagner had a musician been subjected to such irrational, contradictory pressures. Small wonder that Dylan dropped out in the wake of his motorcycle accident, in the summer of 1966: he’d had enough of the messiah role. Instead, he hunkered down in West Saugerties, New York, with his formidable touring musicians—the Hawks, soon to be renamed the Band—and churned out dozens of achingly-old-school numbers. Those songs, the Basement Tapes, are the main subject of Marcus’s book; in them, he writes, “certain bedrock strains of American cultural language were retrieved and reinvented.”
As the tour passed through California, I went to see Marcus, who lives in the Berkeley hills. “The funny thing is that I’m not a Dylan person,” he told me, sipping a beer in his kitchen. “Many years went by when I didn’t care about him at all.” For Marcus, as for many of the original followers, the Dylan of the seventies and eighties was of little consequence. Marcus’s Rolling Stone review of the 1970 album Self Portrait, a baffling detour in the direction of easy-listening pop, began with the words “What is this shit?” Only when Dylan started recording folk and blues covers in the nineties did Marcus become interested again. This critic is a connoisseur of the darkest, weirdest corners of American music—the shrapnel-voiced Dock Boggs and other comical-sinister backcountry singers who had been collected in Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music—and he believes that Dylan belongs there, too. In a 1985 review, Marcus asked to hear “more Dock Boggs” in Dylan’s aging voice, and that alchemy more or less happened. The writer seemed to get inside his subject’s mind, and Dylan indicated as much by providing a blurb
for the paperback of Invisible Republic.
Still, I felt that there must be something missing in a reading of Dylan that brushes over twenty years of his career. What if, as some think, he reached his peak not with the put-ons and put-downs of the sixties but with the chaotic love songs of the seventies? And what if, as Clinton Heylin suggests, he went even further in the eighties, when he fused the personal and the apocalyptic—“Love-sick Blues” and the book of Revelation? Lester Bangs wrote in 1981, “If people are going to dismiss or at best laugh at Dylan now as automatically as they once genuflected, then nobody is going to know if he ever makes a good album again. They’re not listening now, which just might mean that they weren’t really listening then either.”
Back on the East Coast, I had tea with Christopher Ricks, the eminent close reader of canonical English poetry. We met in his sitting room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I don’t teach Dylan,” he told me. “It’s just an obsession.” Although he speaks in the clipped tones of a modern English don, he has a way of plunging into the passive-aggressive dynamic of Dylan’s emotions. “The words constitute an axis,” he said, early in our conversation. “They do not point in one direction.” Dylan indulges heavily in irony, and he sometimes obtains ambiguity simply by repeating a phrase. “Think of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,’” Ricks continued, intoning the refrain. “How many times can you tell somebody not to think twice? You can say ‘It’s all right’ over and over. That’s comforting—but not ‘Don’t think twice.’ I’d start to think.”
