Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  wrong about ’m all

  Well, the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud

  Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood

  In the denouement, Jeff Bridges’ journalist is killed and Jack Fate, wrongly blamed for the crime, is taken away in handcuffs. As he sits bemused in the back of the police van, we hear Dylan’s voice on the soundtrack: “I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.” At which point I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the audience muttering, “Yeah, Bob, and it shows.”

  So Jack Fate ends up, despite himself, as some kind of martyr—not to the truth but to the impossibility of telling it, to the absurdity and amorality of the universe. It’s a narcissistic, repetitious “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” spun out over two hours, and suggests inadvertently that Dylan never did find his way out of that late 60s impasse.

  America was changing. I had the feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a place to be as any.

  —Chronicles

  Among the many jack-in-the-box surprises of Dylan’s career, not many surpass Chronicles, Volume I, the memoir he published in 2004. Finally, after four decades, the literary and narrative flair evident in the songs found its way on to the printed page, and with a warmth entirely absent from Masked and Anonymous. Chronicles is both frank and evasive, credible and preposterous. It’s Dylan in full, by turns artfully disguised and startlingly naked, achingly romantic and flatly desolate. The book is rich with remembrance of a lost past but also haunted—traumatized—by a sense of rupture with that past.

  Chronicles sheds much light on the young Dylan’s relationship to his era, and in so doing confirms, ironically, something Dylan frequently denies: that there was indeed an umbilical link between his art and the world into which it was born. However, it should no more be relied on as a source of undisputed fact than Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s “autobiographical fiction.” In structure and style, Chronicles echoes the earlier book, though its mood and preoccupations are different. Instead of the bright light, sharp outlines and vast skies of Bound for Glory, Chronicles is full of smoky, jumbled interiors. Where the master’s book is open-hearted, righteously indignant and happily engaged with a teeming world, the disciple’s is ruminative, introspective, often equivocal and in the end painfully lonely. Of course, Guthrie was thirty when he published Bound for Glory whereas Dylan was sixty-three when Chronicles came out. Nonetheless, Chronicles, like Bound for Glory, is the tale of a young artist’s formation, the making of a folksinger.

  The narrative meanders and digresses. The sequence of events is sometimes confused (the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 is quickly followed by the rise of feminism, which most people would place fifteen years later). But Dylan’s sense of place is as acute as his sense of time is vague. The bulk of the book is a meditation on New York at the dawn of the 60s, evoked in a prose that is both vernacular and ornate, hypersensitive to the décor of a room, a change in the weather, the pitch of a voice. This is the flickering urban landscape of “Visions of Johanna,” with “all kinds of characters looking for the inner heat” mingling in cluttered Greenwich Village apartments: “Beaux Arts lamps, carved boudoir chairs, couches in plush velvet—heavy andirons connected with chains by the fireplace . . . ” New York in Dylan’s memory is “cold, muffled, mysterious, the capitol of the world,” a city of epiphanies: “I passed a horsedrawn wagon full of covered flowers, all under a plastic wrap, no driver in sight. The city was full of stuff like that . . . snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline . . . a cellar tavern where John Wilkes Booth, the American Brutus, used to drink. I’d been in there once and saw his ghost in the mirror—an ill spirit.”

  There’s an elegiac tone, as if Dylan is in mourning for a unique historical moment, and even more for the young singer from Minnesota, his love of music, his driving ambition, his openness to life and friendship, his naïve doubts and unreflective self-confidence—soon to be lost forever under the avalanche of celebrity. “It wasn’t love or money that I was looking for,” he recalls. “I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity.” Yet he concedes that at this stage he “didn’t have too much of an identity.” The young Dylan appears in this book as a cipher, groping instinctively towards a grand destiny that also turns out to be a harrowing tragedy.

  The Greenwich Village folk-set he’d sneered at in “Positively Fourth Street” is recreated in affectionate detail, a “lost paradise” of intense personalities and moment-by-moment revelations. Alongside the vivid recollections of the folk milieu, there runs a celebration of folk music and a reiterated affirmation of the folk aesthetic. Again and again, Dylan counterposes the richness of folk to the superficiality of the mass culture pumped out by the commercial media:What I was playing at the time were hard-lipped folk-songs with fire and brimstone servings, and you didn’t need to take polls to know that they didn’t match up with anything on the radio. . . . What I was into was the traditional stuff with a capital T and it was as far away from the mondo teeno scene as you could get.

  Folk is presented as the embodiment of a timeless wisdom counterposed to the ephemera of a modern world that “had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn’t seduced by it.” Chronicles brims with Dylan’s distaste for modernity: “Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better.” Dylan contrasts this “wasted world and totally mechanised” with “a parallel universe . . . with more archaic principles and values . . . a culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . landlords and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys.” Part of the appeal of this parallel universe was that it was experienced as a secret realm, a domain reserved for initiates:You had to go find it. It didn’t come served on a paper plate. Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it . . . songs to me were more important than light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

  In Chronicles (as in Dylan’s albums of the 90s), folk reemerges as a touchstone of authenticity. But it is also enduring testimony to the cyclical nature of history, the vanity of human endeavour and the irreducibility of life’s mysteries. “It was always the same pattern,” he says; societies emerge, flourish, and decline (but “I had no idea which of these stages America was in”). Chronicles is riddled with the fatalistic aphorisms that are the hallmark of late Dylan, sometimes wearyingly so:Don’t give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness. Don’t give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us. Let’s get down to brass tacks. There isn’t any moral order. You can forget that. Morality has nothing in common with politics. It’s not there to transgress. It’s either high ground or low ground. This is the way the world is and nothing’s gonna change it. It’s a crazy, mixed up world and you have to look it right in the eye.

  For all the unvarnished directness of the writing, Chronicles is full of feints and dodges; it’s a tease as well as a revelation. Dylan remains coy on many topics and the lacunae are gaping. There’s nothing about the 1963 March on Washington or the Tom Paine award or Newport ’65 or Manchester in 1966. Nothing about drugs or sex. Nothing about his fundamentalist Christian phase or about his Jewishness—except a cryptic story about how people kept leaving his high school bands because he didn’t have the right “family connections.” He mentions his wife on two occasions, but doesn’t explain that these were actually two different wives. When he catches a screening of the movie, The Mighty Quinn, featuring Denzel Washington as a detective, he comments: “Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song.”

  As ever, it’s unwise to take Dylan’s claims about himself at face value. For example, there seems to be no evidence of the actual existenc
e of the bohemian couple, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, whom Dylan sketches in detail. They may be composites or even outright inventions7 but they play a critical role in Dylan’s narrative. The gun-toting Ray’s romantically reactionary view of the South and the Civil War is set against Dave Van Ronk’s “Marxist view” that “it was one big battle between two rival economic systems.” In Chronicles there’s scarcely more than a passing reference to the civil rights movement but pages about the civil war. Dylan portrays himself researching the period on microfilm and uncovering a lasting truth:It’s all one long funeral song. . . . Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.

  Like “Dixie” in Masked and Anonymous, the civil war episode in Chronicles serves to disorient the audience, to suggest that what seems new is in fact ancient. But here as elsewhere in the book Dylan seems to be revising his past to reconcile it to his current world view. There’s no doubt that the recoil from modernity has always been a deep reflex in Dylan and that folk music did indeed appear to him as the embodiment of primeval mysteries. But the young man who wrote “Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “With God on Our Side,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”—and indeed “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It’s Alright Ma”—was a poet of urgency who would have found the fatalism of the later Dylan entirely too pat. As so often in the past, Dylan’s characterization of the politics of his early days is disingenuous: “I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix. . . .” Maybe, but this “primitive” also dissected the political psychology of the fall-out shelter craze in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” and lambasted the anticommunist right (at that time incarnated in Goldwater) in “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

  Despite the insistence on the cyclical nature of history, the book presents the early 60s as a social turning-point. Dylan repeatedly refers to his own inchoate sense of the mounting crisis under the complacent exterior of the American mainstream: “The 50s culture was like a judge in his last days on the bench. It was about to go. Within ten years time it would struggle to rise and then come crashing to the floor.” Dylan also emphasises his own newness: “What I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrase and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before.” In Chronicles, Dylan can’t seem to make up his mind whether nothing changes ever or whether, some time in the sixties, everything changed forever and nothing can be the same again. Chronicles is filled with forebodings of events to come, the sense that the sixties were to unfold as social tragedy, that once again America was to find itself on the cross. But as the book pursues its erratic journey through the past, it seems to be Dylan himself who is wriggling on the cross.

  In the middle of Chronicles, he interrupts his tender memoir of New York in 1960-61 to leap forward in time, offering an unexpected and at first puzzling excursion into two other, lesser known junctures of his career. These curious chapters are titled “New Morning” and “Oh Mercy” and at first glance appear to concern the background of the making of these two albums, which few would place among Dylan’s best. Yet there’s a surprise hidden in these chapters, for they tell stories most artists don’t like to tell, stories of artistic failure. They are studies in alienation, frustration and compromise.

  “The New Morning” chapter is framed by Dylan’s encounter with the elderly poet, Archibald MacLeish, who asks him to compose songs for a play he’s written. Dylan respects the poet but cannot communicate with him. Indeed, he seems to have lost the ability to communicate with anyone. Here Dylan evokes the vertiginous terror of the transformation that had overtaken his life since his days as an innocent unknown in Greenwich Village. Dylan was not merely famous; he was famous as “the voice of a generation,” and he hated it.

  I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. . . . Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics.

  He learns the hard way that “privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.” People “would stare at me when they saw me, like they’d stare at a shrunken head or a giant jungle rat.” He’s appalled at an Esquire cover featuring a monster with four faces: JFK, Malcolm X, Castro and himself: “What the hell was that supposed to mean?” The aggrieved, sometimes appalled tone of these passages suggests that the wounds still smart, that Dylan is still reeling from the trauma of having his self stolen from him—at a time in his life when he had barely begun to know that self. “It would have driven anybody mad,” he observes. “There aren’t any rules to cover an emergency of this kind.” And no models to follow: Woody Guthrie could not show him the way through this dark wood. Dylan could no longer recognize himself in the mirror of other people. “I really was never any more than what I was,” he keeps insisting (forty years later), “a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

  His anger at the media blends with his anger at the movement and his fans. In Chronicles, they appear indistinguishable. He devises a strategy to escape his tormentors—changing his image and style “in hopes to demolish my identity.” He decides to “send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train—create some different impressions.” But it doesn’t work. His efforts to recover himself fail. This is a self-portrait of the artist at an impasse. All that’s left of his personality is his desire to flee the burden the world has imposed on him. And that makes it impossible for him to write:Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed.

  He fails to complete the songs for MacLeish because the play “was conveying some everlasting truth, but . . . truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house.” So the half finished tunes end up on the album known as New Morning. “Maybe there were some good songs in the grooves and maybe there weren’t—who knows? But there weren’t the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head.”

  This sense of incompleteness haunts the following chapter, “Oh Mercy,” which dwells on a career crisis of the late 80s. Of his performances in those days Dylan admits: “The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass . . . my own songs had become strangers to me.” What follows is curious. After stumbling across an unnamed singer in a small jazz bar, he discovers (or perhaps rediscovers) a new (or perhaps very old) musical system which he describes over several pages and to which he attributes an artistic metamorphosis. He says it as “a style of playing based on an odd instead of even numbered system. . . . I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number three is more metaphysically powerful than the number two, but it is.” Over the years, Dylan has repeatedly flirted with pop mysticism (such as Tarot cards and the I Ching). This wary-eyed sceptic seems at times extraordinarily credulous. His refusal to believe in anything for very long goes hand in hand with a willingness to believe, momentarily, in almost anything. But by the time one gets to the claim that the virtue of the system is that it enables Dylan to sing “without fatigue” and also without “emotion,” one begins to suspect a Dylan put-on, a trap for over-earnest critics.

  Even more enigmatic is the ensuing episode, in which Dylan heads for New Orleans to make an album with producer Daniel Lanois. He adores New Orleans (“chronic melancholia hanging from the trees . . . great place to be intimate or do nothing”) but is fru
strated by his inability to communicate with Lanois, and significantly by his inability to meet Lanois’ expectations:Off and on during the time we were cutting Series of Dreams, he’d say to me something like, “We need songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Girl from the North Country,’ or ‘With God On Our Side.’” He began nagging at me just about every other day, that we could sure use some songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn’t have anything like those songs.

  Later, Dylan returns to the theme:I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs he wanted, like “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” “Gates of Eden,” but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the sprits. I had it once, and once was enough.

  So, despite there being, allegedly, nothing new under the sun, “circumstances never repeat themselves.” History, after all, is not entirely cyclical. Crucially, if indirectly, Dylan here acknowledges the historical steel that binds his 60s masterpieces to the rapidly changing social environment in which they were forged. What’s moving in Dylan’s tale of his relationship with Lanois is the artist’s sense of diminishment. He feels overawed by his early achievements and, like the middle-aged Wordsworth, mourns the loss of his erstwhile “power and dominion over the spirits.” Chronicles is preoccupied with the ebb and flow of Dylan’s creative energies but makes clear that to Dylan himself these tides remain mysterious.

  The book concludes with Dylan “standing in the gateway,” living with Suze Rotolo in an apartment in West 4th Street, on the brink of his breakthrough as a song-writer. In the final pages, there’s a curious, inconclusive anecdote in which he describes a conflict over his contract between producer John Hammond and agent Albert Grossman—standing in here, it seems, for art and commerce, principle and opportunism. Although Dylan suggests that his heart was always with Hammond (“There was no way I’d go against him for Grossman, not in a million years”), the reality appears to have been more of a muddle. So the book’s conclusion finds Dylan on the brink not only of artistic self-realization but also of a self-betrayal, an entry into the public gaze that turns out to be an experience of loss and disorientation. “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years time a shit storm would be unleashed.”