by Bell, Ian
At the end of May 2012, as the Nobel chatter resumes and tireless commentators return to the vexed topic of pop stars and poetry, Obama reappears to wrap a blue-and-white ribbon around the neck of a stony-faced artist. The commander-in-chief confers what is, for Americans, the most precious piece of costume jewellery available, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dylan honours the occasion by looking like a hostage. The dark glasses remain in place, even in the White House, but a smile is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this is because a do-or-die pianist from the Marine Corps Band has just played ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’.
A statement from the administration is the usual thing: ‘considerable influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s … significant impact on American culture over the past five decades’. Dylan is on line with the novelist Toni Morrison, the astronaut John Glenn, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and others, dead and alive, accounted great and good. Obama says nice, sentimental things and, looking down from his six-feet-and-one-inch eminence, calls Dylan (5′ 7″) a giant.
Sometimes it seems as though he does little else but receive awards. Late in 2012, he tells his interviewer that he turns down most of what he is offered simply because he lacks the time to collect each and every prestigious ornament. Here is an artist who does not struggle in obscurity. Validation, as the language of the age would have it, is not required. Still, every other media report of the White House event persists in describing Dylan as a folk singer. He has not been one of those, by a generous estimate, since 1964. But for those who know nothing of an ancient musical tradition, and who probably couldn’t care less, ‘folk’ is another of those ’60s things.
As 2012 draws to a close, it is announced that Dylan’s song ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, 48 years old, will be among the 2013 ‘inductees’ to the Grammy Hall of Fame. He has meanwhile emerged, without offering comment, from another round of Nobel speculation (once again, the ante-post second favourite has failed to place) and endured another controversy, this time over his paintings and the charge, now familiar, of plagiarism. His 35th studio album, Tempest, issued in September, has won a lot of praise, some of it preposterous. Now the announced wonder of the hour involves a venerable ’60s star who, miraculously, can still make serious, intriguing music. For Dylan, it seems, there is no escape from his decade.
Posterity might one day take a different view. The lists of such things remind you, for example, that while nine Bob Dylan albums were released in the 1960s, exactly as many appeared in the following ten years. (If you include the vindictively titled Dylan, a collection of leftover cover versions released in retaliation by a spurned record company, the score for the 1970s is in fact ten.) Equally, if chart success is any kind of guide, the artist did far better in the aftermath of ‘his’ era, with three of the American number-one albums that eluded him throughout the ’60s, than he had before.
Still journalism preserves its shorthand note: ‘Dylan/ protest/ voice/ folk/ his generation’. These days, the laptop addendum might skip ahead: ‘Wilderness years/ late renaissance/ astonishing’. The perception behind the precis endures for several reasons. One is that a decade as tumultuous as the ’60s, as purportedly singular, seems still to demand a defining voice. Half a century on, the documentary sequences possess a soundtrack that is beyond cliché: the moptop quartet, the Stones and ‘Street Fighting Man’, a Motown track, and always, as though on an infernal loop, Dylan. Most often he can be heard singing a prophecy-song of changing times when the times foretold are long gone, the prophecy disproven and discarded. Whether this misrepresents history is beside the point. He has become part of the received narrative. No one ever asks the actor when he would like the play to end.
Equally, the chronology of one phase in Dylan’s later career catches the eye for several of the wrong reasons. There came a time when he measured every height with his fall, when his work, like his reputation, suffered a decline so precipitous it seemed unstoppable. Between the appearance of the hectoring evangelical Christian album Saved in June of 1980 and 1997’s Time Out of Mind the test was to find a good word to say about Dylan’s works, then to find more than a handful of people likely to give a damn. In the second half of the 1980s his albums hovered in the suburbs of the Billboard 200, peaking at 54 (Knocked Out Loaded) or 61 (Down in the Groove). A ‘return to form’, declared in repeated triumphs of journalistic hope over experience, might see him graze the top 20, as with 1983’s Infidels, or aim for the edge of the top 30, as with Oh Mercy (1989). Then the collapse would resume. When the best Dylan seemed capable of producing was a brace of eccentric albums of ancient folk and blues tunes in 1992 and 1993, even the staunchest of old fans were no longer buying it, whatever it was supposed to be. In his live works, meanwhile, he was careering from the high peaks of adulation on an avalanche of lousy reviews.
The twenty-first century would decide that Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong are, in reality, fine and fascinating things, born of love and deep knowledge. Beyond the public gaze, they were the beginnings of Dylan’s artistic redemption. At the time, they sounded like the voice of a wounded man groaning in the wilderness. They sounded, moreover, like the last resort of a poet in the purgatory of contractual obligation. Here, self-evidently, was a songwriter, the most esteemed songwriter in the world, who could no longer write. Notoriously, Dylan failed to release a single original composition between September of 1990 and September of 1997. So who wouldn’t have preferred to remember the candescent racket of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’?
Lists of hits and misses do not begin to tell the story. Amid all the dross of 17 lost years in the ’80s and ’90s there were numerous works of lasting worth. Invariably, however, they were buried, like nuggets in deep silt, on albums that were inept or misconceived. Knocked Out Loaded, from 1986, is a lazy, execrable thing that nevertheless contains ‘Brownsville Girl’, one of the most inventive, complex and involving compositions to have appeared under Dylan’s name. Even on the original vinyl record it seemed to come, at the start of side two, as though from nowhere, a narrative woven in patterns so intricate it still puzzles and enthrals admirers. But the track released was itself a shadow, arguably, of an even better original. The fact spoke to another perverse and self-destructive artistic habit.
In the 1980s and 1990s collectors of bootleg recordings began to grasp how completely Dylan could misjudge himself. It is another way of saying that a once-unerring artistic confidence had evaporated. Time and again, the songs he left off his albums were self-evidently superior, superior beyond the limits of relative worth or personal taste, to most of the things he chose to release. It became another Dylan puzzle. This ritual of self-harm had begun with Infidels and the decision to omit ‘Foot of Pride’ and ‘Blind Willie McTell’ (in either of its spellbinding incarnations) from the record. By 1989, Oh Mercy and the suppression – no other word seems right – of songs such as ‘Series of Dreams’ and ‘Dignity’, the pattern was plain. Both albums as released, for all their intermittent glories, were bedevilled by a lack of conviction. The artist’s worst enemy was the artist himself. Then his ability to write anything at all began to desert him.
He had long lost the glorious facility of youth. No doubt he had heard too many people speak too often, too ponderously or too reverently, about his art. Clearly, he had thought about it himself, often enough, while clarifying his language for 1967’s John Wesley Harding, or while distilling the essential spirits of Blood on the Tracks in 1974. By the mid-1980s, when he was struggling to assemble the half-hour’s worth of music he would call Down in the Groove, he had mislaid even the ability to be professionally glib. It amounted to this: Bob Dylan was no longer capable of composing, unaided, a single wholly new Bob Dylan song. The album was a wretched affair.
It should have been journey’s end for a performer in Dylan’s line of work. Beyond a band of diehards, he was no longer taken seriously. Worse, an artist who had always been impatient with the recording process no longer
seemed to take his own records seriously. The next release documented parts of a tour – the wrong parts, but the error was by now predictable – with the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1987. Public gratitude was not much in evidence, if record sales were a guide, and the diagnosis of creative death was confirmed. Somehow Dylan was contriving to make each new album worse than its predecessor. The only rational explanation for Dylan & the Dead, so it seemed, was cynicism.
As though to emphasise the scale of the decay, the singer had meanwhile allowed his record company and his management to pass implicit judgement with 1985’s multi-disc Biograph compendium. The exercise, involving 53 famous or previously unreleased recordings spanning a 20-year period, was not intended to shame Dylan. It was, among other things, the first move in a long campaign to reclaim his work from the bootleggers. Nevertheless, the contrast between tracks discarded in the ’60s and ’70s and the stuff he was passing as fit for consumption in the 1980s was damning. Biograph, an expensive set, sold at least as well as anything purportedly new to which Dylan was then putting his name. In most cases, it did better.
Real Live, a redundant document from a European tour, had been lucky to reach number 115 in the American chart at the end of 1984. Empire Burlesque had reached 33 in the summer of ’85, but the pricey Biograph matched that when winter came, and went on to sell vastly more copies than Dylan’s latest product. Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove would follow: knocked down, then out. Such was the standard verdict. Most talented performers in popular music start out as small fry, as ‘cults’, and proceed with luck, work and judgement to achieve fame. Dylan was heading in the opposite direction. To all appearances, he was a spent force.
Did he care? Did he notice? Stray comments from the period suggest a stoical acceptance that his moment as an unlikely star had come and gone. For all that, whether obliged by contract, financial need or stubborn defiance, he continued to release those derided albums. The 1980s would see seven such artefacts emerge from the recording studios. Infidels and Oh Mercy might each have redeemed Dylan’s reputation, but each was defaced – another unavoidable word – by its maker and those around him. The rest were very easy to forget.
In one sense, it needn’t have mattered. On any fair reading Dylan’s reputation would have been secure thanks only to the songs composed and sung between 1962 and 1978. In his business, particularly at the artistic end of the trade, a 16-year career is nothing at all to be ashamed of. Plenty of performers have made money for decades from work achieved in less time. The Beatles, those reproving deities, had hung together for barely seven years as recording artists, after all. Elvis had counted out most of his days among the living dead. But the seeming creative extinction of Dylan in the late 1980s was peculiarly poignant because it seemed both complete and inexplicable.
He had been perplexing for long enough. As far as the forgiving fans who stuck around were concerned, that was part of the contract. In 1969, there was the ‘country’ singer of Nashville Skyline; in 1970, the baffling anonymous artist of Self Portrait. After two of his most successful works, Blood on the Tracks and Desire, Dylan had ended the 1970s by surrendering his autonomy to God and evangelical Christianity. But at no time had he seemed wholly lost to art, bereft of ideas or a sense of direction. It hardly mattered, when the rot set in, that bootlegs told a more complicated story. As far as most listeners were concerned, Dylan drifted aimlessly through the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. His records were poor or worse and few cared. Nothing important of him remained.
This meant, among other things, that it became silly to talk of Dylan the artist, Dylan the poet. Much attention was still being given to what he had done in better days, but by the 1980s many of the books and articles being published were sounding an elegiac note. The first edition of Robert Shelton’s long-delayed No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan appeared in 1986, when those liable to wonder what all the fuss was about were being offered Knocked Out Loaded. In 498 pages of text, the biography contained only 13 pages dealing with Dylan’s activities between 1980 and 1985. It ended by wondering whether the artist would follow ‘Rimbaud’s route’ – and throw in his hand – or whether he would manage the Yeatsian path to ‘even greater creativity toward old age’. Shelton was not prepared to guess.
The music business can offer at least ten comebacks for every penny. Most draw their inspiration from the creative agency of accountants, from managers sniffing a moment ripe for nostalgia or from the chance to exploit another greatest-hits package. Only rarely do performers renew themselves. Writers, equally, are reluctant to be reborn in late middle age. Lazarus never did explain how the trick was done. Nevertheless, Shelton covered his bets well enough. The late poetry of W.B. Yeats might certainly count as one parallel with Dylan in his second coming; all those old or ageing blues players who were ‘rediscovered’ in his youth could stand as another set of precedents. Equally, you could dismiss all such comparisons. When Dylan rose again, he did it on his own terms.
Among his contemporaries there is a short list of those who have simply ploughed on – Neil Young, Paul McCartney, the egregiously avid Stones – and a vastly long list of the faded and fallen. His case was different. Beginning with his initial work on Time Out of Mind in 1996, and pressing on to Tempest in 2012, he forged another of those 16-year careers, became still another ‘Bob Dylan’, and vindicated himself. Critics fell into the habit of exhuming and adapting a famous line from Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941).4 As it turned out, there was a second act in at least one American life.
In these pages it will be argued, among other things, that in the process Dylan created a body of work – less sumptuous, less startling, less intoxicating – to match any of the products of his 1960s. He did it, moreover, while contending with everything, the whole accreted legend, the multiplicity of identities, that ‘Bob Dylan’ had come to mean. He did it while contending with age, with the fact of time, and with the burden of memory.
So we look again for the answer to the old, plain and perplexing question: how did he do that?
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The Swedish Academy does not publicise its discussions or chat about the tastes of its 18 members when they are done selecting the Nobel laureate in literature. Dylan has been nominated each year since 1997, and each year the arguments over his place on the bookies’ lists have resumed. How can one whose art depends on pop music be suitable for the highest honour available to a writer? Where Dylan is concerned, the game is now ancient: poet or not? If a poet, of which variety, and by which criteria? Specifically, how can poetry be said to exist if it fails to ‘survive’ on the page?
Some still talk and write as though the very question demeans the august prize. Some of Dylan’s own admirers meanwhile dismiss the entire debate, as though to clear the ground for bigger claims. Of course he is not a poet, they will say, but he is the greatest songwriter in a golden age for songwriting and that alone is a big enough thing. Talking to the fan magazine Isis in 2005, the author and Dylan scholar Greil Marcus made the familiar point. The prize is for literature (it turns out). Our boy sings, performs, and writes songs. Besides, said the scholar, Dylan has plenty of awards and no shortage of money. Marcus argued that ‘thousands’ of novelists were more deserving. Elsewhere, he had said confidently that Dylan’s songs are not ‘true literature’.5
Dylan doesn’t need the Nobel and the Nobel doesn’t need Dylan: point taken. But even implicit questions need answers. If you cannot place him among the poets, where would ‘Desolation Row’ figure in the development of post-war popular songwriting? It’s very hard to say. If you cannot set Dylan among writers of verse, what has all the fuss, 50 long years of it, been about? For some critics, that’s even harder to say. And what is this thing, this self-evidently exclusive thing, we call literature (if the Swedish Academy so pleases)? Where American poetry is concerned, a mid-century professorial parlour game, sometimes still misidenti
fied as a ‘New Criticism’, has done its reductive work on art.
Tomas Tranströmer, an octogenarian Swede for whom the honour is long overdue, wins the Nobel in 2011. A year on, the honour and eight million kronor go to Mo Yan, the first Chinese novelist to be recognised, a writer controversial for his failure to be politically controversial in his homeland. In the present context, the fact leaves a trace of irony. On each occasion, nevertheless, there is no sign that Dylan gives a damn. He accepts his honours, when time allows, but shows no inclination to argue over definitions of his work.
Tranströmer, though, is a real poet (who once wrote of ‘Jangling tambourines of ice’, and elsewhere of being ‘north of all music’). His status is not in dispute: anything but. The Swedish master, formerly a psychologist, makes sparse, dazzling arrangements of words to be delivered and received, uttered and heard. So what is it that Dylan does, exactly? Mo Yan’s fictions are rooted in folk tales and given what is described routinely as a ‘hallucinatory’ edge. So why does that sound so familiar? The Nobel, it is sometimes forgotten, is in literature. Lexicographers, paid to think twice, will not stretch the definition of the thing beyond ‘the art of composition in prose or verse’, or ‘the art of written work’. Academicians are a little harder to describe.
Judging by some of the press discussion over a song and dance man, a lot of people still define literature by a process of elimination. The only agreed truth is that no one else in Dylan’s ‘field’ – which would be? – could even merit consideration as a candidate. In this game he is too big, or just too old, to be contained within mere popular music, yet simultaneously insufficiently literary to stand alongside others who pattern words obsessively. Where the recent history of the Nobel is concerned, Dylan might also be, quite simply, too American.
