Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Dylan, so often the victim of the authorial fallacy, invited a difficulty never predicted by practitioners of literature’s numbing less-than New Criticism. The personal pronouns in his songs were no guarantee, he said to us, that the writing was ever an exercise in autobiography. What happened, then, when ‘Bob Dylan’ took the stage to sing ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May’ if the line, pronoun and all, had been cooked up by someone else entirely? What happened to the strange, free-standing consciousness that had been Dylan’s conspicuous gift to popular music? His songs – another pronoun – didn’t come from a Tin Pan Alley production line: such had been the pledge from the start of his first assault on an industry. Now here he was in 1975, knocking out tunes with an off-Broadway talent-for-hire, yet performing as though each couplet, good or bad, was his. All of the acknowledged Dylan-Levy compositions appear in the former’s Lyrics: 1962–2001 (2004). They are each registered for copyright purposes by one of Dylan’s publishing companies. The big book, well worth study for all its flaws, is a testament to the long, enduring career of an unexampled talent. The song index alone runs to a dozen pages and would be longer by far if the book was brought up to date. But the writing of Desire complicates arguments over art and the artist.

  If Dylan had needed no help to compose the great songs of the 1960s, or of Blood on the Tracks, where stood the co-authored mock-ups, the hollow exercises in rhetoric and role-playing, for which Jacques Levy claimed co-paternity? Had the songs been better, no one would bother to ask. Despite the multitude of fans who will hear not a word against it, Desire is what is sometimes called a patchy affair.

  A fortnight after his first attempt to secure useful recordings, Dylan was back in the studio, supposedly in search of a ‘bigger sound’. He organised this quest, if organised is the word, as though throwing an after-hours party, seeming to gather up everyone and anyone who came to mind or happened to be around. The predictable result was a shambles as twenty-one musicians, six guitar players among them (not including the artist), tried to sort themselves out. Production, in the traditional manner, even in the casual manner favoured by Dylan’s old mentor John Hammond, was absent. A luckless Columbia staff man by the name of Don DeVito was granted a producer’s responsibilities but precious little executive power in Studio E. No one, least of all Dylan, was in control. Eric Clapton, always a staunch admirer of the artist and no stranger to the foibles of superstars – he had patented a few notable idiosyncrasies of his own – was among the baffled guests who could not believe what was going on, or what was supposed to be going on.

  Dylan’s old, deep-rooted refusal to pay heed to the realities and demands of the recording process all but destroyed the sessions of 28 and 29 July as ingenious engineers struggled to find space on their 16-track machines for the competing demands of so many instruments and vocalists. The feat could have been accomplished – the Beatles had mastered bigger problems with far less sophisticated equipment – but that would have required more effort than Dylan, addicted to spontaneity, convinced that the best music somehow just happened, was prepared to expend. This heroic delusion would hamper his efforts to record his songs for many years to come.

  The artist could claim, rightly enough, that some of his best music had been produced during lightning raids on the studios. Bringing It All Back Home had required only three days of his time in 1965; John Wesley Harding had needed just as little effort in 1967. Blood on the Tracks might have cost Dylan the equivalent of a full week in 1974, but that was due only to the second thoughts that had caused him to remake the record. He didn’t like to hang around. He did not believe, in any case, that recording captured the reality of music – an unhelpful prejudice if you made your living by selling records – but previous triumphs thanks to ‘spontaneity’ would blind him to his self-created problems. The first serious sessions for Desire were prime examples.

  As predicted, times were changing. Pink Floyd had been lavishing six months of work in 1975 (for whatever reason) on the album Wish You Were Here. Queen’s preposterous ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had required three weeks of labour and, notoriously, 180 overdubs on a single brief passage of music before taking its place on that year’s A Night at the Opera, an album thereafter touted, as though the fact was a badge of honour, as the most expensive collection of tunes anyone had then assembled. Dylan’s dissent from this obnoxious orthodoxy was well known and honourable but not necessarily useful. In London that summer a scruffy sort with ‘I Hate’ scribbled on his ragged Pink Floyd T-shirt was about to join a motley crew called the Sex Pistols. John Lydon and his comrades would mock the decadence of the music industry and its 180 overdubs something rotten. But that little incident wouldn’t help Dylan to get a record made. Of the forty-five takes captured on 28 and 29 July, only one song attempted, entitled ‘Romance in Durango’, would make it to the album.13

  As ever, he got there in the end. Having wasted his own and everyone else’s time, Dylan listened to reason – articulated, it seems, by the bass player Rob Stoner – and stood down most of his army of helpers. After the chaos, the album the artist would release was finished soon enough, but he persisted to the end with minor songs. One was a Dylan-Levy piece entitled ‘Catfish’, dedicated to a star baseball player who bore the nickname, a track that seemed to have been destined from the start for the netherworld of strictly limited interest. Another song, written by Dylan alone, was called ‘Golden Loom’. With a better melody it might have repaid attention, but the writer appears to have lost interest soon enough. Both tracks would turn up on 1991’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 as mere curiosities. Nine songs, fifty-six minutes of recorded music, remained from the sessions to become Desire. It was, for the first time in a long time, a near self-explanatory title.

  *

  From its first assertive notes to its conclusion eight minutes and thirty-two seconds later, ‘Hurricane’ is a thrilling thing. If facts are of no interest, the song fulfils every dream of justice and vindication ever nurtured because of Bob Dylan. Scarlet Rivera’s violin soars like an exultation for the downtrodden; the drums hammer like a mob at the door; the artist sings as though now, finally, he is interested neither in irony nor in the concealment to be had from ambiguity. He wants to tell you a story, a true story.

  The fiddle is ‘slightly off-key’, of course, say people who don’t often listen to fiddles, or attempt to imagine what might be involved in accompanying Bob Dylan. Life’s fact-checkers, meanwhile, cannot vouch for the narrative’s every last word, to say the very least. Some claims made on behalf of a boxer imprisoned for almost two decades for his part in a triple murder are simply wrong. Certain omissions by Dylan-Levy from ‘the story of the Hurricane’, Rubin Carter, amount to shoddy journalism. But these objections are born of hindsight and also omit certain truths. At first hearing, Desire’s long opening track was astonishing, a triumph of compressed narrative, of vernacular writing, of sheer polemical intensity. Despite every off-handed rebuttal, every denial of interest for long years on end, here was Dylan back with a protest song, with an inescapably political song.

  You could bear in mind, of course, that he had never ceased to be a political being. The refusal of a spokesman’s role, the rejection of ideological conscription by ’60s types who wanted only slogans and anthems, was not the same as refusing to think politically. As a performer who owed everything to black music, and as a human being, Dylan had never ceased to despise racism. Nor had he ever lost his non-theoretical aversion to injustice generally. Like Woody Guthrie, his first and last hero, Dylan’s instinct was always to back the individual against anyone’s version of the system. Numerous songs written after he ‘quit politics’ – from ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ to ‘I Shall Be Released’ to ‘Idiot Wind’, to name only three – could be set on repeat play to prove it.

  ‘Hurricane’ was explicit, however. The song was rooted in reality and in recent history. Its only precedent in Dylan’s post-’60s career was ‘George Jacks
on’, and ‘Hurricane’ was better, melodically if not lyrically, than the 1971 song. Until certain doubts began to creep in, ‘the story of the Hurricane’ sounded like a flawless, righteous indictment of racist policing and a corrupt legal system. The important fact, the fact that unites the songs written for Jackson and Carter, was that racial bigotry had not evaporated from American life with the civil-rights movement. By the mid-1970s, too many had chosen to overlook this truth. The artist and his co-writer had not.

  Dylan and Levy had both taken an interest in Rubin Carter and his campaign against conviction. Dylan, like a number of people in the public eye, had been sent a copy of the boxer’s book The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472 (1973). The very subtitle would be disputed by those who pointed out that when Carter was arrested he was in no sense first in contention for ‘the middleweight crown’. Where a bloody triple homicide was concerned, the detail was trivial. In the ‘acknowledgements’ to his book, the fighter had written from the notorious Rahway State Prison in east New Jersey of ‘the corrupt and vindictive officials who played their roles to a T in this tightly woven drama to bury me alive’. He had Dylan’s attention, you must suspect, from page one.

  The story goes like this. In the early hours of 17 June 1966 two armed men entered the nondescript Lafayette Bar and Grill on East 18th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, Rubin Carter’s home town. Without ceremony, the pair opened fire. A bartender and a 60-year-old male customer died instantly; a female customer would die of an embolism four weeks later thanks to multiple wounds. A second male customer, Willie Marins, 42, survived the attack, despite being shot in the head while standing by the pool table. He and the 51-year-old female witness Hazel Tanis would tell the police that the gunmen were black. Neither witness would identify Rubin Carter or his co-accused, John Artis.

  On the night of the killings, the intimidating, shaven-headed boxer, nicknamed ‘Hurricane’ thanks to his ferocious fighting style, was 29 years old. His once-promising career, encompassing 27 wins in 40 fights, 19 by knockout, was fading. He had gained his shot at that middleweight crown at the end of 1964 and had lost in Philadelphia on a unanimous decision. In May of 1965, he had endured the hiding of his life at the hands of the Nigerian Dick Tiger, as Carter himself confessed, in the smoky haze of New York’s Madison Square Garden. In five fights before the shootings in 1966, the Hurricane had lost twice, won twice (against lowly opponents), and registered a draw. When the murders happened, his title hopes were gone.

  It is also fair to say that Rubin Carter had not been a model citizen. Dylan-Levy would overlook the fact in their song, just as Dylan had failed to mention the six hostages who died during George Jackson’s attempt to escape from San Quentin Prison in California in 1971. As with the dead radical, however, it was always possible to argue that Rubin Carter had been the victim of hellish circumstances, and that every circumstance had been a consequence likely to befall any black man in a white world. Such was the consistent view of the author of The Sixteenth Round. ‘In Paterson,’ as Dylan would sing, ‘that’s just the way things go.’

  In his later career, Carter would emerge as an eloquent campaigner for penal reform and human rights. In Canada, for a dozen years after 1993, he was executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, given credit for addressing several miscarriages of justice. On the occasion of his second autobiography, Nelson Mandela would contribute a foreword testifying that the former boxer’s ‘rich heart is now alive in love, compassion and understanding’.14 So who could truly say which was the real Hurricane, or decide which parts of the biographical record were relevant to the paramount claim that he was ‘falsely tried’ and wrongly convicted in a ‘pig-circus’?

  Still, facts are facts. Carter was in a reformatory for assault and robbery by the time he was 14. He was kicked out of the army in 1956, marked down as ‘undesirable’ after four court-martial proceedings. He was afterwards a mugger capable of serious black-on-black violence and the owner, it is alleged, of a fearsome temper. Before the Lafayette killings, he had spent 11 of his 29 years in confinement. The suggestion that before the slaughter he was militant for civil rights, ‘a revolutionary bum’ in the words of the song, is also disputed. There is nothing in Carter’s books, nor in the annals of civil rights, to support the claim that in 1966 he had a functioning political bone in his body. Nevertheless, interviewed by Penthouse magazine for the edition of September 1975, the Hurricane would assert:

  I’m not in jail for committing murder. I’m in jail partly because I’m a black man in America, where the powers that be will only allow a black man to be an entertainer or a criminal. While I was free on the streets – with whatever limited freedom I had on the streets – as a prizefighter, I was characterised as an entertainer. As long as I stayed within that role, within that prizefighting ring, as long as that was my Mecca and I didn’t step out into the civic affairs of this country, I was acceptable. But when I didn’t want to see people brutalized any longer – and when I’d speak out against that brutality, no matter who committed the brutality, black people or white people – I was harassed for my beliefs. I committed no crime; actually the crime was committed against me.

  In The Sixteenth Round, Carter would admit, perhaps boast, that in childhood he had taken to fighting ‘like a duck takes to water’.15 He would also confess to having knifed a man repeatedly – in self-defence against a predatory paedophile, he said – and to having been classified as a juvenile delinquent. Nevertheless, there was room enough in his text for accusations against cops and judges for fomenting ‘prefabricated lies to tear me down’. In Carter’s account of his early years, he had adhered only ‘to the first law of nature – self-preservation’.16

  It was a description of an unjust world that might have been made to appeal to Dylan’s quixotic faith in nature’s outlaws, those individuals forced to defend themselves against the real criminals, the ones who never get caught and never go to jail. A superstar’s reflexive romantic bias didn’t mean the boxer was guilty of a multiple killing staged – or so the cops quickly persuaded themselves – in instant revenge for the murder of a black bartender in a place called the Waltz Inn. It didn’t make Rubin Carter innocent, either.

  A minor criminal called Alfred ‘Al’ Bello had been a couple of blocks away from the Lafayette Bar ‘prowlin’ around’ with burglary on his mind on the night of the shootings. Bello would later testify that as he drew near to the dive – supposedly in search of a pack of cigarettes – he almost ran into a pair of black males. One was armed with a shotgun, one with a pistol, and both were laughing. Bello said he took to his heels as the men got into a white car.

  The petty crook was nevertheless one of the first to reach the murder scene, along with a woman named Patricia Graham (later Patricia ‘Patty’ Valentine) who lived above the bar and grill. She also told the cops she had seen a couple of black men climbing into a white car, a Dodge Polara, before driving north. A second neighbour, Ronald Ruggiero, heard the shots and later said that as he looked from his window he saw Al Bello running westwards on Paterson’s Lafayette Street in the direction of 16th Street. The description of the car given by Bello and Valentine would change at Carter’s second trial.

  Nevertheless, Carter’s car was, supposedly, a match for the getaway vehicle. Having been pulled over once that night and allowed to proceed because a third man, John ‘Bucks’ Royster, had been with them, Hurricane and Artis were stopped for a second time and taken to the murder scene. This took place within half an hour of the shootings. No fingerprints were taken; no tests were made for gunshot residue; no one who had witnessed the events surrounding the killings identified the pair. When Rubin Carter was hauled to Paterson’s St Joseph’s hospital, a horribly wounded Willie Marins, blinded in one eye, indicated that the boxer was not one of his assailants. A cop then found a shotgun shell and a .32 calibre round in Carter’s car. Both items were later declared, wrongly, to be compatible with the murder weapons.
The officer who made the find waited the best part of a week before turning in his evidence. Artis and Rubin, having passed polygraph tests, had meanwhile been released.

  Months later, Bello told the police – and why the delay? – that he had not been alone while sniffing around a sheet-metal works for a burglary opportunity. An individual named Arthur Dexter Bradley had acted as his accomplice. This pair then proceeded to identify Carter as one of the armed men they had seen outside the bar. Bello meanwhile identified 19-year-old Artis. Inevitably, Carter and his companion were arrested and indicted.

  In May of 1967, what Dylan-Levy would describe, correctly, as ‘the all-white jury’ found the accused guilty, but declined to recommend the electric chair. In 1974, after Carter had sued his way out of a state psychiatric hospital thanks to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, Bello and Bradley, located by the New York Times, suddenly claimed they had been cajoled and bribed into lying. This time they said they had not seen Carter and Artis near the Lafayette Bar. It was then that the Hurricane sent Dylan a copy of The Sixteenth Round. In May of 1975, the artist paid a visit to the fighter in prison. After taking notes and talking with Carter for hours, Dylan seems to have promised to write a song.

  In late October of that year, just before ‘Hurricane’ was released as a single, he told the ever-attentive Rolling Stone of his conviction that Carter’s ‘philosophy’ and his ‘were running on the same road, and you don’t meet too many people like that, that you just kinda know are on the same path as you are, mentally’. The remark would be quoted for years to come in arguments over Dylan’s involvement in the case.17 Of more interest, as a measure of his attitude and belief, were a couple of the things that Dylan said next. He made large claims.

  I never doubted him for a moment. He’s just not a killer, not that kind of a man. You’re talking about a different type of person. I mean, he’s not gonna walk into a bar and start shooting. He’s not the guy. I don’t know how anybody in their right mind is gonna think he was guilty of something like that.