Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Despite various fresh travails, McTell continued his singing and (occasionally) recording career until the end of his life. His marriage to Kate, racked with tension worsened by his long absences from Atlanta and repeated infidelities, fell apart not long after he recorded for the Lomaxes. Never lacking charm, he very quickly settled into a new relationship with a twice-divorced mother of two, Helen Broughton, which would last until she died in 1958. But the dislocations of World War II, and a ban on recording by the American Federation of Musicians from 1942 to 1944, badly hurt what remained of the southern race-record industry. McTell got by by continuing his sidewalk singing while devoting himself more to performing in churches.

  In 1949—two years after he and his brother had founded Atlantic Records, and three years before he signed up a new talent, Ray Charles—the young Turkish-born blues enthusiast Ahmet Ertegun brought McTell back into the studio, after he had stumbled across the singer in Atlanta during a talent-scouting trip. McTell recorded fifteen songs, a mix of secular and religious material, but Atlantic released only a single 78 of “Kill It Kid,” backed with “Broke Down Engine Blues.” (Now reluctant to be associated publicly with nonreligious music, McTell required that Ertegun issue the record with a pseudonym; they settled on “Barrelhouse Sammy.”) A year later, another small company, Regal Records, released two McTell 78s under the name Blind Willie, and another 78 of McTell and his old friend Curley Weaver, performing as the Pig ’n’ Whistle Band, named for the drive-in where McTell was still performing, wandering among the parked cars.

  By 1956, McTell had moved his act to another drive-in, the Blue Lantern, which is where the record store owner Ed Rhodes, alerted to who he was, persuaded him to make a tape recording in his shop. McTell’s health, though, was already failing; in the spring of 1959, he suffered a minor stroke that slurred his speech; and on August 19, after a second stroke hit while he was visiting family relations, he died in Milledgeville State Hospital, at the age of fifty-six. Because of a mix-up, since corrected, his tombstone, in the Jones Grove Baptist Church cemetery outside Thomson, bore the name of one of his cousins, Eddie McTier. McTell’s request that he be buried with his twelve-string was overlooked. Instead, a brother-in-law took the guitar, his grandchildren tore it up, and the pieces were thrown in the garbage.*

  In 1981, the Blues Foundation in Memphis named McTell to its Hall of Fame. And had it appeared when it was recorded, Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” would have capped his posthumous emergence as a musical icon. Yet the song had its own curious history. After Dylan decided to drop it from Infidels, his management urged him to include it on subsequent albums, but to no avail. Meanwhile, the Dylan-Knopfler run-through tape circulated among other artists—and finally, the members of a reconstituted version of the Band, without Robbie Robertson, decided to include it on an album they hoped to record. But that project took time to get off the ground, and in 1991 the Dylan-Knopfler version appeared on The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1–3: Rare and Unreleased, 1961–1991. Dylan still seemed indifferent. Only during the summer of 1997, four years after the Band’s version, sung by Levon Helm, appeared on the album Jericho, did Dylan first perform the song in concert.

  Dylan had turned forty-two the year he recorded “Blind Willie McTell” and Infidels—the same age that McTell had told John Lomax he was in 1940 and that Lomax duly reported on the acetate.* Infidels received positive reviews; the critics were relieved that as far as they could see, Dylan had forsaken his religious dogma, and the Dylan they were comfortable with—the Dylan they thought they deserved—had returned. The Dylan on the record is, for the most part, reflective and tender, especially in his songs of the heart. He is the master of many forms, including rip-roaring rock and roll (although the album’s best rock song, “Neighborhood Bully,” upset some narrow politically minded critics as a “conservative” defense of Israel). And the songs are wistful and even rueful about the past. At one point, the singer wishes he had become a doctor and saved a life that would have been lost: “Maybe I’d have done some good in the world / ’Stead of burning every bridge I crossed.”

  Yet Infidels without “Blind Willie McTell” is a much diminished album. (Dylan has said that he didn’t think the recording sessions captured what he wanted in the song. Knopfler was upset at its exclusion and argued strongly that it be left in, and Dylan finished work on the album without Knopfler.) Some of the album’s other songs contained similar themes, but stated them not nearly as powerfully. (“Oh, man is opposed to fair play, / He wants it all and he wants it his way,” in “License to Kill.”) A few lines from the lyrics, especially on the lead track, “Jokerman,” could have been adapted from Dylan’s stronger songs of the mid-1960s (“Distant ships sailing into the mist, / You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing”). But in paying his tribute to Blind Willie McTell, Bob Dylan, a man on the move, described a more profound retrieval, in a meditation on good and evil, history and the present. “The past is never dead.15 It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote—a line that is cited so often, and as often as not inaccurately, that it threatens to become a cliché. “Blind Willie McTell,” in its own way, says it just as well, in gloom but with a glimmer of consoling beauty.

  In “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” the blue-eyed son, having traveled through hell on earth, returns home and vows that he will “know my song well before I start singing.” In “Blind Willie McTell,” in many ways a laconic reprise of “Hard Rain,” the singer, now wiser, knows his song much better, maybe even better than well. Yet at the end of this grim passage from the present to the past and back, the singer is gazing out a hotel window through which he has seen it all—on the road, far from home, his thoughts on another singer’s singing.

  * “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” although in part apocalyptic, is also a song of a quest that leads through sights, sounds, and scenes of everyday misery as well as of a blasted, scorched, and bleeding earth. And unlike Dylan’s other early songs of destruction, it concludes not with justice or redemption but with the singer vowing to sing to all the world of what he has seen and heard.

  * The lyrics manuscripts in the George Hecksher Collection at the Morgan Library include a song, “Gospel News,” written by Dylan sometime in the early 1960s.

  * Although the sessions rarely lasted more than a day or two a year, between 1927 and 1936, McTell would fail to record only in 1934.

  * The precise date of McTell’s birth is uncertain, but the most exacting study, by Michael Gray, proposes May 5, 1903, as the most likely of all the possibilities.

  * Kate McTell, Willie’s widow, said many years later that he had learned from his mother, who could “really tear up a guitar, work with it.” But as Kate McTell also suggested that many listeners thought that Minnie Dorsey was none other than the blues recording great Memphis Minnie—a patent falsehood—her testimony is, to say the least, suspect on these matters. There are some hints that Willie’s father, Ed, and his uncle Harley McTier may have fooled around with him on the guitar when he was very young—but those lessons, if that is what they were, would have ended when his father took off and Willie still was a small boy.

  * A concise statement of this typical view, especially prevalent among northern enthusiasts after World War II, appeared in the liner notes by the energetic blues collector and producer from the 1940s and 1950s Fred Mendelsohn on a compilation album, Living with the Blues, released by his Savoy Records in 1964: “In the beginning there was the blues, born of despair and with no other purpose but to express the feelings of futility.”

  * The ubiquity of blind men among the great southern black performers of the era owed partly to the element of sideshow curiosity. But performing music—whether as a sidewalk beggar or stage-show attraction—was one of the few options left open for southern blacks with ambition and musical talent.

  * No newspaper or official police evidence has been brought to light to corroborate McTell’s story about the shooting death of a
Jesse Williams in Atlanta in 1929—although given the circumstances at the time, Michael Gray surmises, such an incident may not have left behind an official record.

  * There is another way to read this, given that all of the song’s other obvious references are to the American South. There are more than a dozen towns in the United States named Jerusalem, half of them in the states of the old Confederacy. And what is now Courtland, Virginia, used to be the town of Jerusalem—where the slave rebel Nat Turner was hanged, flayed, drawn and quartered, and beheaded after his capture and trial in 1831. Dylan is a student of the Civil War era, so this reference is plausible—making “Blind Willie McTell” even more a song of the South, though with vaster implications. To complicate matters even further, Dylan has taken, in concert, to singing “New Jerusalem,” which might be the city of God as described in Revelation, or one of any number of cities and towns in the United States, or even the New Jerusalem that Joseph Smith, the original prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said would arise in Missouri.

  * Given that the song has just invoked McTell’s name for the first time, it’s possible to get confused and think that it is Blind Willie who is singing after the show. It depends on how one hears the lines “The stars above the barren trees / Were his only audience” and takes “his” to mean. Either way, something important is going unheard, unheeded.

  * Dylan here alludes to an evangelical Christian biblical mainstay, from the letters of Peter, in which the apostle assures the faithful of salvation: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (I Peter 1:23).

  * The song specifies that the singer is in the St. James Hotel, and there has been speculation over the years about the reference, above and beyond the obvious allusion to “St. James Infirmary.” Yet that mystery in itself marked Dylan’s return, in 1983, to layers of allusion largely missing during his Christian phase. Rather than assume that this is some recondite metaphysical, symbolic, or religious reference—having the hotel named for Christ’s apostle Saint James makes no sense—I’ve preferred to think the song must be talking about a real hotel, just as “Highway 61 Revisited” refers to a real highway. And there are a few possibilities. Unfortunately, of all the St. James hotels, the one that best fits the song could not have been gazed out of by Dylan or anyone else, as it was closed for more than a century until it reopened, restored, in 1997. Built in 1837, the St. James Hotel in downtown Selma, Alabama, welcomed generations of plantation owners and cotton factors; Frank and Jesse James are reputed to have stayed there after the Civil War; and it is located only a short distance from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the momentous “Bloody Sunday” civil-rights march in 1965 that helped secure voting rights for blacks. Still, even if the hotel was empty, the building did stand all those years, a mute witness to scenes right out of “Blind Willie McTell.” Another possibility, the original St. James Hotel of New Orleans, was a grand place that opened on Magazine Street in 1859 and closed when the Union army occupied the city during the Civil War and converted the hotel into a military hospital. A thoroughly apocryphal local story calls this the original St. James Infirmary. Partially demolished in 1967 due to structural damage, the New Orleans St. James reopened in a new location nearby in 1999. Since 1875, there has been a St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota, alongside the Mississippi River—the site of the juvenile penitentiary about which Dylan wrote one of his earliest songs. Unfortunately, though, for listeners who revel in allusion, what seem to be the most likely possibilities have no obvious connection to the American past—although they do carry powerful meanings. One is the luxurious St. James Hotel and Club in London, a favorite of affluent musicians and actors—which would make the last verse cuttingly ironic. The other, the once-rundown St. James Hotel near Times Square in Manhattan (since renovated), would have offered views of the seamy as well as the spectacular side of American entertainment’s “crossroads of the world.”

  * At his death, McTell also owned a six-string acoustic and an electric guitar, but they disappeared and their whereabouts are unknown.

  * In fact, McTell was in his late thirties. It is unclear why he misinformed Lomax. But the Lomax recording is the source for the common mistaken claim that McTell was born in 1898.

  PART IV: INTERLUDE

  7

  ALL THE FRIENDS I EVER HAD ARE GONE:

  “Delia,” Malibu, California, May 1993

  T he years from 1984 through 1991 were eventful ones for Bob Dylan. He released eight albums, including five studio recordings of original material; he toured relentlessly (including stints teamed up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead); and he appeared at several high-profile charity benefits, including Willie Nelson’s inaugural Farm Aid concert in 1985 to help financially beleaguered small farmers. As a jape, Dylan joined with Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne to form the Traveling Wilburys in 1988 and went on to record two albums. (The first of them, preceded by the hit single “Handle with Care,” reached number three on the Billboard Top 200, stayed in the best-seller charts for forty weeks, went double-platinum in overall sales, and won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.)* Dylan dabbled in various forms of songwriting, including children’s songs. He starred in a feature film for Lorimar Productions, playing a crusty, aging rock star. His official distinctions began to pile up, including induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and winning a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991. Dylan also married his second wife, Carolyn Dennis, in 1986, a few months after Dennis gave birth to their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, although Dylan hid the marriage from the public.

  Artistically, however, these years marked a prolonged, depressing setback for Dylan, despite some brief interruptions. Each of his original albums included one or two cuts that were at least interesting, but most of his songs, including such duds as “You Wanna Ramble” and “Ugliest Girl in the World,” were uninspired, the thrashing of a tired writer searching for his old spark. (Sometimes there wasn’t even all that much thrashing: the album Down in the Groove, which appeared in 1988, included only thirty-three minutes and ten seconds of music, Dylan’s shortest album by far since the Columbia Records “revenge” release, Dylan, in 1973.*) Dylan’s stepped-up schedule of concert appearances—including 364 dates from 1988 through 1991, the first four years of what fans dubbed the Never Ending Tour—included far too many shows that were strangled or halfhearted, and by the end of the 1980s reviewers and fans had begun calling Dylan’s look onstage his “Death Mask.” Apart from one of the songs on the first Traveling Wilburys album, “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”—which was in part a modern-day gunslinger ballad, and in part a send-up of Bruce Springsteen—Dylan made little effort at serious songwriting on either of the Wilburys albums. The film he appeared in, Hearts of Fire, was a disaster from start to finish.

  Looking back on it all a decade later, Dylan remarked that by 1987, “I’d kind of reached the end of the line.”1 Later, writing in Chronicles: Volume One, he affirmed that he had “felt done for,” like “an empty burned-out wreck … in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.”2 Dylan did experience some sort of epiphany in October 1987, performing an open-air concert in Locarno, Switzerland, when he felt his vocal powers suddenly reappear, and he also retrieved a musical system of chords and cycles first taught him when he was starting out in the 1960s by the veteran blues and jazz guitarist and singer Lonnie Johnson. But soon after, he relates a bit mysteriously in Chronicles, a sudden, terrible accident mangled one arm and sidelined him.

  Four years later, after he performed a rumbling, difficult-to-decipher version of “Masters of War,” Dylan accepted his lifetime achievement Grammy Award with an unmistakable cry of self-loathing and despair, mixed with a stubborn faith in recovery: “My daddy once said to me, he said, ‘Son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this world that your own Mother and Fat
her will abandon you. If that happens, God will believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.’ ” Dylan’s biographers describe this period of his personal life as a constant turmoil, filled with sexual affairs (some brief, others very long-term) and chronic alcohol abuse. In 1990, Carolyn Dennis filed for divorce, and the marriage was formally dissolved two years later.

  The best of Dylan’s albums in these years, musically and poetically, were a pair of multi-record, boxed-set retrospectives. Biograph, released in 1985, included a dozen heretofore unreleased or rare tracks along with an extended overview of Dylan’s entire musical career. The first three volumes of the Bootleg series, packaged together and released in 1991, contained dozens of outtakes of previously unreleased songs (including, at last, “Blind Willie McTell”) as well as some alternate takes of familiar material—but only two tracks (out of nearly sixty) came from the years after 1984. Both collections sold well, kept Dylan’s name before the public at large, and delighted his hard-core fan base from the 1960s and 1970s. But they also were a distraction from—and in some ways a rebuke to—much of what Dylan had been writing and performing in the 1980s. Biograph in particular, although its title was a pun on both an old record label and the legendary Chicago movie theater where the bank robber John Dillinger was finally gunned down by the police in 1934, could also be taken as a strange epitaph for a continuing career that had careened off the rails—a career that Dylan himself, more than once, said he was considering quitting.

  Fitfully, at the end of the 1980s, signs came that Dylan had righted himself. Loosened up by his collaboration with Harrison, Orbison, Petty, and Lynne (which had begun informally at his own home in Malibu), Dylan began composing what he would call “stream-of-consciousness songs,” heedless of lyrical or melodic convention. At the urging of his friend Bono, the lead singer for the Irish group U2, Dylan arranged a meeting in New Orleans with the producer Daniel Lanois in September 1988 and agreed to link up with Lanois again the following spring. Right on time, Dylan returned to New Orleans with a batch of new songs in March, and over the ensuing four months, with local musicians recruited by Lanois, he recorded what would become the album Oh Mercy.