Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  A year later, Dylan and his band recorded a pair of shows in another intimate setting, a special Sony Records concert studio, for inclusion in MTV’s Unplugged series of taped televised concerts. Dylan would have preferred to play old folk songs with nothing but acoustic instruments—in the true spirit of the series’ title—but the programmers decided that traditional music without drums and at least some electric guitar backing would turn off the youthful MTV audience. Instead, Dylan, once again fronting his band on acoustic guitar, performed standards from his personal songbook, with some quirky additions like the heretofore unreleased antiwar song from 1963 “John Brown.” Although some of the best performances ended up on the cutting room floor—including a superb rendition of “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and a slow, sexy “I Want You”—the Unplugged show, as broadcast, showcased a revitalized Dylan to millions of viewers. As a special sign to those older fans and sometime fans who tuned in—but also to show he had not grown too old—Dylan wore a black-and-white Pop Art polka-dot shirt along with vintage Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. Both accoutrements were literal throwbacks to 1965—yet far from pathetically out-of-date, Dylan looked energetic and oddly stylish.

  Several months later—after a surprising appearance at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles for a grand celebration of Frank Sinatra’s birthday, where he sang, at Sinatra’s personal request, his old song of parting “Restless Farewell,” accompanied by a strong quartet—Dylan found himself snowed in on his Minnesota farm, and he began writing new songs. Contrary to his usual practice, he would hold on to the new material for a while—the entire summer and autumn of 1996—revising lyrics and melodies, before he finally booked studio recording time in Miami in January 1997. “It’s a spooky record,” Dylan later said, “because I feel spooky.16 I just don’t feel in tune with anything.” Hoping to achieve a sound that was neither glitzy nor self-consciously old-fashioned, Dylan turned again to Daniel Lanois to work with him as coproducer. The album would eventually be called Time Out of Mind, and it would mark the completion of Dylan’s comeback from his travails and turmoil of the 1980s.

  On an initial listening, Time Out of Mind’s most striking features are its deliberate pace and its muffled, boggy sound. Although the album includes a country jump song, “Dirt Road Blues,” and a banging, sinister backbeat rocker, “Cold Irons Bound,” most of the songs amble quietly, no matter whether the lyrics convey revulsion or resignation. Lanois’s reverberating special production effects—which Dylan later said he regretted—produced an album very much in the mysterious voodoo style of Oh Mercy, but much darker and foggier. Whereas the earlier album sounds like New Orleans, Time Out of Mind conjures up the deepest recesses of a bayou, with smoke drifting lightly across black-green water, Spanish moss clumped so thick that it seems impenetrable. Neither coproducer would tax Dylan’s aging vocal cords unduly, and so, although the cracked-leather vocals of the earlier acoustic albums show up only now and then, on most of the songs Dylan’s voice is hushed—sometimes sepulchral, and sometimes spectral.

  One of the album’s best songs—and the one that now seems likeliest to survive as a canonical Dylan composition—is “Not Dark Yet.” Commonly described as a meditation on morality (which in part it is), it is actually more of a song about weary alienation from a world full of lies, where behind every thing of beauty lurks some kind of pain. Dylan sings of receiving a woman’s kind and forthright letter, but it is of no account because “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Song after song on Time Out of Mind conveys a similar sense of loss and estrangement, portraying a world emptied of everything the singer has ever valued, where his loved ones are either gone or no longer his loved ones. The best he can do is dance with a stranger, which only reminds him that he once truly loved someone else.

  The album’s most brilliant song, the hypnotic, sixteen-and-a-half-minute “Highlands,” which concludes the album, takes its opening line from Robert Burns’s verse “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” itself a poem of distance and estrangement, drawn from a traditional Scots air. In Dylan’s version, complete with its mention of bluebells and the waters of Aberdeen, the Highlands could be Dylan’s own northern Midwest just as easily as it could be Scotland; or it could also be God’s heaven, at least in the final verse. But the song quickly shoots into a rat-race urban America where the singer walks past a park, spots a mangy dog crossing the street, and brushes past an earnest voter registrant. The singer is a man who, like Dylan, is nearing sixty or is just past it; he apparently lives alone; and the song describes his meanderings in a tone that is alternately kvetchy, bemused, amused, and bitter. The central episode involves a semi-flirtation with a pretty waitress, the only person that the singer as much as speaks with during the entire song; the talk gets nowhere; and the man departs the diner, “back to the busy street, but nobody’s going anywhere.” The song is very long, but when it concludes, little has happened and nothing has changed.

  One of the things that makes “Highlands” stand out are its quiet jokes, about Neil Young, about women and women writers, about elections. The lines are at most mildly funny when read, but they are hilarious when sung, or at least they can be when Dylan sings them. Just as changing a few pronouns in a song such as “Tangled Up in Blue” can dramatically shift its meaning, so changes in inflection can invest “Highlands,” a song of Hopper-esque solitude, with an encouraging laughter and wit. “Highlands” also describes a refuge from the alienation and pain, a place that can be reached, a place where the disconnected singer had already traveled in his own mind. Even on an album as bleak as Time Out of Mind, Dylan still manages to sign off with a hopeful “good luck.”

  On repeated listening, another feature about the album stands out: Dylan’s repeated, deliberate, always unacknowledged, but sometimes obvious adaptations from traditional folk and country-and-western music, as well as from high literature. Dylan took the title and some of the words in “Highlands” from Burns, but based its tune on a riff by the great 1930s bluesman Charley Patton. Dylan also lifted the title “Dirt Road Blues” from Patton. The title of the first song on Time Out of Mind, “Love Sick,” echoes Hank Williams’s hit “Lovesick Blues.” Bits and pieces of lyrics from songs ranging from the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waiting for a Train” turn up here and there. The album’s title—an old phrase, long out of usage, meaning “time immemorial”—may just have come from Romeo and Juliet, specifically Mercutio’s description in act 1 of the tiny fairy Queen Mab, who would ride over sleepers and induce dreams of wishes fulfilled:

  Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,

  Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

  Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.*

  Although it was too early to discern what he was doing, with these pastiches Dylan had begun to revamp his American style.

  What was clear at the time was that Dylan had returned to excellent form. And although it was sheer coincidence, it now seems almost symbolic that between the time the studio recording ended and the album’s release, Dylan suffered through and recovered from a grave attack of histoplasmosis, a serious heart infection that might well have killed him. After enduring severe pain for much of the month of June, Dylan was back on the road at the start of August. In late September, he played a special performance for Pope John Paul II at the Italian National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna. Four days later, he inserted “Love Sick” on the band’s encore playlist—the first song from the new album to be played in concert. Early in 1998, the official accolades began coming in, starting with the Grammy for Best Album of the Year.

  Over the next three years, the aura around Dylan was brighter than it had been at any time since the mid-1970s. His touring arrangements affirmed his regained stature. In April 1998, he teamed up with the Rolling Stones for a six-date tour of South American cities. Later tours in 1998 and 1999 included a triple bill with Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, as well as tours with Paul Simon and with the Gr
ateful Dead’s bassist Phil Lesh’s new combo, called Phil Lesh and Friends. And by 2000, Dylan was back to his songwriting.

  In 1999, an interviewer for Guitar World magazine reflected on Dylan’s brush with death and asked him whether, knowing what he now did about Time Out of Mind’s success, he would have been satisfied had it been his final album. Dylan demurred: “I think we were just starting with getting my identifiable sound onto the disc.17 I think we just started. I think there’s plenty more to do. We just opened up that door at that particular time, and in the passage of time we’ll go back in and extend that. But I didn’t feel like it was an ending to anything. I thought it was more the beginning.”

  * The sense of doom had been building in Dylan’s mind for some time. A few years earlier, in June 1989, he performed at the Royal Dublin Society and sang the haunting Irish folk air “Eileen Aroon.” (He had added it to his concert song list a year earlier in Denver.) Dylan had learned the song in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s from the balladeer Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Shortly before his recent death, Clancy told me about the RDS show’s after-party, where he and Dylan huddled together and Dylan gloomily lamented, over and over, that his audiences, even in Dublin, no longer knew the wondrous old songs—even “Eileen Aroon.”

  * Dylan’s official lyrics change The Sacred Harp’s and The Southern Harmony’s wording of the third verse’s opening line, as actually recorded by both Watson and Dylan—“The cause of my Master compelled me from home”—to read “the call of my master compelled me from home.” The substitution marginally strengthens the song’s religious directness. At the same time, by rendering “Master” in lowercase, the official lyrics diminish the religious sense by making the word more ambiguous: as read, the dead pilgrim could be a slave, separated from his family because he has been sold by his master. The official lyrics alter two additional important words, changing the line “pensively stood by his tomb” to “patiently stood by his tomb” and changing “The same hand that led me through scenes most severe” to “The same hand that led me through seas most severe.” The first change badly damages the line, indeed, renders it almost unintelligible. (What was the singer being patient for?) The second provides a more vivid image, but is not necessarily an improvement. The version in The Sacred Harp excluded an extra verse, composed by one J. J. Hicks of North Carolina, which Walker included in The Southern Harmony.

  * Alternatively, Dylan could have lifted the phrase from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Broad-Axe” (1856): “Served those who, time out of mind, made on the granite walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean-waves”; or William Butler Yeats’s “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” (1910): “How should the world be luckier if this house / Where passion and precision have been one / Time out of mind, became too ruinous / To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?” But by far the likeliest source is Warren Zevon’s ballad “Accidentally Like a Martyr” (1978): “Never thought I’d ever be so lonely / After such a long, long time / Time out of mind.”

  PART V: RECENT

  9

  THE MODERN MINSTREL RETURNS:

  “Love and Theft,” September 11, 2001, and the Newport Folk Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, August 3, 2002

  It is May 24, 1966, and at the Olympia in Paris, also known as “la salle la plus importante d’Europe,” time slips.

  Two years after this night of music, many of the young people in the audience will be rioting in the Paris streets, their heads full of ideas that will drive them to proclaim a revolution of the imagination, fight pitched battles with the police and the National Guard, and try to burn down the Paris stock exchange, in what would become known in Left Bank lore as “la nouvelle nuit des barricades,” the most dramatic street fighting of May 1968. Seven hundred and ninety-five rioters are arrested, and 456 are injured.

  But now it’s exactly two years earlier—to the minute—and the rebels-to-be sit expectantly, waiting for the second half of the show, when the curtain parts, and there they see to their horror, attached to the backdrop, the emblem of everything they are coming to hate, the emblem of napalm and Coca-Cola and white racism and colonialism and imagination’s death. It is a huge fifty-star American flag. And Bob Dylan, the emblem of American rebellion and imagination’s rebirth, has hoisted it aloft.

  What’s the joke? But it is no joke. They are here to hear the idol, and know full well that the idol now will play electric (after what turned out to be a frustrating-to-all-concerned acoustic set), which will offend the folk purists in Paris as it has in cities across the United States and Great Britain. But this Stars and Stripes stuff turns a musical challenge into an assault, an incitement, as in-your-face—more so—to the young Left Bank leftists as any Fender Telecaster. In England, the idol had traded insults with the hecklers, but in Paris, on this, his twenty-fifth birthday, he strikes first.

  Bob Dylan and his band at the Olympia, Paris, May 24, 1966. In the shadows, left to right: Rick Danko, in the background just over Dylan’s shoulder, dragging on a cigarette, Mickey Jones, Robbie Robertson. (photo credit 9.1)

  Whether they like it or not, the idol will give them his own version of “America,” a place that they have never learned about in books and, if they have, that they do not comprehend. Angry patrons boo and shout, “U.S. go home!”

  Not quite five months after this concert, the French pop singer Johnny Hallyday plays the Olympia.1 He has two young women backup singers, one wearing a miniskirt, the other, vaguely resembling Marianne Faithfull, dressed in trousers and a vest. He also has a backup band that doubles as his warm-up act, a new group, assembled only recently and still a little rough, that is introduced to the audience as hailing from Seattle, Washington, and that performs, among other numbers, a bent-out-of-shape version of the Troggs’ Top 40 summer smash “Wild Thing.” There is no flag, and by now the Paris audience has caught up, musically—enough to be amazed, not dismayed, by the combo that will later gain fame as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in its fourth public appearance. Only a year earlier, Hendrix was playing with an ensemble, the Blue Flame, as the obscure house band at the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street, where Dylan had scratched out his first gigs in New York, and in time, after his star began to streak, some of Hendrix’s most powerful performances would be his soaring interpretations of Dylan songs. In a time that, looking back, seems impossibly compressed, the early 1960s gave way to the late 1960s, even in Paris, and to the musical counterculture that Hendrix helped invent but from which Dylan always stood at one remove.

  Suddenly, it’s May 1966 again—except that it’s not 1966, it’s 2001, and the venue is certainly not the Olympia, and really doesn’t look like Paris at all. As expected, an organist and a drummer and a bunch of guitarists take the stage. But the headliner, skinny as a fence rail, has swapped his mod-cut houndstooth suit for a black and silver Nashville number, and he wears a five-gallon hat, and he has sprouted a Dapper Dan pencil mustache. Then the band rips into an up-tempo version of “From a Buick 6,” a song off of the album Highway 61 Revisited—except the lyrics have completely changed. The headliner rasps the opening lines:

  Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee

  They’re throwing knives into the tree.

  With “Love and Theft,” Dylan changed shape once again, not as dramatically or as fractiously as he did in 1966, but emphatically enough. He also played tricks with the past and present, memory and history. The new album was certainly the work of an older and wiser artist, now on the verge of sixty, burdened with a mountain of rue. But, stepping outside the squitchy, boggy gloominess and resignation of Time Out of Mind, the singer also sings of brimming desire and is eager to tell about it, though not without irony. He has truly relocated his mark and is ready to step up and cut loose; he has found things he had once thought were lost.

  Even more striking than the album’s mood is its dense eclectic style—the most varied of any Dylan album before it since The Basement Tapes. More expli
citly than ever, Dylan travels through time and space at will on “Love and Theft,” picks up melodies and lyrics from hither and yon (including some wildly unexpected places), and then assembles something new and original for himself and his listeners. He crashes through the deadening domination of up-to-the-minute, on-the-buzz, virtual reality with musical and literary forms (and even recording devices) that are older and truer, without turning in the least antiquarian.* He reclaims the present by reclaiming the past. And he commands his amalgamating American art in wholly new ways in order to express loss and hope, cynicism and wonder, as he had come to feel them at the century’s turning.

  Love and theft, Bob Dylan has said, fit together like fingers in a glove.

  People noticed as soon as “Love and Theft” was released that its title is the same as a book by the cultural historian Eric Lott about the origins and character of American blackface minstrelsy. In the 1820s and 1830s, young working-class white men from the North began imitating southern slaves onstage, blacking up and playing banjos and tambourines and rat-a-tat bones sets, jumping and singing in a googly-eyed “Yass, suh, Noooooo, sah” dialect about sex and love and death and just plain nonsense. The minstrels stole from blacks and caricatured them, and often showed racist contempt—but their theft was also an act of envy and desire and love. Bluenoses condemned the shows as vulgar. Aficionados, from Walt Whitman to Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, adored the minstrels for their fun, and for much more than that. “ ‘Nigger’ singing with them,” Whitman wrote of one blackface troupe in 1846, “is a subject from obscure life in the hands of a divine painter.”2