Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Bob Dylan and Larry Charles on the set of Masked and Anonymous, Los Angeles, July 2002. (photo credit 10.1)

  And just as Melville’s glancing allegorical style spoke to and about his times, so Masked and Anonymous—including its line about an unlettered barbarian president—spoke to the political and cultural circumstances of 2003. Dylan’s presentiments from a decade earlier about the victory of virtual reality seemed ever more prescient (they still do), spoofed mordantly in the film’s depiction of a projected mass media in which straight journalism is utterly hollowed out and desperate, and where television is dominated by official propaganda and hour-long “reality” shows with titles like Slave Trade and Lava Flow. In the immediate aftermath of America’s invasion of Iraq—an America run by a radical, power-hungry right-wing White House of dubious legitimacy, a supine Congress, and a Washington press corps that was either cowed or complicit—there was also a chilling familiarity to some of the film’s dialogue.

  The convergence of fact and fiction became almost too close for comfort during the film’s convulsive conclusion when the newly elevated president, Edmund, proclaims his new administration, a regime in which all collective memory will be wiped out, real violence will replace manufactured violence, eagles will scream, and great nations will fight large wars. “It’s a new day,” Edmund declares. “God help you all.” Dylan had long before renounced any pretensions to being a political seer, but commentary that was all the more dismaying and even frightening for its obliqueness runs through the film, and it remains dismaying today.

  Sheet music to Daniel Decatur Emmett’s “Dixie’s Land,” 1860. (photo credit 10.2)

  None of this, and nothing else about Masked and Anonymous, impressed the film’s reviewers at the time, most of whom gave it a reception even more contemptuous than the one accorded Renaldo and Clara a quarter century earlier. (Music critics took a very different view of the film’s eclectic, cosmopolitan soundtrack.) The few writers who described the film as worthwhile ran the risk of being dismissed as addled Dylan freaks. The critics’ complaints about Masked and Anonymous were, in fact, remarkably similar to those made about Renaldo and Clara: both films, supposedly, were overblown vanity projects undertaken by a rich and pampered star; both were pretentious and incomprehensible; both took a perverse false pride in their willful obscurity.*

  The vilification was not simply a collective reaction by the “cool kids” of the movie-reviewing establishment against a bunch of oddball interlopers—a revenge of the nerds against other nerds, one of whom was a rock star. Nor was it simply a response to the film’s sardonic depiction of critics and reviewers, personified by an obtuse, self-inflated writer played by Jeff Bridges. The film certainly was open to criticism on numerous counts, not least a lack of thematic coherence in its latter stages that worsens until the very final scene, along with an allusiveness that at times was so obscure that it undermines artful intentions. Early on, for example, Dylan strides onscreen as Jack Fate and is greeted by a character named Prospero (played by the comedian and actor Cheech Marin), who reports having just seen two eagles attack and kill a pregnant rabbit—a strange sight indeed, stranger still in the film’s blasted urban landscape. Many viewers no doubt caught the Shakespearean reference, and a few no doubt identified the omen of the eagles and the rabbit from Greek myth and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. But how many simply would not get it, no matter how many times they heard Prospero’s line? In a little scene intended as important and portentous, weren’t Dylan and Charles being just a little too clever for the good of their movie?

  Part of the difficulty, though, is inherent in what Dylan has always attempted to do, albeit in a variety of ways, with his movie collaborators. When asked at a press conference in 1965 about a rumored film in the works and what it would mean, Dylan replied that it would “just be another song.”6 Larry Charles, in an interview about Masked and Anonymous, said he hoped it would be “like a great Bob Dylan song that is listened to over and over.”7 Not surprisingly, though, making a Dylan song, or even the semblance of a Dylan song, into a film turned out to be much more challenging than recording one for an album or CD. Yet instead of taking the film on its own terms and trying to understand its ambitions, the critics declared it unintelligible and turned their backs.

  In his early experiments with Howard Alk, Dylan tried to make songs out of documentary footage and semi-scripted “real life” encounters. Those efforts failed badly—in part because as much as these kinds of unrehearsed happenings can serve as raw materials for effective cinematic drama (whether directed by D. A. Pennebaker or John Cassavetes), they are ill suited to the painterly imagination that goes into writing a successful song, no matter how much that song might draw on documented facts. And although any number of great songs, including great Dylan songs, have contained imagery, sweep, sound, and shifting perspective that can be called cinematic, not too many films have contained the wild ambiguities, aural as well as visual allusions, and layered connections of a great song. Without question, Masked and Anonymous, written and performed as an unconventional contrivance, came closer to achieving that goal than any film Dylan had previously attempted. But just how successful it actually is will take time to tell. The entire enterprise may prove to have been impossible from the start. Dylan’s art is better suited to adapting film to song than vice versa; perhaps lyrics and music are simply more imaginatively numinous than any visual medium. Still, by assembling so much at so many different levels, musically and philosophically as well as visually, Masked and Anonymous was an interesting critical and commercial flop, and may yet establish itself as, at the very least, a telling cultural artifact of a nation in confusion at the close of a long conservative cultural and political era—something much more important than a vanity project from Dylan’s late-career outburst.

  Chronicles is one of the Bible’s books of history, not prophecy. It tells of King David, who saw to it that the chiefs of the Levites, appointed as musicians and singers, had free rein in the Lord’s house, “for they were employed in that work day and night.”8 Dylan’s memoir Chronicles, the first volume of whose three projected volumes appeared in 2004, is also a history, recording names now sung and unsung, while it clears away gossip and tall tales. Among many other things, the book tells us how deeply Dylan has immersed himself in books of history, and it reveals he had been something of a historical researcher during his early days in New York, which had an enduring impact on his work. Yet the most immediately striking things about the book are its warmth, straightforward prose, and grateful tone.

  “Gratitude, not an easy thing,” the literary scholar Christopher Ricks writes: it is “among those human accomplishments that literature lives to realize.”9 For Ricks, as well as for Dylan (who is one of the major writers Ricks has studied meticulously), gratitude means pleasure, the kind of pleasure that comes with love, especially if you take love all the way. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan takes great care to record old gratitude, even when, because of distance, distraction, or deviousness, he did not go all the way. Dylan is also candid about the limits of his gratitude. The book is honest about goodness, given and received.

  Many of Dylan’s fans were surprised to learn about the variety of artists whom he has appreciated over the years, and to whom he now tips his hat. He writes, for example, of how, newly arrived in New York in 1961, he listened endlessly to Frank Sinatra’s rendering of “Ebb Tide,” awestruck by Sinatra’s singing and by Carl Sigman’s mysterious lyrics. He heard it all in Sinatra’s voice—“death, God and the universe, everything.”10 More than forty years later, and now nearly twenty years older than Sinatra was in 1961, Dylan records his appreciation. Yet he doesn’t linger over it. Back then, the action was elsewhere, and that’s where he wanted to be. “I had other things to do … and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much.”

  A teenage Ricky Nelson, circa 1955. (photo credit 10.3)

  Dylan also writes about listening, around the same time, to Ricky Nelson, whom
he also enjoyed—up to a point. “He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurling past him.11 His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood”:

  I had been a big fan of Ricky’s and still liked him, but that type of music was on its way out. It had no chance of meaning anything. There’d be no future for that stuff in the future. It was all a mistake. What was not a mistake was the ghost of Billy Lyons, rootin’ the mountain down, standing ’round in East Cairo, Black Betty bam be lam. That was no mistake.

  “Black Betty bam be lam”—that is, the song “Black Betty”—had come from the ex-convict Leadbelly, and also from the violent multiple repeat offender James “Iron Head” Baker, as recorded by Alan Lomax inside Central State Farm prison in Sugar Land, Texas, in December 1933. And in 1961, as Dylan embarked on his career, this, and not the music and singing of Frank Sinatra or Ricky Nelson, was where it was at, or where it was about to be at. Yet Dylan forgot nothing.

  Four years later, playing a concert at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, Dylan finished his first set with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” singing solo of the sea and of escaping sorrow. (It happened to be the second Dylan show I’d ever attended.) During the intermission, as the stage crew finished setting up for the show’s second half, Dylan told Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Al Kooper, and Harvey Brooks to play his songs calm and steady, come what may. (“Just keep playing no matter how weird it gets” were his exact words, Helm recalls.)12 Then they played in the middle of a summer windstorm: great gusts circled and whistled through the fake-Tudor stadium, whipping the music and the boos and the cheers into a roar nearly as loud as the planes landing nearby at La Guardia Airport. Onstage, outraged men hurtled past the musicians; one protester even knocked Al Kooper off his stool. Yet Dylan appeared to be completely calm, and at the tumult’s height he recomposed the crowd by playing on the piano, over and over and over again, the opening chords of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a sinister riff now turned, strangely, into a mass tranquilizer, restoring law and order and even good humor, mysteriously putting everybody in a quieter mood. He won the crowd over by playing an updated “bam be lam,” only now it came out as “bam be bee bam.”

  Maybe, if only for an instant, Dylan recalled the performance style of Ricky Nelson, playing calm and steady in the middle of a storm. In any event, he recalled that wisdom forty years later in Chronicles.

  When Chronicles finally appeared, there was palpable relief among people I spoke with who had not known what to expect. More than once I heard: “Thank God, it’s not Tarantula.” This was, I think, unfair to Tarantula, Dylan’s late 1960s word collage, which for all of its wasted words has some remarkable passages of avant-garde hilarity and serious grace. Dylan had the intelligence to hold out the ten best pages—a long string of vomit, he called it—and turn it into “Like a Rolling Stone.” After that, he said, no book or poem he wrote seemed really worthwhile; he’d done it. But if you read Chronicles closely enough, bits and pieces of Tarantula shimmer through, none more so than the particularly gonzo section, “Having a Weird Drink with the Long Tall Stranger”:

  back betty, black bready blam de lam! bloody had a baby blam de lam! hire the handicapped blam de lam! put him on the wheel blam de lam! burn him in the coffee blam de lam! cut him with a fish knife blam de lam!

  On through:

  fed him lotza girdles, raised him in pneumonia … black bloody, itty bitty, blam de lam!

  And concluding:

  betty had a loser blam de lam, I spied him on the ocean with a long string of muslims—blam de lam! all going quack quack … blam de lam! all going quack quack. blam!13

  Coming out of 1965–66—the years of Watts, black power, and the shotgun murder by Muslims of Malcolm X, who himself enters into a funny story in Chronicles—this bit of Tarantula is comedy going berserk, the non sequiturs of “Black Betty” replaced by public service announcements and pain and torture and nonsense, but also crazy like in the song, where Betty’s baby gets dipped in gravy. It is a parody of the folk process spinning out of control and spilling more and more blood—blood spouting black, black bloody, blam!

  This was Bob Dylan playing around with what in Chronicles he calls the artistic and linguistic and spiritual template he discovered in his early months in New York, a timeless yet deeply American template, out of which he was able to speak of his time and out of another simultaneously. It was not an epiphany but a process, and more than we ever knew, Dylan now reveals, it came out of literature and libraries and history books.

  Luc Sante has correctly called Chronicles a nonfiction bildungsroman, an education or coming-of-age story, although it’s a Bildung three times over, treating three different moments of transformation—in James Joyce’s pun from Finnegans Wake, “buildung” and “supra buildung.” It starts with two chapters on the New York folk-song scene in the 1960s and ends with a third; in between, it jumps to two other points, in the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, when Dylan, disoriented, had more to learn and relearn. Each of these periods, but especially the first, tells something about how Dylan entered (and then reentered) into history. The entire book is informative as well as grateful, but I find the first two chapters and the last the most compelling, portraying a young artist who, he now writes, felt destiny looking straight at him and nobody else, but who also entered a universe of archaic yet living American archetypes from which, he says, all his songs then sprang—the nation of blam de lam.

  It is decidedly not the story of a baby boomer. Although he is stamped as a 1960s troubadour, Dylan, who was born in 1941, is at pains to point out that he is really a product of the 1940s and early 1950s, which he remembers as a long-past era of political giants like Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin, unterrified men, including “rude barbarians,” who would not be denied. “The world was being blown apart,” he says, and the great men “carved up the world like a really dainty dinner.”14 Chaos and fear and smaller leaders came in their wake. A babe in arms when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Dylan remarks that “if you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning … like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D.” The changes were local as well as international: an older industrial America was dying—the begrimed factory and sunbaked plantation America of the prewar years, a passing America that included Dylan’s Hibbing, the old iron-ore boomtown—and a newer America of suburbs and superhighways and urban ghettos was being born. Yet the change was not always explosive, let alone apocalyptic. And through books as well as music, Dylan was able to reinhabit worlds that had completely disappeared.

  Chronicles opens with an evocation of the now-long-gone Broadway and Times Square, still rooted in the prewar metropolis, which Dylan encountered when he finally arrived in New York. The stogie-smoking Lou Levy, just this side of Damon Runyon, is the head of the music publishing company Dylan has signed with, and Levy introduces him to one of the great figures of the Roaring Twenties, the former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, amid the maroon leather booths in Dempsey’s restaurant. From the very start, Dylan’s recollections shuffle time and memory, jumping the line between B.C. and A.D., pulled backward even as he plunges forward. And backward could go back a long way. “It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment,” he writes, without saying who said it, “but I wouldn’t have known it.15 I was still in it.”

  The liner notes on the back of Dylan’s very first album say that he flunked out of college because he did what he wanted to do—including pore over the works of Immanuel Kant instead of what he should have been studying, Living with the Birds, for a science course. Whatever grain of truth there may have been in that, Dylan now says he came to New York with a mind shaped and constrained by postwar commercial and political culture and its touchstones, from James Dean and I Love Lucy to Holiday Inns and red-hot Chevys. One of the few models of something different was in the hipster vision and street ph
ilosophy of the Beats, and some of that would stick. Another model was in Woody Guthrie and his music, which stuck more. Though Dylan doesn’t say much about it, he’d learned enough in Hibbing to appreciate the likes of John Steinbeck and Walt Whitman as well as Hank Williams and Little Richard. And some of the 1950s—like James Dean and the hot rods—never disappeared.