Bob Dylan (43 page)

Salon
26 November 2001

 

3)
findagrave.com
. It was Connie Nisinger, a high school librarian in the Midwest, who decided that this interesting site needed a picture of the final resting place of Billy Lyons, shot dead in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895, his corpse kicked through time ever after in the countless versions of “Stag-o-lee,” “Stacker Lee” and “Stagger Lee.” Click “Search by name,” type in “William Lyons,” and there is Lyons’s plot in St. Peter’s Cemetery in St. Louis, sec. 5, lot 289. The site allows you to “Leave flowers and a note for this person”: keep clicking and you can leave a cigar or a beer instead. Advertising bars include “Contact Your High School Classmates”—to find their graves?

 

Salon
10 December 2001

 

10) Cameron Crowe: director,
Vanilla Sky
(DreamWorks/Paramount). Charles Taylor writes: “In
Vanilla Sky,
the Cruizesuzs, Tom and Penelope, recreate the cover of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
May God have mercy on us all.”

Interview
February 2002

 

“I don’t think she could bear not to be in the headlines,” said a professor two weeks after Susan Sontag’s instantly notorious
New
Yorker
comment on the September 11 mass murders as “a consequence of specific American alliances and actions”—there apparently being no need to name what they were. The woman speaking had lived through Auschwitz and, as a dissident intellectual, through three decades of a postwar Stalinist regime; at seventy-two she suffered no fools. But Sontag was no different from so many others, from novelists to reporters, from columnists to philosophers, who after that day stepped forward to deny that anything had been done that required any rethinking of anything at all. None had changed his or her mind in the slightest about anything. Nearly every argument was intended to congratulate the speaker for having seen all the way around the event even before it happened. The speakers could have said what President Dwight Eisenhower once said: “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”

Perhaps more than those called to other callings, artists work in the dark—and without artists, society would enter the future blind. “I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me,” as Bob Dylan once put it; the best artists trust that instinct. Especially in a time of chaos—when so many are insisting that what one might feel as chaos is still order—artists can explore, track and map the wilderness of uncertainty and doubt that ordinary political speech means to deny. Rather than calculating what will do the most good or please the most people, artists can trust their own blind bets, without calculating any effects whatsoever. That doesn’t mean art has no effects; it means the best artists accept that they have no control over what those effects might be. But the speech of artists—the language their work speaks—can be as impoverished as that of anybody else.

I think one reason so many people think of the firefighters and police officers who were called to the World Trade Center on September 11 as heroes—those who lived and those who didn’t—is that as they acted to save their city and their fellow citizens, they kept their mouths shut. They had neither the time or the need to justify, apologize, or explain. Perhaps singers and musicians, who
like political actors engage in public speech, have something to learn from firemen and police officers, from people whose extraordinary but also everyday heroism now keeps the word hero from being too easily applied.

What singers and musicians might have to learn is this: when you have nothing to say, it is not incumbent upon you, as a public person, to say anything. “[He] made it very clear he’d written the song about the state of things post 9/11,”
San Francisco Chronicle
critic James Sullivan said to me about Rufus Wainwright’s debut of his song “Eleven Eleven” during a performance last November. “The first lines were ‘Woke up this morning, it was 11:11,’ or ‘. . . the clock said 11:11’—I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh. The dreaded journal entry.’ I like Rufus plenty, but the song struck me like it was his dutiful songwriter’s homework project.” At the austere September benefit concert “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” Bruce Springsteen offered his song “My City of Ruins”—and, really, you could answer its chorus of “Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!” with, “Shut up, God damn it! Give me time to despair! Give me time to hate!” Did the song, written two years ago for the residents of Asbury Park, New Jersey, need to be sung in this utterly different context? Wouldn’t it have been more powerful, more shocking—more of an affirmation of the terrorist attacks not as a “dose of reality,” as Susan Sontag described them, but as a rent in reality—for an artist as eloquent and honest as Springsteen to step forward and attest that for the moment he had nothing to say?

“Let us not talk falsely now,” Bob Dylan sang in “All Along the Watchtower,” three years after his comment on chaos, by then in the middle of the Vietnam War, just before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. How do you do that? In a time of public crisis, when, more than oneself, one’s community is in jeopardy, from within or from without, it may be that a citizen, and especially a citizen who is also an artist, avoids speaking falsely by offering nothing less than the very best of what he or she has to say—which sometimes might mean nothing at all.

Salon
25 February 2002

 

4/5) Dave Van Ronk:
The Folkways Years, 1959-1961
(Smithsonian Folkways) and
No Dirty Names
(Verve Folkways, 1966). When he died February 10th at sixty-five, Van Ronk left behind a well of generosity and affection. Many of those who passed through the Greenwich Village folk milieu in the 1960s, perhaps most, learned the classics from him—“In the Pines,” “Careless Love,” “Spike Driver’s Moan,” “Betty and Dupree”—but as
The Folkways Years
makes plain, what set Van Ronk apart from those with whom he shared his place and time was not his ability to bring the old music to life. Only rarely, as on the shattering “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again” from
No Dirty Names,
one of his few original compositions—the sardonic title instantly dissolving into a chant of self-loathing as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street” looks down from his railroad flat at the junkies hustling their women in the doorways—did he sing anything you couldn’t have heard someone else sing better. Van Ronk was different because he was what so many people think they want to be, if only they could find the time: a man whose life was a gesture of welcoming, a storyteller whose stories allowed those who were listening to imagine that they themselves were in the story, at the same time sitting back in the warmth of Van Ronk’s presence, listening to their own adventures.

Interview
November 2002

 

“How Good It Can Get” is a typically expert Wallflowers tune—and a key to why their new
Red Letter Days
is a break through the wall of craft and moderation the group has always played behind.

Since the band’s debut ten years ago with
The Wallflowers,
when leader Jakob Dylan was twenty-two, their music has rolled through the radio with an ease Dylan’s own father never mastered. “One Headlight,” from the huge 1996 album
Bringing Down the Horse,
so dominated the radio in 1997 that some people figured Bob Dylan wouldn’t release his rocks-and-gravel comeback
Time Out of Mind
until his son made room for it.

On “How Good It Can Get” the singer is introducing a woman to sex. “We’ll make a lover / Out of you yet,” he promises with infinite condescension—with an
and who is this “we”?
hanging in the background as the song moves on.
Red Letter Days
has already kicked off with the life-is-great testament “When You’re on Top”—which on the radio sounds more like a commercial than a single (music this vapidly enthusiastic can sell anything) and will end with “Here in Pleasantville” (few will be surprised by the revelation that all is not pleasant in a place called Pleasantville). But a certain momentum is building in “How Good It Can Get,” and you might wonder why the musician in Jakob Dylan seems never to have asked himself the same question not even hiding in the phrase.

He answers the question of how good it can get on
Red Letter Days
—and it’s something to hear. The violence of “Everybody Out of the Water,” the hammering choruses of “Too Late to Quit,” the rising groove in “See You When I Get There,” the fists-shaking-in-your-face noise of “Everything I Need,” the grinding of brags against doubts in “Feels Like Summer Again”—something as apparently small as the willingness to throw a phrase like “makes me sick” into a melody that seems to promise no trouble for anyone—all of it testifies to a willingness to break through to the other side, and to what you can send back when you make it.

“Everybody Out of the Water” (originally called “New Frontier”) is part watching television last September, looking at the ruins in downtown New York, trying to believe what you were seeing. It’s part “London Calling”—as it appears on the Clash’s 1979 album of the same name, not in this year’s creepy Jaguar commercial (pronounced “Zshag-u-ahr” by the pitchwoman). It’s part
answer record to Bob Dylan’s 1967 “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” or his 2001 “High Water (For Charley Patton)”—itself an answer record to Patton’s 1929 “High Water Everywhere,” which was an answer to the 1927 Mississippi flood. The promise of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—the New Frontier, named, some cynics have suggested, after the hotel where Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut in 1956—hangs over the music as the summation of all broken promises, or what’s left when the floodwaters finally recede. The song gives no quarter, quiets down only to let the clouds gather again, to make the climb of the rhythm back to the top of the song’s mountain more exciting than it was the last time around. “On your mark / Get set, let’s go” is the first line: Can the music keep up with its subject, or even outrun it?

“Everybody out of the water!” Jakob Dylan shouts again and again. When he says, “The city’s been leveled,” right at the start, you don’t quite believe him—not yet. But the guitar figure snaking closely around a spot the whole song is circling from a shrinking distance convinces you the story is for real. “This is the New Frontier / Everybody out of the water” is suddenly frightening.

And then Dylan is doing things he’s never even hinted at before. The word “shit” hurts. The word “sucks” is a void—the way Dylan mouths the word is pure American speech, a complete rejection of all authority, particularly the authority of people saying everything is going to be all right.

That is the message Dylan’s own music has communicated in the past. Now he has opened up a hole deep enough to bury his previous hits—and so when on
Red Letter Days
the suggestion comes that things might indeed be all right, you can believe it’s not an idle notion. But it won’t feel as good as the argument that everything has gone to hell.

 

Wallflowers,
Red Letter Days
(Interscope, 2001).

Salon
4 November 2002

 

10) Bob Dylan: “Train of Love,” from
Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash
(Lucky Dog). Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Dylan almost never does good work on them, but here, surrounded by Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle (it’s against the law to make a tribute album without him), Travis Tritt, Keb’ Mo’, the unspeakable Hank Williams, Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and Rosanne Cash, he gets real, real gone, though not before pausing to wave goodbye: “I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song,” Dylan says before “Train of Love.” “I also want to thank you for standing up for me, way back when.” Way back in 1965, onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where, as the current revisionist line has it, nothing actually happened.

 

Salon
9 December 2002

 

Special Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden Number!

 

1) Announcement (MSG, Nov. 11). For years, the same voice has opened every show with the same words: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Columbia recording artist, BOBDYLAN!”—the name always squashed into a single word. Last August 9, though, in anticipation of a date in Hamburg, N.Y., a looking-back piece appeared in the
Buffalo News.
As print it was boilerplate; hearing it appropriated word for word as Dylan’s new fanfare was pure media shock, the displacement that takes place when the conventions of one form are shoved into those of another. This is what the audience hears today: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s
counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find
Jay-sus,
who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’80s, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!”

 

2) “Masters of War” (MSG, Nov. 11) In 1991, with the Gulf War under way, Dylan stepped onto the stage at the Grammys telecast with his band and played “Masters of War,” from 1963—but you couldn’t necessarily tell. The song was buried in its performance, as if history were its true audience.

With a second Gulf War looming, there was no disguise when, seven songs into the first of two New York shows, Dylan gathered his small band into a half-circle for an acoustic, almost chamber-music version. Played very slowly, very deliberately, the performance made you understand just how good the song is. It wasn’t a matter of relevance. You could imagine that if the last war on earth had occurred thirty-nine years ago—if the song had, by its very appearance, ended war—the song would still speak, just as a 7000-year-old god excavated in Jordan and recently installed in the Louvre is still speaking, reminding you of what you came from, of who you once were.