Bob Dylan (17 page)

Even in
Music in a New Found Land,
Mellers revealed a weakness for the Transcendentalists as against the Nostalgiac (Cooper), the Orgiast (Whitman), and the Blackhearts (Hawthorne and Melville); the essential American experience, he wrote, is that of being “born again,” though he wasn’t speaking religiously. Even in the sixties, explicitly Christian metaphors were woven into Dylan’s songs, and into his persona (“I expect to be hung as a thief,” he said at a devastating press conference in 1965; around the same time he posed on his knees clutching a rough wooden cross). Reading
A Darker Shade of Pale,
it’s hard not to think that it is less four centuries of American music, or two decades of Dylan music, than Dylan’s notorious conversion from nominal Jew to radical Christian that has brought forth Mellers’s eighth-decade exegesis.

For more than ten years, this great critic has been obsessed by the problem of transcendence: from
Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles
(1973) to
Bach and the Dance of God
to
Beethoven and the Vision of God
to the more circumspectly titled Dylan book, which could be called
The Message of Bob Dylan: Believe or Die.
To close the last, Mellers quotes Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
that fabulous text which, like the culture of American democracy itself, can provide all things to all people, so long as one takes care not to stand in one place too long. “I doubt whether man can support complete religious independence and entire political liberty at the same time,” Tocqueville wrote. “I am led to believe that if he has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe.” (Why hasn’t someone told Solzhenitsyn this?) Dylan’s evangelism may appear to go “beyond the bounds of common sense,” Mellers says (“not to mention common charity,” he adds), but “the evolution of American industrial technocracy” has produced a situation “that may be one with which common sense is incompetent to deal.” It’s the great deus ex machina of postwar aesthetics: the Bomb. Even Perry Miller dragged it onstage to close
Errand into the Wilderness
—though not, I think, with Mellers’s message of believe-or-die attached.

As
A Darker Shade of Pale
ends with its flurry of cross-cultural, cross-racial, cross-gender amputations and grafts, one arm remains outstretched toward the light. Dylan’s last word “need not be interpreted in narrowly Christian terms, even by Dylan himself”—still, the “Christian answer may be the most valid in that it is both historical and revelatory” (the Anti-Defamation League and the Muslim Benevolent Society raise their voices: ours aren’t?), and anyway, that answer, like all answers, “must be seen as a beginning rather than as an end,” which is to say that (by this time the reader is asking, “It does?” even before the reader has been told what the
it is) Dylan is correct in affirming that if we are not “born again, our vaunted civilization, whether Christian or pagan, is finished; and will deserve its fate.”

Back in 1963, in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” Dylan sang a protest song against fallout shelters; this is a critic’s fallout shelter. Mellers has left himself a lot of outs, but not enough of them. Yes, as the self-invented creature whose mind and soul are as blank as the continent before him (Mellers waves back to John Locke), the American must be born again, and again, and again, if he or she is to be American at all—but what does this tell us about Melville, Lincoln, Faulkner, or Ned Cobb (the real name behind Theodore Rosengarten’s
All God’s Dangers: The Autobiography of Nate Shaw
), who are the most American Americans we know, and whose works and days were defined by what they imagined they remembered? The white American must be born again in a “creative interfusion” (Mellers) with black and red—so said Melville in
Moby-Dick,
Twain in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Lawrence, and Fiedler—but weren’t they thus saying that the new man or woman is helplessly borne back into the sins and guilts of his or her past? When Dylan kept company with these writers—in the mid-sixties, with the albums
Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited,
and
Blonde on Blonde
—he sought not answers but questions. But what Mellers is talking about is the surrender of the Antinomian will (out of which the new woman or man makes herself or himself)—a surrender to God’s order, a subsuming of human diversity into an at least symbolic messiahhood (Dylan as white-black-red-Christian-Jewish-pagan-male-female-leftist-rightist) as the only alternative to nuclear holocaust. A few years ago, I read a profile of Stanley Marsh 3, the Texas millionaire and patron of the Ant Farm’s celebrated Cadillac Ranch; he talked about his late nights with the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who would put down his drink, stare hard at the man who could, if he so chose, fund Leakey’s next project, and explain to Marsh exactly what lay behind his digs for stray scraps of one-, two-, three-million-year-old bones, which was nothing so tame as the mere mystery of human
origins. No,
If I can prove that all humanity derives from a common ancestor, and therefore that as we are all one war is folly, then there would be no more war—

Remember Bob Dylan? In 1965 he had a hit with “Like a Rolling Stone.” In 1984 he told an old friend, a man he had known since they were students and folk-music fans at the University of Minnesota in 1960, that he was stymied. People demanded the old songs, or simply the ones they knew. He had just dutifully put out
Real Live,
a redundant, fourth-time-around set of greatest hits; his label’s alternative was a five-record archive fit for a dead man. He felt like a dead man, he said. When he sang people sat still like receptacles; he had turned into a reification and his audience had willfully made itself into another. He wanted, Dylan told his friend, to get out of the big halls where expectations were sealed by the ads announcing the arrival of a legend. He wanted to play small clubs—maybe South America. There he would be only a rumor. He could arrive without encumbrances, traveling, as Melville wrote to Hawthorne in 1851, with “nothing but a carpet-bag—that is to say, the Ego.” But Dylan’s managers, promoters, his record company, would not hear of it; they had already forced him to stud his evangelical program with old favorites, and then to perform only those evangelical songs that could themselves be presented as old favorites—
Real Live,
had any Bob Dylan album ever carried a title so flat, so stupid, so nihilistic? Compared to that,
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II,
was poetry.
¹¹

We are not talking about the fate of the world. We are talking about an individual struggling to find his way to the next audience, and thus to the next song worth presenting to that audience, or to the next song which might gather that new audience: the pop equation, the pop paradox. We are talking about the next hit, and whether or not Bob Dylan, forty-four-year-old pop singer, can ever produce anything that could make people forget “Like a Rolling Stone.” As a pop music artist, Bob Dylan will be born again only when he creates something that will make people forget his greatest hit, and who and what he was when he made it.

Mellers is correct when, glancing over the ugliness of Dylan’s 1977 divorce from his wife of twelve years—an event which seems to have led straight to the fundamentalist Christianity which contained the anti-feminist theology necessary to justify the breach—he says that an artist’s biography is ultimately irrelevant to an artist’s work. Finally, we see what we see, read what we read, hear what we hear, in our own ways, and it’s the task of the critic to help us see, read, and hear. Criticism based in personal or social facts only controls work that can’t escape such facts; confronted head on by
Moby-Dick
or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, nobody really cares about who was who and what was what, then. But if biography is irrelevant, metaphysics may be as meaningless as making connections is fecund.

Mellers’s book is set up to make connections, but its goal is elsewhere. When, in 1964, in
Music in a New Found Land,
Mellers wrote about Robert Johnson, dead since 1938, Johnson remained little known. An album collecting his recordings from 1936 and 1937 had been released in 1961; few had heard it. Mellers did not merely register Johnson’s existence. In a paragraph, he set out what he heard in the hidden violence of Johnson’s rhythms even more than in the explicit violence of Johnson’s words: the fulfillment and the superseding of the Mississippi country blues, a form, made by a few men in a small, out-of-the-way place, that would decades later shape pop music all over the world. It’s all been blown to pieces, Mellers wrote: they lie here, and those who can
pick them up will, and will be remembered, and those who cannot, won’t be. Nothing so powerful as this music can ever be killed, Mellers was saying, and indeed it is the explosion itself that has made the once-narrow form accessible to anyone. This was more than prescient for 1964; even in 1973, for Dylan to dedicate his
Writings and Drawings
“To the magnificent Woodie Guthrie and Robert Johnson, who sparked it all off” was only half-obvious. But in
A Darker Shade of Pale
everything is scrambled; what is at stake is not the American musical past (“The Backdrop”), nor even its recent, individualized version (“Bob Dylan”), one person trying to put the pieces together and make a common language new, but a demand for a language which is not particularly American at all, a language which is a good fifteen hundred years older than America black or white. The true weight of Mellers’s book is that Bob Dylan—as the ultimate incarnation of what Emerson called the representative man, as “the first white American poet-composer-singer whose genius is both creative” (he writes his own songs) “and interpretive” (based on other people’s)—can save the world. No wonder he wants to perform in Tierra del Fuego.

Over the past two decades both Mellers’s work and Dylan’s have imploded—but perhaps Dylan can take it as a sign of life that
A Darker Shade of Pale
says more about Mellers’s career than his own. Maybe his new album will be as good as the advance word says it is; if it’s not,
Highway 61 Revisited,
which I have played a dozen times while writing this, still defines what pop music can be. In that record, a string of positive negatives beginning with the unlimited reach of “Like a Rolling Stone” and ending with the long fall of “Desolation Row,” containing the shades of Dock Boggs, Robert Johnson, Roscoe Holcomb, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and hundreds of others, Dylan created music that today remains utterly unsatisfied by the world that music meant to make—or, as the dandy-thief Lacenaire says in Marcel Carné’s
Children of Paradise,
unmake. Dylan merged white euphoria with black realism; Beethoven and Ma Rainey “unwrapped a bedroll”; as in “The Whiteness of the Whale” and the crew’s reply to Ahab’s speech on
the quarterdeck, as in Lincoln’s “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be repaid with another drawn by the sword,” Dylan shouldered all debts in a spirit of providential ecstasis. On the margins of
A Darker Shade of Pale,
Mellers is right—but it must be to Bob Dylan’s comfort that the book that could explain how and why remains as unwritten as the end of his career.

 

Wilfred Mellers,
A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan.
New York: Oxford, 1985. This was Mellers’s fourteenth book; he published nine more after it. I’ve returned to it many times over the years, for stray passages on waulking songs, odd mountain singers who for Mellers represent the poetic heart of their traditions even if those who sell the traditions have never heard of them, even a photo caption:

13 August 1985

 

Big, goopy songs, something like later Elvis ballads with a cranked-up whine instead of that inflated but still grand Presley sweep . . . a few echoes of the basement tapes, “Tears of Rage” on the new “I’ll Remember You” . . . “Clean Cut Kid,” sort of a “protest song,” there’s a beat but it’s CLUNK NOT FUNK—

Do you care? If it wasn’t for prerelease reviews in
Rolling Stone
and
Time
(
This is the one! This is the real comeback! Not like the last one!
raves), it might not be necessary to write off the new Bob Dylan album at all. But here it is,
Empire Burlesque,
one more dead battery, so why not.

Listening to this record quickly dissolves into a search for signs of life; there’re just enough to keep you listening, if that’s your idea of a good time. Put your ear to the chest: yes, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” is too long (even the title’s too long, not to say redundant; didn’t he once have a way with words?), but not only does it get going, it keeps going. Hold a mirror up to the mouth—it clouds over, barely. The horns are pointless, the guitar endlessly noodling even more so, but Sly & Robbie, part of any comeback LP’s necessary contingent of hired names, find a groove and hold it. There’s a shadow of the doomy conviction that drove the 1974 live recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” that rescued the 1976 “Hurricane” from its terrible rhymes and made it stick like a knife quivering in a wall—just a shadow, but it’s something. In moments Dylan seems to forget he’s singing, and so, in those moments, he does sing.