Bob Dylan (21 page)

The story in “Stolen Car” is the same: a husband leaves. But that’s all that’s the same. “I’m driving a stolen car / Down on Eldridge Avenue / Each night I wait to get caught / But I never do.” The song is too slow for someone who says he’s driving—you can
feel him moving down the street, ten miles an hour, five miles an hour, passing one cop car after another, as he moves,
waiting
—but the cops don’t care, it’s as if he’d never been born. He drives in a circle. “She asked if I remembered the letters I wrote / When our love was young and bold / She said last night she read those letters / And they made her feel / One hundred years old.” That seems young to him, now.

The detail that “Hungry Heart” slides over is present, the people are real. As the man drives round and round his town in a circle—maybe he’s been doing it for weeks, years, maybe he’s the guy people point to and say, “You know him, the guy who always passes here at 4 P.M., as if he’s expecting someone to notice him”—but like a homeless man on the same corner for five or six years, no one acknowledges his presence. The story he’s telling is like a story once told by the guitarist Roy Buchanan, who killed himself last month, a story about the tiny California town he grew up in: “Sometimes it gets so quiet here you feel like you could fire a gun inside yourself”—and, he didn’t say, because he didn’t think he had to, no one would hear it. The man singing “Hungry Heart” is out on the open road of “Free Bird” and “Ramblin’ Man.” The man in “Stolen Car” is in his house, his prison cell, fantasizing, like Chuck Berry as he wrote “Promised Land.” The open road has become an image of itself—which, perhaps, is what it always was.

There’s one more road I want to talk about—Highway 61, which you all know. When I first heard Bob Dylan’s song “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965, I was transfixed. Instantly, it was a mystical road to me, a place of visitations and visions. Two thousand miles away from where I lived, it was plainly a place where anything could happen; where, the song said, if you knew how to look, you could see that everything already had happened. Highway 61 was the center of the universe. Bob Dylan was saying that if you think hard enough, see clearly enough, you can understand that the whole of human history, every possible combination of story and syntax, is right before your eyes, that the open road is the road you know best. The song explodes.

Listening to “Highway 61 Revisited” today, it doesn’t matter to me that I know the open road is a narrow, class-based, sexist, race-based theme in American music. Think about it: where are the great road songs from Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett—sorry, “Mustang Sally” isn’t it. Aretha Franklin? The only open road song from Al Green is about wandering from bar to bar in search of God. For these singers, you can’t leave home until you’ve settled your affairs at home, and if you leave, what you get is not freedom but exile. Can you imagine Prince singing a song about the open road? Just to ask the question exposes its triviality. What would the idea have to say to him? And “Little Red Corvette” is not about a car—although it might be the ultimate internalization of the image of the open road.

Bob Dylan came out of the tradition of the twenties and thirties blues and country singers. Getting out of here, down the highway, five hundred miles from my home, not knowing where you’re going, leaving everything behind. No one, certainly no nice, middle-class, Jewish, ex-college student from Hibbing, Minnesota, ever carried it off so convincingly. When Dylan sang the old blues song “Highway 51” on his first album in 1962, he made it real. The way Bob Dylan sang on his early records, he could have been born in Virginia in the seventeen hundreds, turned up for the Gold Rush in California in 1849, headed up to Alaska in the 1890s, made it down to Mexico in 1910—the road was the story, it told the story, the story told you.

When I came to Minnesota in 1966, all I wanted to do was get behind the wheel and get out onto Highway 61—I was sure transcendence was waiting there at every entrance. I pulled onto the highway, and of course it was just like pulling onto any highway. Nothing happened. Still, the song lost none of its force, and it still hasn’t. “OUT ON HIGHWAY 61,” Dylan was shouting, and no singer could put more inflection, more wit and irony, into a shout than the Bob Dylan who was singing in the mid-’60s. Abraham gets the command to sacrifice his son—out on Highway 61, God says. A man has to escape, from what we aren’t told—Highway 61 is the only route. Garbage has to be dumped (a thousand red,
white, and blue shoestrings, you get the idea)—Highway 61 is the place. A drama of miscegenation, incest, and race is played out—where else? And, finally, the last verse. There’s a gambler, he’s got a great idea—let’s put on the next world war. He meets a promoter—well, he’s shocked, but he knows where.

That was 1965. In 1974, when Bob Dylan and the Band toured the country for the first time in eight years—and, in those days, adjusting for the inflation that has taken over pop culture, eight years was like a century—Bob Dylan and the Band played “Highway 61 Revisited,” which they’d never played in the 1960s. The song was the only one that upset them, that confused them, that forced them to acknowledge, as musicians, that they didn’t know where they were going.

Put some bleachers out in the sun, and watch the end of the world. Why not? The open road is full of surprises. Anything can happen. In this song, everything does happen, and so casually. Why not? You’re out on the open road, no metaphor, now the thing itself. It’s a fact, an experience you’re reporting. Just as the open road has no fixed destination, it has no fixed beginning—Sorry-babe-the-road-is-calling-me won’t do. What’s so shocking about “Highway 61 Revisited” is that its two lanes, which will take you anywhere, describe a place where people actually live, where they have fantasized, where they are stuck.

The song could have been called “No Way Out.” There is only one song I know with that title; “I got you, I got you—
and there’s no way out,
” run the lines that shoot out like the hands of a haunt. All the road movies, all the chase scenes, all the flights of all the free birds come to a halt in “Highway 61 Revisited.” You can hear a man at the height of his commercial and mythic success announcing that freedom is confinement—anything can happen, he says, but only at home. He is fantasizing everything within the confines of the familiar; like Chuck Berry in “Promised Land,” he is admitting that the journey is not up to him.

The open road song goes back too far—to a time when there were no roads, only wandering. Daniel Boone wanted elbow room, the country had it, he went looking for it. Other people followed in
his footsteps; their tracks became roads. Eventually, those roads reached the end of the continent; then doubled back, and crisscrossed the continent with highways.

The strangest open road song is Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again”—“We might even / Leave the U.S.A.,” Al Wilson sings under the band’s fatalistic burr. But this isn’t real. “Highway 61 Revisited” is: what’s real is the insistence that the open road is your own ground, your own street, where anything can happen.

I believe that it can, and I believe that looking for surprise wherever it is that you live is better than looking for it where you’ve never been and don’t belong: where, in the end, like Kerouac and Peter Fonda, you’re slumming. I remember reading “Howl” for the first time in 1970, where Allen Ginsberg says, “The cosmos vibrated at my feet in Kansas”—“In
Kansas?
” I said to a friend with disdain. “What sort of cosmos vibrates in
Kansas?
” But I now know Ginsberg should have named the town where it happened, and the street, as Bob Dylan named “Highway 61.” “Look,” my friend said, “anyone can get the cosmos to vibrate in Japan, or China, or India. But to get the cosmos to vibrate in Kansas—that means he was really
there.
”

Allen Ginsberg wasn’t slumming. Unlike his friend Jack Kerouac, he wasn’t looking for what he wasn’t, he was trying to become what he wanted to be, what he already was. The cosmos still vibrates for me in “Highway 61 Revisited.” Whenever I think of it, when I’m driving—you don’t hear it on the radio anymore, but you can call it up out of memory—the number of the highway I’m on doesn’t matter.

As a cliché, the open road is a dead end; starting from nowhere, that’s where it leads. Yet as an enclosed metaphor—as with “Promised Land,” a reach for freedom out of a prison cell, or Springsteen’s “Stolen Car,” which was never stolen, or “Highway 61 Revisited,” just the local road—anything can happen, and you’ll recognize it, understand it, weigh its costs.

This, I think, is what the notion of the open road is about today. When we can fly across a continent that once took months to cross
in a few hours—and see nothing: it no longer matters how long it takes to drive it, walk it—the fastest time defines the place. But the idea of the open road in your own town, in your own mind, in your own cell is a contradiction in terms, and that is why the idea cannot be closed off. As a fact, the open road is now a fantasy; as a fantasy, we will never get off it.

 

Chuck Berry, “Promised Land” (Chess, 1964).

 

———.
The Autobiography.
New York: Harmony, 1987, 216-217.

 

Bob Seger, “Turn the Page,” from
Back in ’72
(Capitol, 1973).

 

———. & the Silver Bullet Band, “Turn the Page,” from
Live Bullet
(Capitol, 1976).

 

Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road,” from
Born to Run
(Columbia, 1975).

 

———. “Racing in the Street,” from
Darkness on the Edge of Town
(Columbia, 1978).

 

———. “Nebraska,” from
Nebraska
(Columbia, 1982).

 

———. “Stolen Car,” from
The River
(Columbia, 1980).

 

Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited,” from
Highway 61 Revisited
(Columbia, 1965).

———. “Highway 61 Revisited,” on
Before the Flood
(Asylum, 1974).

 

Joyce Harris, “No Way Out” (Infinity/ Domino, 1961). Included on
The Domino Records Story
(Ace, 1998).

14 November 1989

 

9) Bob Dylan:
Oh Mercy
(Columbia). Producer’s record, shapely and airless. Featuring Daniel Lanois as the director who likes to chalk marks on the floor and Bob Dylan as the actor who has to hit them.

 

7 April 1990

 

1) Pete Seeger: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from
We Shall Overcome—The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8, 1963
(Columbia). I first heard Bob Dylan’s song as Seeger sang it, just days before the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King replaced Dylan’s Armageddon with a vision of liberation. But both King and Dylan spoke the same apocalyptic language; it was never Seeger’s. His version of the song seemed like a final statement twenty-seven years ago, in the flesh or on the original, one-LP Carnegie Hall recording, but today it’s plain the moment made the music. Seeger notoriously lacked any blues feeling, and “Hard Rain” is proof he had none for country, not even for Child ballads; as Woody Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy he was Henry Ward Beecher, Yankee abolitionist to his toenails. This performance documents one of the great musical events of the American postwar period, but the event is no longer musical; to hear how scary the song is, you have to listen to Bryan Ferry sing it.

 

March 1991

 

1) Various radio stations: format violation (January 15). After so many years devoted to erasing the notion that in the mix of radio
sounds one might expect a subject, it was a shock, on this strange, suspended day, to find the medium talking to you, in a kind of celebration of dread. No matter what button you pushed you were faced with the same conversation, the pressure drop of Edwin Starr’s “War,” or Bruce Springsteen’s cover of it, or Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising,” Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood,” an unidentified woman’s “Will Jesus Wash the Blood from Your Hands,” the Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man” (relief, violation of the new format within the old format; it felt fabulous). Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” seemed thin and arch, too far above the mess of confused, violently random emotion, morally insulated (though not so much as Sean Lennon and Lenny Kravitz’s Peace Choir smile-button video for their new version of the latter, so removed from fear its basic message might have been that Cyndi Lauper had found a way to get back on MTV). Cutting through the many voices, even those of songs only playing in your head—Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” maybe, or Metallica’s “One,” or Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” (“Your military arms,” so softly, “your petrochemical arms”)—was the Pogues’ “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” It’s a long, slow, unbearably bitter first-person account of a mutilated Australian soldier who came back from Gallipoli; Shane McGowan collapses seventy years to make the man explain why he wishes he hadn’t come back, shame and wonderment dripping from every line. When the war began the next day HBO had
Top Gun
scheduled and the radio was back to normal.