Bob Dylan (22 page)

Summer 1991

 

Bob Dylan’s
the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961- 1991
(Columbia) contains a shadow version of his entire career, embedded within fifty-eight performances. They range from a tune taped in a Minnesota hotel room in 1961 to an outtake from the 1989 album
Oh Mercy;
along the way, three CDs collect concert recordings, alternate takes, rehearsals, and publishing demos, programmed roughly year by year. A lot of it is dross, a history of unfinished ideas or untranscended clichés, a book of footnotes. Other parts work as a series of interruptions—of the whole, of whatever you happen to be doing—moments that leap out of the chronology and stop it cold, turn it back on itself. Some seem to need no context, and to make none; some seem to fall together and make a story.

Beginning with the fourth track:

 

1) “No More Auction Block,” from a show at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, late 1962. The song was composed in antebellum times by escaped slaves who had reached the end of the Underground Railroad, in Nova Scotia. As “Many Thousands Gone,” it was probably first taken down by Union soldiers in the middle of the Civil War, in 1862, precisely a century before Bob Dylan mixed it into an otherwise undistinguished set comprising mostly New York folk-scene commonplaces: “Barbara Allen,” “Motherless Children,” “The Cuckoo,” and so on.

The number opens here with a few hurried but isolated guitar notes, which instantly promise a weight no other song sung this night will achieve. Throughout, the guitar sound suppresses melody; instead it produces a strange hum, maybe the sound history makes when for a few minutes it dissolves. Not the acting a singer might do, or impersonation, but a transforming empathy breaks down all distance, not of persona, or race, but of time.

When Dylan sings, “No more / Auction block / For me”—and then, much more slowly, “No more / No more”—there’s no reference to any symbol. The auction block is a thing, you can touch it, people are standing on it: “Many thousands gone.” The hesitations in the singing are so eloquent, so suggestive, that they generate images far beyond those of “the driver’s lash” or “pint of salt” in the lyric. I thought of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, black members of the 1968 U.S. Olympic team, standing on the victory blocks in Mexico City after taking gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash, each with a bowed head and a raised fist in a black glove. A small protest against racism, a silent no to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and it caused a firestorm: the men were all but arrested, and then sent back. The picture of the two of them that was flashed around the world seemed to terrify the nation; listening now to a twenty-one-year-old Jewish folkie as he sang “No More Auction Block” six years before that event, you can feel the reason why. In the symbolic matrix their gestures made, Smith and Carlos suddenly knew, and everyone else just as suddenly understood, what they were standing on.

Skipping twelve tracks:

 

2) “Who Killed Davey Moore?” from a concert at Carnegie Hall, 26 October 1963. Fashionable bleeding-heart pieties about a boxer who died after a fight with Sugar Ramos—in 1971 Dylan himself would be present for the first Ali-Frazier match—but also songwriting as intricate and satisfying as Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield’s “Calendar Girl.” With referee, fans, manager, gambler, sportswriter, and opponent each stepping forward in ritual itwasn’t-me denial, the lyric is almost all dialogue; the filler between the lines (“It’s hard to say, it’s hard to tell”) can seem like genius. You can sense a new energy here: the thrill of getting it right.

Skipping one track:

 

3) “Moonshiner,” outtake from
The Times They Are A-Changin’,
12 August 1963. “I hit all these notes,” Dylan said in 1965, in reply to
an interviewer’s mention of Caruso, “and I can hold my breath three times as long if I want to.” This Appalachian ballad—five minutes of suspension, single notes from the singer’s throat and harmonica held in the air as if to come down would be to bring death with them—must have been what he meant.

Skipping one track:

 

4) “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” piano demo, 1963. Dylan presses hard, right through the song’s instant clichés. Times are changing; events are physically present; the force of history is driving this performance, and you might feel like getting out of the way.

Skipping one track:

 

5) “Seven Curses,” outtake from
The Times They Are A-Changin’,
6 August 1963. A horse thief is caught, his daughter tries to buy his life, the judge demands a night with her instead, she pays, her father hangs anyway—seemingly set and written in feudal Britain (that’s where the melody comes from), this is a simpler, more elemental version of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” perhaps Dylan’s greatest protest song, but with the position of the narrator impossible to place. The resentments and hopes of the preceding tunes of oppression and rebellion, “No More Auction Block,” “Who Killed Davey Moore?” “Moonshiner,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” or others someone else might choose from
the bootleg series,
all are present in this performance, but with an ending: there is no such thing as change. That old melody turns out not to be the skeleton of the song, but its flesh; it carries its own, unspoken words, which are “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Skipping six tracks:

 

6) “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” outtake from
Highway 61 Revisited,
15 June 1965. Chicago blues with a Howlin’ Wolf laugh. All rhythmic hipness, especially the first time Dylan says, “Al
right,
” investing the words with more meaning—more stealth, more motionless
Brando-Dean menace—than any of the number’s real lyrics.

Skipping one track:

 

7) “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,”
Highway 61 Revisited
alternate, 15 June 1965. As if he’d waited one year too many to shake it up and put the Beatles in their place, a headlong rush. And after a minute or so, a heedless extremism, as with the last minute of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”—which, when it was released in 1967, sounded too much like Bob Dylan was singing it.

Skipping one track:

 

8) “She’s Your Lover Now,” outtake from
Blonde on Blonde,
21 January 1965. An unforgiving, barely coherent rant, but less about the unnamed she than the rumble that repeatedly builds up to an explosive convergence of guitar, piano, bass, drums, organ, words, and vocal—a convergence that never arrives in the same place twice. As for the piano, liner notes credit both Paul Griffin (who played on “Like a Rolling Stone” and Don McLean’s “American Pie”) and Richard Manuel, but it must be Dylan. No other pianist could follow his singing; no singer could follow this piano without playing it.

Skipping twenty-one tracks:

 

9) “Blind Willie McTell,” outtake from
Infidels,
5 May 1983. Between “No More Auction Block” and “She’s Your Lover Now” there are barely three years; between “She’s Your Lover Now” and this song, more than seventeen. Seventeen years of good work, bad work, endless comebacks, divorce, musical confusion, a terrible search for a subject producing hopeless songs about Legionnaires’ disease and Catfish Hunter, a retreat into simple careerism, and, most shockingly, conversion to a particularly suburban version of fundamentalist Christianity and then reemergence as a Full Gospel preacher. “You came in like the wind,” he sang to Jesus in 1981, on
“You Changed My Life,” a
bootleg series
number: “Like Errol Flynn.” And went out like him, too, maybe; with three explicitly born-again albums behind him, Dylan seemed to come plummeting back to the world with
Infidels,
and critics climbed on for another comeback, a return to form: “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” and “Union Sundown” sounded like . . . protest songs!

Perhaps they were, but “Blind Willie McTell” is much more. It turns all the old, sainted rebels and victims parading across
Infidels
as across Dylan’s whole songbook to dust, then blows them away. Led by Dylan on piano, with Mark Knopfler in his steps on guitar, this piece claims the story: the singer finds not evil in the world but that the world is evil. The whole world is an auction block; all are bidders, all are for sale: “Smell that sweet magnolia bloomin’ / See the ghost of slavery ships.”

The song is detailed, the language is secular, the mood is final. It’s the last day before the Last Days, except for one thing, one weird, indelible non sequitur closing every verse, every scene of corruption and failure, like a gong: “Nobody can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell.” So the prophet answers his own prophecy with a mystery not even he can explain; the singer sums up and transcends his entire career; and the listener, still in the world, turns off the stereo, walks out of the house, and goes looking for an answer.

10) Blind Willie McTell,
Last Session
(Prestige, 1960). Willie McTell was born in Georgia in 1898 or 1901; he died there in 1959. He first recorded in 1927, and ended his life frequenting a lot behind the Blue Lantern Club in Atlanta, where couples parked to drink and have sex; McTell would walk from car to car, trying to find someone to pay him for a tune. In 1956 a record store owner convinced him to sit down before a tape recorder, and he talked and sang his life and times.

July 1991

 

Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” moves in a circle of images—tent meetings of itinerant holiness preachers, antebellum plantations, the slave driver’s lash, chain gangs, painted women, drunken rakes—and it calls up many more. You might think of Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal:
the road traveled early in the film by Max von Sydow’s thirteenth-century knight, back from the Crusades to find God on his own ground. Instead he finds plague and the Angel of Death, mad monks and a line of flagellants, torturers and a child witch on a huge pile of sticks and branches, ready to be burned. The witch is convinced of her own guilt, and the knight accepts her punishment, even though he understands that it is his homeland, his realm of knowable good and evil, that’s guilty, even if it’s a guilt that his world, with curses laid on it six hundred years later by a filmmaker, will never have to pay for. But to say all of this, to say any of it, to dive straight into the world made by “Blind Willie McTell,” is to violate the sense of time that governs the tune—to go into it too fast.

The song dates to 1983. It was a discarded track from
Infidels,
Dylan’s first commercial step away from the born-again Christianity—the shocking apostasy of one born and raised a Jew—that had ruled his previous three records:
Slow Train Coming, Saved,
and
Shot of Love,
increasingly lifeless works that had all but destroyed a subjective, critical voice with the imposition of a received religious ideology. “How does it feel,” the Christian songs seemed to ask, “to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown,” and the songs answered: it feels like perdition. Still, despite its title,
Infidels
seemed secular; it was full of what Dylan had once called finger-pointing songs. War was bad; capitalism was bad;
Infidels
was a hit. Critics approved and the radio played it. Listening now, you can imagine why “Blind Willie
McTell” was put aside. It would have dissolved the certainties and rancor of the rest of the music, upended it, given it the lie.

Still too fast. “Blind Willie McTell” begins slowly, with the hesitations, doubts, but finally irreducible willfulness that defines the blues. It is in fact just a rehearsal. An earlier, full-band recording had been dumped; this sounds like an attempt to find the song Dylan must have heard inside the song. He hits D flat on the piano, in the Dorian mode, which communicates like a minor key, somber and fearful. The mode takes him back to the old ballads and country blues that shaped his first music, and back to the invention of Christian music as it’s known, to the beginnings of Gregorian chant and the piety loaded into it. There are following steps from guitarist Mark Knopfler, but this you barely register. What you feel is absence, as if Dylan is for some reason refusing to follow his first note with whatever notes it might imply. Then he hits E flat, then D flat again, and the song gets under way.

No knowledge of musical notation or musical history is needed to catch the drama in the moment. The message is clear because it is coded in more than a millennium of musical culture, high and low, vulgar and sanctified:
this is it.
This is the last word.

Who was, who is, Bob Dylan? In the rush of the mid-1960s, it was obvious that he was, and performed as, someone who was always a step ahead of the times. (“I’m only about twenty minutes ahead,” Dylan told John Lennon at that time, “so I won’t get far.”) In late 1965, as the protest politics of the decade were hardening into slogans, he argued for the substitution of dada over directives on placards (“ . . . cards with pictures of the Jack of Diamonds and the Ace of Spades on them. Pictures of mules, maybe words . . . ‘camera,’ ‘microphone,’ ‘loose,’ just words—names of some famous people”). In 1968 he countered the Beatles’ super-psychedelic
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
with music that sounded as if it could have been made by a particularly literary and reflective Hank Williams in 1953, just a year before Elvis Presley cut his first singles, assuming Hank Williams wasn’t already dead. But today one has no idea who Bob Dylan is. He no longer beats the Jesus
drum, but the echoes are there in any interview: his revulsion at wanton women and loose desire, his insistence on someone else’s sin. Reading the conversations, the nice career talk suddenly shaken down, you can almost see the eyes that once seemed to freeze an epoch in an image go cult blank. But this is not what happens in “Blind Willie McTell.”