Bob Dylan (27 page)

I think the great cultural challenge of the next few years is going to be to distinguish between speech that’s true and speech that’s false. And there’s going to be a lot more of the latter than the former, coming from all of us here in this room. Thank you.

 

Mario Savio’s speech in Sproul Plaza on 2 December 1964 was collected on
Is Freedom Academic? A documentary of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley
(KPFA-Pacifica Radio LP, 1965). Film of his speech can be found on YouTube.

 

Bob Dylan,
Long Distance Operator
(Wanted Man bootleg, recorded at Berkeley Community Theatre, 4 December 1965).

January 1997

 

5) Bob Dylan: “All Along the Watchtower,” from
The Concert for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
(Columbia). For the moment, the only licensed, recorded proof that what Dylan and his shocker of a combo (Winston Watson, Tony Garnier, Bucky Baxter, John Jackson) were doing on stage in 1995 was more than an illusion—and, until
Having a Rave Up with Bob Dylan
appears, the only proof that reinventing yourself in your fifties as a lead guitarist embracing syncopation as the source of all values is a brilliant idea.

 

Concert for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
(Columbia, 1996). With one song each from Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Johnny Cash, Booker T. and the MGs, Sam Moore, and Bob Dylan, and three by Melissa Etheridge.

at the conference Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky,
Dia Center for the Arts, New York
14 February 1997

 

When Elvis Costello released “All This Useless Beauty,” the title song of a 1996 album, the song went right past me; I didn’t really hear it. It wasn’t until Costello put the song out again, in a live version recorded in May 1996 in San Francisco, when he was doing dates around the country accompanied only by his pianist, and then in a version he’d asked the band Lush to record, that I began to hear the song. I was hearing it—particularly the Lush version—as the theme song for this conference, or the anti-theme song, because in this song, stars do stand still. Time stops.

According to “All This Useless Beauty,” time stopped a long time ago. The song begins in a museum. “This is song about a woman who’s walking in a beautiful gallery,” Costello said when he introduced the tune in San Francisco. “It’s full of pictures of classical antiquity and idealized beauty. And she looks across to her less than fabulous, late-twentieth-century lover—and she goes, ‘
awwwwwwww
. . .’” Costello sings the song full-throated, the words all rounded. I ran into him a few years ago in the Accademia in Florence, both of us staring at Michelangelo’s
David
—I can’t hear Costello sing this song, this song about all this useless beauty piled up in a museum, without picturing a setting that perfect, that marbled. In the San Francisco performance, Costello even sang a chorus in Italian. You can imagine for yourself what paintings the woman in Costello’s gallery might be looking at—I see Pre-Raphaelite scenes, like Edward Burne-Jones’s
The Golden Stairs,
with a score of Hellenic maidens descending toward some unseen ceremony, or his
Tree of Forgiveness,
with Eve clutching Adam and Adam desperately trying to escape from her embrace. Whatever she’s looking at, in the sing-songy, up-and-down-the-stairs cadence of “All This Useless Beauty,” the woman in the gallery,
Costello says, “imagines how she might have lived / Back when legends and history collide.”

It’s a striking line, thrown away in the song—Costello just lets it drift out of the story he’s barely telling—and the sense of wonder in the words, their air of loss and surrender, matches Bob Dylan’s comment on Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley. “Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature,” Dylan said, and those words are as good as any he’s written in two decades. Those words are so balanced and explosive, they turn the next phrases of his comment, which aren’t bad, into clichés: “in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible.”

This is what stopped time for me. “When legends and history collide”—when what we believe to be hard facts and what we know to be dimly remembered and barely describable ideals go to war against each other, or turn into each other. I think that’s what both Costello and Dylan were talking about: history turning into legend, heaven turning into nature, and vice versa, in a painting of an ancient forest or in a new kind of rhythm and blues record. But the promise is there only to be taken away. In this song, the time “when legends and history collide,” that time of all-things-are-possible, is gone, if it ever was. “Those days are recalled on the gallery wall,” the song goes on, but the woman in the gallery was born too late; she missed those days. She missed it—that’s exactly the word Costello uses, like some sixties person telling someone about Woodstock: “I was there, man, and you
missed
it.” Now all the woman has is a fact, a hard fact in the form of a soft fact, her lump of a boyfriend slumped at her side with all the ideals of the past, recalled on the gallery wall, mocking her. She waits, the singer says, “for passion or humor to strike,” and nothing happens. It’s the collision of history and legend that produced all the useless beauty on the walls—useless because now its only function is to remind whoever looks at it of what’s no longer possible, if you’re stupid enough to believe that anything, or rather everything, ever was.

Costello sings the song as a tragedy; a beautiful tragedy. The irony burns off as he goes on. The words—taken slowly, carefully,
as if something in them, or him, might break—seem to shake in his throat on the choruses. It’s painful. But as Lush do the song, it’s altogether different. Over twenty years, a whole constellation of singer’s singers has taken up residence in Elvis Costello’s voice: Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Sarah Vaughan, Dusty Springfield, Lotte Lenya. When he goes all the way into a piece of music, it lifts off the ground; in a way, it goes onto that gallery wall, keeping good company with whatever useless beauty is up there at any given time. As a punk he was always a classicist; he was always too much of a record fan to let the world get in the way of his sound for too long. Lush is a much younger band, guitarists and singers Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi leading a two-man rhythm section. As a pop group they’ve always looked for the punk in their sound, and on “All This Useless Beauty” they find it. There’s no pose, no preening; what they do with the song makes Costello seem like an actor. Like that moment in the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” when the female singer comes in, earnestly telling her story in a manner so naturalistic it’s an effort to remind yourself that she’s singing, what Lush create with “All This Useless Beauty” is the shock of realism.

The tragic cast Costello gives his tales of the worlds that are now behind us is what lifts, what beautifies, his own tale of useless beauty. But Anderson and Berenyi take their places in the gallery like schoolgirls who’ve been brought in on a class trip—for the tenth time. They’re too smart for their own good; that’s what’s always getting them into trouble on trips like this. They’re suspicious, they think too much, they’re always asking questions—and so what was tragic in Costello’s original is now just bitter. These girls, acting out the most ordinary, everyday events in this gallery, in this song, know what the idealized images of classical antiquity are for. Where Costello feels loss, Anderson and Berenyi see a trick—and their thin, reedy, determined voices, pressing through the tune word by word, nothing at all taken for granted, say one thing. This stuff on the wall—do you think you can fool us with that?

A whole world of mystification opens up out of this performance, a whole social con, or a quick, frozen glimpse of an entire society organized around a con: the con of beauty, of idealism, the con that takes reality away from the life you actually live, every day, and delivers that reality up onto a wall, or into the past, for safekeeping. There are moments of coyness in Costello’s performance; there are none in Lush’s. Listen to it more than a few times, and in its restraint, in the way it makes ordinary talk out of Costello’s elegant chorus, Lush’s “All This Useless Beauty” is as hard, as resistant, as betrayed, as anything in “Anarchy in the U.K.” And yet—when you’re sitting around in the limbo of the present age, dreaming of times when history and legend collided, waiting for passion or humor to strike, one of the things you’re waiting for is a song like this, a song that can change shape and color according to who’s singing it, a song that is like a magic lamp. Here Costello’s version and Lush’s collide; so do the past and the present, the tragic and the commonplace, beauty as a useless rebuke and beauty as an inevitable by-product of pressing down on some stray incident or emotion until it seems it can contain the whole of life. Pressing down—that’s all the woman in the gallery does with her disappointment over her boyfriend. With Emma Anderson’s disembodied contralto floating behind Miki Berenyi’s gritty, plain-speech lead on the choruses—with idealism, a legend of how things should or could be, floating behind hard facts, behind anyone’s history of everyday defeats, insults, humiliations—the song is beautiful, and only as useless as your life. It reveals itself as a song about what’s missing when a mythic dimension is missing from life—and what’s missing is a sense of being part of a story that’s bigger than yourself, a story that can take you out of yourself, outside of the pettiness and repetition of your life, circumscribed as it might be by whatever city or town you live in. The fact is, though, that history and legends collide every day, and we are always part of the collision.

Take what is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive of pop myths: the myth of rock ’n’ roll as an agent of social or even revolutionary
transformation. As a myth, it isn’t necessarily a false story; whether it is or not, it’s a big story, a story with room in it—room for whoever might want to join the story, for whatever beginning or ending one might want to try to put on it. This story has been told many times; depending upon intellectual or political fashion, it’s told with aggression or apology, hubris or embarrassment, presented as a testament of ambition or naïveté. Recently I came across the most extreme version of the story I’ve ever seen, in
Twigs of Folly,
an unpublished memoir by the historian Robert Cantwell, the author of
When We Were Good,
by a long ways the finest book on the folk revival of the fifties and sixties.

One of Cantwell’s themes is that of a type he names “the remorseless spitting American.” He takes the phrase from Fanny Trollope, an Englishwoman who, visiting the new United States in 1830, found herself amazed by the new democratic race she encountered: rounders and roughnecks and women who lived in dugout houses—people who, in Cantwell’s description, had made the leap from “all men are created equal” to “all men are equal.”

For Cantwell, these are the true carriers of the myth of equality, down through the decades: not all of them lawbreakers, exactly, but surely a line of moral outlaws, all of them in some final manner uncivilizable. They scorn all differences and all claims to superiority. They are the romantic, the resentful, the heroic or petty outsider Americans who are nevertheless the only real Americans: the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, John Henry and Calamity Jane, Mike Fink and Jack Johnson, Railroad Bill and Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Brooks and Marlon Brando, James Dean and Charles Starkweather. To give the story over to Cantwell:

Put aside any thoughts as to whether this myth, this story Cantwell is telling, or retelling, is true or false, a vision of wholeness or self-congratulatory generational nonsense. Whatever it is, as Cantwell sets it out it is a story you can become part of, that can situate you precisely where history and legends collide, can help you perhaps to define your own place in your society, or outside of it. It’s a complex story—a tale of debts coming due, of the return of the repressed, and much more—but first and last it is a myth of liberation, of legacy and starting over all mixed up together.

You could join this myth by listening to or arguing about or buying records, or writing about them, or making them yourself, by aligning yourself for or against this or that pop figure—or by publicly professing allegiance to one such figure while, secretly, maybe in a secret you half kept from yourself, you identified most completely with a figure mocked and scorned by everyone you knew. This was a myth you could join by allowing it to judge the
choices you made: between friends, between going to college or not going, studying one thing and not another, between clothes you put on and those you set aside—the choice you made, finally, over just what country, as you defined it, you would be part of, if you were to be part of any country at all.