Bob Dylan (29 page)

You might figure that if the era wasn’t over by 1997, it never would be. That didn’t explain why what should have been straight news—diagnostic reports, information on the cancellation of Dylan’s then-imminent U.K. and European tours—was freighted with preemptive obituaries. In paper after paper, lengthy career summaries were appended to the medical updates. Some dailies ran full-page essays probing the likely longevity of the influence of the Voice of a Generation, if not the man, or the Generation itself. But it wasn’t just in the U.K. American papers, too, put out the call for obit writers. The network news shows wanted critics—not doctors—to draw deep breaths and wrap it all up. Showing its usual flair for matching the slick with the glib,
Newsweek
caught the mood with surpassing vulgarity, burning off the veil of solemnity adopted elsewhere: “The scary news blowin’ in the wind last week was that Bob Dylan might be dying . . . Bob Dylan’s heart in danger? It sounded like a death knell for the counterculture.” You can almost hear them salivating, can’t you? But why this breathless anticipation of a death that in truth took place long ago?

Part of it, I think, is a fear that a singer who once seemed able to translate the vague and shifting threats and warnings of his time into a language that was instantly and overwhelmingly understood
might be able to do it again. Part of it has to do with what Gerri Hirshey, in a recent
Rolling Stone
story on Dylan’s son Jakob (in the top ten with his band, the Wallflowers, for all of the spring of this year) called the “foolish cultural myopia that has long plagued this country: We don’t know what to make of artists who have the audacity to outlive their own revolutions.” There’s something more, though. As Dylan hinted in the basement tune “This Wheel’s on Fire”—theme song, rather frighteningly, for the BBC/ Comedy Central series
Absolutely Fabulous,
where it’s repeatedly keyed to Julie Driscoll’s sly, certain reading of the line “If your mem’ry serves you well”—artists who stick around after their putative moment has passed are troublesome reminders of promises their audiences, perhaps more than the artists themselves, have failed to keep. So you can almost imagine the elegiac, funereal editorial cartoon, picturing a scattering of ashes and a caption: “Now Bob Dylan, too, is blowin’ in the wind . . .”

Empowered media arrogance and arrant media stupidity bucked up against the perhaps little-known but immovable fact that, as this near-celebration was taking place, Bob Dylan, no matter how ill—he did say, on leaving the hospital, “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon”—remained not merely a real person, but an artist doing work that ranks with his very best. Throughout the 1990s he has been reshaping his music, honing a tight, cool little band, clearing his long-blocked throat with two dank, vitriolic, surreptitiously ambitious albums of traditional songs, and reinventing himself onstage, not as a prophet or a careerist or a ruined reminder of better times, but as a guitar player. His shows began to jump: when I last saw him, two years ago, the long shout that kicked off his first number was like a flag unfurling.

The man so hopefully buried, dead or alive, as a creature of the past, as a prisoner of a counterculture he left behind long before it disappeared on its own, has spent the better part of seven years biding his time. Earlier this year he recorded a new album, his first collection of original songs since 1990—unlikely to be released, I’d imagine, until Jakob Dylan makes room for it on the charts. If it does come out, it should be the first Dylan album in well over
twenty years likely to get whoever might hear it wondering what in the world it is.

The record is not like any other Dylan has released, though the music isn’t unlike some he’s made: it has a dirt-floor feeling, with loose ends and fraying edges in the songs, songs that sound both unfinished and final. The music seems more found than made, the prosaic driving out the artful. It all comes to a head with “Highlands,” a flat, unorchestrated, undramatized monologue, wistful and broken, bitter and amused, that describes both a day and a life. The song, as I heard it one afternoon this spring in a Sony Records office in Los Angeles, is about an older man who lives in one of Ed Kienholz’s awful furnished rooms in the rotting downtown of some fading city—Cincinnati, Hollywood, the timeless, all-American Nowheresville you see in David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet
—getting up and going for a walk, maybe for the first time in weeks. In the course of the song he recounts his adventures, recalls the people he met and those he avoided. In a certain sense nothing happens; from another perspective, a life is resolved. The song is someone else’s dream, but as Dylan sings, you are dreaming it. And you can’t wake up.

“How long was that?” I asked the man who’d left me with the tape. “Seven minutes? Eight?” “Seventeen,” he said. This is from the man so many were ready to bury: a singer who, at the age of fifty-six, no longer a factor in the pop equation, can still beat the clock.

September 1997

 

9) Midway Stadium/Ticketmaster: advertisement for upcoming concert (
City Pages,
Minneapolis, June 18) You know how in the ads for once-mighty rock heroes now reduced to playing local bars you’ve
never heard of, the promoter always sticks the title of the one big hit under the marquee name, since you might remember the song even if you’ve forgotten who did it: EVERY MOTHER’S SON (“COME ON DOWN TO MY BOAT”)—GINO’S NO COVER ONE NITE ONLY? But this was a shock, and for a show at the Minnesota State Fair, no less:

Not to mention that it’s “Blowin’,” not “Blowing.”

 

October 1997

 

 

10) Bob Dylan:
Time Out of Mind
(Columbia). A western. It starts with Clint Eastwood’s face at the end of
Unforgiven,
then turns around and heads back east like bad weather.

2 November 1997

 

The challenge of Bob Dylan’s
Time Out of Mind
—his first collection of self-written songs since 1990—is to take it at face value. There is no point searching for autobiographical confessions (“It’s a breakup album, right?” said a friend, referring to all the tunes about lost love and a broken heart) or messages of hope. This is as bleak and blasted as any work a major artist in any field—and by major artist I mean an artist with something, a reputation, an audience,
to lose—has offered in ages.
Time Out of Mind
is hedged only by craft, by the performer’s commitment to his material. The world may be meaningless; he has no choice but to try to shape that void.

At first the music is shocking in its bitterness, in its refusal of comfort or kindness. Then it settles in as something like a conventional set of songs, and then a curve in one of them—the finality of a life left behind in the way Dylan gets rid of the seemingly traditional lines “I been to Sugartown I shook the sugar down” in “Tryin’ to Get to You,” perhaps, or the quiet drift of “Highlands,” a nearly seventeen-minute number so unassuming and mysterious you feel it could have unwound its ball of string over the entire length of the record without exhausting itself—upends any casual listening and throws every bit of word-play or muffled testimony into harsh relief, revealing a tale seemingly complete and whole.

The story opens with the singer, the tale-teller, walking dead streets and ends with him walking the streets of an almost deserted city: “Must be a holiday,” he mutters to himself, as if he could care less if it is or not. Images of homelessness and endless wandering drive song after song. Sometimes that motif suggests a man who doesn’t want a home (“I know plenty of people,” he tells you at one point, “put me up for a day or two”); sometimes it calls up the tramp armies of the Great Depression, or the film director in Preston Sturges’s
Sullivan’s Travels,
disguised as a hobo, riding the boxcar like a railroad bum in order to meet the masses, the dispossessed and the defeated—and finding that the rags of poverty and anonymity are easier to put on than to take off, that they don’t merely hide the signs of wealth and celebrity, but dissolve them.

As in that old movie, made as the Depression was about to disappear into the maw of the Second World War, when
Time Out of Mind
plays, another country comes into view. It’s less the island of one man’s broken heart than a sort of half-world, a devastated, abandoned landscape where anyone might end up at any time, so long as that time is now.

This is a land as still as the plains, its flatness broken only by a violence of tone or the violence of syncopation, of hard truths or a
band’s rhythms rushing up on each other like people running out of a burning house. “I thought some of ’em were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’em all,” Dylan sings in “Cold Irons Bound,” letting the whiplashed rhythm carry his words around their corner. On that rhythm, the word “all” isn’t simply emphasized; the drama of
Time Out of Mind
is in its moments of queerly shared vehemence, when a solitary seems to speak for anyone who might hear him, maybe especially for those who won’t, but that vehemence is never obvious. Here the whole line is not stressed but swung—“
Wrrrrong
about ’em
alllll
”—with the first word tipped up, the last tipped down, an organ sweeping up the song like wind. For a moment, the landscape—which from song to song takes names, “Missouri,” “New Orleans,” “Baltimore,” “Boston-town”—is erased by the movement taking place upon it, and the singer moves out of earshot; when he returns nothing has changed.

The country that emerges is very old, and yet fresh and in sharp focus, apparently capable of endless renewal. At the same time the place is very new, and all but worn out: “I got new eyes,” Dylan sings coolly, in one of the deadliest lines of his writing life: “Everything seems far away.” Verbal, melodic, and rhythmic signatures from traditional blues and folk songs fit into the songs on
Time Out of Mind
as naturally, seemingly as inevitably as breaths—say in the way Dock Boggs, standing on the railroad platform in his “Danville Girl” in 1927, passes the song’s cheap cigar to the singer on the platform in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” That the reappearance of the forgotten past in an empty present is a talisman of
Time Out of Mind
is sealed by the art Dylan has chosen to be imprinted directly onto his disc: the “Viva-tonal/Electrical Process” Columbia label from the late 1920s, a label that ran one series for “Race” or Negro recordings, another for “Old Time” or country.

Dylan’s record spins on that label in the way certain of its choruses and verses seem to write themselves, tossed off with a throwaway gruffness that suggests Dylan knows that on hearing half of a line the listener will automatically complete it even before Dylan himself has sung it: “That’s all right, mama, you / Do what you
gotta do,” as he drawls in “Million Miles.” But the label also spins backwards, until nothing on it can be read. As many incidents in the music seem to come out of nowhere, the nowhere that is both the present and the future of the country where the story Dylan is telling takes place: “Maybe in the next life,” Dylan says elsewhere in “Million Miles,” “I’ll be able to hear myself think.” Over and over, with resignation and sly, twisting humor, with the flair of a Georgia string band or the dead eyes of a gravedigger, the tale-teller poses the same question, sometimes almost smiling when he asks if “everything is as hollow as it seems.”

So often, listening to the songs on
Time Out of Mind
is like watching people pass through revolving doors: the ambiance is that abstract and vague and untouchable. You have as much right to expect someone to reappear as quickly as she vanished as to expect never to see her again. That’s how it is in the central incident in “Highlands,” where a man walks into a restaurant, empty except for a waitress. They banter, almost flirt, and in an instant—an instant of fatigue, of boredom, of his or her memory of too many instants just like it, any of that or just a single word uttered with an edge it shouldn’t carry—the mood dies. The room, the city outside, the nation around it, its entire history and all of the pieces of music and dramatic scenes that so quietly enter and depart from this one—Josh White’s “One Meat Ball,” Skip James’s 1931 “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” Jack Nicholson’s diner dialogue in
Five Easy Pieces,
Dylan’s own “Desolation Row” cut down by Robert Burns’s half-original folk song “Farewell to the Highlands”—all of that, from song to nation, turns hostile and cold. For a moment the waitress turns her back, and the air in the restaurant is now so mean you’re as relieved as the singer when he quietly slips out of his chair. You can feel yourself tensing your muscles as he tenses his. Yet the singer barely has to go out the door, or the song down its Boston street, for you to imagine that this might have been the last conversation the tale-teller ever had—or, in Boston, on the ground where his nation began, the last conversation to even begin to suggest the possibility of a story that hasn’t been told before.

That is what is new in
Time Out of Mind,
and in the country it traces as if it were a map you can read once and then throw away, because you won’t be able to forget it whether you want to or not. Though crafted out of fragments and phrases and riffs far older than anyone living, bits of folk languages that joke and snarl as if for the first time, this is a picture of a country that has used itself up, and the peculiar thrill of
Time Out of Mind
is in its completeness, its complete refusal to doubt itself.

This new story does not come out of nowhere, or at the least it is not a solitary voice in the wilderness. The same cynical, damaged, sardonic, absolutely certain acceptance of one’s own nihilism has been all over Bill Pullman’s face in the last few years, in
The Last Seduction, Malice, Lost Highway,
in Wim Wenders’s recent
The End of Violence
—for just as
Time Out of Mind
is an end-of-the-American-century record, closing with a fantasy of a retreat to the Scottish highlands, to the border country where the oldest ballads first came to light, Bill Pullman, in these films, is the ultimate end-of-the-American-century man. His face may have the cast of knowledge as a movie begins, or it may take most of a movie for the sheen of unsurprise to settle over his features. He may walk with the looseness of the already dead, as in
The Last Seduction,
or shatter before your eyes, as in
Lost Highway
—regardless, as in
The End of Violence
and as with the narrator in
Time Out of Mind,
the fact that in some essential way the story he has to tell ended before he even took the stage only increases his wariness.