Bob Dylan (31 page)

18 & 19) Fastbacks:
In America—Live in Seattle 1988
(Lost and Found, 1991) and Martina McBride: “Independence Day” (RCA, 1993). Patriotism from Seattle and Nashville: “Who says the government’s on your side?” a woman asks flatly as another fills her lungs with the realization that the government doesn’t matter at all—not on home ground, where “The Declaration of Independence makes a difference” (Herman Melville).

 

20) Bill Parsons: “The All American Boy” (Fraternity, 1958). Elvis meets Uncle Sam: “Ah, I’m gonna cut yo’ hair off . . .”

 

21) Geto Boys:
We Can’t Be Stopped
(Rap-A-Lot, 1991). Inside the never-ending pageant of self-congratulation that is white America, there’s a black hole—a few blocks of Houston’s Fifth Ward—where life is so unfixed, it’s not that bodies can’t find their souls, it’s that souls can’t find their bodies.

 

22) Bob Dylan:
John Wesley Harding
(Columbia, 1968). A 1950s black-and-white western as staged by an 1870s minstrel troupe made up of 17th-century Puritans and veterans of the Revolution.

 

23) Alexander “Skip” Spence:
Oar
(Columbia, 1969). Another western: cowboys sit around a campfire and sing old cowboy songs. The only thing bigger than the land, they think, is the sky. The vastness of the nation overwhelms them. Then it swallows them up.

 

24) Sly and the Family Stone:
There’s a Riot Goin’ On
(Epic, 1971). There was, anyway. This is the sound left when it’s over and nobody wants to talk about what happened, and what didn’t.

 

25) X:
Los Angeles
(Slash, 1980). They shot Philip Marlowe up with heroin. He stayed on the case. He stayed on the needle.

 

26) James Brown: “Night Train” (King, 1962). Still on the rails.

 

27) The Stax/Volt Revue:
Vol. 1, Live in London
(Stax, 1967). “Hold On, I’m Comin’” is a reenactment—not of the record, but of V-E Day.

 

28) Firesign Theatre:
How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All
(Columbia, 1969). Oh, you didn’t hear? The U.S.
lost
World War II. But hey, if you lived here, you’d be home by now.

 

29) Laurie Anderson: “O Superman” (One Ten, 1981). If there were a home, that is. There’s not, a woman says, so softly, so carefully, each word clipped to its note. Maybe long ago, on the plains, on the river . . . now there is only power, and we’re mere figments of its aura, a dream that doesn’t need us, a dream so complete we’d dream it ourselves if we could.

 

30) Sam Cooke: “A Change Is Gonna Come” (RCA, 1965). Cooke was dead when his answer record to Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” appeared on the radio. The new country he demanded—an old country, really, that promised land, without the catch, without separation, without exclusion—flared up with the passion in his voice, in his whole body; then it faded away. The song remains a rebuke to the decades that followed it, passing by the tune the way you pass a bum on the street.

August 1998

 

Reading to a small group of listeners at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, Scott Spencer began his seventh novel at the beginning. It’s 1973, and Billy Rothschild, the first-person narrator of
The Rich Man’s Table,
is nine. He and his best friend, neither of whom has
ever met his father, are on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village, playing their favorite game: “Is That Your Dad?” One boy points out a man on the street—could be a rotting junkie, could be a handsome painter—asks the other, “Is that your Dad?” and the kid who’s it has to go up to the man and
ask
him.

When I read the book—putatively about a young man’s quest to force his world-famous, beyond-legendary father to acknowledge him as his son—this struck me as a terrifying premise. Just as Spike Lee knows how to make you watch, Spencer knows how to make words move. The boys get the game going, Spencer carries you into it, and it seems a lot scarier than ringolevio. What’s the kid going to say? How’s the man going to react? And what if—what if it’s him, whoever he is? It couldn’t be, of course, but what if it is? What do you do then?

At Black Oak, Spencer didn’t push the story, he unrolled it. Nervous on the page, the story as Spencer told it was all about the weightlessness of boyhood. A lot of writers on book tours go either flat or florid as they back away from what they’ve written, until you lose all connection between the person before you and the words coming out of his or her mouth, or they pump up the significance of every comma and period, unashamedly in love with the magic they’ve made. Spencer seemed at home with his story; he read as if he trusted it, which is to say he read as if he trusted his readers.

This day, as Billy and his friend play their game, the mark comes across: whoever he is, he somehow knows Billy, calls him by name. So Billy rushes home to his ur-bohemian mother, Esther Rothschild, and she realizes it’s time: she’s going to have to give up all the vague, phony stories she’s doled out over the years about why there’s never been a father around and tell her son the truth. So she does. “It’s Luke,” she says. “Luke Fairchild . . . He was my boyfriend for a couple of years. More like three, I guess.” Billy gets down on his knees and pulls out one of his mother’s old LPs, and there it is, there they are on the cover: “Luke and Esther were hurrying along Bleecker Street, with the wind at their back, lifting the
collars of their matching buckskin jackets, whipping their hair around. They seemed entirely happy and in love. They wore boots, jeans, their bodies exuded confidence and satisfaction. Luke had a guitar case slung over his left shoulder; Esther carried a string bag filled with oranges and a skinny loaf of bread from Zito’s . . .”

The Rich Man’s Table
remains compulsively readable after this—waiting in line at another bookstore, I saw a stack, picked up a copy, found my place, and read half a page before my turn at the counter—as a comic book. Any reader likely to be drawn to
The Rich Man’s Table,
pulled in by its jacket photo of a mid-sixties Bob Dylan lookalike coyly holding a cape over the lower half of his face, will recognize the figures on the album cover described above—the jacket, we’re told, of a Luke Fairchild record called
Village Idiot.
It’s Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
his breakthrough second album, the two of them arm in arm. It was one of the most romantic and indelible images of its time. As an LP cover, it summed up so much of its moment, and the future that moment seemed to promise, that it remains a sort of black hole, complete in itself, pure gravity, still sucking in all the failures and betrayals of its moment, and all those to come. Spencer can’t imagine himself away from this tableau—or he doesn’t try.

It becomes impossible to read anything about “Luke Fairchild” without thinking
Dylan, Dylan, Dylan
—without thinking that as Spencer takes you through all the histories of masturbation, heroin, disloyalty, dishonesty, schizophrenia, and plain selfish pettiness in Luke Fairchild’s career, you’re getting the inside dope and secret dirt no straight Bob Dylan biography could get away with. At Black Oak, Spencer denied any such intent, or commercial tease. He knew little more about Bob Dylan than what he got from liner notes, he said; he started to read one of the standard biographies, then put it down, realizing he’d find his story imprisoned by facts. But while his book may not be imprisoned by facts, it is entirely imprisoned by Bob Dylan’s place in the popular imagination. For close to forty years, people have seen themselves in Bob
Dylan, and read the books they wished they could write into his songs. That Bob Dylan is a tar baby. As if wanting to smear just a touch onto his forehead, Spencer got his hand caught.

I think that what propels a reader through the book—as an older Billy, who is himself writing a book about Luke Fairchild, goes off to interview various lovers and rivals, so all the gaps are filled in as he anguishes over his sort of purposeless meaning-of-life quest to, as a grown man, ask Fairchild “Are you my dad?” and have him say yes—is the suspense of wondering if Spencer will somehow get his hand unstuck. You keep hoping he will—because then a real life might open up into a new story, or anyway give a new dimension to an old one.

It never happens. It less than happens: the whole book is punctuated by lyric quotes from Fairchild’s songs, and the problem isn’t that they read like the most convoluted slipknot bad poetry in the Dylan songbook, from “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” say, or “Chimes of Freedom”—
—the problem is that Spencer, or rather Billy, just like the sort of Dylan fan who explains every Dylan song in terms of what drugs or what woman Dylan was using when he wrote it, explains every Fairchild song in the same reductionist, idiot-autobiographical manner. In these pages, to imagine that any of these songs ever existed in the world, on their own, loosed from the clef of their roman, is to doubt the existence of the world. Really, why have the millions and millions of desperate fans in
The Rich Man’s Table
been hanging on Fairchild’s every word as the sixties turned into the seventies, right up to the present day, if all the man has ever done is talk about himself?

That taking on Bob Dylan as the subject, or springboard, for a novel does not have to lead straight to novelist’s prison was nailed
a clean quarter-century ago, in Don DeLillo’s 1973
Great Jones Street.
DeLillo’s Dylan, here called Bucky Wunderlick, the first-person narrator of
Great Jones Street,
has, as Dylan did in 1966, disappeared from the pop world. As Dylan did in 1967, he has made a set of strange, instantly mythologized recordings that everyone wants to hear, that Wunderlick is almost certain he wants no one to hear: stuff close enough to Dylan’s basement tapes that DeLillo just calls them “the Mountain Tapes.” So DeLillo sets himself up—and within pages he has circled his Bob Dylan (who in 1973, the year
The Rich Man’s Table
begins, remained a specter, a singer who in the previous six years had not appeared in public more than a handful of times) with a set of characters so odd, threatening, and insistent that their own paranoid versions of reality altogether subsume those of everyone else.

Bucky Wunderlick is tired; his skepticism has grown so hard he has begun to doubt whether he actually exists, or, if he does, if he ought to. As far as Bob Dylan goes, he disappears into the same doubts, which soon enough belong to the reader. By the time the novel nears its end, Wunderlick is ready to believe anything, and so are you. “You’re soft, not hard,” one of the many people trying to get their hands on the Mountain Tapes tells Wunderlick over the phone. “You’re above ground, not under it.” He explains everything, as others in DeLillo’s pages have already done.

“The true underground is the place where power flows. That’s the best kept secret of our time. You’re not underground. Your people aren’t underground people. The presidents and prime ministers are the ones who make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom . . . This is where it happens . . . This is where the laws are broken, way down under, far beneath the speed freaks and cutters of smack.”

The whole hipster world is just a scene, the man tells Wunderlick, and the scene is just an illusion, a costume for the streets: “Illusions forced me to change my life.” He did it, he says: “Shall I tell you how I tried to cope? Where I went and how I got there?” “Sure,” Wunderlick says. He sounds vaguely interested: at this
point in the book, for him the secret of being is about as compelling as the third question of the night on
Jeopardy.
But you can’t wait to find out.

“Shall I tell you then? Shall I tell you what I did?”

“Sure.”

“I took a walk down lonely street to Heartbreak Hotel.”

You’ve forgotten all about Bob Dylan by now; so has DeLillo. Like him, you’re loose in the air of a story that, wherever it began, has found its own power principle, that has created its own reason for being. That’s why I read novels, to breathe that air; I have no idea why Scott Spencer wrote
The Rich Man’s Table.

 

Scott Spencer,
The Rich Man’s Table.
New York: Knopf, 1998.

 

Don DeLillo,
Great Jones Street.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

October 1998

 

When people talk about folk music today, I don’t think they’re talking about the big night around the campfire Bob Dylan spent with the ghosts of old American music on
Time Out of Mind
last year, or the ruined country music of Palace and Wilko, which in moments comes from as deep a mine. (“You sound like a hillbilly,” sang Dylan in 1962, offering a booker’s response to his first attempts to get work in New York coffee houses. “We want folk singers here.”) The folk music you can trip over just about anywhere now is not trying to get you lost, as that other stuff is. It’s trying to convince you of something—to get you to agree with it. It may want your money, but most of all it wants your vote.

This music comes in a rattling basket of styles. There are Patti Smith’s sermons and elegies, and Ani DiFranco’s hectoring confessionals and secret handshakes, all orchestrated as a high-concept celebration of authenticity and autonomy—look, she’s put out eleven albums in nine years on her own Righteous Babe label and won’t sign with a major! There are the burgeoning revivals and tributes organized around Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, from a pile of reissues on Smithsonian Folkways to
Mermaid Avenue
—a hard-nosed Billy Bragg-Wilco workup of unfinished Guthrie songs—to Steve Earle’s putrid where-have-all-the-lefties-gone lament “Christmas in Washington” to Bruce Springsteen’s often heart-stopping
The Ghost of Tom Joad.