Bob Dylan (33 page)

But what allowed the Band to redefine rock ’n’ roll in 1968 and 1969, with
Music from Big Pink
and
The Band,
was that it played and sang with such musical sympathy, it was meaningless to untangle one man’s contributions from another’s. Was that bass or guitar, drums or strings, Danko’s voice behind Levon Helm’s, Richard Manuel’s calling out to Danko? On the invaluable video documentary
Classic Albums: The Band,
Helm, Garth Hudson, Robertson, Danko and producer John Simon let you see and hear how the songs were built. They sit at a control board, separate the tracks, isolate the sounds. It’s a magical exercise, but even separated, you can, at this moment in the group’s career, hear that each sound was far more about connecting to another than about calling attention to itself. There, along with that of the rest, is Danko’s deepest legacy in those brief years, in a few songs—“The Weight,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” “To Kingdom Come” “Chest Fever,” “Up on Cripple Creek”—when great artists could lose themselves in the anonymity of their art, in music that seemed to predate them and was sure to outlast them.

When, in the 1970s, the camaraderie went out of the Band’s music, Danko’s singing—with “Stage Fright,” or his version of the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever”—exchanged the style he had as part of something bigger than himself for the mannerisms of a singer who would not expose himself. The catch in his voice became a kind of trick; the abandonment of his fiddle playing in “Rag Mama Rag” collapsed into the stiffness of a singer imitating his own records. And yet, in what at the time seemed like anything but his last years, the soul singer that had been trapped inside Danko all his life finally made it out. On
High on the Hog
and
Jubilation,
little-noticed albums that Danko, Helm and Hudson put out in the 1990s as the Band—with Robertson gone after 1976 and Manuel dead by his own hand in 1986—Danko spoke a new language. “Book Faded Brown” and the gorgeous, painful “Where I Should Always Be” were made of forgiveness and regret, of a self-knowledge one might rather not have, of loss and the kind of smile only a missed chance can bring. As it turned out, they were last chances, and not missed at all.

 

Bob Dylan, “Tell Me, Momma,” from
The Bootleg Series Volume 4—Bob Dylan Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
(Columbia, 1998).

 

The Band, “Don’t Do It,” included as “Baby, Don’t You Do It” on
Crossing the Great Divide
(Genuine Bootleg Series bootleg).

 

———. “Where I Should Always Be,” from
High on the Hog
(Pyramid, 1996).

 

———. “Book Painted Brown,” from
Jubilation
(River North, 1998).

 

Classic Albums: The Band,
directed by Bob Smeaton (1996; Eagle Rock, 2005).

7 February 2000

 

10) Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address (January 27). “We remain a new nation,” Clinton said. “As long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will remain forever young.” “Could Reagan have said it better?” asked a friend, and the answer is, no, he couldn’t have said it better, or half as well. Reagan couldn’t have brought off the Dylan reference as if it had come to him out of the air. And I doubt if Reagan would have done what Clinton did just a paragraph earlier—when, caught in the coded metaphors of American speech, he had a Founding Father (“When the framers finished crafting our Constitution, Benjamin Franklin stood in Independence Hall and reflected on a painting of the sun, low on the horizon. He said, ‘I have often wondered whether that sun was rising or setting. Today,’ Franklin said, ‘I have the happiness to know it is a rising sun’) name a house in New Orleans. Or, as another friend said, “Cue the Animals.”

Spring 2000

 

James Ensor’s 1888 panorama
Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889
is a picture of what you see when you look out from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” It’s worth remembering that both works are screamingly funny—or at least Ensor’s picture today looks funny before it looks like anything else, and when people first heard Dylan performing “Desolation Row,” they couldn’t stop laughing.

Nobody laughed at
Christ’s Entry into Brussels
when Ensor first presented it. Almost nobody saw it. The Twenty, the supposedly
avant-garde Brussels artists’ group which had first shown his work in 1884, rejected it. They’d rejected his paintings before; he was sure his enemies in the group were keeping his work from the public so they could steal his ideas. He was only twenty-eight, but for the previous three years the themes of his best work had been rejection, humiliation, mockery, torture, crucifixion, with Christ at the center of the pictures, until Ensor replaced Christ with himself. But the Twenty wouldn’t give Ensor the satisfaction of recognizing him for who he was, nailing him up in the center of town; then everyone might have had to look him in the eye.

They simply froze him out. The year before, Ensor’s father, an outcast in a family of female shopkeepers, a useless man who lived for music and alcohol, had died drunk on the street; on a greater stage, his life was now Ensor’s to live. Ensor had fantasized himself crucified, but now his great painting was his own cross, bending him under its weight as he and his picture were banished from the city. Thus was he confirmed, the art historian Libby Tannenbaum wrote in 1951, just two years after Ensor’s death, as an artist of “resentment and hatred of mankind,” not to put too fine a point on it—or, as the Belgian-American critic Luc Sante put it just last year, as “the most deadly cynic in the entire history of art.”

Just by its enormous size, its overwhelming visual noise, its thousands and thousands of citizens crowding into Brussels to celebrate Mardi Gras and the incredible coup the city fathers have pulled off with this year’s parade master—LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YES, STRAIGHT OUTTA JERUSALEM, HERE HE IS, JESUS CHRIST!—the picture was meant as an unanswerable last word. In its way it was: nobody answered. If nobody hears you, did you even speak? The whole city, the whole world was present in the painting: businessmen, soldiers, the government, art critics, the bishop, the devil, people in masks, people whose faces looked made out of dough, all caught up in a frenzy of joy over the chance to get close to a really big celebrity—a forlorn, confused-looking Jesus, riding on an ass in the middle of it all—and, at the end of the parade, to crucify him. What a fantastic allegory of the utter
bankruptcy of modern society, of the entire history of mankind! And none of it mattered.

Ensor took the huge thing back to his rooms over his mother’s souvenir shop in the seaside tourist town of Ostend, hung it up on his own wall, and for the next sixty years sat gazing at the vortex he’d made, that he’d seen, that had been made for him: all the hypocrites and liars and frauds and fools in Brussels, in Belgium, in Europe, for that matter everyone on earth, everyone who didn’t understand his genius, who didn’t even try—everyone, everyone, everyone in the picture, everyone who would ever look at it.

Everyone: those who saw it when it was finally shown in public for the first time, in Brussels in 1929, at an Ensor retrospective where the king made him a baron—when, in Libby Tannenbaum’s cutting words, he was celebrated for his post-Impressionist, pre-Expressionist, early 1880s experiments with definition and color, and his blasphemous, threatening work of the late 1880s and 1890s was written of “as the unfortunate result of some extraordinary disease which had enfeebled the artist in his early twenties.” Everyone: those who in later years came to his rooms to pay him compliments, to gaze at his pictures while the old man himself sat in a corner, playing his own songs on a harmonium, just like Allen Ginsberg. Everyone: those who come to see it at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles now. The picture was a giant, final insult, and nobody at the Twenty had trouble figuring that out. One look would do it. The face with cheeks like sausages, that rotting white monstrosity that looks more like a maggot than a man, those people with noses as long as arms—is that supposed to be me? Nobody thought that was funny.

 

 

Bob Dylan has made a career out of dropping hints no one picks up. As he frankly admitted as “Desolation Row” spun to its close, you can recognize everyone in the tune without recognizing yourself: everyone knows Einstein, Ophelia, Romeo, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Casanova, the Good Samaritan, Cinderella, Cain and Abel,
the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, and everybody knows they’re somebody else. So the lines just slip by: “I had to rearrange their faces, and give them all”—the word “all” expanding, “aaaaaaaalllllllll,” until it swallows the words that precede it—“and give them all another name.” Well, you could reply from the audience, that still couldn’t be me: Bob Dylan doesn’t even know my name. Which is like the late Robert Shelton, in the 1960s a Dylan chronicler and confidant, insisting that the clueless reporter in “Ballad of a Thin Man” couldn’t possibly be based on him: “I’m fat,” he said.

As in Ensor’s picture, in “Desolation Row” the listener’s eye is directed toward a circus of grotesques: a beauty parlor filled with sailors, a commissioner masturbating as he caresses a tightrope walker, a whole city in disguise. But whoever they are, nearly all of the characters in the song share one attribute: they’re not free. They are prisoners of judges, doctors, torturers, an entire secret police, and the worst part is they may have recruited its troops from their own hearts. If they are not free it is because they are prisoners of their own ignorance, their own vanity, their own compromises, their own cowardice. By the way they are sung, the saddest lines in the song echo with all that one man used to be, could have been, will never be again: “You would not think, to look at him, but he was famous, long ago,” the “long” stretched out just as long as it will go,
lonnnnnng,
all the way back to the time when the Einstein the man was then wouldn’t even recognize the Einstein he is now.

Dylan recorded first “Desolation Row” in New York, on 2 August 1965—which was also probably the first time he ever sang it. He recorded it again, for the version that would end his album
Highway 61 Revisited,
on August 4. Little more than a week had gone by since his performance at the Newport Folk Festival had brought boos, catcalls, rage, confusion, and silence. It was the first time the troubadour known for his folk guitar and proletarian harmonica had performed with a rock ’n’ roll band since high school. If one of his first original songs, written in Hibbing, Minnesota, in
1958, was called “Little Richard,” Little Richard wasn’t Woody Guthrie, voice of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust. Little Richard was not Of The People; Little Richard was a freak, a foot of pomade, a pound of makeup, and purple clothes. Rock ’n’ roll was pandering to the crowd, cheapening everything that was good in yourself by selling yourself to the highest bidder, putting advertising slogans on your back if that’s what it took, just as one of the banners in earlier and later versions of Ensor’s
Christ’s Entry into Brussels,
a banner right up there with the painting’s “Hail Jesus King of Brussels” reads “Colman’s Mustard.”

“What about the charge that you vulgarized your natural gifts?” the critic Nat Hentoff asked Dylan in his famous
Playboy
interview; it was early 1966, when the fury over Dylan’s heresies had yet to reach its climax. “I’m only twenty-four,” Dylan answered. “These people that said this—were they Americans?” They were; to many in the world of folk music—people who had heard their own voices in Bob Dylan’s, who had found their own righteousness confirmed when they responded to his songs against racism and war, his calls to replace a society of lies with a community of truth—to many who felt these songs as their own, an electric guitar and a loud band were nothing more than a version of the Colman’s Mustard ad. At Newport, a prophet they had trusted with their own best selves had turned his back on them, and on his back was not the blue denim of the worker, the costume he had always worn, but a black leather jacket.

Four days after his performance at Newport, Dylan recorded “Positively Fourth Street,” his bitter, sardonic reply to the Greenwich Village folkies who had fawned and gossiped over him for years, who were at that very moment trying to decide which side to take. It was probably the most complete putdown ever committed to tape—though in Minnesota, where Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing first became Bob Dylan, people have always been sure the song was about Fourth Street in Minneapolis. Filled with heroes and villains from all across Western culture, “Desolation Row” was
less specific, less local, because it was a whole world—and for that matter the song was not always easy for even the singer to find.

At first Dylan tried to record it with bass, played by Harvey Brooks, his own acoustic guitar, and electric guitar played by Charlie McCoy, up from Nashville and the most versatile musician in Music City U.S.A. But there is no groove; again and again McCoy tries to focus the hodgepodge of people Dylan is singing about with a jangling, needling guitar sound, tries to wrap up the verses with a scratching, treble-heavy rhythm, but Dylan seems to fall back from the story, and you never see more than a bunch of people dressed up in costumes. A month later, at the Hollywood Bowl, singing the song in front of an audience for only the second time, Dylan retreats to a strident, humorless voice, and makes this then-shockingly long song, eleven minutes long, into something much smaller: a protest song, though as Dylan finishes it you can hear an ecstatic young girl shouting, “It’s so groovy!” It was the second time through the tune in New York, with Charlie McCoy now playing lead acoustic guitar, that the song took its shape.

The guitars are not electric, there are no drums, but the song is rock ’n’ roll in what it asks for, in the way that it asks. McCoy’s playing is florid as the performance opens, very decorative, and it relaxes the listener, and maybe the singer too. Catching the south-of-the-border feeling that would hover over so much of
Highway 61 Revisited,
McCoy relies most strongly on Marty Robbins’s 1959 bordertown hit “El Paso,” just as Dylan had drawn on a 1958 Ritchie Valens hit for “Like a Rolling Stone,” the number that would begin the album—as Phil Spector put it a few years later, “It’s always very satisfying to rewrite the chord changes to ‘La Bamba.’” But McCoy presses harder as the tune goes on. He looks more for rhythm than for melody. In the instrumental passage after the verse in which, as in so many American folk songs of the century, the
Titanic
sails, McCoy hammers back at Dylan’s steaming harmonica playing until they seem to be driving the ship down as one man. There is nothing discreet about Dylan’s performance. He sings—sometimes he shouts—as if he’s fronting an entire band, as
if he has to fight to make himself heard. He’s hoarse but holding nothing back, rushing some verses, slowing others, dramatizing the song’s right to take its characters from any land and any era, dressing himself as Scheherazade for the Einstein verse, and he sweeps you up. The song doesn’t come off as funny, but as a sad, broken allegory, not as if the song’s tale is a mystery, but as if it’s obvious, as obvious as the last war, or the next one.