Bob Dylan (46 page)

 

August 2004

 

4) Peter Carey:
Theft
(Knopf). “We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist,” says an Australian painter in Carey’s new novel, “and then we saw what had been kept from us.” The resentment is patent, but still it’s a shock when fragments of pop songs—art the man wasn’t born walled off from—explode in his mouth as he rails against a 16th century art critic: “You went to the finest schools all right but you are nothing more than a gossip and a suck-up to Cosimo de’ Medici. I was a butcher and I came in through the bathroom window.”

Artforum
December 2004

 

Bob Dylan’s
Chronicles
could be subtitled “A Life in the Arts” rather than
Volume One
—art is what it’s about. In a humble, modest, very literary way, Dylan sets off sparks all across his career as a performer, which he describes most of all as a career as a student coming face to face with wonders. Early rock ’n’ roll singers “sang like they were navigating burning ships.” “What the folk songs were lyrically, Red’s stuff”—Red Grooms’s—“were visually—all bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys—all the carnie vitality. Red was the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world.” The book is about getting it right, and then throwing it away, to see where it lands—whatever
it
is. Every reviewer seems to have quoted a line about Dylan’s early-sixties immersion in the archives of the New York Public Library, living out the nation’s story by reading newspapers published during the Civil War, discovering “the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write”: “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected.” That line calls attention to itself, in a way that takes you right out of the story—but then come the throwaway lines that slam you into it again. “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.” This book is the truck.

13 January 2005

 

Last November 2nd, on election night, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Bob Dylan played “Masters of War,” his 1963 protest song against arms merchants. It sounded ham-handed and self-righteous even when Dylan was first performing it; why, this night, was the song so frightening, the delivery so deliberate?

Why is the song still alive? There’s a hint of an answer in Dylan’s
Chronicles.
It’s not a memoir, where everything revolves around the author; it’s a bildungsroman, where a questing young man relates the tales of his education in art, life, and the ways of the world.
Chronicles
is an account of learning and discovery, most deeply in Minneapolis in 1959 and 1960, then in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, and an account of frustration and failure in the decades to come. The old man looks back at his younger self less to find out where he took the wrong road (“The mirror had swung around and I could see the future—” Dylan writes of himself in 1987, “an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs”) than to begin again, from the beginning. It’s not a tease that Dylan’s sixties glory years and the startling breakthroughs from the early nineties on are ignored: the book revolves around those poles where the writer knew nothing and where he could do nothing. So it is keen-eyed, doubting, but with the writer giving phrases that leap to mind free rein (“The mirror had swung around”—my god, what happens when the mirror
swings around?
) but also reining them in to serve the story, to push it forward or pull it backward—and the story is that of someone with a gift to live up to, if he can figure out what it is.

That’s what the book is about: figuring that out. The tale-teller is a detective (“I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment to turn on the black-and-white TV,” Dylan writes in perfect pitch, as if walking Philip Marlowe around his Los Angeles
apartment. “
Wagon Train
was on”), a pathfinder, looking at other people’s footprints on the forest floor. He watches the world from a distance; he watches himself only as a reflection of the light the world gives off.

Because he is a musician, the reflections are sometimes echoes, and some of the echoes are words. “My father,” Dylan writes of Abraham Zimmerman, “wasn’t so sure the truth would set anybody free”—and those words sound down through the book. This isn’t just the stiff-necked Jew turning his back on Jesus pronouncing that “the truth shall set you free”; it’s the truth as, again and again in
Chronicles,
Dylan applies it to songs. Folk songs. Old songs. Songs that resist the singer, that change shape as soon as he thinks he knows what they are. Songs that may force the singer to exchange facts for mystery and knowledge for ignorance.

“The singer has to make you believe what you are hearing, and Joan did that,” Dylan says of Joan Baez and her 1960 rendition of “Silver Dagger,” a Shakespearean Appalachian ballad about a mother who carries a knife to keep men from her daughter. “I believed Joan’s mother would kill someone that she loved . . . folk music, if nothing else, makes a believer out of you.” “I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was,” he writes, speaking of Greenwich Village and the mainstream culture that surrounded it. “If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the untruth, well, that’s still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that . . . Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong.” Folk music opened the door to a “parallel universe”: “a culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees and Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—an invisible world.”

Songs that say,
I am true, but there is no truth. Figure that out, buddy.

It was, Dylan recounts, the dare behind his whole career—the poker game he’s still playing. And that is why, on a certain night, an old protest song like “Masters of War” can change shape, swing the mirror around, and dare the singer to sing it, to make it true—“the truth about life,” as Dylan writes of folk songs, “even if life is more or less a lie.” No, it probably wasn’t going to set anybody free, except, for an instant, maybe the singer. But of course you never know.

 

Chronicles, Volume One.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Telluride Film Festival
2 September 2005
Studies in Documentary Film
January 2007

 

The thirty-fourth Telluride Film Festival opened Friday night, September 2. I saw the slithering man-and-woman-meet-at-a-wedding drama
Conversations with Other Women,
and
Capote,
which is good—but Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote is so good he almost silences everyone around him. People were talking about William H. Macy in
Edmund
and
Brokeback Mountain.

The next morning
No Direction Home
went up on the daily TBA boards. As the festival was not permitted to include the film in the
program, and could only show it once, as a sneak, there were no notes to explain what exactly it was—or, for that matter, that it would only be shown once. Some people had read about the movie—the three-and-a-half-hour Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan—but nothing very clear or helpful had been published. People didn’t know it stopped at the end of May 1966, when Dylan ended a world tour in the U.K., in a storm of abuse, and then had a motorcycle accident and stayed off the road for eight years. They didn’t know if it was a project Scorsese had been working on for a decade—or if it was, as it was, what Scorsese made of hours upon hours of interviews with Dylan and compatriots from Minnesota, New York, and anywhere else conducted over the last years by Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager, plus a mountain of performance and news footage, archival photographs, and music famous and unheard. So there were plenty of people at the festival who didn’t know what the picture was, and a lot of people who did, and who figured—this was the buzz all day Saturday—that the crowd would be so huge they’d never get in and so didn’t bother to try. At Telluride everyone stands in line for a movie, usually on the first days lining up an hour or more ahead of a screening, and often people don’t get in—though most films play three or four times, with screenings added as the festival goes on, so by the end everyone has a chance to see what they want to. For the one-shot of
No Direction Home,
the result of confusion, ignorance, and self-intimidation was that the theater, the biggest in town, holding 650 people, was at best two-thirds full.

Nevertheless there was great tension and anticipation in the audience. When I introduced the film, I mentioned that while another, unnamed festival was hosting the official world premiere of the picture, this would be the first public screening of the movie anywhere, and that people could put that into their own words as they chose. It set a tone of eagerness: right from the start, the entire crowd responded to what was on the screen with an engagement—a sense that combined recognition and surprise—that had no analogue at any other screening I attended during the festival
(the Dardennes Brothers’
L’Enfant,
Michael Haneke’s horrifyingly uncompromised
Caché, Walk the Line,
the Johnny Cash story). People were laughing out loud at anything remotely funny or ironic. They were with Dylan—his flinty, thoughtful, mystical, straightforward narration—all the way. There were murmurs and gasps of assent or approval. There was the displacement the film insists on: starting off with an unspeakably intense, suffused-with-danger “Like a Rolling Stone,” onstage in Newcastle in May 1966, with Dylan a dervish possessed by a god you don’t want to meet, and then the weird title, “Many Years Earlier,” as if to suggest that this would be a film about a quest, the tale of what sort of journey it would be that could take anyone, never mind Bob Dylan, to a place as strange and self-immolating as the one that opens the picture.

At the end of the first section of the film, about two hours in, the crowd erupted into long and hard applause, with shouts and cheers, even though it had been made clear that no one associated with the film was present (very unusual at Telluride, where the director of a film is almost always there to introduce and discuss his or her movie, and often the producer or writer or leading actors—for
Capote,
both Hoffman and the director, Bennett Miller, were there for the entire weekend). During the twenty-minute intermission, there were constant “Did you believe that”s and “Did you see”s, people pinpointing this moment or that (at the beginning, Dylan describing himself as a child, discovering another world when he accidentally encountered Bill Monroe’s “Drifting Too Far from the Shore”—the metaphor strikes like a clock as the movie goes on—or Allen Ginsberg speaking of Dylan becoming “at one with his own voice, turning into a column of air”—I couldn’t help thinking, “a pillar of salt”: “Don’t look back”—
or else
). The screenwriter Larry Gross came up and said, “Do you know what this film reminds me of?” “What?” “Peter O’Toole in
Lawrence of Arabia!
” He went on to talk about how, in that movie (and in John E. Mack’s biography,
A Prince of Our Disorder
), Lawrence, without ever losing his uniqueness, or, in contrast, ever truly revealing himself, becomes the emblematic figure of his age. In
Lawrence of Arabia,
Gross said, the social and political history of the time takes
shape, but it is Lawrence who gives it shape, not because he is a figurehead or a spokesperson, but because in some essential and ultimately indefinable way he enacts the age—acting out or performing the essence of its drama, what the age both needs and wants—but in a way that no one else ever would or could. Other people came up to ask what happened next, in Part 2, as if they didn’t know—as if the way Part 1 had unfolded, moving chronologically but continually circling around the cauldron of fury in England in 1966, had cast real, already familiar events into doubt. Or as if they were watching what was on the screen not as the-story-of-their-own-lives but as a movie, where anything can happen.

When the second part began, there was an evident sense of jeopardy. You could feel the stakes being raised minute by minute. The absurdity of so much of the footage from the U.K.—a photographer at a press conference ordering Dylan to “Suck your glasses,” a death threat phoned into a hall and Dylan in his dressing room, saying, “I don’t mind being shot, I just don’t want to be told about it”—was simultaneously ugly and hilarious. A lot of people were tremendously impressed by Joan Baez’s interviews (I was one: her humor, her bluntness, her lack of gentility). Scorsese showed enormous flair, and an invisible hand, not only for picking out appropriate moments from Rosen’s interviews (the Greenwich Village veteran Liam Clancy or Baez saying one thing, Dylan then contradicting or denying) but for finding
the
moment, such as the musician Bruce Langhorne on the perfect tip of the band into “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” People were completely caught up, loving the details, but also, slowly, enveloped by the growing dread. By the time the narrative has doubled back on itself, at the end, day after day in May 1966, fans attacking, Dylan’s performances becoming more assaultive, there seems to be no exit, no way out, no way this can go on, no way this can end.