Bob Dylan (51 page)

The departure from the real is big enough for the reimagining or invention of moments that may go farther into Bob Dylan’s real-life career than any writer, filmmaker, poet, or musician—any fan—has gone before. For me, at least, there is a clarity in Haynes’s film that actual, documented, all but court-adjudicated events have never given up. There are two incidents in Bob Dylan’s career that I’ve never understood: fans booing him at the Newport Folk Festival when he came onstage with a band and played “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and his conversion to Christianity. But on Haynes’s screen they make living sense.

On the West Coast, the reaction of East Coast folkies to Bob Dylan’s new rock ‘n’ roll seemed absurd. Where I lived, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were a constant, people wondered not why Dylan had turned his back on folk music, but why it had taken him so long to get on the train. As Haynes restages the Newport crisis, it’s an assault: from both sides. The music that is flung out at the crowd is so nerve-smashing, and so loud—loud on the soundtrack, in decibels, but loud in a deeper manner, as if rising out of some internal rhythm—that, in the theater, it’s shocking, or even evil. I could imagine myself in the crowd, and I realized I had no idea how I would have responded.

Christian Bale’s Pastor John speaks quietly, even blankly—“with a paunch,” Haynes says, “and a bad perm”—of his new life with Jesus. He’s speaking from a film inside the film: a documentary, made for evangelical TV, with “the first interview with Jack Rollins in more than twenty years!”—and with the unnatural color of its cheap production perfectly validating its reality, taking you right out of the movie you thought you were watching. We sit with the interviewer in Pastor John’s little office, and then we move into a commons room. Pastor John takes the stage; behind him are three well-dressed black women, and a band made up of a few men who look like meth addicts rounded up off the street. Before him are twenty or so people seated in folding chairs, with a few children playing in the background. It looks like an AA meeting. “Hi,” you can imagine Bale saying. “My name is John, and I’m a folk singer.” The people in the audience are human wreckage. But they
are not an audience. They are part of the same fellowship that Pastor John is part of. As he begins to preach, and then, with the voice of John Doe, founder in the 1970s of the Los Angeles punk band X, coming out of Christian Bale’s mouth, as Father John begins to sing and play “Pressing On,” with a straining voice and a sense of mission the song may never have given its composer, you realize that the man on the stage is not giving the people in the chairs anything they have not given him, that he is not telling them anything they have not told him. There is no star, there is no audience, there is no persona, there are no puppet’s strings, there is no mask in this place; in this church, everyone is accepted for who he or she wishes to be, a servant of the same god, and in that way, of each other. For the first time, I did understand: Bob Dylan had been offered the kingdom of being recognized as himself, as someone he had all but forgotten, and he had said yes. It was no matter that Todd Haynes made it all up.

The film is confusing only if one demands that a dream explain itself—and if one refuses the implacable logic on which dreams float. When identity is as fluid as it is in
I’m Not There
—and when a person whose public life has been so bound up with the lives of other people wants to break the invisible contract between performer and audience—then the possibility must be present that identity can be cast aside altogether.

The private person must be able to lose himself in the community. The performer must be able to disappear into the audience. He must be able to dissolve into the fantasies of his own songs: once his own fantasies, then the fantasies of whoever heard the songs.

“I’m Not There” remains the most haunting of the basement tapes songs—and, though it has been bootlegged for years, it has never, until now, as Dylan’s original recording plays on the soundtrack of
I’m Not There,
been officially made public. Here it is as much of a whirlpool as it ever was, but instead of capsizing a filmmaker’s fables with its own supposed authenticity, it fades into the picture, nothing more and nothing less than one more story among all the rest.

The picture holds its shifting shape. In Todd Solondz’s
Palindromes
(2004), a slew of people play a single young girl, but the impression you have at the close is that the character required so many actors because she didn’t exist; here, by the end, the figure of Bob Dylan is at once more elusive and more interesting than before, and you are still certain neither he nor any of Haynes’s characters have told half of what they know. In
What’s Love Got to Do with It
(1993), you may be with Angela Bassett’s Tina Turner all the way—and then the real Tina Turner appears and the movie dissolves. In the last moments of
I’m Not There,
Bob Dylan appears, playing his way across a Möbius strip of a harmonica solo—and he, the real thing, does not reduce the people whose adventures you have watched in any way. You don’t know where the notes Bob Dylan is playing are headed, or even, necessarily, what song they’re from; you don’t know what really happens in Riddle, or, if Billy does escape, where he could possibly go. And that is why, leaving the theater, you are already on your way back in.

 

I’m Not There,
directed by Todd Haynes, written by Haynes and Oren Moverman (Weinstein Company, 2007).

 

Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There,” from
I’m Not There—Original Soundtrack
(Columbia, 2007).

2008

 

The June 1966 issue of the youth-oriented American fashion magazine
Glamour
carried an unusual feature: lyrics from the soon to be released Bob Dylan song “Visions of Johanna,” which Dylan had
been performing onstage, alone, with an acoustic guitar, since late in the previous fall. “Seems Like a Freeze Out,” he’d say to introduce the song before stepping into its slow, languid account of a night of bohemian gloom. Soon the song, recorded in Nashville earlier in the year with the best session players in town, would make a black hole on the first side of Dylan’s double album
Blonde on Blonde.

What was unusual about this was that the lyrics worked on the
Glamour
page as they were presented: bare, without accompaniment, without a singing voice, as poetry. All through Bob Dylan’s writing life—beginning before his 1962 debut album
Bob Dylan,
the songs leaping in ambition, sophistication, daring, and style at first year by year and then month by month if not week by week—Dylan had written words meant to come to life when they were played and sung. A clumsy line meant as no more than a way to get from one place to another—the limp “He wasn’t really where it’s at” between the unflinching “Ain’t it hard when you discover that” and the swirling “After he took from you everything that he could steal” in “Like a Rolling Stone”—could fly by all without harm when it was lifted by a melody that was itself shot out of the cannon of a song by the singer increasing the pressure. But on the page a song’s words are naked. Line by line, “Blowin’ in the Wind” is pious, or falsely innocent—isn’t it obvious whoever wrote “Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand?” already knows the answer, assuming he or anyone can actually bring him or herself to care about such a precious question? But “Visions of Johanna” is asking different sorts of questions. Such as: Where are you? Who are you? What are you doing here? So you want to leave? Think you can find the door?

If you happened to have read “We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it” in
Glamour
in 1966, without having ever heard the line in a song, you could feel stranded in the white spaces between the words. People wandering from one corner of a loft to another, doped, drunk, half awake, fast asleep, no point to the next breath, let alone the next step, “sitting on the floor,” as the musician Steve Strauss wrote of the song in 1967,
“collecting highs like so many stockbrokers collecting shares before retirement”—as slowly as the song was played in late 1965 (at the time, the story was that the song had been written during the great East Coast blackout of 9 November 1965) on the page it was slower, because as a reader you stopped at every word, trying to make it give up as much as it promised.

As a set of five verses, “Visions of Johanna” makes a narrative solely out of atmosphere. That’s one reason why it read so slowly in 1966, and why it can read so slowly today: why the song as words on a page can silence the song you might carry in your head, and make you say the song yourself. There is a drama taking place here, in this dank room—somehow too big, too much space for too many people, too many shadows, for the person who’s telling the story to get his bearings—even if nothing is happening, or if whatever does happen, whatever events actually push the air aside and mark a moment in time the narrator can actually remember, are not really events at all. This is what happens here: “We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight.” Someone says “Name me someone who’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.” A woman opens her fist to show the drugs she has and dares anyone to say no. “The country music station plays soft.” And yet the peculiar contours of the fable that is being related immediately make sense. The words seem to meet each other in perfect balance, and separate with a sense of having said everything there is to say. With poetry having left rhyme behind in the nineteenth century, rhyming couplets are now almost impossible for the modern eye to scan; here the gravity of the words, the dread in the synapses (“But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off”), erases all awareness that a line that ends with face is followed by one that ends in place. It’s a locked-room mystery and you’re in the room. As you read, you can’t imagine wanting to get out, because you haven’t yet explored every corner or plumbed the darkness for whoever might be lying in it. You haven’t found the skeleton keys the guy on the other side of the room keeps muttering he’s going to play on his harmonica.

As the room is locked, there is a way that for the reader no less than for the characters in the song—Louise, her lover, little boy lost, the D train whores—the walls are made of air. That may be why, over the last months of 1965 and the first months of 1966, Dylan was able to record the song in so many different ways. Always singing solo when he took the song to a crowd, in the studio he always took it to the band he was touring with, the Hawks. In New York in November the song is almost a honky-tonk, with a bouncy rhythm, and then in another take in the same session it’s a fury, threatening to shatter anyone who gets too close to the sound; two months later, again in New York, it rises off the ground like a cloud; not long after in Nashville it’s low-budget film noir,
Detour
without a road but with the same dead end. Reading the song as it moves across a page, it’s hard to hear any of that. The words make their own rhythms, and their rhythms enforce their own quiet.

The other songs collected here—“Desolation Row,” “Masters of War,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”—struggle to escape from the recordings the reader brings to them, and sometimes, for moments, they do, but there’s no reason why they should; they weren’t made to live a life outside of music. Who knows what life “Visions of Johanna” was meant to lead when it was written? The answer is to a different question: this is a song with countless lives, most of them as yet unlived.

 

Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna,” on
Blonde on Blonde,
recorded in Nashville, 14 February 1966 (Columbia, 1966). Solo versions can be found in Martin Scorsese’s film
No Direction Home
(PBS, Spitfire Pictures DVD, 2005), on
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
(Columbia, 1998, recorded Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966), and on various bootlegs from that month. The first recordings of “Seems Like a Freeze Out” were made in New York City with the Hawks and Al Kooper. The honky-tonk version, from 30 November 1966, can be found as “Freeze Out (2)” on
Thin Wild Mercury Music
(SP bootleg), with the assaulting recording from the same date included on
No
Direction Home: The Soundtrack
—
The Bootleg Series Vol. 7
(Columbia, 2005); a New York version from 21 January 1966 is on
Thin Wild Mercury Music
as “Freeze Out (1).”

 

Steve Strauss, “A Romance on Either Side of Dada,” from
Rock and Roll Will Stand,
edited by GM. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

April 2008

 

Vince White joined a legendary punk band in late 1983, seven years into the band’s life; his
Out of Control: The Last Days of the Clash
is about the end of a story. Suze Rotolo’s
A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
is about the beginning of a story. “I met Bob Dylan in 1961,” she writes, “when I was 17 years old and he was 20.”

For a time Rotolo and Dylan were a couple; the cover of the book is a version of the photo that in 1963 appeared on the cover of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
the singer and a glowing Rotolo clinging to each other against the cold of a snow-covered Village street. The image radiated freedom, autonomy, adventure, invulnerability. These two people had their whole future ahead of them—theirs, and, it seemed, that of everyone who bought the album, everyone they stood for.

Telling her own tale more than Dylan’s—so rooted to her own ground you can almost feel her feet on the pavement as she walks west on 4th Street across MacDougal—Rotolo writes with the lightest touch. “He was funny, engaging, intense, and he was persistent. Those words completely describe who he was throughout the time we were together, only the order of the words would shift depending on the mood or circumstance.” You might read this as a
description of Bob Dylan; you might read it for the pleasure of how much is said in so few words. You might read it for the way a whirlpool of connection and separation opens up at the foot of the second sentence. Rotolo’s tone creates a drama that is both public and personal, as when she watches Dylan perform the traditional “Dink’s Song” at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. “The audience slowed their chattering; he stilled the room. It was as though I had never heard the song before. He stilled my room, for sure.”