Bob Dylan

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music
(1975, 2008)

 

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century
(1989, 2009)

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession
(1991)

 

In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
(1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)

 

The Dustbin of History
(1995)

 

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
(2000, 2011, originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)

 

Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley
in a Land of No Alternatives
(2000)

 

“The Manchurian Candidate”
(2002)

 

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
(2005)

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
(2006)

 

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison
(2010)

 

As Editor

 

Stranded
(1979, 2007)

 

Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung,
by Lester Bangs (1987)

 

The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the
American Ballad
(2004, with Sean Wilentz)

 

A New Literary History of America
(2009, with Werner Sollors)

In the summer of 1963, in a field in New Jersey, I’d gone to see Joan Baez, a familiar face in my hometown, in Menlo Park, California, and suddenly a familiar face everywhere else—she’d been on the cover of
Time.
This day she was appearing at one of those old theaters-in-a-round, set up under a tent. She sang, and after a bit she said, “I want to introduce a friend of mine,” and out came a scruffy-looking guy with a guitar. He looked dusty. His shoulders were hunched and he seemed slightly embarrassed. He sang a couple of songs by himself, then he sang one or two with Joan Baez, and then he left.

I barely noticed the end of the show. I was transfixed. I was confused. This person had come onto someone else’s stage, and while in some ways he seemed as ordinary as anyone in the audience, something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn’t do it. From the way he sounded and the way he moved, you couldn’t tell where he was from, where he’d been, or where he was going—though the way he moved and sang somehow made you want to know all of those things. “My name it is nothing, my age it means less,” he sang that day, beginning his song “With God on Our Side,” which would turn up the next year as the lynchpin of
The Times They Are A-Changin’
—and while the whole book of American history seemed to open up in that song, the country’s story telling itself in a new way, the song also kept the singer’s promise. As he sang, you couldn’t tell his age. He might have been seventeen, he might have been twenty-seven—and to an eighteen-year-old like me, that was someone old enough.

When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent—there was no backstage, no guards, no protocol—and so I went up to him. He was
trying to light a cigarette, it was windy, his hands were shaking; he wasn’t paying attention to anything but the match. I was just dumbfounded enough to open my mouth. “You were terrific,” I said, never at a loss for something original to say. He didn’t look up. “I was shit,” he said. “I was just shit.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I walked off. I asked someone in the crowd who the person was who along with Joan Baez was getting into her black Jaguar XK-E, then the most glamorous car on the road. When I got back to California I went straight to a record store and bought
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
his second album, the only one in the shop. I couldn’t figure out why some of the songs—about the John Birch Society and a “ramblin’ gamblin’ Willie,” something with a band I called “Make a Solid Road”—didn’t fit the songs described in the liner notes. I took it back and told the store owner there was something wrong with it. “Oh, they’re all like that,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of complaints. Come back next week and I’ll have some good copies.” But I never did go back. I fell in love with “Don’t Think Twice.” I played it all day long. I figured if I exchanged my album it might not be on the next one.

For me, for a lot of other people, perhaps in ways for Bob Dylan himself, his life and work opened up from right about that time. Very quickly—with, say, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a score more songs about conflict and justice, truth and lie, that could be epic and commonplace in the same moment, songs orchestrated by nothing more than the singer’s own bare guitar and harmonica—and then with the mid-sixties albums
Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited,
and
Blonde on Blonde,
filled with visionary performances, most with equally visionary rock ’n’ roll not so much behind the songs as all through them—Bob Dylan became in the common imagination far more than a singer who had, by some happenstance, caught his moment. To do what he’d done, Dylan wrote years later, you had to be someone “who could see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either—but really see, like seeing into metal and
making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” In the early 1950s, kids like Bob Dylan watched someone seeing into metal and making it melt every week on
The Adventures of Superman;
in the next decade, as Paul Nelson puts it later in these pages, Dylan “evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action. Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it—and it really would be significant.”

This is where I came in, as a writer—six years after the show in New Jersey, at the end of Dylan’s adventure as an oracle on the run, just after he released his spare, cryptic album
John Wesley Harding,
an album of parables of the republic, riddles about its cops and robbers, and love songs that took the sting away.

 

 

Bobby Darin had three hit records under his belt when he announced his goal in life: “I want to be a legend by the time I’m twenty-five.” He didn’t make it, but Bob Dylan did.

Those are the first lines from a piece I wrote in 1969 that is not included in this collection of most of what, outside of two earlier books—one on “Like a Rolling Stone,” one on the songs that travel under the name of the basement tapes—I’ve written about Bob Dylan over the years. In 1969 Bob Dylan was twenty-eight. He’d been a legend—a story people passed on as if it might even be true—at least since 1964. But time moved fast then—Bobby Darin, you can imagine, wanted to be a legend by the time he was twenty-five because after that it might be too late.

As a chronicle of events happening as they were written about—which this book, much of it a matter of reviews, reports, sightings, comment in monthly or bi-weekly magazines and weekly newspapers, to some degree is—that heroic period hangs over what I wrote. It’s a given that I am writing about someone
who has done signal work, has made music so rich that even as it appeared it suggested it might be untouchable, not merely by others but by Dylan himself. It was an enormous achievement: the rewriting, in all senses, of American vernacular music, from the fiddlers who took up “Springfield Mountain” at the end of the eighteenth century to Little Richard, at once a recapturing of the past and the opening of a door to what had never been heard and had never been said. All of that is in this book. But at least for its first half it is present as a shadow, a shadow cast by a performer who, as I began to write about him, had fallen under it himself.