Devil Sent the Rain (13 page)

Gotta Serve Somebody

B
ob Dylan's songs are nearly always the record of a struggle—between appearance and reality, or between justice and its opposite, or between the demands of the self and some higher truth. Nothing is taken for granted; one is always choosing.

When Bob Dylan let it be known, in 1979, that he had been born again, it seemed to some that he had renounced the complexity and questioning of his earlier work in favor of what they saw as the prepackaged answers of religion. As time has gone by, though, it is clear that Dylan encountered the Gospel the same way he has encountered everything else he has looked into—with the full complexity of a whole human heart and mind.

When there is the possibility of choice, there is always, just behind it, the reality of judgment. The awareness of judgment hovers behind the insistent questions in “Blowin' in the Wind”; it stares out at the listener from between the lines not only of what he once called his “finger-pointing” topical songs, like “Masters of War,” but also his more imagistic song-poems of the mid-1960s, such as “Maggie's Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” although the targets are a little more ambiguous. In the years just before his conversion, in albums like
Blood on the Tracks
and
Desire
, the finger begins to point, ever more unmistakably, toward the self.

“I think of a hero,” Dylan once remarked, “as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” When Dylan began performing the Christian material publicly, he presented himself, in a sense, as Exhibit A. The songs were a form of personal testimony, and they were accompanied by spoken testimony as well. Yet before too long Dylan eliminated this directly evangelical component of his performance. Perhaps he felt a trap waiting there, one more head on the hydra of vanity, a disproportionate emphasis on his own persona, while it was the song that was, and is, the important thing. He has never stopped performing the songs.

In any case, for a while, on this recording, we can separate what Dylan is saying in his gospel songs from the drama of his saying it. Here, as in his other work, you find the range of human experience; there is serenity, turbulence, joy, gratitude, the hot iron glow of temptation and guilt and pride; there is damnation and hope, mystery and plain talk, all riding the constant and sometimes torturing undertow of the flesh and the world's concerns. In this way we see, again, how rooted Dylan is in the grain of American music, the Saturday night/Sunday morning tug-of-war that has lent tension and fire to the fact of the gospel in the singing of Ralph Stanley, Little Richard, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, and Hank Williams, among so many others.

Truth, whatever its specifics may be, is never argued for; it is revealed. And in these songs the truth of the human heart is revealed, striving after that which will heal it, ennoble it, and, finally, save it from itself.

From
Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan

World Gone Wrong Again

1.

“It's so grandiloquent to speak of ‘the national character,' ” Norman Mailer once remarked, before going on to speak of the national character.

In the centrifuge of the accelerating world, unlike elements once held in solution have separated out. Things go by fast; you have to label them quickly.

America is the incarnation of good; America is the embodiment of evil. Cast your vote; it only takes a second. This is not an essay question; please just mark “yes” or “no.”

America . . . Meaning what, again? Cowboys and Indians? New York City? Hollywood? The Civil War? The CIA? Interstate Highways? Main Street? Wal-Mart? John Wayne? John Wayne Gacy? Earl Scruggs? Muhammad Ali? Rosa Parks? Don Rickles? Flaco Jimenez? Edmund Wilson? Redwood forests? Gulf Stream waters? Ellis Island? Los Alamos? America wants to include all possibility, hence it takes up, potentially, all the space there is. It expands. Something so internally contradictory is, of course, a target for every kind of projection. The mind has trouble accepting such intense contradictions within the same entity. Their presence creates a profound anxiety. Learning to accept them is a discipline.

Is it because the culture as a whole contains such extremes of good and bad that there is such a pull to identify with only one vein or corner of the culture?

To identify with the culture itself means identifying with a high level of tension among elements. It means identifying with the tension itself.

I don't know . . . It used to be important to me. Maybe it still is. I'm trying to figure it out.

But the worst elements in the world are either wrapping themselves in the flag or hoping to exorcise their problems by burning it.

2.

People like to make generalizations about artists, but you really can't. Generally speaking. Any time you say something like “artists need freedom,” right away you realize that artists also need necessity. If you say they need a tradition, it is also immediately clear that they need to be able to work against a tradition. Or, rather, some do. And some don't.

But it is probably true that most people who are artists as we tend to mean that word have very contradictory needs and impulses, and that their work is among other things a way of mediating between opposite forces in their own nature. Melville's poem about art says, “Humility—yet pride and scorn / Instinct and study; love and hate / Audacity—reverence. These must mate . . .” in order to “wrestle with the angel.” It is an impulse toward wholeness and balance.

Certainly most significant artists implicitly or explicitly pose questions about the relation between the individual and society. Everyone, of course, leads a dual citizenship as an individual and as a member of a larger group, just as we all live both in the present moment and in a continuum with some past and future. In the United States, these relations are unusually complex, because the society is based not on a fixed grid of social organization against which intelligible individual dramas play out, but on an ideal of fluidity in which identity is nothing if not elastic and individuals can re-create themselves, or try to, by moving down the road, making a fresh start. That's the mythology, at least.

“Significant artists,” “American artists” . . . the terms are vaguely embarrassing. Even the word “artist.” It is too big a concept. You need to make distinctions among the types. But how useful are the distinctions? Michelangelo, Ravi Shankar, Sarah Vaughan, Akira Kurosawa, Chuck Berry, Beethoven, Sviatoslav Richter, Charley Patton, Emily Dickinson, Romare Bearden, Dock Boggs, Laurence Olivier, William Faulkner, the Notre Dame stone masons, Bessie Smith, an Asmat shield carver, Dante . . .

Today the distinctions between types of artists seem to be less important than they once were. To some people, of course, it is still vitally important to maintain the distinction between, say, “fine art” and “folk art.” Others like to state loudly that there is no difference. But there's a difference. Any time you can make a terminological distinction there's a difference. But how important is it, and to whom? And—if you are interested in this kind of question—why?

It's easy to be dismissive of the kind of anxiety that fuels a strident emphasis on the setting of boundaries for terms. But the disintegration of a culture, or of an individual personality, often begins when it is no longer possible to pose intelligible questions about boundaries. If there are no locatable boundaries, then there is no locatable center, either. There is a paradox here for any culture or individual that seeks to continue growing. As a paradox, it is inherently insoluble. You have to embrace the paradox itself, perhaps, to keep from being smashed to pieces. Like a gyroscope that has to keep spinning in order to stay upright. A lot of times the struggle results in a religious conversion of some type.

3.

Good as I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
, Bob Dylan's two early-1990s solo recordings, recorded just after he'd hit his fifties and more than a decade after he got Saved, sit like a two-headed sphinx in the middle of Dylan's recorded work. People never talk about them all that much. Two records in a row of Dylan, all by himself, performing only traditional (or at least old) songs from the repertoires of Blind Willie McTell, Frank Hutchison, the Mississippi Sheiks, not one Dylan original among them. Nothing but Dylan; everything but Dylan.

For at least the three years preceding 1992's
Good as I Been to You
, the best parts of a Dylan concert were likely to be his performances of other people's songs, especially traditional songs like “Girl on the Greenbriar Shore,” “Roving Gambler,” “Barbara Allen,” “Golden Vanity,” songs he'd known from the beginning, back when people didn't mind stepping on him. It was almost as if he was tired of being himself. Whoever that was. Onstage he often seemed lost in the wilderness. The songs, however, had clearly lasted, and were demonstrably true. They had lasted not just outside him, in the culture, but inside him. They could provide a sense of magnetic north, bearings, orientation.

From the beginning, Dylan pieced together a persona, both social and creative, from found elements. That bag of found elements seemed to give him a meaning, or a rationale, a spiritual or psychic exoskeleton, a set of forms in which he could invest his roiling polymorphous energies. But any exoskeleton can become a cage, too. The thing that supports you from outside also constrains the free exercise of the polymorphous imagination. Being labeled—a marketing device for some, a security blanket for anxious listeners—is the ultimate trap. Eventually the id, or whatever you want to call it, will want to bust up the fixed form by which the world has come to know it. “That's not me,” the Jokerman inside howls. “Never assume you know who I am.” A series of masks or guises, because the inner thing is unknowable itself. Its name is unsayable.

On the evidence, Dylan has been both strongly attracted to absolute claims and yet also extremely wary of them. He apparently operates under an extremely high level of tension. The absolute claim of independence (“Don't follow leaders!”); the absolute need to serve somebody (“Property of Jesus!”). The need to choose moral sides (“It may be the devil or it may be the Lord”); the resistance to shouting “Which side are you on?” The containing of those urgent and apparently incompatible claims within one framework is a very American thing.

4.

Nobody knows what really goes on for an artist. It's presumptuous to think you can, any more than you can know what really goes on inside somebody else's marriage. Unlike elements are engaged in a constantly evolving dialogue.

“I don't know who I am most of the time,” Dylan told David Gates in a 1997
Newsweek
interview. “It doesn't even matter to me. . . . I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. . . . I believe the songs.” In the interview he was speaking specifically about gospel songs, but it is no stretch to imagine that it also applies to the whole body of folk- and blues-based music that informed his work. The songs gave him a text to go on, a Holy Book containing not an orthodoxy but a kind of anti-orthodoxy in which the most disparate elements were all given space at the table. In the mid-1990s he started appearing onstage dressed like the reincarnation of Hank Williams. It may not be too much to say that his intense reconnection to the traditional material at that point amounted to a kind of secular conversion, a renewal and realigning of what was of value, what was necessary, and what was possible.

Parallel things had happened previously in his career, of course. After arriving in New York City in 1961 as the hobo angel boy from everywhere, performing traditional material and then infusing it with more and more of his own inner light and darkness, the wheels stopped in 1966; he went back to the basics with the material that came to be called the Basement Tapes and came out with
John Wesley Harding
. The process began again, and then toward the end of the 1970s the wheels stopped again and he came out with
Slow Train Coming
. One could say that the subsequent
Infidels
, and its outtakes, bears the same relation to
Slow Train
as
Highway 61 Revisited
bore to
The Times They Are A-Changin'
—the calculus of doubt and conflict and irony and corrosive anger and livid imagery supplanting the algebra of faith and direct statement. As if Dante had started the
Divine Comedy
in the
Paradiso
, or at least the
Purgatorio
, and ended in the
Inferno
.

Whether there is a causal relation or not, Dylan's live performances began pulling together sharply in the year or so after
World Gone Wrong
came out in 1993, and he also began work on the material that would comprise two of the best records he ever made,
Time Out of Mind
and
Love and Theft
.

Dylan cited his sources for the
World Gone Wrong
songs in the disc's booklet; the sources for the
Good as I Been to You
songs have been discussed in print with varying degrees of accuracy. In
Behind the Shades Revisited
, Clinton Heylin quotes Ian Andersen, the editor of something called
Folk Roots
, as writing that there is “no shadow of a doubt” that “the rich old has-been” (that would be Dylan) copied his arrangement of “Frankie and Albert” from Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 recording. Really? You listen to it and tell me. Dylan's vocal approach has a lot more in common with Charley Patton's version of “Frankie and Albert” than with Mississippi John's. In fact, what is striking about the performances on
Good As I Been
is the extent to which Dylan turns each song to his own expressive purposes. Heylin, with his trademark penchant for broad, definitive, dubious, and eerily hostile statement, claims that, of Dylan's performances on
Good As I Been
, only “Tomorrow Night” “had the stamp of originality.” I wonder if he knows Blind Boy Fuller's original version of “Step It Up and Go,” or Tom Rush's recording of “Diamond Joe,” the most likely source for that tune (not to be confused with the song of the same name that Dylan performs in
Masked and Anonymous
, which comes from the Georgia Crackers, probably by way of the New Lost City Ramblers . . .). In fact, “Tomorrow Night” may be one of the least original arrangements on the disc.

In any case, on both discs Dylan pulls songs from sources as different as English and Irish balladry, the blues, and nineteenth-century parlor songs, and from performers across the range of the folk tradition—as Harry Smith did in compiling his
Anthology of American Folk Music
for Folkways Records—and claims all of the territory as his own.

5.

Of course, if you say “American artist,” right away a tension is set up. The dual citizenship. Dylan has been one if anyone has. Not by wrapping himself in the term “American,” but by being very aware of the culture and place and time in which he has found himself, and trying to make sense of it. Or give an imaginative shape to it. What was “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream” about? Or “Masters of War”? Or “Clean-Cut Kid,” or “Hurricane,” or “John Wesley Harding,” or, for that matter, “Foot of Pride”? There is the abiding realization that the fate of the individual and that of the culture as a whole are intertwined. The individual in fact recapitulates his or her sense of the culture within himself.

Possession, demonic or otherwise, implies that one part of an organism has taken control of the whole, putting things out of balance and destroying as much of the organism as possible before someone either exorcises the demon or destroys the host organism from without.

America has always been extremely vulnerable to fears of possession, and it has gone through famous periods of panic over it. The Salem witch trials, populist rhetoric about special interest groups, anticommunist fever, Eisenhower's warnings against the military-industrial complex . . . sometimes the concerns are justified. But the most opportunistic elements in the society usually look for a way to exploit the concern in order to gain greater power. Which in turn fuels greater concern . . . This tendency toward entropy seems built into the logic of our society, and it is a paradox from which we may not recover.

In the 1970s Dylan could conceive of going out on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue and reclaiming the spirit of America—freedom, possibility, creativity, inclusiveness—from the clutches of the folks who brought us the Vietnam involvement and Watergate. Today we have bigger problems. The spirit itself, the sense of entitlement, is questionable. In the aftermath of 9/11, the oil companies scrambling to enrich themselves, the media full of sentimentality, the rush to jettison constitutionally guaranteed liberties, shopping as a patriotic duty . . . Is that really what it was all about all the time? Does it really all amount to a big Coke commercial? Who says the greediest and most rapacious bastards in a society get to define what it means? Can a culture get so defiled that its own citizens don't recognize it?