Night Beat (11 page)

“Look, the parents could have said, ’Hey, we’ll talk about it.’ But parents aren’t into that. They don’t know how to deal with what they should do or shouldn’t do. So they leave it to the government.”

Suddenly, loudly, music blares up in the room. Perhaps somebody—maybe Petty—figures the conversation is getting a little too tense. Dylan smiles and shrugs, then pats me on the shoulder. “We can talk a little more later,” he says.

For the next couple of hours, Dylan and Petty attend to detail work on the track—getting the right accent on a ride cymbal and overdubbing the gospel-derived harmonies of the four female singers who have just arrived. As always, it is fascinating to observe how acutely musical Dylan is. In one particularly inspired offhand moment, he leads the four singers—Queen Esther Morrow, Elisecia Wright, Madelyn Quebec, and Carol Dennis—through a lovely a cappella version of “White Christmas,” then moves into a haunting reading of an old gospel standard, “Evening Sun.” Petty and the rest of us just stare, stunned. “Man,” says Petty frantically, “we’ve
got
to get this on tape.”

Afterward, Dylan leads me out into a lounge area to talk some more. He leans on top of a pinball machine, a cigarette nipped between his teeth. He seems calmer, happy with the night’s work. He also seems willing to finish the conversation we were having earlier, so we pick up where we left off. What would he do, I ask, if his own sons were drafted?

Dylan looks almost sad as he considers the question. After several moments, he says: “They could do what their conscience tells them to do, and I would support them. But it also depends on what the government wants your children to do. I mean, if the government wants your children to go down and raid Central American countries, there would be no moral value in that. I also don’t think we should have bombed those people in Libya.” Then he flashes one of those utterly guileless, disarming smiles of his. “But what I want to know,” he says, “is, what’s all this got to do with folk music and rock & roll?”

Quite a bit, since he, more than any other artist, raised the possibility that folk music and rock & roll could have political impact. “Right,” says Dylan, “and I’m proud of that.”

And the reason questions like these keep coming up is because many of us aren’t so sure where he stands these days—in fact, some critics have charged that, with songs like “Slow Train” and “Union Sundown,” he’s even moved a bit to the right.

Dylan muses over the remark in silence for a moment. “Well, for me,” he begins, “there is no right and there is no left. There’s truth and there’s untruth, y’know? There’s honesty and there’s hypocrisy. Look in the Bible: You don’t see nothing about right or left. Other people might have other ideas about things, but I don’t, because I’m not that smart. I hate to keep beating people over the head with the Bible, but that’s the only instrument I know, the only thing that stays true.”

Does it disturb him that there seem to be so many preachers these days who claim that to be a good Christian one must also be a political conservative?

“Conservative? Well, don’t forget, Jesus said that it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. I mean, is
that
conservative? I don’t know, I’ve heard a lot of preachers say how God wants everybody to be wealthy and healthy. Well, it doesn’t say that in the Bible. You can twist anybody’s words, but that’s only for fools and people who follow fools. If you’re entangled in the snares of this world, which everybody is . . . ”

Petty comes into the room and asks Dylan to come hear the final overdubs. Dylan likes what he hears, then decides to take one more pass at the lead vocal. This time, apparently, he nails it. “Don’t ever try to change me/I been in this thing too long/There’s nothing you can say or do/To make me think I’m wrong,” he snarls at the song’s outset, and while it is hardly the most inviting line one has ever heard him sing, tonight he seems to render it with a fitting passion.

AGAIN, 1986. Another midnight in Hollywood, and Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers are clustered in a cavernous room at the old Zoetrope Studios, working out a harmonica part to “License to Kill,” when Dylan suddenly begins playing a different, oddly haunting piece of music. Gradually, the random tones he is blowing begin to take a familiar shape, and it becomes evident that he’s playing a plaintive, bluesy variation of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” Keyboardist Benmont Tench is the first to recognize the melody, and quickly embellishes it with a graceful piano part; Petty catches the drift and underscores Dylan’s harmonica with some strong, sharp chord strokes. Soon, the entire band, which tonight includes guitarist Al Kooper, is seizing Dylan’s urge and transforming the song into a full and passionate performance. Dylan never sings the lyrics himself but instead signals a backup singer to take the lead, and immediately “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” becomes a full-fledged, driving spiritual.

Five minutes later, the moment has passed. According to Petty and Tench, Dylan’s rehearsals are often like this: inventive versions of wondrous songs come and go and are never heard again, except in those rare times when they may be conjured onstage. In a way, an instance like this leaves one wishing that every show in the True Confessions Tour were simply another rehearsal: Dylan’s impulses are so sure-handed and imaginative, they’re practically matchless.

Trying to get Dylan to talk about where such moments come from—or trying to persuade him to take them to the stage—is, as one might expect, not that easy. “I’m not sure if people really want to hear that sort of thing from me,” he says, smiling ingenuously. Then he perches himself on an equipment case and puts his hands into his pockets, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Quickly, his face brightens. “Hey,” he says, pulling a tape from his pocket, “wanna hear the best album of the year?” He holds a cassette of
AKA Grafitti Man,
an album by poet John Trudell and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. “Only people like Lou Reed and John Doe can dream about doing work like this. Most don’t have enough talent.”

Dylan has his sound engineer cue the tape to a song about Elvis Presley. It is a long, stirring track about the threat that so many originally perceived in Presley’s manner and the promise so many others discovered in his music. “We heard Elvis’s song for the first time/Then we made up our own mind,” recites Trudell at one point, followed by a lovely, blue guitar solo from Davis that quotes “Love Me Tender.” Dylan grins at the line, then shakes his head with delight. “Man,” he says, “that’s about all anybody ever needs to say about Elvis Presley.”

I wonder if Dylan realizes that the line could also have been written about him—that millions of us heard his songs, and that those songs not only inspired our own but, in some deep-felt place, almost seemed to
be
our own. But before there is even time to raise the question, Dylan has put on his coat and is on his way across the room.

IT IS NOW twelve years later, 1998, and Bob Dylan—presently in his late fifties—is still an active figure in rock & roll. Over the last several years he has been busier than at any time since the mid-1960s, releasing several collections of new recordings—even at one point writing and singing with the first major group he has ever joined (the Traveling Wilburys, including George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and the late Roy Orbison).

Yet despite this activity, and despite the enduring influence of his 1960s work, until 1997 the modern pop world had lost much of its fascination with Dylan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artists like Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Public Enemy, Metallica, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Beck, Pearl Jam, U2, Courtney Love, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and Master P all produced (more or less) vital work that has transformed what popular music is about and what it might accomplish, and some of that work affected the culture at large, fueling ongoing social and political debate. Dylan hadn’t made music to equal that effect for many years, nor had he really tried to. At best, he tried occasionally to render work that tapped into pop’s commercial and technological vogues (such as
Empire Burlesque
and 1989’s
Oh Mercy
), or he mounted tours designed to interact with the massive audiences that his backing bands attracted (such as his 1980s ventures with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). More typically, he produced records that many observers regarded as haphazard and uncommitted (like
Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove,
and 1990’s
Under the Red Sky—
though to my tastes, they are among his best latter-day records and hold up wonderfully). In the early 1990s, he also released a mesmerizing set recorded for MTV,
Bob Dylan Unplugged,
plus two all-acoustic albums of folk material by other artists,
Good as I Been to You
and the exceptional
World Gone Wrong.
The latter two records feature some of the most deeply felt, spectral singing of Dylan’s entire career—the equal of his best vocals on
Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid,
and
Blood on the Tracks.
(They also feature his all-time best liner notes. “STACK A LEE,” he writes “is Frank Hutchinson’s version. what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality through public acclaim.” Later he writes: “LONE PILGRIM is from an old Doc Watson record. what attracts me to the song is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point. salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.”)

Good as I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
remind me of something Dylan said during our first conversation, back in 1985. We had been talking about the music of Bruce Springsteen and Dylan said: “Bruce knows where he comes from—he has taken what everybody else has done and made his own thing out of it—and that’s great. But somebody will come along after Bruce, say ten or twenty years from now, and maybe they’ll be looking to Bruce as their primary model and somehow miss the fact that his music came from Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie. In other words, all they’re gonna get is Bruce; they’re not gonna get what Bruce got.

“If you copy somebody—and there’s nothing wrong with that—the top rule should be to go back and copy the guy that was there first. It’s like all the people who copied me over the years, too many of them just got me, they didn’t get what I got.” Over thirty years after Bob Dylan’s first album (which was also a testament to his folk sources),
Good as I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
worked as reminders of what the singer “got”—and
still
gets—from American folk music’s timeless mysteries and depths.

In addition, by 1997 Dylan had been touring almost incessantly for over a generation. Beyond his stylistic, political, philosophical, and personal changes, beyond the sheer weight of his legend, Dylan continued to play music simply because, in any season, on almost any given night, it is what he would prefer to be doing; it
wasn’t
just a career action, but instead, a necessary way of living—as if he had returned to the restless troubadour life that he effectively renounced following his motorcycle accident. And yet Dylan’s reclamation amounted to one of the best-kept secrets in modern music. In the early and mid-1990s, in a period when popular music achieved an all-time saturation effect in the media—when numerous network and cable entertainment outlets pumped the sounds and looks and news of pop into our homes on an around-the-clock basis—Bob Dylan worked underneath the pop radar level at the same moment that he was, once again, making some of the most remarkable music of the time. In a low-key yet determined way, Dylan invested himself in his music’s sustaining power perhaps more than ever before. Whereas in his tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, Dylan sometimes seemed to be casting about for a clear sense of his purpose and whereas in his tours with the G. E. Smith band, he semed to want to tear through his songs as if finally to flatten them, in the mid-1990s, Dylan once again played as an itinerant bandleader in firm control of his art’s textures, depths, and contexts—and at the same time willing to see to what lengths he might push it all to. Accompanied by mandolin and steel guitar player Bucky Baxter, bassist Tony Garnier, organist Brendan O’Brien, guitarist John Jackson, and drummer Winston Watson (O’Brien later departed, Jackson was replaced by Larry Campbell, and Watson was replaced by David Kemper), Dylan once more was playing his songs as if they were living moments—new possibilities waiting to be found, explored, explained, even questioned, rather than as if they were simply time-old obligations to be endured, then escaped.