Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (11 page)

Three million had served; a million and a half had seen combat. For all that, the entire military might of the US had failed against a small and often primitive nationalist movement, a ‘fourth-rate power’ in the hubristic words of Henry Kissinger. Too often, the psychological effects on those young Americans who otherwise survived were profound, indelible. It took a distinct collective effort to set their experiences and their memories aside. That, nevertheless, became the burden of the veterans’ complaints while the politicians pretended to draw their strategic lessons.

The larger effect, the abiding effect, was a wholesale loss of faith in government. Until they began to hear and believe that amends could somehow be made for Vietnam through still more military power and preparedness, Americans doubted their leaders. If you got your news from rock and roll, as so many young men in combat had got their news, Dylan’s doubting songs and his spurning of politics could seem like good, simple common sense.

By 1975, in any case, the erstwhile New Left was old news. In January, an attempt by the remnants of the Weather Underground to bomb the Department of State building had been a last gesture by one fragment of a fractured movement. Perversely, radicalism had seemed to draw its only strength from Vietnam. With the war’s end, people drifted away from left politics, new or old. Feminism seemed more relevant and more valuable to many women. Environmentalism struck others as a more important cause than any. The escapism implicit in ‘alternative lifestyles’ seemed more attractive to a lot of people than street protests. Radicalism survived, of course, but it became diffuse. By 1975, the self-contradictory appeal of single-issue politics was everywhere. This was the audience for whom the 34-year-old Dylan was making a record and preparing a tour.

*

The first recording session for
Desire
was held on 14 July, just before Dylan and Levy retreated to quaint but filthy-rich East Hampton on Long Island’s South Shore to resume their songwriting workshop. The session at Columbia’s New York studios was a fruitless affair, at best a testing of the waters. Nothing would be kept for the album. Instead, a trivial and slightly unpleasant Dylan-Levy joke at the expense of
the lesbian radical-feminist novelist Rita Mae Brown – ‘How’d you ever get that way?’ – took up a large part of a long night. For reasons best known to himself, the artist would persist with the ‘comic’ song ‘Rita May’ [
sic
], but a reported seven attempts to achieve a usable recording on the 14th pointed to a problem. A later version of the track would wind up as the ignored B-side to a flop single at the end of 1976, but the song’s sole claim to anyone’s attention was in demonstrating that the writing partnership was successful only fitfully. More than once during the collaboration, whether at Levy’s urging or because he had nothing better to offer, the artist would lower his standards. Some of the results would end up on
Desire
.
¹²

Dylan’s explanation for the absolute failure of a night’s work had less to do with the songs than with the music. Rivera, the borrowed band of the Traffic founder Dave Mason, sundry backing singers and some fine session players had been unable to give him the sound he wanted. Disappointment and frustration, it is sometimes asserted, then caused Dylan to think seriously about assembling his own ensemble. Given that Rolling Thunder was already sounding in his head, however, it was all but inevitable that he would have to get around to picking a few musicians. And why stop at a few?

Several unsuccessful attempts were also made on that first night to capture the song that would become known as ‘Joey’. Dylan might later seek to distance himself from the work, but here was another problematic aspect to the writing partnership. Levy, naturally enough, had his own interests and enthusiasms. One of those arose from an indulgent view of the blood-spattered wiseguys and cynical goodfellas of organised crime in New York City. In the figure of the gangster Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo, Levy detected – presumably by ignoring every readily available documented fact – a kind of folk hero. Dylan, always a sucker for a righteous outlaw, went along with it; most New Yorkers who knew anything about the Mob would be less forgiving. As romantic fiction, the song would have required no justification. As a presentation of historical truth, involving a recently dead hoodlum with whom Levy had been acquainted, it was less dubious than laughable. This would be pointed out forcefully.

Dylan should in any case have known better. He understood the multiple complications of topical song. They had caused him to quit the public-comment game, after all, with an undisguised relief. Back in 1963–4, his ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ had achieved emotional truth at the expense of several facts. With ‘Joey’ he and
Levy would sentimentalise reality, as pop music does, and make a cartoon cliché of Italian American life. Was that worth a memorable chorus? The finished version of ‘Joey’ remains one of the better musical things on
Desire
, but its tangential relationship with truth, its fake mythology and synthetic emotions, were echoed in some fairly dismal writing, certainly on Levy’s part. As one couplet has it, ‘Sister Jacqueline and Carmela and mother Mary all did weep / I heard his best friend Frankie say, “He ain’t dead, he’s just asleep.”’ Any self-respecting director of a real gangster movie would have dumped that last piece of dialogue. Creative-writing tutors would have winced in honest collective pain, meanwhile, at the B-minus fake-archaic ‘all did weep’.

The fact that Dylan-Levy, joined at the tediously hip, were also turning out material as risible as ‘Rita May’ should have alerted the artist to the risks he was running. No one else was likely to care. For fans and acolytes, a Bob Dylan song was a Bob Dylan song, a nonpareil beyond all categories. Only the artist could take responsibility. Instead, he and Levy would in one instance produce what they regarded as a piece worth keeping after playing an aimless word game. It seems the contest was to see who could find the most rhymes for Mozambique. Magnifique – as an example of professional writing technique – the song was not. Undaunted, Dylan took the resultant effort into the recording studio.

A fundamental question would thereafter be set aside by most fans when
Desire
topped the American charts and lingered there for fully five weeks. Were the results of these cooperative songwriting ventures actually much good? Levy’s vaunted theatrical instincts and Dylan’s taste for the ‘cinematic’ would be – and still are – much discussed. A hit is a hit, meanwhile, but the texture of the verses themselves, the lines, couplets, images and rhymes, would too often slip through the critical net. Even in its best moments, the writing on the album is rarely startling and never audacious in the quicksilver manner Dylan had once made his own. Sometimes the lyrics read and sound like sentiment-by-committee, imagery-by-numbers.

Dylan, so often the victim of the authorial fallacy, invited a difficulty never predicted by practitioners of literature’s numbing less-than New Criticism. The personal pronouns in his songs were no guarantee, he said to us, that the writing was ever an exercise in autobiography. What happened, then, when ‘Bob Dylan’ took the stage to sing ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May’ if the line, pronoun and all, had been cooked up by someone else entirely? What happened to the strange, free-standing consciousness that had been Dylan’s conspicuous gift to popular music? His songs – another pronoun – didn’t come from a Tin Pan Alley production line: such had been the pledge from the start of his first assault on an industry. Now here he was in 1975, knocking out tunes with an off-Broadway talent-for-hire, yet performing as though each couplet, good or bad, was his. All of the acknowledged Dylan-Levy compositions appear in the former’s
Lyrics: 1962–2001
(2004). They are each registered for copyright purposes by one of Dylan’s publishing companies. The big book, well worth study for all its flaws, is a testament to the long, enduring career of an unexampled talent. The song index alone runs to a dozen pages and would be longer by far if the book was brought up to date. But the writing of
Desire
complicates arguments over art and the artist.

If Dylan had needed no help to compose the great songs of the 1960s, or of
Blood on the Tracks
, where stood the co-authored mock-ups, the hollow exercises in rhetoric and role-playing, for which Jacques Levy claimed co-paternity? Had the songs been better, no one would bother to ask. Despite the multitude of fans who will hear not a word against it,
Desire
is what is sometimes called a patchy affair.

A fortnight after his first attempt to secure useful recordings, Dylan was back in the studio, supposedly in search of a ‘bigger sound’. He organised this quest, if organised is the word, as though throwing an after-hours party, seeming to gather up everyone and anyone who came to mind or happened to be around. The predictable result was a shambles as twenty-one musicians, six guitar players among them (not including the artist), tried to sort themselves out. Production, in the traditional manner, even in the casual manner favoured by Dylan’s old mentor John Hammond, was absent. A luckless Columbia staff man by the name of Don DeVito was granted a producer’s responsibilities but precious little executive power in Studio E. No one, least of all Dylan, was in control. Eric Clapton, always a staunch admirer of the artist and no stranger to the foibles of superstars – he had patented a few notable idiosyncrasies of his own – was among the baffled guests who could not believe what was going on, or what was
supposed
to be going on.

Dylan’s old, deep-rooted refusal to pay heed to the realities and demands of the recording process all but destroyed the sessions of 28 and 29 July as ingenious engineers struggled to find space on their 16-track machines for the competing demands of so many instruments and vocalists. The feat could have been accomplished – the Beatles had mastered bigger problems with far less sophisticated equipment – but that would have required more effort than Dylan, addicted to spontaneity, convinced that the best music somehow just happened, was prepared to expend. This heroic delusion would hamper his efforts to record his songs for many years to come.

The artist could claim, rightly enough, that some of his best music had been produced during lightning raids on the studios.
Bringing It All Back Home
had required only three days of his time in 1965;
John Wesley Harding
had needed just as little effort in 1967.
Blood on the Tracks
might have cost Dylan the equivalent of a full week in 1974, but that was due only to the second thoughts that had caused him to remake the record. He didn’t like to hang around. He did not believe, in any case, that recording captured the reality of music – an unhelpful prejudice if you made your living by selling records – but previous triumphs thanks to ‘spontaneity’ would blind him to his self-created problems. The first serious sessions for
Desire
were prime examples.

As predicted, times were changing. Pink Floyd had been lavishing six months of work in 1975 (for whatever reason) on the album
Wish You Were Here
. Queen’s preposterous ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had required three weeks of labour and, notoriously, 180 overdubs on a single brief passage of music before taking its place on that year’s
A Night at the Opera
, an album thereafter touted, as though the fact was a badge of honour, as the most expensive collection of tunes anyone had then assembled. Dylan’s dissent from this obnoxious orthodoxy was well known and honourable but not necessarily useful. In London that summer a scruffy sort with ‘I Hate’ scribbled on his ragged Pink Floyd T-shirt was about to join a motley crew called the Sex Pistols. John Lydon and his comrades would mock the decadence of the music industry and its 180 overdubs something rotten. But that little incident wouldn’t help Dylan to get a record made. Of the forty-five takes captured on 28 and 29 July, only one song attempted, entitled ‘Romance in Durango’, would make it to the album.
¹³

As ever, he got there in the end. Having wasted his own and everyone else’s time, Dylan listened to reason – articulated, it seems, by the bass player Rob Stoner – and stood down most of his army of helpers. After the chaos, the album the artist would release was finished soon enough, but he persisted to the end with minor songs. One was a Dylan-Levy piece entitled ‘Catfish’, dedicated to a star baseball player who bore the nickname, a track that seemed to have been destined from the start for the netherworld of strictly limited interest. Another song,
written by Dylan alone, was called ‘Golden Loom’. With a better melody it might have repaid attention, but the writer appears to have lost interest soon enough. Both tracks would turn up on 1991’s
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991
as mere curiosities. Nine songs, fifty-six minutes of recorded music, remained from the sessions to become
Desire
. It was, for the first time in a long time, a near self-explanatory title.

*

From its first assertive notes to its conclusion eight minutes and thirty-two seconds later, ‘Hurricane’ is a thrilling thing. If facts are of no interest, the song fulfils every dream of justice and vindication ever nurtured because of Bob Dylan. Scarlet Rivera’s violin soars like an exultation for the downtrodden; the drums hammer like a mob at the door; the artist sings as though now, finally, he is interested neither in irony nor in the concealment to be had from ambiguity. He wants to tell you a story, a true story.

The fiddle is ‘slightly off-key’, of course, say people who don’t often listen to fiddles, or attempt to imagine what might be involved in accompanying Bob Dylan. Life’s fact-checkers, meanwhile, cannot vouch for the narrative’s every last word, to say the very least. Some claims made on behalf of a boxer imprisoned for almost two decades for his part in a triple murder are simply wrong. Certain omissions by Dylan-Levy from ‘the story of the Hurricane’, Rubin Carter, amount to shoddy journalism. But these objections are born of hindsight and also omit certain truths. At first hearing,
Desire
’s long opening track was astonishing, a triumph of compressed narrative, of vernacular writing, of sheer polemical intensity. Despite every off-handed rebuttal, every denial of interest for long years on end, here was Dylan back with a protest song, with an inescapably political song.