Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (16 page)

The song is beset with literary associations, chiefly involving Joseph Conrad, and is weighed down by its apparent debts. Dylan-Levy didn’t just set a few bits of a novel to a tune, but the temptation to justify the artist in terms of literature has often beguiled the citationists who treat all references as cultural price stickers, marks of artistic worth and quality. If Dylan shows that, for a wonder, he has read a serious work or two, he becomes a serious proposition. On the other hand, the parallels between ‘Black Diamond Bay’ and at least one of Conrad’s later books are hard to ignore.

Allen Ginsberg would make the first move in the allusion-hunting game with his
Desire
sleeve note – presumably based on a conversation with Dylan – exulting in those ‘surrealist mind-jump inventions line by line, except D. says he’s reading Joseph Conrad storyteller’. For whatever reason, some who paid attention to the song then made an erroneous connection with
Heart of Darkness
(1899). The idea would have been intriguing, save for the fact that the connection doesn’t exist; there is no match. The clear family relationship, in structure,
bits of plot and lots of set dressing, is with 1915’s
Victory
, the finest of Conrad’s pre-modern melodramas. In the book, as in the song, structure is paramount.

You can well believe that the song sprang, in some form, from Dylan’s reading. Its other, better reason to exist was as a continuation of his investigation into the possibilities of metaphysical ballads that began with ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ on
Blood on the Tracks
. The two songs have a lot in common but several important differences. At eighty-four lines, seven and a half minutes and seven expertly constructed verses long, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ might meanwhile count as another good example of Dylan’s ‘cinematic’ writing, or what Michael Gray has called, accurately enough, his ‘movie-spinning’.
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The description, a self-confessed species of faint praise, overlooks what might be involved in creating a drama that lasts only 450 seconds, with a startling, audacious inversion of perspective at its end. Dylan-Levy got that from Joe Conrad, but its use in the song is a feat of technical daring.

Mercifully, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ owes nothing whatever to anything Joseph Campbell had to say about primal narrative, mythic or otherwise. There is no hero, certainly no epic journey, least of all a spiritual rebirth. Instead, the song owes everything to Conrad’s use in
Victory
of doubled perspectives, physical and moral, and to the idea of fate, blind and mute, that permeates
Blood on the Tracks
. In ‘Black Diamond Bay’, good and evil contend; people scurry around on their plots, affairs and petty human errands; the volcano explodes regardless. The End.

Back home, at the song’s actual end, the narration is halted by a new voice, possibly a version of Dylan’s own, as he sits at home alone in LA, drinking beer and ‘Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news’. Nothing much happening; some earthquake somewhere; some flotsam; just ‘another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear’. After the long preceding
fin de siècle
drama ‘there’s really nothin’ anyone can say’. There is no mystical revelation to be had from this version of the human condition.

Dylan-Levy handle all of this brilliantly. They pinch details from Conrad – period, island, gambling room, a Panama hat – but adapt only fragments of
Victory
’s plot to get the gist they need. In the novel, a narrative that at first seems realistic, if preposterous, turns out to be nothing of the kind. The reader who sees beyond heroes and devilish villains is given an allegory. In the song, in place of Conrad’s tale of Heyst the ‘forgotten cast-off’, the son a disillusioned ‘philosopher’, one who becomes locked in a struggle with an evil hotelier, Schomberg, for the heart and soul of a teenage girl, Lena – performer in a ‘ladies’ orchestra’, no less – we get high, sardonic comedy. Conrad was writing about faith, love, fate and the challenge of evil. Dylan-Levy offer up a tale of human vanity getting what it deserves. One self-involved character, ‘the Greek’, is even trying ineptly to hang himself while the volcano explodes, the lava flows and the island sinks out of existence. This is, if you are that way inclined, very funny.

‘Black Diamond Bay’ has more sheer vivacity than the rest of the songs on
Desire
combined, ‘Hurricane’ always excepted. If Dylan did not perform it in concert that might have had something to do with the dispassionate, stoic and comical secularism of a piece that makes ‘Isis’ and ‘Oh, Sister’ seem fatuous. Even the stratagems and conceits of high literature are given a kind of comeuppance. Conrad’s genius in
Victory
was in the management of viewpoint: first that of a sailor, then that of Heyst as teller of the tale, then the perspective of Heyst within himself, then a position within a neutral, authorial denouement. Dylan-Levy cut through it all to leave us with a bored guy drinking beer and watching the news. This, says the song, is how we these days understand ourselves: through a screen, through a background filter, through bland announcements that somewhere far off something might have happened that might have mattered to someone, but not to us.

On the remainder of
Desire
Dylan otherwise indulged his abiding need to play cowboy in a piece called ‘Romance in Durango’ and chose to end the album with a song to his wife. The former track was a (mostly) vigorous piece of writing that would have fitted well enough with the handful of sun-baked verses Dylan had conjured up for Sam Peckinpah’s
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(1973). Clinton Heylin, among others, has made the association: the movie had been filmed in the western Mexican state of Durango, after all.
⁴¹
On the other hand, ‘Romance’, theatrical or ‘cinematic’ according to taste, bears several of Levy’s fingerprints. As the ‘theatrist’ would tell Larry Sloman, ‘I love stories and plots.’ Would Dylan have written of ‘Hoofbeats like castanets on
stone’, or had his hero promise that ‘Soon you will be dancing the fandango’? Let’s hope not.

The questions act as another reminder, nevertheless, of the issue of authorship in seven of the works on
Desire
. Heylin records Levy’s claim that most of the lyrics in ‘Romance in Durango’ were the director’s own work. On the other hand, Michael Gray says that in an ‘utterly marvellous’ piece, with ‘its skilful concentration of language’, Dylan ‘as often before … says more with less’.
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So who gets the credit or, if needs be, the blame? With most other songwriting collaborations the issue would not arise. In the old Tin Pan Alley partnerships, above all in the miraculous half-century working relationship between Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a composer operated with a lyricist; the labour was divided. In Dylan-Levy, both participants came up with words, to varying degrees. Since one of the pair was Bob Dylan, a creative singularity, a writer sometimes identified as a poet, authorship is relevant.

Inevitably,
Desire
gives the sense of an artist who is not always wholly at one with his material. ‘Romance’ feels, for whatever the word is worth, like an example. Dylan has a genuine secondary talent for covering other people’s songs, but this album is an entirely different case. On at least one occasion, by his own account, he provided none of the lyrics. In other cases, such as in the Durango romance, his contribution is said to have been minimal. To this day, nevertheless, everything on
Desire
is treated, pored over and ‘analysed’, as a product of his strange, personal and individual genius. Shakespeare’s efforts as a script doctor occupy one of literary scholarship’s discrete categories. Pablo Picasso’s intense and intimate relationship with Georges Braque in the moment of Cubism – and Jacques Levy was no Braque – gets its own shelf of monographs. With
Desire
, everything is held to be Dylan even when the artist makes no such attribution. The mistake is odd, but persistent.

Musically, in any case, ‘Romance in Durango’ was a cliché, a skeletal melody that sounded like a parody of Tejano and exemplified one of the album’s real problems. The artist had not over-exerted himself with these tunes. The record would be a big hit; the Rolling Thunder tour that preceded
Desire
’s release in the first week of January 1976 would be a wayward triumph. But here, even after
Blood on the Tracks
, were more signs of a falling away, of a creative decline. Dylan could not manage all of the words. In the studio, he could no longer ride waves of chaos to glory. And he could not invariably contrive, borrow or
adapt the melodies he needed to make the most of the lyrics he had assembled on the fly with an eager collaborator. The Dylan who could manage such feats unaided was otherwise engaged.

It tells us something, perhaps, about the part played by Sara Dylan in his existence. It might remind us, too, as we weigh out the hits and misses in an artist’s career, that talent exists within a human life, not in ideal, temperature-controlled isolation. Dylan was heading in strange directions even as he produced another big hit of an album. He was becoming unmoored, adrift, even as he seemed to pull
Desire
’s last song from his back pocket. There was no doubt, however, about who had written this one.

Dylan’s confederates in the studio were given no hint of the existence of ‘Sara’. He made the recording used on the album in the early hours of 1 August, after six consecutive attempts, while his visiting wife, not forewarned, sat listening. In a manner that could not be matched by anything on
Blood on the Tracks
, Dylan exposed himself utterly. He seemed to plead for his life.

Jacques Levy would tell Larry Sloman that ‘Sara’ had been written at the house in East Hampton. In
On the Road with Bob Dylan
, ‘Ratso’ Sloman would describe the night of 31 July/1 August as a quiet session in which a good deal of time was spent listening to playbacks of previous recordings.
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Then, it seems, Dylan turned to his wife, said, ‘This is for you,’ and performed ‘Sara’. As noted, it was not done in the single take pop legend might have required. Nevertheless, the song was greeted by those present, in Sloman’s account, in the kind of silence generally described as ‘stunned’. The only important biographical detail is that Sara Dylan remained ‘impassive’.

What she felt is, as ever, not recorded. The song’s appeal is, intensely, a matter of taste. There are clichés enough within it. But here, equally, are scenes from a marriage, viewed through one man’s tired eyes. Here are family moments, intimate thoughts and deep feelings, private – you might have thought – and personal, offered in a manner that was, for this artist, entirely unprecedented. The song ends with Dylan’s keening words, ‘Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.’

Many fans find ‘Sara’ intensely affecting; a few of us wince. How a notably guarded woman might have felt about having her marriage acted out before strangers in the middle of a New York night tends to be overlooked. Clearly, Dylan was so caught up in his emotions he did not see fit to ask permission – for when did he ever? – for such an exercise. Through all the years of their union he and his wife had made their privacy paramount. Now all of that was cast aside simply because he felt the need.

You could call ‘Sara’ one of the great love songs. You could also call it a piece of sentimentalised emotional blackmail. If Levy was right about the moment of composition, Dylan was springing a surprise he had prepared beforehand. Sara, trapped by the performance, might have had reason for her impassivity. He, bereft, simultaneously acknowledging that the marriage was over yet begging for it to continue, could put his side of the story before millions of people in a Bob Dylan song. She had no such opportunity, even if – though you must doubt it – she had wanted such a thing. The fans who hear only an expression of profound love assume that Sara Dylan must have been deeply moved when first she heard the song. But what was she supposed to say or do? Try again, yet again, to make the marriage work, no doubt. For a short while the song would seem to achieve its purpose, but the recording session remains one of the strangest episodes in Dylan’s career.

The paramount rule of his art had been that plain truth is never to be offered, that enigmas have a value for their own sake. This was, over and above everything, how he worked. Precisely because he had avoided explicit autobiography he had achieved universal meaning. Dylan was a creative ellipsis. Now, suddenly, he was telling the world frankly, among other things, of how his wife had helped to get him off heroin in New York at some point (presumably) in 1965.

This, surely, was too close to any bone. Who tells the world such things? Not, or so it had been presumed hitherto, Bob Dylan. We might also remember, however, that ‘Sad-Eyed Lady’ had in fact been written, according to plenty of witnesses, in a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee, on a night in mid-February 1966, when the artist was struggling to put together the album he would call
Blonde on Blonde
. The cure, one cure at any rate, might well have been endured just as he described, but the writing was done in Tennessee, not in New York. The author had said as much himself on more than one occasion.
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Sara Dylan, recipient of a poet’s adoration, undoubtedly the begetter of that great 1966 song, might well have paused in 1975 to wonder what became of the facts.

*

Fake platinum and spray-painted gold weave their spells. Because
Desire
went on to be a big hit, because it remains beloved, because Dylan went on to give it a context with the Rolling Thunder tour, it has been granted a free pass in most of the many assessments of his work. Set it beside
Blood on the Tracks
, however, and treat it song by song. You could call the
Desire
collection ‘diverse’; you could also call it incoherent. It refuses to settle, thematically or stylistically. Then ask yourself – though this is not much of a guide to anything – about Dylan’s own devotion to the fruits of his collaboration with Jacques Levy.