Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (28 page)

This did not, specifically did not, make him a potential recruit for Jesus – he would resolve the contradiction to his own satisfaction before long – but it was proof enough of his inclinations. Not a single song from the 1960s or the 1970s justifies the supposition that this artist was ever far from God. If Dylan embarked upon a spiritual journey, it was a short trip.
Street-Legal
merely refined his theological position a little.

‘Changing of the Guards’ is a degree more complicated than anything else on the album and all the better for it. Christ pops up here, too, as a kind of spiritual superhero on behalf of the meek, anticipating the saviour Dylan would embrace before long. Here too, set in the landscape of mythology and Tarot cards, with an Isis figure for a heroine – perhaps the writer had been reading his D.H. Lawrence after all – are the end times: ‘Merchants and thieves hungry for power’, ‘destruction in the ditches’, ‘Renegade priests and treacherous young witches’, ‘dog soldiers’ in the ‘palace of mirrors’. The last verse will promise peace, the fall of false idols and even the conquest of ‘cruel death’ itself. First, pronouns having been switched, Christ militant will have a word.

In that context, the shuffling of Tarot cards within the song becomes a little puzzling. There is no doubt that Dylan is using the imagery of the old esoteric poker deck extravagantly, though perhaps with less credulity than fans of all-knowing allegorical pictograms would like to believe. Certainly there are explicit references to cards from both the Tarot’s ‘major arcana’ and the minor, whether Fortune, Death, the Moon, the Chariot (‘on the wheels of fire’) or the Tower. The King and Queen of Swords are in the deck, too, as is the Three of Swords with that ‘heart-shaped tattoo’. A lot depends, however, on the pack being employed. For example, the card known as the Tower in English – hence Dylan’s reference – is generally called
La Maison Dieu
, the House of God, in the sixteenth-century
Tarot de Marseille
. Equally, many Europeans have a peculiar tradition that the pack is best used just to play games. Perhaps they are not alone.

Did Dylan believe in Tarot? He might well have been a believer in trumped-up anglophone notions of divination. Some fans would love to think so. Interviewing the artist in London in June, Robert Shelton would certainly mention his ‘fascination’ with the pack.
²⁷
If Dylan possessed a real faith in the cards, he could even have picked up the idea, entirely spurious, that the Tarot has an Isis connection. Like much else that was exotic and unverifiable, this version of cartomancy caught on widely in the 1970s among those packing for their spiritual journeys.

Equally, the artist might simply have decided that a song with a mock-prophetic intent, even a serious mock-prophetic intent, could stand a little esoteric colour. He wasn’t picky. For Dylan, arresting images were, as they remain, pictures worth a couple of thousand words, functioning as a language in their own right. Asking how Tarot squared with the Christian element in ‘Changing of the Guards’ is probably a fruitless exercise. What we know is that this artist responds first to imagery that he can put to his own use. The verbal fantasy landscape painting evident in ‘Changing of the Guards’ isn’t so different, as a matter of technique, from what Dylan had achieved in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, or from what he would achieve in ‘Jokerman’. It might also explain why in due course he would respond with such intensity to the Book of Revelation.

Imagery, not religion, gives ‘Changing of the Guards’ its power, but that’s just the difference – one that Dylan would soon forget too easily – between a poem and a sermon. As far as faith goes, however, what matters about the song is the attraction of the messiah figure for this supposedly Jewish writer. Hitherto, the serious uses to which Dylan had put religious language had been justifiable, more or less, in terms of the Torah. Even this song might have been excused, had there been a need, as a version of Jewish messianic prophecy, of which there is an abundance. Yet looking back it is possible to see just how open Dylan already was to the claim that prophecy had been fulfilled. In London that summer Shelton would assert proudly, ‘He knew I wouldn’t ask him about God.’ The enquiry had been made too many times before.

Street-Legal
’s third great song, hampered by its routine arrangement, encumbered by the girl singers whose presence would become a persistent distraction in the years ahead, is ‘Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)’. This is another definitive rebuttal to the claim that Dylan’s writing had begun to falter. It is evidence, probably superfluous, that his need for Jacques Levy’s help on
Desire
had been personal rather than professional. Again, however, if evidence is required that here was a man lost in life and in the toils of spiritual conflict, most questions are answered.

You can understand ‘the law’ in the conventional sense of the forces encountered by a man forever on the road – one idea that never grows old for Dylan – or you can understand it in the Jewish sense on which the writer was raised. It could be a reference to coppers; it could be a reference to the Halakha, the body of laws for religion and for life. You can take the journey itself as spiritual or as another reworking of the shifting narrative trail traced in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. You can spot the images of personal loss or find something a good deal deeper in the idea of an individual struggling with ‘that enemy within’, himself, his ‘twin’. You can take it, above all, that this Dylan is a man who is approaching God yet is still, given recent events in his private life, somehow incomplete.

*

Dylan was back on the road by the first day of June. Fully seven nights at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles awaited before he and his musicians were due to cross the Atlantic. Soon enough the artist would be praising the wonderful perceptiveness of British audiences as a heartening contrast to the treatment he could expect at home. In
Rolling Stone
, Cameron Crowe would report that Dylan’s performances had ‘won over many doubters’ by the end of the LA run, but the burden of the piece would be the tale of ‘glibly professional’ shows that ‘left most die-hard fans and reviewers puzzled’.
²⁸
The journalist would quote an unnamed ‘prominent musician’ as a surrogate for majority opinion. ‘There were things that killed me and there were things that really pissed me off,’ the bravely anonymous critic would remark. ‘He could take this show to Vegas and not change one note.’

The important fact that Dylan could wear ‘specially tailored’ clothes, switching between ‘a black studded pants outfit or one with a white sequined thunderbolt design’ – both verging on the criminal, it’s true – would go into the
Rolling Stone
notebook. The drastic rearrangement of many favourite songs would be observed. That Dylan had taken to styling himself ‘an entertainer’ while indulging in ‘earnest between-song patter’ would be added to the charge sheet. Crowe would even remember witnessing the
artist shaking hands with members of the audience
. An alleged visit by Dylan to (of course) Las Vegas, supposedly to watch a performance by Neil Diamond, was the only explanation given for this new ‘concert stance’. What’s plain is that the short hop to damning conclusions, hard on the heels of the reviews for
Street-Legal
, had been achieved.

Britain, too, had made up its mind long before the artist arrived. The difference was that the vote had been cast almost unanimously in Dylan’s favour before a note was heard. But then, the perverse islanders liked
Street-Legal
. Their music press had not stooped to asinine abuse of the record. Instead, music journalists had rummaged in the superlatives drawer for the old folder marked ‘Best Since …’ In the UK, the album would become his biggest seller since
New Morning
.

Dylan had not played in Britain since the last day of August 1969 and the Isle of Wight festival. Everyone, artist and audience, had chosen to forget the ‘mixed reception’ given to that show with The Band, irrespective of any virtues captured by bootleggers. One performance aside, Dylan had not toured among the British since 1966. Tickets for his run at Earls Court therefore sold out instantly to people who had queued for days; many more could have been sold. Audiences were warm, forgiving, ready to enjoy themselves and eager for him to succeed. In fairness, he didn’t let them down. He and his band had performed better than pretty well in Los Angeles, but in London there was a meeting of minds between the artist and his public. Quoted – or roughly paraphrased – by
Melody Maker
after the last Earls Court show, Dylan said:

Doing these concerts here has made me realise about British audiences. They’re really something different – they actually come for the words and the songs. That’s what’s missing back home. There they tend to come for … not so much the music, more the sideshow.
²⁹

This was not mere flattery from a gratified artist. The Earls Court audiences were not dissuaded in the slightest by new arrangements of old songs, or dismayed by alleged hints of ‘Vegas’. Veterans of Dylan shows would long afterwards maintain that these were among the best concerts he ever gave in Britain.
Melody Maker
’s Ray Coleman would write that ‘Different lines of his songs came over with fresh force’, that ‘Rarely, if ever, has the song [‘Just Like a Woman’] been so brilliantly blown apart and knitted together again’, that ‘his harmonica solo was a riveting joy’. The journalist would remember the notes of the solo ‘bringing the ecstatic crowd to its feet with a mighty roar’. Coleman, who did not insist that the last night was necessarily the best of Dylan’s London run, would even give a special mention to a performance of ‘Señor’. The contrast with the reception the artist would receive in his native land in the autumn of the year would count as remarkable. Either the English capital got very lucky, or the tour lost something important when it returned to the States, or Dylan was dead right about prevailing attitudes back home.

What can be said for certain is that an authentic hero’s welcome still awaited him across Europe. He painted his newest masterpiece in Rotterdam, Dortmund, Berlin, Nuremberg, Paris and Gothenburg. As in London, the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan was accepted without reservation by the French over five nights at the 10,000-seat Pavillon de Paris. David Bowie and Bob Marley had managed only a couple of nights apiece there in the preceding weeks. Europe also allowed the artist and his band – between whom there now existed a genuine rapport – to behave like overgrown cultural exchange students. They took in the sights. Dylan even paid a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Back in England, he made amends for the Isle of Wight. The ‘Picnic at Blackbushe’, staged on a Hampshire airfield that had once housed the RAF and, later, the US Navy, had been fully expected to draw big weekend crowds. It was supposed to meet part of a huge and lucrative British demand for Dylan after the adulatory reports of the Earls Court shows. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on ticket sales said that an impressive 100,000 customers could be expected. On Saturday, 15 July, according to predictably cautious police estimates after the event, something like 200,000 turned up; the real figure was undoubtedly greater. Some of the horde might have been eager to see Graham Parker and the Rumour, Eric Clapton or Joan Armatrading, but the day’s headline act and unquestioned star, resplendent in a top hat borrowed from a hotel doorman, was Dylan. As darkness fell and bonfires began to spark into life in every corner of the site, he commenced a near-three-hour performance that would include six of the nine
Street-Legal
songs. If your taste runs to coincidence, ‘Señor’ was followed, not for the first time on the tour, by ‘Masters of War’. With everything from a solo version of ‘Gates of Eden’ performed in a pool of blue light to ‘Forever Young’ with Clapton playing along, Dylan’s set culminated in what had become his standard encores. Again, the juxtaposition seemed to make a point: first, ‘Changing of the Guards’, then ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’. The reception from the vast tribe on the airfield was, in that word favoured by benign reviewers down the decades, rapturous. All that remained was to persuade America to take the same view.

It didn’t happen. The final American stretch of this world tour would be a very long haul. Dylan would seem to run out of energy or patience as concrete stadium succeeded concrete stadium in the course of 65 shows. He and his musicians would perform in thirty-one states and three Canadian cities before delivering their valedictory encores at the bizarrely named Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida on 16 December. Harmony within the band would be disrupted, meanwhile, when the artist took up with Carolyn Dennis, one of the singers – in what would become a significant relationship for both of them – after already getting himself involved with another of the vocalists, Helena Springs. For better or worse, Dylan could and did please himself in these matters.

It made little useful difference to performances that would cease to be fresh, confident or assured before the last hike of the globe-spanning expedition was far advanced. Instead, Dylan’s singing would too often seem to bear out the criticisms levelled against the vocals on the album by Greil Marcus. The new arrangements would also lose their original poise and conviction. Monstrous world tours are the enemy of art, as any performer who isn’t too busy counting the money comes sooner or later to realise. Dylan was more alert to the problem than most, but with too many minds already made up thanks to reviews of
Street-Legal
, and with all the cracks about alimony, Elvis and lounge acts, some of his shows would fail to sell out.