Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (44 page)

That one I couldn’t quite grasp what it was about after I finished it. Sometimes you’ll write something to be very inspired, and you won’t quite finish it for one reason or another. Then you’ll go back and try and pick it up, and the inspiration is just gone. Either you get it all, and
you can leave a few little pieces to fill in, or you’re always trying to finish it off. Then it’s a struggle. The inspiration’s gone and you can’t remember why you started it in the first place.

The writer calculated – though he seemed none too sure – that by the end he was wrestling with four different sets of lyrics. Of the
Biograph
version he could only concede that ‘maybe I got it right, I don’t know. I had to leave it. I just dropped it.’ Frustration clouded his judgement. There were several candidates on
Shot of Love
clearly more deserving of being ‘just dropped’. It was one thing to despair of a song that had given him so much trouble, quite another to stick with lesser works just because they had surrendered without too much of a fight during the recording process.

‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’, a track that was discarded but later restored to the album, sits somewhere between the fistful of outright failures on
Shot of Love
and ‘Caribbean Wind’. Again, there are differences between the words as recorded and those in print under Dylan’s name. As lyrics, in either rendering, they are powerful indeed. ‘Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement, / Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent’ is not a bad opening by anyone’s standards. Nevertheless, the usual Dylan-friendly dose of finical textual analysis will not alter the fact that musically the track is bombastic and pedestrian, an inadequate notion of R&B inadequately rendered. Praising the written words does not justify the track. Where Dylan is concerned, this annoying little truth is too often forgotten. Some rate the song highly, nevertheless, but even judging by one decent recording from the handful of live performances it was given in 1980, it fails to convince. Yet
still
its place on the album should never have been in doubt.

And then there was ‘Angelina’. The history of this song could almost persuade you that the Devil really was causing mischief in Dylan’s world. He – the artist, not the evil one – knew how good the piece was. He knew the album needed its lyrical weight amid tracks that were either insubstantial or routinely savage. It was planned as
Shot of Love
’s closing track even after ‘Caribbean Wind’ was discarded.
⁸
In the end, ‘Angelina’ joined the discards for no better reason, supposedly, than to satisfy the technical demands of vinyl and keep the album’s running time to the 40-minute mark. Rhymes that were both audacious and wonderfully absurd – concertina/Angelina/hyena/subpoena/Argentina – and a dizzying depiction of an allegorical landscape straight from Revelation-the-movie: these were dumped wholesale, along with a fine melody and a lovely Dylan performance, just to spare the runts in the
Shot of Love
litter. That the artist was obliged to make choices is hardly the issue. The choices he made were catastrophic and baffling.

Why songs such as ‘Caribbean Wind’ or ‘Angelina’ had to make way for the likes of the strange, half-hearted and entirely pointless ‘Lenny Bruce’ remains one of the bigger mysteries. The artist has not explained himself. It’s not so much that Dylan does any disservice to the dead comedian, just that, in his writing and in his performance, he sounds as though he couldn’t care less about the supposed martyr for free speech half-remembered in an indifferent eulogy. It is truly hard to believe that the author of ‘Angelina’ and ‘Caribbean Wind’ could have written the likes of ‘Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on / Never did get any Golden Globe award, never made it to Synanon’. Why go through the motions?

On one ingenious reading, meanwhile, the album’s title track was ‘inspired’ by John Lennon’s death. It’s the kind of interpretation you need to want to believe. Dylan was reported to have paid a visit to Yoko Ono in New York a month after the murder, though the claim resists documentation. The real problem is that the verses of ‘Shot of Love’ contain only a couple of lines that could be applied, directly or remotely, to Mark David Chapman and his victim.

At a press conference in Travemünde in (West) Germany in July 1981, Dylan would observe that Lennon ‘was actually shot by someone who supposedly loved him. But what kind of love is that? That’s fan love. That’s what hero worship can breed, if you worship a man in that kind of way.’ So the mere words shot and love would turn up in a reply to a journalist. How the actions of a crazed and armed fan could be discussed in any other way is difficult to fathom. In reality, the song ‘Shot of Love’, raising the curtain on another album packed with Dylan’s millennialist melodramas, comprises a set of simple oppositions. Such is the sermoner’s basic technique. The singer needs an inoculating shot of God’s love to protect him against the world’s vices. He doesn’t need a shot of heroin, codeine or whiskey for what he’s got. He has seen ‘the kingdoms of the world’ and been left afraid.

If this was a tribute to the agitator for universal peace and love, it was set out in terms Lennon would have struggled to understand. In his next response to the press in Travemünde, in any case, Dylan would give short shrift to the deceased’s most famous hymn to secular morality, the dreaming ballad that contemplated the absence both of heaven and of hell. Dylan wouldn’t waste words: ‘I never liked that song.’ ‘Shot of Love’, if it has anything at all to do with John Lennon, might just be taken as a graceless rebuttal to a murdered man’s beliefs. Should that be the case, the title wins no marks, given the circumstances, for good taste.

Dylan’s song was not redeemed, in any case, by the production assistance of the veteran Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell. (He had happened to drop by the studio. Ringo Starr and Ron Wood did the same and wound up recording ‘Heart of Mine’. This is how the album was made.) It was fruitless to attempt to turn the artist into a second-rate R&B performer, pointless to believe that even a little of Blackwell’s old Specialty Records precision would establish a meaningful difference between a groove and Dylan’s religious rut. The songs he was casting aside offered all the clues for which he was searching. Why spurn them for the sake of weary, preconceived ideas about the way a pop album should be assembled?

The question could have been asked several times over of
Shot of Love
. Any one of eight songs could have made room for ‘Angelina’, the best candidate – given an abundance of choice – being ‘Watered-Down Love’. But such arguments, like much of the album, are trivial in the end. Paul Nelson got it right. The credit Dylan earned in better works is not transferable and
Shot of Love
does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. To excuse it as ‘underrated’, as is the habit of fans who find justifications for any shoddy thing made in the artist’s name, is just special pleading. The important fact is that Dylan had begun to misjudge his own gifts utterly.

As though to crown the humiliation, he allowed the album to go on sale with a ghastly ‘pop art’ cover image that almost made the sleeve of
Saved
seem justifiable. Another biblical verse, Matthew 11:25, would be quoted. ‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,’ it runs, ‘because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.’ The speaker doing the thanking is Jesus, not a contemporary songwriter, though whether God would have accepted responsibility in any event for some of the statements on Dylan’s album is a question for theologians.
Shot of Love
became his second big failure in succession for good reasons.

*

That year, like a nasty premonition come true in the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder, a stalker was plaguing the artist at Rundown and elsewhere. Had he been in the mood to think in such terms, Dylan might have noticed an unpleasant irony. By most measures, he was a waning star. According to the harshest judgements made of
Saved
, judgements that were about to be repeated, he no longer deserved all the attention he had once received as of right. Yet here he was with the least desirable of superstar accessories, a devotee so fixated, persistent and threatening it would take security guards, cops and a restraining order to get a woman named Carmel Hubbell out of Dylan’s life.
⁹

Like Lennon’s killing, the incident was a reminder of how savagely weird parts of what remained of the counter-culture had become. That June, while Hubbell was trespassing repeatedly on Dylan’s Point Dume estate, NBC was broadcasting the first televised interview with Charles Manson, instigator of the hideous 1969 murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others, and of a helpless Los Angeles couple named LaBianca. While Hubbell was making death threats to Dylan’s security staff and calling herself ‘Ms Manson’, the imprisoned leader of ‘the Family’ was on TV evading Tom Snyder’s questions about the slaughter of innocent strangers. ‘Well,’ Charlie Manson said at one point, effortlessly sinister, ‘if I could get some help from the doctor then I could get my mind straightened out a little bit and I [could] come back and play like a human.’

It probably escaped Dylan’s notice, but the frenzy incited by this individual had been inspired in its turn by a fanatical belief in certain prophecies supposedly contained in the inerrant Book of Revelation. Manson was also a believer in the imminence of the apocalypse (to be inaugurated, in his version, by racial war). The Family’s leader had been confirmed in his psychotic convictions by an ability to interpret songs from the Beatles’ 1968
White Album
as evidence either of Christ’s return, or as ‘programming’ for the final conflict. Seven people and an unborn child had been murdered, in other words, thanks to a crazed misreading of mostly banal Lennon-McCartney lyrics. Rock music, having taken itself far too seriously for too long, had been accepted by some of its most demented enthusiasts as one kind of gospel. On the
other hand, Manson had not toured America to sing and preach
his
unforgiving version of Revelation and nightmarish global destruction.

Dylan’s concert schedule for the rest of 1981 was designed to give
Shot of Love
all the help the artist could provide. Albert Grossman, his unlovable former manager, was meanwhile suing for certain royalties he maintained were due under contracts that had always been more generous to the representative than to his client. Albert had never lacked gall. Dylan had paid him a lot of money during their partnership and was still handing over a large chunk of his earnings under a previous settlement, thanks entirely to the legal fiction that Grossman had made a contribution, any sort of contribution, to the songs and recordings. A counter-suit was lodged. The case would come close to winding up as the music world’s Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Bob v. the Bear, no quarter asked and none given, but the cash equivalent of a double-platinum album for lucky lawyers. For the most part, Dylan left his team to deal with the problem. Nevertheless, the willingness of a man who was anything but a spendthrift to sign big cheques for legal services was evidence of a deep animosity. Grossman had made off with the artist’s money once too often.

After a handful of warm-up concerts in Illinois, Michigan and Maryland, Dylan and his now-familiar band arrived in Toulouse at the end of the second week in June for the first of 23 European concerts. On his previous visit to the continent in 1978 acclaim had been near-universal. This time the tour, while not exactly inglorious, was granted a qualified welcome. In London, where six nights at Earls Court were planned in the confident belief that 1978’s triumphs would be repeated, ticket sales were slow. The fault did not lie with the artist and his musicians. The kindest explanation is that all the publicity generated by Dylan’s adoption of evangelical Christianity had poisoned the well of public affection.
Slow Train Coming
and
Saved
had both been hits in Britain, but by the summer of 1981 audiences had probably heard as much from that version of Bob Dylan as they wanted to hear. Whatever it represented in heartland America, evangelical preaching had long since ceased to be part of the British mainstream. On the first night at Earls Court there was slow handclapping when Dick Holler’s ’60s hit ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ was performed in the wake of ‘Slow Train’ and a Carolyn Dennis rendition of the gospel song ‘Walk Around Heaven All Day’. By the third night, though his high-register singing and his daring treatment of works such as ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ had received favourable coverage, Dylan seemed to be on the verge of admitting defeat where his religious works were concerned. He told his audience:

This is a new song off a forthcoming record album. I hope it’s on the album anyway. It’s called ‘Dead Man, Dead Man, When Will You Arise’. I wrote quite a few new songs. I thought I’d play them because I don’t know how much longer I’ll be playing new songs. People wanna hear the old songs. I was thinking of cutting out all the new songs. So I can play … I’m gonna play just older stuff. This time here in London I’m gonna play all the new songs in case they never get heard again.

Given that the tour was only being staged for the sake of his new
Shot of Love
songs, this was disingenuous. It was also a tacit admission, however, that Dylan was perfectly well aware of how completely he had squandered the confidence of many fans. It might not have counted as an emblematic moment, but on the last night at Earls Court a bottle was thrown from the audience after a run of three religious songs towards the end of the show. The missile struck Dylan’s guitar, prompting him to retort, ‘You’re gonna have to go out a long way to hurt me.’ Despite what he chose to believe or pretend, it wasn’t just a case of the old against the new. All performers with a back catalogue full of well-loved hits have to cope with that mixed blessing. The issue was the nature of songs such as ‘Dead Man, Dead Man’. Few audiences, Dylan’s audiences least of all, cared for this sort of remonstrance: