Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (5 page)

No doubt Dylan also remembered that while sales of
Planet Waves
had struggled to reach 600,000 copies by the close of 1974, at least 5 million applications for concert tickets – some estimates run to double that number – had been received. A Dylan still singing those ’60s songs was preferred to his best recent efforts in the studio. Close to 700,000 people across America had been desperate just to see him and lucky enough to have their wishes granted; what they heard was of less importance. The biggest cheers, night after night, had been for ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. By its end, the sole useful function of Tour ’74 had been to show Dylan how
not
to stage public performances. It was a lesson he would digest in 1975 with fascinating consequences.

*

Some questions had seemed to hang in the air, for all that, as he reappeared on stage for top dollar and the undivided attention of those still transfixed by a shared past. They were not artistic questions, as such, but they had to do with this artist’s place in an altered world. A lot had happened in the eight years of his seeming absence. The consoling Aquarian mythology of the 1960s had disappeared like so much fairy dust – he had been prescient about that – and no one was yet hailing glad conservative morning in America. If anything, the opposite was true. As the American political system was shaken to its roots, the very survival of the Republican Party seemed to be at stake. The common mood was sour; faith in the nation was in short supply. Vietnam had lurched towards a kind of peace – for American enlisted men, at least – but the conflict’s apparent conclusion in 1973’s Paris Peace Accords bore no resemblance to a US victory. It tasted very like defeat for the nation that had never before lost a war.

When Dylan and The Band took to the road at the start of ’74, America’s last moon mission in the twentieth century was over and done. The Arab oil embargo was rattling the economy and corroding business confidence. Many of those who had found their identities in the impulses of the counter-culture were heading for the hills and retreating to communes. Meanwhile, the affair of the Pentagon Papers, the vast Department of Defense study copied by the analyst Daniel Ellsberg and part-published by the
New York Times
in the summer of 1971, had demonstrated an astounding, dispiriting truth. Four American administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – had lied systematically to the people about their activities and intentions in Vietnam. In October of 1973, thanks to charges relating to bribery and the evasion of taxes, the vice-president himself, Spiro T. Agnew, had been obliged to resign.

Then, capping all, there was the aftermath of a strange episode in a Washington office and apartment complex named the Watergate. A vast unravelling at the heart of the state was set in motion by an affair that had seemed, for long enough, like a footnote to the list of America’s worries. At first, no one – no one who was anyone, at least – had given a damn. Afterwards, the folk myth of heroic journalists righteous for truth against the odds would fill the void where a body politic once had stood.

So a 24-year-old watchman, Frank Wills by name, had come across five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices on the night of 17 June 1972. So the cops had been called and made their collars in the wee small hours. And so what? At first it hadn’t sounded like the biggest crime on record. True, a quintet resplendent in business suits and surgical gloves with sophisticated bugging equipment to hand did not qualify as run of the mill, but these were early days for the great American conspiracy theory. Even journalists suspicious of President Nixon took a while to join the dots.

Then, amid wave upon wave of revelations, chiefly from the
Washington Post
, hell broke loose. By the first week of 1974, most Americans knew something – and some knew many things – about Watergate, the presidency, and the state of America’s democracy. These were headlines read around the world.

First, belief in the nation had been tainted by a war whose conduct and point, if any, had seemed to tear the country apart. Loyalty to the idea of America right-or-wrong had been tested beyond the breaking point. All the draft dodgers taking refuge in Canada and elsewhere in no sense represented a majority, but there was a nagging symbolism in their defiance. To conservatives they represented betrayal, but that in itself was troubling. The other side of the political coin said that too many of America’s claims had proved counterfeit. Certain veterans of the fighting in Indochina, authentic heroes among them, had become prominent in anti-war protests.

Then there was the Watergate thing. To all the doubts over probity in foreign policy were added devastating allegations: that the president re-elected in a landslide as recently as 1972 was out of control, that he had engaged in a conspiracy against the constitution, that his deeds had been criminal. Whatever Americans thought of the man in charge, the office of president, and all it represented, remained near-sacred. In one sense, Richard Milhous Nixon stood accused of sullying faith itself. The crisis was without precedent.

*

Each night on his tour Dylan would win blistering cheers for a certain famous line among several famous lines in his song ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. This was not mere lazy, reflexive counter-culture approval. In city after city, not a soul was in any doubt that, sooner rather than later, even the President of the United States would have to stand naked before the people. In early 1974, those enemies against whom he had raged and cursed for so long were closing in on Nixon. This time, they had the law on their side.

Dylan had performed his song as usual at the Coliseum in Denver, Colorado, on the evening of 6 February. As usual, those once-prophetic lines had caused whoops and cheers. That very day the House of Representatives in the 93rd Congress had approved a resolution ‘providing appropriate power to the Committee on the Judiciary to conduct an investigation of whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States’. A little less than a fortnight later, just after Dylan’s tour had ended, the Senate committee investigating the labyrinthine Watergate affair would end its public hearings. The 39th president had nowhere left to hide. Impeachment was inevitable if he failed to resign.

When the articles of impeachment appeared at the end of July, they could not have been more damning. But then, how else could a president fall if not thanks to ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’? In the matter of Watergate, Nixon had obstructed justice, violated his oath and his constitutional duty, then conspired ‘to cover up, conceal
and protect those responsible and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities’. There was more.

This president had commissioned lies, condoned lies and been party to the withholding of evidence. He had bought silence and attempted to influence witnesses, tried to misuse the power of the CIA and, not least, ‘made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States’ into believing that White House misconduct had been investigated.

Nixon had abused his power shamelessly and repeatedly by attempting to tamper with both the tax service and the FBI in an effort to confound ‘enemies’. Finally, thanks to his disdain for subpoenas, he had been flagrantly in contempt of Congress. It would take decades of careful, assiduous PR work to bring this sepulchre back to any semblance of whiteness. Candour, poetically enough, would have nothing to do with it.

Nixon would go nowhere near a jail, of course. Few at the time were surprised by that. Awash with self-pity, apparently still sustained by his most famous lie – ‘I’m not a crook’ – he would resign in August and receive a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford. Some 70 minions, bagmen, burglars, dirty-tricks artists and bit players would be less fortunate.

The shock to American belief in America was profound. Some of that was echoed – anticipated and echoed – in ‘It’s Alright, Ma’. That he had sensed the impending disillusionment fully a decade before the Watergate crisis was taken as confirmation of Dylan’s genius. According to a
Newsweek
report in January of ’74, his performance of the song on the tour’s opening night in Chicago ‘even inspired one man to rip off his clothes and declare his presidential candidacy on the spot’. But Dylan had written ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ in 1964, and detected the rot, and foreseen contempt for authority figures, when his own understanding of political engagement had begun to alter. Those existentialist lines – ‘But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked’ – had not been intended as a comment on judicial process.

A decade later, the arena crowds could cheer his intuitions all they liked. He would not, could not, resume the cursed role of spokesman. There was nothing in his recent repertoire that resembled ‘It’s Alright, Ma’. If audiences applauded what sounded like a judgement on Nixon, they were indulging in nostalgia for the brave old world of protest. And nostalgia, as Dylan would tell the
Los Angeles Times
in 1992, ‘is
death’. Even amid the tumult of a constitutional crisis, he would not be lured into making political pronouncements. Those days were gone.

Vietnam and Watergate were reason enough for protest and what America, quaintly, would sometimes term ‘social comment’. But when had Dylan last risked a simple statement of honest opinion? His songwriting no longer allowed such a thing. Even before the great exhaustion of 1966, even before the flirtations with Nashville and the desperate, nomadic search for privacy, he had denounced that conceit (and by implication denounced his younger self). In his now unshakeable opinion no one who claimed to know the truth, least of all a mere singer, deserved serious attention: the act of making the claim was proof of bad faith, of ignorance and illusion. Equally, pronouncements on issues of the day were antithetical, somehow, to creativity. Passing controversies, slogans and ideologies and positions, had nothing important to do with the permanent truths of art.

Such, at least, had been Dylan’s reasoning. Fundamentally, he didn’t want the job. He had tasted ‘leadership’ and the experience had horrified him. To be expected to think in a certain way, to speak and perform in a certain pre-approved manner, was more than he could bear. A clumsy couplet in ‘Wedding Song’ on
Planet Waves
was blunt enough: ‘It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large / Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge.’ He would not have that kind of greatness thrust upon him. By the early 1970s, only a deity could have dented his indifference.

It remains a mistake, nevertheless, to imagine that Dylan somehow relinquished his intelligence, or that politics, politics in the broadest and deepest sense, would disappear entirely from his music simply because he cancelled his subscription to this cause or that movement. His objections were specific: he was no one’s glove puppet. He would not be taken for granted. This didn’t mean he ceased to think or, however subtly, to voice his thoughts.

That summer Dylan was on his farm in Minnesota, drafting and redrafting a song about deceit, general and particular. ‘Idiot Wind’ would range across the bleak territory of a broken marriage and tear through the storm of dishonesty sweeping the republic.
Blood on the Tracks
, the album he would record later in the year, would be categorised as ‘personal’, confessional, autobiographical. Dylan was too acute, too artistically slippery, to fall headlong into that trap. ‘Idiot Wind’ would descend sometimes into vicious petulance, but the old knack for finding a universal allegory in a personal circumstance survived. While justice kept its appointment with Nixon, Dylan was shaping an image of democracy’s decay that would stagger Allen Ginsberg. In a 1976 interview with Peter Barry Chowka for
New Age Journal
, the poet argued that the song was ‘one of Dylan’s great, great prophetic national songs, with one rhyme that took in the whole nation’.

*

A few weeks after his tour’s end in Inglewood, California, on 14 February 1974, Dylan was back in New York, studying painting and pondering the state of his marriage. If half the rumours reaching the press and TV were true – by August, even
Rolling Stone
would see fit to make note of the gossip – he had done himself no favours and hurt Sara Dylan deeply with his failure to resist the sexual temptations available to a superstar on the road. The album he would write and record later in the year would persuade many listeners, meanwhile, that the couple’s problems ran deeper than a few casual betrayals.

Who really knows, or has the right to know? There is the unanswered question of cause and effect. Unhappiness caused by infidelity, or vice versa? There is the fact that Sara Dylan has kept her memories and thoughts to herself, held fast in absolute privacy. There is the fact that those who read
Blood on the Tracks
like an open letter harbour a naive idea of what pronouns might (or might not) signify in a song. Finally, there is the fact that Dylan has said only a few enigmatic things down the years to explain – to appear to explain – what happened to his first marriage.

In 1978, notably, he would tell the
Dallas Morning News
that the study of painting was the true beginning of his estrangement from Sara. It was during his lessons, Dylan said, that ‘our marriage started breaking up’. She ceased to understand him, he would recall. For whatever reason – that part would remain obscure – she no longer grasped what he was saying or thinking. Dylan, meanwhile, ‘couldn’t possibly explain it’.

You could call it a strange tale. In this anecdote, the most famous ‘break-up album’ of them all arose from insights gleaned during the studies that helped to cause the break-up. Further, the meaning of separation and loss is explored – in several of the songs, at least – through methods acquired in the classes that hastened separation and loss. There is no such word as meta-irony, but there ought to be.