Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (50 page)

Such talk might be enough to persuade the unwary to prefer
Saved
and
Shot of Love
. That would be a big mistake. Those who greeted
Infidels
as a relief and heard its merits were not so far wrong. It would be a long while before they were again allowed even a notable-if-shifty failure from this artist. Nevertheless, the largest and most important fact, then as now, was that Dylan disfigured one of his better efforts in the studios for reasons that even he has struggled to explain. Mark Knopfler went off to Europe on tour with his band and the artist was left alone to overdub, mix the album and make his own choices. They were bad choices. Afterwards, Knopfler would be baffled, dismayed and just a little peeved by what became of all his exertions on behalf of
Infidels
. Once again, Dylan’s attitude towards his own work raised questions. Did he know what he was doing? More to the point, did he know why?

No tour was planned for 1983. Dylan went back to Malibu, messed around with some young local musicians and in March 1984 put in an appearance on NBC’s
Late Night with David Letterman
. The performance was both chaotic – for want of the right harmonica the singer was momentarily lost – and enthralling. The video for ‘Jokerman’ had been released during the previous month to much media chatter and acclaim. Predictably, the version of the song thrashed out for the TV audience with just bass, drums and guitar by Dylan and three under-rehearsed youngsters was barely a second cousin to the album track. The artist seemed invigorated, nevertheless, by his pick-up band and the company of a new generation of musicians.

Nothing came of it. Those four words could stand as the epitaph for most of Dylan’s endeavours in the years ahead.

THE CLEVER COMMERCIAL MOVE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO FOLLOW
Infidels
in short order with another polished, professional and mostly ‘secular’ album, one laying to rest the obnoxious allegation put about by supercilious hacks that Bob Dylan had suffered a midlife creative crisis. In theory, such a task should have posed no serious challenge. Four albums had appeared in just over four years since the release of
Slow Train Coming
in August 1979. They had ranged from decent to dreadful, but a song such as ‘Jokerman’ demonstrated even to the artist’s worst enemies among the critics that, despite everything, his essential talent was intact. In his born-again moment he had been furiously productive. What hindered Dylan now? There was surely no good reason to doubt that he could deliver product if required.
Infidels
had meanwhile repaired most of the damage done by
Saved
and
Shot of Love
, reaching number twenty in America and number nine in Britain. Columbia had recouped a large part of whatever vast sum they had paid out for a five-album contract. There was a moment to be seized.

It didn’t happen. Some 13 long months would elapse between the appearance of
Infidels
and a new Dylan album. The artefact when it arrived would amount to little more than a stopgap, a desperately poor one at that.
Real Live
would seem only to justify the perennial suspicion among fans that cynical performers stick out concert albums when they have nothing better to offer. Dylan’s effort would be treated with the disdain it deserved – even the title would seem lazy – but miserable sales figures would not spur him into action. Evidence for a loss of appetite, interest, will, desire, concentration and creativity would mount. Another seven months would go by after
Real Live
before Dylan’s twenty-third studio album reached the stores. Celebrations would be muted when they were even audible. All the ground regained with
Infidels
would be lost, and lost, so it would seem, irretrievably. Even the last of all possible excuses, ‘better than nothing’, would be hard to sustain. And the album called
Empire Burlesque
would not be the worst of it.

*

For some who remember the period, the 1980s tend to call W.H. Auden’s contemptuous epitaph for the ’30s to mind. Here was another ‘low, dishonest decade’, its clever hopes soon expired. If the coke habits, booze, ugly fashions, ostentatious wealth and gaudy politics of the few were insufficiently distracting, the ’80s counted for everyone else as a time when it made rational sense to be uncertain and afraid amid global ‘waves of anger and fear’.
¹
It was a decade that seemed to baffle Dylan even as it all but destroyed him as a writer.

Both America and Britain had acquired right-wing governments as conservative as any they had seen. The absolutist free-market policies promoted by these administrations would make a minority rich and leave the majority to worry about jobs and the uncertainties of a post-industrial world. Both countries had elected leaders, in Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with a marked taste for Cold War rhetoric and an eagerness to risk a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Both leaders liked to preach a stern economic discipline that somehow they failed to practise. While increasing the defence expenditure of the United States by 40 per cent in real terms between 1981 and 1985, Reagan, that enemy of ‘public spending’, was piling up the national debt as though assembling an oozing toxic layer cake. No matter how hard he hacked away at the programmes intended to aid the poor, the Republican president could not balance the books. By the time he left office early in 1989, the debt burden would have almost tripled, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. While the better-off were enjoying his tax cuts and
Infidels
was being released, the unemployment rate in 1983 for ordinary Americans, according to the official numbers, was touching 10.4 per cent. By borrowing to cover Reagan’s budget deficit, their country had become the biggest debtor the world had seen. Times had indeed changed.

Unabashed neo-liberalism had arrived in the democracies of the West. Country to country, the family resemblance was unmistakable. Trade unions, the public realm, left-idealism under the banner of the bleeding heart, the ‘permissive society’: these were to be prepared for
history’s dustbin. To justify an agreeable theory, Thatcher’s British ‘economic miracle’ had torn the vitals out of manufacturing and turned the country into a net importer of goods for the first time. In January 1982, if you believed figures based on ever-changing, politically useful methods of calculation, the average rate of joblessness in the United Kingdom was 12.5 per cent. In the old industrial regions of the country, one in five were out of work. In the most afflicted areas, the figures were still worse as Thatcher prepared to pick a fight with Britain’s coal miners and divide her country utterly. Dylan might have tired of ‘issues’ – though ‘Union Sundown’ had seemed to say otherwise – but he could not ignore the world in which he found himself. He could try, though.

On one reading of events, the advent of Reagan and Thatcher was proof enough that the progressive forces which once had claimed Dylan as a figurehead had failed completely. Not a lot of overcoming had been done by those who liked to sing reassuring anthems. The ‘foes’ mentioned in the youth’s ‘When the Ship Comes In’ when he performed the song at the Washington civil rights march in August 1963 had not chosen to ‘raise their hands / Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands’. Moreover, Reagan and Thatcher were the democratic choices of their peoples, elected and re-elected. The only alternative explanation, still being heard more than 20 years after those early-’60s songs, was that the battle had been lost because Dylan and others besides had deserted the fight. The criticism could have been developed further. By the early ’80s born-again Bob had seemed to forget even the reasons for the conflict. Where morality was concerned, especially the moral failure he defined as sin, that Dylan had been on the side of the conservatives. The single telling fact might be that such insights, if insights they were, had done his art no good.

In music, as in real life, the 1980s were proving to be a charmless decade. If, for argument’s sake, year zero was 1956 and the Big Bang in a small universe the release of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, maximum entropy was achieved within three decades. What began with Elvis Presley at an afternoon recording session on Nashville’s McGavock Street on 10 January in ’56 was over and done, never to be renewed, when Dylan was releasing
Empire Burlesque
and preparing the folly he would call
Knocked Out Loaded
. Presley had brought him to consciousness as a 14-year-old. A decade later Dylan was contending with the hanging judges at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. A decade after that, barely a month before the anniversary of the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ session, he was on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, singing for the freedom of Hurricane Carter. Yet by the time one more decade had elapsed Dylan would be telling a journalist from the Australian TV programme
60 Minutes
that he didn’t know much about anything. By the sound of things, he wouldn’t care a great deal either.

In January 1986, the programme’s George Negus would ask the artist if the times had truly changed as once he had predicted. The answer: ‘I don’t know. I’ve no answer.’ Had he believed, then, in the imminence of those great changes when he wrote the song? ‘I would have no way of knowing,’ replied the oracle. His religion, Dylan would claim, ‘has more to do with playing the guitar’. As to possessing anything as risky as an actual opinion about anything at all, the response from this
fin de siècle
performing artist would be worthy of a suspect under interrogation, or of a coma victim regaining consciousness. ‘I mean,’ he would say, ‘it would be pointless for me to go out and say how I feel about this and how I feel about that.’

One popular theory, attractive because it is impossible to prove, holds that everything Elvis began ended with punk. The rest, including Dylan’s career from the mid-1980s onwards, has been a dull, irrelevant footnote, or a species of nostalgia. The explosive energy of the primeval moment had dissipated by the time the ’80s arrived; the music, as one of the singer-songwriters Dylan permitted said, had ‘died’. So the story goes. But the belief that pop was flawless and unimpeachable once upon a time is founded on a myth. The idea that innovation ended was being mocked by new-school hip hop even as Dylan was turning
Infidels
into a jigsaw with most of the important pieces missing.

The 1980s were peculiarly decadent, much of the time, for reasons of their own. Some of it had to do with the nature of that low, dishonest decade; some of it had to do with the likes of Dylan and his surviving contemporaries, the odd species known as rock stars, befuddled people with too much money and too little remaining artistic sense. Music was in decline in the middle of the 1980s for the simple and profound reason that those who had once made the great records settled for inferior stuff, even risible stuff. The buying public seemed to have no complaints, after all.

In Britain in 1984 Paul McCartney would score a number one with ‘Pipes of Peace’; Stevie Wonder would do the same with ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. Lionel Richie would enjoy a gargantuan British hit with the frankly creepy and musically redundant ‘Hello’. Most of the rest would involve drum machines, Wham! and Duran Duran. If Dylan was in need of a hint, meanwhile, the essential American response in 1984 would be Bruce Springsteen’s vastly successful valediction to the Vietnam generation and their music,
Born in the USA
. That album would sell more copies, upwards of 15 million of them, than most of Dylan’s releases put together. He had always been a minority taste. In 1984, he seemed determined to stretch the definition of that category to its limits.

In a suddenly conservative world, a subgenus of the self-involved called
yuppies
occupied a lot of column inches and airtime. Credit and the consumption justified by credit were the new preoccupations of those in work and, as they perceived it, on top of the heap. There was a lot of talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, about individualism and liberty, rather less about communities and freedom. In this era, Reagan and his bosom friend Thatcher shared a taste for moralistic homilies. They seemed to stress that any difficulties in life were due to personal character flaws, or to a society that had lost its ‘values’.

This kind of conservatism could be comical, never more so than in 1987 when a wandering right-wing academic named Allan Bloom would decide that America had boarded the handcart to hell because its colleges had succumbed to relativism and the exotic allure – Thomas Jefferson was not available for comment – of Enlightenment thought. Bloom’s book,
The Closing of the American Mind
, would provide an emblematic cultural moment by picking on music, ‘rock music’ that is, as the reason for young America’s ‘spiritual void’ and the failure of youth to attend to all the things Allan Bloom had to say about the books Allan Bloom had decided were eternally canonical. To read
The Closing of the American Mind
in 1987 was like spinning a dial and picking up 1957, loud and clear. Rock music, Bloom wrote in the ’80s, ‘has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not
eros –
but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored’.
²
It was, indeed, ‘the beat of sexual intercourse’ and it was helping to lay waste the nation’s intellectual capacities, its capitalism and its democracy. Bloom would have Plato and Nietzsche on his side, whether they knew it or not, but he would make no mention of Bob Dylan. The book was a big success, meanwhile. In its aftermath, as one journal would record, ‘Conservative cultural commentators burst forth from all corners, rhetorical cudgels in hand.’ Their list of pernicious trends ‘was long and varied: political correctness, multi-culturalism, deconstruction, cultural and moral relativism, feminism, rock & roll, television, the legacy of the Sixties …’
³

That last decade was long over and done, as the artist knew better than most. The 1970s had given him a tantalising encore. In the 1980s, most of the time, he would struggle and fail to find a Bob Dylan adequate to the occasion. That once reliable conveyor belt of identities had ground to a halt. Suddenly his art, what remained of it, had neither purpose nor meaning.