Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (51 page)

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So much was evident during a brief, catastrophic European tour, the last Dylan would countenance before the early weeks of 1986. The only apparent motives for this 1984 exercise were the sums of money that could be taken on the gate at big football stadiums and Olympic arenas across the continent. Band introductions aside, Dylan barely spoke a word to the vast crowds. The veteran musical crew assembled by Mick Taylor might have been designed, meanwhile, to illustrate just how redundant this version of ‘rock’ had become. As often as not, the hired hands had no idea what Dylan intended to play on a given night and no understanding of how, if at all, they were supposed to follow his butterfly instincts. For whatever reason, Carlos Santana and his band were hired as one support act; Joan Baez as another. Soon disillusioned, yet again, she failed to stay the course. Later, the experience would be recalled as ‘one of the most demoralising series of events I’ve ever lived through’. Baez would also record how it felt to be groped, it seems for old time’s sake, by an enervated, half-aware superstar whose character she could barely recognise.
⁴

Dylan was knocking out old hits for big money, yet talking, when he deigned to talk, as though he lived for art alone. On 27 June, in a café in Madrid, he would tell Mick Brown of England’s
Sunday Times
that ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now’.
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The next night he would be doing ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and all the other old songs he had begun to regard as perfunctory offerings to those who still thought it a treat to glimpse from several hundred yards’ distance someone who might once have been Bob Dylan. The ‘stadium-rock experience’ was another of those 1980s phenomena to which he had consented. Here was the deified artist, beyond reach and almost beyond sight; here too were the multitudes who would take what they were given. Any belief in the communicative function and power of art and artist was boiled away while the band, the contract labour, played on.

By the time the tour reached the inverted pit of London’s Wembley Stadium on 7 July, Dylan was littering his stage with ‘guest stars’. An honest groundling might have glimpsed Van Morrison, or heard a guitar that might have been played by Eric Clapton. The alert ticket-holder probably noticed that the artist had messed around with the words to ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and, as ever, decided that ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ stood in need of revision. The worth of all this would be revealed when
Real Live
, with tracks recorded in London, Newcastle and Dublin, was released in November of the year. It is possible, just about, to argue that the album does not represent the better moments of the tour, but it still gives a fair account of the average show in Europe in ’84. American record-buyers – which is to say non-buyers – would make
Real Live
the least successful of all of Bob Dylan’s albums. Number 115 on the
Billboard
chart would be its reward and its requiem.

Back in America, he returned to the studios and began the long, tedious process of casting around for inspiration in the hope that an album would emerge. Songs, suddenly, were coming hard, but that was not the whole story. The fact that Dylan’s very first studio sessions would revolve around material that had found no place on
Infidels
was revealing. The fact that he tried (and failed) to make something out of ‘Clean-Cut Kid’ rather than ‘Foot of Pride’ or ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is beyond curious. It was as though he no longer understood how a great song sounded.

The standard excuse for Dylan’s working methods, an excuse he has used often enough in his own defence, is that he does not return to the scene of previous defeats. If a song is deemed a failure, he forgets it and moves on. In Dylan’s telling of the legend, fantastic unheard works float between possible universes. With
Empire Burlesque
, nevertheless, he would return twice to the
Infidels
discard pile, consciously and deliberately, yet take an interest only in one fine song and one minor piece. No issue of principle as to the reuse of previous work was at stake, therefore. Dylan nevertheless took an avid interest in some songs and ignored other, better works. It is almost as if he was keeping ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in reserve for the rainiest of days.

That blasphemous suggestion can be heard among fans, now and then. The basic allegation, the conspiracy within the grand conspiracy, is that Dylan’s many outtakes, known to the world of ‘collectors’ almost from the instant a recording console switch is reset, are no accident, that since the Bootleg Series he has salted tracks away for the sake of a secondary, if highly profitable, outlet. This, it is argued, is how he allows himself to think twice, to make amends, and to take no responsibility for what might have gone wrong with all those ‘official’ albums. With the Bootleg Series as a safety net, there is no longer a pressure to get things right first time around. All albums become, in a sense, provisional. A judicious release of outtakes can repair the reputational damage of any number of past failures. A new album can be revised, in effect, almost as soon as it has been released. It is a pleasing idea, but silly. No one wastes material the way Dylan has wasted material, sometimes in moments of dire need, if his calculations are so cold-blooded. Equally, no one has worked as he has worked, amid a virtual posterity, for quite so long.

So: when did discussions truly begin over the creation of the
Biograph
box set, the one that would be released to the world at the end of October (or the beginning of November) in 1985? When did Dylan, who had failed for years to make anything useful out of the basement tapes, decide to feed on his own corpus? A great deal of work on copyrights and permissions, not to mention a lot of archival labour and audio restoration, must have been undertaken before the ‘unprecedented retrospective’ (and so forth)
Biograph
collection of five vinyl discs or three CDs gained Columbia’s approval. A certain amount of thought on the artist’s part must also have taken place. The first of the big, lucrative box sets dedicated to a living artist, a concept that would give the music industry a second lease on life, didn’t just happen.

Dylan’s tendency to regard himself and his work as entities existing outside the present moment has never been accidental. Equally, no one begins to curate his own life inadvertently, least of all in the trough of a writer’s despond. Yet the most remarkable sleight of hand conducted by this artist down the years has involved persuading the world (himself included, it sometimes seems) that stuff just happens. Songs somehow get written, albums somehow get made and fame – none of this is Dylan’s doing – somehow descends. Yet by allowing the
Biograph
set he did not just give permission for still another greatest-hits package. With this little casket he altered his perspective on his own work. In fact, he would alter everyone’s perspective, even when they thought they knew every possible angle. Accepting the past, and with it all those accumulated identities, he could never be the same unencumbered artist again. He would make a fair few bucks from
Biograph
, though, and go on insisting that none of it was his idea.

In the mid-1980s, no one had yet realised that you could, in essence, flog a bunch of old, near-forgotten stuff to the middle-aged demographic and screw the tape thieves, as it were, to boot. For that matter, you could repackage a career, an artist or an entire self-conscious ‘legendary’ existence. Dylan’s public position was then, as it remains, to disdain all his missing back pages. He still pretends that his hugely lucrative Bootleg Series releases have somehow just materialised while his back was turned. In November 1985, talking to
Time
magazine about
Biograph
, he would state:

It wasn’t my idea to put the record out. This record has been suggested in the past, but I guess it just didn’t come together until recently. I think it’s been in the works for like three years. I had very little to do with it. I didn’t choose the songs. A lot of people probably had a hand in it. The record company has the right to do whatever they please with the songs. I didn’t care about what was on the record. I haven’t sat down and listened to it.
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Dylan would go on to boast that if someone had made it ‘worth my while’ a compilation twice the size might have been forthcoming. It could, he said, have contained nothing but his unreleased songs. In a slight if inadvertently truthful slip, however, the line about ‘the record company has the right to do whatever they please’ would be undermined by the artist’s flat statement: ‘I’m the final judge of what goes on and off my records.’ So who had sanctioned the box set? Columbia might have been entitled to another greatest-hits package, but not to
Biograph
. Like everyone else in his business, Dylan signs contracts. These specify the number and nature of his releases. Sony/Columbia, as the conglomerate is these days more accurately styled, cannot just empty its vaults of his material as it sees fit. To this day, the planning of Bootleg Series releases is subject to continual revision according to choices made, if the record company is to be believed, only by the artist or his representatives. If nothing else, uncertainty and fascinating rumours keep the hardcore fans interested.

Biograph
had been in the planning, nevertheless, ‘for like three years’ as of November 1985. So the intention to memorialise Bob Dylan in a lavish if unproven format, if with no more than his tacit consent, had come into existence just after
Shot of Love
was dying its deserved death. The artist was regarding himself – his life, his writing, his career – as an artefact as early as 1982. To see his monument being erected while he was trying to make a new record, even if he ‘didn’t care’ about the contents of
Biograph
, must surely have had an inhibiting effect on his writing. The evidence of Dylan’s mid-1980s albums suggests
that the effect was near-paralysing. Even today, the continuing archaeological excavations represented by the Bootleg Series must make for an odd existence, like reading your own obituary day after day. ‘Bob Dylan’, that mirror within a mirror, is a work forever in progress for the man who bears the name.

Back in 1985, the accusation that he aimed for a ‘disco’ sound with
Empire Burlesque
was perhaps the most half-witted of all the criticisms the artist has ever encountered. A lot of things can be done, no doubt, to the accompaniment of a Dylan soundtrack, but dancing has never been one of them. The same was true of the album he made in fits and starts, with a changing cast of musicians, between the summer of 1984 and March 1985. The aim was to achieve what was then a ‘contemporary’ sound with the help of the fashionable engineer and producer Arthur Baker, an individual who had worked, as Dylan was no doubt aware, with Bruce Springsteen. It is not a sound – cluttered, top-heavy, full of manipulated drum machine effects, synthesisers, horns and over-assertive bass lines – that has improved with age. It is as though a template was created before anyone listened to the songs. But then, the album itself can probably be summed up by the fact that its best track, ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’, was in essence a leftover from
Infidels
.

In this song, as elsewhere on the album, Dylan had begun to incorporate snatches of old movie dialogue into his writing, anticipating techniques he would adopt wholesale in the twenty-first century. Yet while the ventriloquising of hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart works brilliantly in ‘Tight Connection’ – ‘Well, I had to move fast / And I couldn’t with you around my neck’ is lifted almost intact from a picture called
Sirocco
(1951) – other borrowings are less successful. Songs, it turned out, could not be assembled from found art alone, though criticisms of Dylan’s technique are sometimes based on a deep misunderstanding of what plagiarism means. Who could have resisted ‘I’ll go along with the charade / Until I can think my way out’, even if its source was a less than perfect 1949 Bogart movie called
Tokyo Joe
? If the audience is ignorant of the source, what does it matter? The issue is one of intent and artistic resources. Could a writer be culpable because he lifted a few lines while stuck for ideas, yet innocent of theft if, consciously and artistically, he was trying to create a particular verbal resonance? Dylan would have to deal with that persistent question at a later date.
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Of the rest of the
Empire Burlesque
songs, or rather the best of the rest, the mesmerising ‘Dark Eyes’ was a simple, acoustic affair, blessedly free of Baker’s ‘production’ and relying on just Dylan’s guitar, his harmonica and his words. Supposedly inspired by a late-night encounter in a hotel lobby, it sounds like a lament for all women who stray in the dark, for the writer himself, and for lost souls everywhere.

Typically, Dylan would discard a thundering version of a song entitled ‘When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky’ that he had recorded with Steve Van Zandt and Roy Bittan of Springsteen’s E Street Band. It would be resurrected – for everything the artist did could now be revised or restored to life – on 1991’s
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
. The same luck would not befall another, better and far more important track that emerged, as though from nowhere, during a session in Los Angeles during the second week in December 1984. Written with the playwright Sam Shepard, ‘New Danville Girl’ is one of the most structurally complex narratives ever to bear Dylan’s name. As such, it is also one of the most sophisticated meditations on identity, fate and memory ever attempted in popular song (or in any other art form). All that being the case, it was almost inevitable that the track would not make the
Empire Burlesque
album. When Dylan later returned to the piece he failed to improve it and used the song, renamed ‘Brownsville Girl’ and still a riveting creation, to pad out a miserably poor album. For now, that’s another story.