Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (58 page)

The largest crime he committed during the making of
Oh Mercy
was the omission of a song entitled ‘Series of Dreams’, closely followed by the decision to drop another work called ‘Dignity’. A third piece, ‘Born in Time’, would turn up on a subsequent Dylan album, but in a rendering that would sound undistinguished when set beside the track discarded from
Oh Mercy
. When the magnificent
Tell Tale Signs
, volume eight in the Bootleg Series, appeared in October 2008 with its outtakes and ‘previously unreleased’ tracks, anyone with an interest in Dylan could just about piece together the work that might have been. It would cost the fan the price of two albums, the second running to three discs if you felt extravagant, for the privilege. In effect, though
Oh Mercy
still contained songs of rare quality, songs such as ‘Most of the Time’, ‘What Was it You Wanted’ and ‘Ring Them Bells’, it had been deprived of 30 per cent of its power.

The grievous loss was ‘Series of Dreams’, a song unlike any that Dylan had produced before, one that proved he was no extinct creative volcano and vindicated the Lanois method. By the artist’s standards the skeletal lyrics were nothing special, yet the song truly did manage to capture the haunting power of a dream. Furthermore, it was a vivid illustration of a theme that had long underpinned Dylan’s work and thought, less a question of ‘What’s truly real?’ than an enquiry into our ability ever to experience reality as anything more than a succession of overlapping dreams. On one reading, the speaker in the song could simply be describing what seemed to go on in his head while he slept. In one dream

Yet these dreams, twisted one within the other, might also be happening in a dream-like reality. Lanois has drums that pound like an insistent question as the singer in the first verse describes himself thinking about his series of dreams, but then saying that the thinking itself, about nothing ‘specific’, also felt ‘Like a dream, when someone wakes up and screams’. In this human condition, as Dylan observes, there is ‘no exit in any direction’ and no way to break out: ‘the cards are no good that you’re holding / Unless they’re from another world.’

So brilliant was the track, Dylan clearly had no choice – or so the jaundiced listener is left to conclude – but to leave it off the album. The best of the songs that survived his veto – and the best are very good – were enhanced by that ‘swampy’ Lanois production, a design for the album’s overall sound that seemed to manipulate light, shade and ambient temperature within the verses. Some still find the producer’s method too fussy, the results contrived and artificial, but it suited Dylan’s words. ‘What Was It You Wanted’ sounded sepulchral; the lovely ‘Shooting Star’
felt
elegiac; ‘Most of the Time’ was in its essence nocturnal. So much could be taken for granted, you might think, as part of a producer’s job. Yet Lanois and his musicians complemented Dylan’s lyrics in their arrangements and playing with an assurance that no one else had achieved, the artist least of all in his attempts to manage his recording sessions, in a very long time.

In parts,
Oh Mercy
would have a kind of Southern Gothic quality. The mysterious if melodramatic ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’, the tale of a Bible-quoting stranger with whom a woman disappears leaving no explanation or clue, showed that Dylan had not lost his interest in punishment and sin. ‘Most of the Time’, the stoical confessions of a man no better than ‘halfway content’, sounded like evidence that age had begun to take its toll on a writer approaching his 48th birthday. The title ‘What Good Am I?’ spoke for itself: one writer, at least, was not impressed by Bob Dylan. ‘What Was it You Wanted’, solemn as a walk in a graveyard, was the artist at his most icily dismissive, and his most commanding.

Yet still he lacked the crucial ability to make important decisions and get them right. Worse, indecision only made Dylan stubborn. With his unparalleled record of achievement, who was to tell him he was wrong? He was not, in any case, some gauche teen idol to be commanded by a producer; all the power was his. Lanois had been granted as much of a say as anyone Dylan had worked with since Jerry Wexler during the
Slow Train Coming
sessions, but when push came to shove only one person called the shots. By all accounts, Lanois argued hard for ‘Series of Dreams’. It was the one song above all others he hoped to protect from the artist’s reckless self-censorship. The producer was proud of his contribution to the track, in each of its several incarnations, and rightly so. He had understood instantly that Dylan was embarked on a new kind of writing. Lanois had sensed the possibilities and had struggled to bring them to fruition. As far as he was concerned,
Oh Mercy
could and should have been the start of something. In the end, Dylan was once more the chief obstacle to what could have been one of the finest of Bob Dylan albums. He still managed to emerge with an album that was pretty fair. Above all, it was no
Down in the Groove
.

Rolling Stone
would decide that ‘
Oh Mercy
explores moral concerns and matters of the heart with a depth and seriousness Dylan has not demonstrated since
Desire
’.
¹¹
The habit of measuring the artist against a yardstick he himself had shaped was, as ever, near pointless, but it at least served to affirm the truth that there was some flame of creative life left in him.
Oh Mercy
would reach number 30 on the American chart, a showing that was both indifferent and far better than anything
Down in the Groove
had managed. British buyers meanwhile placed the new album at number six, a more reasonable verdict. If still another comeback was required,
Oh Mercy
was surely a start.

*

In May 1989, Dylan once again toured Europe. Afterwards, he set running the tale of the never-ending odyssey by playing on in America from July until September. That autumn he reorganised his management, giving the job of handling his concert bookings to one Jeff Kramer in Los Angeles and responsibility for his New York office to another Jeff named Rosen. Dylan also turned up, incongruously, at a telethon in LA for Chabad-Lubavitch, scaring up a whole new flock of ‘rumours’, which is to say guesses, about the nature of his religious beliefs. In the spring of 1990, meanwhile, he busied himself once again with the largely pointless if lucrative Traveling Wilburys project. Roy Orbison had died suddenly during the previous December. The ageing ad hoc celebrity boy band were deprived of a guiding spirit, but the survivors pressed on regardless. They were rewarded, if that’s the word, with a flaccid little album that would come nowhere near to matching the sales of its predecessor.

Amid all this, with plans being laid for a year of touring that would encompass 92 shows, the artist was attempting to make another album of his own. This time the fashionable Was brothers, David and Don, joined the list of music industry Dylan fans who thought they could master the job of producing his work. The brothers hired the likes of Al Kooper and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan as the core of a top-heavy if illustrious musical crew. George Harrison, Elton John, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby and other famous names put in appearances in the studio, but the added scattering of glitter did nothing to improve
Under the Red Sky
. After the album’s release in September, Robert Christgau of the
Village Voice
would decide to ‘rate’ the album more highly than
Oh Mercy
, apparently because the new set showed ‘post-punk’ tendencies, whatever those might be, but most attentive reviewers would be as dismissive as most record-buyers. Dylan’s downward slide would resume: 38 in America, number 13 in Britain. With one good leftover from
Oh Mercy
, a fine mock children’s song that gave the album its title and one terrific track inserted to compensate the diehards,
Under the Red Sky
would get what it deserved in the marketplace. Loyal buyers deserved some small recompense, in whatever shape or form, for a set that began with a thing called ‘Wiggle Wiggle’.

A piece of fun? Just a nonsense song for the sake of it? Those are comforting thoughts, no doubt. Instead, a track that has pole position in any contest to find the worst thing Dylan ever recorded sounds like a demonstration of his contempt for his industry, for his work and for the album-making process. To choose the ‘Wiggle’ horror as the album’s opening number smacked of something more than carelessness. With this, so it seemed, the artist was defying enemies and allies alike. Along with a second-best version of the marvellous ‘Born in Time’, the song called ‘Handy Dandy’ was the compensation, a piece in which Dylan described and adopted a fascinating, funny and devilish persona, part gangster, part Cotton Club bandleader, part demonic presence. It was, in essence, a recasting of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with a few rough grains of the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ from 1963 thrown in, but none the worse for that. Dylan at least sounded as if he was briefly happy in his work. For the rest, it was an ill-written album, one from which plenty of ‘analysis’ could be derived, but precious little real listening pleasure. For what it’s worth, Dylan himself has never had good things to say about
Under the Red Sky
.

He went back on the road as though going on the run. Performance now truly did seem to be the entire point of this artist’s existence. In January, after the first sessions for the album, he had made a dash for Brazil, France and England, finishing up with six long-remembered nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Once
Under the Red Sky
and the last Traveling Wilburys sessions were complete, he was gone again, to Canada and the northern United States. In midsummer he could be found at any European festival anyone cared to name. By August he was hitting the homeland once more and still touring – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – by the middle of November. The idea that Dylan was doing all of this to promote an album he disliked and the public disdained was laughable. Whatever the reality of the ‘Locarno epiphany’, that mythologised moment of truth, it was obvious that he could not or would not stop performing. Another trait was becoming plain. Some shows could be incandescently brilliant, others utterly risible. Those who bought tickets for a Dylan concert were given no guarantee as to the version of the artist liable to turn up.

So much was becoming common knowledge within his industry. What was not yet known was the significance of
Under the Red Sky
, an album that would remain ‘underrated’ for very good reasons. Of itself, that needn’t have mattered. Dylan’s lyrical gift had ebbed since
Oh Mercy
, but he had still managed to come up with ten original songs for the
Red Sky
project. He had made poor albums often enough before, in any case, and hauled himself out of the pit. There was nothing to say he wouldn’t recover again. His riposte to those who had gathered for his wake after
Down in the Groove
had been robust enough, after all. The several failures of
Under the Red Sky
would surely be forgotten in time. What no one knew was that those were to be the last songs, good or bad, that Dylan would write and record in seven years.

*

It was as though he went underground. No one still hoped to hear this artist voice any sort of comment on the nation’s affairs, or ever again reset the compass for popular music, but the absence of his songs would become almost disorienting for those who had followed his career. The lacuna would have no precedent. Dylan had endured a savage writer’s block before and survived. He had suffered ‘amnesia’ like an actual neurological wound. In the early 1970s he had struggled long and hard to find creative alternatives to the miraculous, unforced spontaneity of the ’60s. But even the hiatus between
New Morning
’s release in October 1970 and the
Planet Waves
‘comeback’ of January ’74 had not been wholly barren. There had not been much writing to underpin the
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
soundtrack in July 1973, but ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ had still counted as a lot better than nothing. What began after
Under the Red Sky
was a crisis of a different order, one that seemed only to deepen when Dylan talked amiably, expertly, about the art of songwriting to Paul Zollo of
SongTalk
magazine in April 1991, or when he claimed to a journalist in April 1994 to have ‘a bunch of papers and notes and things lying around. Only time is going to tell when those things come out.’
¹²
Year after year, nothing would ‘come out’. If a couple of sparse albums of old folk and blues tunes were meanwhile to be Dylan’s oblique judgement on modern times, the statement made would prove hard to decipher. Beyond those enigmatic offerings he would fall silent as a recording artist, as though one part of him had ceased to exist.

Instead, he would be out there somewhere, ceaselessly in motion, entirely public and utterly inscrutable, somehow barely visible under all the blazing stage lights. You could catch him if his tour came to your town – and there was always a good chance of that – but save for an outbreak of strangeness, a performance of the Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ or Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’, it would become hard to describe what he was doing or why. Witnesses at some of his shows would begin to claim that he wasn’t necessarily sober during every performance. One city would report that the concert was dire, another that their Dylan had been magnificent. In part, the tale of the never-ending tour would be born of the self-evident fact that for fans there would be nothing else to go on during seven lean years. An entire aesthetic would be devised, one that persists to this day, to justify the claim that Dylan’s creativity survived and thrived in the stark, undeniable absence of new songs.