Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (68 page)

While Dylan marked fully ten years back on the road and took less-than-onerous superstar gigs with fellow artists of a certain age, October provided a thunderous, bracing echo from his past. It also offered a rebuttal to the never-ending chatter about a never-ending tour. If brevity was the criterion, a title like
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert
deserved no prizes. In every other respect the double CD was, as legend and all the real bootlegs had long said, impeccable. Anyone who bought this when it went on sale on 13 October and then caught Dylan’s show in a town called Duluth, Minnesota, just nine days later was invited to contrast and compare. The tour that took the artist to the city of his birth saw some pretty fair performances along the way. It had nothing to compare with a slice of the historical record as it pertained to the events of 17 May 1966.

Dylan would tell interviewers, reasonably enough, that he could no longer be the person who had given that Manchester show, or write those songs, or occupy that near-impossible role, or endure the killing pressures once imposed on a young man not yet 25. All his complaints and explanations were fair. They nevertheless invited the question: who could he be, then, and what could he do as the century approached its end?
Time Out of Mind
had provided the beginnings of an answer. Yet as the months and the tours came and went he seemed to have no interest in pursuing a conclusion.

In 1999, he would give 119 public performances, breaking his own record once again. Four dozen of these ‘arena experiences’ would be shared with Paul Simon, for reasons probably best explained by the prices the two legends felt entitled to charge. They would not ask for an arm and a leg at every stop along the way while one short man alternated with a shorter man – Dylan won that contest, just for a change – in opening or closing the show. Some customers would get away with surrendering just the contents of a wallet with a couple of fingers attached, depending on what the local nostalgia market would bear. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a loyal fan of one or other star would contemplate a top price of $75; in Camden, New Jersey, the costliest ticket would be $100. A fan in Concord, California, who wanted the best seat in the house could expect to pay $127.50, while in Vegas the top-end entry fee was $150. At Madison Square Garden, New Yorkers who refused to settle for less than the finest accommodation would pay $123. To put this in context, the most expensive ticket for an Eric Clapton show at the Garden two years later would be $80. The highest price demanded by U2 during their blockbusting 2001 tour would be $130.

Money aside, it is hard to identify the purpose and point of the joint-tour exercise. For the most part, predictably, dedicated Dylan fans would enthuse over his performances – though bootlegs say these were nothing special – and pay little attention to Simon. Even those wholly enamoured of the artist would become just a little sceptical, however, about this particular detour on the endless highway. One fan, having attended six shows in a week, would remark after the last night at the Jones Beach Amphitheatre in Wantagh, New York, on 31 July that though the concerts had been ‘very good’ it was all ‘kinda uneventful’.
²⁰
Seth Rogovoy, journalist and prolific writer on Dylan, would open a review of a show in Albany, New York, with these words:

Lightning didn’t strike nor did fireworks ignite when Sixties icons Bob Dylan and Paul Simon joined forces on a handful of songs at the Pepsi Arena on Tuesday night. In fact, what on paper might have seemed like a stroke of promotional genius – putting the two folk-rock visionaries together for the first time in their careers for a barnstorming tour of the nation – turned out to be anti-climactic from the get-go.
²¹

Rogovoy, another finding few flaws in Dylan’s own performances, would finish up by remarking that the concert was a failed attempt to produce ‘something new and unique’. Presumably that was not the aim. Nevertheless, when the usual story says that the artist was in the throes of a creative renaissance by the end of the ’90s, it is worth bearing in mind how he chose actually to spend his time.
Time Out of Mind
and all the publicity engendered by the latest ‘comeback’ were causing a renewed interest in Dylan and his works by the century’s end. The album had sold a million copies. Yet for most of the time this artist reborn was just playing the arena circuit, spinning on a wheel.

The spring of 1999 had seen him return to Europe for the 11th year in succession; the next dozen years would be no different. It would matter greatly to handfuls of devoted people, no doubt, to know who had joined or left the ‘Never Ending Tour Band’, which musician had stayed the course and which one could tolerate the experience the least. In the bigger scheme of things all the theories and tales did not alter the fact that the tours were a poor substitute for creative work. Yet the odd fact remains that Dylan would revive his reputation as a recording artist, and do so emphatically, while treating the making of albums as little more than a necessary chore. The income from concerts meant that he would no longer be in thrall to the despised studio. He could play live and tell some journalists that it was his first and only love, his artistic reality, his whole existence. Others would be told that he could take it or leave it. Did he notice, then, that a big part of his usual crowd were the same people, night after night, following him from venue to venue?

On 10 December 1999, Rick Danko died in his sleep of heart failure, aged 56 and a day. The weight, his own physical weight, had proved too much after a lot of booze and a lot of drugs. The singer and bass player – or trombonist, or fiddle player – who had helped Dylan to write ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and harmonised with him during several of the songs on the basement tapes, had been in poor shape for a while. He had last played briefly with Dylan in August 1997, when the artist’s tour halted for a concert in Connecticut. Danko had been the Band member who in 1967 spotted that a big pink house in the middle of 100 acres was available in Saugerties, New York. By the late ’90s he and Garth Hudson, the last men standing, had been reduced to travelling from little show to little show in a motorhome. Levon Helm, who had found better things to do with himself, would forever maintain that Danko had worked himself to death because he had never received his fair share of money from
The Last Waltz
and other Band ventures.

In the summer of 1999, the little town of Hibbing, Minnesota, had begun to lay plans for a new exhibit in its public library. The municipality already had a museum dedicated to its claim to fame as the birthplace of the Greyhound bus line. The Hibbing Historical Society also had a museum to call its own. By the century’s end, nevertheless, the need was felt to recognise another piece of local history. The Zimmerman kid, still remembered by a few older residents, was to be memorialised while he yet lived. Meanwhile, the news that his beloved mother had been diagnosed with cancer would remind Dylan that time and mortality could not be denied. Beatty Zimmerman would die on 27 January 2000 at the age of 84.

*

In 1999 there had been one moment of clarity in a fog of concerts. That summer, tempted by Hollywood, Dylan had gone into a New York studio for a day and turned out a recording of a song called ‘Things Have Changed’. Typically, it was better than at least half the stuff on
Time Out of Mind
, a cynical song from the world’s end that also somehow managed to make sense within the context of the movie for which it had been designed. It made some sense of the era, too. For a change, the film, entitled
Wonder Boys
, would also be a pretty fair effort. ‘Things Have Changed’ would win Dylan an Academy Award.

Film music had come to his attention, no doubt because it paid very well. The piece he wrote for
Wonder Boys
cannot be dismissed cynically, however. It is as sharp and penetrating a sketch of human vanity as anything he ever created. The song, compelling proof that he could still write when the need arose, also contains another of those fragments of evidence, if such was still required, that Dylan’s fascination with an apocalyptic ending for humankind had not been extinguished. ‘If the Bible is right,’ as he sang, ‘the world will explode.’ The real point offered in this work is that the speaker, or the artist, couldn’t care less.

‘Things Have Changed’ might also have contained a hint that not only could Dylan still manage a new song at short notice, but that, amid another lengthy pause between albums, there might be more to come. In point of fact, there is no evidence that he was not writing all the while. His problems with writer’s block are well-enough established. The paucity of new songs between 1969’s
Nashville Skyline
and 1974’s
Planet Waves
, from an artist who had spent most of the ’60s in a ferment of creativity, had been impossible to ignore. The seven lean years between
Under the Red Sky
and
Time Out of Mind
told their own story. The long silences between albums during Dylan’s later years are a different matter. If he was making excellent money out on the road, felt no creative need to make yet another album and despised the recording process, it makes sense to believe him if he says a piece of work was done when he ‘had the time’. No doubt his record company had some say in the matter, but in 2000 Sony would make do with no fewer than three compilation albums titled, almost comically, as a
Best of … Vol 2
; a
Very Best of
; and an
Essential Bob Dylan.
As though to mock every sceptic and critic, the last of these would do very well indeed, in due course being ‘certified platinum’ in America, Britain and Australia and as a ‘gold’ record elsewhere.

Touring continued regardless. In 2000, while the American market was assaulted once more, Europe got two separate visits from Dylan. In February 2001 he was off to Japan and Australia once more, pausing along the way to accept his ‘best original song’ Oscar by satellite link from Sydney. The year would end with the death of George Harrison, the Beatle of whom Dylan had been most fond. That much was plain from the statement in which the artist made his farewells. Touchingly, it was written as though to suit the beliefs and the character of the deceased. Of Harrison, Dylan said:

He was a giant, a great, great soul, with all of the humanity, all of the wit and humour, all the wisdom, the spirituality, the common sense of a man and compassion for people. He inspired love and had the strength of a hundred men. He was like the sun, the flowers and the moon and we will miss him enormously. The world is a profoundly emptier place without him.

That year it became known that Dylan had indeed returned to the recording studios. He was finishing work in May at Clinton Recording in Manhattan, in fact, when he reached the age of 60. When had he ever imagined that birthday? It would not prevent journalist after journalist asking a man in his 60s what he thought about the ’60s. Yet in July, astoundingly, it transpired that despite every denial he might have been thinking about that confused and intoxicating decade himself.

In Italy, during a press conference held at the De La Ville InterContinental Roma Hotel to publicise the release of his new music, Dylan remarked, it seems out of the blue, that he was working on a book to ‘be published in an article form, but as a book, a book of articles, because they’re ongoing’. At first he said that this was ‘as much as it is at the moment’. When pressed about ‘articles’, however, Dylan went on:

Oh, I think that with this type of writing I was just trying to find the right way to get into it, rather than making it some kind of self-serving story of my particular past. If it seems to happen that way, it’s actually dissimilar in a lot of ways. I can do it because I’m a famous person, so I use that fame, because a lot of the things I might write about other people know about anyway. So with a person like myself, the process of doing it this way works.

I mean, I’m not really making a real attempt to do this. I just do it in my spare time.
²²

*

‘Love and Theft’
keeps the promise made by
Time Out of Mind.
With this album it becomes possible to talk seriously of a Dylan who was not only renewed but, at 60, reborn creatively. Here all the claims made for his late period are not only plausible but undeniable. Only controversy over his methods – charges of plagiarism, bluntly – would stain the achievement, at least for nature’s tenacious pedants. Most of those charges were and remain specious, trivial, irrelevant to the great mass of listeners and born of a profound ignorance of artistic method, far less of ‘folk process’, but they have clung to Dylan ever since
‘Love and Theft’
appeared. In fact, the hunt for evidence against the accused has become a tiny, if furiously busy, cottage industry. Where once it was a critic’s delight to cite those among the quick and the dead who could be named as a Dylan ‘influence’ or somehow just associated with his themes and manner – Keatsian, Rimbaldien, Poe-like and the rest – in the twenty-first century the game has become one of spot-the-pilfering. The always-implied justification is that with this album Dylan began to adopt an underhand method by which to eke out a waning creativity. Some hasten to add that they just knew it all along. Given his free and easy manner with other people’s material down the years, not least his old habit of claiming as his own that which was ‘traditional’, this doesn’t cause many presses to be stopped. But these days, if you believe those who are most vehement, the issue is more serious, less excusable, sometimes inexplicable. Plagiarism, a word liable to cause every writer since Chaucer to look shifty, is the subtext of
‘Love and Theft’
.

Dylan knew it, too. He got his mockery in first: hence those quotation marks around his title; hence his title. Others might prefer collage, cut-and-paste, modernist technique, a sophisticated system of allusion and invocation, or a statement about a form of writing that makes no bones over how inspiration and tradition really work. The fact remains that the artist was perfectly self-aware. Grant him this much, then: it is an unusual thief who advertises his theft. Dylan took his title wholesale from a book and stuck it between quotation marks.