Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (74 page)

In 2006, a woman by the name of Ingrid Mössinger, curator of the Kunstsammlungen Museum in Chemnitz in Germany, had come across the book during a visit to New York. Subsequently she had secured Dylan’s agreement for an exhibition and also inspired him to turn the drawings into paintings. So our artist had become an artist. Not only that, he had become, perhaps predictably, a bestselling artist, with his own
www.bobdylanart.com
at the forefront of the marketing effort. More prestigious exhibitions had followed in galleries around the world. Collections of prints and books had begun to appear annually. They had sold very well indeed. In fact, given a rough calculation of the limited-edition runs and the ‘sold out’ notices on his art website, Dylan the artist has to date sold perhaps 20,000 prints at £1,500 a time. Everyone should have such a hobby.

The artist’s Asia Series was described initially by its promoters as a ‘visual journal of his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea’. It was composed, supposedly, of ‘first-hand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape’. Within days some of those viewing the works in the Madison Avenue gallery were pointing out that such claims did not so much stretch the truth as twist it into elaborate knots. Yet in this case, just for a change, things were exactly as they seemed.

Briefly, as many as ten of Dylan’s ‘first-hand’ works had been copied, and copied slavishly, from photographs. There was no possible way to deny the fact. There was no good way to explain it, either, when some of the images had been looted from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy, an intrepid camera
opérateur
who had captured colour (‘autochrome’) images in South East Asia on behalf of Albert Kahn’s early-twentieth-century ‘Archives of the Planet’ project. These victims of Dylan’s acquisitiveness were not mere Sunday snappers. Their photographs were not overlooked works or internet detritus, though Dylan was also accused of ‘borrowing’ six images from the Flickr stream and private collection of a fan named Okinawa Soba. Within days, the Gagosian had ceased to call the show a ‘journal’, preferring instead ‘a visual reflection’. What could not be undone was an interview with the artist staged for the exhibition’s catalogue. Dylan had said:

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. What I’m trying to bring out in complex scenes, landscapes, or personality clashes, I do it in a lot of different ways. I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start with something tangible.

So had he somehow been in the room in Vietnam in 1915 when Léon Busy was conducting an exercise in photographic colonialism entitled
Indochine/Woman Smoking Opium
, a picture whose composition and details exactly – as in, ‘in every respect’ – anticipated Dylan’s
Opium
? Was there any important difference between Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1948 photograph of a Chinese eunuch once of the court of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the painting bearing Bob Dylan’s signature? How about the artwork of a pair of Yakuza gangsters lighting a cigarette and the monochrome Bruce Gilden photograph from 1998? What of the Kessel? It had once existed as a 1950
Life
magazine cover shot bearing the caption ‘Boys playing Siamese chess in front of the Trocadero Hotel’. Was Dylan’s painted facsimile truly just an example, then, of ‘Whatever it takes to make it work’?

A few members of the New York art crowd capable of mistaking theory for artistry attempted to defend Dylan by talking about ‘reference photographs’. The excuses had a hollow sound. Given everything that had gone before, the humour of the situation lay in the fact that each of those photographs were (and are) protected by the iron laws of copyright. Whether Dylan paid to use the images is not yet clear. That he simply copied or traced them, for whatever ‘artistic purpose’, is beyond argument. The last line of defence, it seems, was that they became art, if they became art, simply because Dylan decided to make paintings of them. For those accustomed to treating him as a singular talent, it was a poor return on a long-standing investment.

Looking at the evidence in 2011, it was hard not to be reminded of every previous debate over plagiarism. Then, yet again, you were left to ponder motives. Perhaps Dylan had been too arrogant to realise or care that the Asia Series invited exposure and humiliation. Perhaps, hiding in plain sight, he had fully expected to be caught out. That possibility counted as bizarre but not, on balance, impossible, given the debate over
Chronicles
. Cartier-Bresson is one of the most important names in the history of photography. His images are near-impossible to disguise. Surely Dylan knew as much?

If the paintings were examples of love and theft why, yet again, had Dylan made no attributions, given no credit, and invited the unwary to believe that each and every image was his own, unaided and original work? The rhetorical question was fast becoming his most important contribution to every argument about the nature of his creativity. If the Asia Series was intended as a complicated statement about art and originality – the last possible plea in mitigation – it didn’t work. This time the charge of plagiarism was impossible to refute.

IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST 2002, FANS ATTENDING A DYLAN SHOW
at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York State, were treated to a novel piece of entertainment just before the artist and his band took the stage. It was almost sunset on the tenth night of that year’s summer tour of the United States and Canada. For those stuck on the idea, it was concert number 1,440 of the everlasting road trip. It was also just another show. As Aaron Copeland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ played, the voice of Al Santos, Dylan’s road manager, boomed out over the fairgrounds in a perfect stentorian parody of every cornball stage announcement ever made. It might as well have been Ed McMahon opening the old
Tonight
show with his ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counter-culture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned make-up in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’80s, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!

The introduction would be retained for a decade to come. In due course, it would be adapted slightly to make sardonic mention of ‘Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan’, but the joke would survive. It was a good joke, given that it was mostly true. What made it funnier was that Dylan had not invented this baroque spiel. It had been taken, more or less wholesale, from an article that had appeared in the
Buffalo News
less than a week before. Fully 40 years before that, the artist had been in the middle of recording
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
with no possible idea of the fate that awaited him. In 2002, he was making a nonsense of those who still made a nonsense of his life and times. And mocking himself, too, trading cliché for cliché. If they wanted a caricature, they could have a caricature. A joke is as good a place to hide as any.

*

Dave Van Ronk, mentor-in-chief in the Village all those decades before, had died earlier in the year at the age of 65. He had never left the district. At the end of June 2004 the City of New York would rename the little street where he had lived near Sheridan Square in honour of the blues player. A lot of old friends would show up for the ceremony. Dylan, who no longer stood around on street corners listening to speeches, would be touring in Europe, as usual.

He had spent many nights sleeping on a couch in Van Ronk’s West 15th Street apartment during his first year in the city. Later he had repaid the hospitality by stealing his host’s arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ for the sake of the
Bob Dylan
album. Van Ronk had meant to record the piece himself. Relations had become strained for a while, less because of the betrayal than because of what the theft – unambiguous, on that occasion – had seemed to reveal. Craft and career, art and its imperatives, had mattered more than friendship. Van Ronk, self-styled Trotskyist, had never been capable of the ruthlessness an entertainer needs if his desire is a big name or big money. Dylan would remember the older man fondly in
Chronicles
.

In his American concerts early in 2002 the artist had opened, as often as not, with the old murder ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’, a song that had appeared as the first track on Van Ronk’s first album,
Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues and a Spiritual
, in 1959. By coincidence or choice, Dylan had performed the ballad in Charleston, West Virginia, on the night after his old friend’s death on 10 February. Given all that he had learned, absorbed and borrowed from a Greenwich Village autodidact, you could count the performance as a perfect example of the eternal folk process. The song belonged to no one save the singer of the moment. Unless he made it his own, of course.

All Dylan did was play. It was as though he was working his way through the population centres of the developed world one by one. In Europe, there was still some glamour attached to his appearances in London, Paris or Zurich, but in the heartland a Bob Dylan show was commonplace by 2002. He came and went with the seasons; sometimes fair, sometimes foul. Most of the fans who saw him year after year, or who travelled from place to place to witness multiple performances, had become as tolerant of Dylan’s failures as they were eager for a memorable night. They took their chances. This show might be bad, but tomorrow’s might become part of the enveloping legend. Few other performers, if any, had achieved this kind of relationship with their audiences. Judging by online fan chatter, some of the most devoted even found a strange connoisseur’s fascination in seeing Dylan perform badly, as though it only made the next triumph sweeter. This audience, the initiates within the cocoon, were as much a part of the never-ending phenomenon as the artist. Arguably, since they clung to the name despite all his scorn, the tour belonged to them, not to him.

Nevertheless, year after year, in city after city, there would be walkouts at Dylan’s shows. Those who refused the contract, who expected to hear an artist who resembled his recorded work, believed they were entitled to more than pot luck for the price of a ticket. Sometimes they had a case. It was one thing to reject the idea that the artist should repeat himself, another to use the legend of perpetual creativity to excuse substandard shows. Those aficionados who defended Dylan at all costs – for he rarely bothered – were still taking refuge in the ‘reinvention’ argument when he was doing no such thing, when the performances sucked, when he seemed tired, surly, or simply uninterested. In 2002, amid 77 shows in North America and 29 in Europe, no one was entitled to expect perfection every night. Equally, no concert-goer should have been naive enough still to believe that Dylan, of all people, would attempt to reproduce note for note some track he had recorded in 1965 or 1975. But even in a year when he was putting on good shows with a good band – and 2002 often resembled such a year; London had seen at least one very fine performance – there was a sense of mechanical repetitiveness about the tours. Dylan would sometimes answer journalists who asked why he worked so hard by pointing to some other musician – Willie Nelson and B.B. King were favourites – who toured constantly and did more concerts in a year than he ever contemplated. It was true enough. He has never come close to matching the 250 to 300 dates King was fulfilling annually well into his 70s. But no journalist seems ever to have asked the follow-up questions. Was that the sort of revered, mummified figure he wanted to become? If so, why?

It led him to strange places for unexplained reasons. The Erie County Fair, ‘America’s Fair’, was one such. Essentially an agricultural show with a carnival and other entertainments attached, the event saw Dylan and his band playing to a racetrack grandstand in western New York State. Even the hardcore fans didn’t think it was anything special as a concert. All agreed that it was a bizarre place to be watching this artist in action. The best you could say is that a racetrack on a hot night made a change from another carbuncular sports arena custom-built to shrivel the soul. Almost a year had passed since the release of
‘Love and Theft’
. Another four years would elapse before a new Bob Dylan album emerged.

In the meantime, reports concerning the artist had begun to appear in the Hollywood movie papers just after Dave Van Ronk’s death. They said Dylan was in ‘discussions’ over a possible starring role in a picture that might be called
Masked and Anonymous
. It seemed someone still believed he could be turned into an actor. Someone certainly seemed to believe, at any rate, that his name remained potent enough to get a film project off the ground and attract the sorts of talent who could turn cachet into cash.

There was a little more to it than that. In fact, there was a lot more to it. No one was wooing Dylan for this piece of work, nor was he being tempted with big money. He was one of the co-writers, a moving force behind the entire picture. The itch he had felt before attempting
Renaldo and Clara
needed to be scratched again. Dylan was in the mood to make a statement. Yet on 8 June the
Hollywood Reporter
would confirm that Angela Bassett had been added to the cast and state:

Written by Rene Fontaine and Sergy Petrov,
Masked
is based on the unpublished short story ‘Los Vientos del Destino’, written by Enrique Morales. It follows the story of Dylan’s character, Jack Fate, a wandering troubadour brought out of prison by his former manager for one last concert, a charity benefit. Bassett would [
sic
] play Mistress, who has a past with Fate. The cast also includes Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Penelope Cruz, and Jeff Bridges.