Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (79 page)

It was not without a few problems, however. For one thing, the famous director’s chief contribution seemed to be to truncate the filmed performances fans wanted most to see. Above all, the startling long-lost colour footage shot on 17 May 1966 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall was cut short, apparently for the sake of ‘dramatic effect’ and some by-the-numbers film-school editing. The viewer was granted the infamous ‘Judas’ moment, but just a taste of the music that ensued. Once a fan had recovered from the astonishment of seeing a visual record of the fabled incident, a certain resentment followed. Given the dramatic structure of the entire documentary, with Dylan accelerating towards an almighty psychological crash, the miserly use of footage from Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester seemed self-defeating.

Scorsese had been brought in to make sense of all the material, new and archival, that Rosen had compiled. In exchange, the director had been allowed to put his million-dollar brand on the finished picture, though his actual role was in essence supervisory. Scorsese shaped the narrative, the ‘Bob Dylan story’, with great skill, but it was Rosen who asked the crucial questions. Inevitably, many choices were then made. The decision to end the film in 1966 was in one sense obvious, in another sense too obvious. That’s how the story of Dylan’s life and career is always told, but in
No Direction Home
it had the effect of locking the artist into an era, an era of which he tends to speak with a well-rehearsed disdain. Anyone coming to Dylan’s work for the first time thanks to the documentary would have received a sample of the ‘voice of a generation’ legend and little else. The only dissenting, gently sceptical voice to be heard was that of the artist himself. Some of his contemporaries, it’s true, were fascinating. Suze Rotolo, consenting to a very rare interview, was refreshingly dispassionate. Joan Baez was nicely acerbic. But everything was fashioned to preserve the orthodox view of the ‘poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll’, the one parodied in all those Al Santos stage introductions.

That said, Scorsese brought an unerring sense of period to the work. His depiction of Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota’s North Country – crucially, his use of Dylan’s own memories of childhood – was a marvel. Arguably, the viewer got a better idea of a man’s sense of himself from those early sequences than from any other part of the film. Scorsese also managed to document the tumults of the ’60s, the struggles and the rupture with all that had gone before, in a way that avoided most of the clichés. As a documentary record of a period, Dylan or no Dylan,
No Direction Home
was a corrective to a lot of glib pseudo-historical chatter. If Britain was swinging in the ’60s you wouldn’t guess it from the dreary scenes of a glum brown world captured in this film.

As Michael Gray, suitably indignant, puts it in his Dylan
Encyclopedia
, the documentary gives only a minimal account of one part of its subject’s musical education. The desultory treatment of the blues, that crucial formative influence, is indeed ‘scandalous’.
¹⁵
The misjudgement on Scorsese’s part spoke of a willingness to accept without argument the old ‘folk singer’ label and ignore the complicated roots of Dylan’s affections and art. This director, of all directors, should have known better. But then, you could also observe that the documentary does not delve deeply or often into its subject’s literary background. If Dylan is the near-unique product of musical circumstances – he and Elvis had that much in common – the same could be said of his development as a writer. That he is very well-read is well known, but he is well read in unusual ways.
No Direction Home
does not begin to explain what this autodidact made of himself when he began to make verses.

The film remains a wonderful piece of work. Its release raised Dylan to the American pantheon while reminding you that despite everything, the honours and the awards, the veneration and the three and a half hours of airtime, he remained discrepant. Somehow he still didn’t fit with the larger culture, high or low. That might have been one reason for his importance, of course. Nevertheless, though no one has admitted as much, least of all the figure at the centre of it all, the release of
No Direction Home
on the heels of
Chronicles
looked like an attempt to reclaim Dylan’s history. Or rather, to shape and control perceptions of that history. A memoir that was not a memoir, a biographical film with just one contestable version of a life, above all the old illusion of a figure forever slipping off into the shadows: along with the Bootleg Series, these were offered as the approved, official record. Any idea that Dylan had at last decided to confess all was spectacularly wide of the mark.

Even the movie’s ‘soundtrack’ album was no sort of soundtrack, though none the worse for that. Instead,
The Bootleg Series Vol
.
7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack
was another large trove of treasures, with a couple of outtakes apiece from
Highway 61
and
Blonde on Blonde
to surprise even the most avid of bootleg collectors. The point was control, control of the past as it loomed over the present, control of reputation, work and image. Dylan knew everything there was to know about the myth of Bob Dylan.

Product continued to appear, each release a seeming exercise in coming to terms with historical memory, the problem of a vast ‘legacy’ and the demands of the bottom line. So it was that in August 2005 Columbia released
Live at the Gaslight 1962
, an artefact from the beginning of recorded time. Since this album captured the coffee house singer in the last days before fame’s hurricane, someone thought it clever to strike an ‘exclusive’ distribution deal with the Starbucks beverage chain. Depressingly, revealingly, this kind of thing had become standard practice for the 64-year-old artist. As though to balance the historical accounts, still another
Best of
was issued for the American market in November. Providing the sleeve notes, the author and TV executive Bill Flanagan had the good grace to call the unremarkable release ‘a sampler for new listeners … a starting point’. There was no other excuse. Those listeners might have been better advised to begin, meanwhile, with
Live at Carnegie Hall
, a promotional ‘EP’ or mini-album that also appeared in November.

Quite why Columbia/Sony chose to release just half a dozen tracks when they had the full 19-song concert recording in their possession was, as ever, baffling. The show Dylan gave on 26 October 1963 had been taped in preparation for an
In Concert
album that was abandoned for unexplained reasons. Two tracks had since turned up on
The
Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
and two on the
No Direction Home
soundtrack. This
Carnegie Hall
made use of the artwork designed for
In Concert
decades before, but it amounted to another ‘sampler’. As a response to the bootleggers, it was close to useless, even if the handful of tracks did demonstrate just how powerful a performer the young Dylan had been. Predictably, an illicit double CD set of the full 1963 show entitled
Unravelled Tales
would appear in the summer of 2008.

*

February 2006 found him back in the studios in New York. This time, finally, he was at work on his own behalf. Whether he knew it or not, Dylan was about to make his most successful album since
Desire
20 years before. All the attention earned by
Chronicles
and
No Direction Home
, all the journalism expended since
Time Out of Mind
on the alluring theme of the impossible creative renaissance: all of that was about to pay off handsomely. As any number of reviewers around the world would soon confirm, the artist was about to complete his late-period trilogy with a masterpiece. Someone should have told the artist.

The point is less trivial than it seems. Dylan’s recorded work is classified persistently in terms of ‘trilogies’ even when he denies having any such notion. As with the tour that never ends, helpful critics tell the artist what he has done when their favourite theory has been no part, so he says, of his intentions. So the three albums that appeared like lightning flashes between March 1965 and May 1966 are described as a trilogy when the differences between the works, thematic and musical, are obvious. Nothing on
Bringing It All Back Home
would sit easily on
Blonde on Blonde
, but that detail is ignored. Similarly, the albums made while Dylan was in the throes of Christian evangelical belief get called his ‘gospel trilogy’, despite the fact that
Shot of Love
pays attention only intermittently to the obsessions of
Saved
. Neither album involves gospel music in the proper sense, in any case, but that too is forgotten. To some ears, ‘trilogy’ sounds irresistibly impressive. The evidence says Dylan doesn’t think that way.

He certainly did not think that way about the album he would call
Modern Times
. It was not intended to complete a design commenced with
Time Out of Mind
because there had been no such design. Talking to the novelist Jonathan Lethem late in the summer, the artist would ‘demur’ at the word trilogy.

Time Out of Mind
was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner. But by the time I made
‘Love and Theft’
I was out of the corner. On this record, I ain’t nowhere, you can’t find me anywhere, because I’m way gone from the corner. I would think more of
‘Love and Theft’
as the beginning of a trilogy, if there’s going to be a trilogy … If I decide I want to go back into the studio.
¹⁶

In other words, he had paid no attention to the idea before it was put to him. By 2006, the attempt to give his work the formal unity of a trilogy, to ascribe to it a fixed set of themes, ideas and interests, was in danger of becoming another of the labels he had always detested. The truth of the work was at risk of being submerged by the latest clichés. Chief among those was the one that confused Dylan with a historical figure just because he wasn’t getting any younger and because he was fascinated with origins and roots, sometimes as ends in themselves, sometimes as explanations for modern times. He was being consigned to the archives while he yet lived. In 2006, the
New York Times
would call him ‘an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear, where he finds clues to eternal truths in both the blues and the Bible’.
¹⁷
The description would be fair enough, but it would carry a noxious whiff of obituary, as though better voiced in the past tense. The idea that history could and should be deployed for a modern purpose was being lost. The specific idea that an older America mired in hard times might have something to say to the country after 9/11 was being missed entirely. Instead, too often, the artist was being treated as a revered antique.

A kind of unthinking cultural nationalism was also beginning to emerge. By 2006, Dylan was being described as one of those great, quintessential Americans, a maker of culture and history, a figure who seemed to contain the country’s whole spirit and character. Again, this was not too far from the haphazard truth. He approached the
idea
of America much as Whitman, Twain, or Scott Fitzgerald had approached it. But he was also a living, working performer in the twenty-first century, with all that implied, not some exhibit trapped inside the museum of collective memory. As Dylan aged, the urge to treat him as a national monument, the last American hero, was becoming a little perilous for his art.

You can take it, then, that he did not name his album
Modern Times
for nothing. He had been called Chaplinesque often enough in his youth; one of the allusions made by the album’s title was therefore plain. Chaplin’s 1936 comedy had mocked the modernising pretensions of capitalism and satirised its dehumanising effects. First and foremost, it was a movie about exploitation. The running gag was that industrialisation was crazy and liable to drive people crazy. Modern times were bad for the human race. One of Dylan’s responses would come in language of a kind he had never before employed.

The artist’s interest in the buying power of the proletariat had not been noted hitherto. On the other hand, Dylan was straightforwardly correct: real wages for American workers had been in steady decline for years while wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The verse quoted is not one he has been accused of stealing, a fact that is interesting for its own sake. By 2006, the obsession with plagiarism among those who watched over Dylan meant that much of his work, the work for which no handy antecedents could be found, was being neglected. What was being said in the songs was being ignored studiously. ‘Borrowing’ had become the only topic when it ought to have been a footnote. The statement made by ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ and by the rest of the album was not unimportant, after all.

Praised extravagantly as it was,
Modern Times
would turn out to be a victim of some truly purblind scholarship. Even now, the album tends to be discussed in terms of what it owes to ancient blues, old popular songs, or poetry. What Dylan did with his sources somehow becomes a secondary issue, perhaps because he did complicated things with found materials. It is a lot easier to investigate alleged thefts from Henry Timrod, Robert Johnson, or Bing Crosby – Dylan is nothing if not eclectic – than it is to talk about an artist’s belief in biblical prophecy and the precarious lives of the downtrodden poor. Some seemed to think the title
Modern Times
was merely whimsical. In reality, it signifies a deeply political piece of work by an author still inclined to believe that these times are the end times. He might have sneered endlessly at party hacks, but he had not stopped thinking about power and powerlessness.