Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (86 page)

On the internet, nevertheless, scandalised fans reacted as though the artist had contrived another
Self Portrait
(as though that would have been a bad idea). Not for the first time, many missed the point. Not for the first or the last time, their reluctance to accept that Dylan was entitled to autonomy, or just to his whims, was striking. Elvis had made Christmas albums; Springsteen had done Christmas songs: where was the by-law forbidding a wistful messianic Jew with a taste for tales of the apocalypse from participating in an all-American tradition? That such recordings, good or bad, were meanwhile as traditional as anything contrived by ‘folk process’ was a truth some fans were never likely to concede.
Christmas in the Heart
was fun: wholly innocent, daft and incongruous, but fun. It would get nowhere near to number one in America, but number 23 was a sight better than the result achieved by
Under the Red Sky
. And those charities, granted royalties in perpetuity, would benefit for many years to come.

*

On 9 February 2010, Dylan was back in the White House, this time to perform – he had never played the hall before – during a concert entitled ‘Songs of the Civil Rights Movement’. He sang ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ in a gentle, piano-backed version with an unusual air of quiet pride and even, though he claimed to despise the emotion, of nostalgia. An old man stood for a few minutes in a young man’s shoes. A veteran, voice cracking and striving, sang the words of a beginner for the sake of an African American president. It was an affecting moment, but it was also a reminder of just how much time had slipped away. In the second decade of the twenty-first century Dylan remained a modern artist, perhaps the most modern of them all, but he was also becoming a piece of history. There was no way to escape the contradictions lodged in that truth.

Early in the summer, undaunted, he found a few more fresh pastures. Touring took him to Greece, Bulgaria, the republic that called itself Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and the Slovak Republic. In most of these concerts the artist who had made his earliest marks during the worst of the Cold War’s paranoia was bringing his music to formerly Communist countries for the first time. It made for an odd disjunction. In America and western Europe people were still turning up at Dylan concerts just to complain that he sounded nothing like his records. In Bucharest and Sofia, Skopje and Zagreb, they were trying to match the image of the aged man on stage with the tale of the most significant artistic figure in half a century. Just to complicate matters further, he gave them ‘Jolene’, trivial and dull, as an encore.

Past and present were entangled. Bob Dylan, every last one of him, existed in a weird continuum. Each new instalment in the Bootleg Series – new for many, ancient for the artist – imposed its echoes on his existence, his image and his reputation. At every turn, all those previous Dylans infiltrated his life. The question of identity, personal and artistic, was more complicated than anything Todd Haynes had imagined when he was writing
I’m Not There
. Bob Dylan seemed to exist at numerous points in time simultaneously.

In September 2010, an exhibition of the 40 canvases he called the ‘Brazil Series’ opened at the National Gallery of Denmark. In October, another volume in the Bootleg Series, one entitled
The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964
, made its appearance. Anyone who knew nothing about the makers of these works would have had problems connecting one with the other. No amount of learned argument over ‘pictorial’ songs and narrative paintings – and there would be plenty of that until the uproar over the Asia Series commenced – solved this puzzle. Brutally, you could observe that the rough, mud-hued canvases shown in Denmark lacked clarity, drama and any real instinct for composition. That wasn’t often said about Bob Dylan songs, even the minor pieces taped at the start of the ’60s just to satisfy the youth’s publishers. Yet something more than lost time or a gulf in technique separated the two collections. The young singer getting his work down as fast as he could scribble the verses might have amounted to little more than a found identity, a personality assembled or imposed by circumstance. His songs, even the earliest, had chiselled out the contours of individuality with a madcap intensity. The 69-year-old painter displayed no personality of any kind. His canvases were less dispassionate than disengaged, less objective than inert. If Dylan had put his heart and soul into these images, evidence for the sacrifice was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that was what had attracted him to painting in the first place.

The Copenhagen exhibition, though spared a fuss over plagiarism, was given what is known among polite critics as a mixed reception. Which is to say that those who staged the show at the Statens Museum for Kunst spoke proudly of their achievement and highly of their artist. The Danish press, on the other hand, were less than kind. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, the gallery’s curator, Kasper Monrad, reckoned that Dylan’s work had ‘ties to a figurative tradition that has remained vibrant up through the twentieth century’. The ‘painterly mode’ identified was meanwhile placed in line of descent ‘from French modernist painting of the 1920s’. John Elderfield, the Englishman who had served as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and who would become Dylan’s ambassador in the world of high-end galleries, wrote about ‘the imperatives of his visual imagination as it travels back and forth across the borderline between painting and song’.
⁹
The names of famous artists, Matisse chief among them, were thrown around. Judging by press comment, the critics must have looked at different pictures entirely.

According to agency reports, the daily
Berlingske Tidende
said: ‘When we talk about music, Bob Dylan is one of the great Picassos of the twentieth century, but this is not the case for his painting.’ The newspaper also believed that the Statens Museum had staged the exhibition ‘not because his canvases are good, but because he is Bob Dylan’. The financial journal
Boersen
was also unhappy with the national gallery for putting ‘financial interest ahead of artistic judgement’, knowing that the name would be a draw regardless of the quality of the work. In
Information
, an art history specialist named Peter Brix Soendergaard offered the opinion that ‘Bob Dylan paints like any other amateur, using a rather oafish figurative style. He is what we used to call a Sunday painter.’
¹⁰

In conspicuous contrast, bad reviews for
The
Witmark Demos
were hard to find. Sales were pretty satisfactory too, taking Dylan to number 12 on the American chart. It was as though critics had forgotten just how good the young singer had been. That said, the 47 tracks possessed a ragged, unquenchable vitality that would have deserved success at any time. Among the juvenilia were sketches of some of the works – ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Times They Are a-Changin’ and ‘Tambourine Man’ among them – from which agreeable Albert Grossman had for years extracted fully 50 per cent of Dylan’s publishing earnings. The fact did not diminish the quality, or the sense of remembered and imagined excitement, of the
Witmark
set. Even those who knew the performances well enough from bootlegs were startled by the freshness after more than 40 years of the refurbished recordings. Once again, the Bootleg Series was demonstrating the extent and durability of Dylan’s achievement. The claim that he was an artist bigger than any era was becoming hard, if not impossible, to dispute. He had outlived many of his contemporaries and outlasted them all.

The beginning of 2011 brought news that he was, in his own mind, a long way from done. Anyone who signs a six-book deal with his seventieth birthday approaching either has ambitions for longevity, or no interest in the issue of age. Dylan’s claims in 2006 that he was contemplating a second
Chronicles
volume were in any case confirmed. But half a dozen books? It seemed that the Proustian knack, once acquired, can become a habit. As it transpired, the artist had signed with Simon & Schuster to provide not one but two more books in the vein of
Chronicles
. A third book would ‘reportedly’ comprise samples of the wit and wisdom of
Theme Time Radio Hour
’s DJ, but details of the other promised volumes were not disclosed. That might have been just as well. No news report was indelicate enough to make much of the fact that almost seven years had elapsed between the appearance of
Chronicles: Volume One
and the signing of the six-book agreement. At that rate, the third book was liable to arrive as the author celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday. Asked in September 2012 if there would even be a second volume, Dylan’s first reply was ‘Oh, let’s hope so’.
¹¹
He then said that he was ‘always working on parts of it’, that he didn’t mind the writing, but found making time for rereading difficult. By the middle of 2013, in any case, there was no sign of
Chronicles: Volume Two
.

He was an author, then, and he was a figurative artist. He was a stage performer and a living historical project. He was the recipient of more awards than you could fit into a U-Haul trailer, a movie composer for hire, available for acting jobs, radio, documentaries and TV advertising. He would blow briefly into very expensive harmonicas for sale and resale. He could be hired for the most select private engagements. In short, the making and recording of albums was just one line of work among many. The revenue stream it represented was a minor tributary, even if the flow had increased slightly since the appearance of
Modern Times
. But then, no one still produced records pell-mell, year in and year out, as they had in the 1960s. The few remaining conglomerates no longer wanted product in that kind of quantity. A specialist back-catalogue line such as the Bootleg Series, with no recording costs at stake and a guaranteed market of willing buyers, was a welcome exception. The fact remained that albums had ceased to be the cornerstones of Dylan’s business plan. They mattered only as works of art, for whatever that was worth.

In this, he was no different from other stars of popular music in the early twenty-first century. There was no money
to speak of
in album sales, or so they said. The big bucks, the customary rewards, were to be had from the concert circuit: hence the extraordinary ticket prices being charged by the acts making their laser-lit homes in gigantic arenas.
¹²
By the time Michael Jackson died of a self-inflicted heart attack in June 2009 he had sold 100 million records and blown hundreds of millions of dollars on toys and trash. At the end, his intended solution to his fantastically complicated financial problems was a scheme to stage no fewer than 50 concerts in succession at London’s 20,000-seat O2 Arena. According to promoters, Jackson would have made £5 million a show. Dylan had never been in that league. Equally, there was no sign that he had ever squandered his earnings in the style of the screwed-up maker of
Thriller
. (If anything, the artist had a certain reputation for being ‘careful’ with cash.) Yet the detail overlooked in all the award citations straining for eloquence with their talk of poetry and culture was that Dylan’s most profound gift had long been a secondary concern. When he felt moved to make an album he would apply himself, most of the time, with the same concentration he had brought to the task in his greatest days. But art was no longer his main business. Those who wrote the big books or argued over allusive imagery too often forgot an obvious truth.

Nothing interrupted the tours. Time that could not be spared for prose revisions could always be found for those. At the beginning of April, Dylan set off on a month-long trip to the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. He began with another new country, known to most as Taiwan, known to itself as the Republic of China. No one in the western media was troubled by this choice of destination. In contrast, the artist’s next stop three days later, in another Chinese republic, the vast empire that claimed to be in the sole possession of its people, would set off one of those miniature typhoons of controversy that seemed to engulf Dylan periodically. Most of those involved, not least the artist himself, would miss the point of the argument entirely.

According to some press reports – reports Dylan would later dismiss convincingly – shows in Beijing and Shanghai had been cancelled during the previous April after permission was refused by China’s Ministry of Culture.
The
Guardian
, acting on information from Taiwanese promoters Brokers Brothers Herald, had said that the ministry ‘appeared wary of Dylan’s past as an icon of the counter-culture movement’.
¹³
Yet on 6 April 2011, there he was on stage at the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing. This time
The
Guardian
reported that the artist was ‘singing to the culture ministry’s tune’. In a story that was part report and part review, datelined on the night of the show, the paper ran an unsourced quote stating that the performance was ‘strictly according to an approved programme’. In other words, Dylan had allowed himself to be censored. If the story was true, he had agreed not to perform songs deemed provocative by an oppressive one-party regime. Worse, as the tale told by the
Guardian
and others stressed, this surrender had taken place in the week in which the admired dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been locked up.

The paranoia of the ‘Communists’ controlling totalitarian capitalism in China was not the world’s biggest secret. They had censored the Rolling Stones (who, typically, had lost no sleep over that). They had refused entry to the ‘unsuitable’ Oasis. They had been furious, supposedly, when in 2008 the Icelandic singer Björk had shouted (or muttered, depending on who you believed) ‘Tibet! Tibet!’ during a song called ‘Declare Independence’. In November 2012, Elton John would be visited by police in Beijing after he announced that his show in the city was dedicated ‘to the spirit and talent of Ai Weiwei’. In March 2013, the veteran German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk would be denied a visa because, according to Agence France-Presse, they had agreed to participate in a Free Tibet benefit in Washington a decade before. The regime had long made its views on the liberties it would allow to performers very clear. ‘Paltry and few’ just about covered it.