Bob Dylan (24 page)

 

March 1993

 

3) Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Bill Clinton, James Ingram, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, children’s choruses, adult choruses, and more: “We Are the World,” at An American Reunion, preinaugural celebration on the Mall of America (HBO, January 17). It may be that behind the great good feeling of this performance lies only propaganda, a fabulous sheen of communitarian self-recognition disguising a new administration that means to leave the country as it found it. But as John F. Kennedy proved against his own will, or for that matter his thoughtlessness, false promises can be taken up by those who only hear the tune and don’t care about the copyright. If, as Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen puts it, “The
sound
of Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did,” then the same can be said of the sound of Kennedy’s voice and his political acts. The same may prove true of Bill Clinton’s demeanor and his political instinct—as opposed to his personal instinct—to pull back at the first sign of trouble. The double-hearted rule but do not govern; desires have been loosed in the air and there’s no telling where they’ll light.

 

8) Bob Dylan: “Chimes of Freedom,” An American Reunion (HBO). Yeah, he sounded terrible, but did you see that jacket? Purple, with black appliqué? On a night when Michael Jackson looked less human than the Mickey Mouse men in Disneyland commercials, Dylan looked like he’d just bought a Nashville haberdashery.

December 1993

 

For the second time in less than a year Bob Dylan has released an unproduced, acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica collection of traditional blues and folk songs. A small voice from the sidelines—even the wilderness—in its own way
World Gone Wrong
traces the renunciations of fame, responsibility, and authority Nirvana tries and fails to enact on
In Utero,
their response to the stardom that followed
Nevermind,
which they now see as a failure because too many people liked it. Dylan won’t have that problem.

Good As I Been to You,
his 1992 Election Day special, was his most striking music since . . . since the last time he cut the ground out from under your feet, whenever that was. It stopped at number fifty-one on the
Billboard
charts and didn’t make the
Village Voice
national critics poll chart at all. Their loss: Dylan came to life in the old clothes of “Canadee-I-O,” “Hard Times,” “Frankie & Albert.” As he does on
World Gone Wrong,
he came to life as a singer; then as now, as a singer, in the hesitations and elisions of his phrasing, he came to life as a philosopher.

On both records, the music is all about values: what counts and what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t. The performance is modest, but anything but casual. Finding the fatalism—the foreboding—in the old, twisting melodies of “Love Henry” and “Jack-a-Roe” on
World Gone Wrong,
as he did with “Jim Jones” and “Blackjack Davey” on
Good As I Been to You,
as a philosopher Dylan comes to life as a gatekeeper, a guardian. “I have to think of all this as traditional music,” he said in 1966. “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to
come and take away their toilet paper—
they’re
going to die. Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’—they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs. They’re
already
dead.”

This is precisely the talk Dylan talks in the liner notes to
World Gone Wrong,
where he says where the songs come from and explains what they’re about. “What attracts me to the song,” he writes of “Lone Pilgrim” (the only composition on
World Gone Wrong
credited to a named author, as opposed to a blues or folk progenitor), “is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point, salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.” Regarding “Stack A Lee,” archetypal tale of the black outlaw and perhaps the best-known number on
World Gone Wrong,
“what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality thru public acclaim. truth is shadowy . . . the songs says that a man’s hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it’s a matter of taste.” On Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine”: “it’s about variations of human longing—the low hum in meters & syllables. It’s about dupes of commerce & politics colliding on tracks . . . it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control—watching the red dawn and not bothering to dress.”

Dylan is claiming absolute and infinite meaning for the songs he’s now singing. The trick is to hear in these songs even a fraction of what he hears: whether it’s McTell’s 1931 “Broke Down Engine” or Dylan’s, Dylan’s “Blood in My Eyes” or the Mississippi Sheiks’ 1931 original, William Brown’s 1942 “Ragged & Dirty” or the same story half a century later. Dylan hears a whole world, a complete millenarian opera, in every tune; the person who buys the record, takes it home, puts it on, is going to hear a small-time drama into which intimations of the uncanny (“roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese”) occasionally, inexplicably intrude. “Ragged & Dirty,” a coy blues, is first of all carnal; the way Dylan slides into the piece, barely speeding the pace, is a one-verse seduction. “Stack a Lee” is quickstep true crime, graveyard
humor: “Taken him to the cemetery, they failed to bring him back.” But Dylan hears as much mysticism in these prosaic American jokes a he does politics in the almost Arthurian “Love Henry,” where a parrot bears witness against its murdering mistress.

In “Blood in My Eyes,” a man is trying to get something going with a prostitute. You can feel the age in his voice; you can also feel he’s probably impotent. The weariness, the fear of humiliation, the despair in the man’s voice as he describes the situation, the way he hopes he’ll get what he wants, is almost too painful. Only that moment when he drifts out of the dollars and cents of the day’s concern and into the chorus, “Got blood in my eyes / For you,” is sweet. It’s so sweet, summoning desire so plainly outside the realm of fulfillment, that the man’s loneliness overwhelms anything else he might bring into his life. And yet, when you’re as lonely as Dylan has now made this man—as he’s made you, if he has—you’ll bring anything into your life in an attempt to turn that isolation into something else: an adventure in a foreign land, a lover’ murder, God’s kiss.

As
World Gone Wrong
plays, with Dylan’s scratchy, seemingly disdainful voice quickly growing full, earnest, urgent, then delicate, all these things do turn into one another. The music traces a circle from which there need be no exit. And if you pick up Dylan’s cues and hunt down the originals of the songs as he names them—the Mississippi Sheiks’ “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You,” on their
Complete Recordings, Vol. 3,
or Doc Watson’s “Lone Pilgrim,” on
The Watson Family
—you might find a certain discontinuity between the old versions and the new. The older singers often sound eager to please; Dylan doesn’t. He sounds as if his goal has been to get all the way into these old songs, and then get lost.

 

Bob Dylan, on traditional music, to Nat Hentoff, “The Playboy Interview” (
Playboy,
March 1966), collected in
Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews,
edited by Jonathan Cott. New York: Wenner Books, 2006, 98.

 

———.
Good As I Been to You
(Columbia, 1992).

 

———.
World Gone Wrong
(Columbia, 1993).

 

Mississippi Sheiks, “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You” (1931), on
Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order (1931-1934
) (Document, 1991).

 

———. “The World Is Going Wrong” (1931), on
Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 3 (15 December 1930 to 24 October 1931
) (Document, 1994).

 

Doc Watson, with Gaither Carlton, fiddle, “The Lone Pilgrim,” from
The Watson Family
(Folkways, 1963; Smithsonian Folkways, 1993); field recordings by Ralph Rinzler, Eugene W. Earle, Archie Green, and Peter Siegel, 1961-1963.

November 1993

 

Aren’t tribute albums terrible? You don’t look to mass extravaganza concerts—one performer after another trooping across the stage in fealty, in memoriam, or bowing to some good cause—for real music. The artifacts such shows leave behind are just souvenirs. Even legendary Woodstock produced only a single number that’s still talked about: Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

When more than a score of stars gathered at Madison Square Garden on October 16, 1992, to play Bob Dylan’s songs and thank him for supposedly putting a head on the body of popular music, it would have made sense to expect what a lot of people in fact came up with: respectful or wrong-headed or decently satisfying turns by the likes of Eric Clapton, John Mellencamp, or the Clancy Brothers. There was no reason to expect that time and again people would step forward and, reaching for something in a Bob Dylan
song that had never quite been heard before, leave their own careers in the dust. It was a shock then and it’s a shock now.

Sound recordings are just a map here; the video is the territory. You can hear what Johnny Winter—backed, as were most others this night, by the in-your-dreams combination of Booker T. and the MG’s plus drummers Jim Keltner and Anton Fig—does with “Highway 61 Revisited,” but you can’t exactly hear his performance. The sound is sardonic, hip, fast, uproarious, just as it was on
Second Winter,
the great lost album of 1970. But it’s Winter’s appearance that takes the song to other worlds. On he comes, impossibly thin, his arms covered with tattoos of hex signs and hoodoo symbols, tattoos that look more like Kaposi’s sarcoma than anything else, tattoos that seem to have eaten away most of the flesh he’s apparently intending to play his guitar with.

This is a pagan apparition. The song is going to begin with “God said to Abraham, kill me a son,” but Winter looks as if he’s already been sacrificed. Then out of nowhere, as Winter stands still, his mouth closed, you hear weird hollers and moans. It’s as if the song knows what’s coming, and it’s flinching, as if the song doesn’t want to play itself. But Winter is only tuning up. He does play the song, rams through it, leaves.

Lou Reed doesn’t look as if he’s going to do anything odd. Dressed in black—big surprise—wearing glasses, he comes out to sing “Foot of Pride,” a tune Dylan left off his 1983 album
Infidels.
It’s a very long song: two or three hundred verses, about half a million words. Reed reads them off a music stand. This is quite distracting, until Reed hits the first chorus; then the biblical curse of the number hits home. The huge roar that emanates from the stage doesn’t seem tied to any individual; the vertigo the sound creates is a vertigo of rising, not falling. Reed could be standing on his head for all you’d care. He’s created a monster and now he’s riding it.

Heard today on
John Wesley Harding,
“All Along the Watchtower” is cool, sinister, a tale about Limbo told in Purgatory: “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl,” it ends, leaving
the listener in a wasteland. Jimi Hendrix’s version of the wind-storm has been riding the airwaves for twenty-five years; it’s probably the strongest cover of a Dylan song anyone has ever produced.

Neil Young steps out to prove the song has just begun to speak. As Jon Landau once said about Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” (perhaps Booker T. and the MG’s finest hour), this is not a classic, it’s an epic. “All along the watchtower,” Young says to himself over and over after he’s all but ended the performance, as if the power of the image has only just now hit him. It’s all modern war, what he’s done with the song; go back and listen to Dylan’s version after Young’s and it’s like hearing Robert Johnson for the first time, a man who died before you were born in a place you’ll never get to, exiled by the fact that you’ll never catch up with him.

All of this, though, is merely art. What happens with Roger McGuinn and “Mr. Tambourine Man” is something else: real life, the transformation of a man before your very eyes. Looking fine and just a bit uncertain, at once proud and shy, he strides out to join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He launches into the song with the same ringing Rickenbacker twelve-string notes and the same fey, Beach Boys voice that made “Mr. Tambourine Man” a number one hit in 1965. But then he passes the single verse the Byrds used all those years ago, and lunges for the next one.

He is a different person. The voice is thicker; the body rocks back and forth. There’s a vehemence here that no one has ever heard from this man before. On the “and” in “And if you hear vague traces,” his voice lifts into the air and the word fragments, then floats down as pieces of some Scots ballad, but McGuinn is already making the hard consonants of the next words into weapons, a blacksmith with “s
kkkkk
ipping reels of rhyme”—the performance is cruel, heedless, vengeance for a crime that isn’t named.

That act—that vengeance—is something one can hear all through Dylan’s own work, even if he once said that all of his songs end with “Good luck.” You can hear that, too: there are a lot of good smiles in the show, but the best of them comes almost at the end, when Dylan and everyone else have finished “Knockin’
on Heaven’s Door.” The taciturn mask Dylan has worn for the last numbers of the concert breaks; just barely, he seems to acknowledge that he might have heard something he hadn’t heard before, even in his head.