Bob Dylan (30 page)

In
The End of Violence,
Pullman is a movie producer whose life, not unlike that of Preston Sturges’s John L. Sullivan (played by all-American boy Joel McCrea), is turned upside down. We first see him in his aerie looking down over all of Los Angeles, surrounded by computers and cell phones; soon he is dressed in rotting clothes, part of a crew of Spanish-speaking gardeners, hefting his leaf-blower, moving invisibly through perfectly groomed estates where, only days before, he looked past his own gardeners as a lord. With an old baseball cap on his head, his eyes squint against the sun; weirdly, they also squint inward, as if it’s only with a
squint that he can bear to look at himself. Unseen by everyone else, a drifter, unshaven and penniless, he misses nothing, but the more he understands, the less need he has to say anything to anyone. Who would listen?

Blowing his harmonica through passages of “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” until the song builds on itself like a folk version of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” it’s not a question Bob Dylan has to ask himself. Though most often spoken of today as a figure from the past, as someone now marginalized along the dimmer borders of the pop world, Dylan might well answer that when the music is as uncompromised as it is on
Time Out of Mind,
it’s the old songs and the people in them that listen; the dead streets of his new songs, as depopulated, somehow, as the streets in his 1963 “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” will have to take care of themselves. And Dylan may be far less marginalized than he seems; he may be less of a crank, or a pop outsider, than an embodiment of the sort of cultural memory he plays with in
Time Out of Mind.

Last May, in the college town of Iowa City, on the Dubuque Mall, a soul band set up its amplifiers, and soon a woman was belting out Chaka Kahn imitations, driving the afternoon street singers into corners, where their acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica renditions of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and the Replacements’ “I Will Dare” could barely be heard. As night came on the crowds got younger, the basement bars noisier, the street singers more numerous—by ten, there was one every twenty feet or so, each looking equally bereft and ignored, each with a girlfriend in idolizing attendance—and the repertoire more ambitious: “These Foolish Things,” “You Belong to Me,” the old folk song “Railroad Bill,” something that must have been by Phil Ochs, the Rolling Stones’ “The Singer Not the Song.” Every singer seemed to want nothing more than to sound like Bob Dylan, and in his own way, every one did.

 

Time Out of Mind
(Columbia, 1997). 1998 edition includes a second CD with live “field recordings” of “Love Sick,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Can’t Wait,” and a time-stopping “Blind Willie McTell.”

———.
Not Standing in the Doorway with the Dirt Road Blues (Just Yet)
(Rhythm Rhizome/Wild Wolf bootleg of 1997-1999 live recordings of
Time Out of Mind Songs
).

———.
Life on the Square
(Boss bootleg of 1999-2004 live recordings of all the songs from
Time Out of Mind
).

19 January 1998

 

In 1997, Jakob Dylan’s band, the Wallflowers, sold four million copies of its second album,
Bringing Down the Horse.
Led by the hit single “One Headlight,” it stayed in the Top 10 for most of the year and, sustained by the single “Three Marlenas,” the album is still on the radio.

Thirty-five years after the release of his first album, Bob Dylan, Jakob Dylan’s father, was all over the news. Death-scare headlines circled the globe in May when he was hospitalized for a heart infection. In September, he performed for the Pope in Bologna, Italy. In October, he released
Time Out of Mind,
his first album of original songs in seven years, to universal critical acclaim. In December, he was honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

This confluence of circumstances prompted a major metropolitan daily to send out calls to various they-should-knows asking if in thirty-five years Jakob Dylan would loom as large as his father does today.

Why should he? It’s a dumb question; it’s also irrelevant. Because so much money is at stake, pop music seems to be about careers. But beneath the surface, perhaps on the level where the money is actually made, pop music is really about a social fact. At any moment, anyone might have something to say that the whole country, even the whole world, might want to hear, and maybe only
one such thing. The ruling values of pop music might seem to be situated in the accumulation of fame and riches. They might be found in the way a song can turn your day around and then disappear.

A singer reaches you with a song. He or she has no responsibility to reach you with another one, and you have no responsibility to respond if he or she tries. Heard or overheard, a song—on the radio, in a bar, hummed by someone standing next to you in line—diverts you from the path your day has taken. For an instant, it changes you. But you can forget about it as surely as you may feel shadowed until you hear it again.

Or, rather, you may try to forget about it. You may not be allowed to. A hit song you don’t like is an oppressive mystery. Granted that almost every female person of my acquaintance considers Jakob Dylan the cutest thing currently walking on two legs, what was he doing dully offering “One Headlight” until spring turned into fall? It was like watching someone do a jigsaw puzzle with four pieces, over and over again.

As omnipresent hit singles go, “One Headlight” was too flat to be more than a mild headache, and of course you could always change the station. It takes a great single, like Hanson’s “MMMBop,” the most ubiquitous record of last year, to produce a migraine. You need a piece of music so deliriously catchy, so insidiously marvelous, that you can’t change the station, a song you can’t stop hearing even if you turn the radio off.

That was the story in a skit built around Hanson’s recent appearance on
Saturday Night Live.
The three teenage Hanson brothers enter an elevator. Suddenly two terrorists (the guest host Helen Hunt and the cast member Will Ferrell) rush in, shut the door and hold the boys at gunpoint. “MMMBop” has driven them insane, and they want nothing less for Hanson. Earplugs in place, the terrorists stop the elevator between floors, put “MMMBop” on a boombox set to REPEAT, and wait.

It takes only an hour or so for the first Hanson to crack; his mouth jerks up in a horrible grin. A few hours later a second Hanson succumbs. The third just keeps on happily tapping his
feet. Mr. Ferrell takes out his earplugs; a smile spreads over his face, and he too begins to move. Realizing he’s gone over to the other side, Ms. Hunt has no choice but to execute him on the spot.

That’s one way to settle the mystery of a hit single. But some singles, like the Wallflowers’ current “Three Marlenas,” are mysteries that intensify until they finally float off the airwaves and disappear into the air.

The song walks in and out of the struggles of people who have no money and expect none. Jakob Dylan plays the simplest cadence on his guitar, never varying it. A piping organ makes the people you’re hearing about seem bigger than their small lives, even heroic. Then all the orchestration falls away, and only the guitar is left, counting off the time. The whole piece pauses, and the singer says the hell with it. He’s going to get a car and drive it, with the top down and the radio on. The eavesdropping tone of his descriptions of other people is replaced by a bitterly casual James Dean snarl. “I’m going right out of state,” he says. “Now, I ain’t looking back until I’m going / Right through heaven’s gate.”

He stretches the word “heaven” as far as it will reach. He bets all he has on that word and the next, but without tipping his hand. Though his face remains impassive, the phrase “heaven’s gate” works as a magnet, pulling in metaphors from every direction, filling up the hole that has opened in the music.

The hole is filled with thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate, the seekers who killed themselves last March, well after “Three Marlenas” was recorded but before it reached the radio and stuck there. It is filled with Genesis 28:17, where Jacob, in terror, dreams his way up his ladder to “the gate of heaven,” and with “Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,” from the seduction song in Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline.

Jakob Dylan’s song is filled with the slowly building disaster of the 1980 Michael Cimino movie about the Johnson County War, where “Heaven’s Gate” were words painted on a tented roller rink in Sweetwater, Wyoming, in 1892. In that roller rink, for what it’s worth, the musician T-Bone Burnett, the onetime Bob Dylan accompanist
who produced the Wallflowers’
Bringing Down the Horse,
was the leader of the film’s “Heaven’s Gate Band.”

Merely working in culture, with all questions of intent moot, Jakob Dylan has called up these metaphors. With his song weighted by events he could never have foreseen and analogues he may never have known, he creates the sense that wherever the singer in his song is going, he isn’t coming back. It’s as if he expects to find heaven’s gate closed and even hopes it will be, so he can drive right through it and break it down.

Listening, you can almost see it happen, but the picture won’t come into focus. So you listen harder every time you come across “Three Marlenas,” wanting nothing more than to go all the way into the mystery it has presented, until finally you just get tired of trying. The day comes when you find the song playing and you hear nothing at all. Like so many singles, the record has gone back where it came from, wherever that is.

 

Wallflowers, “One Headlight” and “Three Marlenas,” on
Bringing Down the Horse
(Interscope, 1996).

 

Hanson, “MMMBop” (Island, 1997).

 

Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”—Original Soundtrack,
music composed by David Mansfield (United Artists, 1980; reissued Rykodisc, 1999).

28 May 1998

 

1) Chuck Berry: “Promised Land” (Chess, 1964). This is the map, as “The Poor Boy” sets off from Norfolk, Virginia, to discover the country: a journey that moves from poverty to wealth, from a bus to a plane setting down at LAX. All pop music that takes America
as a subject—whether winding toward tragedy or toward the sweetest harmony—runs off this mountain.

 

2) Carl Perkins: “Blue Suede Shoes” (Sun, 1956). “Don’t tread on me,” with a smile and an open hand.

 

3 & 4) Chuck Berry:
More Chuck Berry
(Chess, 1955-1960) and the Beach Boys:
The Best of the Beach Boys, Vol. 2
(Capitol, 1962-1966). The map begins to fill up, with blacks and whites, cars and girls, grand adventures into the night. “Let it rock,” Berry commanded; “I get around,” the Beach Boys respond coolly, a car full of guys on top of the world. There’s no threat in this land a good song can’t answer.

 

5) Dion: “Abraham, Martin and John” (Laurie, 1968). It breaks my heart; sometimes I can’t bear to listen to it, to hear the country that isn’t there.

 

6) Bob Dylan:
Highway 61 Revisited
(Columbia, 1965). Out here it’s one endless game of chicken. A squinting eye sees a land that’s all threat, and a voice that could have come from any state or all of them describes a nation defined by hysteria and redescribes it as an awful, somehow thrilling joke—without a punch line.

 

7 & 8) ZZ Top:
Eliminator
(Warner Bros., 1983) and Tarnation:
Gentle Creatures
(4AD, 1995). Same road, but no problem: you want all-night convenience stores, hot-sheet motels, we got ’em on the Interstate, and cheap, too.

 

9) Bobby “Blue” Bland:
Two Steps from the Blues
(Duke, 1961). You also have the St. James Infirmary—and a nation of strangers.

 

10) Pere Ubu:
Pennsylvania
(Tim/Kerr, 1998). So you turn off the Interstate, into forgotten small towns, and pretend that you, too, could belong in that diner—that you, too, could be one of the ghosts.

11) Bruce Springsteen:
Nebraska
(Columbia, 1982). The map shrinks to a single state where, once, as Chuck Berry was singing, a teenager and his girl friend got in their car and drove: “And ten innocent people died,” Springsteen as Charlie Starkweather sings without glee or apology. It’s the early Reagan years; wealth has become the measure of all things, and Starkweather has returned as the prophet of that nihilism.

 

12) “5” Royales: “The Slummer the Slum” (King, 1958). But the map can open up at any moment. “Don’t try,” says the singer in deadly stop-time, “to figure out / Where I come from,” and you can’t. Though there are two Americas in the number—one black and poor, one rich and white—there is also a single, shared church. It’s what the late Robert Palmer called the Church of the Sonic Guitar, which Lowman Pauling burns down and rebuilds from the ground up.

 

13) Barrett Strong: “Money (That’s What I Want)” (Anna, 1960). Money as the measure of freedom, the sound of a riot, the pursuit of happiness grabbed like a handoff and taken straight through the line.

 

14) Allen Ginsberg:
Holy Soul Jelly Roll—Poems and Songs, 1949- 1993
(Rhino Word Beat, 1994). Citizenship: how to get it, how to use it.

 

15) Prince:
Dirty Mind
(Warner Bros., 1980). An orgy, staged in Minnesota, by blacks and whites, Christians and Jews; the First and Fourteenth Amendments acted out and put to the test.

 

16) Randy Newman:
Sail Away
(Reprise, 1972). A slave ship as the
Titanic:
nothing can go wrong. The ship sails gloriously into Charleston Bay, and sinks the country.

 

17) Jimi Hendrix:
Woodstock
(MCA, 1994). As he told it, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was the story of a nation ripping itself to pieces, then stitching up the flag as a crazy quilt. His face is still in it.