Bob Dylan (47 page)

In
Walk the Line,
there’s a fascinating scene, early in the straight this-then-that biopic story, where Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, in Memphis in about 1954, takes his little amateur group to audition for Sam Phillips’s Sun label. They do a gospel number,
and Phillips says, “I don’t believe you.” Phoenix as Cash is outraged: “What, you don’t believe I believe in God?” Phillips explains that it doesn’t matter what Cash thinks he believes; he has to convince other people: “Make me believe something.” So Cash begins to fumble out “Folsom Prison Blues.” It isn’t until the end of the picture, when Cash goes into Folsom Prison itself to play, that you believe Phoenix believes he is Cash, or could have been.

That lack of reality isn’t present in
No Direction Home,
and not because it’s a documentary. Either through Rosen’s interviewing, or Scorsese’s sense of picture, the people who speak—Dylan’s
Freewheelin’
girlfriend Suze Rotolo, beautiful and exuberant, the poker-faced harmonica player Tony Glover, Dylan’s one-time fellow-traveler Bob Neuwirth, people who passed through Dylan’s life and whose lives he passed through—don’t seem to be trying to impress anyone, to come off well, to flatter themselves. And there is a kind of reality that people may have difficulty integrating with aesthetic representations. That is, you can be overwhelmed by
Walk the Line,
and at Telluride a lot of people were—but if you are seeing
No Direction Home
at more or less the same time, or connect the two,
Walk the Line
can’t explain itself when set against the scene in
No Direction Home
of Dylan and Cash, backstage in Leeds in May 1966, singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” (The footage has never been seen before—D. A. Pennebaker shot it, but he didn’t use it in his own, unreleased film of the 1966 tour, and Dylan didn’t use it in his barely released
Eat the Document.
) Here’s Johnny Cash, he’s thirty-three, he looks sixty, he looks dead, his face deformed by abuse and guilt, and the question of how he got to this little room, of how he’s going to get out of it, becomes, in an instant, the question that opens
No Direction Home
itself, with that Newcastle “Like a Rolling Stone.”

At the end, people broke out into two or three minutes of sustained applause and cheering—again, even though they knew there was no one there to receive it. The audience stayed for the entire, long credit roll, perhaps thinking there’d be something they’d regret missing. At the end of the credits, people burst into applause again. And then a lot of people simply did not leave their
seats, as if they thought there might be an extra reel of outtakes for those who truly demonstrated their commitment.

 

No Direction Home,
directed by Martin Scorsese (PBS, Spitfire Pictures DVD, 2005).

12 July 2006

 

Sometime in the early 1970s, I visited Paul Nelson’s apartment in New York, on Lexington Avenue. I’d seen Paul often in the years before, but this was the first time I’d seen him without a cap: the day I found out that underneath that cap, he was completely bald. In his own house, he could be himself.

Paul was a serious book collector: a maven, a fetishist. His shelves were filled with endless editions of 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled detective fiction. First editions in perfect condition; battered paperbacks with lurid covers. Placed here and there were books on stands, as artworks. They were there to be stared at, to fall into, to reflect back, like mirrors. He handed me
Five Sinister Characters,
a 1945 paperback collection of Raymond Chandler stories: “Trouble Is My Business,” “Red Wind,” “I’ll Be Waiting.” On the cover were pictures of a rich woman in a heavy necklace, a mean-looking cad in a pencil moustache, a World War I officer, a Chinese thug, and a woman in a veiled hat—a woman who was clearly a man. The crude portraits were like a scrim over the writing inside, teasing you that, as you read, you’d be able to tell who was who, when the whole point was that you wouldn’t.

Paul was a humble, generous man with the driest sense of humor imaginable, all in the way he dropped an eyebrow; you knew you weren’t seeing a fraction of what was there. The apartment was an airy, pleasant place, but it was also a cave. “P.N. has a Phone-Mate automatic answering machine, which he leaves on twenty-four hours a day, to screen out all calls he does not want,” Paul’s close friend and collaborator Lester Bangs wrote about that time in a set of notes for a book he planned, “All My Friends Are Hermits”—in those days, you still had to explain what an answering machine was. “Sometimes, after I hear the beep and say who it is, he immediately picks up. Often he does not. Sometimes the latter option obtains for weeks.” Paul hid from his own writing. In 1974, when Jim Miller and I were trying to get the chapters Paul had promised for
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
out of him—on Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart, people Paul loved, and who loved him—we left what we thought were funny, then what we hoped were threatening messages on his machine, pushed his buzzer, shouted up from the street, mailed ransom notes (I can’t remember who the hostage was supposed to be). We had no idea if he was in the apartment or not. We fantasized—it’s a commonplace, banal fantasy, everyone’s had it—that he was in there dead, not to be found until the neighbors couldn’t ignore the smell. We gave up, and began looking for other writers.

Finally the pieces came. The one on Dylan was a detective story. Paul was the Op; culture was his beat. His clients (from “the Manhattan Institute of Critical Enterprise” and “the Majorities Enter the War League”) were looking for a hero to promote, and thought Dylan might still do the job.

“In the mid-sixties Dylan’s talent evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action,” the detective explained. “Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it—and it really would be significant.”

“Mystical mumbo jumbo,” one of the clients said; it was a whole career in seventy-five words. Those words took Paul weeks to write, and over the last thirty years they’ve bounced back to me again and again and again. A lot of writers live their lives without ever getting anything quite so right, in words that would come to no one else.

 

Paul Nelson, “Bob Dylan,” in
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,
edited by Jim Miller. New York: Random House, 1976.

 

———with Lester Bangs,
Rod Stewart.
New York: Delilah Books, 1981.

 

Neil Strauss, “The Man Who Disappeared,”
Rolling Stone
(28 December 2006-11 January 2007).

September 2006

 

“One of the ancients by now, whom all moderns prize”—so said Bob Dylan on his first
Theme Time Radio Hour,
now running weekly on XM Radio. He was speaking of Muddy Waters, but he could have been talking about the mostly traditional songs remade—from the ground up, from the inside out—on
Shaken by a Low Sound,
the second album by Crooked Still, a four-person Boston combo. Not long ago, the
New York Times
Arts & Leisure section featured one of its patented idiot trend pieces, this one on “Freak Folk,” a celebration of the likes of Devendra Banhart, pixie dust, Joanna Newsom, beard-stroking, “the Vermont musical collective Feathers,” and hugs. There would have been no way to fit in Crooked Still. People die in their songs. People are dead before the songs begin.

Taking up tunes that were tired clichés even during the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s—“Railroad Bill,” “Little Sadie,” “Wind
and Rain”—and some that, though just as old, were never so shopworn—“New Railroad,” “Ain’t No Grave,” “Lone Pilgrim,” and “Ecstasy”—singer Aoife O’Donovan, cellist Rushad Eggleston, banjo player Gregory Liszt, and bassist Corey DiMario seem to trust the songs they’ve chosen to give up what they’ve never given up before. Each song, you can feel, is like a book written at once in English and an unknown tongue. If you read it you will read what everyone before you has read. If you speak the words out loud, you will say what has never been said.

O’Donovan doesn’t conform the characters in her songs to her gender. It’s a man who shoots Little Sadie—no reason given, a face, a hand to a pistol, a finger squeezing the trigger, and it’s the incomprehensibility of the act, or the obviousness, that’s kept the story alive for so many lifetimes—and so O’Donovan becomes that man. In a high, thin but commanding voice that at first calls back Alison Krauss, Sandy Denny, or the less-well-known Anna Domino of Snakefarm, O’Donovan enters the songs as if through a back-door visible only to her. Finding herself alone in the rooms of the songs, she’s Goldilocks trying out every bed—reliving, as she lays herself down, every nightmare and every act of love each bed ever witnessed. Then she rises. Facing the judge in “Little Sadie,” the gravestone in “Lone Pilgrim,” the hangman in “New Railroad,” Jesus in “Ain’t No Grave,” the fields of heaven in “Ecstasy,” she knows exactly what to do.

In “Little Sadie,” it’s a turn Eggleston makes on his cello—really, it’s as if he’s physically turned it, turned its back on you—that opens the song to a kind of suspense it may never have held before. You realize, suddenly, that the simple murder ’n’ justice tale the words tell is not what the song is about at all; now it’s an opening into something much darker, beyond the reach of any law. “Ain’t No Grave” is a stomp, moving fast, a syncopation built on the cello that carries everyone off the edge of the world in a spirit of pure abandon because they know God will be there to catch them. When Liszt opens up on banjo—playing easily, then picking up the pace, then playing as if with two instruments and four
hands—you find yourself shaking your head in wonder, no idea how you reached the place Liszt has taken you, and not willing to leave. In the same way, as the band crawls into “Ecstasy,” it all but hides itself from the music it’s making, because this song, from the 1844 backwoods hymnal
The Sacred Harp,
does not belong to the band. But what they learn, as they play, so slowly the rhythm the song makes is a rhythm of coming as close as you can to a complete stop, is that it never belonged to anyone, and never will.

The songs to which Crooked Still now applies itself were made to capture whole countries of experience, fantasy, forgetting, revenge, guilt, and escape—countries that had already vanished as the songs were made, countries as they were, countries yet to come. The band takes up the songs as if they contain knowledge far beyond any person who might sing them. “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone / It’s not the hanging that I mind, it’s the laying in the grave so long”—it’s not the words that get inside you, because the knowledge isn’t in the words. It’s in the melodies, and, here, you can hear the melodies giving the singer the knowledge they hold, if she can rise to their challenge—like learning that God is real by reciting a prayer.

 

Crooked Still,
Shaken by a Low Sound
(Signature Sounds, 2006).

November 2006

 

1) The Drones:
Gala Mill
(ATP/R). I was attracted to this solely because the title of the band’s last album,
Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By,
echoes two of my favorite
band names: When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water and And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. How could
Gala Mill
be anything but great? Sure, dull title, but according to the press release, this Australian four-piece, led by singer-guitarist Gareth Liddiard, recorded on “an isolated 10,000-acre farm” in Tasmania. Eat your heart out, Nick Cave.

None of that—and none of the band’s earlier music—is any preparation for what happens here, from the first moment. “Jezebel” is a long, delirious song that seems to suck all the chaos and horror of the present moment into a single human being, who struggles to contain that world inside himself: a world that seemingly takes the shape of the Belsan school massacre of 2004, which in this noise is all but recreated. Especially on the choruses, when a drone comes up, hovers, waits—and it’s unnerving, waiting for the sound to break—you can’t tell if the singer succeeds or not, or if it would be better if he succeeded or failed. Better for who? You are dragged into this song as if you were a prisoner. The performance is a shocker—and the album, casting off its echoes of Neil Young and Eleventh Dream Day, staking out its own territory in song after song, can hardly recover from it. Not until the final number, a nine-minute reenvisioning of a traditional Australian convicts’ ballad—and after that, you really will know this band by their trail of dead.