Bob Dylan (50 page)

That is the truth, and that is the mystery. In the case of Bob Dylan, as with any person who does things others don’t do, the mystery is always there. But from the overwhelming fact of the pure size of Hibbing High School, from the ambition and vision placed in the murals in its entryway, from the poetry on the walls to the poetry in the classroom, perhaps to memories recounted after everyone else had gone—or memories picked up by a student from the way a teacher moved, hesitated over a word, dropped hints he never quite turned into stories—these soils were not unprepared at all.

 

Robert Cantwell, “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival,” collected in
Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined,
edited by Neil V. Rosenberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1993.

 

———.
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1996.

 

B. J. Rolfzen,
The Spring of My Life.
Hibbing, MN: Band Printing, 2004. Rolfzen died in 2009 at 86.

 

Bob Dylan, “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” liner notes to
The Times They Are A-Changin’
(Columbia, 1964).

 

———. “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
(Columbia, 1963).

———. “Ain’t Talkin’,” from
Modern Times
(Columbia, 2006).

 

Woodrow Wilson, “Address of Woodrow Wilson at Lincoln’s Birthplace,” collected in
From Lincoln to Coolidge,
edited by Alfred E. Logie. Chicago: Lyons and Carnahan, 1925.

 

See also the booklet
The Hibbing High School,
text by Dan Bergan, photos by Chuck Perry, Hibbing: 2001; Bergan and Larry Ryan’s documentary film
The High School of Bob Dylan
(DVD, 2010); and Dave Engle,
Just Like
Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota,
Mesabi, Rudolph, Wisconsin: River City Memoirs, 1997.

June 2007

 

9/10) Larry Kegan, Howard Rutman, Robert Zimmerman: “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Boppin’ the Blues,” Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “I Want You to Be My Girl,” “Ready Teddy,” and “Confidential,” and
Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966
(Weisman Museum of Art, University of Minnesota). On Christmas Eve, 1956, three boys, two fourteen and one fifteen, pooled their quarters for the record machine at Terline Music in St. Paul, Minnesota. You put in a coin, you got about thirty seconds, so with the fifteen-year-old pounding a piano they rushed to harmonize on whatever they could until the machine cut off and then started up again with another tune. It sounds like a slumber party, kids giddy from staying up past their bedtime, and what’s surprising is not that one of these kids turned into Bob Dylan, but that little more than a year later he was—as pictured in a recently discovered photo featured in the Weisman exhibit—singing the same songs in the Golden Chords, commanding a stage with fervor and confidence, looking pretty much as he looks now: flash coat, dark pants, dark shirt, white tie, hair in a pompadour, eyes like slits.

 

May 2007

 

10) Howard Fishman: “I’m Not There (1956),” from
Howard Fishman Performs Bob Dylan & the Band’s “Basement Tapes” Live at Joe’s Pub
(Monkey Farm). An interpretation but, for as a long as it plays, an irrefutable translation of a legendary song that seems beyond human ken, and not only because half of its words are missing and you can’t quite be sure if the other half are there or not. Soon to be a major motion picture.

Interview
November 2007
with
DVD notes to
I’m Not There
2008, rewritten 2010

 

Imagine that, given all the different masks, wardrobes, accents, and gestures Bob Dylan has assumed over the years—the way in which he has seemed to be, moment by moment, almost different people—that he was different people. Each with his own different name, face, motive, passions, way of walking, way of talking—and different destiny. Then the story—of a generation, an era, or merely a single person whose voice other people wanted to hear—could open up in any direction at all. The full range of the imaginative transformation Bob Dylan has for nearly five decades offered the world at large—from Puritan folksinger to drunken Surrealist to born-again Christian to fatalistic traveler, with countless selves in between—could be transferred to an audience, who could then reimagine the story for themselves. Todd Haynes made his film
I’m
Not There
as part of that audience. “You think,” he says, “I’m going to give people the Dylan movie and be very rigorous about trying to convey as many aspects of him as I think are true and recurrent”—but a spirit of play, the thrill of improvising on the spot with actors, musicians, designers, cinematographer, makeup artists, carries your rigorous intentions away. The result is a film with a cakewalk of lead actors, none playing a character who is precisely Bob Dylan—and, just as vitally, a film where no one on the screen is precisely not.

Todd Haynes’s movies get under your skin or they pass right over it.
Velvet Goldmine
(1998) was seductive from start to finish and I’ve almost never thought of it since. I could hardly bear
Safe
(1995) and
Far from Heaven
(2002) when they came out, and few weeks have gone by without some blocked gesture, an uncompleted sentence, crawling out of what I had no intention of ever thinking about again.
I’m Not There
is different. It’s immediately engaging. It cuts back and forth between different times, stories, protagonists. Music—Dylan’s songs in his own voice, in the voices of the actors, in the voices of the singers the actors are miming—flies through the air like a trapeze artist shooting out of the frame on one side of the screen and returning on the other with a different face and different clothes.

The story of one character is not dependent on the story of another. All of the characters pursue their own fate—often with a crowd professing love or hate pursuing them—independently of each other. Each character’s story reaches a kind of conclusion in a territory none of the others may have ever visited.

Still, nothing is resolved. Perhaps because no character is killed off (there is a motorcycle accident, the rider is laid out on a table, but since we know Bob Dylan is not dead, the scenes communicate as a device, merely literary), not one story ends, or even merely stops, in a manner that’s acceptable, that doesn’t leave you hanging, trying to imagine how it could have come out differently. So you leave the theater ready to talk about the movie, buttonholing the person next to you—but even more than that, you want to see the picture again, right away.

It all moves so fast, there are streams of lines and facial expressions and physical stances no one could catch entire the first time through, and walking away, looking back over your shoulder, you find yourself thinking that maybe what you thought happened isn’t what happened at all. Maybe the citizens of Riddle rush the bandstand and kick Pat Garrett to death. Maybe Jude Quinn gets away clean. Maybe Pastor John will come back to the world—or lead you to accept Jesus into your heart.

Picture yourself taking a figure from postwar culture and contriving an imaginary biography for that person: John F. Kennedy. Philip Roth. Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. Aretha Franklin. Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frank Sinatra. Now imagine that this person, whoever you choose, will be portrayed by numerous persons unlike each other. Young. Old. White. Black. Male. Female.

Right away, you can tell who contains multitudes—and who doesn’t. For some, the idea breaks down in the face of the person it’s supposed to realize. For others, you realize you’ve never had a clue who this person was—and you believe this may be the way to understand, if not who that person actually was, who and what he or she might have been. What the person wanted from his or her time, and what the time wanted from the person.

Who is that person? Throughout the film, there are interludes with Ben Whishaw as a dandy claiming his name is Rimbaud and facing a battery of are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-poet inquisitors—but the story truly begins in 1959, with Marcus Carl Franklin as an eleven-year-old African-American boy named Woody. He’s a hobo guitar-player in love with the dust-bowl ballads of the Great Depression and trying to live them out, a dreamer brought up short when a woman who’s taken him in for a decent meal looks him in the eye and tells him to “sing your own time.” He runs, hops a freight, is pitched out of a boxcar by old men as the train passes over a bridge and into a river, where like Pip he sees a whale coming right at him: the rest of the story.

Soon we meet Christian Bale as the early sixties protest singer Jack Rollins, his face all angles and anguish. He is an instant legend
so potent that a movie actor named Robbie Clark will become world-famous when he stars in a film about the young conscience of his generation. As Robbie Clark is played by Heath Ledger—and Clark’s wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg as a cross between Bob Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, his real-life wife Sara Lowndes, Patti Smith, and, as she has built a persona over the years, Gainsbourg herself—they will together act out a version of the romantic life of a real-life Bob Dylan who is now, already, no longer anything like the owner of his own story.

We meet Christian Bale again, now called Pastor John: Jack Rollins twenty years after he fled to an evangelical ministry in the Gateway Fellowship Church. And then, at first slowly, then with an unstoppable momentum—with Cate Blanchett’s Jude Quinn, a mid-sixties pop star at war with his own audience, and with the dreamlike vertigo of Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid, a hermit living on the outskirts of the dream-town called Riddle—the balance of the film shifts. The play of identities slows, and the pace of characters in trouble, trying to outrun their own fate, takes over.

Blanchett is a marionette in constant motion, an actress scaring her own character as the character, trying to manipulate his own strings, makes history with every fluttering gesture, every errant or loaded word. The sardonic face he tries desperately to keep in place—sometimes hilariously, as he dances before a bigger-than-life statute of Jesus on the cross, crowing “Do your early stuff!” like one of his own angry fans—is turned not forward but backward, as he attempts to keep the flood of the history he has already made and that has made him from sweeping him out of history, his own and anyone else’s. That’s how
I’m Not There
gets Blanchett’s Jude to a Warhol-like gallery party in 1966 where a huge video screen shows the president of the United States quoting Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” just like a college student: where, in his own voice, LBJ all but bursts out of the movie like Pecos Bill to thunder “DEATH TO ALL THOSE WHO WOULD WHIMPER AND CRY” and you can’t believe he didn’t say exactly that when he had the chance. Jude collapses, vomits; hustled out of the building and
into a waiting limousine surrounded by screaming fans pounding on the windows, he looks straight into the eyes of a woman in the crowd looking straight into his, straight through him, as she lights a match and, without blinking, sets her hair on fire. That, the woman seems to be saying to Jude Quinn, is the real song inside the music you’re making now—the song you’re afraid to sing, the song I’m not afraid of. Over the years, countless people have told Bob Dylan that he said what they felt but couldn’t say, that he gave them a voice. This small, irreducible event is that story—an incident which my memory tells me happened then, though my memory won’t tell me where, why, who did it and to whom—turned back on the singer.

Gere’s performance—and the setting of a small country town where the citizens carry the names of characters in Dylan’s crazy-quilt farrago of the mostly still-unreleased songs from the basement tapes—may be the key to the vitality of the film itself.

“The Billy section,” Haynes says, “enacts one of Dylan’s escapes, one of his retreats from life, from the public glare, which happened throughout his career, and first and most notably in 1967 after his motorcycle crash. And his retreats from public life were also, at times, retreats from modernity, from the urban life”—and so, Haynes says, “you had to have a western.” In his retreats from public life, “Dylan was a wanted man, an outlaw—to me, it wasn’t a huge departure from the real.” But as with the woman setting her hair on fire, it’s a departure big enough to allow the people of Riddle to step out of the basement and tell a story the real Dylan’s songs never contemplated. Here, everyone goes about in masks, one person with a flag painted over one side of his face, another wearing a woven basket around her head. When, to speak at a public gathering, Gere’s Billy puts on a clear plastic mask, it becomes plain that, as in a miniature of the conceit of the film itself, it is only when one can appear as someone else that he or she is free to say what he or she really thinks, to truly use that voice that, here, every character did receive from some now spectral, perhaps altogether mythical figure named Bob Dylan.