Bob Dylan (52 page)

The book is demure, quiet, level, even through a nervous breakdown. Rotolo tells the story of a shared milieu and of a romance that, in its way, was also shared, but her self-respect is such that it translates into respect for the reader. She never violates her own privacy, and thus she never violates yours. Sex is never mentioned; with drugs, other than marijuana there is only the one awful night someone doses her drink with LSD. And as for the third part of the equation, there is that
Freewheelin’
album: “It was folk music, but it was really rock and roll.” She makes her own textures, so that what is left out doesn’t feel as if it’s missing, and what is left in maps the territory she wants to bring into view.

The great thrill of Vince White’s book is that, more than twenty years after the fact, he summons up the frantic state of mind of two years in the Clash as if they were still unfinished.

After Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon kicked guitarist Mick Jones out of the Clash, they held auditions. People showed up, played to backing tapes, weren’t told what band they might be joining. Vince White was one of two guitar players hired—as an employee. He was never off probation. In 1985 Strummer tells White he’s reforming the original band—he never did—and tells him to get married.

White brought a pure punk mind into the group. After graduating from college, he found himself overwhelmed by a sense of corruption and futility: “Everyone I met seemed to accept all the appearances of reality as truth. Like a giant conspiracy of assumptions that said a bus was a bus. But a bus wasn’t a bus. It was an obscene red metal object that moved down the street carrying
blank faces that had come from nowhere and were going absolutely nowhere.”

That was the sense of the world that went into the first Clash songs, which seemed to batter the city walls in a search for a way out. Now the band is in Los Angeles and Strummer, here portrayed as all but driven mad by his own messiahship, is making radio promos: “‘We want you there to take the floor and break it down and get with the
real
sound of
Rebel rock!
’” There wasn’t “a trace of irony,” White writes. “I was shocked. I didn’t recognize him . . . It was insulting and degrading. To people’s intelligence. To us and everyone who came to the shows. Surely people weren’t that stupid?”

White’s book turns its end into a beginning: he goes to work as a cab driver, makes more money than he ever did as a musician, and travels the world as a free person. Rotolo turns her beginning into an ending: her book, it becomes clear, is about the freedom a certain place and time offered those who were willing to grasp it, and as Village memoirists have written for more than a century, that place and time are gone. But unlike most of her countless forebears, from Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson on down, Rotolo doesn’t rest with
I was there
(and you weren’t): “Though it is a concept now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds . . . it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual physical neighborhood or not.” Both White and Rotolo are seeking truth and freedom, and neither writes as if their reader is any less worthy than they are.

 

Vince White,
The Last Days of the Clash.
London: Moving Target, 2007.

 

Suze Rotolo,
A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.
New York: Broadway Books, 2008.

London
Times

7 June 2008

 

What’s this stick-figure fisherman looking over a harbor full of blues and yellows and lots of sunny white? It’s one of the 170
Drawn Blank
gouaches and watercolors that Bob Dylan made last year—going back to a collection of
Drawn Blank
black and white drawings and sketches he’d made between 1989 and 1992, taking transfers of the old work, painting over them, discovering what the old pictures wanted to become.

Like many pictures more—
Amagansett, Vista from a Balcony, Bicycle, Still Life with Peaches, Sunday Afternoon
(which could be called “Sunday Painter”)—
Fisherman
is also postcard art. It’s the sort of stuff that’s sold in tourist towns in the retail equivalent of tea rooms, the stores that call themselves shoppes and charge extra for the cards “By Our Local Artists.” An overstylization, which here is a lack of style, presses a banality that often seems to be the ruling principle of the pictures (“Drawn Blank?” Firing blanks? Or a shooter who doesn’t even look at what he’s shooting at?). Depthless bodies and faces match the dullness of the pleasant scenes, their primitiveness its own kind of pretentiousness, whether it’s
Woman Near a Window, Society Lady
(so much less than the Weegees it seems to come from, just as
Reno Balcony
calls up Robert Frank’s 1956 view from a hotel room in
Butte, Montana
), portraits of Tom Clark, Paul Karaian, Nick LeBlanc,
Cupid Doll,
or any of the nudes and semi-nudes. You’ve seen it all before. But others draw you into a dialogue. Where is this place? Have I been there? Is it real?

Here, working through three or four new paintings made from a single old drawing, what’s shown no longer fits into its cliché. Houses—
House on Chestnut Street, Front Porch of a House on Hayes Street
—seem almost to burst from some unseen pressure, as if they’re rotting from the inside. The heat that comes out of the density in
Freret Street New Orleans
is instantly recognizable if you’ve
ever been there, but you haven’t seen it before: unlike the person who painted this, you haven’t imagined how it looks. TV sets, found in motel rooms—
Lakeside Cabin, View from Two Windows
—hold more secrets than women. The women pretend to be alive, or the painter is trying to bring them to life; the TV sets acknowledge they’re already dead, or the painter has somehow broken them before they were turned on. Looking at these little boxes, you can’t imagine that they ever carried pictures of their own.

The work here that sings with invention, play, seriousness—a commitment to the moment the image is making—comes with a few
Twilight Zone
-like variations: like an octopus changing colors before your eyes, in
Corner Flat
the same chair is occupied by four different people, seemingly in an instant, as if it’s a single person in disguise against his or her own self.

In
Rose on a Hillside,
there is a rose in the foreground. Behind it, absolutely different scenes—mountains, a small town, a house, the New York skyline from across the Hudson—loom up in turn, as if, if you know how to look at the rose, it will call up whatever you desire. There is
Train Tracks:
a western scene, a track to its vanishing point, mountains in the background, a depot, a telegraph pole. One in blue and green and brown, two in black and white except for a warm brown for the track, three, it’s a movie set—and then, with the final version, the whole scene in black and white, save for the sky, blank before, now a quiet explosion of pure gold.

It’s a visionary moment, just as the oh-so-contemplative series
Man on a Bridge
is its counterfeit—for those who need to reduce all art to autobiography, pictures which allow the viewer to imagine that the bearded figure there is Bob Dylan himself, at the crossroads of life. Symbolism! But the last
Train Tracks
is not symbolism. It’s not reducible. You want to go to this place. You want to see that sky happen. You can’t, so you settle for the next best thing. You keep looking at the picture—which after all made up that sky as if it had never been, which maybe it hadn’t.

The portrait of Bob Dylan that serves as a frontispiece for the book version of
The Drawn Blank Series
is a 2006 photo by William Claxton—the jazz photographer best known for his intimate, almost
preternaturally cool mid-1950s pictures of Art Pepper, Billie Holiday, and most of all Chet Baker. His Dylan picture seems based on the only photo known of the protean Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton, made in about 1929. Dylan’s floppy bow tie ties the two together; both communicate a sense of weight, knowledge, experience, fatalism. Those qualities are present here and there in the
Drawn Blank
pictures—not so fully as in the strongest of Dylan’s recent music, “Ain’t Talkin’” from the 2006
Modern Times,
but with an unlikelihood to make you realize Dylan’s songs don’t say all he might want to say.

 

Bob Dylan,
The Drawn Blank Series.
New York: Prestel USA, 2008.

September 2008

 

3) Howard Hampton writes (June 11): “I stumbled on Dylan’s endorsement of Obama (
London Times,
June 5: ‘Right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can’t expect
people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up—Barack Obama . . . Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to’). Makes sense that there would be that spark of recognition—the thing that amazes me is that the Clintons never seemed to get that they were dealing with someone more formidable than a Howard Dean in blackface. So they wound up looking like Baez and Seeger, the Old Regime, undone by the sound of a greater sense of possibility than they were willing to entertain—hence the whole ‘Electability’ issue would frame the election as ‘No We Can’t’ (elect a black man) vs. ‘Yes We Can’ (dream a better country, as MLK or poor tortured RFK did once upon a time).”

10 October 2008

 

You can find a map of the transformation Bob Dylan has wrought in American music over the last twenty years—a transformation in the way he has made it, certainly, but perhaps even more deeply in the way that many people now hear it—in the first two tracks of the third CD of
Tell Tale Signs:
a disc available only in the cruelly priced “Expanded Deluxe Edition.” ($169.99, as opposed to $22.99 for the two-CD set). I don’t mean to one-up; what is here is where it’s been placed, and as one person associated with the production put it, “Ultimately it will all be available to everyone; people will just download it.” Time will tell.

But here is Bob Dylan in Chicago in 1992, taking up the folk song “Duncan and Brady,” just months before moving on to the stripped-down, solo investigations of American commonplace songs—from black, white, and shared traditions—that first came to light later that year with his
Good as I Been to You
and continued in 1993 with
World Gone Wrong.
For those records, Dylan worked in his own home studio, without other musicians, without a producer. He found more of a voice in the melodies, twisted and jumped on his own acoustic guitar, than in the words. But in Chicago, with the concept not yet clear—with the songs yet to tell him how they wanted to be played—Dylan has given himself over to the producer David Bromberg, a musician who, as is said of a pompous rabbi in Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America,
“knows everything. Too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”

“The ballad gets what the ballad wants,” the singer David Thomas is fond of saying—except when someone like Bromberg kidnaps it and holds it for ransom. Here is a tale about a gunman and a bartender that has never, in its more than a century of changing hands, cried out to be done up with bass, drums, two or three guitars, organ, and synthesizer, all played as if the instruments themselves are self-orchestrating robots, with a perfectly congruent disembodied, science-fiction sound. The song doesn’t know what to do with all this, and Dylan doesn’t either. The mess of the thing ultimately goes back to his own uncertainty about what his music is and what it is for; he was coming out of a long period of contrived writing, fallow orchestration, more than ten years of desperate flailing for a something that not only could be put on the market but demanded to be brought into the world. So he tries gamely to keep up with the big band’s hurried clacketyclack, as if to say, moment to moment,
this will all be over in three minutes, two minutes, one minute—
There’s no soul in the performance, and no body.

The old songs that sprung to such cryptic life on
Good as I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
took a new form in 1997 with
Time Out of Mind.
There the likes of Blind Willie McTell’s “Ragged and
Dirty” and the mists-of-time British ballad “Love Henry” shed their skins and grew new ones, turning into “Dirt Road Blues,” “Standing in the Doorway,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” “Cold Irons Bound.” Onstage the songs changed shape yet again, as if they were less made than found, daring their putative composer to keep up with them. On numerous real bootlegs—as opposed to Dylan’s own official bootlegs—it was plain that “Cold Irons Bound” grew faster and bigger than anything else, but I have never heard anything like the
Tell Tale Signs
performance, from the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, in 2004.