Bob Dylan (28 page)

That is the myth—as it was acted out in the sixties, as it was received, transmitted, invented, codified, and then taken as a natural fact, as a legend of history. In the fifties—Cantwell’s epoch of the flood, of the moment when everything changed—this legend wasn’t present. There were only events. The myth had to wait—and by the time it arrived, history had faded, faded enough for legend to replace it. At bottom, that’s how you join a myth: you join in constructing it, in making it up. Making up this particular myth was to one degree or another the sense or nonsense left to the world by the first generation of pop critics. Does that make the myth untrue? Of course not. It makes it a strange and shadowing standard, a standard all pop music that followed upon the first emergence of rock ’n’ roll has to be seen to match, or overtake, or overthrow, or render irrelevant. It’s a standard every record, every performance, has to somehow affirm or dismiss.

But as Robert Cantwell writes out the myth of pop transformation—which he is writing plainly, if dramatically, as history—it isn’t hard to see another, poisonous myth inside of it, as if biding its time: a germ in the idea of equality, the idea carried forth so ferociously by Cantwell’s “remorseless spitting Americans,” a germ that will emerge not to prove that all might exist on the same plane of legitimacy, but to prove that some people are true and some are false. This is the myth of authenticity, or purity—the idea that true art, or true culture, exists outside of base motives, outside even of individual desires, particular egos, any form of selfishness, let alone mendacity, let alone greed.

This myth rewrites the past no less than the myth of pop transformation does, and more violently. The earliest version of this myth wasn’t written out; it wasn’t a story. It was acted out. It was the payola investigations of the late fifties and early sixties, all
based in the certainty, on the part of certain guardians of public morals, and politicians who knew a good horse to ride when they saw one, that the only reason the airwaves were filled with garbage, and that decent children, white children, had turned away from decent culture, was that someone was paying disc jockeys and radio programmers to play what otherwise would have never been heard. Rock ’n’ roll, in other words, was itself payola: a conspiracy. It was a trick, not unlike that other fifties media panic, subliminal advertising. Both the fear of payola and of subliminal advertising were versions of the ruling postwar myth: that, like the seedpods in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
communism could creep up on America as it slept. At the time, in the late fifties, this argument—which was itself vaguely subliminal—didn’t even feel like a metaphor. Communist messages secreted in Hollywood movies, like fluoride in public water systems, would weaken the will or the brain tissue itself, until Americans were powerless to resist. And on the radio, among teenagers everywhere, it had already happened.

A different version of this argument came out of the folk revival that took shape concurrently with the payola scandals. Pop music, rock ’n’ roll, was looked on as trash, the adolescent indulgence society at large said it was, something to grow out of. It was corrupt; it was all about money; it was all about imitation, every emotion a counterfeit, every gesture second hand. But with folk music—old mountain music, blues, reels, and story songs, ballads that sounded as if they’d been written by the wind—the soul of the singer came forth. Stripped of artifice in its performance, the music produced a naked person, who could not lie. The speech that issued from his or her mouth was pure; the motive, simply to tell the truth, was pure; and the performance made both singer and listener into authentic beings, who could not lie because they could not want to.

A present-day version of this version of the anti-pop myth comes in Fred Goodman’s book
The Mansion on the Hill,
which is about the presumed clash between art and commerce in contemporary
pop music. Here, because pop music takes shape in a capitalist milieu, it is inevitably deformed and corrupted, until nether performer nor listener can tell truth from lie. Never mind that pop music might as usefully be seen as a form of capitalism as any kind of art—Goodman’s version of this myth is bizarre.

Before Bob Dylan stepped from folk music into rock ’n’ roll in 1965, Goodman argues, rock ’n’ roll was a “pop-trivial medium.” There was no such thing as expressiveness, no authenticity of any kind, just—stuff. Money and sounds. But rather than a resurgent, Beatle-driven rock ’n’ roll wiping folk music off the cultural map—as the story is usually told—Goldman argues that, through Dylan’s agency, folk music completely rewrote the rules of pop music. Now, according to Goldman, suddenly the rock ’n’ roll sound could carry truth: true messages and true beings. You could be true to yourself; to thine own self you had to be true. But because there was still money to be made off of rock ’n’ roll—in fact, more than ever before—a fatal contradiction loomed.

Despite suggestions in
The Mansion on the Hill
that the man who once wrote “Money doesn’t talk it swears” kind of likes to, you know, swear, Bob Dylan, Goodman said on the radio in an interview about his book, had stayed pure. “There’s Dylan and there’s everybody else,” he said. “He’s never made a record to make money; he’s never made a record to make a hit.” Any good pop fan should answer that with, “Well, if Bob Dylan never made a record to get a hit, he ought to. It’s not too late.” But the whole concept, the whole division, is ludicrous—and still this myth of purity, this folk virus, is today as defining a pop myth as any other. In England it defined punk from the beginning, with some fans all but demanding written proof of working-class status before a record might be considered, and it defines much of the punk milieu today. That’s the world Adam Duritz of Counting Crows came out of in Berkeley—and it was this myth, far more than anything that can be reduced to an attitude, that drove him out of town. He wrote his songs, formed this band and then that one, made his music, followed where it led, and his music hit—and
then, in a drama that Kurt Cobain acted out within himself, arguing with himself, raining abuse on himself, Duritz found himself a pariah on the streets of his own city, cursed by those onetime friends and fellow scenesters who did not cross the street or turn their backs and walk the other way when they saw him coming. Not only had he betrayed the purity of the Berkeley punk community, he was like a disease: get too close, and you could catch it. It all goes back, so seamlessly, to the folkies who decided that the Kingston Trio, never mind that they’d somehow gotten the word out first, were phonies.

Given the weight of pop myths—and there are scores of them, intertwined and overlapping stories about what it means to be a performer or part of an audience, about love and death, identity and facelessness, and on and on—it can be a shock to encounter performances that seem utterly free of myth, that seem to come forth completely on their own terms, as if they came out of themselves. That this might be possible is perhaps the most alluring pop myth of all. Myth or not, it’s what I heard on
Golden Vanity,
a Bob Dylan bootleg a friend in Germany sent me.

Bob Dylan acted out an odd, to many incomprehensible or irrelevant little cultural drama in the early and mid-nineties. Onstage, he offered often shockingly powerful versions of his old songs, performed with a tight, relentless band, with himself as lead guitarist, to the point that long, snaking instrumental passages, doubling back and descending into near silence, and then, like the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” erupting into a greater noise, would overwhelm the parts of the song that were actually sung. Sine 1990 he has issued no new songs of his own, instead substituting records of old blues and folk standards. It’s these sorts of songs that are collected on
Golden Vanity
—the oldest of the old songs, ballads, and airs that are hundreds and hundreds of years old, collected in the form of audience recordings made at Dylan shows from 1988 through 1992. Some of the songs are common coin, numbers everyone sang in the days of the folk revival, “Barbara Allen” or “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Some are obscure, at least
to me: “Eileen Aroon.” These are the sort of songs Bob Dylan recorded in St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1960 and 1961, on cheap tape recorders in cheaper student or dropout apartments, because in those days these songs seemed like a key: a key to another country or another self, a strange music carrying, like all strange music, the call of another life.

In the early sixties, Dylan, then twenty, twenty-one, could invest these songs with flesh and blood. As he sang, men and women, lords and ladies, ghosts and demons, all the figures of the old ballads appeared before you. But now, as Dylan sang these same songs in his late forties, in his early fifties, all that these songs once meant, as talismans of the folk revival, charm pieces of purity and authenticity, as keys to a kingdom, has been forgotten. As knowledge, as rules, what the songs once meant has been passed down in the form of punk, not in the form of “Little Moses” or “Two Soldiers” or “The Wagoner’s Lad”—and so these songs appear, on a bootleg CD, not as culture at all, but as some sort of contradiction, anomaly, or disruption, coming out of nowhere: speech without context, a foreign language.

In a dark, bitter, chastened voice, Dylan sings these old songs as if he knows they contain the truth of being, from birth to death, and as if that truth would be plain to all if only the songs could be sung as they were meant to be sung, or heard as they were meant to be heard—if only the world were, for an instant, in perfect balance. Passion lifts the songs, a yearning so fierce it’s hard to credit, hard to listen to. A retreat, a withdrawal in the face of a world that was always the way it is and that will never be any different, backs the singer away from himself, and he seems barely to sing at all. But inside the audience, where these recordings were made with handheld microphones and hidden tape recorders, there is an utterly different world, and people live in it.

People are shouting, cackling, growling like dogs, yelping Deadhead yelps and whooping hippie whoops, imitating each other, vocally high-fiving, barking and drunk. It’s the weirdest thing. This is no collision of history and legend—the collision from
which myths arise, the myth emerging as a new language no one has to learn, as with teenagers and rock ’n’ roll in the fifties, or whether the collision was arranged, the myth set forth as a new language everyone has to learn. Here, in these recordings, as what the singer is doing and what the crowd is doing cancel each other out, there is no history and there is no legend. The centuries of persistence in the ancient songs Dylan is singing, and the ancient singer he appears to be, make the noise of the crowd seem like vandalism; the refusal of the crowd to listen makes the wisdom of the songs, and the passionate body of the singer, seem like vanity. The result is the most compelling music, or the most compelling event, I’ve heard, or become part of, in a long time: irritating, confusing, impossible to hear and in moments impossible to pull away from. You hear someone struggling to turn what he believes to be timeless, outside of historical time, back into ordinary time, and the instinctive effort of others to stop him.

There’s no myth I can pull out of that or drape around it. It’s a new incident, without a story, so far—like the two shouts that open Sleater-Kinney’s “Little Mouth,” the film-noir theme in DJ Shadow’s “Stem/Long Stem,” or a thousand other things anyone could name.

 

Elvis Costello, “All This Useless Beauty,” on
All This Useless Beauty
(Warner Bros., 1996). Costello writes in his notes to a 2001 reissue that the song was written for the British folk singer June Tabor, who recorded it for her 1992 album
Angel Tiger
(Green Linnet), where it was “actually delivered with more anger than on my version”—though to my ears it’s a concert recital in a long dress. “None of these lyrics,” Costello wrote of “All This Useless Beauty,” “Little Atoms,” “You Bowed Down,” and other songs, “contained any anger toward the characters, only disappointment that they had settled for so little.”

 

———. “All This Useless Beauty,” from Costello & Nieve, on “San Francisco Live at the Fillmore (15 May 1996),” from
Los Angeles San Francisco Chicago Boston New York
(Warner Bros., 1996). A unique document of a unique tour: a box of five short CDs (five or six songs per city) drawn from live radio broadcasts of shows by Costello and Attractions pianist
Steve Nieve from May 1996. The highlight might be a more than seven-minute version of “My Dark Life,” also from San Francisco. Throughout the performances are at once pristine and explosive, reserved and inviting, private and common, with crowd noise that is by turns fawning and obnoxious, responsive and hushed, the real ambiance of real rooms. “It’s not a record of well-produced, high-tech concerts,” Costello said at the time. “It’s a record of overheard concerts.”

 

Lush, “All This Useless Beauty,” included on Elvis Costello & the Attractions,
You Bowed Down
(Warner Bros., 1996).

 

Robert Cantwell, “Twigs of Folly” (unpublished, 1997).

 

Fred Goodman,
The Mansion on the Hill.
New York: Times Books, 1996.

 

Bob Dylan,
Golden Vanity
(Wanted Man bootleg). Songs include “The Girl on the Green Briar Shore,” “When First Unto This Country,” “Trail of the Buffalo,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “Lakes of Pontchartrain.” Courtesy Fritz Schneider.

August 1997

 

I was in England in late May, trying to get people to read a book about Bob Dylan’s 1967 basement tapes recordings, when the story that Dylan might be near death from a rare heart ailment hit the papers. The queer thing about the news was the seeming eagerness with which it was reported. You could almost hear a sigh of relief: “My liege, I bring great news—the ’60s are over! Finally, we can close the book!”