Night Beat (12 page)

On his best nights onstage, Dylan might take a song like “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” or “Desolation Row” and turn it upside down, filling it with new energy and craziness. Moments later, he may turn around and deliver a folk ballad like “One Too Many Mornings” with a heart-stopping grace, in a voice as sweet as the voice with which he first recorded it, over thirty years ago, or he could produce “John Brown” (for my money, his best antiwar song) and render it with a truly breathtaking force. In May 1998, I saw Dylan take the stage at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and cleave into “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (from the 1966 album
Blonde on Blonde
) with new rage, new thoughts, new rhythms, and a new melodic fancy. It was plain that Dylan and his current band had achieved an impressive brand of musical kinship, much like the quick-witted empathy that the singer once shared with the Band during their concert sprees of the 1960s and 1970s. But in the late 1990s, Bob Dylan played “Tangled Up in Blue”—the
Blood on the Tracks
song about what lies past lost fellowship and ruined faith—with more ferocity and openness than any other song in his set. Night after night, he would push into a stinging flurry of acoustic guitar riffs and strums in midperformance, as if trying to break the song wide open and find its last meanings, and the audience would react as if they were hearing something of their own story in the turmoil of the music, and the lyric’s account of flight and renewal.

But as I say, these nightly triumphs went undernoted until the middle of 1997. Popular music magazines did not document Bob Dylan’s amazing resurgence. In fact, with their increasing dependence on the flawed science of demographics (which so often determines the content and cover-story decisions of many of today’s magazines), most pop media simply didn’t know how to write about a renewal that wasn’t trumpeted and orchestrated by a publicity stratagem. (Two notable exceptions: a series of mid-1990s articles written by Paul Williams in the reborn
Crawdaddy!
and Greil Marcus’s
Invisible Republic
.) It took two events to bring popular attention back to Dylan. The first happened in late May 1997, when Bob Dylan entered a Manhattan hospital after suffering severe chest pains. Early reports claimed that the singer had been struck by a heart attack (it turned out that Dylan had incurred histoplasmosis, a severe but treatable fungal heart infection), and the day’s evening news and cable entertainment programs treated the illness as prelude to an obituary. Dylan didn’t die, of course, but he was hit harder with the illness than he let be known at the time. Still, the episode served as an admonition of sorts: Bob Dylan had changed the world, and the world had all but forgotten him.

The second turnaround event was an affirmation of Dylan’s songwriting and singing talent. In late 1997, Dylan released his first album of new songs in over six years,
Time Out of Mind
—a work that proved as devastating as it did captivating. In the song “Love Sick” in the album’s opening moments, a guitar uncoils and rustles and Dylan starts an announcement in a torn but dauntless voice: “I’m walking”—he pauses, as if looking over his shoulder, counting the footsteps in his own shadow, then continues—”through streets that are
dead
.” And for the next seventy-plus minutes, we walk with him through one of the most transfixing storyscapes in recent music or literature.

Though some critics saw
Time Out of Mind
as a report on personal romantic dissolution—like
Blood on the Tracks
twenty-two years earlier—
Time
’s intensity is broader and more complex than that. It
is
, in part, an assembly of songs about what remains after love’s wreckage: Dylan sings “Love Sick” in the voice of an older man, talking to himself about the last love he could afford to lose, wanting to let go of his hopes so he can also let go of his hates, and damning himself for not being able to abandon his memory. For singing this haunted by abandonment, you have to seek the lingering ghosts of Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, and Frank Sinatra. But
Time Out of Mind
goes beyond that. By the point of the album’s sixteen-minute closing epic of fatigue, humor, and gentle and mad reverie, “Highlands,” Dylan has been on the track of departure for so long that he arrives someplace new—someplace not quite like any other place he has taken himself or us before. Is it a place of rejuvenation? That seems too easy a claim, though this much is sure:
Time Out of Mind
keeps company with hard fates, and for all the darkness and hurt it divulges, its final effect is hard-boiled exhilaration. It is the work of a man looking at a new frontier—not the hopeful frontier seen through the eyes of an ambitious youth, but the unmapped frontier that lies beyond loss and disillusion.

Time Out of Mind
is an end-of-the-century work from one of the few artists with the voice to give us one. And, like Dylan’s best post-1970s songs—including “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” “Man in the Long Black Coat,” “Under the Red Sky,” “Dark Eyes,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Death Is Not the End,” “Blind Willie McTell,” and “Dignity”—
Time
’s songs aren’t that much of a deviation from such earlier touchstones as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Shall Be Released.” That is, they are the testament of a man who isn’t aiming to change the world so much as he’s simply trying to find a way to abide all the heartbreaks and disenchantment that result from living in a morally centerless time. In the end, that stance may be no less courageous than the fiery iconoclasm that Dylan once proudly brandished.

IT IS TEMPTING, of course, to read some of Dylan’s recent music as a key to his current life and sensibility—but then that has long been the case. That’s because, in the aftermath of his motorcycle accident, Dylan became an intensely private man. He did not divulge much about the details of his life or the changing nature of his beliefs, and so when he made records like
Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait,
and
New Morning—
records that extolled the value of marriage and family as the redemptive meaning of life, and that countless critics cited as Dylan’s withdrawal from “significance”—many fans assumed that these works also signified the truths of Dylan’s own private life. Later, in the mid-1970s, when Dylan’s marriage began to come apart, and he made
Blood on the Tracks
and
Desire—
with those records’ accounts of romantic loss and disenchantment—his songs seemed to be confessions of his suffering, and the pain appeared to suit his artistic talents better than domestic bliss had. Well, maybe . . . but also maybe not. The truth is, there is still virtually nothing that is publicly known about the history of Bob Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lowndes—how it came together, how it survived for a time, or how and why it ultimately failed.

Since that period, there is even less that is known about Dylan, beyond a few simple facts: namely, that he has never remarried and has apparently never found a love to take the place of his wife, except, perhaps, his love for God (though there were rumors in early 1998 that Dylan may have secretly remarried—maybe even more than once), and he reportedly maintains an attentive and close relationship with his children. Past that, Dylan’s personal life pretty much remains hidden; in fact, it is one of the best-guarded private lives that any famous celebrity has ever managed to achieve. Dylan’s friends do not disclose much about his secrets—except, that is, when they leak his unreleased recordings—and Dylan himself likes discussing these matters even less than he likes discussing the meanings of his songs.

Which only causes one to wonder: Are Dylan’s songs truly the key to Dylan? Does his life still pour into his work? And is he a happy man—or have his history and vision instead robbed him of the chance for peace and happiness forever, as some critics surmised with
Time Out of Mind?

There are, of course, no definitive answers to questions like these, and maybe they aren’t even the right questions to be asking. Then again, with Dylan it isn’t always easy to know just what
are
the right questions to ask. During those recording sessions for
Knocked Out Loaded,
back in 1986, I once or twice tried broaching some of these topics with him. One night, at about 2 A.M., Dylan was leaning in a hallway in an L.A. recording studio, talking about 1965, when he toured England and made the film
Don’t Look Back.
Though it was a peak period in his popularity and creativity, it was also a time of intense pressure and unhappiness—a time not long prior to his bizarre, early-morning limousine ride with John Lennon. “That was before I got married and had kids of my own,” he told me. “Having children: That’s the great equalizer, you know? Because you don’t care so much about yourself anymore. I know that’s been true in my case. I’m not sure I’d always been that good to people before that time, or that good to myself.”

I asked him: Did he think he was a happier man these days than twenty years before?

“Oh man, I’ve never even thought about that,” Dylan said, laughing. “Happiness is
not
on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I’m happy, I’m happy—and if I’m not, I don’t know the difference.”

He fell silent for a few moments, and stared at his hands. “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words,
happiness
and
unhappiness.
It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, “Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’ Now,
that
must be a happy man. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be—that’s much more important than just being happy.

“Anyway, happiness is just a balloon—it’s just temporary stuff. Anybody can be happy, and if you’re not happy, they got a lot of drugs that can
make
you happy. But trust me: Life is
not
a bowl of cherries.”

I asked him if, in that case, he felt he was a blessed man.

“Oh yeah,” he said, nodding his head and smiling broadly. “Yeah, I do. But not because I’m a big rock & roll star.” And then he laughed, and excused himself to go back to his recording session.

That was about as far as we got with that line of questioning.

A couple of nights later, I saw Dylan during another post-midnight visit. “I’m thinking about calling this album
Knocked Out Loaded,
Dylan said. He repeated the phrase once, then laughed. “Is that any good, you think,
Knocked Out Loaded
?”

Dylan was in that album’s final stages, and he wanted to play me the tape of a song called “Brownsville Girl,” that he had co-written with playwright Sam Shepard and had just finished recording. It was a long, storylike song, and it opened with the singer intoning a half-talked, half-sung remembrance about the time he saw the film
The Gunfighter,
starring Gregory Peck: the tale of a fast-gun outlaw trying to forsake his glorious, on-the-run life when another fast-gun kid comes along and shoots him in the back. The man singing the song sits in a dark theater, watching the gunslinger’s death over and over. As he watches it, he is thinking about how the dying cowboy briefly found a better meaning of life to aspire to—a life of family and love and peace—but in the end, couldn’t escape his past. And then the singer begins thinking about all the love he has held in his own life, and all the hope he has lost, all the ideals and lovers he gave up for his own life on the run—and by the time the song is over, the singer can’t tell if he
is
the man he is watching in the movie, or if he is simply stuck in his own memory. It was hard to tell where Dylan ends and Shepard begins in the lyrics, but when “Brownsville Girl” came crashing to its end, it was quite easy to hear whom the song really belongs to. I’ve only known of one man who could put across a performance that gripping and unexpected, and he was sitting there right in front of me, concentrating hard on the tale, as if he too were hearing the song’s wondrous involutions for the first time—as if it were the first time Bob Dylan was hearing about the life he has led and can never leave behind.

I didn’t really know what to say, so I said nothing. Dylan lit a cigarette and took a seat on a nearby sofa and started talking. “You know, sometimes I think about people like T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters—these people who played into their sixties. If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing I’m doing now. This is all I want to do—it’s all I
can
do. . . . I think I’ve always aimed my songs at people who I imagined, maybe falsely so, had the same experiences that I’ve had, who have kind of been through what I’d been through. But I guess a lot of people just haven’t.”

He watched his cigarette burn for a moment, and then offered a smile. “See,” he said, “I’ve always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I’ve been about anything, it’s probably that, and to let some people know that it’s possible to do the impossible.

“And that’s really all. If I’ve ever had anything to tell anybody, it’s that: You can do the impossible.
Any
thing is possible. And that’s it. No more.”