Night Beat (9 page)

In July 1966, shortly after the
Blonde on Blonde
sessions—and immediately following a tumultuous concert tour of the United Kingdom with his backing group the Hawks (later renamed the Band)—Dylan was riding his motorcycle one morning nearby his home in Woodstock, New York, when the back wheel locked and he was hurtled over his handlebar. He was taken to Middletown Hospital, with a concussion and broken vertebrae of the neck. An impending sixty-date concert tour of America was canceled and so were all future recording sessions. He retreated to his home in Woodstock, with his wife and children, and spent months holed up with his friends in the Band. According to some rumors, Dylan was not as seriously hurt as was widely believed, and had decided to use the time off to immerse himself in his new family life. According to others, Dylan also used the sabbatical to recover from the intense psychological turbulence and rumored drug-and-alcohol bents of his short-but-titanic season as the king of rock & roll.

During that layoff period—in that same season that became known as the Season of Love—Dylan sat around at his Woodstock home and in the basement of a nearby house rented by members of the Band, and in essence reevaluated not just his music, but his political and spiritual tempers as well. All together in that time, Dylan and the Band recorded something over one hundred tracks—many of them new songs (most improvised on the spot) and several others that were covers of old folk, country, and rock & roll songs. What resulted was a set of recordings that many fans and critics regard as Dylan’s most haunting and arcane body of work (author and critic Greil Marcus has written an entire terrific volume on the subject,
Invisible Republic,
published in 1997). Interestingly, Dylan himself would only rerecord two or three of those songs for release on his own later albums (though several tracks appeared on subsequent collections of his unreleased material, and many of the songs—most notably “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears of Rage,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and “Too Much of Nothing,” were soon covered by such artists as Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Byrds, and the Band). Finally, in 1975—eight years after those sessions—Dylan authorized an official release of some of those recordings,
The Basement Tapes
(though if you look hard enough, you can find a five-CD set called
The Original Basement Tapes
that pretty much documents the entire affair; it’s well worth the search and the expense).

As Marcus and others have noted, the basement recordings are full of strange parables, biblical references, half-finished tales of humor, flight, death, and abandonment. It is all roughhewn, primitively recorded—as if a ghost were taking it all down in its impalpable memory. And yet there is something about those songs that seems timeless, as if all the tumult going on in the world outside (a tumult that Dylan helped make possible with his earlier mind-challenging style of rock & roll) was simply far removed. At the same time, you
do
hear America—its joys, its losses, its fears, and betrayals—in those basement recordings as you hear it nowhere else in Dylan’s music, not even in his early, more explicitly political anthems. What remains interesting, though, is how distant Dylan has sometimes seemed from what he and the Band created during that long season.

There is a spooky, unforgettable bootleg video of a visit between Dylan and John Lennon, as they sit in the back of a limousine, winding their way through London in post-dawn hours. It was shot in 1966 (for the singer’s
still-
unreleased, astonishing film,
Eat the Document
), during Dylan’s wild and dangerous U.K. tour with the Hawks, and in the roughly twenty minutes that the episode lasts, you can see that Dylan was a man clearly close to some sort of breakdown. At first he and Lennon are funny and acerbic—not to mention competitive—in their exchanges, though it also seems apparent that Dylan has been up the entire night, maybe drinking; maybe taking drugs. Suddenly, he starts to come undone. He is sick of having a camera in front of him at every moment, and more than that, he is
literally
sick. He turns pale and begs the driver to get him back to the hotel as quickly as possible. Lennon, meantime, is cautious, trying to stay clever, though he looks clearly horrified at what he is witnessing. Had Dylan kept up that pace—that pace of indulgence, that pace of making music that challenged almost every aspect of the world, music that outraged his old fans and caused his new fans to want him to push even
harder—
he might well have been dead within a season or two. The psychic costs of that sort of artistry, of that force of invention, can be unimaginable. It was as if Dylan danced extremely close to the lip of an abyss.
We
wanted to know what he saw there—we wanted to know so that we could have that knowledge without running the ungodly risk of facing that abyss ourselves. Dylan probably got as close to that edge as one can and still remain alive, and finally he decided that the glimpse alone was not worth his obliteration. Dylan, it seems, saw too much too fast, and was afraid of ever getting that close again to chaos.

At least, that’s one way I have sometimes thought about what informed Dylan’s retreat into Woodstock and into the fraternity of the Band and their music-making. It was a way of finding what could be recovered after one had learned too much about the meanness of not just the world outside, but also about the dark, troubled depths of one’s own heart. Still, periods of retreat can sometimes be as painful to recall as whatever led to the retreat in the first place, and for whatever reason, Dylan has only occasionally incorporated the basement material into his active repertoire. Years after that time, Dylan would tell biographer Robert Shelton: “Woodstock was a daily excursion to nothingness.” The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, in a conversation with Greil Marcus for the purpose of Marcus’s
Invisible Republic,
seemed to confirm Dylan’s comment: “A lot of stuff, Bob would say, “We should
destroy
this.’ ” In that nothingness, though, Dylan made some of his best music, and—not for the last time—reinvented himself.

EIGHTEEN MONTHS after his 1966 accident—and at the peak of rock & roll’s psychedelic era—Dylan returned to the pop world with
John Wesley Harding:
an acoustic-guitar and country rhythm-section album, featuring a man who was now singing in a startlingly mellifluent voice. Along with the basement sessions,
John Wesley Harding
was music that set out to find what could be salvaged in the American spirit—what values of family and history might endure or help heal in a time of intense generational division and political rancor. It was as if Dylan were trying to work against the era’s context of rebellion and refusal, a context that he, as much as anybody, had helped make prevalent. (Indeed, almost every work Dylan made subsequently would run against the grain and temper of the predominant rock & roll sensibility.) Or perhaps he had simply lost his affection for a cultural momentum that, in his rush to fame and invention, had almost cost him his life and sanity.

But Dylan had changed rock & roll too much to undo or stop its drift, or to be released from the promises of his earlier visions.
John Wesley Harding
was simply further proof: The album’s stripped-down sound and bare-bones style set in motion a wide-ranging reevaluation—and reaffirmation—of rock & roll root values and had a tremendous impact on everyone from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the Byrds and Grateful Dead. In effect,
John Wesley Harding
flattened the visions and ambitions of psychedelia. After hearing
John Wesley Harding,
the Beatles made “Get Back,” the Stones revivified their blues sensibility with
Beggar’s Banquet,
the Grateful Dead made their countryish masterpieces,
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty,
and the Byrds (who had now acquired the remarkable Gram Parson) became an unabashed, fully-formed country-western band with
Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

This trend began to disturb some critics a year later when, in 1969, Dylan recorded his own full LP of lovely and pure country songs,
Nashville Skyline,
that included a raggedy duet with C & W star Johnny Cash. The immediate effect of this offbeat turn was to complicate the myth of Dylan’s personality, and the meanings of his music. It made him appear more enigmatic, mysterious, and abstruse, and raised questions not only about the validity of his musical departure, but about our political responses to it. Since country music was widely viewed as the music of a working-class sensibility, and since it represented a conservative audience that was seen as stalwart supporters of the war in Vietnam, did this mean that Dylan had now turned political sides? Or had he simply lost faith in political solutions altogether? (“Dylan’s calm sounded smug, tranquilized,” wrote historian Todd Gitlin in
The Sixties.
“To settle his quarrel with the world, he had filed away his passions.”) Could music this refined and seemingly apolitical have any real meaning for a young audience still under the shadow of the Vietnam War? After all, rock & roll was supposed to be
for
a young audience, and in the climate of the late 1960s, that audience was politically concerned—in fact, mortally threatened. How could a rock figure of Dylan’s caliber make music that failed to respond to those concerns? Like Elvis Presley before him, Bob Dylan changed the course of a nation, and then, it seems, attempted to remove himself from the ramifications of such an act.

Typically, Dylan was rarely helpful when it came to discussing such matters. In a 1968
Sing Out!
interview (perhaps the most intriguing Dylan has ever given), Dylan’s friend Happy Traum told the singer that Dylan’s latest songs weren’t as “socially or politically applicable as they were earlier.” Dylan replied: “Probably that is because no one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before, I saw it the way they saw it. . . . Anyway, how do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

Some detractors accused Dylan of misreading the times, of refusing to commit himself on demanding issues, and perhaps they were right. But all the critical scrutiny only managed to obscure the truth that much of Dylan’s post
-Blonde on Blonde
music was still wondrous.
John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid,
and
Planet Waves
comprise a lovely, daring body of work. And even such broadly reviled works as
Self Portrait
and
Street Legal
are graced with more affecting music than most critics still care to admit. (If you need proof, play
Self Portrait
’s “Copper Kettle” some late night, when you have both a dismal—at least melancholy—mood and a strong drink at hand.) If much of Dylan’s early 1970s work would no longer transform pop music or youth style, it was partly because the pop world didn’t much want a Dylan it couldn’t own or define—a Dylan unwilling to make obvious, assuring gestures—and perhaps Dylan didn’t much want that audience.

For a brief period in the mid-1970s, this all changed. In 1974, Dylan mounted his first tour in eight years (again, with the Band), resulting in the raucous
Before the Flood.
At its time, it proved the most successful rock tour to date. Then, Dylan recorded what many critics still view as his single finest work,
Blood on the Tracks.
All the singer-songwriter’s old wit and fire were back in fine form—but there was also a new, more aching depth, which many observers attributed to rumors that Dylan’s marriage with Sara Lowndes was beginning to pull apart. In 1976, another fine album,
Desire.
Then, another major tour: Dylan barnstorming across America with the Rolling Thunder Revue, putting on some of the most fanciful and tantalizing shows of the decade, singing and writing like a man newly possessed.

Perhaps, then, it should have come as no surprise that, after this extraordinary season of renewed popularity, Dylan would make his boldest bid at disengaging himself from pop concerns. This time out, he turned his perspective to making “born again” Christian moralist music that had little lasting favor among most rock critics and pop faddists. The cut-and-dried piety and matter-of-fact singing in Dylan’s Christian music caused many of us to wonder whether his early greatness had simply been a fluke, or something that had now evaporated. Indeed, some of that music
was
pretty trying—just about all of
Slow Train Coming—
but parts of
Saved
and
Shot of Love
were plain bracing, especially the former’s “Solid Rock,” which sounded like the Sex Pistols proclaiming the might and wrath of early Christianity’s world-shattering vision (which, come to think of it, really isn’t that much different than punk’s early world-shattering vision).

After the Christian venture (which, in some ways, I think never really ended for Dylan), it seemed to many fans that Dylan had now lost not just a certain vital sense of commitment, but also much of his relevance. Though Dylan would go on to make much resourceful music, he would never again produce work that would change or redefine America and its music or culture (“Like a Rolling Stone,” as much as in any work in pop’s history,
made
the times—in fact, the song didn’t attract an audience so much as simply ran it over with the impact of the inevitable). Dylan’s surpassing moment—among the brightest and most influential moments in modern American culture—had come and then, more quickly than any admirers ever expected, it had passed, and with much of his subsequent music he simply tried to outdistance the claims of his own past. Consequently, Bob Dylan found himself in a dilemma shared by no other rock figure of his era: He had been sidestepped by the pop world he helped transform. For the last thirty years or so, he has had to cope with that knowledge—and he has also had to cope with the knowledge that an increasingly capricious pop world has never really forgiven him for having lost the momentum of his frenzied, world-breaking vision.