Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (47 page)

You can turn anything into a religious context. Religion is a dirty word. It doesn’t mean anything. Coca-Cola is a religion. Oil and steel are a religion. In the name of religion, people have been raped, killed and defiled. Today’s religion is tomorrow’s bondage.
¹⁸

Faith was not denied, never that, but it was given the kind of spin to which faithless, secular types could assent without turning a hair. Dylan would perform the same trick with nuance when asked about the search, if any, for his Jewish identity. ‘My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt,’ he would say. ‘They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses …’

Am I looking for them? Well, I don’t know. I ain’t looking for them in synagogues with six-pointed Egyptian stars shining down from every window, I can tell you that much.

Three months or so later, just before
Infidels
was due to be released, Dylan would take another crack at explaining where he stood on the issue of religious belief. He would also try to tell the
Los Angeles Times
why his musical ‘gospel’ moment had passed. He would not ‘disavow any of that’, but he would scarcely testify lustily for the Lord, either. Noticeably, his unfortunate if entirely unconscious habit of placing himself on the cross-but-one next to Christ would endure.

I don’t particularly regret telling people how to get their souls saved. I don’t particularly regret any of that. Whoever was supposed to pick it up, picked it up. But maybe the time for me to say that has just come and gone. Now it’s time for me to do something else … It’s like sometimes these things appear very quickly and disappear. Jesus himself only preached for three years.
¹⁹

If he did win a contract worth $4 million an album, Dylan spent some of the money wisely. In addition to Knopfler and his colleagues he invited Mick Taylor, the best guitarist the Rolling Stones ever had, to join him at the Power Station. The two had been friends for a while, probably having met at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in January 1982 when Taylor was performing in a Bluesbreakers reunion tour with John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie. The blues guitar player was a good choice to support and complement Knopfler. Dylan’s next smart move was to call up Lowell ‘Sly’ Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, drums and bass respectively, a pair already long established as the rhythmic heart of modern reggae. All in all, it was a crew few recording artists could match, or afford to match.

At least 16 new Bob Dylan songs were recorded during the
Infidels
sessions amid the usual plethora of cover versions, traditional numbers, jams and phantom titles. Eight tracks would survive to give a vinyl album the near-standard duration of almost forty-two minutes. Of the eight original songs discarded, two would be retrieved for later albums, in one case because the artist was by then desperate enough to risk the woeful number entitled ‘Death Is Not the End’. (Listen to it once or twice and you begin to pray for an end that is certain and swift.) The second tune reserved for recycling, ‘Clean-Cut Kid’, was a kind of mid-period sub-Dylan protest song to do with the malign effects of a wicked society on the innocent mentioned in the title – ‘they made a killer out of him’ – that did not detain the artist for long in 1983 and would never amount to much. Of the remaining half-dozen works, one piece was entitled ‘Julius and Ethel’, a song recalling the notorious Rosenberg case and the Brooklyn couple’s execution in 1953 for espionage. These days there is little doubt that Julius attempted to pass America’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union; his wife’s guilt is less certain. In the 1980s, nevertheless, arguments over the case were still dividing opinion between left and right. Dylan took the accurate if uncomplicated view that the 1950s had been a weird and paranoid time in which America became a strange, bewildered and fearful place, but his song was no ‘Hurricane’, nor even a ‘George Jackson’. The author has never sanctioned its release in any form and its existence is not acknowledged by
bobdylan.com
. That might simply be because it is not a good song. ‘Juvenile’ would be one description.

That left five tracks. Versions of each would turn up on
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
in 1991, but that release would not solve the puzzle of what Dylan had done to
Infidels
. Two songs, ‘Lord Protect My Child’ and ‘Tell Me’, probably deserved to wind up on a ‘rare and unreleased’ compilation; two more, ‘Foot of Pride’ and ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’, should be listed on the charge sheet among the bigger crimes of omission the artist has committed. Even these lapses are dwarfed by the failure to allow the release in 1983 of the song called ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Its absence from
Infidels
has set Dylan against everyone who has ever heard the work and bothered to pass comment. At the time, Mark Knopfler, fighting hard for the song, was aghast. His opinion still wins the listener’s vote. Fans and those who write about Dylan meanwhile debate whether ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was just the best thing he did in the 1980s or among the best things he has ever done. In that context, discussions of whether the version captured on
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
is slightly superior or mildly inferior to a widely circulated, frighteningly powerful ‘electric’ rendition feel like casuistry.

Perhaps the real judgement on the artist is this: anyone who wants to hear how
Infidels
could (or should) have turned out has no choice but to reassemble the album from a range of sources, as though from spare parts. In this day and age, that’s no big deal. It was not especially difficult in the 1980s to hunt down outtakes and alternate takes: the better-known ‘acoustic’ version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was doing the rounds within a year of
Infidels
being released. The point is that Dylan is supposed to be known as a maker of albums as well as of songs, of artefacts with an artistic coherence and a considered design. The making of albums might be redundant in a pick-and-mix digital era, but it has been Dylan’s line of work for half a century. If
Infidels
had been a painting he would have stood accused of putting a boot through the canvas.
²⁰

As it was, he shredded his entire artistic scheme for the sake of one track, ‘Union Sundown’, mourning the fact that the land of the free market was losing out in capitalism’s race to the bottom. The song was an alert anticipation of globalisation and its discontents, but it was no ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Few of Dylan’s works save, perhaps, ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ are as instantly haunting as this.

It sounds at first like an evocation of the Passover story in the Book of Exodus. Egypt is the land condemned to suffer ten plagues; the Israelite slaves are meanwhile instructed to mark out their homes with a lamb’s blood so that God will spare them. As Exodus 12:7 has it: ‘And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses …’ It could also be that Dylan has in mind the ‘hobo signs’ that were common during the Depression. These were the crude, coded marks left by rambling men in chalk or coal on fences, walls and doors to guide their comrades. A circle with an arrow through it meant ‘Don’t go this way’. Two parallel arrows across the circle said ‘Get out fast’.

A third possibility is that with the phrase ‘this land is condemned’ Dylan is making poetic use of a common piece of legalese. By the right of eminent domain – in Britain, by the right of compulsory purchase – authorities acquire private land for public use, but only after it has first been ‘condemned’. In the nineteenth century, the ruthless hustlers who built America’s railroads got their hands on this useful power and abused it mightily. In Dylan’s context it has more to do with what became of African Americans and their farms in the Southern states after the Civil War as vengeful whites, deprived of their plantations and their slave economy, set about subjugating and robbing blacks once more. The land earned by the sweat of newly freed slaves who had dreamed of their ‘40 acres and a mule’ was stolen wholesale. If legalised theft didn’t do the trick, though often enough it was sufficient, the Klan and the lynch mob were at hand.
²¹

Dylan being Dylan, it is better than possible that all three ideas are concentrated in a few words. Thus: a land condemned by God because of slavery; a land where it is dangerous to stray; a land stolen from its people. At the heart of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a meditation on what became of America thanks to the war between the states and the causes of that war. So the writer lifts us aloft in a few bare lines to look down on a landscape somewhere, at some shifting point in time, in the American South.

There are places called Jerusalem, most of them vanishingly small, dotted throughout the region – in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee – and beyond. Nat Turner, leader of a slave revolt in 1831, was executed at one such town (since renamed Courtland) in Virginia’s Southampton County. Equally, the biblical allusion could be straightforward, intended to encompass the entire Judaeo-Christian world. It’s more likely that everything lying between a city of sin and the city of God has been condemned. Then, as though a movie camera has soared and dipped, we are in the dark lands of East Texas, ‘where many martyrs fell’. A song making a connection between the treatment of black Americans and enslaved Israelites, as many spirituals did, has plenty of history on its side. In this verse, Dylan might also have had in mind ‘Fallen’, a well-known (if very bad) nineteenth-century poem by the once-popular lecturer and hymnist John Lawson Stoddard. The horrors inflicted by lynch mobs are central to its theme. (Stoddard was also an early advocate of the Jewish right of return to Israel, interestingly enough.) In part, ‘Fallen’ runs:

Where racism was concerned, the history of East Texas from the post-Civil War Reconstruction to the middle of the twentieth century was as vile as any among the Southern states. As one scholar explains, ‘At the dawn of the twentieth century, East Texas was notorious for lynching and was considered one of the worst regions in the state, leading the state in 1908 with 24 deaths.’ In 1910, when Blind Willie McTell was a child, ‘more than 100 blacks had been lynched in the Lone Star State’.
²²
Most died in East Texas, it is explained, in an area which then stood third among those regions of the United States in which lynchings were commonplace. After Mississippi and Georgia, where McTell was born, Texas as a whole was the state that gave itself over most eagerly to lynch law, accounting for 468 victims between 1885 and 1942.
²³

This, dense with history, thick with connections, is just the first verse. Dylan has here embarked on the kind of historical writing that would become a distinguishing glory of his later career, his era of consuming
interest falling – very broadly speaking – in the years from the Civil War to the undated orphan birth of the blues. When he cast the song aside he would lose the thread he had discovered in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ for the best part of a decade. He would pick up this narrative again only when he remembered the art of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, as the fascinating sleeve notes to 1993’s
World Gone Wrong
would explain.

It is almost as if ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was removed from
Infidels
because Dylan himself wasn’t ready for the challenges implicit in the song. Here he sets the agonies of black Americans squarely at the centre of the country’s history. Inevitably, he is laying out all the reasons for the civil-rights movement and, therefore, for his own earliest work. In this song, the inescapable fact of slavery defines both the nation and the singular cultural gift, the music that grew from the blues, it gave to the world. This, Dylan is saying, is what we come from: look and listen. The long bondage of black America, rendered here in terms both physical and spiritual, was the abiding horror that gave birth to the music that altered the country. African Americans were the enslaved children of God. So what were whites?

It is a moment of high sophistication in Dylan’s career. It makes the arguments of a song like ‘Neighborhood Bully’ seem crude and fatuous. At no point in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is the listener’s sympathy or tears demanded. Dylan doesn’t bother to
tell you
that a historic crime without precedent or parallel was committed in the land of the free. He is insisting instead on its centrality, its near-biblical significance, and its expression in the music that has penetrated every fibre of American culture.

His first four verses resemble panels in an altarpiece, both sombre and glowing. In the second verse the scene is an encampment. Whether this is a stopping place for runaway slaves, a revival meeting, or one of the travelling tent shows that criss-crossed the south for 70 years is left unclear. It could be any and all of the three. History says, nevertheless, that the minstrel and variety companies run by the likes of F.S. Wolcott and Moses Stokes gave Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith and many others their starts. At one point, Dylan sings that ‘Them charcoal gypsy maidens / Can strut their feathers well’. Bessie Smith’s very first job as a teenager with the Stokes travelling troupe, just before the First World War, was as a dancer on the chorus line.