Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (54 page)

In the early autumn of the year he travelled to England to participate in a catastrophe of a movie entitled
Hearts of Fire
, a drama intended by its director, Richard Marquand, as a ‘study’ of stardom. Instead, it resembled a parody of every lame rock and roll movie cliché ever to stain celluloid, one in which Dylan played a parody of himself as the reclusive veteran superstar ‘Billy Parker’. It soon became clear that his acting had not improved much with the years, but the malformed script was no aid to performance. In America, the feature went, as industry shorthand had it, ‘straight to video’, sparing discerning customers the waste of a night out. Of more immediate importance was the fact that Dylan had agreed to come up with at least four and possibly six new and original songs for the film’s soundtrack. In the event, he managed, barely managed, just two. The best way to describe ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’ and ‘Night After Night’ is to say that they could cause you seriously to doubt that Bob Dylan actually wrote them. The second of the pair begins: ‘Night after night you wander the streets of my mind.’

Towards the end of the
Hearts of Fire
shoot the artist traded dialogue with a BBC crew for a piece the documentary makers would entitle
Getting to Dylan
.
¹²
It was a clever title. He had acted out the role of the unapproachable star and made it devilishly hard for his interrogators to get anywhere near him for weeks, finally dragging them all the way to Toronto, where parts of his movie were being shot. They retaliated slyly with the suggestion that some of the things getting to the artist were not necessarily doing him a world of good. At times Dylan seemed to have a bad cold, for example, a condition that came and went unpredictably. At other moments the idea that anyone could get through to him on any real human level, person to person, straight question and straight answer, was mocked by his affectless demeanour while he sat fidgeting in his movie-star trailer. Just as in the mid-’60s, Dylan’s entire effort went into remaining resolutely unforthcoming, but on this occasion his idea of postmodern mockery was to sketch his interviewer, fail to take enquiries about his work seriously, and affect no interest in anything, in general or in particular. The impression given was that it was no affectation.

The first of two encounters for the documentary team had barely begun before Dylan was laying down his perverse rules. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know, I’m not gonna say anything that you’re gonna get any revelations about … It’s not gonna happen.’ His songwriting? ‘I just write ’em.’ Politics? Yet again, Dylan claimed to be baffled by the very meaning of the word. His public? ‘Nobody knows me and I don’t know them.’ By the end, he was resorting to old press-conference tricks from a previous life. ‘Well, gimme an answer,’ he demanded at one point, ‘and I’ll say it.’

Once upon a time, that kind of thing had seemed like a street-smart tease in the face of fatuous enquiries. This time around Dylan looked and sounded as though he truly had no answers, as though jadedness had become pathological. Worse, he behaved as if he was perfectly, coldly content with his condition. At no point did he attempt to explain why this poor, put-upon star, this legend (and so forth) reduced to playing in a second-rate melodrama because his albums no longer sold, was bothering to talk to anyone at all. The fires had been doused.

In February 1987, Dylan turned up in Los Angeles at a Taj Mahal concert, then at a Warren Zevon session where there was a need for a harmonica player. In March, he sang a George Gershwin song, ‘Soon’, at a Brooklyn Academy of Music affair to mark the half-century that had passed since the composer’s death. Dylan was by then four years older than Gershwin had been at his passing. The paradigmatic Jewish musical genius had composed
Rhapsody in Blue
when he was only 26,
An American in Paris
before he was 30 and
Porgy and Bess
when he was just 37. Dylan was not the only dazzling meteor ever sighted in the American firmament. In his short life, Gershwin had not wasted a day and had never succumbed to self-indulgence, to self-pity, or to lethargy. Dylan’s creative inertness had become his public image.

The only important mystery attached to the recording sessions for the work Dylan would call
Down in the Groove
is why he bothered. It was an album made to fail, predestined, if that’s the word, to have not a prayer. The artist could only have justified this exercise if his intention had been to inform the world that his talent was extinguished. At least 30 musicians were called to the scene of the crime, but not one among them could crack the case. The likes of Mark Knopfler and Sly and Robbie, who knew something about the artist and his methods, could not provide him with a clue. Superstar peers such as Eric Clapton and Jerry Garcia could not revive the corpse. Paul Simonon and Steven Jones, those jobbing punk survivors of The Clash and the Pistols, could shed no light on the mystery. Unlike
Knocked Out Loaded
, the nadir before the nadir, there would not even be that one song to treasure, that single sliver of hope, in the wreckage named
Down in the Groove
.

Even Columbia paused over this one. In fact, the company paused for an entire year. Efforts to record the album began in March and ended in June, but the 32 minutes retrieved from the debacle would not see the light until the end of May 1988. Dylan would juggle with what he had during that long hiatus, altering the running order, inserting a couple of previously discarded failures of his own as though throwing damp twigs onto dying embers. It made no important difference. The album would reach number 61 on the American album chart and only get so high because, miraculously, there were still handfuls of customers refusing to believe that Dylan was incapable, finally, of repaying their faith.

It is almost redundant to discuss
Down in the Groove
, like recycling waste paper for a thesis on waste paper. Of ten tracks, only two were the artist’s own work. One was ‘Death Is Not the End’, the song that buyers of
Infidels
had been spared for the sound reason that the writer had insulted the memory of his talent before getting around to insulting the audience. It begins:

The other original piece offered by the world’s greatest songwriter was ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, one of the works he had struggled to contrive for
Hearts of Fire
. It no more needs to be quoted here than it needed to be recorded. Remarkably, however, neither song is quite as bad as the pair Dylan devised with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead when he was trying to mend the mesh in his shredded net. The artist would come to have a bizarre attachment to the piece called ‘Silvio’, even sanctioning its release as a single in 1988. It seems he liked it. An alternative view is that the track is objectively hateful and infallibly, almost supernaturally irritating. It is redeemed somewhat only by the fact that its companion piece is worse. Officially, Dylan was to blame for just the music, but he was entirely responsible for performing a song called ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’ and putting it on an album. The full measure of what
Down in the Groove
signified is that he could come up with nothing, nothing at all, better than this piece of stupefying nonsense.

The album’s cover versions are blameless by comparison. The fact that Dylan discarded a couple of those while tinkering with the sequencing has even allowed a few of his blindly loyal fans to misapply the weasel’s favourite word to the entire farrago.
Down in the Groove
is, apparently, ‘underrated’, a misunderstood and overlooked ‘classic’. One answer to that claim would be this: underrated only by anyone who has heard several hundred other Bob Dylan recordings. The album’s single saving grace is a good performance of the traditional ‘Shenandoah’. There was a clue in that fact, had Dylan been paying attention.

*

His legal contest with the hovering ghost of Albert Grossman, that other reminder of past glories, was dragging towards its end while the flotsam of
Down in the Groove
was being lashed together. The Bear himself had died of a heart attack on a Concorde flight to London in January 1986, but his widow, Sally, had elected to carry on the fight on behalf of the Grossman estate. In May 1987, Dylan sanctioned an out-of-court settlement that cost him a couple of million dollars but got him what he truly wanted, the publishing rights to his own work. In essence, the deal was a recognition of the familiar distinction between justice and law. Albert’s moral right to own any part of those songs had been as questionable as the percentages he had extracted at every turn from his young client’s earnings. On the other hand, as the settlement in effect recognised, the contracts had been sound enough in law. Grossman had been ruthless, but not stupid. Dylan, trapped all those years later in an era when he was barely able to string a verse together, had won full ownership of the art he had made when songs had flowed from him like prophecies from an entranced oracle. That must have made for a strange moment in the spring of 1987.

His next move was stranger still. Fans of the Grateful Dead were, as they remain, almost as fixedly dedicated as fans of Bob Dylan. Among devotees, for whom the name Deadheads has long seemed apt both as a description and a definition, the band possessed a significance – arrived at through a lot of drugs, a lot more hippie twaddle and a seemingly infinite tolerance for the zero-sum pastime called jamming – beyond any music they happened to play. On a good day, that was pedestrian, sometimes achieving the heights of tiresome. On a bad day, what with the drugs, the Dead were inept, relentlessly so. They talked a good song, however, and there is no denying their inexplicable popularity. Some of those stoned Deadheads spent their lives travelling from show to show.

Like everyone else for whom credibility mattered, the band were big Bob Dylan fans. The artist meanwhile counted the band’s guitar player, Jerry Garcia, as a friend. He also had a respect, for reasons best known to himself, for the lyrics of Robert Hunter. None of these facts counted as a sound enough basis for a collaboration. Nor was the money, even the very large amount of money, that Dylan accepted for agreeing to six shows with the Dead collective in the biggest stadiums available in July much of an excuse. We can only presume that he wanted cash quickly to pay off the widow Grossman. That kind of motive is not often worth confusing with artistic inspiration.

There are, as usual, bootleg recordings of the tour rehearsals staged at a place called Club Front in San Rafael, California, in June. Copies of these are often extensive, not to say endless – in such matters, the word ‘complete’ on packaging counts as fair warning – but they have the merit of showing Dylan being nudged into attempting songs he had long ignored. Left to his own devices, he would probably not have considered
John Wesley Harding
songs such as ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ or ‘The Wicked Messenger’. Equally, for whatever reason, he had never paid attention to the likes of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ or ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’. At San Rafael he was even talked into essaying ‘Joey’, the disputable
Desire
song he had written with Jacques Levy. That was the good news, all of the good news. From the desultory bootleg recordings can be heard the approaching sounds of a disaster in the making.

In this period the artist had at least one vice in common with his new colleagues. They had always been relaxed in their attitude towards what was good enough for the public, apparently believing that if they were entranced by their ramshackle efforts the customers would feel the same way. A faith that, some of the time at least, things would somehow ‘come together’ on stage was part of the price audiences were expected to pay. By 1987, Dylan had acquired the same view. Add the fact that the Grateful Dead loved his songs but seemed utterly incapable of understanding how the artist achieved a performance, in his better moments, and the script for a real farce was written. Deadheads were numerous; big crowds could be guaranteed. But the alliance was so inherently foolish, its basis so fragile, a humiliation for Dylan was certain.

So it proved. On the inevitable concert bootlegs the following can be heard: one famous songwriter struggling to find the melodic line, never mind the heart, of song after song; one cult band operating below even their modest best; and two acts occupying the same stage who each seem, often enough, to be unaware of the presence of the other. A decent live album might yet have been salvaged. Six big shows would surely have yielded seven tracks fit to be released. In one set of post hoc excuses that claim would be made and Dylan would get the blame for dumping some of the least-bad recordings. The truth is that nothing in the material discarded would have improved the album entitled
Dylan & the Dead
when it was released finally in February 1989. The critical consensus then would be uncomplicated: if this was the best, God help the rest. Should you ever wish, with malign intent, to deter a prospective young fan from taking an interest in Bob Dylan, play him or her a couple of the San Rafael bootleg tracks, then this dead-and-barely-alive set.

*

Years later, Dylan would say that 1987 was almost the end of him as a performer. He might have been trying to fool the public, but he was not fooling himself. In 2001, John Farley of
Time
magazine would be told: ‘At that point, I was just going to get out of it and everything that entails.’ Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio would hear in 2004 of how ‘I really didn’t feel like my heart was in it much any more.’
¹³
Perhaps so, but Dylan still crossed the Atlantic to spend September and half of October on tour once again with Tom Petty and his band. During an interview with
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder in Jerusalem on the eve of the second concert the artist was observed to be drinking with relentless, practised ease. On stage that night he looked haggard and uncertain in his movements. The concerts were not well received in Israel, though they would improve as the artist dragged himself across Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, back to Italy and Switzerland, then to France and Belgium, and finally to England. But even the improvements would not be to every taste.