Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (61 page)

Dylan would go back to the well within ten months.
World Gone Wrong
would draw deep, once again, on the songs that had called him to the fountainhead of American music from the moment he first heard Lead Belly in 1959 and exclaimed to a friend, ‘This is the thing, this is the thing!’
²¹
Perhaps because it leaned more on the country blues and on songs necessarily less ancient than before,
World Gone Wrong
would seem more immediately accessible than its predecessor, both murkier and wittier, more obviously like the Bob Dylan with whom album-buyers – those who remained loyal, at any rate – were familiar. Yet the second set would do less well than the first, perhaps because the novelty of hearing the artist with just his guitar and harmonica had worn off, perhaps because too many reviewers found too much to say about ‘production’. Neither collection would sell in significant quantities. In sales terms, these brave and unflinching albums would languish with
Down in the Groove
.

Dylan placated a lot of critics, however, chiefly by giving them a lot of high-flown things to say – as above – about folk tradition and such. On
World Gone Wrong
he offered up a Blind Willie McTell song, ‘Broke Down Engine’, as though to make an explicit connection with his own ‘Blind Willie McTell’, newly liberated with
The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1–3
. The artist’s decision to make these albums of ‘traditional’ material would cause a good deal of semi-scholarly comment. Any number of issues, some of them fascinating, would be raised for those with a discursive turn of mind. That was the real risk in the exercise: Dylan would yet again be discussed for what he seemed to signify, rather than listened to for what the songs said. No one ever managed to say quite enough about his version of ‘Delia’, another turn-of-the-century tale of death and loss in which the past haunts the present. Its refrain – ‘All the friends I ever had are gone’ – is like a living and continuing memory, one of those links with universal meaning that can’t be severed.

Conventionally,
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
are taken to mark Dylan’s reawakening from an artistic coma. Convention has the right idea, but it overlooks the fact that the best part of four long years would pass before any of the lessons learned from the making of a pair of albums were applied. Those much-admired
World Gone Wrong
notes, those defiant boasts of ‘revival, getting a new lease on life’, of not seeking ‘immortality thru public acclaim’, of going against ‘cultural policy’, of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, made nothing happen. Instead, close to four years would be filled with a
Greatest Hits Volume 3
that would contain only one modest hit, with an
MTV Unplugged
that would fail to assert itself as the live album it should have been, and with still another
Best of
. The Dylan who found his roots in his garage studio would not begin to flourish, not for a very long time, thanks only to
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
.

They did not inspire him to write. Musically, perhaps personally, they enforced a conservative view of art and existence. In that sense, at least, Dylan did not decide ‘to go forward’. Henceforth, as though to confuse semanticists, everything that mattered to him would lie in the past. Even when he found a way to write again, all of Dylan’s reality would be historical reality. In one sense, he would surrender to a truth that had been obvious since the end of the ’60s. As much as anyone, as much as Blind Willie McTell or a Border ballad, ‘Bob Dylan’, too, was becoming a part of tradition.

The artist might have owned the copyright, but in reality ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ were already in the public domain. The fact marked an end, finally, to the promise of modernity, perhaps even of Modernism, as the ’60s had understood that promise. The idea, albeit the fictive idea, that pop music must always be new was finished. Instead, with
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
, Dylan played his part in formulating the ground rules for what was becoming known as Americana, nostalgia’s niche market. He could and did scorn the term, but the implications would be hard to ignore. Embrace ancestral ‘roots’ and, one way or another, you neglect progeny. While belief in the possibility of progressive politics was withering in America amid Clinton’s sunny opportunism, music was turning its back on the future. Pop’s key word had once been ‘tomorrow’, but that was yesterday. In recording
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
, Dylan was leading the way, but this time he was leading the retreat towards the reliable past.

He had not solved the old Greenwich Village conundrum, the one posed by all the old and implacable guardians of purity. Tradition was essential; tradition was life; but dogged traditionalism could crush the life from art. One way or another, in any case, none of it made a practical difference to Dylan’s own career in 1992 and 1993. Whatever else has been said about his reimmersion in the wellsprings of his music, the fact remains that close to four years would pass before he managed to record a single new song in his own name.

Something else had been made obvious by
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
. It had already been noticeable in some of the cold, rumbling echoes of
Oh Mercy
. His voice was going, if it had not already gone. The range and fluidity of that once-extraordinary instrument was reduced drastically on
Good As I Been to You
and on its successor album. By 1993, Caruso’s ghost had nothing more to fear when it came to hitting notes or holding them. The endless touring, the ritual nightly fight to perform his kinds of song, had done truly fearful damage to Dylan’s most distinctive instrument. Sometimes the noises coming from his throat resembled the echoes of a scouring storm in a dry canyon, sometimes the sound of ice cracking, sometimes of weary, rusted girders parting. Sometimes, against the odds, it all still worked wonderfully well; sometimes nothing worked. He tried to pick songs and arrangements of songs that did not exceed his diminishing capacities, but tour by tour he was losing ground. Smoking and hard liquor had done him no good, of course, but the effects of so many shows were proving to be brutal. There would be speculation in due course about emphysema and any other substance-related, attenuating condition you could name. To some ears the vocal changes were so sudden there had to be a complicated explanation, whether exotic or sinister. The likeliest truth remains that an untrained singer with an uncompromising style had failed to take elementary precautions and pushed his equipment beyond its limits. As the years passed, guesses would neither matter nor help. Dylan’s voice had always been part of his art. From the beginning, one part of the fundamental meaning of any Bob Dylan song had been in its delivery. By the early 1990s, some of that art was already forfeit.

Just before
Good As I Been to You
appeared, Columbia came up with another obituary. The 30th Anniversary Celebration, staged on 16 October 1992 at Madison Square Garden in New York, was a little casual as to dates – the first album had appeared in March 1962 – but lavish in its use of celebrity names. Some parts of a long evening were a lot of fun. Lou Reed’s knowing performance of ‘Foot of Pride’, that song dropped from
Infidels
, compensated for several of the witless acts of fealty committed on the Garden’s stage. It was oddly cheering, meanwhile, to see the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem return with ‘When the Ship Comes In’. George Harrison’s choice of ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ at least showed some imagination. For all that, this was a record-company ‘tribute’ with top-dollar ticket prices and a pay-per-view TV audience. It served only to invite a question: was Dylan so far gone as to require obsequious last rites? He had the wit, while performing only a brief, three-song set, to look wholly uninterested in the entire affair.

*

His own concerts continued, show after show, year after year. There are useful databases listing every last one. Collate the lists with each season’s bootleg efforts and you can access a record of the deterioration in Dylan’s once-exquisite voice, if that’s your taste. There are good things recorded amid the debris, but there is a lot of debris. There is also a clear sense that by 1993 and 1994 Dylan was simply going through the motions once again. The shock and awe provided by Interstate 88 were long gone.

Surveying all of this you can also note, with a certain wonderment, that by the autumn of 1993 the artist could be found touring with Santana, a band so dull they seemed to make an entire art form out of the many possibilities of tedium. In reality, Dylan needed that tasteful entertainment-industry noise because he could no longer hope to draw big crowds on his own behalf. He would repeat the trick as the decade wore on, touring South America with the Rolling Stones, or offering counter-culture vaudeville to the heartland with Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. Most tellingly, Dylan would end the decade trailing around arenas with Paul Simon, an artist towards whom he had long exhibited a certain ambivalence, let’s say.

This spectacle would take place, it should be remembered, even after the artist had won back the cold, tiny hearts of the reviewing fraternity with a lauded album of his very own songs. Whatever the financial imperatives – could any still remain, could he
still
need the money? – touring would become an end-without-end in itself. While indecent quantities of semi-creative writing would be expended on the meaning and significance of the never-ceasing concert phenomenon, the damage to Dylan’s vocal folds would be profound.

In November 1993, he took what might have been his last chance to record a late-period concert album that could have stood the test of time. The idea, it seems, was for a TV special that would capture Dylan in the kind of ‘intimate’ setting he said he liked best. To that end, he booked an upmarket, velvet-draped, ‘retro’ Manhattan venue called The Supper Club, hired a TV crew and digital recording gear – all of this was coming from his own pocket – rehearsed hard and played four shows over two nights. It was, no doubt, his last remaining alternative to an album of original songs, given that
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
had not exactly raced up the lower slopes of the charts, but bootlegs say the artist was vindicated. Some of his performances at The Supper Club were far better than anything he had managed on stage in 1993; some were the best things he had done since his voice began to disappear.

The fact that only bootlegs of the full shows can be had – the newer, ‘soundboard’ versions are excellent – tells the rest of the story. In January 1994, having seen the last of a large amount of his cash, Dylan scrapped the whole project. No explanation was given. A single track, a marvellous rendition of
Oh Mercy
’s ‘Ring Them Bells’, would appear, predictably, on 2008’s
Tell Tale Signs
. But as with the Bromberg sessions in Chicago, another chance to put a respectable face on Dylan’s career in the 1990s was let slip for reasons only he understood.

A year later, Dylan and his band were to be found participating in an MTV Unplugged exercise. The artist had wanted to perform a set consisting of only traditional songs, but the cable pop-loop channel, having no interest in anyone’s cultural roots, insisted on ‘hits’. Dylan obeyed and produced a fair enough set that sold surprisingly well, almost gracing the top 20 in America and touching number 10 in Britain. For all that, it was just another interlude in the perennial round of tours upon tours. By 1994, even diehards were finding those pretty dull. The younger crowd that Dylan had set out to convert with Interstate 88 were turning up, it seemed, out of simple curiosity. Hordes of them had been present in August for Woodstock ’94, the self-conscious, not to say money-conscious, attempt to reproduce the famous 1969 festival in New York State that multitudes of their parents had embraced and Dylan – that year’s Dylan – had despised. On this occasion, mercifully, young America witnessed the artist at something like his best, but such miracles were becoming rare. As a rule, the performances were no longer catastrophic. They were simply nothing out of the ordinary. Special pleading offered in elaborate justification for all the ceaseless tours had become implausible.

Dylan pressed on, as though convinced that stubborn determination would get him to where he wanted to be, wherever that was. At the end of 1993 he had been granted a new contract by Sony, the Japanese corporate behemoth by then in possession of the Columbia brand. This time Dylan had signed up for no fewer than ten albums. No one seems to have raised the delicate question.
Greatest Hits Volume 3
and
MTV Unplugged
were all very well – though the former would in fact do very badly – but how did the artist intend to fulfil the rest of the contract? There would be a glut of repackaged Dylan material on the market in the years ahead, but his willingness to make a blind bet on his vestigial writing skills counts as remarkable. Whether he truly needed the money, or simply wanted the money – there are two schools of cynical thought – he was living beyond his artistic means.

*

Some of those wedded to the idea of the never-ending tour – or N.E.T., as initiates persist in calling the phenomenon – do a fine line in theoretical constructs. Some elect to believe that the concerts have more to do with Dylan’s art than any piece of plastic, that his songs are not held in a single moment, or locked into any one recorded version. (The word ‘version’ is itself often called in evidence.) Some further contend, in a properly post-postmodern way, that what an artist might intend by a song or a performance is neither here nor there.

This last argument becomes authentically comical when Dylan rejects the idea of a never-ending tour and derides even the phrase, as he has done many times. The statement (of fact, as far as he is concerned) is simply ignored. There is an N.E.T., whether he likes it or not. Reality as Dylan understands it is a minor detail within the great art event. What he says he is doing on stage is but one part, not an especially important part, of the never-ending deconstruction. In that exercise, as the reliable joke goes, the only thing we know for sure about Bob Dylan is that his name isn’t Bob Dylan.