Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (81 page)

All that was truly lost, never to be recovered, was the voice, once his chief instrument. In
Modern Times
, as in
Love and Theft
, Dylan employed several stylistic tricks – elisions, stresses, slurs, abrupt pauses – to distract attention from the fact that there were notes he would never hit again. Sometimes he achieved remarkable effects. Sometimes, in fact, there were things emerging from those corroded pipes – ‘Nettie Moore’ is one good example – of which the young Dylan, always desperate to sound older than his years, had never dreamed. Vocally, nevertheless, the artist was covering his losses as best he could. Somehow the fact made the success of
Modern Times
seem all the more remarkable. Dylan wasn’t raging against the dying of the light. He was treating the diminution of his powers as just another creative problem to be solved. Jonathan Lethem put it well when describing his meeting with the artist just before the album’s release.

What we do understand, if we’re listening, is that we’re three albums into a Dylan renaissance that’s sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with
Bringing It All Back Home
, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out …
²⁴

In staking his claim to the deep soil of American music, Dylan ceased to be a figure beyond the mainstream. At the start of the twenty-first century he was reordering the criteria by which both music and literature were understood, much as he had once ‘put an end’ to Tin Pan Alley. He would never be conscripted by the academies, but he was being accepted, even embraced, by the arbiters of what was important. Hence all the awards, hence all that ‘cultural nationalism’. There was no longer a qualm over describing him as the most significant artistic figure, or perhaps just the most significant American, of his age. Having been down and almost out, having been reduced – having reduced himself – to a performer barely one thin cut above a club act, he had confounded friends and enemies alike. No one, in any field, had come back in this manner before. He had defied age, time and, above all, every prowling, mocking ghost that had ever borne the name Bob Dylan.

*

Just before his 65th birthday, he had consented to become a disc jockey. The deal had been done with the XM Satellite Radio subscription service in December 2005, but the first broadcast from Studio B in the fabled Abernathy Building (which didn’t exist) was not heard until 3 May 2006.
Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan
would become one of the most quixotic and charming episodes – or rather, 100 episodes – in his career. Who couldn’t love a DJ who followed Jimi Hendrix and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ with Judy Garland? Who, save those who ran radio by computer program and the hokum of market research, could not warm to someone who fashioned his broadcasts around off-the-wall ‘themes’? ‘Mother’, ‘Jail’, ‘Flowers’, ‘the Devil’, ‘Dogs’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Luck’: only when an unavoidable event such as Christmas intruded did the host deviate from his plan of having no plan.

The first show, for no immediately obvious reason, was entitled ‘Weather’. Eighteen tracks, dating from 1928 and the Carter Family to Hendrix in ’67, pursued the topic of meteorological events wherever it happened to lead. Dylan seemed to enjoy every minute. After all those years and all those concerts spent saying absolutely nothing to his audiences – ‘Nobody gives a shit how you’re
doin’ tonight
in Cleveland’ – he turned out to be a natural broadcaster. The kid who once listened avidly in the small hours to 50,000-watt clear-channel stations for music ‘blastin’ in from Shreveport’ had become an older gentleman with the freedom to play any record that took his fancy. As a youth he had listened out for Muddy Waters. The first record played on the first
Theme Time
was Waters and ‘Blow Wind Blow’.

Dylan was often wickedly funny in these weekly broadcasts. Most people knew about the wit; he was famous for that. Few had been exposed to the artist as a shameless stand-up, purveyor of sensationally bad jokes and sheer whimsy. Yet on tour, if in a good mood, he had been known to crack some awful gags. In the days when he was using back-up singers he had on occasion introduced the women as ‘my ex-wife, my next wife, my girlfriend and my fiancée’. The drummer George Receli had once been described as ‘probably the best drummer … on the stage’. If Dylan was feeling particularly jolly, no joke was too juvenile. Thus, to the good folks of Wisconsin’s metropolis: ‘Nice to be here. One of my early girlfriends was from Milwaukee. She was an artist. She gave me the brush-off.’ Between records,
Theme Time
could involve an hour or more of this sort of drollery interspersed with poetry readings, ancient jingles, cocktail recipes, fake calls and invented emails, advice on divorce and any odd if unreliable fact Dylan’s researchers had managed to dig up. There would be speculation, inevitably, that he was working to a script supplied by the TV writer and producer Eddie Gorodetsky, from whose vast collection many of the deeply obscure tracks broadcast on the show were taken.
Theme Time
rarely sounded as though it had been scripted.

Only Dylan, you thought, could have uttered the irrefutable statement, ‘Few things go together as well as country and western music and crazy people.’ Only he could have spoofed his listeners – and be taken seriously by some of them, journalists included – by claiming he was thinking of hiring out his sandblasted voice to the makers of satellite navigation systems. ‘I think it would be good if you’re looking for directions,’ Dylan muttered on the ‘Street Maps’ show, ‘and you heard my voice saying something like, “Take a left at the next street … No, a right … You know what, just go straight.” I probably shouldn’t do it because whichever way I go I always end up at the same place … on Lonely Avenue.’

The first show began with the voice of the actor Ellen Barkin as the somewhat-mysterious ‘Lady in Red’. ‘It’s night-time in the big city,’ she said, exhaling each word. ‘Rain is falling. Fog rolls in from the waterfront. A night-shift nurse smokes the last cigarette in her pack … It’s
Theme Time Radio Hour
with your host, Bob Dylan.’ Barkin and the DJ would keep this glorious nonsense going for the best part of three years. The introductions would vary a little from week to week, but the parody of long-gone radio links would remain a beloved vignette within the show. Episode ten, ‘Summer’, commenced with ‘It’s night-time in the big city. Angry prostitutes fight over a street corner. A man gets drunk and shaves off his moustache.’ Show 13, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’, began: ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A guilty man goes home to his wife. It’s time to make the doughnuts.’ The introduction to the two-hour episode broadcast for Christmas and New Year in 2006 might count as Barkin’s finest moment. ‘It’s night-time in the big city. A department store Santa sneaks a sip of gin. Mistletoe makes an old man sad. Eight reindeer land on the roof of the Abernathy Building.’

In dull reality, Dylan recorded the show in his spare moments while touring the world. When the first episode went out he was nowhere near Washington DC, where the temporaneous Abernathy Building was alleged to be situated, but out on the road between Davidson, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. When the ninth show was aired, Dylan was performing in Bournemouth on England’s south coast. During the next broadcast he was in transit between Clermont-Ferrand in France and Cap Roig in Spain. It made no difference to the fiction of the nodding night owl in Studio B who seemed to say whatever came into his addled head while playing records no other station would recognise, far less touch.

Amid the entertainment, the show offered an unimpeachable musical education. Whether the tracks were picked by Dylan, Gorodetsky or by some collaborative process was neither here nor there. When Episode 14, ‘The Devil’, opened with Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ it wasn’t hard to guess who had made the selection. The DJ played a lot of his well-known favourites and took the listener on an inimitable journey through the history of American popular culture. It was another way, more playful than his albums, of explaining a country’s past. When
Theme Time
was picked up by the BBC and Ireland’s Phantom FM in 2007 it was in recognition of the fact that something unique in broadcasting had been achieved by the ever-eccentric host and his omniscient producer. Something very funny, too.

During an early show entitled ‘Father’, Dylan reported: ‘We got an email from Johnny Depp from Paris, France. He wants to know “Who was the father of modern communism?” Well, Johnny, Karl Marx was the father of modern communism. He also fathered seven children.’ Apropos of the Tom Waits song ‘On the Nickel’, the host said: ‘Waits has a raspy, gravelly singing voice, described by one fan as like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razorblades after not sleeping for three days. Or as I like to put it, beautiful.’ At one point during the 2006 Christmas broadcast, Dylan sent out his idea of season’s greetings: ‘To all of our friends listening in behind bars, we know you made mistakes, we’re sorry you have to be there, but Merry Christmas to all of you, from all of us here at
Theme Time Radio Hour
.’ When the theme was ‘Flowers’, the host began: ‘Tonight we’re going to be talking about the most beautiful things on earth, the fine-smelling, colourful, bee-tempting world of flowers – the Bougainvillea, the Passion Flower, the Butterfly Cleradendron, the Angel’s Trumpets, the Firecracker plant. We’re going to be talking about Rosa rugosa, the Angel Face, All That Jazz, the Double Delight …’ So it went on, plant after plant, the names no doubt plucked from the internet by a researcher, yet turned into a weirdly hypnotic Dylan performance.

If
Theme Time
ever had a serious point – the proposition is open to question – it might have had something to do with the DJ’s belief in music’s deeper meaning and importance, in the galvanic force that had once propelled him unstoppably out of Hibbing, Minnesota. No one knew better than Dylan that music could change lives; no one believed more sincerely that something important was being lost from the culture. When he grumbled about modern recording technology and its failure to capture the pure truth of a performance, he might as well have been bewailing the decline and fall of the West. It made him sound like a crusty reactionary, but Dylan believed he was defending something precious, something irreplaceable. So for three years the essence poured forth from the Abernathy Building of his mind: Muddy Waters and Buddy Holly; Ray Charles and George Jones; Van Morrison and Charlie Parker; Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, the Beatles, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, Elvis, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson. There was an implicit question in all of this: why did no one else ever play these things? Amid it all, the artist did what he did best: he told stories to strangers. That said, only Dylan could have illustrated the theme of ‘Birds’ with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ followed by Al Jolson singing ‘When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’.

*

He bobbed. In addition to recording an album and launching his radio show, Dylan gave 98 concerts in the United States and Europe in 2006.
Modern Times
was released on 29 August and its songs soon began to appear on set lists for performances on the West Coast. Despite all his talk about quitting the recording studios, Dylan was quick to embrace the new material. Clearly, the idea that he could go on playing the same old songs ‘forever’ was no longer self-evident.
²⁵
In February 2007, though he declined to put in an appearance at the event, the artist was given another pair of Grammy awards thanks to
Modern Times
. It brought the running total of those honours to ten. In May of the year, he reached the age of 66 in the briefest of breaks in a touring schedule that saw him return to Australia and New Zealand amid the usual campaigns in North America and Europe.

Grammy awards or not, the shows continued to divide audiences. While the success of the album attracted new crowds, walkouts were still being reported. By any normal standards, Dylan’s voice was beyond any hope of recovery. Despite his complaints, the detested recording studio offered the protections and second chances that were unavailable in the middle of a ball park. As ever, those who were prepared to grant Dylan licence in all things didn’t seem to care. Often enough they could persuade themselves they had witnessed something truly remarkable – ‘historic’, ‘awesome’ and the rest – when the recorded evidence said they were deluded. For the casual customer or the fan returning to Dylan after years of indifference, the game of name-that-song was too often infuriating. Another, more thoughtful section of the audience had meanwhile arrived at a new reason to bear with the artist. There might not be another chance, they told themselves, to see Bob Dylan perform.

It was not yet dark. By any decent estimate, in fact, the artist was hardly classifiable as old.
Modern Times
had displayed an unmistakable vitality. It hadn’t felt like any sort of valediction. Nevertheless, a lot of reviewers began to wonder how much useful life was left in the performing artist when his voice was utterly ravaged and his interest in the job at hand often seemed slight. His band was professionalism itself, on stage or in the studio. Millions of people were still fascinated by his work, past and present, and by the mutations of what they took to be his personality. Books, the endless infernal books of study, criticism and reportage, continued to appear. But the concerts and the bootlegs that materialised after almost every show continued to raise the question of whether Dylan remained viable as a live performer. His voice, it was observed, was far more reliable at the start of a tour than at its end. That voice needed to be rested, but in the concert season – generally from March or April until the middle of November – he allowed it no respite. Doubts were raised constantly and Dylan ignored every one of them. For him, it seems, the good nights eradicated every memory of the bad. In 2006, just after the release of
Modern Times
, he could be found exulting that his band were ‘the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man’. He could be heard talking of the shows as though performance was an obligation, a kind of vocation, but he gave no hint of reservations about his fitness for the task. That wasn’t his way. Every word he spoke gave credence to the belief that these tours would never end.