Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (84 page)

IN OCTOBER 2007, DYLAN WAS GIVEN THE PRINCE OF ASTURIAS AWARD,
an honour created in the name of the heir to the Spanish throne. The artist was staging a concert in Omaha, Nebraska, and unable to show up in the city of Oviedo for his diploma, medallion, 50,000-euro cheque and a fine piece of Joan Miró sculpture. Once again, Dylan’s excuse was reasonable. Just finding the time to pick up all the awards on offer was becoming a problem. August institutions around the world seemed to be competing to burden the artist with their superlatives. Aside from sometimes saying politely how very honoured he was, Dylan had no real response to these grand affairs. He was proud, no doubt, to be taken so seriously, proud that the boy who had once been patronised in dingy coffee houses for his out-of-tune guitar and his Guthrie impersonations was being exalted after half a century of work. But there was something odd, nevertheless, in the spectacle of Bob Dylan becoming canonical. Some of the orotund citations sounded like obituaries. Some of them seemed to have been written by people who had not heard many of the songs.

As 2008 began, Episode 62 of
Theme Time Radio
was broadcast. The languid Lady in Red was her familiar self: ‘It’s night-time in the big city. Temptation is on every corner. A man rents a hotel room under an assumed name.’ The show’s theme on 2 January was ‘Number One’, or as Dylan put it: ‘For the next 60 minutes, we’re gonna be talking about one-horse towns, one-track minds, one-armed bandits, one false move, one in a million, one too many, one way or another, one brick shy of a load, and one and only. So stay here one and all and listen to songs on a singular subject, that subject being … number one.’ After playing ‘I’m the One Who Loves You’, a 1963 track by The Impressions, Dylan allowed himself another of his little jokes. ‘The Impressions had Curtis Mayfield at the helm,’ said the host. ‘Curtis was a triple treat. He wrote the songs, he played guitar on the songs, he sang on the songs.’

A month later, the
Theme Time
theme was ‘Mail’. As Dylan explained to his listeners, this involved ‘love letters, pen pals, going postal, ransom notes, letters to Dear John and Dear Abby, Miss Lonelyhearts … We’ll be returning things to sender, and we’ll be telling you that your cheque’s in the mail.’ In his case, the next cheque was never far away. The early shows of the year would take Dylan to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Later he would be in Canada, then back in Europe. In the summer, the artist would criss-cross America once more before finishing up back in Canada. The European leg of the annual trek was a little more interesting than usual. In June, audiences in Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Croatia were granted their first encounters with the legend. Even tiny Andorra, a speck on the maps, was not forgotten. Dylan’s booking agents were exhausting the land masses still untouched by their artist.

He would manage 98 concerts in 2008, a modest enough achievement by his standards. On the other hand, James Brown had thought nothing of putting his Revue through 330 one-nighters in a year. Charles Dickens, star of the Manchester Free Trade Hall and other tough venues, had once given 129 of his scintillating readings in a few brief months on the road. Harry Houdini had picked his locks in every vaudeville house in America and traversed the continent of Europe. Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show had kept going for a quarter of a century and done their stuff, their version of equine Americana, for all the crowned heads. Frank Sinatra had retired at the age of 55 and staged comebacks often, many said too often, as his great voice diminished and his memory ebbed away. There were meanwhile many thousands of honest performers, as Dylan knew well enough, who had never made a record and would never make a record. Cash on the nail aside, performance was a kind of addiction, satisfying a need that could not be met in any other manner. It was a way of life and it, too, was enmeshed in tradition. Performance was a part of an artist’s contract with the public. For all his complaints, for all his ambivalence and his contradictory explanations, it seemed that Dylan still felt a need to stand before an audience.

He ploughed on, for better or worse, when some of the younger stars in his business were making no apologies for miming on stage to pre-recorded backing tracks. Their audiences wanted spectacle and music that sounded exactly like the downloaded noises in their headphones. Why risk screwing up? Dylan risked it year in and year out. At some point, therefore, he deserved to be taken at his word. Performance, he argued, was central to his artistic being. Why then would he do anything else? The trouble was that this artist’s public performances were sometimes bad and often, at this point, no better than dull. Only rarely did the shows reveal anything new about the songs. The desire to be on stage was less an artistic imperative than an end in itself.

By 2008, it was inconceivable that the annual tours were being staged to meet a financial need. He didn’t put on all those concerts, as most of his surviving contemporaries put on concerts, just to plug a new piece of product or to celebrate some so-called reunion. He didn’t do it for the sake of critical appreciation. Despite all the complicated theories, he wasn’t out there, in country after country, simply to remake his songs or reinvent his art. No one needed to go all the way to Andorra to mess around with a melody. The judgement remains, nevertheless, that while the obdurate spirit was only too willing, the voice was weak and growing weaker. On any estimate not clouded by the conviction that Dylan could do no wrong, he had not staged an interesting tour in five years. Even the shop-worn claim that each attempt to reconfigure a melody or switch a few words in a lyric counted as a creative act no longer held up. Sometimes it seemed like a game, a mere distraction from the fact that in reality Dylan had nothing much else to offer. Yet still he needed to be Bob Dylan, showing himself to the world.

In April 2008, the author of
Chronicles
would find himself on the receiving end of a ‘special’ Pulitzer Prize. This one was for his impact on popular music and American culture. Mention was also made of ‘poetic power’. His son Jesse collected the citation on Dylan’s behalf, but amid general applause a few doubts were raised. The artist was the first ‘rock musician’ to be honoured with a prize meant for writers and journalists, yet the Pulitzer people had failed to give him the award for poetry, or to select his prose work for attention. John Coltrane, too, had been given a posthumous ‘special citation’, not the music prize. Writing in the
New York Times
, Dave Itzkoff wondered how many people were ‘ambivalent, or even uneasy, and fretted that the grizzled troubadour’s authenticity was being co-opted’. The journalist contended that ‘Dylan aficionados’ were ‘apprehensive’ and called in aid the novelist Jonathan Lethem as one of those ‘who see the Pulitzer as another chapter in [Dylan’s] complicated history with the establishment, an ongoing dance of distancings and détentes’.
¹
Clearly, the artist had no such qualms.

In the following month, Suze Rotolo would publish her memoir,
A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
. The smiling girl on the second album’s cover had kept a resolute near-silence for decades, but having been misrepresented so often by strangers she had decided it was her turn to tell a few stories. Her relationship with Dylan had been brief enough, three years at the most, and as nothing to the forty-year marriage Rotolo had enjoyed with the film editor Enzo Bartoccioli, but no reviewer of her book would pause over those facts. Such was the way Dylan’s supereminence warped reality around anyone touched by the nimbus. Encroaching fame had been one reason for the failure of the affair, his juvenile selfishness aside, after Rotolo had refused to surrender her independence to the impossible demands of his career. Her book was more than a collection of superstar anecdotes, but it too was caught still in Dylan’s orbit, what with its title and its cover image taken from that famous
Freewheelin’
photo-shoot on Jones Street, near the little apartment they had shared at 161 West 4th Street before the storm carried him away. Despite her best efforts, one brief episode had cast its shadow over Rotolo’s entire life. So how could anyone hope to live with this man? And where, as a human being, did that leave him?

Like Dave Van Ronk, Rotolo had never left the Village. She would tell one interviewer that she and Dylan had kept in ‘occasional’ touch over the years, but that was all.
²
Respect for their shared history had endured and he had made no attempt to interfere with her book. Nevertheless, she knew and he knew that the things his audiences wanted from songs such as ‘Don’t Think Twice’ were long lost in the deep past. Only the legends remained, but the legends were all-consuming. For decades, Suze had been an artist, teacher and activist in her own right, but when she died of lung cancer on 25 February 2011, obituaries would be published around the world for a single reason. That Rotolo had taught Dylan a little about politics and poetry and introduced him to the habit of sketching during a short romance in a bygone decade counted for more than a life well lived. Once upon a time, for a brief while, Suze had been privy to a handful of the secrets of which ‘Bob Dylan’ was composed. For most of those who would mark a woman’s death, nothing else would really matter. But then, she is not remembered in these pages for any other reason. Dylan would offer no public response to her book or, when the moment came, to a former lover’s passing.

At some point between 7 September and 23 October, between the ending of one tour in Santa Barbara, California, and the resumption of performances in Victoria, British Columbia, he went back into the studios yet again. Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters in Malibu was about as close to home as Dylan could get, but the circumstances in which an album came about were as odd as any in his long recording career. With a certain impertinence, the French film director Olivier Dahan, fresh from the Oscar-winning success of
La Vie en Rose
, had asked the artist to contribute not one but ‘ten or more’ songs to a new picture to be called
My Own Love Song
. As he would tell the writer Douglas Brinkley, Dylan didn’t quite know what to make of this Gallic gall.

At first this was unthinkable. I mean, I didn’t know what he was actually saying. [In faux French accent] ‘Could you write uh, ten, twelve songs?’ Ya know? I said, ‘Yeah, really? Is this guy serious?’ But he was so audacious! Usually you get asked to do, like, one song, and it’s at the end of the movie. But ten songs? Dahan wanted to put these songs throughout the movie and find different reasons for them. I just kind of gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing.
³

Dylan would call on the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter for help with all but one of the songs on what became
Together Through Life
. Once again, a collaborative effort would be treated as though it was all the artist’s own work. While Dylan was in the studio, meanwhile, another instalment in the Bootleg Series appeared that made the need for a co-writer seem faintly ludicrous. The set called
Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006
was volume eight in the never-ending project and the most striking chapter in what amounted to a counter-factual history of Dylan’s career. It was also, in any one of three released forms, a remarkable album in its own right. Those who talked of trilogies forgot to take this large piece of work into account. It was, as it remains, easily the equal of
Modern Times
and
‘Love and Theft’
. There is a good case for saying that, whether as a single, double or horribly overpriced three-disc set, it was better than either of those albums.

In part, nevertheless, it was another episode in the old story. Here were the works, sometimes in several forms, that Dylan had elected to discard or neglect. Here finally was ‘Red River Shore’ twice over. Here was ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’, two tracks from the 1992 sessions with David Bromberg, the better attempts (three of them) at ‘Mississippi’ and a taste, albeit just one track, from the shows at the Supper Club in New York in 1993. Critics, it is fair to say, were delighted and perplexed, irritated and approving. Most of the irritation would arise from the fact that someone, whether within Columbia or the artist’s management, had let greed’s mask slip. While the two-CD
Tell Tale Signs
would be sold at a normal sort of price - $18.99 in America, £10 or so in Britain – the fans devoted enough to want the three-disc ‘deluxe edition’, with its flimsy book and a two-track piece of ‘bonus’ vinyl, would have to find $129.99 or its equivalent in their local currency. Most fans were furious. Even the diehards understood that they were being exploited simply because of their willingness to buy anything with Dylan’s name attached. These were the people most likely to covet the ‘deluxe’ package, after all, and these were the people being gouged. For some, the price seemed to mark what the artist really thought of his most devoted admirers.

The chance offered late in October by the Hohner musical instrument company to purchase a ludicrous limited edition ‘complete set of seven Marine Band harmonicas in the natural keys of C, G, D, F, A, B, and E which have been played and hand-signed by Bob Dylan’ was taken as an insult added to injury, even by those with no aspirations to attempt a tune. Neither wit nor elegance was involved in this joke. Yet in the summer of 2013
bobdylan.com
was still offering the ‘Bob Dylan Signature Series Harmonica’, gold-plated reed plate and all, for $120. Should anyone have desired the ‘Individually Hand-Signed Harp in a Carved Ebony Box’, the price given was $5,000. For those interested in owning the full seven-harmonica set, one of only twenty-five known to ‘exist worldwide’, with each instrument guaranteed to have felt the warm breath of the artist himself, the tab was $25,000.

Tell Tale Signs
was a mesmerising piece of art with a lot to say about the human condition. By 2008, the marketing effort for the Dylan brand also said something unmistakable about human nature. Fans who had stuck with the artist for four decades found the realisation hard to take. Those struggling to balance the poetry with the price tags found it impossible to explain. Yet the obvious explanation was probably the right explanation.
Tell Tale Signs
contained a couple of versions of the song called ‘Dignity’, the
Oh Mercy
piece that Dylan had failed to record to his satisfaction in New Orleans in 1989. Two lines run: