Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (26 page)

Early speculation would put the settlement figure at $6 million, then at $10 million. Later estimates, taking into account those property assets around the country, ran to $36 million
plus
a continuing half share of the royalties – pick a figure – for songs written and recorded between 1965 and 1977, with the proviso that a further payment would be due to Sara Dylan in the event of Dylan’s catalogue being sold.
¹⁴
He appears not to have put up much of a contest, if he put up any contest, over the money. That part of the final rupture between himself and Sara was settled quickly and, to all appearances, amicably. The real fight would be over the custody of the children.

His love for them was never in doubt, but somehow Dylan persuaded himself that he, of all people, with his habits, women, fame, fans, creative life and professional obligations, was entitled to believe he could care for his brood. Sara would be ferocious in her determination to disabuse him of that idea. Yet again, his understanding of his several competing identities – Bob Dylan the artist, Bob Dylan the rock star, Bob Dylan the doting father and others besides – was inadequate, worse than naive. Children aside, nevertheless, the divorce was settled at the end of June.

‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ had not foretold this. There had been no mention of Californian community property law in ‘Sara’. In hindsight it was self-evident, nevertheless, that the years of Dylan’s real contentment had been those eight years after 1966 when he had hidden from stardom and stayed away from touring, living with his family at Woodstock or on Cape Cod. For the private man who carried the name, picking up the burden of ‘Bob Dylan’ had been a big mistake. On the other hand, no one had put a loaded gun to his head, or deceived him into thinking that the rock and roll ‘lifestyle’ was an inevitable adjunct to rock and roll music. He had made his own choices. Among other things, he alone had decided that his brush with old Norman Raeben had caused his wife to cease to ‘understand’ him. And plainly, above all, Sara Dylan had been expected to tolerate more than was tolerable, even in a celebrity union.

Still, by the summer of 1977 a central part of his former existence had removed herself from his life. Another muse – for Sara had been that, if she had been anything – was gone. He would still sing the songs he had written because of her, but their essential, original meaning was gone. As so often before and since, Dylan retreated to his farm in Minnesota. Still another girl was with him.

*

He would write a group of songs that summer, just as he had written songs in 1974. This time, however, he would not rush into the studios, as he had done with
Blood on the Tracks
, to turn his writing into an album at the first opportunity. It might have been better if he had.

On 16 August 1977, while Dylan was on the Minnesota farm, news broke that Elvis Presley had died in Memphis. The artist was distraught for days, yet he couldn’t have been entirely surprised. The grotesque condition of the only king of rock and roll had been plain for the world to see for long enough. Presley’s late concert performances, sweating at the slightest exertion and straining at the seams of those preposterous jumpsuits, had become a joke to everyone but the blue-rinsed, middle-aged faithful. For all that, few had truly understood the depths of Presley’s drugged, bloated degradation. Peter Guralnick, foremost among his biographers, would describe a performer who was scarcely able to sing or follow a melody in his last shows in 1977, ‘a man crying out for help when he knows help will not come’.
¹⁵
Dylan had known, as most observers had known, that something was seriously amiss in the strange world that Elvis inhabited. Still the death came as a profound shock to the artist.

A part of his past, and therefore of his world, had been eradicated. Perverse as it sounds, the loss of Presley mattered almost as much to Dylan as the loss of his marriage. Or perhaps, possibly, it counted as another of those last straws. Elvis, the music, the lost world of the 1950s, the hope and defiance and unstoppable energy, had been essential to the person Dylan was, or believed himself to be. If those sound like childish, self-involved notions, the truth about this artist is misunderstood. He was of a generation, perhaps the last such generation, for whom pop music was part of the meaning of existence. It’s not a big guess to say that Dylan grieved for himself when he grieved for Elvis. According to what he would tell Robert Shelton almost a year later, he suffered ‘a breakdown’ when he heard about the death.
¹⁶

I went over my whole life. I went over my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week after Elvis died. If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I couldn’t be doing what I do today.

Dylan seems to have worked hard in Minnesota, but he put the work aside, for whatever reason, when he returned to California determined to reclaim his children. It was as though they represented the one loss, the last loss, that could not be borne. His relationship with Sara, civilised and businesslike as the divorce had gone through, struck an unnavigable reef of animosity. Even her decision to take the kids on a holiday to Hawaii had caused him to believe she was plotting to move them beyond his reach. These parents were in territory familiar to the survivors, poets and superstars or not, of many broken marriages. For the Dylans, it all became as hideous and pointless as any suburban trauma, dragging on week after week in hearings and negotiations between lawyers. The full tabloid tale of court orders and accusations – find your ‘expert’, find your ‘evidence’ – serves no one now. In the end, inevitably, Sara Dylan won the day and established herself somewhere in Beverly Hills. The artist got his children for the holidays.

*

Renaldo and Clara
saw the flickering light finally with a pair of premieres, in New York and LA, in the last week of January 1978. The
Village Voice
would set no fewer than six critics on the movie and five of those would struggle to come up with a decent word to say for the production. The journal’s James Wolcott would observe that so many reputations went down with the film it was like watching the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Mark Jacobson would begin his review by casually wishing Dylan dead for lending his name to a picture that failed to supply true confessions.
¹⁷
Long after the event, the journalist would concede that the review ‘came out a little more negative than I would have liked’. What ‘came out’ began

I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times, the way they did for Hubert Humphrey. The way they do for Chaplin, or Adolf Hitler. Just the immutable facts. Seeing all those immutable facts about Elvis made his dying worthwhile. The high points. What a sum-up. You don’t get much gray, but like the reporter in
Citizen Kane
found out, gray doesn’t necessarily amount to shit.
¹⁸

You could say the same about certain movie reviews. Sometimes you begin, just about, to understand the artist’s contempt for journalism. Along the way – having said, with spectacular nastiness, that ‘Dylan had a good reason to beat Sara’ – Jacobson complained because the movie was longer than
Citizen Kane
, because it ‘revealed’ nothing new about Dylan, because it was a ‘rich kid’s vanity project’, and because – this seemed to be the film’s real offence – the poor critic didn’t get it. Years later, he would confess that ‘you will always write things you wish you didn’t’. There is one infallible solution for that problem.

In America, in any case,
Renaldo and Clara
’s reputation was left bleeding in the dust. The
Village Voice
was only the shrill soprano in a chorus of lousy reviews. Writing in the
New Yorker
, Pauline Kael complained that the movie was both a failed and a dishonest drama, guilty of employing the star’s former lover (Baez) and wife as a kind of ‘tease’.
¹⁹
Critics lined up to trash the picture while film fans eager for a production with a song in its heart took their pick that year from
Grease
,
The Buddy Holly Story
and
Animal House
.

In Europe,
Renaldo and Clara
was at least treated with a degree of respect, perhaps because Dylan himself had long been treated as a serious artistic proposition by Europeans, or perhaps because European film critics, with their auteur theories and their art-house cinema loyalties, were always liable to give an earnestly pretentious director a break. In truth, Hollywood’s commercial imperatives still counted for less on the old continent than on the new. Bernardo Bertolucci’s
1900
(1976) had run to 245 minutes in the
short
version. Jan Troell’s
The Emigrants
(1971) and its sequel,
The New Land
(1972), had between them demanded 395 minutes of a viewer’s time. In any case,
Renaldo and Clara
would be given an out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May and, lest it be forgotten, win the Interfilm Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival later in the year. A minority of people, European people, had the temerity just to enjoy the picture.

It made no difference. The film, given only a limited release to begin with, was gone from American movie houses within a few weeks. A further messy edit sanctioned by Dylan towards the end of the year, cutting the running time to two hours and giving more room to the concert footage, did a little better, but it was not enough. Within a few years the director would withdraw the film from distribution entirely. Those who wanted their ‘Bob Dylan’ as they understood him were not to be denied.

He was in no hurry to keep them happy, but suddenly he had no choice. Poverty did not beckon, exactly, but with millions spent on the Point Dume house, millions more on the movie, and tens of millions awarded to Sara, Dylan was obliged to go back to work, like it or not. So he reasoned, at any rate. In May of 1978, he would even confess to the
Los Angeles Times
that he had ‘quite a few debts to pay off’.

I had a couple of bad years. I put a lot of money into the movie, built a big house … and there’s the divorce. It costs a lot to get divorced in California.
²⁰

Clearly, the divorce was the big ticket on the list. The briefly controversial switch to large venues during the autumn and winter tour of 1975 had been excused, after all, by the need to divert revenues to
Renaldo and Clara
. No one was obliging Dylan to subsist meanwhile in a vast mansion on a big Malibu estate. The settlement made on Sara was the debt that could not be avoided. But he did not intend to go broke, or even to change the style of living to which he had grown accustomed, on that account.

After the embattled heroics of the spring tour, a revival of Rolling Thunder was neither plausible artistically nor attractive financially. Perhaps the artist just decided that a trip abroad would do him a power of good. It’s more likely that his newly chosen manager, an individual accustomed to producing concerts for the likes of Presley and Sinatra or managing the likes of Neil Diamond, made the traditional showbiz suggestion. If Dylan needed to raise some money, Jerry Weintraub would happily organise the kind of world tour that was the closest approximation to a licence to print the stuff. Japan, the Far East, Europe, the United States: dozens of concerts and millions of tickets for the sake of one man’s divorce settlement. Set beside this operation, the Rolling Thunder troupe were Boy Scouts up against the US Marines.

It’s not an insignificant detail. In 1978, Dylan would chase the bottom line. All the talk of small clubs, folk roots, bohemia and being happy just to sing and play anywhere for anyone might never have happened. This time musicians would not be selected on a whim and a prayer. This time there would be no messing around with old pals, art cinema or campaigns for the wrongly convicted. Everything would be bent to a single end. Dylan’s accountants could no doubt have supplied all the reasons, priced to the last penny. Those fans who wanted to believe that he existed as a creative singularity inside a bubble called genius would have to cope, as best they could, with this fact of the artist’s life: he liked to talk about living just for the music, but he was not eager to retreat to a poet’s garret. Being rich was very much easier, and a lot more agreeable, than being poor. Dylan was not about to give it all up. American reviewers would not call this ‘the Alimony Tour’ for nothing.

Rehearsals began towards the end of 1977 in a rented Santa Monica factory space he called Rundown Studios. Bootlegs dating from the last week in December of that year still do the rounds. Some of the recordings contain rough accounts of what were then new Dylan compositions, but he still had no plans – none he would reveal, at least – for an album. On this occasion, mercifully, Jacques Levy’s services had not been required for the writing process. At first it would seem that the musicians who began to arrive at the studio were not needed either, what with the distractions of the fight for custody of the Dylan children and the impending movie premieres. Work did not start in earnest until the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

Dylan was now remodelling his old songs habitually, even obsessively, on the basis of experiments in rehearsal. It was as if he realised that he would need some sort of artistic stimulant if he was to remain fully conscious through nine months, ten countries, four continents and one hundred and fourteen shows. By the time it was all over, someone would calculate – these show-business legends always wind up being expressed in suspiciously round figures – that Dylan had played to two million people. By the end, nevertheless, only a very few Americans would believe they had seen the best of him.

Back in Santa Monica he had prepared himself, his eight-piece band and three backing vocalists – the membership of both altered somewhat as the weeks passed – by trying out certain of the new songs and by trying to make the old songs sound new. What began to emerge was not always bad but it was, invariably, weird. With Rolling Thunder, Dylan had moulded his music to suit the musicians he had chosen. At Rundown, he took another step: the nature of the band, girl singers, sax player and all, dictated the ‘arrangements’. Unkind souls, American reviewers in particular, would later conclude that Elvis had been too much on the artist’s mind. Words such as ‘Vegas’ and ‘lounge act’ would be employed. Dylan drew the line at a jumpsuit – though sequins would be sighted – but tolerated several other indignities.