Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (43 page)

It was time to move on: Dylan could always sense that truth. At the Warfield Theater on 15 November 1980, he had cajoled Mike Bloomfield to the stage. The guitarist who had stood with Dylan during the tempest of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, who had helped to make
Highway 61 Revisited
the gravitational force of 1960s music, played with real vehemence that night on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and on a new song, ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’. Though every date he mentioned was wrong, Dylan had told the audience the story – had told
a
story – of how he and his guest had first met. A fine tribute had then been paid to the blues prodigy who ‘just played circles around anything I could play’. Afterwards, Dylan invited Bloomfield to join the band on a permanent basis, or so it was said, but the guitar player had ceased to be fit for that kind of work. Heroin had claimed all of his attention years before. Three months after the show, Bloomfield, just 37, had died of an overdose.

Eras sometimes end several times over, with every appearance of finality. In January 1981,
Playboy
had published a long interview in which the unmistakable, disobliging voice of John Lennon could be heard pronouncing on everything under the sun and all parts beyond. Asked at one point if he found it ‘distressing’ that Dylan had become a born-again Christian, Lennon had replied:

For whatever reason he’s doing it, it is personal for him and he needs to do it. But the whole religion business suffers from the ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ bit. There’s too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I’m not pushing Buddhism, because I’m no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian, but there’s one thing I admire about the religion: there’s no proselytizing.

There had been no opportunity for Dylan to respond, even if he had felt so inclined. On 8 December 1980, a deranged fan by the name of Mark David Chapman, an individual with a direct line to God and a grievance against Lennon’s ‘blasphemy’ in once comparing the popularity of Jesus with the popularity of the Beatles, had put four bullets from a .38 Special into the singer on a wintry New York street. Another small part of Dylan’s universe had been chipped away. Afterwards he had been entitled to wonder about the things that might have been passing through the disordered minds of some of his own alleged fans. If peace-loving retired Beatles attracted homicidal losers, what lay in wait from those who hated what once they had loved about Bob Dylan? He had seen his share of fixated admirers and obsessive true believers. If he had read
Playboy
’s interview with John and Yoko, however, he might also have noticed his old, distant friend and sometime rival scorning the worship of dead heroes. ‘God willing, there are another 40 years of productivity to go,’ Lennon had said. Not for him. In this, as in so many things, he and Dylan had parted company.

*

A vastly better album could have been assembled from
Shot of Love
’s outtakes than the album the artist chose to release. Bootlegs, legal and illegal, still prove the point. Listen to those tracks once or twice and it becomes an indisputable point. Dylan worked on the set, on and off, from the first recording of ‘Every Grain of Sand’ late in September 1980 all the way through to the final sessions of May 1981. For him, that was a long stretch and an unprecedented effort. In the end, all the labour served only to show that there was a fine balance to be struck between his belief in spontaneity and the need for second thoughts. It was a balance Dylan could not achieve. What killed
Shot of Love
, in essence, was that he got bored with his own best songs long before the album was complete. Given too much time to think, he wound up ripping the heart from the work. A precedent was established.

The biggest loss was a song entitled ‘Caribbean Wind’. Next among the gold discarded for the sake of dross was a piece called ‘Angelina’. ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar’, a track that succeeded in its lyrics as often as it failed musically – through no lack of trying – would be restored to
Shot of Love
when the CD format came along. The summary judgement remains, nevertheless, that Dylan lost the ability to catch quicksilver. If he tried to get through the loathed recording process in one as-live rush he was betting everything on a single throw of the dice and liable to lose. If, on the other hand, he tried to imitate the painstaking habits of his contemporaries, if he submitted to the industrial processes of the music industry, something inside of him died.

Bruce Springsteen’s
The River
was the number-one album in America when Dylan and his band took the stage at the Warfield. It had been a year and a half in the making. Dylan could disparage that kind of obsessive effort – and disparage Springsteen, in those days – but if sales were any guide the results spoke for themselves.
Shot of Love
consumed eight and a half months of the artist’s life, if mixing and overdubs are taken into account. A great many rehearsals were staged at Rundown before tapes rolled. Producers came and went. For the first time in his career, driven to distraction, Dylan became one of their number. He had never spent so long making a record. Yet the upstart Springsteen had put in twice as much effort and emerged with the prize.
The River
was at number one for the entire month of November 1980.
Shot of Love
got to number 33 late in August 1981.

Dylan simply could not work in the way others worked. For him, the songs existed in their moment. Others could rave about some old, discarded piece of tape. If the essence of a song couldn’t be caught in the first moments of creativity it was dead and gone. With
Shot of Love
Dylan tried and failed to cure himself of the attitude. He tried different studios, different arrangements, different groups of musicians. Yet he could not find an environment to suit his preferred methods. In the making of the album he simply wound up fiddling and tinkering, attempting numerous versions of numerous songs in numerous styles. That was one clue to all the problems he would face in the 1980s. He didn’t truly know what he wanted.

In 1981, at least two Bob Dylans had begun to contend for possession of the microphone. The album’s biggest failure was in the attempt to unite them, to mix the overtly religious and the apparently non-religious. Dylan still had his Christian faith and wrote accordingly. But he had also realised – it is not clear exactly when or how – that there were other things he wanted to say, or rather other ways in which he wanted to be heard. ‘Every Grain of Sand’, by far the best thing on the album – though a good argument can be made for the alternative version done with Jennifer Warnes – is the paramount case in point. It is, unambiguously, a religious song: most listeners get that far. Those who notice the hymn-like quality it shares with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ are noticing what is obvious and true. But this is no joyous celebration of simple belief. It would not have suited the Vineyard’s evangelising purposes. This song stresses what Dylan explained when he said that conversion was difficult and painful. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is an acknowledgement that when the believer raises his gaze from the pages of his Bible, when he pauses in his praises, life goes on, difficult and perplexing.
Slow Train Coming
and
Saved
had not paid much attention to that fact.
Shot of Love
, in construction and intent, is concerned with little else. Yet only in this one song does it succeed in achieving its purpose. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is, aptly, the album’s single redeeming feature. Dylan could have spent the rest of his eternity in the studio and he would still have failed to transmute the other songs he chose to release into anything of real value. A couple, ‘Heart of Mine’ and ‘In the Summertime’, are bearable: that’s about the best you can say. The rest dishonour Dylan’s art and do no credit to his faith.

The detail is not incidental. The artist’s travails amid his ‘Christian trilogy’ did not arise, as he seemed to want to believe, simply from secular prejudice. His problems had a lot to do with the kind of faith he was expressing and, above all, with the way in which he chose to express it. Too often, the godly Dylan sounded like the opposite of a Christian. Besides which, the music wasn’t up to much. Paul Nelson, one of the best critics he ever had, noticed as much in a
Rolling Stone
review of
Shot of Love
. Throughout most of the album, Nelson wrote, ‘Bob Dylan sounds more like an irate child who’s just been spanked than a grown man who’s found the answer of answers.’ Nelson had begun his review with this:

Truth be known, my initial reaction was just another example of the old and familiar Bob Dylan syndrome: i.e., because the man’s past achievements have meant so much to so many of us, we tend to give his newest work the benefit of every doubt. No more. For me, it stops right here. Unfortunately, except for ‘Every Grain of Sand’,
Shot of Love
seldom gets any more interesting than that first listening. Quite the opposite, in fact.
⁵

The reviewer went on to assault the tenor of the album. It was not an attack on the music or the songwriting – though Nelson got around to those – but an attack on the artist himself. This Dylan, bathed in God’s love or not, was simply unpleasant, a sanctimonious egomaniac.

By not appreciating the genius of Bob Dylan’s current material, we’re supposedly crucifying him, even though he’s awfully handy with the hammer and nails himself. Dullards that we are, we can’t understand God. We don’t understand Dylan. Our love is no damn good (‘Watered-Down Love’). We’re barely alive (‘Dead Man, Dead Man’). Therefore, each and every one of us can go to hell.

Well, fuck that. Sinning against God and sinning against Dylan are two different things.

The last remark was certainly true, though its truth was a fairly recent discovery for some critics. The fact was that Christianity had done nothing to diminish Dylan’s familiar self-righteousness. The sometimes vicious character he had displayed for much of the ’60s was intact on
Shot of Love
. The difference was that this time around the artist gave no credence to scepticism, or – ‘Every Grain of Sand’ always excepted – to humane doubt. The Dylan of the 1960s had set himself against proscriptive authority, against anyone who had tried to tell anyone else how to live or think. Finally he had gone over to the other side and a couple of almost-secular love songs couldn’t disguise the fact. Dylan had once stood up for the kind of liberty-loving individualism that Reagan invoked as a principle but disdained, as his treatment of the Berkeley students had shown, in practice. On
Shot of Love
there was a singer announcing that ‘Revolution even ain’t [
sic
] no solution for trouble’, inveighing against ‘The glamor and the bright lights and the politics of sin’, denouncing those who ‘laugh at salvation’ and marking the line between the saved who were ‘the property of Jesus’ – in the truly awful song of that name – and those who were not. In this version of spiritual warfare, anyone who ‘Mocked my God, humiliated my friends’ was an enemy. The artist was as brutal towards that kind of foe as he had ever been while skewering hapless journalists with righteous wit in the ’60s. This Dylan might have had good Christian grounds for associating social breakdown with the absence of faith, but his analysis, if that’s the word, was just the Religious Right’s boilerplate rhetoric with a rhyme scheme attached. He surely knew as much. So when did Bob Dylan ‘turn his back on politics’, exactly?

‘Caribbean Wind’ was the song that could have made the difference, the song that makes so much else on
Shot of Love
sound juvenile and petty. Predictably, the version that would be released with the
Biograph
box set in 1985 in no sense represents the song in its best incarnations, lyrically or musically. It is inferior to the version Dylan performed at the Warfield on 12 November – for the first and last time in concert – and a lesser work to the much-bootlegged account captured at Richard Perry’s Studio 55 in Los Angeles at the end of the following March.
⁶
The relevant point is that in
any
version this song, in all its multiple renderings and mangled transcriptions, revisions and rewrites, is still preferable to everything else on
Shot of Love
save ‘Every Grain of Sand’. In the struggle to pin down ‘Caribbean Wind’, Dylan lost track of it entirely. One consequence, as Clinton Heylin has explained, is that even the last-gasp attempt released on
Biograph
does not accord with the words printed in Dylan’s
Lyrics 1962–2001
.
⁷
That’s the least of the complications. For example, the rather fine Studio 55 variant – not the first, not the last – begins with the arresting

On
Biograph
, the song begins with just the
tiniest
alteration:

The second couplet has nothing to do with John Milton, who makes no mention of the rose of Sharon – hence Dylan’s lower-case rendering of ‘paradise lost’ – or with Tom Joad’s sister in John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). It has everything to do with Song of Solomon (2:1). The leap from the Pentagon to Scripture is not small, but that was just part of Dylan’s difficulty. With apocalypse looming (again) in all versions of the song, he was trying to find a way to express the tensions between physical and spiritual desire, between the need to trust and the readiness to distrust. He was also trying to display these ideas within the structure of the narrative, much as he had done in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, by switching points of view and juggling with timeframes. As with that song, the result of all the tinkering was a tangle of competing and sometimes conflicting versions.

Dylan would tell Cameron Crowe, author of the
Biograph
notes, that ‘Caribbean Wind’ started life on St Vincent in the Windward Islands after ‘a strange dream in the hot sun’. It also began to emerge, as Dylan would admit with uncharacteristic frankness, when he was ‘thinking about living with somebody for all the wrong reasons’. No name would be given. In
Lyrics
, if it matters, you can read: ‘Would I have married her? I don’t know, I suppose …’ The uncertainty, the tentativeness, was echoed at every step of the song’s composition. As Dylan would explain to Crowe,