Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (52 page)

The complicated history of
Empire Burlesque
does not make the album any more interesting unless your taste runs to the analysis of outmoded production techniques. Yet again, like a man calling heads and getting tails a statistically improbable number of times, Dylan had misjudged – and therefore misunderstood – his own best songs. In 1985, he had few enough of those. Too many of the pieces that survived his haphazard culling were probably better read than heard. That was not, presumably, the judgement an artist in need of a hit record wanted to hear. If
Empire Burlesque
caught a break from the critics when it was released that was mostly because of continuing relief that God remained a backseat driver. As Clinton Heylin has observed, the artist had stripped religious allusions from ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ – Christ’s blood and so forth – when turning the song into ‘Tight Connection to My Heart’.
⁸
Overt religiosity was behind him finally. It might say something about the open-mindedness or otherwise of critics, but any Dylan album without born-again overtones had a head start in the mid-’80s.

Record-buyers would be more pragmatic, raising
Empire Burlesque
no higher than number 33 in the American chart. British fans, loyal as ever, allowed the album to rise briefly to number seven, but in Dylan’s homeland the public was more perceptive than some of the critics who allowed undimmed hope to be father to their thoughts. At this distance in time it is hard even to understand what
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder thought he was hearing when he wrote of

a blast of real rock & roll, funnelled through a dense, roiling production – custom-chopped-and-channelled by remix wiz Arthur Baker – that affords Dylan more pure street-beat credibility than he has aspired to since … well, pick your favourite faraway year. Could there be actual hits hunkering here? Is Dylan ‘back’? Again? One is tempted to trumpet some such tidings.
⁹

History would judge it to be a trumpet solo. For his next trick, in any case, the artist would join the chorus. In January of 1985, whether because of some species of industry peer pressure or a sincere belief in celebrity-endorsed charitable endeavours, an unmistakable voice could be heard peppering an unremarkable if well-meaning singalong called ‘We Are the World’. This was the American response to the Band Aid project launched in Britain a few months earlier by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to succour the oppressed in Ethiopia. USA for Africa, as the American ensemble called itself, involved a large and absurdly ‘diverse’ group of singers and show-business types. Dylan found himself in a Los Angeles studio alongside everyone from Willie Nelson to Ray Charles, Springsteen to Diana Ross, Paul Simon to Kenny Rogers. He delivered his closing chorus with a certain growling gusto, but at the time he seemed not to wonder why a song dedicated to the downtrodden failed to ask about the reasons for their plight. ‘We Are the World’, banal and sentimental, was certainly not a Bob Dylan song, far less a human-rights anthem. On the other hand, it did raise tens of millions of dollars and, presumably, saved some lives.

In the aftermath, Dylan was persuaded to take part in the gigantic transatlantic Live Aid event in July. Of all the mistakes he made in the 1980s, this would be among the worst. It would certainly be the best remembered. The idea was to stage two vast concerts, one at London’s Wembley Stadium, the other in Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, and to link them by satellite with other shows around the planet. In one mark of his continuing eminence in American music, Dylan was asked to close the concert on his side of the Atlantic before the massed ranks of celebrity sympathisers gathered for a rendition of ‘We Are the World’. In theory, there should have been no problem. Anyone who saw Dylan’s performance at the time, or has seen it since, will recognise the ghastly fascination experienced by a TV audience estimated at 1.9 billion as grim reality unfolded.

One idea had been for Dylan to perform ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with the reassembled Peter, Paul and Mary. Whether because the symbolism was too much for him – the trio’s version of his song had long been a mixed blessing – or because his voice was no longer up to the job, the artist took against that proposal. He decided instead that he would perform with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Contrary to appearances in Philadelphia, the three
did
rehearse before facing the global audience. On stage, however, the Englishmen gave the distinct impression that perhaps they had killed time while waiting to go on by sharing a bottle or two. Dylan, sweating and strained, didn’t look good. His companions looked as though they were lounging in the back room of an after-hours club as time was being called. The improvised sound was pitiful while the artist’s choice of songs was hardly calculated to tug heart strings or open wallets around the world. ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ and ‘When the Ship Comes In’, a pair of songs from his earliest days, were not the sunniest works in Dylan’s repertoire. The inevitable ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ meanwhile failed to suggest that ‘the answer’ had ever involved regiments of rich, self-regarding superstars wheedling cash from common folk for the sake of the starving. The impression given by the louche trio – to be strictly fair, they had been denied the onstage monitors that would have allowed them to hear how they sounded – was not helped when the singer decided to speak. After ‘Hollis Brown’, Dylan said:

I’d just like to say I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they could just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million maybe, and use it, say, to pay the … pay the mortgages on some of the farms … the farmers here owe to the banks.

It was as though there was a near-audible intake of breath from households around the world, followed by a vast global thought bubble. It said: why don’t
you
find ‘one or two million’ for those farmers? Dylan, so it seemed, had failed even to bother to inform himself of the purpose of the event for which he was supposed to be the inspirational headline act. The little speech was naive, at best, and the effect on what remained of his reputation among the general public was catastrophic. Here, it seemed, was a choice example of just how detached from reality a spoiled emperor of rock could become.

Dylan would redeem himself somewhat, at least in American eyes, by inspiring Willie Nelson to mount the Farm Aid concert later in the year in Champaign, Illinois. The artist would put in a near-sensational performance with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at that event, as though making amends for Philadelphia. When the time came, Dylan would take unusual care with rehearsals and technical matters. The privations being suffered by rural America were real enough and he would more than do his bit. Nevertheless, to many among the enormous TV audience who saw him perform in Philadelphia on 13 July, the verdict was obvious. Bob Dylan was utterly redundant, a dismal and decadent joke who couldn’t even give a respectable performance of one of his oldest and most famous songs.

*

At the beginning of November,
Biograph
appeared. As though to emphasise the paradox of a living artist’s status as a historical artefact, Columbia staged a big reception at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The triumphs of a bygone era would be celebrated to honour a songwriter who had not enjoyed a hit in a while.

Dylan had meanwhile published a revised edition of his
Writings and Drawings
(1973). Though this time around he had settled for the arguably less pretentious
Lyrics: 1962–1985
as his title, there was no denying the irony attending his situation. Aged only 44, the poet of popular song had somehow managed to become both canonical and washed up. His private life remained chaotic, involving several women simultaneously, but that kind of turbulence had not impeded Dylan in the past. Something else, the times or passing time itself, was afflicting him. Interviewed by Cameron Crowe for the booklet that accompanied
Biograph
, he had said, ‘Actually I’m amazed that I’ve been around this long. Never thought I would be.’ Meanwhile, with nothing much to sell save an inferior album, he was turning up in prestigious publications all across America as the paterfamilias of pop-music art in the ‘rock’ style. Almost without fail, journalists wanted to ask the legend about his legend, or question the myth-maker, as they would call him, about the myth.

Well, people tell me about the myth, you know? Some people are in awe. It doesn’t penetrate me for some reason. I wish it did because then I might be able to use it to some advantage. I mean, there must be some advantage to it. I haven’t been able to figure out what it is as yet. [He laughs.]
¹⁰

Among other things, the box set, with its earliest tracks dating all the way back to 1962, was a reminder that he had already spent more than half of his entire life in fame’s hot glare. Robert Allen Zimmerman, his legal existence long since eradicated, was barely even a memory. Bob Dylan, his manifestations arrayed like a group portrait on the
Biograph
track listings, was the only reality the artist could hope for in 1985. Nevertheless, the elegant box set had the effect of turning his life into a historical event even as he tried to live that life. His relationship with time had been altered by what was represented on some pieces of brittle plastic. He was historic and actual, present and gone, this artist with the invented name. Amidst it all, art was deserting him. Whatever else he thought about while he made a play for yet another woman at the Whitney reception – apparently a Susan Ross by name – he must have begun to wonder what would become of Bob Dylan if his writing failed once and for all, if there were no more songs. He had suffered the affliction before and called it ‘the amnesia’. In 1985, as the years piled up behind him, it must have resembled extinction.

Biograph
would do exactly as well as
Empire Burlesque
in the American charts, but reaching number 33 with a box set was vastly more impressive than pulling off the feat with a single album. Given that
Biograph
went for $30 a pop and involved no recording costs, the artist and his record company did far better out of the old Dylan than the new model. The compilation would also have a far longer shelf life than
Empire Burlesque
, an album whose reputation has not improved with time. Neither outcome counts as unfair to the works involved. Even granting all the usual fan arguments over what is and what is not represented by
Biograph
, it illuminates the sheer scale of Dylan’s achievement in 24 years. He was not far wrong when he claimed that he could have filled the box twice over with original but unreleased music. Not one of his contemporaries could have made the same claim. Columbia had not filled
Biograph
with every last scrap of detritus; anything but. The bulk of the material was familiar, but it set an entire career in a new context. The ‘previously unreleased’ songs served only as a reminder that there was a lot more to Dylan than his hits – the term is used loosely in his case – might have suggested. Others in the music industry whose self-regard would before long cause them to demand an equivalent testimonial had no such abundance of riches stored in the vaults.
Rolling Stone
’s reviewer would not be far wrong when he referred to the ‘mere ten sides’ contained in
Biograph
. Within the box, as the magazine’s Tim Holmes would say, was ‘incontrovertible evidence of a continuing explosion of genius’. No one had said that about
Empire Burlesque
. The single word in the
Rolling Stone
encomium inviting a quibble was ‘continuing’.

*

On the last day of January 1986, Dylan became a father again. Three days later he went back on tour. The simple facts are eloquent. He was by instinct a family man, but by nature a travelling musician. He loved children, but he was most content, or at his least vulnerable, out on the road. There is plenty of romanticised nonsense in the history of pop, blues, R&B and rock and roll to explain and justify the dichotomy, but Dylan has endured (and deserved) doses of disruptive truth at intervals during his career. As his life with Sara had shown, a faith in domesticity had conquered him more than once. He had surrendered willingly to the idea of a (mostly) normal life, one he had not experienced since childhood. But he had also accepted every promise implicit in the devil’s music and failed, time after time, to honour even the idea of fidelity. By the beginning of 1986 he was at the centre of multiple relationships. By that time, equally, the singer Carolyn Dennis, with whom he had resumed an affair, was about to have his sixth child. The little girl, named Desiree, would subsequently have the kind of ‘secret’ existence best understood by tabloid newspapers fond of seeing the word in 84 point sans bold. The only truly relevant fact is that parenthood had once intruded forcibly on Dylan’s public life and altered his behaviour. In 1986, mother and newborn child remained at home while he flew to New Zealand.
¹¹

It would be known as the True Confessions tour. The Farm Aid show had convinced Dylan that he, Tom Petty and Petty’s band were made for one another. That would turn out to be a matter of opinion. They had gone through the motions of rehearsals, but in reality they knocked the performances together by trial and error at the expense of paying customers. The first shows, in Wellington and Auckland, were dire; the opening night in Sydney, Australia, the first in a run of four concerts, might have passed as adequate if the artist had not been Bob Dylan. Rambling chatter to do with Jesus being ‘my hero’ was the new father’s only coherent statement on life as he understood it. A few nights later he was introducing his song for Lenny Bruce by talking about the playwright Tennessee Williams and misunderstood artists generally. In Melbourne on 20 February, Dylan said in a song introduction: ‘We’re in Lonesome Town, learning to forget. Sometimes you got to do that. God knows, there’s enough to remember.’

He could not have known or guessed, but that strange little aside might have passed for a premature epitaph for a friend. When the tour reached Japan, Dylan was informed that Richard Manuel had hanged himself with his belt in the early hours of 4 March in some lousy Florida motel after another lousy gig on the endless highway. The end had come after a performance in an ‘upscale’ joint called, of all things, the Cheek to Cheek Motel, but it had been a long time coming. Manuel had been drinking too much and doing too many bad drugs for too many years. The collapse of The Band after the
Last Waltz
movie had been his signal to subside, piece by broken piece, into incoherent misery. Long before the end, the sublime falsetto and the writing had been reduced to scrap. Dylan was entitled to remember the piano player and drummer who had provided the melody for ‘Tears of Rage’ back in Woodstock in 1967, but he kept any fury for the lost Band member to himself. There would be no onstage eulogies from the artist, just more chatter about Tennessee Williams. Manuel, born a lost soul, had in any case left no note. There had been nothing left to say. The shy man might have provided his own last words, in any case, on one overlooked song from The Band’s second album: ‘When you awake,’ it went, ‘you will remember everything.’ Sweet Richard had chosen to forget it all.