Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (59 page)

The America he traversed in the early 1990s had decided to remain conservative. The Iran-Contra scandal, the fascinating tale of the Reagan White House flogging missiles to Iranian hostage-takers in order to fund murderous Nicaraguan insurgents, had not harmed the Republican cause in the slightest during the 1988 election. Barely half the electorate had bothered to vote, but George H.W. Bush had still put the Democrats and his opponent, Michael Dukakis, to disorderly flight. By 1990, some 15 per cent of Americans were still failing to graduate from high school, yet that was exactly the percentage of their fellow citizens who had been smitten by ‘home computing’. An alliterative mouthful, the World Wide Web, was about to go public while conservative commentators fretted over porn, public morality and the subversive habit they called political correctness. Inspired by Robert Bly’s book
Iron John
a few stout men were off in the woods hunting for masculinity while a few others were being handcuffed for crimes committed in the Wall Street undergrowth. In Iraq, a place that could be found on most maps, a former American ally named Saddam Hussein would spend the summer of 1990 preparing to invade a kingdom built on oilfields called Kuwait. The United States had not been in a real war for a while.

In 1990 and 1991, nevertheless, a Bob Dylan fan was plotting to remove Bush from the Oval Office. The connection between Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and the old New Left as the artist once had known it was remote, by no accident, but a lot of things had changed. The breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had seen the Soviet regime begin to unravel like a threadbare banner. On the day after Christmas in 1991 the USSR would be gone, formally and for good. Republicans would claim most of the credit on Reagan’s behalf, and even allow a little of it to Bush, but at first they would fail to notice that much of their self-declared purpose and a lot of their rabble-rousing opportunities had disappeared with the Russian reds. A short war over Kuwait had done Bush’s opinion-poll ratings a power of good in the early part of 1991, but suddenly the ground was shifting, all but unnoticed, under Republican feet. If there was no longer a need to fear the nuclear war that had sometimes seemed inevitable when Reagan was in charge, what need was there for a war party addicted to defence spending? Political territory that had seemed secure for conservatives was put at risk while the evil empire folded and the economy struggled. A Democrat who represented youth, change, hope and other non-specific virtues while tending to the concerns of middle America might be in with a shout: such was Clinton’s insight, even if his own party needed a lot of convincing.

This candidate was certainly young enough. Dylan’s junior by five years, Clinton was the first presidential contender in the artist’s career who did not regard him as the perplexing voice of a coming generation. In 1991, Dylan would be 50, no one’s idea of the voice of youth, rebellious or otherwise. Yet what was Clinton if not proudly, even aggressively youthful, though ‘moderate’ in all things (save his sexual behaviour)? He could command a stage and inspire a crowd as well as any famous singer. Clinton was, after all, a performer first and last. He had a genius for it. He also knew what he was talking about, down to the last abstruse detail, but he could speak as though talking personally to each and every member of an audience. The candidate had charisma, ‘voice of a generation’ charisma.

Against this master politician planted firmly on the centre ground a new strain of conservatism was beginning to organise even as Bush luxuriated in his poll ratings after the first Gulf war. Right-wingers of this variety hated Clinton’s guts. They hated him most of all simply because he was brilliant. Their loathing became frantic when it became obvious in the summer of 1992 that this Democrat was dangerous, that he could win and go on winning. Conservatives turned on Bush, the traitor in the Oval Office with his effete talk of common ground, but their real impulse was a fear of losing power. The ’80s had been a good time to be rich and right wing. That was – wasn’t it? – the American way of life, to be defended at all costs. Clinton was no more left wing than he was celibate, of course, but that didn’t matter. There was the risk that he would preside over the return of ungodly liberalism if his party gained control of the government. While Dylan turned the corner into middle age, old battle lines were being redrawn. A fact was rapidly becoming a cliché. Amid Clinton’s victories in the 1990s the country would divide evenly and, it seemed, beyond hope of reconciliation into the so-called 50–50 nation. Where would an artist stand in that kind of American landscape? Dylan the songwriter would be silent for years on end, as though lost in a fog, but reality would find him in the end. The present, as he would realise, begins in the past.

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Those who track the artist’s activities have a job on their hands when they list, tabulate, annotate, adumbrate and otherwise pore over the first half of the ’90s. Unless you have the philosophical serenity of a data-entry clerk, it must be tedious work. Tour after tour after tour, musician following musician, one-night stand following one-night stand in city after city, country after country: the bare historical facts of places and dates are not, of themselves, enthralling. Whatever the level of art created, the statistical record of the unending tour is the opposite of fascinating reading. Eleven musicians were on retainers from Dylan between the summer of 1988 and the autumn of 1992. Some of them were crucial to his performances; not one played a significant role in his life. He worked almost ceaselessly. It left the rest of his existence all but empty of incident.

In August 1990, his marriage to Carolyn Dennis had ended. Since the final dissolution in 1992 she has barely said a word about the relationship and nothing about the reasons for the split. In 2001, provoked finally by revelations in the Howard Sounes biography
Down the Highway
that a child had been born and a wedding had taken place, Dennis did release a brief statement. Plainly unhappy that her privacy had been breached, she said: ‘To portray Bob as hiding his daughter is just malicious and ridiculous. That is something he would never do. Bob has been a wonderful, active father to Desiree.’ Dennis went on to explain that she and Dylan had taken advantage of a California law that allowed them to seal their marriage certificate from public scrutiny. ‘Bob and I made a choice,’ the singer said, ‘to keep our marriage a private matter for a simple reason – to give our daughter a normal childhood.’ Finally, in an attempt to kill off a persistent piece of speculation over Dylan’s motives for his ceaseless travels, Dennis added: ‘To say I got a huge settlement that forced Bob to do concert tours is fictitious, irresponsible and hurtful.’

In the first three years of the 1990s he put on an average of 95 shows annually during those tours, taking his music to all corners of North America, to Europe, to Central and South America, and to Oceania. It didn’t leave much time for a marriage, or for anything else. For most of the period there was room only for bad habits and peculiar incidents. In February 1991, for example, the organisers of the Grammy Awards had the actor Jack Nicholson present Dylan with one of those obituaries disguised as a ‘lifetime achievement’ prize at a ceremony in New York. First he sang ‘Masters of War’ very badly just as American troops were preparing to retake Kuwait. Then he gave a strange, halting little acceptance speech to the audience at Radio City Music Hall. ‘My daddy,’ Dylan said, ‘he didn’t leave me too much.’

You know, he was a very simple man and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he told me was this … [Here Dylan allowed himself a lengthy pause while some in the crowd laughed.] He said, ‘You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.’

It was the statement of a man who considered himself to be a Jew: Dylan was paraphrasing a passage from a nineteenth-century rabbinical text.
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It was no joke, either; despite the laughter of a puzzled audience, he didn’t joke about his father or rabbinical texts. Why he would also have considered himself to be ‘defiled’ is, however, as puzzling as his reasons for sharing his guilt with an audience full of rich, sleek and bewildered music-industry types. Perhaps a reported case of flu had left him in poor spirits. Equally, it might be that spirits of another sort had given him an existential hangover.

Life on the road was hardly likely to have rendered Dylan pure in body and mind. The shows he had given just days before in Scotland, Ireland and in London had left even hardcore fans shocked by his demeanour and his grisly performances. Reviewers were writing openly that the star appeared to be drunk. In the
Guardian
, Michael Gray had observed that at the start of the first show in Glasgow Dylan ‘shuffled onstage wearing a tartan jacket and looking like he’d had a drink’.
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Another who was there would report that the next night’s burlesque was no more reassuring. The artist ‘certainly seemed to be the worse for alcohol at the second Glasgow show, dropping his guitar a couple of times and wandering off stage during “Positively 4th Street”, leaving his astonished band to continue without him’.
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These were not isolated incidents. All the credibility Dylan had accumulated with his return to touring was being dissipated by a drunk and an unrehearsed group of confused musicians who were sometimes worse while sober than the boss deep in his cups. In London, people walked out. Those who stuck around, real fans almost by definition, had the disconcerting (not to say unsatisfactory) experience of being unable to recognise the songs Dylan thought he was singing. The Grammy Awards audience reported the same technical difficulty. These were not ‘creative reworkings’, not deliberate attempts to reawaken interest in familiar pieces by demolishing preconceptions. These were atrocities.

If there was anything to the claim that this artist defined himself in performance, that his real art was the product of the concert stage, both the singer and the songs were being defiled. Had the story ended there, as many thought it might, Dylan would be remembered as just another superstar casualty in the Elvis Presley memorial ward. As it was, Joe Queenan, writing in
Spy
magazine, would describe the figure who appeared at the televised Grammy awards.

If any of the tens of millions watching had not already realised that Bob Dylan, poet, wit, heart-rending vocalist, hipster, scourge, had turned into Bob Dylan, somewhat pathetic kook – well, now they knew.
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So he felt ‘defiled’. So the question becomes: why carry on disgusting and destroying himself? In his book, Sounes asserts that Dylan was in need of cash because of his divorce. His recent albums had certainly sold badly and he had nothing new, nor even the hope of something new, to offer Columbia. It makes no sense, however, to believe that an individual with Dylan’s instinct for survival would annihilate himself in public once and for all. He had a precious asset, in any case. That he allowed the asset to be exploited just at the moment he was supposedly in dire need is probably an encouragement to cynics, but a few facts are worth bearing in mind. One is that the reports of drunkenness sound nothing like a superstar’s decadence. Alcohol might have crept up on Dylan, but the worst of his behaviour coincided with the aftermath of a divorce and the misery that tends to accompany such an event. He wasn’t in a mess because he was on the road. He was in a mess when he happened to be on the road. Second, even if he allowed Columbia to issue choice parts of his back catalogue at an opportune moment, he wasn’t quite out of a job as a performer. He didn’t quit that job, either, even when all his previous Bob Dylans were supplying the record company with revenue and his alimony had long been covered. Drunk or sober, Dylan wasn’t forced out onto the road.

The next premature obituary arrived, in any case, around a month after the weird affair at Radio City Music Hall. It was welcomed by all save a rueful few capable of making comparisons between the Dylan who had stumbled insensibly around British concert stages and the writer represented by
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991
. The worst that could be said of the compendium was that it laboured under a title better suited to a dusty manuscript folio hidden in library stacks than to one of the great achievements in modern art. Bootleg collectors deprived of their bragging rights would quibble, of course, over the choices made. Many fans would meanwhile wonder about the implicit comment made by this box set on the status of
Blood on the Tracks
and
Infidels
. Finally listeners were given the chance to encounter ‘Blind Willie McTell’, or to hear a drastically different account of ‘Idiot Wind’, but that only deepened the mystery of the original albums. There would be frustration, too, that despite the appearance at long last of ‘I Shall Be Released’, the basement tapes were still being denied proper representation. The 58 tracks did not tell the whole story about any period in Dylan’s career. The story they did tell, one only hinted at by the
Biograph
release, was a tale of startling, enduring achievement that dwarfed
Down in the Groove
and
Under the Red Sky
. In fact, it made them look ridiculous.

That might have played on Dylan’s mind, whether he needed the money or not, while the box set was in preparation. On the one hand,
Volumes 1–3
was testimony to 30 years of matchless work. No songwriter of Dylan’s or any generation ran it close. On the other hand, this piece of the historical record stopped, much as he had stopped, in 1989, with a debatable remix of the marvellous ‘Series of Dreams’. Even if he had thought to extend this collection, what could he have offered to represent the rest of his labours in the 1980s and 1990s? A ‘Brownsville Girl’, a ‘Born in Time’, or a ‘Handy Dandy’? Add all those and a few others together and you would have a fine album. Count it as the fruits of better than a decade, without the malformed
Infidels
and the botched
Oh Mercy
, and it looks like slim pickings. Besides, in March 1991 the 58 tracks on the box set only served to remind Dylan and the world that he had ceased to write anything at all. He showed no signs of resuming the old, addictive habit. Talking to Paul Zollo in April, he would not mention
Volumes 1–3
. Sounding wistful, the artist would say, however, ‘It’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.’
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