Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (62 page)

He has no voting privileges, even if we agree on who ‘he’ might think he is. The audience will have their own ideas, based on their own experiences, of what is taking place and what it might mean (especially if they have trouble making out the words). The insight can be refined to serve the claim that Bob Dylan, in numerous manifestations, is merely a ‘text’ to be interpreted through an understanding of what might be going on during performances. Both meaning and identity, say the fruits of one low-hanging branch of critical theory, are neither fixed – given the subject, this is handy indeed – nor stable phenomena. Jacques Derrida, the loquacious French ‘post-structuralist’ philosopher, has a lot to answer for, in short (but you can take him at his theoretical word that any written remark of his is not to be trusted).
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No matter. This version of chatter became fashionable among those who wrote about Dylan, by no coincidence, at a time when he was doing a lot of touring and no writing worth the name. He and his never-ending performance schedule suited interlocking postmodernist theories only too well. Biographical approaches, the treatment of songs as literary objects, the artist’s intent: these could be rejected or denied ‘authority’. If ‘Bob Dylan’ had no fixed identity and persisted in ‘reinterpreting’ his songs out of all recognition, what remained but performed art, forever mutable, forever in flux? As Michael Gray wrote, perhaps a little wearily, a quaint notion of ‘anti-text’, as it might be called, ‘has become the main cliché of Dylanology in the 1980s and 1990s … Dylan’s constant “reinterpretation” of his work in performance is insisted upon as showing – and actually as itself
arguing –
that there is no finished text of any individual song.’
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Gray’s fatigue, if such it was, is understandable. As a matter of mere biographical fact, Dylan doesn’t ‘reinterpret’ his songs
constantly
. Often enough, you wish he would, but he denies doing any such thing and he’s right. He has sometimes revised his lyrics, as poets do, and more often tried to freshen up his musical arrangements, as musicians will. He has expressed dissatisfaction with his albums and on occasion has described his recorded songs as ‘blueprints’.
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His attempts to improve on the originals are therefore unsurprising. In any case, he was never one to attempt to reproduce a recording. That’s traditional, and no big deal.

To state the obvious, you cannot ‘reinterpret’ anything unless there is a text prepared for reinterpretation. In Dylan’s case, that will be found on an album somewhere. It is original, fixed (remixing aside) and enduring. The same argument applies to the rejection of biographical approaches and to the claim, useful to certain kinds of critic, that authorship is mostly incidental to art. The problems of biography are familiar and ancient. Facts are slippery, people lie, impressions conflict, memories fade, witnesses are unreliable, most interpretations differ, editorial choices are made: and so what? To leap from these self-evident truths to the claim that any description of a life is irrelevant to a piece of art neglects the obvious:
someone
did the work, at a certain place, under certain circumstances, for certain reasons. Life, as a song would soon enough mention, is hard.

The attempt to relegate reality to footnotes can have some amusing consequences. So it is that in a truly illuminating book, Lee Marshall’s
Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star
(2007), you can find a consideration of the biographical approach and why it has been rejected by certain writers, followed by this statement: ‘Dylan himself has criticised those who offer biographical readings of his songs.’
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Who has done this criticising? What do we know about this critic and why should it matter? You could repeat the questions when the issue of the author and his irrelevant intentions is raised. You could return to the table and lay down a couple of chips when the claim is made that meaning and identity are never ‘stable’. Dylan’s identities – not roles, not masks, not aliases – have come and gone throughout his life. So much is true and such has been his abiding problem. That has nothing to do with meaning. Meaning remains available.

The belief that concerts without end offer the only authentic insights into Dylan’s art has also led to assaults on anyone who spends time treating the songs as literary works. Granted, the lit-crit approach has its problems. It gets bogged down, inevitably, in spurious debates over whether a songwriter who sings his works and messes around with text and delivery can be a poet. (The better question is to ask what poetry is made of and where the argument lies.) But the rebuttal remains: in the beginning, there was a piece of work, written down, revised and rewritten before it was performed.
Someone
made
that
. Once the song was recorded it became a text, with an author who was not ‘privileged’ but still, you can be sure, picking up an author’s royalties. Even the endless arguments over ‘folk process’ do not alter the truth that a person who calls himself Bob Dylan makes Bob Dylan songs before any of the art-in-performance can even begin.

Sometimes the performances have been vile: there’s that small detail. If the artist on occasion disdains to play in the same key as his musicians, critical theory might be superfluous. Naturally, tour devotees have their answers ready. Marshall writes, disarmingly, that ‘Fans of the N.E.T. do not attend multiple shows because the performances are consistently magnificent’. Instead, these tours ‘create an environment in which special moments can occur’.
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Those ‘outside of the N.E.T. cocoon’ – a revealing word – might not grasp the logic of this, but once you escape ‘the tyranny of recording’ things become easier. So the recorded songs that drew people to Dylan in the first place become secondary to the communal experience of those inside the cocoon. On a good night.

A bystander might wonder how Dylan gets away with this. A truly thoughtful bystander might then wonder why it is that Dylan, alone among performers, gets away with selling tickets, decade after decade, to a coterie that does not expect him necessarily to be any good. The sheer weight of intellectual effort to understand his work and career has something to do with it, no doubt. The apparent artistic worth of songs whose authorship is, apparently, scarcely important might be another factor. But as Michael Gray has also observed, ‘never-ending-text theory’ can be damned convenient for a writer who is blocked solid.
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Such was Dylan’s chronic condition for most of the 1990s. What’s fascinating, as a banal biographical detail, is that he persisted with his never-ending tours even as his literary gifts returned, as time and age encroached, as his shredded voice made a nightly mockery of his poetry – an irony rendered as performance art, then – and as his relationship with history, his own history and the history of his country, was altered.

In 1995, Dylan put on 116 shows in Europe and America. In 1996, he roused himself for just 84 concerts. One of those, for which the press received no invites, was staged in an improvised ‘nightclub’ created within the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of February ’96. The writer who thought up a famous line about money preferring expletives to straight talk performed at the Biltmore, in a voice without complaint, before 250 of the guests of Nomura Securities International Inc., the American arm of a transnational high in the empyrean of international finance. Clearly, an author’s intentions had no bearing on any art created that night. For those who trade in financial instruments, it was a $300,000 expense. He opened with ‘Jokerman’.

*

Far from the realms of redundant theory, Dylan was making crateloads of money. Howard Sounes arrives at the slightly improbable gross figure of $35 million as the artist’s annual earnings from his tours in the mid-’90s, implying $350,000 nightly and every show a sell-out, but the point stands.
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Even after the crew, the bodyguards, the dependants, the musicians, the functionaries, the management, the accountants, the promoters, the motels, the taxes, the office staff, the transport, the broken guitar strings and all of Mr Dylan’s domestic utility bills had been accounted for, a lot remained. Much of that was earmarked, it seems, for a property portfolio that by mid-1998 would embrace 17 ‘substantial’ pieces of real estate around the world.
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The artist had begun to seem avid for what his brand could earn.

In October 1996, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ could be heard advertising a Canadian internet bank. In the years to come corporate offers – for the benefit of Apple Inc., for Victoria’s Secret lingerie, for the Cadillac Escalade ‘luxury sport utility vehicle’ – would not be resisted. ‘The Times’ had already been sold off once, early in 1994, to the tax-efficient accountants at Coopers & Lybrand for the purposes of company self-congratulation before Bank of Montreal was given its bite of the ethical cherry. Perhaps this was Dylan’s idea of subversive social comment. Perhaps he was confirming the death of the author, as demanded by semiotic theory. Or perhaps he just wanted the money. What can be said for certain is that he more closely resembled the CEO of a multimedia enterprise than the person who in 1985 had told Cameron Crowe that rock music had become ‘a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing’.

You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so and Maxwell House Coffee must be OK because Ray Charles is singing about it. Everybody’s singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something. In the beginning it wasn’t anything like that, had nothing to do with pantyhose and perfume and barbecue sauce …
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Later in the interview, Dylan had told the journalist: ‘I’m not selling breakfast cereal, or razor blades or whatever.’ In 2009, nevertheless, he would sell a brutally mashed-up version of his heartfelt song ‘Forever Young’ not to Coke but to Pepsi – slogan: ‘Every generation refreshes the world’ – for a Superbowl half-time advertising spot. Things go better, it transpires, with Bob.

The biographical approach, lacking rigour, allows for ideas such as presentiment. On 19 November 1995, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Dylan could be found singing ‘Restless Farewell’, a song he had not performed in public since 1964. The number was a request. The person doing the requesting, so it is said, was Frank Sinatra himself on the occasion of a ‘star-studded’ 80th birthday event in the great singer’s honour. His knowledge of Dylan’s back catalogue had not been noted previously.

The artist, on the other hand, had always admired Sinatra, Bing Crosby, the late Presley and the rest of the old-style crooners and balladeers who could always hit all the notes. At the Shrine, Dylan sang sincerely and well. He finished up with an infinitely modest and infinitely deferential ‘Happy birthday, Mr Frank!’

So one possible future was glimpsed, perhaps, by the artist who had once written ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. The way things were going, he too was destined to wind up inside the museum, a national treasure, while his posterity went on trial. Dylan was at risk of becoming the author of his own obituary as, unstoppably, the years slipped away.

ACUTE PULMONARY HISTOPLASMOSIS IS ABOUT AS MUCH FUN AS IT
sounds. Europeans don’t often run the risk of acquiring the ailment, but in parts of America, especially around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the fungal histoplasmosis infection is common enough, generally because of bird or bat droppings in the soil and the microscopic spores the crap generates. Inhale the spores and you might get sick. If you are unlucky, you might get very sick. Dylan was unlucky.

After he was hospitalised on 25 May 1997, the severity of his illness was explained by a delay in the diagnosis. That’s entirely possible. He had complained of chest pains and inadvertently set running the tale that a heart attack had occurred. Instead, struggling for breath, he was enduring pericarditis, a painful swelling of the fibrous sac around the organ. Since a formal diagnosis of histoplasmosis can often take weeks, during which the fungus is cultured in the lab, the delay wasn’t necessarily surprising. If properly treated with antibiotics, the infection is rarely fatal, but what soon became known as Dylan’s ‘brush with death’ was unusually nasty.
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Histoplasmosis ‘ranges from the totally asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness through acute and chronic pulmonary forms’ to (it says here) ‘a severe disseminated involvement primarily of the reticuloendothelial system [by which foreign particles are otherwise cleared from the blood] which may spread to the heart, central nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, and other organs’.
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In plain language, while most people have no symptoms, or very mild symptoms, Dylan was at the upper end of the unpleasantness scale. Pericarditis in such cases tends to afflict the very young, the elderly, or those who have a compromised immune system. The artist had just turned 56 when he was hospitalised in Los Angeles. He was no kid, but hardly ancient. He was released after just a week, though concerts scheduled for Britain, Ireland and Switzerland in June were cancelled. Yet even by August, when he had returned to touring in the United States, the Dylan who spoke to Edna Gundersen of
USA Today
was not exactly back to his old self.

I’m doing as good as I can under the circumstances. I’m still taking medication three times a day. Sometimes it makes me a little light-headed and dizzy. And I need to sleep a lot. I did get the doctor’s OK to do this tour. I guess I’ll make it through … I don’t have the energy I usually have, so I have to save it all to perform. Outside of that, I’m doing as well as I can.
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Dylan also admitted that he had been off his feet for six weeks, barely able even to walk. ‘When I got out of the hospital, I could hardly walk around my yard,’ he told Gundersen. ‘I had to stay in bed and sleep all the time. I guess it’s a slow process of recuperation.’ Clearly, it had been no minor affliction. At another moment in the interview, Dylan told the journalist that the sheer pain of pericarditis ‘stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out.’ Given such consequences, you wouldn’t wish a delayed diagnosis on anyone. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to wonder about the shape Dylan’s immune system was in before he fell sick. Constrictive pericarditis, it seems, is usually a complication of viral infections, less frequently of influenza, rheumatic fever, HIV or tuberculosis. Even for the experts, reasons can be hard to name. Dylan’s brief statement on leaving hospital had made a lot of people smile, but caused a few to wonder. ‘I’m just glad to be feeling better,’ he had said. ‘I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.’