Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (67 page)

Instead, they were grateful to him. Clinton had disappointed liberals systematically, but middle America chose to see existence through the bright prism of the economy. Three weeks after the second inaugural the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed above 7,000 for the first time in its history. With a couple of blips along the way, it went on rising. In May 1997, unemployment fell below 5 per cent for the first time since 1973. To Bill Clinton’s 266,489,999 fellow Americans, such facts trumped any sexual impropriety. In that year, 81.7 per cent could declare that they had completed high school; 23.6 per cent had finished four years of college. They had 212 million motor vehicles and 192 million firearms between them, but possession of the latter, confined to 25 per cent of adults, was in decline. True, 13.8 per cent of Americans, fully 36.4 million souls, were still living below the poverty line, but the country had seen worse. Most had not seen better times since the 1960s. ‘Slick Willie’ Clinton, glib and grinning, soulful when required, solemn when the occasion demanded, happy to be all things to all the voters he could convince, was delivering.
¹⁶

Conservative loathing for the President of the United States would not abate. The more popular he grew, the more the right fumed and raved. It didn’t matter what the opinion polls said. One America, with one idea of the country’s nature and purpose, held the other in contempt. The feeling had been growing for a while. Before long the belief would become a cliché. Politically, culturally, socially, by geography and sometimes by ethnicity, the republic had become divided against itself. What one of his aides would call ‘the Clinton wars’ were the public expression of a deeper truth.
¹⁷
He was the symbol, the lightning rod, simultaneously a sworn enemy and the people’s champion.

In himself, this president was a kind of parable. The man from Hope, Arkansas – a town that might have been created for a campaign slogan – could seem like the embodiment of the old dream that encouraged every kid from a modest, difficult background to aim for the White House. In the right light, he could look like the last best hope (indeed) of ’60s liberalism. But he had a bad habit of betraying those who believed in him most. Morally, his outlines were as blurred as a silvery fog. Personally and politically, he was a mass of contradictions, both idealistic and cynically expedient, inspirational and capable of producing a deep disillusionment.

Even the apple of prosperity Clinton gave to the American people had a worm at its heart. A lot of cheap, dangerous credit had bought his popularity. When in November 1999 his signature brought an end to the Glass–Steagall Act that had hindered banks from playing roulette with depositors’ money, consequences followed. One was the near collapse in 2008 of the entire banking system, with it the economy of the western world. Clinton achieved federal budget surpluses, it is true, but private individuals were borrowing all they could and spending all they could. When the banks were ‘liberated’, with his enthusiastic support, a disaster was set in train. Like the president’s affairs, the ’90s were only good while they lasted.

It was an apt moment, whether he realised it or not, for Dylan to have his mind filled with the music of the 1920s and 1930s. The truth about what was to befall America in the twenty-first century could be found, had anyone bothered to wonder at the end of the ’90s, in those bygone eras. That music was the story of how the people had behaved in hard times.

*

Dylan didn’t pause for long after finishing his album. By the second week in February 1997 he was back on tour for a round of concerts in Japan. Unless you have an unnatural taste for endless lists of the which-songs-were-played-where variety, the narrative for this and most of the following few years becomes predictable, not to say tedious. The known story of a life involves some public events, some private matters, an interview here and there and the wait, generally a long one, for an album of new work while Dylan toured on and ever on. In 1997, his shows would scarcely differ in format or style from the shows of 1996. Even after recovering from his encounter with histoplasmosis Dylan would sometimes seem exhausted on stage – during several concerts in August he was forced to sit down between songs – but nothing, so it seemed, would keep him from girdling the planet to play his shows.

Back in the real world, his contemporaries were disappearing, one by one. By default, and by dint of sheer, stubborn perseverance, a 56-year-old Dylan was becoming a grand old man. He was to issue a lot of brief obituaries and sing numerous songs in tribute to the dead in 1997 and in the years after. The pop world he had transformed a generation before had made a virtue of transience, of always moving on, of forever discarding its brief past for the sake of an alluring, insistent future. By the ’90s, the remaining pioneers, hucksters, wounded saints and one-hit wonders of the 1960s were discovering what transient really means. Richard Manuel and Jerry Garcia had already quit the field. On 5 April another private matter intruded when Dylan was told that Allen Ginsberg had died at his home in Greenwich Village of liver cancer and its complications.

Perhaps America’s bravest post-war poet, if not its best, the older man had managed to be both besotted with Dylan and one of the most alert, dispassionate observers of the Dylan phenomenon. Ginsberg had been a profound inspiration for the artist long before their first meeting at a party above a Village bookshop late in December 1963. At minimum, much of what Dylan wrote in the mid-1960s would have been very different had he never read
Howl
and
Kaddish
. Not many hours after Ginsberg’s death, the set list for a concert in Moncton, New Brunswick, was altered. That night, Dylan performed ‘Desolation Row’. After it was done, he told the audience: ‘A friend of mine passed away, I guess this morning. That was one of his favourite songs. Poet, Allen Ginsberg.’

Unlike others, that poet had never lost his faith in the possibility of radical change. He had been carried away, ecstatically so, by what he supposed to be the mind-altering epochal significance of the Rolling Thunder Revue. For all his nonsense, Ginsberg had never surrendered his devout belief that Dylan was a revolutionary force. There had been a reason, equally, why the poet had been given the role of ‘The Father’ in
Renaldo and Clara.
As to art, Ginsberg saw in Dylan the embodiment of what he called ‘poetry-music’, the essence of each recombined in a way that was both ancient and modern. There was an irony in the fact that one man had personified the counter-culture even as the other was rejecting its grandiose claims and messy thinking, but that had never tainted their friendship. The artist had owed a lot to Ginsberg.

With his Buddhist friend gone, Dylan added another creed to his collection by making an appearance at Italy’s 23rd National Eucharist Congress in Bologna on 27 September, three days before
Time Out of Mind
was released. The event was a Catholic ‘youth festival’ involving two less-than-youthful men and some 300,000 young Italians. Pope John Paul II oversaw events from a throne above the stage, or rather called the shots (though apparently half-asleep for much of the time), while a nervous-looking Dylan offered up ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. Then the artist climbed the staircase, removed his cowboy hat, kissed the pope’s ring and exchanged a few private words, prophet to pontiff. Finally, John Paul did as all good pastors must and took ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, that most ambiguous of songs, as the basis for an unambiguous sermon. The pope said to Italy’s young Catholics: ‘You asked me: how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? I answer you: just one. One only.’ You get the gist. Then Dylan finished up with ‘Forever Young’.

There are only two possible explanations for his motives in accepting the engagement. They are not mutually contradictory; quite the reverse. One is that Dylan was not entertaining a dozing pontiff as a charitable gesture. By all accounts, a fee of several hundred thousand dollars was secured from those arranging the show for all those Italian kids. A second explanation is that it did not trouble Dylan in the slightest to sing for a pope who took a dim view of contraception, abortion, gay marriage, left-wing priests and several other things of this world. It is worth mentioning, however, that John Paul had established formal relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel just four years before the Bologna congress. For Dylan, that might have counted for something. Whatever the reasons, this strangest of all his performances was another reminder that any naive souls still hankering after the subversive, mercurial and politically progressive artist of years long gone needed to reset their preconceptions once and for all.

In London, a week later, he would tell
Mojo
magazine that Bologna had been a ‘great show’. Asked if he was involved in ‘world affairs’, however, Dylan would once again reply, ‘No, I can’t really say that I am.’ Despite histoplasmosis, he was about to face a final run of 32 American dates in a concert schedule that would total 94 performances by the time 1997 was done. In the year ahead, Dylan would surpass even his accountants’ expectations by fulfilling no fewer than 110 engagements across the planet. Yet in talking to journalists he persisted in giving the impression that none of it had much to do with him, or with his wishes. If this was a man bent upon perpetual art-in-performance, he seemed to have no good idea of what his motives might be. Not for the first time or the last, his remarks gave credence to the suspicion that the grand artistic ritual of the alleged tour without end had become aimless, a tedious commercial venture. As he sometimes liked to claim, it was just a job.

I don’t know why people talk about never-ending, because I don’t really consider myself on tour. We just go out and play a certain amount of shows every year, so it isn’t really a tour. It could stop any time. Part of me doesn’t want to do it all. Part of me would just like to be done with it all.
¹⁸

Roughly a year earlier he had been nominated, finally, for the Nobel Prize in Literature due to be awarded in 1997. Though Dylan laughed off the whole idea when any journalist asked for his reaction, even pretending to be ignorant of what the Nobel signified, it was the beginning of a contest over the nature of literary art that would persist (with ample opportunity for laughter) into the twenty-first century. Allen Ginsberg, stalwart as ever, had written in support of the claim being made on Dylan’s behalf, calling him ‘a major American Bard & minstrel of the XX Century, whose words have influenced many generations throughout the world’. The artist deserved his Nobel, according to Ginsberg, ‘in recognition of his mighty and universal powers’. Professor Gordon Ball had made the formal nomination, stating: ‘In our modern era Bob Dylan has returned poetry to its primordial transmission by human breath and body … in his musical verse he has revived the traditions of bard, minstrel, and troubadour.’
¹⁹

Nice try. The 1997 prize went instead to the Italian playwright Dario Fo. He was not a popular choice among
littérateurs
, ironically enough, because the keepers of high culture regarded him as a performance artist rather than a real writer. The Nobel committee recognised this difficulty in their press release announcing the award. It was full of high-flown verbiage about ‘texts’ that were ‘always open for creative additions and dislocations, continually encouraging the actors to improvise, which means that the audience is activated in a remarkable way’. Dylan’s better-read fans could and would take encouragement from that. A playwright whose work depended on performance rather than the printed page? Surely one more obstacle to their candidate’s elevation had been removed.

It might seem like a neat if inadvertent touch, meanwhile, to have had the nomination go forward when finally there was a Dylan album capable of backing up the claims being made for his art. In reality,
Time Out of Mind
arrived in the stores just a week before the Nobel selectors announced their winner on 7 October. There is therefore the grisly if entertaining possibility that a bunch of nonplussed eminent Swedes believed they were being asked to judge the creator of
Knocked Out Loaded
and
Down in the Groove.
In any case, Dylan’s backers hadn’t thought the problem through. Understandably, they took it for granted that everyone had heard of, and heard, their candidate. He is certainly well-respected in Scandinavia, where English-speakers are commonplace. But what was the committee being asked to judge? Printed lyrics in place of their sacred ‘texts’? A group of recordings containing things that sucked along with things that were sublime? And where stood the vaunted Dylan of evolving live performance whose audience ‘is activated in a remarkable way’ (on a good night)?

The persistent belief that the artist’s never-ending candidacy is the victim of snobbery and prejudice towards popular culture, not to mention towards Americans, is probably well founded. Other factors should not be ignored. It is less a question of whether purblind Swedish professors can understand Dylan’s work than of explaining what it is they are being asked to understand. Plenty of reluctant witnesses to his career have had that problem down the years. Calling him an artist is easy. Stating the nature of the art is a trickier task. Ginsberg’s ‘poetry-music’ had been a good stab at a definition, but it was not a complete description.

In January 1998, Dylan did a few shows with Van Morrison. In February, he dispatched another note of condolence and praise, this time to a funeral mass in Jackson, Tennessee. Carl Perkins, peer to Elvis, writer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, had died of throat cancer, aged just 65. Dylan’s note read: ‘He really stood for freedom. That whole sound stood for all degrees of freedom. It would just jump off the turntable. We wanted to go where that was happening.’ If there is an art to writing such things, Dylan was becoming adept.

March found him in South America, taking the money (presumably very good money) and swallowing whatever pride was involved in serving as an opening act for the Rolling Stones. In May, as though to prove that finding a new, younger audience was not at all times his priority, he was performing concerts jointly with Joni Mitchell. That month he also found another set of fine and sincere words for the recently deceased Frank Sinatra. None of this activity was of any real significance. As in the aftermath of
Oh Mercy
, Dylan seemed already to have decided that a creative renaissance could wait. Room had been found in his concerts for songs from
Time Out of Mind
, but if he was eager to write more, he showed no urgent sign of desire. Patently, making albums was an afterthought.