Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (69 page)

The book itself, Eric Lott’s
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(1993), is a sophisticated analysis of the cultural transactions down the decades between African Americans and a white world. It does not for an instant deny the thefts from black artists that have formed the basis of much of white American culture, but it spends a great deal of time unravelling the complicated impulses in its title’s first word. Dylan knew all about that. His joke, a sly and brilliant joke, was to acknowledge everything, all the music that had made him, by stealing the very name of Lott’s book. For some of his most dogged pursuers that wouldn’t do. To them it would seem like a fancy, postmodern excuse for plagiarism and a piece of misdirection to boot. In their indictment, Dylan was admitting to a lesser crime in order to conceal truly heinous offences.

If you knew none of this,
‘Love and Theft’
could give many years of unalloyed pleasure. If you knew it all, down to every last musical ‘quotation’ and lyrical ‘allusion’, would it matter? Those who can’t grasp why this is one of Dylan’s finest albums, who have quaint ideas about originality and imagine that literary art must function like a variety of (respectable) journalism, miss not only the pleasure of the thing, but fail to see how Dylan’s ‘plagiarism’ functions within his larger purpose. If part of your aim is to examine and revivify your country’s history, what else would you bring to bear if not historical materials? If, meanwhile, you come to terms with the idea of found art and the resetting of found materials for poetic effect, the charge of plagiarism is almost puerile. In Dylan’s method things old and new echo within the landscape created, as they do in memory, as they do in the real world of which we hear so much. Things overlap and interconnect, change meaning in juxtaposition, acquire a significance they would not otherwise possess. When Dylan does it, some pretty good tracks also become available.

Take the following verse from ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. Is it possible, do you think, that Dylan stole those two characters? Never mind. Assiduous textual detectives, those who seem to believe that all true art is entirely pristine and wholly original, would track the first pair of lines to a Civil War poet called Timrod. The lit dicks would not make quite as much fuss over the second pair, or explain how those lines function in relation to the lines that precede them.

Some lines are borrowed, but the result is wholly original. Robert Burns pulled this trick time and again. Elsewhere Dylan might quote F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Gatsby
– nothing minor, just the unmissable ‘You can’t repeat the past’ – or a Japanese memoir. In ‘Lonesome Day Blues’, for one example, there’s a big portion of Mark Twain. There are jokes, too, from the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Conceivably, there are also classical allusions. But then, the classics themselves are stuffed with allusions. In this variety of critical argument, a big point is being missed.

To get the sound he wanted, finally, the artist – ‘Jack Frost’, for his purposes – produced the album himself. The sound he secured is the first and most obvious clue to the relationship between
‘Love and Theft’
and American history. Dylan had indeed moved forward by turning back the clock. Using his touring band for the first time – having grasped finally that people who played with him every other night knew his little ways better than any expensive session crew – the album resembled an aural scrapbook of the pre-history of pop. Its reference points were the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. None of the songs shout masterpiece; that wasn’t the point. In an odd way, the album was all the better for it. Dylan’s greatest works, the big songs, have a habit of diminishing everything around them. With
‘Love and Theft’
the listener is granted an
apparently
relaxed, sunny suite of songs in the vernacular, full of little jokes – some even have punchlines – and eccentricities. This is one of those rare things, a loveable Dylan album.

The loose (very loose) literary equivalent to Dylan’s structural method might be William Faulkner’s tales of Yoknapatawpha County. The songs are not interlinked, not explicitly, but journey almost from scene to scene. Even the darker pieces are somehow smoothed out to fit the overall pattern. So the great ‘Mississippi’ is revived, but here it sounds nothing like the versions attempted for
Time Out of Mind.
With
‘Love and Theft’
Dylan also finds a style that suits his ever-diminishing voice. The 60-year-old sounds even older, in places, than his age should allow. At all times he sounds as though his first album in the twenty-first century is being broadcast from some Alabama radio station in the late 1940s with Hank Williams and Bukka White hanging around outside.

As observed,
‘Love and Theft’
is saturated in ‘influences’. There’s plenty of blues, some of it so familiar and obvious Dylan was all but pleading with listeners to notice what he was doing. If on one song he sings ‘it’s all in vain’ and on another ‘I believe I’ll dust my broom’, he is making the most overt reference possible to Robert Johnson. You can discover the blues even in song titles such as ‘Lonesome Day’ or ‘Po’ Boy’. If most of his audience has meanwhile never heard of Charley Patton, to whom ‘High Water’ is dedicated, what does it matter? The blues and what the blues has signified in American history is a main tributary for
‘Love and Theft’.
The African American experience is what truly matters in ‘High Water’, not the fact that Dylan quotes from an ancient song called ‘The Cuckoo’ that he used to sing back in the Gaslight club in 1962.

The idea that Dylan was supposed to cite every source, confess to every appropriation and submit to being treated as a desiccated folklorist was absurd. Worse, it was banal. Yet to read some subsequent comment, confess was exactly what he was supposed to do. If he was reassembling found art with this album, a perfectly respectable technique was involved. This was not the young Dylan who had passed off melodies and more as his own. This was not the master thief, the sponge. This was a conscious (and self-conscious) artist. The distinction would escape several people whose only apparent desire is to have the artist document every last facet of his life and work. And then apologise.

The sunny mood of
‘Love and Theft’
is deceptive, of course. The songs in this album have as their trademark the sting in the tail, the jab that seems to come from nowhere. They are once again driven by religion, but also by the curious conviction, as in ‘Things Have Changed’, that resigned acceptance of this world means the singer no longer has to care about anything much. On this album, it’s almost a side issue. Above all, these are stories, fables, episodes from what Greil Marcus identifies as the ‘old, weird America’. One fine joke in this album is that despite all the literary allusions every voice is the voice of the common people. Irrespective of anything the songs might have to say, Dylan was making the claim that America exists in its voices and its music, in cultural geneaology, in tradition as it evolves and mutates. His critics crawled all over the thefts and forgot about the love.

*

No one in Mahattan bought ‘
Love and Theft’
on the day of its release. New York had other things to worry about on 11 September 2001. The coincidence was grim, but grim coincidence it remained. Unlike so many others in his trade, Dylan did not rush to write a song, patriotic or otherwise, about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His views about what any piece of art was worth amid a cataclysm were well developed. Besides, his creativity had long before lost the reflexive speed needed for so-called ‘topical songwriting’. In any case, ‘9/11’, as it soon became known, seemed existential rather than just another pressing issue of the day. By another brutal coincidence, Dylan’s old boyhood friend Larry Kegan, comrade of the Herzl summer camp and beyond, had succumbed to a heart attack on the day America was assaulted. Death happened, as life happened, without politics or poetry. Musicians could only make music. Dylan kept going.

AT NO POINT IN ITS 293 PAGES IS THE BOOK PUBLISHED BY DYLAN IN
October 2004 described as a memoir. Even the dust cover’s encomium does not risk the word ‘autobiography’. Instead, the buyer is offered explorations and elegies, intimacy, insight and the briefest stab of punctuating memory. On second sight, the advertisement seems to have been constructed with some care. What is claimed is tantalising; what is left unsaid more tantalising still. The publisher’s commendation for
Chronicles: Volume One
promises only glimpses, as through a dusty window, of an author’s thoughts and the influences exerted on those thoughts. This is not chapter and verse, then.

A chronicle, says the dictionary, is ‘a continuous record of events in order of time; a history’. Dylan’s
Chronicles
propose no such thing. The significant word in the blurb, the reader will soon enough learn, is ‘storytelling’. The book is not corroborative evidence for anyone’s case. Yet when the first printing hit the
New York Times
bestseller lists – and remained there for 19 weeks – it was classified as non-fiction. It is part of Dylan’s method, in prose or verse, to question whether such a claim can be made of anyone’s life.

The critical reception, as he would tell the novelist Jonathan Lethem in the late summer of 2006, moved him almost to tears.
¹
This author, so long in the making, had the fond belief that literary critics must know what they are talking about, unlike their colleagues on the music (rock and pop) beat. Dylan seemed to believe – each to his own – that book hacks can’t be fooled. If they said
Chronicles
was vital and valuable, the writer was hugely gratified. It was as though the youth who struggled so hard and long with his
Tarantula
experiment 40 years before had been vindicated at last.

The confession to Lethem was a reminder that, after everything, Dylan still cared about the reception his work received. It suggested he must have been nervous indeed about appearing in this manner in the court of critical opinion. It told his audience – as though they needed telling – that he understood exactly what to expect with his name above the title. By publishing
Chronicles
he had once again placed himself under investigation. That fact, in turn, said something about the careful, artful way the seemingly nonchalant book was constructed. You could even call it cunning. Not for the first time, Dylan took preconceptions and juggled with them in a piece of writing that no one had ever expected to see.

Chronicles
is not a memoir, not in the usual sense. It is certainly not a cradle-to-the-present autobiography, not a Rousseauian
Confessions
, an apologia, or the definitive explanation for a life. In 2012, Dylan would remind readers, via his usual
Rolling Stone
conduit, that the book does not, in fact, contain the very meaning of existence, his ‘or anyone else’s’. The text, he would say, ‘doesn’t attempt to be any more than what it is’.
²
The modest disclaimer could leave the reader to wonder what, in that case,
Chronicles
does attempt. A lot
is
explained, but most of that happens allusively, between the lines. The choices made in the narrative, or rather narratives, were meanwhile surprising to many fans in 2004 and downright baffling to those looking eagerly for Dylan’s frank remembrances of famous times past. The omissions seemed wilful. For all that, the blurb did not lie: what you got for your bestseller was as fine a piece of pure American storytelling as most readers had recently seen.

*

There are no direct quotations from
Chronicles: Volume One
in this book, just as there were no direct quotations from the singer’s prose in its predecessor. For once, the overworked word ironic can stand in plain sight. As my
Once Upon a Time
was nearing completion, someone in Dylan’s office – and who knows? – declined to grant permission for the use of selected passages. Such is the artist’s right and copyright.

The simple idea had been to allow the subject to speak for himself, now and then, while warning the reader, here and there, that alternative accounts were available. Judging by the message relayed from New York through Simon & Schuster, Dylan’s publisher, umbrage was taken by someone at a few illustrative samples from my text. Scepticism towards the idea that
Chronicles
provided any kind of full documentary record of events and conversations from four decades back and more, human memory being what it is, was taken as an assault on Mr Dylan’s ‘veracity’. (I place the word in quotation marks to signify quotation: it’s a habit worth acquiring.) Close readers of his book might therefore begin to see where irony comes in. I was being forbidden to quote from a volume richly and demonstrably stuffed with quotations, very few of them acknowledged. The subject, it turns out, is a sensitive one. It is also fascinating.

Perhaps, first time around, I should have mentioned the reviews of
Chronicles
instead. One, written by the film critic and novelist Tom Carson and published in the Sunday books section of the
New York Times
on 24 October 2004, had plenty to say about veracity. There was ‘the voice Dylan has devised for his youthful self, which is spellbinding in its hokum’. That voice was ‘transparently fraudulent’. The writing offered ‘some of the best fake
Huckleberry Finn
’ Carson had ever read. The reviewer further observed, correctly, that ‘the book’s larger purpose is mythographic’, but he went on to note its ‘reality-distorting priorities and revealing omissions’, not least in Dylan’s failure to address his ‘square peg’ Jewishness in 1950s middle America. To point out, said Carson, ‘that
Chronicles
is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it’s genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one …’ The memoir was deemed ‘self-serving’, but also – I had laboured the same point – a marvel. ‘This is a veteran carny’s magic show,’ observed the man in the
New York Times
, ‘not a confessional.’ Precisely.