Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (80 page)

Politics in the plain sense is far from dominant on the album, of course, but here and there Dylan could pass for Jim Casy, the faithless preacher of Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
, oppressed by sex, righteousness and justice. Yet ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ – number two because the country singer Merle Haggard had used the title first – is more than just a series of oblique observations on current affairs and tough economic times. It ranges across the country’s history, speaks the biblical language of revolution straight from Dylan’s old song ‘When the Ship Comes In’, displays a real empathy with poverty’s victims, takes a detour by way of classical literature, and yet remains rooted in twenty-first-century realities:

If you say that Dylan is full of surprises you have said nothing at all. This is the writer who ‘rejected politics’? Nevertheless, all those years of muttering that party politics is meaningless, fraudulent or the work of the Devil led a lot of listeners to assume, even when the contrary evidence was plain, that he took no interest in the woes of this world. All of the people in the songs of
Modern Times
are common folk, distressed, spooked, confused and oppressed. They struggle with life and faith, but their suffering is no accident. As often as not, bad things have been done to them. A lot of vengeance is plotted on this album, even when the rhymes are outrageous.

‘Love and Theft’
had a light heart;
Modern Times
wears the organ bloody and ragged on its sleeve. The album exists in a smoky twilight, out on dusty roads, in bare rooms. It contains the nagging sense of ending, perhaps for America, perhaps for the world. Hence that odd line in ‘Workingman’s Blues’, ‘I can see for myself that the sun is sinking.’ It is as though the speaker has just noticed the approaching darkness for the first time.

The producer, this ‘Jack Frost’, knew his business. When he told journalists that doing the job himself simply saved a lot of time and ‘rigmarole’, Dylan was being too modest.
Modern Times
was solid evidence for the claim that some of his previous albums had been ruined by eager industry pros convinced they understood the needs of his music better than he ever could. Even if they did not justify his erratic decision-making, the new recordings were proof that the artist could achieve the sound he wanted without anyone’s help. ‘I know my form of music better than anyone else would,’ as Dylan put it in 2009.
¹⁸
It was just a pity that it had taken him so long to grasp this self-evident fact.
Modern Times
sounded wonderful.

The opening track, ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, all but painted a picture. However the effect was achieved, it was like listening to some supernatural roadhouse band crowded onto a tiny, ill-lit stage in the early hours with a singer who sounded as though he was facing his last night on earth. This, though, was rockabilly, ‘primitive’ rock and roll, a source code invested with the spirit of Carl Perkins and carried by two guitar players (Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman) performing as though they have just heard Chuck Berry for the first time. Meanwhile, the vocalist – there is no other word for it –
declaims
.

In due course it would be pointed out that Dylan had slipped in a reference to Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
(‘The Art of Love’) and that there were other lines from the Roman poet’s works scattered throughout the album. A snatch of Virgil’s
Aeneid
had already turned up in ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ on
‘Love and Theft’
. In New Zealand, the poet Cliff Fell would write in the
Nelson Mail
in October of his amazement on discovering several lines from Ovid’s
Tristia
and
Epistulae ex Ponto
(‘Black Sea Letters’) in the songs of
Modern Times
.
¹⁹
In most cases, the correspondences were exact, dead ringers in fact. For example, the seventh verse of ‘Workingman’s Blues’ has the lines ‘No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you.’ In the translation used by Fell,
Tristia
(2.52) runs: ‘My cause is better: no one can claim that I ever took up arms against you.’ Scott Warmuth would duly add to the tally of Ovidian echoes and Richard Thomas, professor of classics at Harvard, would contribute half a dozen more.
²⁰

This would be interesting, just as the citations derived from the works of Berry, Bing Crosby, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Timrod, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Stanley Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins and others besides would be interesting. Whether the discoveries could be called significant was another question. If the desire was simply to run up an indictment of Dylan for theft, the game was as banal as ever, founded in ignorance. On the other hand, anyone who wanted to ask why the artist was laying claim to a near-spiritual connection with Ovid, old and sick, exiled to Tomis on the war-torn edge of the empire (and therefore of civilisation) by a ruler’s inscrutable whim, was entering fascinating territory. What Dylan had done mattered far less than why he had done it.

Cut off from the world, family and friends, Ovid believed that exile had destroyed him as a poet. In his
Metamorphoses
he had described the ages of humankind as golden, silver, bronze and iron. The last of these – faithless, savage, lost to truth – was for Ovid his modern times. Dylan was borrowing these lines for a specific poetic purpose. By the time he made
Modern Times
he almost certainly knew that every last example of ‘intertextuality’ would be netted and pinned to someone’s tray of specimens. Cliff Fell, who believed the ‘homage’ to Ovid was something to celebrate rather than bemoan, probably put it best. Dylan, he wrote, had ‘cast the songs as a modern lament, in the mask of a new Ovid, a kind of modern exile in the modern world’. Fell used the handy word
bricoleur
and pointed out what should have been obvious: ‘Ovid, himself, stole lines and stories from Homer, as did Virgil. And Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole ideas and lines from Virgil and Ovid. It goes on. It’s a part of the poetic process.’

For whatever reason, that process was not well understood. As David Kinney would observe in a
New York Times
op-ed piece in 2012: ‘For the past decade, a great debate has been boiling about the authenticity of Mr Dylan’s work.’
²¹
Out in the ‘blogosphere’, where Joni Mitchell’s blunt allegation of plagiarism had raised temperatures, the pot had boiled over. The media’s headlines would meanwhile arrive clad in protective question marks, but their very ambivalence would be suggestive. ‘Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?’, said one. ‘Is Bob Dylan a Phony?’ ran another.
²²
The witless charge of simple plagiarism, like the demand that Dylan should have named all his many sources, ran up against a familiar but fundamental question. Who else could have shaped all of those found materials into these songs?

Even ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, at first hearing the most blatantly imitative and derivative track on
Modern Times
, is intended to be understood as the artist’s contribution to a piece of blues heritage held in common by a host of musicians. Dylan made no attempt to disguise what he was doing. Listeners might think of it as a familiar Muddy Waters tune – he had the hit and took the credit – but old McKinley Morganfield also ‘stole’ the song. The sole issue of real substance arose when anyone asked if one rich man deserved every cent of the royalties from an album whose credits announced, ‘All songs written and composed by Bob Dylan.’ Still, if plagiarism is defined as ‘passing off’, what does the artist’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ have in common, in meaning and intention, with Crosby’s ‘When the Blue of Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’? A melody has been adapted; the lyrics are worlds, universes, apart.

The artist’s ‘Spirit on the Water’ sounds at every turn like
something
you’ve heard before. We can take that to be Dylan’s intended effect. It’s western swing; it has stride piano, a walking bass, some lines you could sing in church and some you certainly would not. But you need hear neither the voice nor a rather pretty harmonica break to know that this could be no one else but Dylan. Nor is this one of those ‘American songbook’ exercises that seem to attract unthinking praise as often as this artist has attracted suspicion. All the borrowings littering the album are mere cues, musical and rhetorical. Dylan’s way with words is utterly distinctive.

Is that last line an allusion to Johnny Cash and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’)? Or does Dylan get to it by way of a hundred murder ballads, country laments and blues songs? The Cash song was itself based on a movie and a stolen melody, but who still knows or cares? One of the great achievements of
Modern Times
springs from the artist’s refusal to give a damn for arguments over method. He knows that songwriters, songmakers, have always operated in the manner he has adopted. They faced less scrutiny than Bob Dylan, but that’s another story. His lovely ‘Nettie Moore’ shares a title and a few words with a nineteenth-century song. It takes a cliché – ‘They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don’t think it will’ – from ‘Moonshiner’, a traditional piece he had performed in his days in the Village. Numerous blues singers had also found the line irresistible. But the ‘Nettie Moore’ of
Modern Times
bears no resemblance whatever to its sources. In any sense that matters, it’s a new song. With its antique language intended to evoke a sense of lost time, it exists for the sake of the last line of its chorus:

The fact that
Modern Times
amounts to a full-spectrum analysis of pre-modern American music would be noticed by all. Every style that went into the making of popular song, and therefore of the country’s native culture, was there. Dylan would be applauded for his range of reference, the ease with which he made it all seem his own, the fact that he understood what tradition involved. Any comparison with Presley as a one-man pop-music melting pot, fusing every influence, was justified by the album. It would sometimes be forgotten, however, that Dylan’s pursuit of pre-rock and roll styles was not a species of nostalgia or some antiquarian hobby. The concerns of
Modern Times
are eternal and
therefore
contemporary. The final track, ‘Ain’t Talkin’’, stands out from the rest as the summation of everything the album has been about: faith and the loss of faith, failure, the urge to vengeance, hard times and injustice. Still the pilgrim keeps on walking. No single verse gives an adequate idea of the whole. It is enough to say that while critics prepared to celebrate the triumphant conclusion to a so-called trilogy, Dylan ended the album with words that were as bleak as they were unflinching.

Cliff Fell yielded to no one, it seems, in his admiration for what Dylan had achieved. He did make one point, however: ‘Section 13 of
Tristia
begins with Ovid sending greetings from “his outback” and section 14 speaks of Ovid’s wife being known “to the world’s end”.’
²³
In terms of poetic method, this was fascinating, but of no greater consequence than that. It should have given pause, nevertheless, to anyone still inclined to treat Dylan’s lyrics as specimens of purest autobiography.

When the album was released at the end of August it would go straight to number one in America and in several other countries. At 65, Dylan would achieve the curious feat of being recognised as the oldest performer ever to have topped the US album charts. But that was apt. Though a few critics carped that
Modern Times
did not justify all the fuss, or argued that the artist was being lauded less for the music than for his improbable longevity, it was impossible to maintain that he had failed to achieve his ‘renaissance’. It was hard, too, to ignore the fact that Dylan had re-emerged with a new kind of songwriting, writing less flamboyant than it had been once upon a time, but more acute and more considered. Allied to his innate talent was the kind of editorial intelligence required to make sense of all those sources. Words, his own or borrowed, no longer spilled from him in torrents, but the songs were none the worse for that. Some of them stood comparison with his greatest works of the 1960s. It would soon be possible to argue, in fact, that some among them might prove more enduring than the magical songs of his youth. As to quality, this listener holds to the belief that there are six truly terrific pieces of work in the ten tracks of
Modern Times
. Very few albums, in any period, achieve that kind of ratio. As it happens, most of those are Bob Dylan albums. He had not merely recovered creatively. By the end of 2006 it was clear that as a writer he was as good as he had ever been, and in some respects better. If the charge ran that he was assembling and arranging fragments, they were glittering fragments turned into a glittering whole. These too were compositions.