Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (9 page)

Dylan had never before felt the need for a collaborator. He had worked with the prowling ghosts of the long-dead often enough in adapting or appropriating old songs. Richard Manuel of The Band had provided the melody for ‘Tears of Rage’ during the recording of the basement tapes, just as the group’s Rick Danko had contributed to ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’. Refusing credit for his contribution, Dylan had helped McGuinn out on ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ – with an opening couplet and a half scribbled on a napkin – for the soundtrack to the 1969 film. He had also part-written the banal ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ with George Harrison at Woodstock late in 1968. Before the release of
The Basement Tapes
, however, none of these works had been allowed anywhere near a Bob Dylan album. Amid the composition of hundreds of songs, he had never sought a full-time writing partner. Dylan flew solo: the persona was well established and intrinsic, or so it seemed, to his art. How could there be equal billing when he had no equals?

Jacques Levy, six years Dylan’s senior, was nothing if not a resourceful character. A trained clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst – useful skills, perhaps, in the entertainment business – he had already acquired a certain reputation as the director chosen by critic-impresario Kenneth Tynan to launch the witless ‘erotic revue’
Oh! Calcutta!
on Broadway in 1969. With a musical based on
Peer Gynt
in mind, Levy had then done some writing with McGuinn, the best-known example being ‘Chestnut Mare’, an enduring piece whose precise relationship with Ibsen’s poem-play remains to be explained. Later in life, the dramaturge would become a professor of English and drama at a college in upper New York State. On his death in 2004 an obituary notice in the
New York Times
would describe him as a ‘lovable, brilliant, irascible, inspiring, principled rebel hipster, charismatic sweetheart of a man’. When he bumped into a famous acquaintance one summer day in lower Manhattan in 1975, Levy was presented with a proposition: would he care to help Bob Dylan out with some songs?

In another version of the story, the two met at The Other End, having been introduced previously by McGuinn. During their conversation, so it seems, Dylan suggested a collaboration. At Levy’s loft apartment, just around the corner on LaGuardia Place, they then set to work on a half-finished song named ‘Isis’. Who then wrote what as the pair worked through the night is very far from clear.

Dylan’s motives are equally obscure. Interviewed by Bill Flanagan early in 1985 for the book
Written in My Soul
(1986), the artist was asked why he had not persisted instead with ‘what you’d tapped into with
Blood on the Tracks
’. The answer:

I guess I never intended to keep that going. It was an experiment that came off. I had a few weeks in the summer when I wrote the songs. I wrote all the songs for
Blood on the Tracks
in about a month and then I recorded them and stepped back out of that place where I was when I wrote them and went back to whatever I was doing before. Sometimes you’ll get what you can out of these things, but you can’t stay there. Co-writer. That was probably an album where I didn’t have anything and I wasn’t even thinking about making a record. I think I ran into Jacques downtown and we went off and just wrote some songs.

‘I didn’t have anything’: was that truly the case? He had written ‘Abandoned Love’, after all, such as it then was, and composed a better song during his trip to the south of France in late spring. In each version of the tale of his first efforts with Levy, ‘Isis’ was already begun. Equally, Dylan’s typically casual assertion that ‘we went off and just wrote some songs’ did not quite match Levy’s memory. He would tell the writer and editor John Bauldie that the pressure on the pair during the writing process was ‘tremendous’.
⁴
Dylan was not just messing around.

Nevertheless, the fact that in this of all years he felt the need for a co-writer is hardly insignificant. It is as though the masterpiece that was
Blood on the Tracks
had drained him in some peculiar way, or that the effort had been so singular it was impossible to repeat. Dylan, having ‘stepped back out of that place’, might have felt no desire, if that’s the word, to accept the further emotional consequences of the Raeben method.
Blood
, his artistic life’s blood, had been the only word for the experience. In any case, and contrary to public appearances, he was not quite as certain of his restored gifts as he might have seemed.

Consider the claims Dylan would make about the insights gleaned from his art teacher in 1974. In April of 1978, the journal
Rock Express
would learn that he had understood how to explore ‘all the different selves that were in there’. In November of the same year,
Rolling Stone
would be told of an artist who had managed at last ‘to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously’. By helping Dylan to put mind, hand and eye together, Raeben, it was asserted, had given him conscious control of unconscious impulses. What had become of all that when the new songwriting partners were trading lines for unreliable topical songs, or sketching out their corny verse fictions? Collaboration involves an inevitable, if partial, surrender of artistic identity. The Dylan of
Blood on the Tracks
had disappeared, or had been suppressed. Perhaps he was too much to bear.

In the second half of July 1975 Dylan would fill an album of songs with Levy’s help. Certain of the recordings would become, as they remain, much admired. For all that, it is open to question whether Dylan’s songwriting was enhanced by the partnership. A better question might involve asking why this singular intelligence felt in any need of support, and why a supposedly reborn writer would seek out a passing supplier of words. The artist who embarks upon such an arrangement has either made a calculation involving the sum and its parts, or he is none too sure of himself.

Each of the songs created by Dylan and Levy, first in New York and then at the artist’s house on Lily Pond Lane in the village of East Hampton, out on the Long Island shore, are treated still as works by the former. A couple of the pieces are held by some fans to be among the most significant of all ‘Bob Dylan’ songs. No one, it seems, thinks twice about it, as though Dylan’s imprimatur is as close to authorship as makes no difference. Nevertheless, in another interview with Flanagan, this time a 2009 promotional effort arranged and published by his own
bobdylan.com
, the artist would state flatly that Levy ‘wrote the words’ for at least one song. ‘I just sing it,’ Dylan would maintain of the piece entitled ‘Joey’. It was his way of abdicating responsibility for an item of verse reportage that succeeded artistically but came up short – and not for the first time in Dylan’s career – journalistically.

When the album
Desire
emerged in January of 1976, only two of its nine songs would be wholly in the artist’s name. Ginsberg, contributing stray thoughts in fervid sleeve-note jottings, would not linger long over the question of authorship, or whether such a thing mattered. In the poet’s ecstatic prose, these were ‘Dylan’s Redemption Songs! If he can do it we can do it. America can do it.’ Levy had a 35 per cent copyright share, by contract, in those seven featured works, but the appraiser from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics found only ‘the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ’50s & early ’60s … poet alone at microphone reciting-singing surreal-history love text ending in giant “YEAH!” when minstrel gives his heart away & says he wants to stay. Dylan will stay here with us!’

And so, relentlessly, on. Ginsberg knew all about Levy. Neither the poet of
Kaddish
nor anyone else could calculate the division of labour in the writing of the lyrics for
Desire
, but the assumption of sole authorship by a lone genius persisted. Precisely because Ginsberg knew all about Levy, however, he was obliged at length to concede that a ‘Half-month was spent solitary on Long Island with theatrist Jacques Levy working on song facts phrases & rhymes, sharing information seriousness’. The seer, jotting down notes, did not explain how Dylan could have spent his time both ‘solitary’ and in intense collaboration.

So who wrote the songs? Or rather, who contributed which idea, and wrote which part, if the artist with his name on the album could later all but disown ‘Joey’, or if the ‘theatrical’ opening to ‘Hurricane’ was not, in fact, wholly his doing? Ginsberg would describe another track, accurately enough, as ‘a short novel in verse, old-fashioned Dylan surrealist mind-jump inventions line by line, except D. says he’s reading Joseph Conrad storyteller’. So where was Levy in the making of ‘Black Diamond Bay’, the best of all the jointly written songs to emerge from
Desire
?

Submitting amiably to questions from fans on a ‘social news and entertainment’ website late in 2012, Levy’s son Julien, still to be born at the time of the collaboration, gave a partial account of his father’s side of the story.
⁵
It did not entirely clarify matters.

The writing process I think worked in some version of Dylan spitting out things he’d been working on on guitar or piano, and my dad would spit out whatever struck him as a response to the music. Or maybe they had a plan, and my father would jot down lyrics and they’d refine it with music, bit by bit, adding here, subtracting there – chiselling away at it until it was a fully-realised song.

Julien Levy then suggested that even the song ‘Isis’, a set of verses that has received scrutiny inordinate by most standards, far less by the standards of those who pan for their gold in Dylan’s streams of consciousness, was strictly a co-production, right down to its venerated first line. Levy also maintained that, in his father’s view, there was rather less to the piece, vaunted symbolism and all, than met the ear.

Dylan invited my dad over to work on some songs, my dad showed up, they got to work. Dylan said he had a little piano thing he had been working on and he started banging out those first piano chords to ‘Isis’. My dad just spat out, ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May …’ and Dylan loved it, so they just kept going with it like that, creating this story until it reached a conclusion. By the time it was done, Dylan loved it, and was so excited that he ran downstairs to the local bar and read the lyrics out to whoever was just sitting there. It was on the strength of that that they decided to keep writing together.

My dad always talked about how there was no special symbolic meaning behind any of the images in ‘Isis’, that it was just a fun, adventurous kind of cowboy story.

The ‘local bar’ was undoubtedly The Other End. That apart, Julien Levy’s account of his father’s recollections casts a cool light – amid much affection for Dylan – over the figure of the artist in this moment. Here’s our excited poet, rushing off to regale the drinking classes with his latest molten verses. Here’s the overlooked collaborator, who has been the catalyst for the process from its first line, maintaining after the fact that nothing more than a fun cowboy story had been achieved. Jacques Levy also told the journalist Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman that the ‘Isis’ melody was at first ‘almost a dirge’.
⁶
It would not be much improved when the artist decided to enter the recording studio.

In his account of the Rolling Thunder tour from its gestation to the end of its first phase, Sloman quoted Levy to the effect that writing with Dylan was ‘a totally co-operative venture’ and that it was ‘impossible to remember’ who had contributed which line to a song. Nevertheless, it is a notable fact that after the end of 1978 the co-written works would disappear entirely from Dylan’s concert repertoire for the best part of a decade. Talking to Paul Zollo from the magazine
SongTalk
in the spring of 1991 – though the interview would not be published until the winter issue – the artist failed to shed much light on the matter.

We both were pretty much lyricists. Yeah, very panoramic songs because, you know, after one of my lines, one of his lines would come out. Writing with Jacques wasn’t difficult. It was trying just to get it down. It just didn’t stop. Lyrically.

Between fits of knowing laughter, Dylan would further observe that ‘Isis’ was ‘a story that meant something’ to Levy. ‘Yeah. It just seemed to take on a life of its own, as another view of history.’ In this interview Dylan made it clear that the song so often treated as a personal statement, the song he would sometimes announce from the stage as being ‘about marriage’, was nothing of the kind. His memory of the writing instead turned on the need to prevent a piece that could have gone ‘just about any way it wanted to go’ from getting ‘too close’. He was asked the obvious question: too close to whom? Answer: ‘Too close to me or him.’
⁷
The lingering implication was that such a risk had been averted, both for the artist and for the writing partner to whom a cowboy story had ‘meant something’.

Desire
remains a perplexing thing because it has no settled style, because a distinctive authorial voice is hard to spot, and because Dylan claims or refuses credit for authorship as and when it suits him. In pop music, generally speaking, the last detail is of no importance: songs are written to order, to suit the artist or the occasion. In terms of art, in terms of poetry, in terms of certain songs to which several varieties of symbolic and personal importance have been ascribed, it amounts to a puzzle. At moments throughout the Rolling Thunder adventure Dylan would present himself in terms of a theatrical conceit that would one day become familiar. Here he was, ‘live and in person’, yet also, physically, masked and anonymous, that hideously famous ‘Bob Dylan’ face shielded sometimes by strange plastic armour, or painted ghostly white. So was he making the words of Jacques Levy merely seem to be his own? If so, a lot of fan-babble since has been ill-advised.

One warm afternoon in late June or early July, meanwhile, a 25-year-old violinist with extravagantly long hair and a feigned gypsy look who went by the name Scarlet Rivera was stepping out of her Lower East Side apartment, instrument case in hand. She was planning to visit a friend before commencing rehearsals with what
People
magazine would later understand to be ‘an obscure 10-piece Latin band that paid her $100 a week’.