The question is, do you want to listen to this stuff? Do the bits and pieces you might hear on the radio or MTV touch you, do they catch you up short, provoke a response? Does any of it demand as much from you as Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”? For all the hopeful critical line-toeing about Sly & Robbie ’n’ Ron
Wood & Mick Taylor ’n’ mixmaster Arthur Baker—
serious record-making
after years of one-take foolishness, etc.—the voice is what does or doesn’t reach you; the voice is what counts. And except in moments it’s the same voice Dylan has been strangling on since 1978, since
Street Legal.
Even on
John Wesley Harding,
ten years before that (think about it: in 1968 Dylan’s career was seven years on, a fraction of its present entity, and the legend was already in place, already the Gorgon to be faced down, refused, accepted, evaded)—even then, there were instants in which, as a singer, Dylan sounded sick: ill. On “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” say: his voice curled up in his throat, will and desire collapsed under leaden vowels. It was hard to know where the dead weight came from; the lilt of “Down Along the Cove,” the nimble turns of “As I Went Out This Morning,” made it easy to forget. But since
Street Legal,
that sick sound, that sound of pain, has been close to Dylan’s whole voice.
In the domain of cliché, pain suggests blues, but this is anything but a blues voice: a voice that drifts away from its owner, gazes back at its maker, speaks of such things as “my second mind.” The pain in Dylan’s voice communicates as irritation, at best as bitterness. A whine that most often presents itself as cracker-barrel wise, it’s the voice of a crank—a crank who wants you to believe he’s seen it all but really just wants to complain that he hasn’t liked what he’s seen. Or is it that those who’ve looked at him haven’t liked what they’ve seen, haven’t liked it enough, haven’t liked it in the precise, proper, mysteriously right way?
Empire Burlesque
is no more and no less confused than
Street Legal.
Unlike
Infidels
or the Christianist albums, that record was a career move against confusion, and so is this. It doesn’t sound like mud straight off, as
Street Legal
did—the record has a bright, balanced sound—but mud is what it is. Save for the last track, “Dark Eyes,” Dylan alone with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, nothing connects to anything else. It’s pure entropy: when the night comes falling from the sky it just goes back.
After the 1983
Infidels,
a decent hit, a five-LP retrospective including much unreleased material was shelved—the balance sheets
showed Dylan wasn’t ready for the history books. The quickie
Real Live
was shoved onto the market instead. The banality of the title cued the reviews, which were awful when they appeared at all; the album was a stiff. It contained Dylan’s most exciting performances since the 1975
Blood on the Tracks,
the only true comeback album he’s ever made. On the
Real Live
version of “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan went through the verses as if he knew both what they said and what they didn’t say, and so he changed words all over the place. He played with the song, laughed with it, brought it to life, no doubt inventing as he sang. He reminded me that in 1965, when he would stand alone on a stage and sing the then-unreleased “Desolation Row,” people would laugh out loud, and he would grin. His music wasn’t a burden his audience was expected to shoulder; it was an adventure its audience was free to join, and free to reject. It wasn’t about Bob Dylan; only fools wondered if this or that song was about Joan Baez.
I hold no special brief for Bob Dylan as folk singer; he was great, but he was a better rocker, one of the four or five most piercing rock ’n’ roll singers of all. In the mid-sixties, when he was chasing the Elvis legend, shouting onstage with his hands cupped around his mouth to make a megaphone against the roar of the Hawks behind him, there was more of Dock Boggs, Buell Kazee, and other deep hollow singers in his voice than there ever was before. After closing his shows with “Like a Rolling Stone,” he would sneak backstage, sit down at the piano with Johnny Cash, and find his way into an American folk language so old his voice defined culture. He was rooted in history and rooted in the present moment, but there are no roots in his music now. The solo “Dark Eyes” connects not because it calls up some spurious, readymade sense of folkie roots, but because it’s the only song on the album where Bob Dylan isn’t singing about some undefined, unknown, unknowable, paranoid “they” or “you”: “they” who turned the clean-cut kid into a killer, “you” who doesn’t love me in just the way I need to be loved. “Dark Eyes” connects because here, as a singer, as a voice, Dylan is talking to somebody. That it’s himself is no matter: he’s not talking to a fixed object, an enemy, as he is
everywhere else. What takes place, as he falls out of his crank-prophet voice and drifts into a reverie, is a conversation. You can imagine yourself part of it.
The theme of
Empire Burlesque,
both in lyrics and in the voice that puts them across, is simply stated: hell is other people. The most characteristic lines are from “Trust Yourself”: “If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself . . . You won’t be disappointed when vain people let you down.” This dead end is where Dylan has been heading for years now;
Empire Burlesque
is one spirited variation after another on
Street Legal
’s notoriously non-ironic “Can you cook and sew / Make flowers grow / Can you understand my pain?”
I don’t think it’s worth asking if this signifies anything whatsoever about the state of things in 19 and 85: the collapse of pop community, the fragmentation of the audience, Big Chill—you know the line. I think it’s merely personal, and I won’t speculate as to the source. What’s the way out for someone who once caught fifty states, four hundred years, and four seasons in his voice? I don’t know, but perhaps it’s something that begins with the voice, something that makes the voice fuller, and less full of itself. Not humility, not regret—maybe cortisone, maybe a lot more Dock Boggs.
Bob Dylan,
Empire Burlesque
(Columbia, 1985).
SPEAKER TO SPEAKER
Artforum
April 1986
In 1984, in his book
Rock Stars,
Timothy White made the heretical statement that the music of Bob Dylan was ultimately less significant than Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” Dylan’s songs were “of the ‘time-and-place’ stripe,” White said, while “Be-Bop-a-Lula” existed “on its own terms . . . It is an emotion preserved in song,
unconditional, wholly without boundaries.” Dylan’s songs were themselves boundaries, and together they simply made a map; they told a certain generation, a certain pop audience, where it was. Once that audience vanished, the songs would go with it. In 1969, Nik Cohn had said much the same thing in
Pop from the Beginning:
“In my own life, the Monotones have meant more in one line of ‘Book of Love’ than Dylan did in the whole of
Blonde on Blonde.
”
It’s time to take up this argument, if only because a quarter-century after Bob Dylan began his professional career in the Greenwich Village folk milieu, and twenty-one years after he seized the center of rock ’n’ roll with “Like a Rolling Stone,” the market is flooded with the flat insistence that his songs need not exist on their own terms: that the map supersedes the territory it supposedly describes. Wilfred Mellers’s critical study
A Darker Shade of Pale,
Robert Shelton’s
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan,
Dylan’s own
Lyrics 1962-1985
and the five-LP retrospective
Biograph
—each in its way presents Dylan’s music as self-referential, each song meaningful only for its position on the map, which now describes no commonplace territory, but one man’s career. The listener plays no part in the affair; one looks on from afar, and feels privileged for being allowed to do so.
The result is that one is led to confront Dylan’s work—to think about it, to listen to it, to feel it—either in terms of his mythic status (Mellers), his heroic status (Shelton), or his cultural status (
Lyrics, Biograph
). That is, one is led away from confronting his work. Mellers constructs Dylan’s career as a progression from an artist’s appropriation of various folk strains to his transformation into the ultimate American, the ultimate New Man: White-Negro European-Amerindian Jewish-Christian Male-Female. Within such a structure, every song functions; none takes place. With Shelton, one follows the chronological odyssey of a man seeking always to “do it his way”; all that matters is whatever his way is, and so songs are simply incidents in an exemplary process of self-realization. On
Biograph,
recordings from 1962 through 1985 are jumbled out of chronological sequence to say that Dylan’s music was whatever
“Dylan,” as a sort of moving concept, was doing whenever he did it. As a flat premise this flattens the music, with “Just Like a Woman” pumping up its next-track neighbor, “On a Night Like This,” “On a Night Like This” deflating “Just Like a Woman.” Whether the story is told by Mellers, Shelton, or Dylan himself, Dylan’s performances, as moments in which he committed an act, in which something was actually happening, are completely trivialized as music, no matter how grand the claims being made for them. Each performance exists only in terms of the larger story being told, which is no longer a large story at all. It becomes impossible to understand the story Dylan’s career really tells: to understand that, at certain points (say,
Highway 61 Revisited
in 1965, or the basement tapes in 1967), Dylan actually did something, and that at other points (say, “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963, or his 1974 comeback tour), he didn’t.
“Kinda ersatz,” said a friend as we listened to Bob Dylan’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time, on the radio. He meant contrived, second-hand—received. This great anthem of the Civil Rights movement, no matter how profound its effect on the world (it brought people together, made sense of their hopes and fears, was good for singalongs, made Sam Cooke so envious he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come”), was from its first appearance a proof of White’s time-and-place argument: a song less written about a time and place than by them, an inevitable translation of events into a poeticized reflection. The song itself was blowing in the wind. Dylan picked it out; it was received so readily because, in a way, people had already heard it. With “This Wheel’s on Fire,” from the basement tapes, something altogether different was going on—in terms of a person creating something that would not have been had that person acted differently, something
was
going on. Real music is universal language because it speaks in many tongues: no matter how effective the apocalyptic images and tones of “This Wheel’s on Fire” translated the apocalyptic moods of 1967, the song could not be held to any fixed, time-and-place meaning. It created its own time and place: one would have heard
it in 1967, and one hears it today, as an event, not as a comment on an event, or an incident in a career, or an element in a mythos. Such a way of looking at things is not merely absent but expelled from
Biograph
or Mellers’s and Shelton’s books. Within the settings they establish, there is no way to think about why “This Wheel’s on Fire” is real and “Blowin’ in the Wind” is false (or, if you prefer, vice versa), or why “A Change Is Gonna Come” is immeasurably richer than “Blowin’ in the Wind.” One performance validates another, invalidating any other sort of perception while promoting the career as the source of all meaning.
To promote an individual as the source of the meaning of the individual’s work is to promote pure solipsism. It is to make it impossible to think about how meaning is made—to experience meaning being made, or to experience the way a given performance continues to make meaning far beyond its presumptive time and place. There is no way to talk about the possibility that Dylan’s career describes not aesthetic progress, but the invalidation of the idea of this kind of progress—that it is a story of both triumph and tragedy, that the fact that the 1964 “It Ain’t Me Babe” can be placed on an album next to the 1974 “You Angel You” is a denial of everyone’s best hopes. But if one ignores the perspective of
Biograph,
and listens for oneself, a real event becomes possible.
“You Angel You” is a bouncy piece of junk, an affirmation of nothing. “It Ain’t Me, Babe” was always a fine song, but on
Biograph
—remastered, the voice brought forward, allowed to change its shape with every word—it is overwhelming, and it destroys the smeared setting that has been made for it.
Here Dylan moves from certainty to an ambiguity that frightens him back toward a certainty the falsity of which he has just revealed. His whole career comes into focus—as a continuing attempt to tell the truth as he sees it, supported by economics, mythos, and the lack of anything better to do. His career is an attempt to tell the kind of truth one can discover only in the act of telling what one thinks one already knows, which the act itself exposes as vanity.
It’s foolish to expect that anyone could accomplish such an act by the mere fact of being who one is—at any time, in any place. It makes sense that the confluence of who one is with certain times and places would produce such moments, and that other confluences would not. The question of how the performance of a song makes meaning is raised; so is the question of how a song fakes it.
Timothy White,
Rock Stars.
New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1984, 139.
Nik Cohn,
Pop from the Beginning.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Rev. ed. as
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.
London: Paladin, 1970, 174.
Wilfred Mellers,
A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan.
New York: Oxford, 1985.
Robert Shelton,
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan.
New York: Beech Tree, 1986.