Bob Dylan
By Sean Wilentz
Bob Dylan, one of the monumental writers and performers of rock and roll, has left an enduring impact on
modern culture as the finest American popular songwriter of the second half of the twentieth century. In a career
that has spanned more than fifty years, he has passed through many phases -- restless and always in the throes of
discovering something new, never content to rest on his previous artistic achievements and many laurels. Bruce
Springsteen, who is among the major artists most deeply affected by Dylan, has described him as a revolutionary,
every bit as powerful and as important to the history of rock and roll as Elvis Presley: "The way that Elvis freed
your body, Bob freed your mind. And he showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not
mean that it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and the talent to expand a pop song until it contained the whole
world."
The multitude of Dylan's musical styles is daunting, ranging from Woody Guthrie-style popular ballads
through genre-smashing 1960's rock, Nashville country-and-western, impressionist art songs, African-American
gospel, all the way to vintage Tin Pan Alley Christmas carols from the 1940s. If there have been artists, like Pablo
Picasso, whose genius lies partly in repeatedly reconfiguring their styles, then Dylan is a Picasso of song. He is,
as the critic Christopher Ricks once observed, a singular figure of plurals, a man not with a voice but voices,
immersed not in a tradition but in traditions. Yet the conventional view of Dylan, as someone who has constantly
reinvented himself, is also misleading. True, he has said that he was born very far from where he was supposed to
be; and early on he turned himself from a college drop-out named Robert Zimmerman into an artist, Bob Dylan.
But since then, although he has grown and shifted gears, he has always been unmistakably himself. Even as he has
embraced new discoveries and tried them out, he has never buried and forgotten his older discoveries. Other artists
have performed his songs (some, notably Jimi Hendrix, brilliantly), but even in those new forms, very few of
Dylan's hundreds of compositions could be confused for the work of anyone else.
Dylan has left his mark on literature as well as music. In 1965, the poet Allen Ginsberg, defended Dylan from
the charge that, by embracing rock and roll, he had sold out to vulgar commercial interests: "Dylan has sold out to
God. That is to say, his command was to spread his beauty as widely as possible. It was an artistic challenge to
see if great art can be done on a juke box." Ginsberg described Dylan's art as "an answering call or response to
the kind of American prophecy that [Jack] Kerouac had continued from Walt Whitman." More broadly, Dylan has
merged poetry, myth, and song, with an unsurpassed artistic ambition. Dylan's fusions, the critic Anne Margaret
Daniel has noted, bring to mind what the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats attempted early in the twentieth
century with his combinations of Celtic myth, song, drama and poetry. They can also be understood as a
fulfillment of what the Modernist Ezra Pound foresaw as Modernism's future, reincarnating the spirit of Homer's
epics and classical Greek drama in their mixture of words and music.
For a long time, Dylan shied away from saying much of anything in public about his artistic intentions. (He
has opened up more since 2000, especially in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One , published in 2004.) In part,
Dylan has needed to wall himself off from the powerful, sometimes frightening personality cult that has grown up
around him, even as he has been fiercely protective of his own public image. Above all, though, he appears to
believe that his art, alone, is which matters, and that heavy overlays of theory, interpretation, biographical
connection, and politicized exhortation miss the point. His intentions are in the work itself. He believes in the
songs that he has heard as well as the songs he has written, more than he believes any other authority, and
believes they should stand on their own. "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the songs," Dylan told an
interviewer in 1996. "I don't find it anywhere else....I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've
learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe
in the songs." Understanding Bob Dylan, requires, above all, listening hard to his work.
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, and raised tk miles to the north, in
the iron-mining town of Hibbing. His parents, Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman (known to her friends as Beatty)
had married and settled in Duluth in 1934; Abram worked as a manager for Standard Oil until he was stricken
with polio in 1948 [ck], which prompted the family's move to Hibbing, where Abram was able to work alongside
his brothers, Maurice and Paul, at their electrical appliance store. Part of a small but close-knit local Jewish
community, the Zimmermans raised Bob, the eldest of their two sons, in the faith (he was bar mitzvahed in 1954);
but the boy was very much alive to the American popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Movies were especially
important. (Three of Zimmerman's uncles owned a local movie theater, the Lybba, named after his greatgrandmother, Lybba Edelstein.) But popular music - first rhythm and blues along with country and western, and
then early rock and roll - became his greatest passion.
After dark, Zimmerman could pick up the powerful signals of radio programs broadcasting from the South,
notably KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana; and he would stay awake in bed until two or three in the morning
listening to the likes of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Howlin' Wolf. Inspired by what he
heard, he formed several bands while in high school, with names like the Shadow Blasters and the Golden Chords.
(The latter's performance, at a high school talent show, of the Danny and the Juniors' hit, "Rock and Roll is Here
to Stay," was so loud and raw that the school's principal cut the microphone and brought down the curtain.) In
1959, the year he graduated Hibbing High, Zimmerman sought out the singer Bobby Vee, who was attaining a
national as well as regional reputation. Using the stage name Elston Gunn, Zimmerman appeared in two shows
playing piano in Vee's backup band.
Zimmerman's nascent musical career was very briefly interrupted when he moved to Minneapolis in the fall of
1959 and enrolled as a freshman at the University of Minnesota - but his musical passions quickly overwhelmed
academics. Now, though, he was attracted to a burgeoning folk music scene in and around a student bohemian
neighborhood called Dinkytown. Rock and roll, he recalled years later, had come to seem unserious; the folk songs
were "filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."
Putting away his electric guitar in favor of a Double-O Martin acoustic, Zimmerman began playing on the
Dinkytown folksong circuit, notably at a coffeehouse called the Ten O’Clock Scholar. It was then that he began
introducing himself as "Bob Dylan," possibly taking his new name from one of his favorite poets of the time,
Dylan Thomas (although he has since denied any such simple explanation).
Dylan dropped out of the university at the end of his freshman year and in January 1961, he headed to New
York, where he hoped to meet the hobo troubadour Woody Guthrie, who had become spiritual as well as musical
idol. Guthrie was wasting away from Huntington's chorea at Greystone Park Hospital in New Jersey, but Dylan
got his wish only days after his arrival in New York, at the home of Bob and Sidsel Gleason in East Orange,
friends of Guthrie’s whom the hospital allowed to care for him on weekends. There, Dylan also fell in with
Guthrie's most accomplished acolyte, the singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott, as well as with what remained of a 1940s
world of left-wing activist folksingers, writers, and collectors that included Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax. Dylan
also began making his way performing in the Greenwich Village clubs that were the hotbeds of Manhattan's
version of the early 1960s folk revival, including the Café Wha?, the Gaslight, and Gerde's Folk City. A
performance of Dylan's at Gerde's in September 1961, prompted the critic Bob Shelton to write a glowing review
in the New York Times, which brought Dylan his first taste of public recognition. A month later, the legendary
Columbia Records producer John Hammond, taking what many of his colleagues considered a foolhardy risk,
signed Dylan to a recording contract. In less than a year, and to the consternation of many of his fellow folk
performers, Dylan the newcomer had leaped to the front of the pack.
Dylan had learned a great deal from the folk and blues performers and enthusiasts in Minneapolis (among
them Tony "Little Sun" Glover and Jon Pankake); now he was absorbing as much as he could from the New York
folkies, old and young, including Elliott, Paul Clayton, Mark Spoelstra, and, above all, Dave Van Ronk. Friends of
Dylan’s from those days have described him as a Woody Guthrie jukebox. Yet by the time he recorded his first
album in November 1961, Dylan was performing songs by the bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jessie Fuller, and
Bukka White, as well as arrangements of traditional songs that he had picked up from Van Ronk and (on a visit to
Cambridge, Massachusetts) Eric Von Schmidt. Only a month after that, on a brief visit to Minneapolis, Dylan
astounded his old friends with his expanded repertoire and sharpened talents. By then, Dylan has said (a twinkle in
his eye), he, like the legendary Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, had gone to the crossroads and made a
bargain with the devil to gain his musical gifts.
Dylan soon made further breakthroughs. His first album, entitled simply Bob Dylan, included only one
original composition, "Song to Woody," a homage to Woody Guthrie sung to the tune of one of Guthrie's own
songs, "1913 Massacre." By the time he began recording his second album, though, in April 1962, Dylan was
writing new songs in large batches, and over that spring and summer, some extraordinary compositions poured out
of him. "Blowin' in the Wind," first performed at Gerde's Folk City in April, would become, along with "We Shall
Overcome," one of the main anthems of the civil rights movement, then at its height. (As recorded, shortly
thereafter, by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, the song would become an international musical phenomenon;
released as a single, the record sold an astonishing three hundred thousand copies during its first week on the
market.) "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," composed before and not during (as is commonly believed) the chilling
Cuban missile crisis, still stands as a hair-raising song of apocalypse, earthy horror, and artistic endurance. "Ballad
of Hollis Brown," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Tomorrow is a Long Time," all appeared during these
months, proving that Dylan was a precocious master of lyrics of love and longing as well as of the social
commentary for which he was beginning to gain a reputation. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan , which appeared at the
end of May 1962, immediately established Dylan as a major songwriter as well as performer - and some of his
better songs, like "Hollis Brown," did not even appear on it, but would await release on later albums.
Dylan's third album, The Times They Are A-Changin', recorded in August and October 1963, was the first to
consist entirely of his own compositions, and it marked the highpoint of his politically inspired work. With its
title song leading the charge, Dylan sang bitterly of American history as war-torn and self-righteous ("With God on
Our Side"), of the human cost of corporate greed ("North Country Blues"), and of an prophesized uprising of the
righteous oppressed ("When the Ship Comes In"), all in ways that encapsulated some of the rebellious thoughts
and moods of the emerging New Left. One of the album’s political songs, "Only a Pawn in Their Game”
(which Dylan sang at the historic March on Washington on August 26 [ck], 1963) described the murder of the
civil rights leader Medgar Evers as a complicated story of social class as well as race that dug a deeper than the
usual liberal platitudes about southern oppression. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," the finest song on the
album, turned the story of the slaying of a black hotel worker (albeit with some literary license) into a moving,
surpassing work of art.
Yet by the time The Times They Are A-Changin' appeared in January 1964, Dylan's own emotions had
changed to another key - and with it, his art began shifting as well. The assassination of President John F.
Kennedy on November 22 appeared to crystallize a nagging suspicion of Dylan's that conventional and even
unconventional political action would never succeed in righting the world's wrongs. He turned more introspective.
(In that moment of national trauma, he was hardly alone.) He also looked for different styles of expression.
Meeting the poet Allen Ginsberg a little more than a month after Kennedy's murder advanced Dylan's renewed
appreciation of the revolution in language and sensibility of the so-called New Vision that had inspired the Beat
Generation, whose poetry and prose Dylan had first encountered in Minneapolis. Immersed in the works of
William Blake and (especially) Arthur Rimbaud, as well as of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the other beats, Dylan
would soon be composing what he later called the "chains of flashing images" that, in various ways, would
dominate his lyrical output for the next three years - what many critics and listeners consider the very richest of
Dylan's many rich periods.
Ironically, and at would turn out, fatefully, by the time Dylan shifted gears, his image as a darling of the folksong singing Left had solidified. Emblemized by Barry Feinstein's stark black-and-white portrait of him on the
cover of The Times They Are A-Changin' -- which evoked John Steinbeck's Great Depression America of The
Grapes of Wrath, and James Agee's and Walker Evans's hardscrabble American South of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men - Dylan was now a political as well as a cultural icon. His appearances at the Newport Folk Festival
and elsewhere with the activist folk star Joan Baez, known to be his lover, intensified his leftish aura. In general,
folk music carried with it overtones of plain authenticity and anti-consumerism, as well as associations with
continuing struggles for economic and racial justice. In that context, Dylan's journey into different spiritual and
later musical realms would strike some of his most adoring fans as a kind of heresy.
"There aren't any finger pointing songs in here," Dylan told a journalist when he recorded, in a single session
in June, his new album, Another Side of Bob Dylan . "From now on, I want to write from inside me…for it to
come out the way I walk or talk." Combined with his attachment to Rimbaud, Dylan's dedication to writing from
within amounted to his own adaptation of what Ginsberg, many years earlier, had called the effort to capture “the
shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the conscious mind.” The songs amounted to repeated
declarations of independence, from amorous entanglements ("All I Really Want to Do," "It Ain't Me, Babe),
emotional dishonesty ("To Ramona"), and self-important political orthodoxy ("My Back Pages"). The album also
included songs of ardor and of rejection (from both sides of the hurt), as well as a couple of comic romps. Above
all, there was "Chimes of Freedom" -- an expansion of some lines of poetry that Dylan had written about the day
President Kennedy died, but reworked into a pealing of thunder and lightning for all the world’s confused and
abused, a song of tender empathy far outside the old politics of left and right, black and white.
Another Side, as well as Dylan's performances at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival in July, upset some listeners,
especially some of the arbiters of taste in the folk revival's left-wing old guard. In one of the leading folk song
magazines, Sing Out!, the editor Irwin Silber criticized Dylan sharply for writing new songs that seemed "to be all
inner-directed now, inner probing, self- conscious -- maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion.”
Silber lamented that Dylan seemed to be turning into "a different Bob Dylan than the one we knew." But Dylan,
having plunged into symbolist poetry, had also been turned on by the music of the Beatles to the fresh
possibilities electric rhythm and blues as well as rock and roll. Thus he inspired, he had moved well beyond
what some of the folkie establishment declared was too far out.
On January 14, 1965, Dylan showed up at Columbia Records' Studio A in Manhattan for the second session of
recording a new album, which would eventually be called Bringing It All Back Home — and he brought with him
three guitarists, two bassists, a drummer and a piano player. One of the first songs they recorded was
"Subterranean Homesick Blues," a Chuck Berryish rock number, less sung than recited, about lures, snares, chaos,
not following leaders, cooking up illegal drugs, and keeping an eye out for the cops. That spring, Dylan would tour
England and return to his acoustic playlist, but the film made of that tour, Dont Look Back, shows him a
conscientious trouper who is obviously bored with the material and the audiences’ predictable responses. The
most wrenching – or at least the most famous – of Dylan’s artistic shifts was underway.
Leading off with "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Bringing It All Back Home announced Dylan's return to
rock and roll musical forms (although his fans remained unaware of his high school rocker past). Yet the LP was
also a hybrid. Its first side consisted entirely of songs played with rock accompaniment, including a new, gut shot
declaration of independence, "Maggie's Farm," in which the singer proclaimed he would no longer slave away for
boring phonies who want everyone to be just like them. But the second side was all-acoustic, featuring three of the
finest songs Dylan would ever write, all of them refinements of the style he had ventured into on Another Side:
"Mr. Tambourine Man," the song of a weary artist, at his wit's end, singing out to a musical muse; "It's All Right,
Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," Dylan's equivalent of Ginsberg's "Howl," an accounting of how society's pliers bent
humanity out of shape; and a mysterious, Blakean song poem about truth and corrosive illusions, "Gates of Eden."
Dylan had taken the musical style that had first made him famous, singing solo with guitar and rack-clamped
harmonica, as far as he could artistically - and no one has taken it further than that in all the decades since. For
the foreseeable future, though, his musical imagination would work wholly within the framework of rock and roll.
At the same time that he was moving back into rock, Dylan was laboring over a literary work, a word collage
that, against Dylan's intentions (he considered the book unfinished) would appear in 1971 as Tarantula. At some
point, he later related, he took ten pages of his prose - "a long string of vomit," he called it - and turned it into the
lyrics of a new song addressing a Miss Lonely who once had it made but now had nothing. The music, derived
from a riff made most familiar to rock and roll fans by Ritchie Valens's 1958 hit single, "La Bamba," began with
a drum shot that cleared the way for an immense new sound for Dylan, founded on the organ playing of session
man Al Kooper. "The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother," Bruce Springsteen recalls,
"and we were listening to, I think, WMCA. On came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the
door to your mind, 'Like a Rolling Stone.'" The song kicked open a lot of doors when the single appeared in July
20, 1965, and would peak at number two on the Billboard chart. The king of folk music quickly crossed over to
rock and pop stardom. But first, five days after “Like a Rolling Stone"'s release, with the song already getting
air-play on Top 40 AM radio, Bob Dylan would ignite a civil war at the Newport Folk Festival.
Black blues musicians such as Muddy Waters had been playing electric sets at Newport for several years
before 1965. But rock and roll (and, for that matter, electric blues) played by white boys was, just too much for
the older eminences of the folk establishment to bear. And rock and roll played by the great young hope of the
folk revival, Bob Dylan, the reputed successor to Woody Guthrie, was worse than heresy, it was blasphemous, a
tawdry sell out to the forces of cheap artifice and Mammon. So when Dylan, performing in his high profile,
evening concert slot, hit the stage dressed in a black leather jacket and phosphorescent orange shirt, accompanied
by Kooper, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's crack guitarist Mike Bloomfield and other members of the Butterfield
band, and ripped into "Maggie's Farm," the place erupted. Some of the booing may have been because of the poor
quality of the sound system, and some of it because of the brevity of Dylan's scheduled set (which was limited to
three songs), but some if it certainly came from folk purists angry at Dylan's new appearance and sound. The
older heads took it especially hard. (In his memoir, the Newport festival impresario George Wein writes that "at
the sound of the first amplified chords, a crimson color rose in Pete [Seeger]'s face and he ran off. The rest of us
[on the festival's official board] were just as shocked and upset…This was a sacrilege, as far as the folk world was
concerned.") And as several subsequent concert appearances would prove, a portion of Dylan's younger fan base
took deep exception to his electrified music.
Dylan was shaken and hurt by some of the reactions at Newport, but he carried on unfazed. At the very end
of August, Columbia released Highway 61 Revisited , the album of songs he had recorded along with "Like a
Rolling Stone," and which included, among other masterpieces, the title track, a riotous, cutting depiction of the
American scene; "Ballad of a Thin Man," a barrage against bookish, unhip conformism; and "Desolation Row," a
rock and roll masque, deeply influenced by the Modernist poetics of T. S. Eliot as well as by Allen Ginsberg.
Fans rushed the stage in fury during the second-half electric set of a concert in Forest Hills, New York, two days
before the album's release; but the scene was much cooler at a performance at the Hollywood Bowl a week later.
Audiences were similarly divided when Dylan picked up his touring in earnest in the fall backed by the rockabilly
star Ronnie Hawkins's former band, Levon and the Hawks. The booing came frequently. (The Hawks' drummer,
Levon Helm, became so fed up by the hostility, as well as by having to appear as a mere backup band, that he
quit the tour completely.) Yet at some concerts, notably a series of dates around the San Francisco Bay area in
early December, the audience's responses were warm, even rapturous.
The nastiest showdowns came the following spring, when Dylan and the Hawks (with the drummer Mickey
Jones sitting in for Helm) played several cities in Britain as part of a whirlwind around-the- world tour that had
begun in Hawaii and Australia. Folk fans were more tightly-knit in Britain than America, organized into local folk
clubs, some with ties to the Communist Party; and for them, Bob Dylan's apostasy demanded public denunciation.
Night after night, the faithful tried to hoot down Dylan's electric set. The drama reached a climax at a tumultuous
concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, where, just prior to the set-ending number, "Like a Rolling Stone," a
young man in the audience shouted, "Judas!" Dylan strode to the microphone: "I don't believe you," he drawled,
"you're a liar"; then Dylan turned to his band members and, with a profanity, instructed them to turn up the
volume. "Rolling Stone" crashed through the din; Dylan had the last word.
All along, as the civil war raged among his fans, Dylan undertook a new and even bolder experiment in the
recording studio. Some sessions in New York with Kooper, the Hawks, and an assortment of studio musicians,
beginning in October 1965, produced one cut with a majestic sound, "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),"
but failed to capture a usable version of a new, long composition of which Dylan was justifiably proud, initially
called "Freeze Out" and later renamed "Visions of Johanna." The proceedings then moved to Nashville where,
when the touring temporarily broke off, and under the guidance of producer Bob Johnston, a collection of superb
session musicians, joined by Kooper and the Hawks' guitarist, Robbie Robertson, turned out another masterpiece,
Blonde on Blonde - an album with enough great music to produce two LPs, with one song, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the
Lowlands," taking up one entire side of one of the records.
In a later interview, Dylan described his signature sonority as "that thin, that wild mercury sound" that appeared on
some of the tracks on Blonde on Blonde . Intimations of that sound, created out of whorls of harmonica, guitar, and
organ, had appeared on Highway 61, but it now became realized in Nashville as what Al Kooper would call "the sound
of 3 a.m." Blonde on Blonde borrows from several musical styles, including 1940s Memphis and Chicago blues, turn-ofthe-century vintage New Orleans processionals, contemporary pop, and blast-furnace rock & roll. Poetically, it is
triumphant both in its range and its complexity, moving from the seemingly frivolous and delightfully ambiguous "Rainy
Day Women #12 & 35" (with its jacked-up chorus of "Everybody must get stoned"), to the shifting angles on coughing
heat pipes and lovers' disconnections and connections in the Blake-influenced "Visions of Johanna," to Dylan's paean,
also influenced by Blake, to his newlywed wife, Sara, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." On the cusp of his twentyfifth birthday, Dylan, spinning on the edge, had a well-ordered mind and an intense, at times biting, rapport with reality.
The album's songs are rich meditations on desire, frailty, promises, boredom, hurt, envy, connections, missed connections,
paranoia, and transcendent beauty—in short, the lures and snares of love, stock themes of rock and pop music, but
written with a powerful literary imagination and played out in a pop netherworld.
And something else happened in the time between the fracas at Newport and the release of Blonde on Blonde nine
and a half months later: some of Dylan's resistant fans, in Britain as well as the United States, caught up with him,
while his turn to rock and roll brought him an entirely new group of listeners. The album reached number nine on the
Billboard Pop Album Chart, and number three on the British album charts. Dylan the troubadour–poet was now a fullfledged rock and roll star -- and in the process, he had begun to transform both rock and roll and what it meant to be a
star. His manager, Albert Grossman, scheduled another grueling tour of the United States and foreign cities for the late
summer and fall [ck] of 1966.
The tour would not happen. On July 29, Dylan, during a much needed respite, crashed his motorcycle not far from
Grossman's country house outside Woodstock, New York, and immediately went into seclusion. He would not appear
on tour again for eight years.
With some justice, writers and critics have taken Dylan's removal from the scene in 1966 as the end of a major
phase - some would say the major phase - of Dylan's career. Several biographers parse his career into "pre-accident"
and "post-accident" periods. Certainly, inside of five years, Dylan had made an indelible impression on American culture,
and created a body of songs that most pop singers and composers would gladly call a lifetime's work. (Martin
Scorsese's excellent tk-hour television documentary, No Direction Home, limits itself to the years through mid-1966 –
and yet it still has the feel of an epic.) Not only had Dylan transformed the folk revival. Not only had he (as his preconcert introduction today announces, "put folk into bed with rock." He had also transformed the basic terms of
American songwriting, bridging the distance between writer and performer and more or less single-handedly destroying
the entire world of Tin Pan Alley. And, as Bruce Springsteen later observed, he had figured out ways to meld poetry
and lyrics that expanded pop songs until they contained the whole world. Yet - and this may end up being one of the
most impressive things about his career - Dylan survived the 1960s to complete decades more work, following a path
that, although far from steady, had a very long way to go after Blonde on Blonde .
Withdrawn in Woodstock, surrounded by friends (including the members of the Hawks, who would soon
emerge as the Band), Dylan remained very active, even if he wasn't on the road. On 1966-67, he worked on
footage taken by the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (who had made Don't Look Back) to produce his own, semisurrealist film, Eat the Document. At about the same time, he and his friends laid down the hours of informal
playing that became, much-truncated, the Basement Tapes double album in 1975. The original tapes–since
analyzed imaginatively by the critic Greil Marcus -- included a good deal of folk music and other writers' songs,
but also enough original and co-written material to fill at least two albums; and some of that material was stunning,
including "Tears Of Rage," "I Shall Be Released," and "Too Much Of Nothing." In retrospect, the tapes show that
when Dylan had returned to the rock & roll of his youth in 1965 and 1966, he hardly had severed his roots in all
sorts of popular American song, including country & western, rhythm & blues, as well as the wide repertoire of
the folk revival.
In September 1967, less than fourteen months after the motorcycle incident, Dylan returned to Nashville to
record the musically simple but poetically rich John Wesley Harding with the producer Bob Johnston, and only
two sidemen, multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttrey, who had also performed on
Blonde On Blonde . With its stark, simple arrangements and his sometimes cryptic ballads, John Wesley Harding
reflected influence by William Blake (notably on "As I Went Out One Morning") but also, more identifiably than
ever, the Bible, in the diction of songs such as "All Along the Watchtower," and more powerfully, "The Wicked
Messenger."
Over the next eight years, Dylan released six [ck] albums of original material and covers (beginning with the
unabashed country-western collection, Nashville Skyline, and culminating in Planet Waves and Blood On The
Tracks, as well as The Basement Tapes), an outlaw-political song single ("George Jackson"), several tracks from
sporadic concert appearances and brief recording sessions, the soundtrack album for the film Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid, and a double album of performances of his comeback tour with The Band in 1974. He also performed,
backed by the Band (called "The Crackers") at a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie in Carnegie Hall in January
1968, as well as at the Isle of Wight festival a year later, at George Harrison's historic concert for Bangladesh in
Madison Square Garden in 1971, and, having been persuaded by Phil Ochs, at a benefit concert for the Friends of
Chile, also in Madison Square Garden, in 1974. Tarantula appeared in 1971; two years later, Dylan published a
book of his song lyrics accompanied with some of his line sketches, entitled Writings & Drawings; and he played
a minor role in the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid film, directed by Sam Peckinpah. Compared to his astonishing
peak from 1962 until 1966, these have seemed like fallow artistic years for Dylan - but for any other musical artist,
the results of his retrenchment would qualify as a strong achievement.
Dylan's biographers have written in detail of his personal turmoil during this period, spent largely off-stage and
out of the public eye: the beginnings of the fitful disintegration of his marriage to Sara Dylan, which left them
basically separated by 1975; the business battles that caused him to break with his original recording label,
Columbia (which in turn prompted Columbia, holding him to his contract, to release what has been called a
"revenge" album of inferior outtakes and entitle it, Dylan) before he returned to the label in 1974; the fierce strains
with his manager, Grossman; and Dylan's ill-starred decision, in 1969, to move his growing family back to the
heart of Greenwich Village, followed by a later relocation to Malibu.
Dylan has also spoken of a kind of artistic crisis, as if, despite his productivity, he had lost touch with his
basic gifts and aspirations: "It's like I had amnesia all of a sudden… I couldn't learn what I had been able to do
naturally - like Highway 61 Revisited . I mean, you can't sit down and write that consciously because it has to do
with the break-up of time." The "amnesia" became so bad that, by 1974, Dylan felt as if, while chasing his muse,
he was only going "down, down, down…I was convinced I wasn't going to do anything else." Yet Dylan
remained open to fresh ideas - more so now, perhaps, than at any time since his career began.
One of Dylan's more interesting experiments - from the vantage point of his cultural genealogy, one of the
richest; and from that of aesthetics, one of the most profound – had to do not with songwriting and performing,
but with painting. In his early days in New York, prodded in part by his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, Dylan had taken
an intense appreciation at the sculpture and painting that was everywhere to be seen, from the downtown work of
the charming, madcap Red Grooms to canvases of Gaugin on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And
Dylan's lyrics had always contained especially strong visual as well as narrative elements. In "Visions of Johanna,"
he even wittily described the paintings in the museums where infinity goes up on trial, including Mona Lisa with
the highway blues. During the Australia leg of the 1966 tour, he sometimes introduced one song as the tale of a
painter with the name of an old P.T. Barnum circus performer who lived near Juarez, Mexico, and who had had
an especially productive "blue period": hence (ha, ha!), "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." In 1968, one of his own
paintings, of various musicians and an on-looking circus elephant, served as album art for the debut album of the
reborn Hawks, The Band's Music From Big Pink. In the early 1970s, when Dylan sang of one day painting his
masterpiece, he also made a painted self portrait as the cover art for his double album, Self Portrait (a collection
of cover versions and traditional songs along with selections from the Isle of Wight performances), and included
some of his drawings in the new book of song lyrics.
In the spring of 1974, after he broke out of his seclusion with his national tour with the Band, Dylan turned
up at the studio of painter and instructor Norman Raeben on the eleventh floor of Carnegie Hall. Then in his
seventies, Raeben, the child of the great émigré Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem, was instructing students in
Jewish thought but also in painting, and Dylan wound up spending a good part of the early summer of 1974 at the
easel under Raeben's tutelage. It is unclear how much the sessions actually improved Dylan's sketching and
painting; at neither would he ever become highly skilled, though he was and is certainly credible. But Dylan
credited Raeben with nothing less than teaching him "how to see," by putting "my mind and my hand and my eye
together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt."
With Raeben, Dylan learned to eschew conceptualization (the bane, in Raeben's view, of the contemporary art
scene), and to see things plain, as they really are, always aware of perspective, both straight-on and from above,
simultaneously. He also learned how to abandon the sense of linear time to which he had clung automatically, and
to understand the artistic possibilities of pulling together the past, present, and future, as if they were of a piece,
permitting a clearer, more concentrated focus on the objects or object at hand.
Also in that summer of 1974 working mainly in a house around back on a farm he had purchased in
Minnesota alongside the Crow River, Dylan pored over a small red notebook, writing lyrics for a new album that
would capture the wounds, scars, and sorrowed wisdom of love. His writing included, early on, what would
become "Tangled Up In Blue," a song he would later describe as directly beholden to Raeben:
I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different
parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s
what I was trying to do... with the concept of time, and the way the characters
change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if
the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the
whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.
Nor did it matter who the "she" was in the song, or how many shes there really were, or when anything happened;
the song hangs together as one that took ten years for Dylan to live and two years for him to write.
The album that eventually emerged from that work, Blood On The Tracks, was full of blues, although only
one song, "Meet Me In The Morning," was written in standard 12-bar form. It included songs of longing, gratitude,
and fury, and an elliptical narrative about the Jack of Hearts that sounded like brave, possibly self-inflating
allegory (even if it wasn't). It ended with a grace note of hope, "Buckets of Rain." Some of the stanzas in some
of the songs were painterly. Part of "Simple Twist Of Fate" (alternatively titled, "Fourth Street Affair") took place
inside a strange hotel with a burning neon sign; the song's tale of aloneness conjured up the spirit and even the
composition of an Edward Hopper canvas.
Curiously, Blood On The Tracks, now widely considered one of Dylan's greatest albums, met with some harsh
reviews upon its release in January 1975, as critics complained chiefly about what one called the "indifferent"
musicianship of Dylan's accompanists. Perhaps the sustained mood of resigned melancholy, broken occasionally by
songs such as "Idiot Wind" and "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," blocked listeners from hearing the first
mature musical reflections to come out of the 1960s and early 1970s by a popular artist who had survived them.
But no matter; Dylan flew the coop and spent several weeks during in the late spring of 1975 in France with the
artist David Oppenheim, at one point meeting the king of the Gypsies in southern France. Then, at the end of June,
he turned up again in Greenwich Village.
At some point that spring, according to Roger McGuinn, erstwhile mainstay of the Byrds, he and Dylan were
tossing basketballs around at McGuinn's home in Malibu. Dylan suddenly paused, grabbed a ball, stared out at the
ocean, and said that he wanted to do "something different."
Knowing that "different" could mean just about anything to Dylan, McGuinn asked what he had in mind.
"I don't know…something like a circus."
The result of Dylan's musing would be a tour unlike any other in the history of rock and roll, the Rolling
Thunder Revue. Dylan had long been fascinated by the travelling circus, with its big top and sideshow attractions;
and his desire to make an ambitious movie only grew after the somewhat frustrating experience with Pat Garrett
and Billy the Kid . During the summer of 1975, he popped up back in Greenwich Village, hanging around and
occasionally playing in the old bars and clubs, when he wasn't out on Long Island composing songs for a new
album, which would become Desire. Out of the album sessions and the momentarily rekindled Village scene,
Dylan pieced together a troupe of new friends and old (including Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, and McGuinn)
to tour mainly through New England cities and towns in anticipation of the nation's bicentennial in 1976. The tour
would be very much a circus, made up of one-night stands, usually in small venues, presenting a set-list that
combined traditional folk songs (including the finale, Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"), a few older
Dylan songs, and pieces from the still-to-be released album. The latter included the song "Hurricane," a vivid
protest ballad about the case of the imprisoned ex-middleweight boxer, Hurricane Carter, whom Dylan believed
had been falsely tried and convicted on racially-motivated charges, and whom he hoped to help set free through
his concertizing and publicity work.
The revue would also be an occasion for Dylan to make his own movie, in conjunction with his friend, the
experimental filmmaker Howard Alk. The film would include a good deal of concert footage and documentary
material, but would also be an improvised drama, based chiefly on three characters, the artist and protagonist
Renaldo (played by Dylan), his wife Clara (played by Sara Dylan), and a resurfacing woman from Renaldo's past,
called the Woman in White (played by Joan Baez). Shot off- and onstage during the tour, the effort would also
contain theatrical elements borrowed from classic European films of the 1940s and 1950s, including Marcel
Carné's Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise). Les enfants featured the great French actor Jean-Louis
Barrault as a mime, who would perform in the whitened face of the Pierrot, with antecedents in sixteenth-century
Italian commedia del arte; that example appears to be one reason why Dylan, at most of the shows, performed in
whiteface. And, although the final result, the four-hour Renaldo and Clara, is at times deeply obscure and stylized,
it represents an interesting failed effort at translating some of the themes of Dylan's songs about identity and
illusion into drama and putting them on the screen.
Musically, the Rolling Thunder Revue was remarkable for its revamping of traditional music and Dylan's older
material, as well as its presentation of new songs. Dylan sang with an emphatic clarity that at times seemed
vehement; the music derived it sound from a blend of pedal-steel guitar and fiddle rather than on organ and
harmonica. But the revue was larger than its songs, larger, too, than the sum of its theatrical parts. Moving from
commedia del'arte to Marcel Carné to Woody Guthrie cut a huge swirl through time and space, far bigger than
assembling the Greenwich Village folk revival with newer musical currents and then making a movie out of it.
Meant to make history, or at least make a statement about the past and the present, the Rolling Thunder Revue
had plenty of historical elements imbedded in its spirit, and those elements were ineffably American. The revue
began and ended, after all, during the autumn following the two hundredth anniversary of the battles of Lexington
and Concord, outside Boston. During the summer after the tour -- when, as it happened, the Revue would regroup
for a second, southern swing -- the entire country would undertake a gigantic celebration of 1776 (or an attempt
at celebration, in the sour public mood that lingered after the Watergate affair). Now, Bob Dylan, who had picked
up the American bardic cudgel from Ginsberg, who had earlier picked it up from Walt Whitman, kicked off the
patriotic commemoration by making music, theater, film, and poetry with his friends on a tour that wound its way
past village and farm in the very cradle of the American Revolution.
The Rolling Thunder Revue was, finally, a many-layered entertainment, featuring intense performances by
Bob Dylan unlike any he had ever given before and would ever give again. The theater of the mind in his old
songs became flesh, and then got fleshed out even more, partly in the assembly of acts, but above all in Dylan's
own singing and dancing and miming -- insistent, driven, attentive to stagecraft in ways that Dylan never had been,
renewing the old and, at his best, making the new sound old. And then, in a flash, like a circus -- or like the
meaning one thought was taking shape in a Dylan song, the meaning that for an instant seemed so concise and so
clear - the Revue was gone, vanished, never to be exactly the same way again -- heading for another joint, or for a
dusty old theater that looked a lot like the Lybba, the past permuting and combining with the present.
And the future? As the decade wound down, Dylan's art jumped into an entirely new phase, another
seemingly utter break from his past that shocked and infuriated many of Dylan's devotees. Dylan's so-called
Christian period began in 1979, when he experienced what he called a profound spiritual awakening in Jesus
Christ with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in California. His marriage with Sara had finally ended in divorce
two years earlier; one of Dylan's girlfriends, the black actress Mary Alice Artes, was drawn to the New Age
evangelical sect and, having rededicated herself to the Lord, she arranged for a pair of Vineyard pastors to pay
Dylan a visit at his home in Malibu. Dylan privately received the Christian Messiah in his heart at some point
over the next few days.
Dylan's Christian fixation after 1979 at once reinforced his earlier interest in prophecy and apocalypse (as on
"When The Ship Comes In") but also transformed it. The Vineyard fellowship, like every evangelical Christian
sect, emphasized universal access to redemption in Christ from original sin through intense prayer leading to
spiritual rebirth. But the Vineyard fellowship also had its particularities, above all an attachment to the premillennial view that Christ's second coming was imminent. After the battle of Armageddon, which was about to
start, the wicked would be damned, the godly saved, and a thousand-year reign of peace would commence.
In Dylan's case, the Vineyard's pre-millennialism came heavily inflected by the best-selling book by the
Christian Zionist and former Vineyard devotee Hal Lindsey ( The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970). The
fellowship had a joyous side, expressed chiefly in musical performances in church services. But it made no room
for the do-gooder reformism associated with most post-millennial sects and denominations, which held that Christ
would return only after the redeemed had created a heavenly millennium on earth. Taking as their essential
biblical scripture the New Testament book of Revelation, the New Age pre-millennialists believed that doomsday
truly was impending, that Christ was almost certainly among us now, and that His final judgment would be upon
the world before we knew it.
Yhe apocalyptic themes in Dylan's music now appeared as foretold by the eschatological prophets of the Old
Testament, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and as described by St. John of Patmos in Revelation - earth's ruin in the
great tribulation, which would bring Satan's destruction and engulf unbelievers in eternal fire, while the paradise of
the New Jersualem opened to the Christ's saints and servants. Faith was the only way to redemption, and there was
nothing metaphorical about it. "I told you 'The Times They Are A-Changin' and they did," Dylan preached to a
concert audience in 1979, in one of what became known as his gospel raps. "I said the answer was 'Blowin' in the
Wind," and it was. I'm telling you now that Jesus is coming back, and He is! And there is no other way of
salvation…There's only one way to believe, there's only one way - the Truth and the Life."
With a few outstanding exceptions, Dylan's lyrics came to have two predictable themes: warning the
unrepentant of imminent apocalypse and the Second Coming; and affirming his personal redemption and gratitude
to the Lord. By 1981, the sheer repetitiveness of his piety had drained away the sense of dread. There were,
though, those exceptions. On Slow Train Coming, "Gotta Serve Somebody" attacked the sins of envy and pride,
and blasted through dozens of pasteboard masks, including Dylan's own. "Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto
Others)" was an interesting revision, lyrically and musically, of sentiments about sincerity in early Dylan songs
such as "All I Really Want To Do," but now rendered in light of the book of Luke, 6:31. Two songs recorded for
Shot of Love but omitted from the original release blended presentiment of doomsday with deeply-felt confusion
about love affairs gone bad. The first, "The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar" -- later inserted on the LP's
second pressing and then the compact disc version, after it received heavy airplay on independent radio stations as
the "B" side of the 45 made of "Heart Of Mine" -- was another hard rocker, its sound recalling that of Highway
61 Revisited. The other, "Caribbean Wind," composed while Dylan was sailing through the islands, described the
destructive tangle of desire and liberty as well as anything he had written since Blood On The Tracks.
Above all, there was "Every Grain Of Sand," a beautifully wrought composition, tenderly performed as the
final track on Shot of Love, a summary of Dylan's search for redemption. With no desire "to look back on any
mistake," the singer still beheld the "chain of events" that had caused ruin -- "the flowers of indulgence and the
weeds of yesteryear." Yet the singer also saw the hand of the Master in every trembling leaf, and had come to
understand the power and necessity of faith -- faith not in fame, influence, a woman's love, or anything other than
in God.
By the time he had completed Shot of Love in 1981, Dylan's writing had begun to turn again, becoming much
less preachy on his 1983 LP, Infidels, than on the preceding two albums. Still, Dylan's Christian phase - his latest
explosive confrontation with himself as well as his listeners - had deeply affected his art above and beyond the
lyrics and melodies. By choosing to record the first two Christian albums with the legendary soul music producer
Jerry Wexler, and at Wexler's favored Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, Dylan returned to the
sounds and surroundings of the South as he had not since Nashville Skyline - and this time, he journeyed to the
deep South, the South of black gospel and rhythm and blues. Dylan's links spirituals and gospel -- evident in his
early recording of "Gospel Plow" and his transformation of "No More Auction Block," into "Blowin' In The Wind"
-- went back far, at least as far as Odetta, and then the Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, and then, maybe most of all, to the Staple Singers, the first African-American group to record Dylan's
songs. Now those links were amplified and obvious to everyone, especially on songs like "Saved" and "When You
Gonna Wake Up?" They would turn up again in a song Dylan tried record for Infidels but would not be released
until 1991, arguably the best song Dylan wrote in the 1980s: "Blind Willie McTell," a vivid song of southern
history and human corruption sung as a paen to the old blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s.
The gospel period also led Dylan to revamp completely his stage show, featuring a revolving cast of black
female singers who would open the concert and then provide backup for a set list that, from the autumn of 1979
until the autumn of 1980, consisted entirely of Christian songs. (Dylan would become romantically linked with at
least two of the singers, Helena Springs and Clydie King, and would eventually marry a third, Carolyn Dennis,
who bore him a daughter, Desiree, in 1986; the two would divorce in 1992.) As performance, the gospel concerts
were as defiantly provocative as the raucous second-half rock shows of late 1965 and early 1966. The format was
as unconventional for a mainline rock concert in 1979 and 1980 as the Rolling Thunder Revue had been in 1975.
Yet the gospel concerts, like the revue, were very much in the American grain -- not a travelling medicine show,
but another kind of spectacle beneath the big top. Dylan reinvented the southern tent show revival, starring himself
as the singer and hellfire preacher.
Dylan entered his most prolonged period of artistic struggle after 1983. Although each of his original albums
in the 1980s after Infidels included one or two cuts that were at least interesting, most of his songs, including such
duds as "You Wanna Ramble" and "The Ugliest Girl In The World," were uninspired, the thrashing of a tired
writer searching for his old spark. Dylan's stepped up schedule of concert appearances - including 364 dates from
1988 through 1991, the first four years of what fans dubbed "the Never Ending Tour" -- included far too many
shows that were strangled or half-hearted; and by the end of the 1980s, reviewers and fans had begun calling
Dylan's look on stage as his "Death Mask." He did participate in a successful musical jape, joining George
Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne is a knocked together band called the Traveling Wilburys.
Apart, though, from one of the songs on the first Traveling Wilburys' album, "Tweeter and the Monkey Man" which was in part a modern-day gunslinger ballad, and in part a send-up of Bruce Springsteen - Dylan made little
effort at serious songwriting on either of the Wilburys albums. A film he co-starred in, Hearts of Fire, was a
disaster from start to finish.
Looking back on it all a decade later, Dylan remarked that, by 1987, "I'd kind of reached the end of the line."
Later, writing in Chronicles Volume One , he affirmed that he had "felt done for," like "an empty burned-out
wreck" who had "no connection to any kind of inspiration." Dylan did experience some sort of epiphany in
October 1987, while performing an open-air concert in Locarno, Switzerland, when he felt his vocal powers
suddenly reappear; and he also retrieved a musical system of chords and cycles first taught him when he was
starting out in the 1960s by the veteran blues and jazz guitarist and singer, Lonnie Johnson. But soon after, he
relates a bit mysteriously in Chronicles, a sudden, terrible accident mangled one arm and sidelined him.
At the end of the 1980s, signs came that Dylan had righted himself. At the urging of his friend Bono, the
lead singer for the Irish group U2, Dylan arranged a meeting in New Orleans with the producer Daniel Lanois in
September 1988, and agreed to link up with Lanois again the following spring. Right on time, Dylan returned to
New Orleans with a batch of new songs the following March; and over the ensuing four months, with local
musicians recruited by Lanois, what would become the album Oh Mercy. The album contained some very strong
songs and a few excellent ones, their themes ranging from cutting commentary on the contemporary scene
("Political World") to laments about personal unsteadiness, loss, and resignation ("Most Of The Time"), to the
most noble and moving Christian hymn that Dylan had yet composed, "Ring Them Bells," to a song about
blasphemy and abandoned conscience, of and for the 1980s, "Man in the Long Black Coat."
Less than a year later, though, an energized Dylan released Under the Red Sky, and the critics once again
bemoaned his continuing decline. Oh Mercy, it seemed, was a fluke; its successor supposedly proved that Dylan
was truly a has-been. In fact, the detractors went overboard. Listened to as the children's song that it is, for
example, the much-derided track "Wiggle Wiggle" is not silly but charming. (Dylan had dedicated the album to
"Gabby Goo Goo," his playful nickname for his four-year-old daughter.) On "Unbelievable," Dylan conjured up an
abiding outrage at the world's ways and how his life was turning out, both of which were "unbelievable like a lead
balloon." But the sour reviews translated into disappointing sales.
Depressed by the failure of Under the Red Sky, with the formal ending of his second marriage nearing, and
with contractual recording obligations looming, Dylan stepped back from his songwriting, though not from his
touring. In June 1992, he linked up in Chicago at the Acme Recording Studio in Chicago with an old collaborator,
the blues singer and extraordinary instrumentalist David Bromberg, and Bromberg's band; and in three days of
work, Dylan, Bromberg, and the band produced sufficient material for a brief album, mixing traditional folk songs,
contemporary folk songs, a blues by Blind Willie Johnson, and Jimmie Rodgers's "Miss the Mississippi." Then
Dylan shifted to his home garage studio in Malibu, armed only with a guitar and harmonica, just as he had been at
the start of his career, and began turning out more traditional songs to flesh out the Bromberg recordings. Quickly,
though, the solo material that came pouring out of Dylan added up to more than was necessary for an entire album
of its own. For reasons never entirely explained, the Dylan-Bromberg recordings were quietly shelved, and instead
Dylan released two solo acoustic albums, Good As I Been to You in 1992 and World Gone Wrong in 1993. It
proved a pivotal moment for Dylan's art.
Even when he turned his back on the 1960s folk revival, Dylan had explicitly honored the traditional folk
music, with its myth, contradictions, and chaos; indeed, insofar as the folk revival prized old time music for its
supposed simplicity as well as purity. Dylan's break, and even his turn to surrealism and electricity can be seen as
an effort to preserve the wilder spirit of folk music. "Folk music is the only music where it isn't simple," he told a
pair of interviewers in 1965, contrary to the assumptions of many folkie purists:
It's never been simple. It's weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I've
never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far
out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.
Now that Dylan was feeling as if his creativity had severely slowed, he returned to his musical roots, continuing to
add traditional material to his concerts, and listening to fresh collections of blues, mountain songs, contemporary
folk music. Feeling as if he had nowhere to go, he knew very well where he should head: "If you can sing those
[folk] songs, if you can understand them and perform them well, there's nowhere you can't go."
The tracks on Good As I Been To You form a miscellany of old songs that included, among others, a turn-ofthe-century blues, "Frankie and Albert" (in the style of Mississippi John Hurt's original recording in 1928); an old
English tune, "Canadee-i-o," and an old Irish ballad, "Arthur McBride and the Sergeant" recently given superb new
life on recordings by, respectively, Nic Jones and Paul Brady; songs made famous by the Stanley Brothers and
Mance Lipscomb (including the latter's "You Gonna Quit Me Baby," which also supplied Dylan with the album's
title); Stephen C. Foster's heartfelt "Hard Times"; plus "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" World Gone Wrong is darker
and more coherent, grouped around American rural blues of the early twentieth century about aging, love gone
wrong, and murder; a Civil War army ballad and a British navy ballad; two songs, back to back, that Blind Willie
McTell had recorded (including "Delia," one of the first songs performed ever performed as a blues number); and,
as a benediction, an old Sacred Harp ballad hymn Dylan had learned from a Doc Watson record, "Lone Pilgrim."
The simplicity of the arrangements, the pathos in the new cracking of Dylan's aging voice, now past fifty, and
the retreat from any hint of studio excess impressed the critics, one of whom, David Sexton, likened Good As I
Been To You as the work of "a powerful ghost," "deeply inward" rather than nostalgic. Especially on World
Gone Wrong, Dylan entered each song and possessed it - and, by looking backward, took a leap forward in how
he conceived of himself and his art. The critic Bill Flanagan, in the finest review of World Gone Wrong, hit the
point beautifully.“When Dylan sings, in this version of 'Delia,' 'All the friends I ever had are gone,'" Flanagan
wrote,
it breaks your heart. His world-worn voice reveals the cracks behind the stoicism in a
way that this most unsentimental of singers would never allow in his lyrics. The
weight of nobility and loss are as appropriate to this older Dylan's singing as anger
and hunger are to the snarl of his youth.
That weight, and the gallantry with which Dylan expressed it, had belonged to the blues from the start; it just took
Dylan a half-century of living his own life for him to be able to express it this way.
Over the winter of 1995-96, snowed in at his Minnesota farm, Dylan found his songwriting muse once more.
The songs, Dylan later said, "just naturally hung together, because they share a certain skepticism. They're more
concerned with the dread realities of life than the bright and rosy idealism popular today." Hoping to achieve a
sound that was neither glitzy nor self-consciously old fashioned, Dylan turned again to Daniel Lanois to work with
him as co-producer when he decided to record in January 1997. The album would eventually be called Time Out
Of Mind, and it would mark the completion of Dylan's comeback from his travails and turmoil of the 1980s.
On an initial listening, Time Out Of Mind's most striking features are its deliberate pace and its muffled,
boggy sound. Although the album includes a country jump song, "Dirt Road Blues," and a banging, sinister
backbeat rocker, "Cold Irons Bound," most of the songs amble quietly, no matter whether the lyrics convey
revulsion or resignation. Lanois's reverberating special production effects produced an album very much in the
mysterious voodoo style of Oh Mercy, but much darker and foggier. Whereas the earlier album sounds like New
Orleans, Time Out Of Mind conjures up the deepest recesses of a bayou, with mist drifting lightly across blackgreen water, Spanish moss clumped so thick it that seems impenetrable. Neither Lanois nor Dylan would tax
Dylan's aging vocal chords unduly; and so, although the cracked leather vocals of the earlier acoustic albums show
up only now and then; on most of the songs Dylan's voice is hushed -- sometimes sepulchral, and sometimes
almost spectral.
One of the album's best songs - and the one that now seems likeliest to survive as a canonical Dylan
composition - is "Not Dark Yet." Commonly described as a mediation on morality (which in part it is), it is
actually more of a song about weary alienation from a world full of lies, where behind every thing of beauty lurks
some kind of pain. Dylan sings of receiving a woman's kind and forthright letter, but it is of no account because
"[i]t's not dark yet, but it's getting there." Song after song on Time Out Of Mind conveys a similar sense of loss
and estrangement, portraying a world emptied of everything the singer has ever valued, where his loved ones either
are gone or no longer his loved ones. The best he can do is dance with a stranger, which only reminds him that he
once truly loved someone else.
On repeated listening, another peculiar feature about the album stands out: Dylan's deliberate, always
unacknowledged but sometimes obvious appropriations from traditional folk, and country and western music, as
well as from high literature. Dylan took the title and some of the words in his song “Highlands” from the lateeighteenth-century Scots' poet Robert Burns, but based its tune on a riff in the great 1930s bluesman Charley
Patton. Dylan also lifted the title "Dirt Road Blues" from Patton. The title the first song on Time Out Of Mind,
"Love Sick," echoes Hank Williams' hit "Lovesick Blues." Bits and pieces of lyrics from songs ranging from the
spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting For A Train," turn up here and there. The
album's title -- an old phrase, long out of usage, meaning "time immemorial" - may have come from Shakespeare
and may have come from Warren Zevon.
What was clear at the time was that Dylan was returning to excellent form. And although it was sheer
coincidence, it now seems almost symbolic that, between the time the studio recording ended and the album's
release, Dylan suffered through and recovered from a grave attack of histoplasmosis, a serious heart infection that
might well have killed him - yet which he survived, to continue the latest turn in his journey. After enduring
severe pain for much of the month of June, 1997, Dylan was back on the road at the start of August. In late
September, he played a special performance for Paul John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.
Four days later, he inserted "Love Sick" on the band's encore playlist - the first song from the new album to be
played in concert. Early in 1998, the official accolades began coming in, starting with the Grammy for "Best
Album of the Year." Over the next three years, the aura around Dylan, as he continued his touring and turned to
writing a batch of new songs, was brighter than it had been at any time since the mid-1970s.
With his next album, " Love and Theft" - released, eerily, on September 11, 2001, the day of the Al Qaeda
terrorist attacks on the United States -- Dylan changed shape once again, not as dramatically or as fractiously as he
had in 1965-66, but emphatically enough. He also played tricks with the past and present, memory and history.
The new album was the work of an older and wiser artist, now on the verge of sixty, burdened with a mountain of
rue. But, stepping outside the squitchy, boggy gloominess and resignation of Time Out Of Mind, the singer also
sings of brimming desire and is eager to tell about it, though not without irony. He has truly relocated his mark
and is ready to step up and let rip; he has found things he had once thought were lost; he includes one song about
disaster, "High Water (For Charley Patton)" that sounded chillingly prescient in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Even more striking than the album's mood is its dense eclectic style - the most varied of any Dylan album
before it since The Basement Tapes. More explicitly than ever, Dylan travels through time and space at will on
"Love and Theft," picks up melodies and lyrics from hither and yon (including some wildly unexpected places,
ranging from Virgil to the black songster group of the 1920s and 1930s, the Mississippi Sheiks), and then
assembles something new and original for himself and his listeners. With this modern minstrelsy, foreshadowed on
Time Out of Mind, the album blasts through the deadening domination of up-to-the-minute, on-the buzz, virtual
reality, using musical and literary forms (and even recording devices) that are older and truer but without turning
in the least antiquarian. Dylan reclaims the present by reclaiming the past. And he commands his amalgamating
American art in wholly news ways in order to express loss and hope, cynicism and wonder, as he had come to
feel them at the century's turning.
Upon its release, Dylan called " Love and Theft" an album of greatest hits that hadn't become hits yet, and it is
hard to pick out one or two standouts. One of the most powerful songs, though, is certainly "High Water," with
its allusions to the blues great Patton's "High Water Everywhere," a song of the floods that devastated Louisiana
and Mississippi in 1927. The song is filled with allusions to physical destruction, which in turn become a
metaphor for calamity of every variety; but, as in all his best work, those allusions carry far beyond what is right
in front of the listener, containing the cosmos that is in every grain of sand. All of the floods on " Love and
Theft" aren't just floods, they're also The Flood. Why else do Charles Darwin and his ultra-materialist friend
George Lewes (lover of the great novelist, George Eliot) turn up in "High Water," wanted dead or alive by a
snarling Mississippi judge? Lewes tells the believers, the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew (Protestant/ Roman
Catholic/ Hebrew?) that, no, they can't open their minds to just anything, and for that the high sheriff's on his tail.
The song also has one of the album's magicians and hoodoo men and bragging mannish boys, who declares
himself no pig without a wig and bids you with menace to treat him kind.
As a whole, the album - with its songs of seduction, woe, and ironic defiant aging, not to mention its
vaudeville jokes - is a journey through innumerable American popular musical genres. And with his expert timing,
better than ever, Dylan shuffles space and time like a man dealing stud poker. One moment, it's 1935, high atop
some Manhattan hotel, then its 1966 in Paris or 2000 in West Lafayette, Indiana or this coming November in
Terre Haute, then it's 1927, and we're in Mississippi and the water's deeper as it come, then we're thrown back
into Biblical time, entire epochs melting away, except that we're rolling across the flats in a Cadillac, or maybe it's
a Mustang Ford, and that girl tosses off her underwear, high water everywhere. Then it's September 11, 2001, and
we're inside a dive on lower Broadway, and, horribly beyond description, things are blasted and breaking up out
there, nothing's standing there, "it's baaaaad out there/High water everywhere." It's always right now, too, on "Love
and Theft."
The album received immediate critical acclaim and earned Dylan a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk
Album. Yet while " Love and Theft" easily could have served as a capstone to a successful recording career, Dylan
responded to its success by turning out fresh work like a man possessed. Not a year passed over the ensuing eight
when he failed to produce something of significance, including two albums of original music; a large retrospective
of previously unreleased recordings; an album of traditional carols and pop Christmas songs; the first volume of
his memoirs, Chronicles; a full-length feature film; a 3 and 1/2-hour television documentary, directed by Martin
Scorsese, about his early life and career; a major museum exhibition in Europe of his sketches and gouaches (with
clear artistic debts to Norman Raeben); and Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan , the most
original radio show to appear on the air in recent memory. Dylan also received two Grammies, a Prince of
Asturias Award, an honorary degree from St. Andrews University in Scotland, and a Pulitzer Prize special citation.
All the while, he performed, on average, more than 100 shows a year, and never fewer than 97 - a punishing
schedule almost unheard of these days for an artist of Dylan's stature and renown, let alone one who was past 60.
While he did not come close to the astounding creative intensity of 1962-66 - no artist his age could possibly
have replicated that experience - Dylan enjoyed the most productive phase of his career since that time, as he
extended and explored the inventiveness sparked by his re-awakening in the early 1990s. He also consolidated the
latest incarnation of his public image, now carefully constructed as a wizened cultural elder statesman, an icon of
musical Americana who still had plenty left to say, do, and sing, before it got too late. His new work hardly
received universal acclaim. Listeners caught on to his method of writing and playing as, in the critic Jon Pareles
put it, "the emissary from a reinvented yesterday," which at once had made him more comprehensible and created
new controversies - including angry and sometimes obsessive but finally lame charges that his various melodic and
lyrical borrowings and transfigurations amount to plagiarism. (Solidly a senior citizen, Dylan, approaching the age
of 70, was still getting under a lot of people's skins.) But the artist kept moving on, pursuing ambitions old and
new, compelled by some combination of forces to push himself as hard as he could for as long as he could. The
full measure of his work after "Love and Theft" could only be taken, when listeners had more time to digest all its
richness and variety. And, in his firework bursts of creativity, he still left the world wondering what he would be
up to next.
Portions of this essay have been adapted from Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, New York: Doubleday, 2010,
© Sean Wilentz.