Bob Dylan Read online

  5

  BEYOND STARDOM: ROCK HISTORY AND CANONISATION

  Stardom and celebrity are inherently social phenomena. You cannot be the only person to know you are a star, a celebrity only in your own home. This means that the public nature of being a star continually affects the individual star’s sense of self, even in private. Consider other states of being such as being black or being woman. If you’re a woman, your womanhood is a public matter. It affects what people think of you, what is deemed appropriate behaviour in your presence, how you dress, what activities you do. Embodied in your individual personality are a whole series of social norms and expectations that affect how you think, how you act, and what others think of you. Being a woman is inherently social, even when the woman has a ‘private life’. The same is true for celebrities. Even if they have a ‘private life’ – something I questioned in chapter 2 – that private life is always public, always structured by public meaning.

  Because stardom is inherently social, it is important to consider it systemically, as a more or less coherent system with specific characteristics. As I said in chapter 1, conventional biographies of stars often ignore the ways in which the life of a particular star is structured in ways similar to other stars. This is no surprise: one of the key characteristics of stardom is that it emphasises individuality and so, as biographies are part of the star system, they also serve to reinforce the primacy of the individual. Specifically, they tend to overemphasise the inherent charisma or talent of the star as the basis of their stardom, and the agency (power) of the star (or, sometimes in cases such as Elvis Presley, the power of a Svengali figure) in creating the star’s image. The ideology of stardom here has much in common with discourses of authorship and bohemianism that cohered during the nineteenth century: the innate genius of the artist represented the unique individuality inherent in us all while simultaneously marking off that particular individual as extra special, a hero of the modern age. The same can be said of stardom – the star is represented both as a special individual with particular talent or charisma while at the same time a representation of the ordinary, the proof that anyone can make it in a democratic society.

  Subsequent literary theory has undermined many of the conceits of the Romantic myth of genius, however, not only rejecting the possibility of ‘pure’ originality (all new creations are recombinations of things already in existence) but also rejecting the possibility that the author can control the meaning of his creation. When combined with a systemic understanding of stardom, such postmodern literary theory provides a useful way of considering the meaning of particular star-images. A newly emerging star never has a blank canvas on which to work, there are always the structural constraints of stardom in general as well as specific social and cultural influences that shape a star image. Even someone as ‘unique’ or ‘groundbreaking’ as Dylan had these constraints. Despite my claim that Dylan was the first rock star, we can clearly see a range of different star types and influences in his persona. The most obvious of these are Woody Guthrie, James Dean, Buddy Holly and other rock and rollers, Hank Williams and the Beat poets. These are not just musical influences, they are influences that shaped how the public star/artist should act.

  At the same time, once a particular star-image has emerged (growing out of narrow social milieu into wider currency, such as a local music scene), it ceases to be controllable by the star. Star-meaning is constructed by the audience and not by the star and/or manager. The star can try to shape their image, can make a ‘serious’ film, release a folk album, do interviews in particular magazines but, ultimately, it is the public that decide what the star-image means. ‘Strictly speaking, the public faces that celebrities construct do not belong to them, since they only possess validity if the public confirms them. The relationship of esteem is also one of dependency.’1 If you think about it, there are very few stars who have ‘retired’, stopped being stars at the height of their fame. There are far more cases of stars trying to cling on to their stardom, releasing one more album, making another comeback. It is the public who decide when a star stops being a star, not the individual star.* This is an example of what Turner refers to as ‘celebrity from below’;2 the power to maintain celebrity, and the power to construct what a particular celebrity represents, is with the public. This returns us to the thorny relationship between stardom and biography – individual biography is an important component of how stars engender meaning, but the meaning that stars signify does not depend upon biographical accuracy. Take Dylan as an example – forty years after leaving the protest movement, Dylan’s stardom still, to a certain extent, represents pacifism and anti-war protest:

  A lot of my songs were definitely misinterpreted by people who didn’t know any better, and it goes on today. . . . Take ‘Masters Of War’. Every time I sing it, someone writes that it’s an anti-war song. But there’s no anti-war sentiment in that song. I’m not a pacifist. I don’t think I’ve ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it’s about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. (Robert Hilburn interview, 2004)

  Whether Dylan is or has ever been a pacifist, however, does not matter – if Dylan’s stardom represents anti-war sentiment then it represents anti-war sentiment and Dylan can argue otherwise until he’s blue in the face, it won’t change the fact that it represents anti-war sentiment. Fans can highlight the ‘misrepresentation’, show how this particular song is not actually anti-war, but that doesn’t matter either.*

  This ‘public ownership’ of a specific star-image is not unique to popular music but it does have a particular intensity because of the notion that music stars represent particular groups of people. The folk ideology in rock music dictates that the star is representative of the social group from which she emerges. If the star begins to move away from the group then the audience will be quick to correct or reject her. Popular music stars belong to their fans (Dylan was introduced to his audience at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 with the statement ‘Here he is, take him, you know him, he’s yours . . . Bob Dylan.’).

  This is not to suggest that stars have no power, just less than is conventionally presented. A star clearly has more power than an individual fan to construct what the starimage means; the supporting industry (such as managers and record labels), as well as complementary industries like radio and the press, also have considerable power in creating a particular meaning. Much of the interest in individual star biographies lies in the battle over star-meaning, either a star battling with his manager/record company/film studio over control of his image, or the conflict with public meaning of the star. In some cases, this kind of conflict become central to the star’s meaning (such as Garbo’s ‘I want to be alone’) and Dylan is one such example. Dylan was so culturally significant that his star-meaning was always more open to contestation than lesser stars. That he emerged within a cultural movement that emphasised collectivity only added to the potential claims of public ownership of Bob Dylan. One of the interesting things about Dylan is how the struggle for the meaning of Dylan’s star-image has proved a central strand of that star-image. And whereas for the majority of celebrities, the struggle over image is with managers and publicists, for Dylan, the struggle has been primarily with his audience. The ambivalent relationship between Dylan and his audience has been a central motif of Dylan’s career. It can be seen most clearly in 1965–6 when audiences booed Dylan’s new electrified music, but it can also be seen in 1979, when audiences booed Dylan playing Christian music, and in 1961 in the folk establishment’s ambivalence towards Dylan’s eclecticism. It can even be seen in Dylan’s ongoing Never Ending Tour project. In general, the tense relationship is used as evidence of Dylan’s artistic bravery, a marker of his authenticity as he follows his artistic impulse and ignores the demands of the market, but there are times when the battle over Dylan’s meaning has been used as evidence against Dylan, as proof of his artistic decline. Such instances include the crucial 1967–70 period w
hich I will discuss in this chapter, as well as some of the response to the Never Ending Tour. There is in fact, a notable split: those conflicts written about with the benefit of hindsight are used as evidence of Dylan’s bravery (how could the audience not hear how great the electric music was?) while those events that were written about as they happened (the release of Self Portrait, his turn to Christianity, the Never Ending Tour) tend to be used as evidence of Dylan’s weakness (we were right, he was wrong). This is an important split, and I will return to it.

  The struggle for the meaning of the ‘Bob Dylan’ star-image is itself a key component of that image. Returning to the issues discussed in chapter 2, we can see how his star-meaning affects how we interpret Dylan’s songs. Many songs are interpreted as at least in part a rejoinder to his audience (I mentioned ‘Love Sick’ in the introduction; other songs considered this way include ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, ‘All I Really Want To Do’, ‘In The Garden’ and ‘What Was It You Wanted?’). Paul Williams writes that ‘Dylan has often realized and demonstrated that any man/woman “I”/“you” song can also be about . . . the relationship between a singer/performer and an audience’.3 Once again, Williams places too much emphasis on Dylan’s power to control meaning; surely the point here is that Dylan’s stardom structures the meaning of songs which enables them to be heard in a particular way. There is nothing in the words of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ that implies it is about anything other than a male/female relationship. It is only knowing what we know about Bob Dylan that facilitates this dual reading. Similarly, Williams himself recounts how he hears ‘Seeing The Real You At Last’ as being in part about the audience. It’s a plausible point but it is driven by Williams’ own knowledge of Dylan’s relationship with the audience and not from anything ‘within’ the song. Again, this is not to suggest that Dylan has no power to control meaning. Obviously, song lyrics enable some meanings and close down others – ‘Wedding Song’ is a man/woman song that is clearly not about the audience. And, as I argued earlier, Dylan is aware of his stardom and does not use it naively (singing ‘All I Really Want To Do’ at Newport ’64 was probably a calculated move; I am less convinced that singing ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ after the electric set at Newport ’65 was, even though it has subsequently been interpreted that way). When Dylan returned to touring in 1974, after an eight-year hiatus, the first song he played was an unreleased one from 1963 called ‘Hero Blues’.

  Yes, the gal I got

  I swear she’s the screaming end

  She wants me to be a hero

  So she can tell all her friends

  This was ostensibly a man/woman song, and Dylan quite deliberately subverted its meaning in an attempt to assert ownership of his star image.* This tension between Dylan and his audience is a continuing theme throughout Dylan’s career. Even as late as 1997, Dylan stated:

  Some days I get up and it just makes me sick that I’m doing what I’m doing. Because basically – I mean, you’re one cut above a pimp. That’s what everybody who’s a performer is. (David Gates interview)

  I want now to discuss a specific episode in this battle, perhaps the most significant period for constructing the totality of Dylan’s star-image. Ironically, it is also the period in which Dylan published less work than any other time in his career, 1967–70.

  KEEPING SILENT

  In ‘Hero Blues’, the singer laments that he can never live up to the expectations placed upon him by his lover. He chides that

  You need a different kind of man, one that can grab and hold your heart

  You need a different kind of man, you need Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The use of Napoleon, the exemplar of Romantic individualism for Lord Byron, is prescient, for in the period 1963–6 Dylan had been granted a similar kind of heroic leadership. When he emerged within the folk movement, he was labelled as the spokesman of a generation, a title he repeatedly rejected. When he shifted into electric music, he was once again feted as the primary leader of the new youth movement, the only man hip enough to know exactly what was happening. The expectations of both kinds of leadership placed extraordinary burdens on Dylan, not least in the way that the media dealt with him, asking him absurd questions about politics, young people, his music, his position as a leader (Do you care about what you sing? Do you think young people understand a word you say? How many folk singers are there?). During the folk singer period, Dylan was generally polite, though sometimes playful, in rejecting any kind of position and any role of leadership. As the decade progressed, however, Dylan’s responses became more sardonic and confrontational:

  Q: Can you tell me when and where you were born?

  Dylan: No, you can go and find out. There’s many biographies and you can look to [them]. You don’t ask me where I was born, where I lived. Don’t ask me those questions. You find out from other papers.

  . . .

  Q: Of course your songs have a very strong content . . .

  Dylan: Have you heard my songs?

  Q: I have. ‘Masters Of War’. ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

  Dylan: What about ‘[Boots] Of Spanish Leather’? Have you heard that? Why don’t you listen to that? Listen, I couldn’t care less what your paper writes about me. Your paper can write anything, don’t you realise? The people that listen to me don’t read your paper, you know, to listen to me. I’m not going to be known from your paper.

  Q: You’re already known. Why be so hostile?

  Dylan: Because you’re hostile to me. You’re using me. I’m an object to you. I went through this before in the United States, you know. There’s nothing personal. I’ve nothing against you at all. I just don’t want to be bothered with your paper, that’s all. I just don’t want to be a part of it. Why should I have to go along with something just so that somebody else can eat? Why don’t you just say that my name is Kissenovitch. You know, and I, er, come from Acapulco, Mexico. That my father was an escaped thief from South Africa. OK. You can say anything you want to say.

  (Laurie Henshaw interview, 1965)

  He developed the ‘anti-interview’ method of throwing questions back at journalists so that they had to answer what they thought was true, as well as his famous ‘truth attacks’, outbursts of Beat-philosophy intended to undermine the interviewer’s sense of self:

  I’m saying that you’re gonna die, and you’re gonna go off the earth, you’re gonna be dead. Man, it could be, you know, twenty years, it could be tomorrow: any time. So am I . . . Alright: now you do your job in the face of that – and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself. (To a journalist from Time Magazine, 1965)

  In rejecting any kind of label, however, in disclaiming any suggestion of leadership, Dylan merely reinforced his position as leader. In the same way that the anti-hero is himself a kind of hero, breaking convention to highlight the problems of the world, Dylan’s anti-leadership position (including his instruction ‘don’t follow leaders’ in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’) was itself a form of leadership. Dylan did not have fans, but followers:

  It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. ‘You’re the prophet. You’re the saviour.’ I never wanted to be a prophet or saviour. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No. (Ed Bradley interview, 2004)

  The pressure of being Bob Dylan in 1965–6 was extraordinary and it clearly took its toll – a comparison of pictures from 1965 and 1966 illustrate the difference. In 1965 Dylan looks sharp and alert whereas in 1966 he often seems exhausted and spaced out, clearly taking drugs in order to cope. Dylan was later to say that in 1966, you got ‘the feeling that I might die after the show’ (Craig McGregor interview, 1978). Dylan had to escape New York because of the pressure, and in 1965 he moved to a leafy settlement called Woodstock, a couple of hours north of the city. In July 1966, Dylan had a minor motorcycle accident while riding in Woodstock. Although it did not seem so at the time, the
accident marked the start of a period of withdrawal for Dylan. Between the accident and 1970 his public appearances were limited. An interview with the New York Daily News in May 1967 was the first public pronouncement from Dylan since the crash. This eleven-month period of silence within the context of the sixties recording industry is in itself remarkable (Dylan had released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde within a fifteen-month spell). In the last week of 1967, Dylan released a new album (John Wesley Harding) with no publicity; in 1968, his only public performance was at Woody Guthrie’s memorial concert and there was no album; in 1969, he released the 26-minute album Nashville Skyline, performed three songs on Johnny Cash’s TV show and played at the Isle of Wight festival in the UK; in 1970, he released the album Self Portrait. And that’s it; four years’ worth of work (the same length of time that produced all releases from Freewheelin’ to Blonde On Blonde). This is Dylan’s least prolific spell in terms of official output; in terms of star-image, however, it is probably the most important spell of Dylan’s career.

  Dylan had personal reasons for spending time out of the public eye; he clearly needed to recuperate his health and he had recently married and started a family. It also seems clear, however, that Dylan hoped a period out of the spotlight would take the pressure off his star responsibilities. The inherently public nature of stardom, however, meant that Dylan failed in his attempts to withdraw from public life.

  Stars are commodities. The only reason that stars exist is because the individual can be turned into a product. Where stars are different than, say, handbags, however, is that they also contribute to the making of the product, ‘they are both labour and the thing that labour produces’.4 Recognising this means recognising that the star is always engaged in the process of creating and maintaining stardom – the star is part of the star’s own promotion. The role that the star plays in creating their stardom is one reason why any meaningful distinction between public and private life for the star is impossible. It also means, however, that all attempts to escape from fame are doomed to circularity, with the desire to escape fame becoming a central element of the fame itself. The one thing that everyone knows about Greta Garbo is that she wanted to be alone.