Bob Dylan Read online

  Given the inescapability of stardom, the only option would seem to be silence, and Dylan is not the only star to adopt an ‘aesthetic of silence’ (Salinger is another example). If the meaning of one’s stardom is contested, and one’s statements are open to constant misinterpretation, then saying nothing would seem the only eloquent solution. But while silence could result in the complete dissolution of stardom – the public could get bored, move on to the next thing – it is the public that decides if this happens, not the star. If the public maintains an interest, then the star remains a star. Even after thirty years of living a reclusive lifestyle, Garbo was still a star and still bothered by the paparazzi. And, if stardom is maintained by the public, then the silence has an audience; it becomes a statement in itself.

  This is what happened in Dylan’s case. Dylan himself was almost entirely absent from public life in 1967, yet his stardom still dominated rock culture. The reason for this is a historical coincidence – Dylan’s crash and withdrawal from public life coincided with the full flourishing of rock culture and, in particular, the emergence of a specific form of rock criticism that defined rock’s key features and outlined its history. Any significant cultural form or movement requires cultural ‘accreditation’, it needs to be acknowledged as worthy of its significant status. This happens both from without, as existing cultural institutions acknowledge the value of the new form, and within, as the new form develops its own body of criticism, its own journals with ‘critics who propagate and promote it while they propound and evaluate’.5 Gendron suggests that for rock this begins to occur in 1966. The first review of a rock record in a major American newspaper occurred in the New York Times in February 1966 (Robert Shelton reviewed ten albums, including one by Dylan) and a specific rock column was introduced into the Village Voice in June 1966. Sandwiched in-between was the first issue of the first rock magazine, Crawdaddy, set up by 18-year-old fan Paul Williams (later to write the Performing Artist series of books on Dylan). Over the next eighteen months, rock was accepted not only by bastions of highbrow authority (mainly through the accreditation of The Beatles’ highbrow pretensions in releasing Sergeant Pepper), but also through the emergence of the specialist ‘rock critic’, who began appearing in regular newspaper columns and in the emerging specialist rock press, in magazines such as Fusion and Creem. The most significant new rock journal, Rolling Stone, was first published on 9 November 1967.

  The important thing to recognise here is not just that rock became accepted as a worthy cultural form at this time, nor that it became the dominant mainstream music. What is important is that through this process of accreditation, rock itself becomes defined. If it is an important cultural form, what are its key features? What does it stand for? Who are the key players? The ideology of rock outlined in the previous chapter – the contradictory mixture of self-expressiveness and social reflection – only becomes clearly formulated during this period. The new music magazines clearly differentiated themselves from teen fan magazines that concentrated on pin-ups and industry publicity. Rather than just featuring commercially successful stars, aesthetic achievement would be the most important factor.* They were intended as serious criticism about serious music – Crawdaddy’s first issue carried an article entitled ‘The aesthetics of rock’. Through the new rock press, rock culture itself defined its key characteristics, its key players and works and, in this process, developed a specific historical story of how rock emerged. The period roughly from 1967–1969 is crucial in understanding how 1963–1966 has subsequently become characterised and understood.

  All history is written after the event and events are thus ‘framed’ by the worldview of those writing that history. Do the new ‘academics’ of rock look at the emergence of rock and roll, or the period 1963–6, neutrally and extrapolate the key features of rock, or do they already have an idea of what ‘rock’ is and then interpret the historical events through that particular lens? The answer is surely the latter. This is not a question of bias but of how all events are given meaning socially – an absolute objectivity is impossible. Writing history is one of the key ways in which a social group defines its own ideologies, its own social identity. It offers an opportunity to define who is in and who is out and rock historicising was no different (for example, the first full length study of Dylan’s work, published in 1972 but very much part of rock’s self-definition, contains the declaration that ‘country music just isn’t that valuable’).6 The period prior to 1967, and alternative forms of music, became framed within 1967’s conceptual framework of what rock was and who made up its constituency.

  The history of rock music that was developed by rock critics goes something like this. Before 1956, life is very dull and musical consumption is a family affair – artists like Sinatra were enjoyed by adults and children alike. Then, in 1956 – Bang! – Elvis Presley appears and rock and roll is born. This new music is a fusion of black and white music (rhythm and blues mixed with hillbilly). Teenagers have their own music, which liberates them but offends adults and is demonised by authoritarian institutions. Then in 1959, rock and roll dies down, as its main players are sidelined by drafting, scandal, imprisonment and death. Popular music in the period 1960–2 is bland, characterised by Tin Pan Alley songwriting with corny ‘moon/June’ rhymes and ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?’ Suddenly – Bang! – the folk revival appears and shows that popular music can have a social conscience and does not have to be limited in its subject matter. Dylan, as part of the revival, illustrates the breadth of language that can be used within popular song. Then, in 1964 – Bang! – the British Invasion produces genuinely exciting and danceable music that reinvigorates popular music. With their homages to rock and roll and rhythm and blues, The Beatles and The Stones show that there had been great music going on in America but people were not hearing it because of racial segregation in the charts. Finally, in 1965 – BANG! BANG! – Dylan’s lyrical advances merge with the beat music of the British Invasion and rock music is born. While rock and roll and the music of the beat boom were exhilarating, they were also a bit juvenile; rock music deals with adult themes while maintaining the emotional and visceral power of the earlier musics.

  This history is familiar to anyone with a passing interest in popular music. It is an extremely simplified and misleading history but my purpose in outlining it here is not to correct it.7 Actually, as I have repeatedly said in relation to stardom, the myth is more important than the facts in this regard – what people believe to be true about rock, or about Dylan, matters. My interest in this history is its emphasis upon radicalism and, in particular, how it presents musical history as a series of revolutionary moments rather than recognising evolutionary continuities. This emphasis on radicalism plays a key role in how Dylan’s stardom has been structured. While there are clear continuities both in Dylan’s work and his star-image throughout his career, the emphasis is on change – Dylan’s chameleon nature – and conflict – the booing at Newport ’65 and the 1966 World Tour.

  Dylan’s period of silence coincides with the time that rock culture is developing its own ideology, writing its own history and creating its own canon. Dylan is placed at the very top of this, above even The Beatles.* Even as he was absent from the scene, Dylan found his cultural cachet increasing as ‘the feeling spread among growing numbers of young people that wherever their head was at, Dylan had been there before’.8 Dylan has commented on this process in subsequent interviews:

  When I got back [into public life] I couldn’t relate to that world, because what I was doing before that accident wasn’t what was happening when I got back on my feet. We didn’t have that adulation, that intense worship, I was just another singer really. (Craig McGregor interview, 1978)

  It wasn’t me who called myself a legend. It was thrown at me by editors in the media who wanted to play around with me or have something to tell their readers. But it stuck. (Robert Hilburn interview, 1992)

  By keeping silent, his commercial stock incr
eased too – John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline were his two bestselling records of the decade. The release of John Wesley Harding was heralded as a break from the electronic excesses of 1967’s psychedelic era and Dylan was once more interpreted as making a major breakthrough, opening the door for a ‘return to roots’ revival. None of this did Dylan’s desire for privacy any good. His privacy was routinely invaded in Woodstock: indeed, he woke up one morning to find someone in his bedroom watching him and his wife sleep. Dylan allegedly resorted to keeping a rifle by his front door to ward off his fans. He even had to move out for a couple of weeks in 1969 when a large music festival held at Bethel, 60 miles down the road, was actually called ‘Woodstock’ to trade on the countercultural cachet of Dylan’s residence. Keeping silent had not succeeded in taking the heat out of Dylan’s star-image. He therefore adopted a new strategy: saying nothing.

  SAYING NOTHING

  In the previous two chapters, I have discussed how the relationship between rock and politics emerged through its origins in the folk revival. Rather than providing an explicit alternative political manifesto, rock’s politics were more intangible and therefore, supposedly, more effective than conventional politics. Rock supposedly both reflected and promoted a particular affective sensibility, a way of thinking and feeling that was inherently political in its development of a critical consciousness, but not explicitly political as it wasn’t tied to any political organisations. Towards the end of the 1960s, however, rock culture and radical politics did become more explicitly intertwined. With the intensification of feeling against the Vietnam war, flashpoints at Columbia, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, People’s Park, and Kent State seemed to be galvanising a broad based youth movement into violent action.* At the same time, there were youth uprisings elsewhere around the world, most notably in Paris in May 1968. With the rise of the Black Panther movement, the civil rights movement in America also became more violent. Rock music was interpreted by many as a central element of youth culture’s revolutionary nature, as some rock musicians claimed a more explicitly political role and the underground press claimed ownership of rock stars as the guerrilla warriors of the revolution.

  The increasing radicalism of youth culture and its relationship to rock music had effects for Dylan’s star-image even as he stayed out of the limelight. Dylan’s work, particularly the albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, featuring songs like ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘Desolation Row’, were held up as the benchmark of politically aware rock. Marqusee describes the former as a ‘critique of the repressive . . . monstrous totality of social domination [through which human freedom] . . . is menaced on all sides’.9 Dylan’s past songs meant that his star-image became radicalised during the late sixties. As Marqusee argues, youth radicalism in America

  was clearly seen and felt to be part of a global insurgency. Whether Dylan liked it or not, in many parts of the world he was heard as the voice of dissident America . . . In the USA, no matter how firmly Dylan disclaimed any representative function, his voice was heard more than ever as the voice of and for the social crisis that everyone now agreed was gripping the country by the throat.10

  The most notable example of this was the formation of a terrorist group in 1969 who called themselves ‘The Weathermen’ after a line from a Dylan song.

  In what was surely a deliberate attempt to undermine his star-image, to wrest control of what ‘Bob Dylan’ meant away from those who placed him in the vanguard of radical politics, Dylan’s public persona became increasingly apolitical. Earlier attempts to shake off the ‘spokesman of a generation’ tag had been rejected by the public. In saying that he just wrote what was on his mind, he had been adopted as a representative of the generation’s individualistic consciousness. In the late 1960s, he therefore produced music that could not be adopted by the counterculture. In April 1969, he released Nashville Skyline, an album of simple country songs. As youth revolution supposedly raged in the streets around him, the spokesman for his generation merely sang:

  Peggy Day stole my poor heart away

  By golly what more can I say?

  Love to spend the night with Peggy Day.

  While elsewhere on the album he told us:

  Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum,

  Call me for dinner, honey, I’ll be there

  . . .

  Oh me, oh my, love that country pie!

  Dylan’s choice of country music is not innocent as the genre is associated with the American South and known as being religiously and morally conservative.* Dylan’s voice is also presented differently on this album, a much smoother voice is heard in distinction to the insistent roughness of earlier albums. All in all, Nashville Skyline is a nice, if slight, album. One would expect, given the historical situation in which it appeared, that being ‘nice’ would in itself be cause for criticism. Yet the album received generally favourable reviews, being praised for its overall charm and the craft of the lyrics. The main explanation for this, I think, is that the ‘return to roots’ revivalism of American rock was still in full swing and the album was viewed as a well-meaning homage. Nashville Skyline is one of Dylan’s most popular albums among non-Dylan fans. As Dylan’s career has unfolded, however, the album is often portrayed as the start of a long decline.

  One album of slight country tunes would not be sufficient to alter Dylan’s star-image, and his policy of wilful deconstruction continued throughout 1969 and 1970. Any request for a political statement, indeed any kind of statement, was politely rebuffed. Rolling Stone published a major interview with Dylan in November 1969. For an artist famed for giving nothing away, it is conceivably the least revealing and mundane interview of Dylan’s career. When questioned about his social importance, he professed ignorance:

  Q: Many people . . . all felt tremendously affected by your music and what you’re saying in the lyrics.

  Dylan:Did they?

  Q: Sure. They felt it had a particular relevance to their lives . . . I mean, you must be aware of the way that people come on you.

  Dylan: Not entirely. Why don’t you explain to me. . . .

  Q: You’re an extremely important figure in music and an extremely important figure in the experience of growing up today . . . And I’m curious to know what you think about that.

  Dylan: What would I think about it? What can I do?. . . I play music, man. I write songs . . . I believe, also, that there are people trained for this job that you’re talking about – ‘youth leader’ types of thing, you know? I mean there must be people trained to do this kind of work. And I’m just one person, doing what I do. Trying to get along . . . Staying out of people’s hair, that’s all.

  (Jan Wenner interview, 1969)

  In August 1969, Dylan played at the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK. At a hastily arranged press conference, Dylan continued his ‘say nothing’ policy.

  Q: Can I have your general views on the situation of drug taking among teenagers and young people these days?

  Dylan: I don’t have any of those views . . . I wish I did, I’d be glad to share them with you . . .

  Still Dylan proved a box-office draw, with an estimated 200,000 people descending on the small island. Dylan’s performance was criticised for being too short and his new performing style was also underwhelming. He saved the best until last, though, when, in 1970, he released Self Portrait.

  Self Portrait is a landmark album. It contains 24 tracks, 2 lightweight Dylan originals, 4 songs from Dylan’s performance at the Isle of Wight, and 16 covers of contemporary songs, fifties pop tunes and traditional country and folk songs. The album has no coherence (the live tracks are scattered through the album, for example), supposedly Dylan’s response to the newly emerging bootlegs of his earlier recordings. More importantly, however, the album was produced with slushy string arrangements reminiscent of the kind of music rock was supposed to displace. It is notorious, perhaps the most criticised album in all of rock. The most wel
l-known review, by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, famously begins ‘What is this shit?’ Other reviews were similarly scathing. It is a landmark album because it is the moment that Dylan ceases to be regarded as infallible, as one who opened doors through which others were bound to follow. From this point on, reviewers stopped giving Dylan the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, as I argue below, from this point onward the reverse happens, and no matter how good an album Dylan produced, it was almost always accepted with a ‘could do better’ review.

  Regarding Self Portrait, it is possible that Dylan just produced a poor album, but it seems more likely that it was a deliberate attempt by Dylan to reclaim the meaning of his stardom. This is certainly how Dylan has presented its release subsequently:

  That album was put out . . . [because] at that time . . . I didn’t like the attention I was getting. I [had] never been a person that wanted attention. And at that time I was getting the wrong kind of attention, for doing things I’d never done. So we released that album to get people off my back. They would not like me anymore. That’s . . . the reason that album was put out, so people would just at that time stop buying my records, and they did.11

  This could merely be Dylan rationalising a mistake after the event – perhaps in this instance the role of audience conflict in Dylan’s star-image makes this reading of Self Portrait more plausible when he actually just released a bad album! There are a number of factors that support Dylan’s assertion that this was deliberate subversion, however. Firstly, the album title seems a deliberate statement. A self-portrait, of course, is meant to reveal the artist’s inner sense of his own self. Following Nashville Skyline, there had been calls for the return of the ‘real Dylan’, and calling the album Self Portrait seems a deliberate reaction to such calls. ‘These trite songs, these casual performances’ it says, ‘are the real me.’ Then there is the album cover, which contains no words, either name or title, just a slightly clumsy painting of a face. All of his previous albums had contained photos of Dylan, so the implication once more seems to be that this is an accurate presentation of who Dylan is. Thirdly, there is the fact that Dylan, the most famous songwriter of his age, shows that he considers his self-portrait to consist of songs by other writers. Fourthly, there is the opening track, ‘All The Tired Horses’. It is one of only two Dylan originals on the album, yet Dylan’s voice is absent from the song, replaced by female singers. Given the relationship between voice and stardom, particularly in Dylan’s instance, this is again a significant (and, one could assume, deliberate) gesture. Finally, there is the use of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ from the Isle of Wight performance. It is an awful performance, with Dylan forgetting words and singing it entirely without feeling. It is Dylan’s most famous song, arguably the best song of all time. No other song could have fulfilled the function of differentiating the new and old Dylan so well, emphasising that the songwriters covered by Dylan on Self Portrait included the Dylan who wrote that song.12