Bob Dylan Read online

  One further industry strategy had a significant impact on Dylan’s stardom. As a way of compensating for declining sales of current releases, labels came increasingly to rely on their back catalogues as a way of maintaining profitability. Catalogue sales could always be guaranteed from a new generation of record buyers emerging that would want to own ‘the classics’, but they were given a major boost with the advent of the compact disc which persuaded many people who already owned vinyl versions of the classics to buy them again. The emphasis on catalogue sales created a new structural environment for what ‘Bob Dylan’ would mean in the mid-eighties. Following this period of ambiguity, record label strategies during the middle of the decade came to structure the meaning of ‘Bob Dylan’ in a very specific way, one that centred upon his ‘Living Legend’ status as a means of generating profits. The clearest example of this was the release of Biograph in 1985. Biograph was a landmark release - the first box-set offering a retrospective of an artist’s entire career; fifty-three tracks, including a number that had never before been officially released. The set was a luxury, and therefore expensive, item but sold well and it demonstrated the full potential of the new CD medium to the recording industry. It also conferred a gravitas on Dylan’s past (this was before the box-set retrospective was an honour bestowed upon anyone who has walked into a recording studio). As Roy Kelly stated at the time, ‘here is an artist of weight, density and history. Here is a man who can fill a box with albums, like Wagner or Mozart or any of those old Europeans.’25

  The problem is that Dylan had already stated (in the liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home) that he didn’t want to be Mozart because, like Tolstoy, Joe Hill and James Dean, he was dead. Such a comment illustrates why Dylan would prove ambivalent to the way his stardom developed during the mid-eighties. He has always been wary of the effect that nostalgia plays in idealising the past and paralysing the present, regularly criticising the media’s representation of ‘the sixties’. During this period he found the same processes happening to him. There was a kind of ‘commercial canonisation’ of Dylan’s work that sought to freeze him as a nostalgia act. During the mid-eighties, Dylan’s stardom signified his past, and his present function was to be a living representation of ‘the sixties’:

  I’m not really a nostalgia freak. Every time you see my name, it’s ‘the sixties this, the sixties that’. It’s just another way of categorizing me. (David Fricke interview, 1985)

  Dylan had been victim to canonisation before, of course, as discussed in the previous chapter, but it happened in a particular way during the eighties, as media industries became more adept at opening up new revenue streams that depended upon ransacking the past.*

  A clear example of this kind of nostalgia, and Dylan’s ambivalence towards it, can be seen in 1984, when Dylan participated in a short European tour. The whole enterprise was dominated by the past. The tour was co-headlined by Santana, a performer hardly at the cutting edge, while promoter Bill Graham even added Joan Baez to the bill in a bid to raise profile and boost sluggish ticket sales. This was a step too far even for Dylan, though, who steadfastly ignored Baez and she quickly left the tour. Dylan was clearly disengaged from the project. Despite spending some of 1983 jamming with a number of young post-punk musicians (culminating in a successful performance on the David Letterman Show) Dylan chose as his band a collection of middle-aged musicians whose best years were behind them. He also left bandleader duties almost entirely to guitarist Mick Taylor, suggesting an ‘unprecedented detachment from the whole enterprise’.26 The nostalgia can be seen in the setlist: only three songs were rehearsed from his three ‘religious albums’, and only three songs in total from Planet Waves, Desire and Street Legal. By the end of the tour, and in a lengthy setlist, Dylan was playing only four or five songs written since 1974.

  The 1984 tour demonstrates what Dylan was in danger of becoming - the rock superstar retreading former glories in front of large audiences. For a period of two or three years, Dylan’s response to such developments was disengagement. It seems to me that Dylan refused to invest much of his self into his current work. The end result is a period where Dylan’s output is lacklustre. Although Dylan’s mid-eighties work is often dismissed as poor by critics, it is actually better described as adequate – not terrible, but not hitting many heights either. The 1984 and 1986 tours, the Infidels and Empire Burlesque albums all show a level of professional competence that is, frankly, ‘alright’.* Most of his public appearances were professional and Dylan had a comfortable media profile from 1984–6 – he was portrayed with dignity, as a member of the old guard. Lip-service was paid to his current ‘vitality’ but he was predominantly portrayed in relation to his symbolic past. The release of Biograph enabled a reaffirmation of the greatness of his past and prompted a series of retrospective appraisals in various media. Dylan suddenly found himself in the centre of the media spotlight: a strong live performance on the nationally broadcast Farm Aid charity show; a 15-minute profile on the national TV show 20/20; the cover of Spin magazine and interviews in Rolling Stone, Time and the Los Angeles Times. Heylin suggests that Dylan ‘found himself for the first time adopting an elder statesman of rock persona he felt comfortable with’.27 To my mind, however, his public performances at this time tell a different story, displaying a disengagement with the present. For example, in his 1985 interview with Robert Hilburn for the Los Angeles Times, Dylan offered the following discussion of his new album, Empire Burlesque:

  I [don’t] want to sit around and talk about the record. I haven’t even listened to it since it came out. I’d rather spend my time . . . listen[ing] to other people’s records. Have you heard the new Hank Williams album, the collection of old demo tapes? It’s great.

  And of Biograph:

  Columbia wanted to put out a retrospective album on me . . . I didn’t care one way or another . . . I guess it’s OK for someone who has never heard of me.

  This process of disengagement, coasting through interviews on cruise-control illustrates a discomfort as the weight of his own history becomes increasingly oppressive. One of the key themes throughout Dylan’s work has been the lifelessness of ‘official culture’, by which I mean the manner in which canonisation, academic study, evaluation, classification and so on drain the vitality out of cultural items. Any cultural work is a form of communication and, as such, is inherently social. This is a key element of Dylan’s work and is why he sees his place of work as the concert hall rather than the recording studio. The process of canonisation, however, generates the notion that a work is so good that it stands above time, for all ages. This removes the work from its social context and means that a work of art is praised not for what it says but merely for what it is – a special object. The specialness of the object – its ‘aura’ – becomes so overpowering that we cannot see what the work was trying to say.28 Dylan has always been deeply antithetical to such processes:

  Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out . . . You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime . . . All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums. (Ephron and Edmiston interview, 1965)

  It is an issue he has considered in song. In ‘Visions Of Johanna’, he sings:

  Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial

  Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

  But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues

  You can tell by the way she smiles

  In this verse, Dylan criticises the process of removing ‘culture’ from everyda
y experience. By placing cultural artefacts in a shrine – in museums, on university curricula – we rob them of their vitality, of their social nature. Mona Lisa once meant something but now she is condemned to sit behind bulletproof glass until the end of time. Stuck inside, immobile.

  Dylan has thus always been suspicious of the way that culture becomes sanctified through the way we classify and categorise. In the mid-eighties, however, he found this process happening to him: in a commercial way, maybe, but the same process of stasis nonetheless. His past became filed away – an easily digestible piece of social history, another way of making the sixties safe by mythologising them within the current ideological environment. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Dylan’s behaviour at the time indicates an ambivalence towards the process even as he contributed to it. Firstly, in the closing song of Infidels, ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’, Dylan revisits the theme of ‘Visions Of Johanna’ but this time makes it directly applicable to the singer:

  But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting

  That’s hanging in the Louvre.

  My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches

  But I know that I can’t move.

  The ambivalence to his past living on permeates a variety of Dylan’s projects at the time. There was the publication of Lyrics 1962–1985, a book that collated the lyrics of all his albums, together with liner notes, prose poems and various other songs. The book constituted a major retrospective but was done in a slipshod manner that raises questions regarding Dylan’s intent. The book contains a large number of revisions and inaccuracies that undermine its claim to be a definitive summation while there are a number of significant omissions, including all of the songs left off his two most recent studio albums.29 The collection seems to portray ‘Dylan thumbing his nose at or trying to erase . . . his art even as he anthologizes it’.30 During this period, Dylan completed a number of works that specifically addressed the issue of stardom. He starred in the forgettable film, Hearts of Fire, playing an old rock star coaxed out of retirement, and he collaborated with Sam Shepard on the ‘one act play’ True Dylan that ruminates on the media’s interest in celebrities.

  Shepard also co-wrote ‘Brownsville Girl’ the most significant statement made by Dylan on the ambivalence of his stardom. The song, an 11-minute epic, was released on the 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. Aidan Day, in his analysis of Dylan’s lyrics, argues that the song concerns the ontological status of memorial fragments, ‘a collapsing of distinction between actual or real and artificial or fictional’ that ‘plays with tenses and perspectives as it enacts the lack of chronological structure in the inner life of the mind’.31 Such a summary illustrates the problems of applying an analysis that prioritises the literary aspect of Dylan’s work (the subtitle of Day’s book is ‘reading the lyrics of Bob Dylan’) and returns us to the argument I made in chapter 2 regarding the role that stardom has in creating song meaning. We hear Bob Dylan singing these words and, while it may be possible for a singer to adopt a narrator persona, the nature of music stardom means that there is always a layer of meaning in the voice itself that relates what is sung to the life of its singer. Accounts which concentrate on the biographical detail of the author may be reductive, but to restrict our understanding to a textual ‘reading’ misinterprets how song itself creates meaning. There is no way that this song cannot not in some way be about Bob Dylan. Indeed, Dylan invites such ideas by failing to distinguish between actor Gregory Peck and the film character he plays – in the last verse of ‘Brownsville Girl’ it is the actor, and not the character, who is shot in the back.

  The song begins with the narrator recalling ‘a movie I seen one time’. The title is not mentioned, but it is The Gunfighter, a 1950 film starring Gregory Peck. In the movie, Peck plays Jimmy Ringo, a notorious sharpshooter who is haunted by his fame because every town contains a kid wanting to become famous as the man who shot Jimmy Ringo. Ringo was eventually ‘shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself’. The key theme of the song – the tribulations of fame – is thus present in the film that is the subject of the song. Following a summary of the movie in the first two verses, the narrator begins to address an undefined ‘you’ and recounts a series of memories, though they lack a sense of progression or linear narrative. However, the narrator’s flashbacks and his recollections of the movie become increasingly intertwined. In the tenth verse, he says

  Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head

  But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play.

  The singer finds it increasingly difficult to separate the notoriety of Jimmy Ringo and his own experiences. There follows more flashbacks – the singer is caught in the crossfire, doesn’t ‘know whether to duck or to run’ and is ‘cornered in the churchyard’, before being on trial (Dylan describes himself portrayed in the press as ‘a man with no alibi’). In highlighting the trials of fame, Dylan draws attention to his own situation as a star, most notably in two separate lines that drip with irony about his predicament – ‘oh, if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now’, and ‘I don’t have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone’ (to which the backing singers add a sarcastic ‘oh yeah?’). Hearing this star sing such lines – metaphorical or not – and at this time, clearly adds a layer of meaning to the song.

  Towards the end of the song, we return to the present tense, presumably where the song started:

  Well, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck

  Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind

  He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about

  But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line.

  Michael Gray has pointed out the irony that, in offering a song about being a star, Dylan adopts the position of a fan.32 These lines – ‘I’ll see him in anything’ – surely reflect Dylan’s ambivalence towards his own audience at this time, demonstrating a concern that his own audience would turn up no matter what he did. Writing of the 1984 tour, John Lindley suggests that the overwhelming reliance upon sixties material was an understandable response by Dylan given that, in 1981, impassioned performances of ‘Slow Train’ and ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ received lukewarm responses from the crowd while mundane run-throughs of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ were rapturously received.33

  Lindley is correct to highlight that the most important thing to consider is the relationship between Dylan and his audience. To explain it, we need to consider the wider cultural developments discussed in this chapter, how they enabled and disabled Dylan’s stardom in particular ways. During this period Dylan stood for the past, and was part of the emergence of a particular kind of ‘living legend’ celebrity that linked well with the reliance on back catalogue and cross media promotion in the 1980s music industry. Dylan proved extremely ambivalent, not to say uncomfortable, in this kind of stardom and some of his work can be seen as offering a commentary on the situation. The role of living legend accepts that you’re not actually dead yet, but reduces the star merely to repeating the glories of the past. Dylan’s 1986 tour, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as his backing band, demonstrates this well: the arena shows were generally well-received by the wider audience but they merely stood for another run-of-the-mill rock show, a rerun of the ideology that elsewhere was being shown up as an empty promise.

  Dylan’s experience was not unique in this regard: if I am discussing wider understandings of stardom then it would seem odd if I were to claim them as affecting him alone. But they did affect him in a particularly pronounced way because of his existing star-meaning. His association with the earnest, politically committed element of rock did not sit well in the Thatcherite-Reaganite world where ‘there was no such thing as society’. The hedonism and excess of previous rock eras fitted well with the new consumerism as new cultural spaces (main
ly suburban arenas) emerged for large-scale tours, such as those by Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones, that offered an opportunity for extravagant consumption in which middle-aged suburbanites could relive the hedonism of the sixties and younger listeners could create their own version of a mythic past. For Dylan, whose image was more associated with the social conscience of the sixties rather than its mythical consumption, the terrain was more awkward. At the same time, other processes of canonisation were in play that had the effect of freezing those past glories; worshipping them but also reducing their potency by stripping them of their lived vitality and elevating them to the status of sacred commodities.

  Dylan would later discuss the problems he felt during this particular period:

  I was going on my name for a long time, name and reputation, which was about all I had. I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell . . . I didn’t feel I knew who I was on stage. (Robert Hilburn interview, 1997)

  The question remained whether Dylan could find a way of working that incorporated his past without being overwhelmed by it:

  It was important for me to come to the bottom of this legend thing, which has no reality at all. What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work. . . . If you try to act a legend, it’s nothing but hype. (Robert Hilburn interview, 1992)

  To get to the bottom of the legend thing, he developed a conscious strategy: the Never Ending Tour.

  Snapshot:The wandering minstrel

  Dylan played six concerts co-headlining with The Grateful Dead in the summer of 1987.Though these shows were criticised by both Dylan and Dead fans, they had an immeasurable impact on Dylan’s career as they were the impetus for the ‘Never Ending Tour’ (NET), which began in 1988. Before that, however, Dylan released the poor Down In The Groove album. It is now possible to interpret the album as an early step to getting back in touch with the music that influenced him, but at the time it was viewed as his weakest ever release. Dylan toured Europe in autumn 1987, again with The Heartbreakers as his backing band, though the manner of the shows was much changed from 1986. The tour was extremely creative, with a wide range of songs played in new arrangements, but it was heavily criticised.