Bob Dylan Read online

‘I’m Not There’ is remarkable . . . Dylan improvises only vaguely realised lyrics against a hauntingly beautiful melody. The remarkable thing about it is that even though, for the most part, the lyrics are not lyrics at all, but sounds, the performance is moving, emotionally over-flowing. It is Dylan’s saddest song, and one of his greatest vocal performances, for he catches feeling without words.29

  I consider Dylan a great singer and writing this book has forced me to address why I think this. In the end, the word I have been led to is ‘authority’. It seems to me that the great singers have ‘authoritative voices’, by which I mean that they demonstrate a total control over the song, to the point of domination or ownership. This is not merely a technical mastery (though that is significant) but a quality of personality that the voice contains. Think of truly great performances, such as Sinatra singing ‘My Way’ or Johnny Rotten singing ‘Anarchy In The UK’, and you hear a singer claiming ‘this is MY song, and it will do what I want it to’. Dylan regularly displays this kind of authority: there is a confidence, a certitude in the voice. The great singers are those that can consistently ‘take over’ the song they are singing, their personality shines through the song rather than being subsumed within it. Dylan almost always achieves this. This quality of great singers, this vocal authority, is the reason that I suggested earlier that it makes no sense to consider a popular music ‘text’ as having any existence outside of its performance. You cannot take the singer out of the song.*

  VOICE, CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY

  The inextricable link between voice and song returns us to questions of authorship, only this time concerning the relationship between the singer and the lead character of the song. If songs are a form of rhetoric, then they contain a central character who demonstrates a particular attitude. So how do we conceptualise the relationship between the singer and the song’s lead character?

  One answer is that it depends on the conventions of the genre. There are many different streams of influence on Dylan’s songwriting and performing styles but, given their significance to the development of rock, folk and blues are particularly notable. Though this obviously over-generalises, the two traditions offer different ways of placing the singer within the song. In the folk tradition, the singer’s personal character is often absent from the story being told in the song. The songs ‘Stack A Lee’ and ‘Jack A Roe’ from World Gone Wrong are examples of this. In this type of song, the singer clearly exists as a narrator of a story rather than as a participant within that story. Folk music thus offers a kind of ‘third person’ approach to singing, and the status of the singer as a narrator is often explicitly noted within the structure of the song, either by drawing an audience together to listen at the start of the song (Dylan utilised this most famously in singing ‘Come gather round, people, wherever you roam’) or by using their narrator position to cast judgement on the protagonists of the song (for example, in the last verse of ‘Seven Curses’, Dylan casts seven curses on the wicked judge).

  In contrast, the blues singer is not singing ‘to’ anybody, and does not explicitly acknowledge an audience. Instead, the singer is a character in the narrative being described. To continue using songs on World Gone Wrong as examples, ‘Blood In My Eyes’ and ‘Broke Down Engine’ would illustrate this kind of format. Because the singer’s character is placed within the story of the song (as in ‘Blood In My Eyes’, ‘Woke up this morning, feeling blue / Seen a good-looking girl, can I make love with you?’), this means that the blues is often interpreted as a very self-expressive genre and blues songs are supposed to offer a representation of the singer’s actual experience.* This interpretation of the blues means there is a greater likelihood of assuming the ‘I’ of the song is actually the singer representing his own real-life experiences. Even in this supposedly self-expressive genre, however, things are not straightforward, for the essence of blues songwriting lies in irony: ‘For obvious historical reasons, [blues] . . . has always been metaphorical, has always been dependent on double meanings, on allusion, indirection, and puns, on symbolism’.30 If this is the case, can we ever be sure what we hear is true or honest? Can we rely on a blues song to provide a reliable barometer of the singer’s personality? The theoretical answer has to be that we cannot, but, as with the discussion of authorship, I am more interested in the ways that we think we can.

  The way to consider this still, I think, lies in discussing how the voice itself creates meaning. There are two things to consider here: firstly, how the voice is linked to the body and, secondly, how the voice is assumed to reflect a pure subjectivity. Although the voice more often than not reaches us in a disembodied form (on recordings), we strive to reembody it, either imagining its bodily production – picturing Dylan with his guitar at the microphone singing these words – or going to see its bodily production at concerts (surely one of the major reasons for seeing someone in concert is to see them singing). Though the voice may seem easy to disembody, in reality it is clearly tied to the body. Commenting on Dylan’s voice, Robyn Hitchcock states that ‘he keeps you company. You put on a Dylan record and, by God, you know someone else is there with you’.31 This is an idea that Roland Barthes has pursued, utilising two phrases – ‘the grain of the voice’ and ‘writing aloud’ – that insist upon the physicality of the voice. Barthes argues that the singing voice has its own texture, which offers a ‘materiality of language’ that ‘signifies’ (provides meaning) separately from what the words being sung may themselves be signifying. For Barthes, the grain of the voice exists in the ‘friction between the music and . . . language’32 and ‘forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language – not what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sound-signifiers’.33

  What is significant for Barthes is not how the grain of the voice may put across the meaning of words especially well but simply that it offers us evidence of its bodily production. It is not the ‘subjectivity’ of the singer that is embedded in the voice, but the erotic body:

  Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theatre of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.34

  Barthes is thus interested in the bodily nature of the singing voice and one of his aims is to move away from the idea that the voice expresses a pure spirit, a pure, individual subjectivity. Despite Barthes’ arguments, however, this is exactly how the voice is generally considered. Perhaps more than anything else, the voice is understood as representing the true essence of a person, as offering an unmediated self. One important development in this regard was the invention of the microphone in the mid-1920s. This meant that singers could utilise a variety of new singing techniques more subtle than the previous practice of singing as loudly as possible to reach the back of the theatre. This new style of singing (crooning) created a supposed intimacy that made it seem like the singer was revealing their innermost emotions to a trusted confidante, the listener.* This intimacy means that we tend to think that we in some way know the singer because we ‘connect’ with her voice35 – her voice is assumed to tell us something about her personality. The voice in pop is thus interpreted as personally expressive (in contrast to classical music where the sound of the voice is more structured by the score).36 The voice seemingly proves to us the existence of a real individual with real emotions behind the front, behind the performance (though in reality this works in reverse: socially, we already fervently believe in the reality of the private individual and this leads us to believe the voice offers evidence of this). Like the eyes acting as the ‘window of the soul’, the v
oice is assumed to tell us things about its owner, perhaps deeper things than they would otherwise choose to reveal. The voice seemingly offers us a glimpse of the authentic individual behind the star, but the listener’s relationship to it is one of tension, bound up in the possibility of knowing that individual (through the voice) and the impossibility of knowing them (because you only have a record).37

  Concerning Dylan, this tension – between knowing and not knowing – is often presented in a literary way, as being embedded in the lyrics. For example, Brown states that ‘Dylan’s lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire’.38 However, the ‘illusion of intimacy’39 is actually a property of Dylan’s stardom, particularly in the way his stardom is made flesh through his voice. The way that the voice suggests something going on beneath the surface is very similar to how stardom works, and we have thus returned to the starting point of this chapter – the relationship between public figure and private individual.

  STARDOM, PERSONALITY AND THE ‘ILLUSION OF INTIMACY’

  I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing in Dylan’s ‘texts’ that deals with issues of self, naming, privacy and stardom. Dylan has obviously addressed such issues in his work, and there are examples throughout this book. I do think that in many ways they are secondary, however, to the way that Dylan himself has been interpreted by critics. In particular, he has consistently been portrayed as chameleon-like, continually picking up and casting off new identities – protest Bob, hipster Bob, country Bob, Vegas Bob, born again Bob . . . The interesting feature of Dylan’s reinventions, however, is how they are often seen as a representation of the ‘authentic’ Bob Dylan. There is a reluctance to see Dylan’s transformations as a form of acting and they are instead portrayed as reflective of his own essential self. Heylin, for example, refers to Dylan’s ‘perennial reinventions of himself’,40 while Roe states that ‘a wardrobe of identities is stock-in-trade for many popular musicians . . . In Dylan’s case, by contrast, multiple aliases are conditions of being’.41 In one sense this is odd because, as music fans, we are generally aware that star personae are a performance (Madonna fans are aware of this, for example, in their appreciation of Madonna). Generally, audiences are aware of the constructed nature of stardom and celebrity (we know the effort that goes into producing an image, and the army of workers in the publicity industry). At the same time, however, we authenticate certain individuals as being the ‘real thing’, as somehow being untainted by all the artifice. The essential paradox is that a star-image (for that is all we can know) is being authenticated as something more real than an image. Dyer suggests that this is possible because stardom is embodied in physical persons, so there is always a promise of something ‘real’ behind the celebrity mask. However, he also points out the infinite regress to this logic – an individual authenticated by their stardom is then used to authenticate that very stardom!42

  One of the key facts that contributes to popular conceptions of Dylan is his change of name. As a teenager, Robert Allen Zimmerman adopted various pseudonyms before settling on Bob Dylan, to which he legally changed his name in August 1962. Various reasons have been offered for this particular choice, most persistently the idea that it was a homage to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Such an argument is almost undoubtedly incorrect.* There are a number of possible inspirations for the name: Dylan suggested it was after an uncle called Dillon, while there is a Dillon Road in Hibbing where he grew up, and young Bob was a fan of sheriff Matt Dillon in the TV series Gunsmoke. I think it unlikely that Dylan chose the name in reference to any one particular thing and that the actual sound of the words was the most significant reason for his choice – remember that his first names were Bob Allen (Dylan reportedly initially spelt the name as Dillon rather than Dylan, and my hunch is that he changed the spelling when he practised signing autographs and preferred its look, but that’s pure speculation). One of his earlier pseudonyms, Elston Gunnn, shares a similar rhythmic feel, and the names of his children also have comparable looks or sounds (Jesse Byron Dylan, Anna Lee Dylan, Samuel Abram and Jakob Luke). One reason, which I have never seen given serious consideration, is that Dylan would not have had the success he did if he had kept his family name, Zimmerman. I think there are cultural (racist) reasons for this which can be pithily summed up by suggesting that the name lacks ‘star quality’ and that Dylan was aware of this. Reasons for this particular name are less significant than the act of changing, however, and how that change has been interpreted. Scobie argues for acknowledging ‘the importance of the adoption of a pseudonym as the foundational moment of Bob Dylan’s career. For him, this was more than a matter of convenience. It was a far-reaching gesture of self-definition, rooting his identity and signature in an archetypal trickster’s move of self-disguise’.43 This once again emphasises changes in persona as something more than mere surface, as a fundamental defining of the self. What we see regularly repeated in accounts of Dylan is that these changes of the self are of more personal significance than merely putting on a new act: this is an expression of the genuine Bob Dylan. Ultimately, I do not think this position is sustainable because it relies on the idea that there is an authentic self behind the public performance of stardom. My argument is that we can rely on no such idea. We should not assume that there is anything behind the celebrity screen – what you see is what there is and, while what we see may suggests to us a reality to which we do not have access, and while we may like to believe that there is something there, in the end, what we see is all there is.

  Let me again try to explain by way of literary analogy. Samuel Clemens, following the convention of the time, adopted the pen name Mark Twain when he began writing. Maybe Clemens could have remained a private figure had he restricted himself to being a pseudonymous literary author. Rather than merely being a literary author, however, Twain gave lecture tours and became a significant public figure. The distinction between Twain and Clemens thus becomes more difficult to sustain. The performances were given by ‘Mark Twain’ not ‘Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain’. How can we possibly distinguish between the two? As Moran argues, ‘The symbiotic relationship between promotion and self-promotion in the public construction of authors like Twain makes any attempt to distinguish between the “public” author and the “private” self a deeply problematic exercise’.44 Twain himself made great play of his double-self, as has Dylan, who has regularly drawn attention to his dividedness. ‘I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan’ he told Cameron Crowe, ‘It’s like Rimbaud said, “I is another”.’

  In her discussion of Twain, Susan Gillman develops the notion of imposture for dealing with how the duality is understood. She argues against analysing Twain in terms of a simple division between the private individual and the public author because the two are so closely entwined as to actually be one: ‘Whereas twinning or doubling suggests merely mathematical division, imposture leads to a kind of logical vicious circle. Since “posture” already implies posing or faking, “imposture” is the pose of a pose, the fake of a fake: the word implies no possible return to any point of origin.’45 This is, I think, a useful way of considering Dylan – the impossibility of a return to any point of origin. Scobie has made similar points about Dylan. By interpreting ‘Bob Dylan’ as a ‘text’, Scobie correctly asserts that we cannot know a real Bob Dylan, only all of the different meanings and values attached to him through his work, interviews, star performances, criticism, fan discussion and so on. I would go further than this and suggest that there is no ‘real Bob Dylan’ for us to know because the idea that there is a private Bob Dylan implies that there is such a thing as human personality that exists independently of its social circumstances. Consider the following statement, however:

  People react to famous people, you know? . . . Say you’re passing a little pub or a little inn, and you look through the window and you see all the people eating, talking and ca
rrying on. You watch outside the window and you can see them all be very real with each other, as real as they’re gonna be. Because when you walk into the room, it’s over! You won’t see them being real any more. (Christopher Sykes interview, 1986)

  I think it is implausible that a major star could ever escape this situation. Even when alone, having the knowledge that people ‘stop being real’ in your presence affects everything you think or do. There is no time when Bob Dylan isn’t ‘Bob Dylan’. Given that, how can there be a ‘real person’ behind the image?

  This may seem like quite a radical position but it is not something unique to stars but, rather, is a characteristic of us all. The idea of a pre-social self is not a defensible proposition. For one thing, it does not consider the recent historical emergence of ideas such as ‘privacy’ and ‘personality’. ‘Privacy’ first became a significant concept during the late seventeenth century, most notably manifested in changes to domestic architecture that moved sleeping quarters upstairs and increasingly subdivided large communal areas into smaller, more private rooms.46 ‘Personality’, with its current meaning of a set of personal characteristics or traits, is an even more recent development, intimately linked with the twinned discourses of stardom and consumerism in the first decades of the twentieth century.47 What both concepts have in common, therefore, is that they both emerge in a particular social formation – modernity – that is more public than ever before, and both emerge as something that is constantly under threat. Privacy is something which you can never find in the modern world, while personality is how you try to distinguish yourself when you are already a part of an anonymous mass.

  We are never pure essence but are always socially mediated, even when we are alone. This is one of the conditions of modern individuality. Our belief in a ‘constant self, distinct from the social roles we have to play and how we represent ourselves to others’48 is a crucial way of making sense of the world in which we find ourselves (it is, in other words, ideological). At the same time, however, there is anxiety over whether, in the end, all we really are is how we perform for others. Stardom is a key way in which such ideologies are perpetuated and stars, as exemplars of individualism, experience the dilemma in a particularly intense form. In a sense, stars have more privacy to be invaded than ordinary people. So, when Dylan said in 1994 that, on becoming a star, ‘a person ceases to become a person’ (Ellen Futterman interview, 1994), he is not quite right: they actually become a super-person, aware of their privacy more intently than ordinary people.