Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  WHERE I CAME IN

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - Breath Control, 1970-1974

  SELF PORTRAIT NO. 25

  (1)

  (2)

  (3)

  (4)

  (5)

  (6)

  (7)

  (8)

  (9)

  (10)

  (11)

  (12)

  (13)

  (14, 15, 16)

  (17)

  (18)

  (19)

  (20)

  (21, 22)

  (23)

  (24)

  (25)

  NEW MORNING

  WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW

  BANGLA DESH

  DOUG SAHM AND BAND

  HEAVY BREATHING

  HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED REVISITED

  A MOMENT OF PANIC

  PART TWO - Seven Years of This, 1975-1981

  AN ALBUM OF WOUNDS

  from LINER NOTES

  DYLAN GETS NASTY

  THAT TRAIN DON’T STOP HERE ANYMORE

  SAVE THE LAST WALTZ FOR ME

  STREET LEGAL

  MORE OR LESS LIKE A MOVING STONE

  AMAZING CHUTZPAH

  from LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS

  from THEMES FROM SUMMER PLACES

  from SONGS OF RANDOM TERROR—REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10, 1980

  PART THREE - And Eight Years of That, 1985-1993

  NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET

  OVER THE EDGE

  COMEBACK TIME AGAIN

  SPEAKER TO SPEAKER

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  BOB SPITZ, DYLAN: A BIOGRAPHY

  THE MYTH OF THE OPEN ROAD

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  DYLAN AS HISTORIAN

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  PART FOUR - New Land Sighted, 1993-1997

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  WHAT’S NEW IN THE CEMETERY

  THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT CELEBRATION

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  “LIKE A ROLLING STONE” AFTER TWENTY-NINE YEARS

  DOCK BOGGS

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  BOB DYLAN AFTER THE 1994 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

  FREE SPEECH AND FALSE SPEECH

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  ALL THIS USELESS BEAUTY

  PART FIVE - New Land Found, 1997-1999

  PREEMPTIVE OBITUARIES

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  A MAP YOU CAN THROW AWAY

  ONE STEP BACK

  THIRTY RECORDS ABOUT AMERICA

  TABLE SCRAPS

  FOLK MUSIC TODAY—THE HORROR

  OLD SONGS IN NEW SKINS

  PART SIX - Hopscotch, 2000-2001

  THE MAN ON THE LEFT

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  WHERE IS DESOLATION ROW?

  HOPSCOTCH REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  TOMBSTONE BLUES

  WHEN FIRST UNTO THIS COUNTRY

  LIVE 1961-2000— THIRTY-NINE YEARS OF GREAT CONCERT PERFORMANCES

  HANDSOME MOLLY

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  SOMETIMES HE TALKS CRAZY, CRAZY LIKE A SONG

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  HIGH WATER EVERYWHERE

  PART SEVEN - Find a Grave, 2001-2004

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  NOT SINGING TOO FAST

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  HOW GOOD CAN IT GET

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  THE LOST WALTZ

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  PART EIGHT - Beat the Clock, 2004-2010

  CHRONICLES

  CHRONICLES

  THE WORLD PREMIERE OF NO DIRECTION HOME

  BOOKSHELVES—PAUL NELSON, 1936-2006

  FOLK MUSIC TODAY-RAPTURE

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10 THE TRAIL OF DEAD

  A TRIP TO HIBBING HIGH

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  I’M NOT THERE

  VISIONS AND VISIONS OF JOHANNA

  THE BEGINNING AND THE END

  THE DRAWN BLANK SERIES

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  TELL TALE SIGNS: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006—The Bootleg Series Volume 8 ...

  SAM MCGEE’S “RAILROAD BLUES” AND OTHER VERSIONS OF THE REPUBLIC

  STORIES OF A BAD SONG

  REAL LIFE ROCK TOP 10

  EPILOGUE

  CODA

  Acknowledgements

  LYRIC AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS

  Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music

  (1975, 2008)

  Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989, 2009)

  Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)

  In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92

  (1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)

  The Dustbin of History (1995)

  The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (2000, 2011, originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)

  Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley

  in a Land of No Alternatives (2000)

  “The Manchurian Candidate” (2002)

  Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005)

  The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006)

  When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)

  As Editor

  Stranded (1979, 2007)

  Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs (1987)

  The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the

  American Ballad (2004, with Sean Wilentz)

  A New Literary History of America (2009, with Werner Sollors)

  FOR JENNY

  WHERE I CAME IN

  In the summer of 1963, in a field in New Jersey, I’d gone to see Joan Baez, a familiar face in my hometown, in Menlo Park, California, and suddenly a familiar face everywhere else—she’d been on the cover of Time. This day she was appearing at one of those old theaters-in-a-round, set up under a tent. She sang, and after a bit she said, “I want to introduce a friend of mine,” and out came a scruffy-looking guy with a guitar. He looked dusty. His shoulders were hunched and he seemed slightly embarrassed. He sang a couple of songs by himself, then he sang one or two with Joan Baez, and then he left.

  I barely noticed the end of the show. I was transfixed. I was confused. This person had come onto someone else’s stage, and while in some ways he seemed as ordinary as anyone in the audience, something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn’t do it. From the way he sounded and the way he moved, you couldn’t tell where he was from, where he’d been, or where he was going—though the way he moved and sang somehow made you want to know all of those things. “My name it is nothing, my age it means less,” he sang that day, beginning his song “With God on Our Side,” which would turn up the next year as the lynchpin of The Times They Are A-Changin’—and while the whole book of American history seemed to open up in that song, the country’s story telling itself in a new way, the song also kept the singer’s promise. As he sang, you couldn’t tell his age. He might have been seventeen, he might have been twenty-seven—and to an eighteen-year-old like me, that was someone old enough.

  When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent—there was no backstage, no guards, no protocol—and so I went up to him. He was trying to light a cigarette, it was w
indy, his hands were shaking; he wasn’t paying attention to anything but the match. I was just dumbfounded enough to open my mouth. “You were terrific,” I said, never at a loss for something original to say. He didn’t look up. “I was shit,” he said. “I was just shit.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I walked off. I asked someone in the crowd who the person was who along with Joan Baez was getting into her black Jaguar XK-E, then the most glamorous car on the road. When I got back to California I went straight to a record store and bought The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album, the only one in the shop. I couldn’t figure out why some of the songs—about the John Birch Society and a “ramblin’ gamblin’ Willie,” something with a band I called “Make a Solid Road”—didn’t fit the songs described in the liner notes. I took it back and told the store owner there was something wrong with it. “Oh, they’re all like that,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of complaints. Come back next week and I’ll have some good copies.” But I never did go back. I fell in love with “Don’t Think Twice.” I played it all day long. I figured if I exchanged my album it might not be on the next one.

  For me, for a lot of other people, perhaps in ways for Bob Dylan himself, his life and work opened up from right about that time. Very quickly—with, say, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a score more songs about conflict and justice, truth and lie, that could be epic and commonplace in the same moment, songs orchestrated by nothing more than the singer’s own bare guitar and harmonica—and then with the mid-sixties albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, filled with visionary performances, most with equally visionary rock ’n’ roll not so much behind the songs as all through them—Bob Dylan became in the common imagination far more than a singer who had, by some happenstance, caught his moment. To do what he’d done, Dylan wrote years later, you had to be someone “who could see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” In the early 1950s, kids like Bob Dylan watched someone seeing into metal and making it melt every week on The Adventures of Superman; in the next decade, as Paul Nelson puts it later in these pages, Dylan “evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action. Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it—and it really would be significant.”

  This is where I came in, as a writer—six years after the show in New Jersey, at the end of Dylan’s adventure as an oracle on the run, just after he released his spare, cryptic album John Wesley Harding, an album of parables of the republic, riddles about its cops and robbers, and love songs that took the sting away.

  Bobby Darin had three hit records under his belt when he announced his goal in life: “I want to be a legend by the time I’m twenty-five.” He didn’t make it, but Bob Dylan did.

  Those are the first lines from a piece I wrote in 1969 that is not included in this collection of most of what, outside of two earlier books—one on “Like a Rolling Stone,” one on the songs that travel under the name of the basement tapes—I’ve written about Bob Dylan over the years. In 1969 Bob Dylan was twenty-eight. He’d been a legend—a story people passed on as if it might even be true—at least since 1964. But time moved fast then—Bobby Darin, you can imagine, wanted to be a legend by the time he was twenty-five because after that it might be too late.

  As a chronicle of events happening as they were written about—which this book, much of it a matter of reviews, reports, sightings, comment in monthly or bi-weekly magazines and weekly newspapers, to some degree is—that heroic period hangs over what I wrote. It’s a given that I am writing about someone who has done signal work, has made music so rich that even as it appeared it suggested it might be untouchable, not merely by others but by Dylan himself. It was an enormous achievement: the rewriting, in all senses, of American vernacular music, from the fiddlers who took up “Springfield Mountain” at the end of the eighteenth century to Little Richard, at once a recapturing of the past and the opening of a door to what had never been heard and had never been said. All of that is in this book. But at least for its first half it is present as a shadow, a shadow cast by a performer who, as I began to write about him, had fallen under it himself.

  The story I followed was, in its beginning, the story of Bob Dylan as he tried to transcend, match, avoid, deny, or escape what he’d already done. I was a fan; I looked for those dropped cigarettes. But if the achievement of the previous years was a given as I began to write, what was not a given was how the story unfolded, and how so far it has turned out. This chronicle really begins with Dylan’s 1970 double album Self Portrait; by the end of the year, the Beatles would be defunct; Jimi Hendrix, a great Bob Dylan fan and perhaps his greatest interpreter, in time maybe a partner, would be dead; and the notion of Bob Dylan as someone who could not open his mouth without telling his own kind of truth would be gone, too. So I began as a disbeliever: Is that all there is? This can’t be all that there is. One record, one show followed another as the seventies turned into the eighties, as Ford replaced Nixon and Carter Ford and Reagan Carter and all through those years Bob Dylan sang, “Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked”; for a time, I tried to convince myself that whatever the record or the show, it was as good as I wanted it to be, until the falsity became just too clear.

  If the decline, a kind of public disappearance, became a given in itself, what was not was the almost biblical story the music would tell: that it would take Bob Dylan more than twenty years to play his way out of the trap set for him by his own, once-upon-a-time triumph, that after all that time of wandering in the desert of his own fame—that time, as Dylan once put it, explaining the imperatives of folk music, by which he meant the Bible, by which he meant the mystery of plenty and famine, of “seven years of this and eight years of that”—that the old pop star, the antique icon, the dormant oracle, might then begin again as if from the beginning, with no limits to what he might say or how he might say it. There was no telling that this turn in the river would occur in 1992, with a quiet little album released on election day, carrying the cigarette-butt title Good As I Been to You, a collection of the kind of songs Bob Dylan was singing in coffeehouses, in friends’ apartments, before he ever stepped into a recording studio. It was an event that passed almost unnoticed, and which opened up the next two decades as fields in which anything was possible, where any new song could be discovered and any old song could be, in itself, the oracle that, once, people had taken the singer to be.

  From that point on there was a new story to follow—and it was so strong, so surprising, that it cast everything that had preceded it in a new light. That is the arc of this book.

  Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people’s responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it was my way of doing that.

  The pieces collected here begin with a rumor and end with a presidential election. There are reactions in the moment and long looks back for undiscovered stories. But more than anything there is an attempt to remain part of the conversation that Bob Dylan’s work has always created around itself: You have to hear this. Is he kidding? I can’t believe this. You won’t believe this—

  A lot of the noise of that conversation is in the items scattered through the book from my column Real Life Rock Top 10, which I began writing in 1986 at the Village Voice, and has since migrat
ed to Artforum, Salon, City Pages in Minneapolis, Interview, and the Believer, where it is as I write here. From any particular column it might be a 2) reconstructing an advertisement, a 7) quoting someone’s letter or e-mail, along with a 1) for one song from an album and a 10) for another. But as much of that conversation is in longer pieces following the way a Bob Dylan song found its way into people’s lives, real, as with “High Water” after the terrorist attacks of 2001, or fictional, as with the episode of Homicide that was not ripped from the headlines but from “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

  More than half of this book was written in the last thirteen years, both because that period in Bob Dylan’s career and work is infinitely interesting in its own right, and because what he’s done in those years has brought all of his previous work, heard and unheard, and all that lies behind it, back into play. There are pieces here I cannibalized in the course of writing other books, but that may have said more, or anyway something else, in their original and shorter form. There are any number of times when what I wrote was wrong—usually when I convinced myself something was better than it was—and in these pages I’m still wrong. I have edited to omit redundancies as best I could, but I haven’t gone back to make myself look smarter than I was, or for that matter to make myself look like a better writer. There are a few early pieces that are not here because they’re simply too puerile to see the light of day. But I stand behind everything that is here, even when it’s wrong—in the midst of a conversation, especially one I think many somehow knew would last their whole lives, the heat can’t always be separated from the light.