Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read online

  The conversation I’m speaking of ultimately goes back to Bob Dylan’s voice—his conversation with his audience, his songs, other people’s songs, and himself. It’s a conversation that has enlisted Ma Rainey and Roy Orbison, John F. Kennedy and Brigitte Bardot, Charlie Chaplin and Blind Willie McTell, Medgar Evers and Stagger Lee, Tom Paine and the Fifth Daughter on the Twelfth Night, Gene Austin and Robert Burns, Georgia Sam and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon Johnson and Diamond Joe, Arthur McBride and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Jack-a-Roe. Finally, in that conversation, I think Bob Dylan has kept his promise. Heedlessly, haltingly, clumsily, with mastery, from Hibbing, Minnesota, to wherever he might be playing tonight, from the age of twenty, when his public life began in New York, to almost fifty years later, he has worked as if his age meant nothing and his name less. He has moved from state to state and decade to decade as if nothing was certain, as if everything was up for grabs. The conversation in and around his music has for many made life more interesting than it would have otherwise been, more fun, more frustrating, and it has raised the stakes of the lives of those who have taken part.

  This is a constant, and it is a constant subject of this book, by the happenstance of pieces following one after the other over more than four decades, the left hand likely not remembering what the right hand did in any one moment, but ending up holding the same albums and singles and books and movies and letters. The constant is Bob Dylan’s voice—I mean the physical thing, what you listen to. It’s not the pitch, the tone. In the songs that come to life, whether in 1962 with “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” or 2009 with “Forgetful Heart,” it’s the attack, the point of view, the way the voice enters a piece of music, what it does there, how it gets lost, how it gets out, how it remains the same, which is to say that voice remains unpredictable.

  This is music as a game of three-card monte. It’s what happens in the curls in the words in “As I Went Out One Morning,” the heavy steps in the cadences of “Ain’t Talkin’,” when you are, suddenly, taken out of yourself, out of your house or your car or the street where you’re walking, into a place that you recognize but can’t name. It’s this ability to unsettle, to unhand the conventions by which anyone lives a life—what one expects to hear, say, be told, learn, love, or hate—that defines Bob Dylan’s voice, in the smallest and in the greatest sense. It’s the ability to bring the whole world into focus with the dramatization of a single syllable—the way the word care drops off its line in “High Water” like someone quietly stepping out of a tenth-story window, or being pushed—and that I’ve tried to follow.

  PROLOGUE

  THE LEGEND OF BLIND STEAMER TRUNK

  San Francisco Express Times

  24 December 1968

  Raised high above the audience were three paintings done in orange and red, somehow a confusion of the masks of comedy and tragedy, now in their own spotlights. The bass player, bending his instrument into circles, was bopping all over the stage, even in motion like a still photograph of the personality of movement which is the freedom of rock ’n’ roll. The singer was flashing a red axe at the lead guitarist, sending out the last lines of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” as he set up for the crash of notes that was sure to follow. They hit it; the two musicians whirled around the microphone, guitars only inches apart, fingers almost touching, the sounds climbing higher and up to the rafters, the roof getting in the way.

  Moving out now, the singer twisted around with a grin for the crowd, the band on its own, building toward the final chorus, the singer framed by the tangles of his own hair, hands traveling fast over the red guitar:You can do anything that you want to baby

  That you want to baby

  Yes, if you want to baby if you

  Just don’t make me hurt!

  That was Bob Dylan in the fall of 1965, over three years ago. Bob Dylan and the Hawks onstage—there’s been nothing like it before or since. Three years of memories, of waiting, scares of the end and false starts toward another chance. Will we remember the thrill of that last time? Memories turn inward and return with legends, images too big to hold.

  Legends are out of sight but not quite out of mind; they never intrude, but only emerge out of the day, off the streets, out of the walls. Legends are supposed to represent the pomposity of death, but they can tell jokes, too. The legend of the sightless blues singer used to mean a lot in Berkeley; somehow that story brought people into contact with suffering and creation on the road, down the American highway, maybe to the mountain men before the beaver were trapped out of the high streams, back to Oedipus and Homer, the man who walked but couldn’t see, the man carried by his own secret knowledge.

  It got to be something of a cult, and cults don’t tell jokes. People turned around and laughed at their legends, and lo, out of Blind Lemon Jefferson came Blind Joe Death and the immortal Blind Ebbets Field. New legends were appearing, though, some that at times seemed too grand to speak with, figures with an innocent grandeur that somehow made you nervous. Such was the mood one night in the old Jabberwock in Berkeley.

  The place was filled and it was late, time for that ever-recurring Berkeley rumor. One guy turned to another and began it. “I heard ...I heard that Dylan’s in town.” Two minutes, and everyone in the place had heard it as well. By itself, the process began to grow. “Somebody said he might show up here, don’t know yet...” Every time the door opened or closed heads turned and eyes brightened and then turned away. Before half an hour had passed the tension was almost unbearable.

  Backstage, eager minds were plotting. A man stepped onto the platform. Quiet came, and he began to speak. “Tonight a very wonderful thing has happened. As some of you may know, someone who has created much of our finest music has arrived in Berkeley—a singer, a musician, a songwriter. As a special favor, he has agreed to do a song for us, but because of complications in his contract—I just can’t explain them right now—he cannot allow us to announce his name. But,” he winked, “I’m sure you all know who I mean.” It was going to happen. Everybody beamed. The announcer retreated backstage, and returned. “I’ve just learned,” he said, “that because of those complications I just mentioned, B—, I mean, he, cannot actually appear in person. But”—and there was a pause—“he will perform!”

  There was a great scuffling noise. Backstage, a figure was being lowered into a huge box, harmonica in hand. Out front, the audience edged closer. The announcer moved in for the kill. “And now, since he cannot actually appear in person, since we cannot actually pronounce his name, we bring you—Blind Steamer Trunk!” The enormous box was carried onto the stage, the lid propped up, and out of the old timbers and rusty hinges came a tantalizingly brief harmonica solo in the best Dylan style. The lid plopped down and the great box was borne way into the night. Blind Steamer Trunk belonged to the ages.

  Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” on Long Distance Operator (Wanted Man bootleg, recorded Berkeley Community Theatre, 4 December 1965). An even hotter version can be found on the bootleg series volume 4: Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (Columbia, 1998, recorded Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966).

  PART ONE

  Breath Control, 1970-1974

  SELF PORTRAIT NO. 25

  Rolling Stone

  23 July 1970

  Written and arranged by Greil Marcus

  Chorus: Charles Perry, Jenny Marcus, Jann Wenner, Erik Bernstein,

  Ed Ward, John Burks, Ralph J. Gleason, Langdon Winner, Bruce Miroff,

  Richard Vaughn, and Mike Goodwin

  (1)

  What is this shit?

  (1) Sung by a female chorus, “All the Tired Horses” is a gorgeous piece of music, perhaps the most memorable song on this album. In an older form it was “All the Pretty Horses in the Yard”; now it could serve as the theme song to any classic western. Can you hear the organ standing in between the strings and voices? Shane comes into view, and The Magnificent Seven: gunmen over the hill and out of time still got to ride. It
sounds like Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns singing, as a matter of fact.

  The beauty of this painted signpost promises what its words belie, and the song’s question becomes the listener’s: he can’t ride when the horse is asleep in the meadow.

  (2)

  “I don’t know if I should keep playing this,” said the disc jockey, as the album made its debut on the radio. “Nobody’s calling in and saying they want to hear it or anything . . . usually when something like this happens people say ‘Hey, the new Dylan album,’ but not tonight.”

  Later someone called and asked for a reprise of “Blue Moon.” In the end it all came down to whether radioland really cared. The DJ kept apologizing: “If there is anyone who needs—or deserves to have his whole album played through it’s Bob Dylan.”

  (2) After a false beginning comes “Alberta #1,” an old song now claimed by Dylan. One line stands out: “I’ll give you more gold than your apron can hold.” We’re still at the frontier. The harmonica lets you into the album by its nostalgia, and it’s the song’s promise that matters, not the song itself, which fades.

  (3)

  “What was it?” said a friend, after we’d heard thirty minutes of Self Portrait for the first time. “Were we really that impressionable back in ’65, ’66? Was it that the stuff really wasn’t that good, that this is just as good? Was it some sort of accident that made those other records so powerful, or what?

  “My life was really turned around, it affected me—I don’t know if it was the records or the words or the sound or the noise—maybe the interview: ‘What is there to believe in?’ I doubt if he’d say that now, though.”

  We put on “Like a Rolling Stone” from Highway 61 Revisited and sat through it. “I was listening to that song five, ten times a day for the last few months, hustling my ass, getting my act together to get into school—but it’s such a drag to hear what he’s done with it...”

  (3) Something like a mood collapses with the first Nashville offering, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” a slick exercise in vocal control that fills a bit of time. After getting closer and closer to the Country Music Capital of the World—and still keeping his distance with Nashville Skyline, one of the loveliest rock ’n’ roll albums ever made—the visitor returns to pay his compliments by recording some of their songs. How does it sound? It sounds all right. He’s sung himself into a corner. It sounds all right. Sign up the band.

  (4)

  GM: “It’s such an unambitious album.”

  JW: “Maybe what we need most of all right now is an unambitious album from Bob Dylan.”

  GM: “What we need most of all is for Dylan to get ambitious.”

  JW: “It’s such a...”

  GM: “. . . though it is a really...”

  GM & JW: “. . . friendly album.”

  (4) “Days of ’49” is a fine old ballad. Dylan’s beginning is utterly convincing, as he slips past the years of the song (listen to the vaguely bitter way he sings “But what cares I for praise?”). He fumbles as the song moves on, and the cut falls apart, despite the deep burr of the horns and the drama generated by the piano. It’s a tentative performance, a warm-up, hardly more than a work-tape. The depths of the history the song creates—out of the history of pathos Johnny Cash gave “Hardin Wouldn’t Run” (sounding like it was recorded in the shadows of an Arizona canyon) or “Sweet Betsy from Pike”—has been missed. The song is worth more effort than it was given.

  (5)

  “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard for Dylan to do anything real, shut off the way he is, not interested in the world, maybe no reason why he should be. Maybe the weight of the days is too strong. Maybe withdrawal is a choice we’d all make if we could...” One’s reminded that art doesn’t come—perhaps it’s that it can’t be heard—in times of crisis and destruction; art comes in the period of decadence that precedes a revolution, or after the deluge. It’s prelude to revolution; it’s not contemporary with it save in terms of memory.

  But in the midst of it all artists sometimes move to rewrite history. That takes ambition.

  (5) When you consider how imaginative the backing on Dylan records has been, the extremely routine quality of most of the music on Self Portrait can become irritating. It is so uninteresting. “Early Morning Rain” is one of the most lifeless performances on the entire album; a rather mawkish song, a stiff, well-formed-vowel vocal and a vapid instrumental track that has all the flair of canned laughter.

  (6)

  The Four Questions. The four sons gazed at the painting on the museum wall. “It’s a painting,” said the first son. “It’s art,” said the second. “It’s a frame,” said the third son, and he said it rather coyly. The fourth son was usually considered somewhat stupid, but he at least figured out why they’d come all the way from home to look at the thing in the first place. “It’s a signature,” he said.

  (6) “In Search of Little Sadie” is an old number called “Badman’s Blunder” (or sometimes “Badman’s Ballad” and sometimes “Little Sadie”) that Dylan now claims as his own composition. As with “Days of ’49,” the song is superb—it’s these kinds of songs that seem like the vague source of the music the Band makes—and what Dylan is doing with the tune, leading it on a switchback trail, has all sorts of possibilities. But again, the vocal hasn’t been given time to develop and the song loses whatever power it might have had to offer, until the final chorus, when Bob takes off and does some real singing.

  This bit about getting it all down in one or two takes only works if you get it all down. Otherwise it’s alluding to a song without really making music.

  (7)

  Imagine a kid in his teens responding to Self Portrait. His older brothers and sisters have been living by Dylan for years. They come home with the album and he simply cannot figure out what it’s all about. To him, Self Portrait sounds more like the stuff his parents listen to than what he wants to hear; in fact, his parents have just gone out and bought Self Portrait and given it to him for his birthday. He considers giving it back for Father’s Day.

  To this kid Dylan is a figure of myth; nothing less, but nothing more. Dylan is not real and the album carries no reality. He’s never seen Bob Dylan; he doesn’t expect to; he can’t figure out why he wants to.

  (7) The Everly Brothers version of “Let It Be Me” is enough to make you cry, and Bob Dylan’s version is just about enough to make you listen. For all of the emotion usually found in his singing, there is virtually none here. It is a very formal performance.

  (8)

  “Bob should go whole-hog and revive the Bing Crosby Look, with its emphasis on five-button, soft-shoulder, wide-collar, plaid country-club lounge jackets (Pendelton probably still makes them). And, like Der Bingle, it might do well for Dylan to work a long-stemmed briar pipe into his act, stopping every so often to light up, puff at it, raise some smoke and gaze, momentarily, toward the horizon, before launching into [this is John Burks in Rags, June 1970] the next phrase of ‘Peggy Day.’ Then, for his finale—the big ‘Blue Moon’ production number with the girls and the spotlights on the Mountains—he does a quick costume change into one of those high-collar 1920s formal shirts with the diamond-shaped bow tie, plus, of course, full length tails and the trousers with the satin stripe down the side, carnation in the buttonhole, like Dick Powell in Gold Diggers of 1933. Here comes Dylan in his tails, his briar in one hand, his megaphone in the other, strolling down the runway, smiling that toothpaste smile. ‘Like a roll-ing stone’...”

  (8) “Little Sadie” is an alternate take of “In Search of...” I bet we’re going to hear a lot of alternate takes in the coming year, especially from bands short on material who want to maintain their commercial presence without working too hard. Ordinarily, when there are no striking musical questions at stake in the clash of various attempts, alternate takes have been used as a graveyard rip-off to squeeze more bread out of the art of dead men, or merely to fill up a side. “Little Sadie” fills up the side ni
cely.

  (9)

  “It’s a high school yearbook. Color pictures this year, because there was a surplus left over from last year, more pages than usual too, a sentimental journey, ‘what we did,’ it’s not all that interesting, it’s a memento of something, there’s a place for autographs, lots of white space, nobody’s name was left out . . . It is June, after all.”

  (9) “Woogie Boogie” is fun. The band sounds like it’s falling all over itself (or maybe slipping on its overdubs) but they hold on to the beat. There is as much of Dylan’s feel for music here as anything else on Self Portrait. If you were a producer combing through a bunch of Self Portrait tapes for something to release, you might choose “Woogie Boogie” as a single—backing “All the Tired Horses.”

  (10)

  Self Portrait most closely resembles the Dylan album that preceded it: Great White Wonder. The album is a two-record set masterfully assembled from an odd collection of mostly indifferent recordings made over the course of the last year, complete with alternate takes, chopped endings, loose beginnings, side comments, and all sorts of mistakes. Straight from the can to you, as it were. A bit from Nashville, a taste of the Isle of Wight since you missed it, some sessions from New York that mostly don’t make it, but dig, it’s Dylan, and if you wanted Great White Wonder and Stealin’ and John Birch and Isle of Wight and A Thousand Miles Behind, Self Portrait will surely fill the need.