Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read online

  I don’t think it will. It’s true that all of the bootlegs came out in the absence of new music from Dylan, but I think their release was related not to the absence of his recordings but to the absence of the man himself. We are dealing with myth, after all, and the more Dylan stays away the greater the weight attached to anything he’s done. When King Midas reached out his hand everything he touched turned to gold, it became valuable to everyone else, and Dylan still has the Midas touch even though he’d rather not reach out. It is only in the last two years that the collecting of old tapes by Dylan has become a national phenomenon, and there are many times more tapes in circulation than are represented on the bootlegs. It sometimes seems as if every public act Dylan ever made was recorded, and it is all coming together. Eventually, the bootleggers will get their hands on it. Legally, there is virtually nothing he can do to stop it.

  He can head off the theft and sale of his first drafts, his secrets, and his memories only with his music. And it is the vitality of the music that is being bootlegged that is the basis of its appeal. The noise of it. Self Portrait, though it’s a good imitation bootleg, isn’t nearly the music that Great White Wonder is. “Copper Kettle” is a masterpiece but “Killing Me Alive” will blow it down. Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding are classic albums; but no matter how good they are they lack the power of the music Dylan made in the middle sixties. Unless he returns to the marketplace, with a sense of vocation and the ambition to keep up with his own gifts, the music of those years will continue to dominate his records, whether he releases them or not. If the music Dylan makes doesn’t have the power to enter into the lives of his audience—and Self Portrait does not have that power—his audience will take over his past.

  (10) Did Dylan write “Belle Isle”? Maybe he did. This is the first time I’ve felt cynical listening to a new Dylan album.

  (11)

  In the record industry, music is referred to as “product.” “We got Beatle product.” When the whirlwind courtship of Johnny Winter and Columbia was finally consummated everyone wanted to know when they would get product. They got product fast but it took them a while longer to get music. Self Portrait, which is already a triple gold record, the way “O Captain! My Captain!” is more famous than “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is the closest thing to pure product in Dylan’s career, even more so than Greatest Hits, because that had no pretensions. The purpose of Self Portrait is mainly product and the need it fills is for product—for “a Dylan album”—and make no mistake about it, the need for product is felt as deeply by those who buy it, myself included, as by those who sell it, and perhaps more so.

  As a throw-together album it resembles Flowers1; but it’s totally unlike Flowers in that the album promises to be more than it is, not less. By its title alone Self Portrait makes claims for itself as the definitive Dylan album—which it may be, in a sad way—but it is still something like an attempt to delude the public into thinking they are getting more than they are, or that Self Portrait is more than it is.

  (11) “Living the Blues” is a marvelous recording. All sorts of flashes of all sorts of enthusiasms spin around it: the Dovells cheering for the Bristol Stomp, Dylan shadow-boxing with Cassius Clay, Elvis smiling and sneering in Jailhouse Rock. The singing is great—listen to the way Bob fades off “deep down insyyy-hide,” stepping back and slipping in that last syllable. For the first time on this album Dylan sounds excited by the music he’s making. The rhythm section, led by the guitar and the piano that’s rolling over the most delightful rock ’n’ roll chord changes, is wonderful. The girls go through their routine and they sound—cute. Dylan shines. Give it 100.

  (12)

  “. . . various times he thought of completing his baccalaureate so that he could teach in the college and oddly enough [this is from ‘A Rimbaud Chronology’]2 of learning to play the piano. At last he went to Holland, where, in order to reach the Orient, he enlisted in the Dutch Army and sailed for Java in June of 1876. Three weeks after his arrival in Batavia [Charles Perry: ‘We know Dylan was the Rimbaud of his generation; it seems he’s found his Abyssinia’] he deserted, wandered among the natives of the jungle and soon signed on a British ship for Liverpool. After a winter at home he went to Hamburg, joined a circus as interpreter-manager to tour the northern countries, but the cold was too much for him and he was repatriated from Sweden, only to leave home again, this time for Alexandria. Again, illness interrupted his travels and he was put off the ship in Italy and spent a year recovering on the farm at Roche. In 1878 he was in Hamburg again, trying to reach Genoa to take a ship for the East. Once more he tried to cross the Alps on foot but in a snow-storm he almost perished. Saved by monks in a Hospice, he managed to reach Genoa and sail to Alexandria, where he worked as a farm laborer for a while. In Suez, where he was stopped on his way to Cyprus, he was employed as a ship-breaker to plunder a ship wrecked on the dangerous coast at Guardafui. Most of the first half of 1879 he worked as a foreman in a desert quarry on Cyprus, and went home in June to recover from typhoid fever.”3

  (12) “Like a Rolling Stone”—Dylan’s greatest song. He knows it, and so do we. Not only that, but the greatest song of our era, on that single, on Highway 61 Revisited, on the tape of a British performance with the Hawks in 1966. If one version is better than the other it’s like Robin Hood splitting his father’s arrow.

  1965: “Alright. We’ve done it. Dig it. If you can. If you can take it. Like a complete unknown, can you feel that?”

  We could, and Bob Dylan took over. All that’s come since goes back to the bid for power that was “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  “Can you keep up with this train?” The train no longer runs; I suppose it depends on where your feet are planted.

  Dylan from the Isle of Wight is blowing his lines, singing country flat, up and down, getting through the song somehow, almost losing the whole mess at the end of the second verse. You don’t know whether he dropped the third verse because he didn’t want to sing it or because he forgot it. It’s enough to make your speakers wilt.

  Self Portrait enforces or suggests a quiet sound. “Like a Rolling Stone” isn’t “Blue Moon” but since most of Self Portrait is more like “Blue Moon” than “Like a Rolling Stone,” and since it is a playable album that blends together, you set the volume low. But if you play this song loud—very loud, until it distorts and rumbles—you’ll find the Band is still playing as hard as they can, for real. Their strength is cut in half by the man who recorded it, but volume will bring it back up.

  Some of “Like a Rolling Stone” is still there. A splendid beginning, announcing a conquest: Levon Helm beating his drums over the Band’s Motown March (ba-bump barrummmp, ba-bump barrrummmp), smashing his cymbals like the glass-breaking finale of a car crash; and best of all, Garth Hudson finding the spirit of the song and holding it firm on every chorus. Near the end when the pallid vocalizing is done with, Dylan moves back to the song and he and the Band begin to stir a frenzy that ends with a crash of metal and Bob’s shout: “JUST LIKE A ROLLING STONE!” There is something left.

  1965: “BAM! Once upon a time...” The song assaults you with a deluge of experience and the song opens up the abyss. “And just how far would you like to go in?” “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say we’ve been there.” That wasn’t good enough. “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you.” It peered out through “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “All Along the Watchtower,” but it seems Dylan has stepped back from its edge.

  The abyss is hidden away now, like the lost mine of a dead prospector. “Like a Rolling Stone,” as we hear it now, is like a fragment of a faded map leading back to that lost mine.

  (13)

  I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.

  (13) Why does “Copper Kettle” shine (it even sounds like a hit record) when so many other cuts hide in their own dullness? Why does this perfor
mance evoke all kinds of experience when most of Self Portrait is so one-dimensional and restrictive? Why does “Copper Kettle” grow on you while the other songs disappear?

  Like “All the Tired Horses,” it’s gorgeous. There are those tiny high notes punctuating the song in the mood of an old Buddy Holly ballad or “The Three Bells” by the Browns, and that slip-stream organ, so faint you can barely hear it—you don’t hear it, really, but you are aware of it in the subtlest way. There is the power and the real depth of the song itself, that erases our Tennessee truck-stop postcard image of moonshining and moves in with a vision of nature, an ideal of repose, and a sense of rebellion that goes back to the founding of the country. “We ain’t paid no whiskey tax since 1792,” Bob sings, and that goes all the way back—they passed the whiskey tax in 1791. It’s a song about revolt as a vocation, not revolution, merely refusal. Old men hiding out in mountain valleys, keeping their own peace. (The old moonshiners are sitting around a stove in Thunder Road, trying to come up with an answer to the mobsters that are muscling in on the valley they’ve held since the Revolution. “Blaf sprat muglmmph ruurrp ffft,” says one. The audience stirs, realizing they can’t understand his Appalachian dialect. “If you’d take that tobacco plug out of your mouth, Jed,” says another whiskey man, “maybe we could understand what you said.”)

  What matters is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most inventive singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like. The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded. On “Copper Kettle” that all happens, and it is noticeable because this is the only time on Self Portrait that it happens.

  “Not all great poets—like Wallace Stevens—are great singers,” Dylan said a year ago. “But a great singer—like Billie Holiday—is always a great poet.” That sort of poetry—and it’s that sort of poetry that made Dylan seem like a poet—is all there on “Copper Kettle,” in the way Bob changes into the lines “. . . or ROTTEN wood...” fading into a quieted “they’ll get you—by the smoke...” The fact that the rest of the album lacks the grace of “Copper Kettle” isn’t a matter of the album being different or new. It’s a matter of the music having power, or not having it.

  (14, 15, 16)

  “. . . very successful in terms of money. Dylan’s concerts in the past have been booked by his own firm, Ashes and Sand, rather than [this is from Rolling Stone, December 7, 1968] private promoters. Promoters are now talking about a ten-city tour with the possibility of adding more dates, according to Variety.

  “Greta Garbo may also come out of retirement to do a series of personal appearances. The Swedish film star who wanted only ‘to be alone’ after continued press invasions of her life is rumored to be considering a series of lavish stage shows, possibly with Dylan...”

  And we’d just sit there and stare.

  (14) “Gotta Travel On.” Dylan sings “Gotta Travel On.”

  (15) We take “Blue Moon” for a joke, a stylized apotheosis of corn, or further musical evidence of Dylan’s retreat from the pop scene. But back on Elvis’s first album, there is another version of “Blue Moon,” a deep and moving performance that opens up the possibilities of the song and reveals the failure of Dylan’s recording.

  Hoofbeats, vaguely aided by a string bass and guitar, form the background to a vocal that blows a cemetery wind across the lines of the song. Elvis moves back and forth with a high phantom wail, singing the part that fiddler Doug Kershaw plays on Dylan’s version, Elvis finally answering himself with a dark murmur that fades into silence. “It’s a revelation,” said a friend. “I can’t believe it.”

  There is nothing banal about “Blue Moon.” In formal musical terms, Dylan’s performance is virtually a cover of Elvis’s recording, but while one man sings toward the song, the other sings from behind it, from the other side.

  (16) “The Boxer.” Remember Paul Simon’s “How I was Robert Mac-Namared into Submission,” or whatever it was called, with that friendly line, “I forgot my harmonica, Albert”? Or Eric Anderson’s “The Hustler”? Maybe this number means “no hard feelings.” Jesus, is it awful.

  (17)

  Before going into the studio to set up the Weathermen, he wrote the Yippies’ first position paper, although it took Abbie Hoffman a few years to find it and Jerry Rubin had trouble reading it. A quote:

  “I’m gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange till I look like a walking mountain range then I’m gonna ride into Omaha on a horse out to the country club and the golf course carrying a New York Times shoot a few holes blow their minds.”

  “Dylan’s coming,” said Lang.4

  “Ah, you’re full of shit” [said Abbie Hoffman in his Woodstock Nation ], “he’s gonna be in England tonight, don’t pull that shit on me.”

  “Nah, I ain’t kiddin’, Abby-baby, he called up and said he might come . . .”

  “You think he’d dig running for president?”

  “Nah, that ain’t his trip he’s into something else.”

  “You met him, Mike? What he into?”

  “I don’t know for sure but it ain’t exactly politics. You ever met him?”

  “Yeah, once about seven years ago in Gertie’s Folk City down in the West Village. I was trying to get him to do a benefit for civil rights or something . . . hey Mike will you introduce us? I only know about meetin’ him through Happy Traum...”

  “There’s an easier way . . . Abbs . . . I’ll introduce you. In fact he wants to meet you...”

  Would Self Portrait make you want to meet Dylan? No? Perhaps it’s there to keep you away?

  (17) “The Mighty Quinn” sounds as if it was a gas to watch. It’s pretty much of a mess on record, and the sound isn’t all that much better than the bootleg. The Isle of Wight concert was originally planned as an album, and it’s obvious why it wasn’t released as such—on tape, it sounded bad. The performances were mostly clumsy or languid and all together would have made a lousy record. Two of the songs had something special about them, on the evidence of the bootleg, though neither of them made it onto Self Portrait. One was “Highway 61 Revisited,” where Bob and the Band screamed like Mexican tour guides hustling customers for a run down the road: “OUT ON HIGHWAY SIXTY-ONE!” The other was “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Dylan sang solo, playing guitar like a lyric poet, transforming the song with a new identity, sweeping in and out of the phrases and the traces of memory. He sounded something like Billie Holiday.

  (18)

  It’s certainly an odd self portrait: other people’s songs and the songs of a few years ago. If the title is serious, Dylan no longer cares much about making music and would just as soon define himself on someone else’s terms. There is a curious move toward self-effacement: Dylan removing himself from a position from which he is asked to exercise power. It’s rather like the Duke of Windsor abdicating the throne. After it’s over he merely goes away, and occasionally there’ll be a picture of him getting on a plane somewhere.

  (18) “Take Me as I Am or Let Me Go.” The Nashville recordings of Self Portrait, taken together, may not be all that staggering but they are pleasant—a sentimental little country melodrama. If the album had been cut to “Tired Horses” at the start and “Wigwam” at the end, with the Nashville tracks sleeping in between, we’d have a good record about which no one would have gotten very excited one way or the other, a kind of musical disappearing act. But the Artist must make a Statement, be he Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, or Tommy James and the Shondells. He must enter the studio and come out with that masterpiece. If he doesn’t, or hasn’t bothered, there’ll be at least an attempt to make it look as if he has. If Dylan were releasing more music than he’s been—say, a single three times a year
, an album every six months or so—then the weight that fixes itself on whatever he does release would be lessened. But the pattern is set now, for the biggest stars—one a year, if that. It’s rather degrading for an artist to put out more than one album a year, as if he has to keep trying, you know? Well, three cheers for John Fogerty.

  (19)

  Because of what happened in the middle sixties, our fate is bound up with Dylan’s whether he or we like it or not. Because Highway 61 Revisited changed the world, the albums that follow it must—but not in the same way.

  (19) “Take a Message to Mary”: the backing band didn’t seem to care much about the song, but Dylan did. My ten-year-old nephew thought “It Hurts Me Too” sounded fake but he was sure this was for real.

  (20)

  Ralph J. Gleason: “There was this cat Max Kaminsky talks about in his autobiography who stole records. He stole one from Max. He had to have them, you know? Just had to have them. Once he got busted because he heard this record on a juke box and shoved his fist through the glass of the box trying to get the record out.

  “We all have records we’d steal for, that we need that bad. But would you steal this record? You wouldn’t steal this record.”