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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Elsewhere, he talks about listening to Judy Garland, taking the D train to the Brooklyn Paramount to see his old Minnesota friend Bobby Vee, how Frank Sinatra's "Ebb Tide" killed him whenever he heard it. Years later, recording an album in New Orleans, he takes notice of a Paula Abdul song blasting out of a passing car. In the same period, he ventures into a strange little Louisiana roadside shop and hears the Beatles' "Do You Want to Know a Secret" coming over a scratchy radio and captures in simple lines the euphoric community that group offered: "I remembered when they first came out. They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group. Their songs would create an empire."
There was an underside to that community that Dylan has already spoken of. "Then," he said, meaning the '60s, "you didn't know which end the trouble was coming from. And it could come at any time." As "Chronicles" is read and reviewed, we can probably expect to hear that Dylan turns out to have hated the '60s, in the same manner that some reviews of Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" have said of Roth, "Whaddya know? He's a Jew after all!" "There has been so much talk about 'The Good War,' the Justified War, the Necessary War, and the like, that the young and the innocent could get the impression that it was really not such a bad thing after all," wrote Paul Fussell about World War II. And for all the undeniable sense of possibilities, it is still easy to get the impression that the '60s were all the Youngbloods singing "Get Together" and none of the Stones singing "Gimme Shelter."
There's no romanticism about the '60s in Dylan's writing, just an honest reckoning of things as they were. He doesn't treat his generation as angels who were somehow exempt from promulgating the violence that was in the air. Dylan implicitly addresses the irony that the era preaching individuality had its own version of the stifling conformity it decried. In 1964 Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out, published an open letter, Dylan recalls, accusing him of "shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation." Dylan adds: "I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs."
Dylan had seen the noose that came with his role. He heard the individuality of the voices in the folk and blues he was drawn to, where the folk community heard only "the struggle," the need for the performer to obliterate himself in the service of the masses. That belief had odious manifestations. In his book on minstrelsy, "Where Dead Voices Gather," Nick Tosches wrote about the white kids turned on by the blues revival of the '60s who -- to experience "authentic" black culture -- wanted rediscovered black musicians to affect the roles of poor, illiterate farmhands. Who, Dylan must have thought, could have heard Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams or Bascom Lamar Lunsford and not heard an individual? For that matter, who could have heard "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and not heard an individual?
"Whatever the counterculture was," Dylan writes, "I'd seen enough of it." Dylan is generous in his praise of others in "Chronicles." But as any good performer should, he has his share of ego. With a touch of humor he notes, of his arrival in New York, "I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot."
As Dylan sees it, withdrawing as he did to escape the freaks who besieged him and the ridiculous calls for him to be a leader cost him the ability to observe. He is open about the aimless, uninspired spate of work he produced in the late '60s and, with the exceptions of his reunion with the Band, "Blood on the Tracks," and the Rolling Thunder Revue, most of the '70s. But what distinguishes "Chronicles" is what has distinguished -- and upset people throughout -- most of Dylan's career: the inconvenience of his genius.
In the middling, muddled '70s, we knew how to think about "Bob Dylan" -- a former genius putting out records that nobody was very eager to hear, even if we halfheartedly listened to the "Dylan Is Back!" hype that preceded each one. We knew we'd be let down. He would turn up at celebrity benefit concerts and be feted now and then, but otherwise everyone could pretty much relegate Dylan to his glory years, agree that "Highway 61 Revisited" was pretty great and think it was just too bad about "Shot of Love" or "Infidels."
But Dylan, much as he did to the folk community in the '60s, screwed up the script, tossed in a new act when most of us were expecting the curtain. Starting with 1992's "Good as I Been to You," an album whose ugly, thrown-together cover suggested those endless late-Elvis LPs, Dylan began finding his voice again. Except that nobody was ready for a Dylan comeback that ended with "Froggy Went-a Courtin'." But he did it by going back, as he did scouring the microfilm of old newspapers as a young man, by returning to the strange old blues songs and ballads he had loved, by putting together a hard, tight young band who toured with him endlessly. Dylan had always kept his songs open to interpretation and new ways of playing. The new versions turned out to be too strange even for some older fans. Like the mean version of "Masters of War" he screamed through on the 1991 Grammy Awards during the Gulf War, a version so fast and hard it took nearly half the song to go by before being recognized.
A performance like that can say to people who had long ago decided they knew how to think of Bob Dylan, "Nothing is settled. Everything is up for grabs." It wasn't the young beautiful dandy of the '60s in gabardine print suits before us. This was a man with a jowly, lined face, a sharpie's mustache, and an almost formal bearing. The suits and cowboy hat he wears throughout "Masked and Anonymous" make him look like a cross between a gentleman rancher and the ghost of Hank Williams.
But what we see isn't an aged man as much as a man who has slipped the limits of age. Are those suits a hipster's look or a link to the past? Why not both? In 1960s New York, the young Dylan had felt something contemporary in stories about reform movements, anti-gambling leagues, slave-wage factories. For a while he made his own contribution to the legacy of those news reports and tall tales and rumors and prophecies. He outran the mantle of "conscience of his generation" as hard and fast as he could, only to wind up being slapped with it when the contemporary state of his career seemed an unworthy coda to that work.
Finally, in the last decade, Dylan seems to be opening up the time portal he always envisioned. Put on "Time out of Mind" or "Love and Theft" or the version of "Dixie" he sings in "Masked and Anonymous," maybe the most profound piece of American popular music since "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and what you hear is ageless.
In "Chronicles" he writes about what he learned from those ancient news clippings:
"There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."
As good an explanation of any as to why the work Dylan has been doing for the past 10 years feels like the rock of ages -- solid and inexplicable and known to us, even if, as the best music always does, it makes you wonder, what was that?
