HARD RAIN: A DYLAN COMMENTARY1999 EPILOGUE for DA CAPO edition
by Tim Riley
AT HIS 30TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION in 1992, surrounded by friends such as Roger McGuinn, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Lou Reed, Dylan played the fading rock icon as pale, puffy ghost, the burned-out shell of the voice-of-a-generation who had written the evening's pageant of classic songs. The marvel wasn't so much that so many stars had gathered on Madison Square Garden's stage to salute one man, but that everything being sung had come out of THIS man—the ghost you saw before you. There was little that could cause this grand a tribute to go wrong: everybody besides Dylan seemed in good shape and pleasant mood, and unlike a lot of rock spectacles, this event was both sincere and humble. (Of course, the hand of Columbia Records could be felt, especially behind appearances like Sophie B. Hawkins, whose roiling, literal take on "I Want You" was unbearable, and cut from the final recording.) But when Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O'Connor came onstage, the audience stirred awkwardly. Seven days earlier she had appeared on Saturday Night Live and torn up a picture of the Pope. That protest had had several targets: the host that week was Andrew Dice Clay, and some female members of the SNL cast walked off the set in protest of the cheap misogynist laughs that had made him famous. As she tore the Pope's photo up, Sinead's comment was "Fight the real enemy." She had considered refusing to appear on the same stage with Dice, but decided to use the opportunity to spotlight misogyny's higher sources.
At Dylan's tribute, she was slated to sing "I Believe in You," but there was an awkward pause as she stepped to the mike. She took the measure of the audience in front of her, and decided to wait. That seemed provocative enough. The rumble began to grow, and soon it was clear that there were plenty of folks in the audience who were angered by O'Connor's presence. Apparently, the Pope is off-limits as a subject of protest to New York audiences. More likely it was the specter of a woman refuting a male authority figure of a male-dominated religion that was reeling from a widespread priest pedophile scandal it refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for. O'Connor's temerity in the face of such prejudice continues to be a defining feature of her feminist persona.
But standing on Dylan's stage, O'Connor must have felt a sense of dejà vu. Two years earlier, at a concert in New Jersey, she refused to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" at a summer concert. In the following days, her protest became a tabloid item, with Frank Sinatra leading the charge as middle America lamented the disrespect shown its country. Nobody bothered to ask Frank Sinatra if he would sing the Irish national anthem when in Ireland.
As soon as the grumble at the Dylan anniversary concert began to grow, the mood turned cold, and it was apparent that Sinead would either have to acknowledge the sinister noises in the audience or let them shame her. She blustered, and then retorted with a sneering version of Bob Marley's "War," sung as much in offense as defense. Her gambit finished, she marched quickly offstage, only to receive a supercilious hug from Kris Kristofferson, who seemed to be trying to urge her to continue with her Dylan song. She dealt with his embrace like a pro running back disposes of a defensive end.
During the final weeks of that first Clinton campaign, when the right-wing era of Reagan and Bush was finally challenged successfully, to stand as a member of Dylan's audience and witness O'Connor's dilemma up close was to feel extremely discomfited. In the sixties, of course, this kind of cultural collision was not only conventional but de rigeur, especially at a Bob Dylan concert. Dylan himself sang at the March on Washington in 1963, and traveled to Greenville, Mississippi, during the Freedom Rides to lend his support for voter registration drives during the civil rights movement. After he effectively renounced song protest with "My Back Pages," his adventuresome muse became a kind of protest in itself: against whatever kind of rock career anybody else might expect from him; against what kind of musical style was considered "hip" or "square"; and mostly against whatever "traditional" career expectations might be defied in the brave new context of rock'n'roll. At events like the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan was the rock star who had championed the very idea of singing to loud boos from a hostile audience.
But by the '80s and '90s, Dylan began to resemble someone more like Ray Charles, who had no compunctions about singing for Republican National Conventions even though its Presidential candidates and platforms were explicitly racist. (Charles was part of the Republican delegations' less than 1% minority population during conventions of this era.) Dylan took many a gig in this period that could be considered neo-conservative at the very least: for the West Point Military Academy in 1990; or accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys in 1991. By the spring of 1997, this political neutrality—or denial&8212;had so much momentum that Dylan performed at the Vatican for the Pope himself a few short weeks after accepting the Congressional Medal of honor from President Bill Clinton without a hint of irony.
Can anyone imagine the Dylan of an earlier era allowing Sinead O'Connor to be booed offstage for defying the Pope—without so much as a retort? Alongside fiascos like his ambivalent 1985 LiveAid set and his indecipherable 1991 Grammy appearance (where he sang "Masters of War"), the thirtieth anniversary performance sealed the impression that Dylan was more a casualty of the '60s political legacy than a survivor. Who could have predicted that Dylan, the premiere symbol of '60s political activism, would someday make Frank Sinatra seem observant?
Apparently the Pope's untouchable status was second only to Dylan's, who proceeded to move the show forward as though nothing had happened. As the icons gathered to sing "My Back Pages" for the finale, it was clear they were singing more about aging than politics; and as touching as it was, it was hard not to notice a nervous Sinead O'Connor meandering in the midst of things, looking shell-shocked and out of place.
AT THIS WRITING, in mid-1998, Dylan's "rehabilitation" in the public imagination is supposedly complete. TIME OUT OF MIND, an album soaked in death and dejection, won overwhelming critical praise upon its late 1997 release, made Dylan a Grammy favorite, and joined many year-end critical lists. This came on the heels of Dylan's bout with a rare heart ailment in the spring of 1997, which hospitalized him and flooded his record label with phone calls. The publicity, and a NEWSWEEK cover story, bulleted the album to a number ten debut on the charts, his highest ever.
The media reported Dylan's big year in tones of hushed reverence, as if his symbolic status held him above criticism. And yet if TIME OUT OF MIND represented anything beyond Dylan's bloated self-pity, it spoke poorly of its audience. The CD opened with the words "I'm walking through streets that are dead," and descended from there. He bleated lines like "You took the silver, you took the gold/You left me standing out in the cold" with such sullen contempt it was hard to believe that this was the same guy whose imagination once drank listeners under the table.
Coasting on his reputation as the most original songwriter going, Dylan now copped his album titles from old Steely Dan songs. And his new numbers were anything but metaphoric: when he sang a lyric like "Trying to get to heaven /Before they close the door" he meant it only literally. In an era when many of the most interesting bands embraced the lo-fi conceit (Portishead, Pavement), Dylan went hi-fi. His recordings sounded like crap long before it was cool, but now he used producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel) to frame his gravelly mumble in gorgeously layered colors. He wrote almost exclusively in the first-person in the humorless tone of a world-weary crank.
In his prime Dylan was the antithesis of the artist as static entity: you never knew what he would do next, but it was often the least likely move, hyper-counterintuitive, and it forced you to rethink your entire concept of rock and Dylan's place in it. This was the fount of sixties counterculture intellectualism, who dosed 1967's psychedelic summer of love with the subdued JOHN WESLEY HARDING, and lobbed a relaxed C&W turn, NASHVILLE SKYLINE, into Woodstock's hippie largesse.
Reports from many of Dylan's 1998 shows were glowing, which argued that Dylan still has greatness in him onstage. But his presence in popular culture is meager compared to the hype that still surrounds him. GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU (1992) or WORLD GONE WRONG (1994) are said to be the records that brought his muse back into focus. In rock, the oldies fallback recording has a tradition of being a place-holding career move, the kind that signals creative stagnation, when the performer can't figure out what to do next. Coming amidst a seven-year lull between original songs (1990's BLOOD RED SKY and 1997's TIME OUT OF MIND), Dylan was lucky to dodge that charge. The material was well-chosen, but these performances lack the cockeyed humor Dylan sang with as younger man. His voice, long abused by nicotine and god knows what else, has less raspy charm than bedraggled cynicism, and he puts these records over with what might be called the opposite of panache. Compared to the casual verve of the Band's MOONDOG MATINEE (1973), those Dylan records sound exhausted, and not in particularly interesting ways.
TIME OUT OF MIND scans like a poor Dylan parody. The sarcastic contempt Dylan smears across his eyeglasses is overbearing, and the ironies are few and frail. It culminates with a winding distention of a blues called "Highlands," which turns out to be yet another protracted narrative of longing for a woman, a lost love, a hope betrayed:
She said you don't read women authors do you
I said you're wrong
She said who've you read then
I said I read Erica Jong
Unlike the waitress he confronts in "Tangled Up in Blue," there's not much going on here. A woman accuses Dylan of not reading female authors. He disagrees, then offers up Erica Jong as evidence of his vast acquaintance with feminist fiction. Besides going for the sloppy, obvious rhyme, what are we to make of this? That Dylan reads Erica Jong as a way of rubbing feminist's noses in how mediocre their novelists can be? That Erica Jong counts as a woman novelist but only barely? The more cynical reading might be: Dylan reads women authors only when they're washed-up '70s post-celebrities who popularized term "zipless fuck."
The overwhelmingly positive praise TIME OUT OF MIND received points to a larger misperception surrounding fading rock idols, namely, the wish that even if their best work is behind them, they remain vibrant icons despite the vast rut of commercialism rock culture now stands for. This is not meant to imply that all of Dylan's work in the last three decades is poor, but the overwhelming bulk of it lacks in comparison to his best years (1962-75). Indeed, the good work after Rolling Thunder Revue casts telling aspersions on his major releases. His singing with the Traveling Wilburys is shot through with humor and a sense of shared burdens with his fellow icons Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison. And he's participated in a number of tribute albums for the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and Doc Pomus that have kept his voice at play in the ongoing rock dialogue about sources and influences.
PERHAPS THE MOST COMPELLING proof of Dylan's irrelevance came from moments notable for his absence. At the MTV Video Awards in 1996, Jakob Dylan took the stage with his band, the Wallflowers, to perform their hit "One Headlight." Alongside him, Bruce Springsteen sang harmony as though this youngster deserved it, and used his superstar status to do something besides boost his own stock. Jakob, perhaps the most burdened of rock progeny, could use a big brother onstage, and Springsteen coaxed some of the sweetest smiles out of the young hand his audience had ever seen. By contrast, his father, Bob Dylan, kept his distance from his son's career. And Dylan the elder was not seen harmonizing on anybody else's son's stage.
And as Dylan was writing and recording TIME OUT OF MIND, another album was being made under the auspices of Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie's daughter by Marjorie. Overseeing the Guthrie papers at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City, Nora had helped Dave Marsh put together a boisterous book of unpublished writings, PASTURES OF PLENTY, in 1989. In 1995, she wrote the British songwriter Billy Bragg with an irresistible invitation: to compose music to some of the hundreds of leftover song lyrics Woody had scribbled down and left behind.
Bragg, along with the roots-rock band Wilco, began collaborating on a series of songs that became MERMAID AVENUE, which was finally released in 1998 to widespread critical praise. And it's no wonder: MERMAID AVENUE countered what Dylan had been singing about with a zealous optimism and experience that only rock could deliver. It made Dylan sound like a has-been as it elevated Bragg's and Wilco's audience's best hopes surrounding Guthrie's legacy.
By 1998, the Guthrie legend had winnowed to a few contradictory meanings. Guthrie was supposedly the American Johnny Appleseed come to life, recalled mainly as a political troubador, the kind of writer who never found a socialist cliché he didn't like, whose sole purpose as a musician was to carry the leftist word. One of the most famous pictures of Guthrie features the logo writ large across his guitar: "This machine kills fascists."
But that stereotype of Guthrie has always been over-simplified, as anyone who reads Joe Klein's WOODY GUTHRIE: A LIFE (Knopf, 1983) can attest. (Klein would find fame as Anonymous, the author of PRIMARY COLORS.) Guthrie's politics was only one aspect of his persona, and you could argue it was drawn directly from experience. The subtext of a lot of his songs was: if you didn't emerge from the Dust Bowl and the Depression as a radical progressive, you probably didn't have a brain, and your soul was up for grabs. But nobody can listen to Guthrie's children songs without realizing he had a rakish sense of fun, and the romanticism behind songs like "Pastures of Plenty" and "Deportees" can't be explained by politics alone.
The preference for Dylan's inward, psychological approach to Guthrie's outward, agitprop persona has always been a red herring. Dylan's greatness lies in just how ingeniously he straddles these two approaches, and keeps the listener guessing as to his ultimate intentions—and how much is pure accident. After all, his first public appearance after the BASEMENT TAPES came at a Carnegie Hall Guthrie memorial in early 1968, where he offered up three Guthrie songs with the Band ("I Ain't Got No Home," "The Grand Coulee Dam," and "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt"). This set ranks with his Bangladesh appearance among the finest Dylan live sets ever recorded. Extending the folksy-ethereal mood of the BASEMENT TAPES even as he brought these Guthrie songs some neurotic grit and emotional depth, Dylan embraces all the warmth and humor these songs have to offer, and the spontaneous communities that spring from homeless privation. The best Dylan may be even more complex—and inconsistent—than authors like Greil Marcus (INVISIBLE REPUBLIC) would have you believe.
At this point, it's impossible to imagine Dylan reimagining Guthrie the way Bragg and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco do on MERMAID AVENUE. There's no "Ingrid Bergman" in Dylan the crusty, the bleeding-heart romantic, any more than there's a "California Stars" or an "The Unwelcome Guest," songs that revive Guthrie's humility as they approach his melodic naturalism. When Tweedy sings "We throw away enough to feed the hungry," he makes it truer in a way than perhaps Guthrie ever imagined.
Looking back, the least uncomfortable person at Madison Square Garden at that 1992 anniversary concert may have been Dylan himself, who, for all we know, was unaware of the Sinead O'Connor incident. Dylan may still have great records in him, but for a huge segment of his audience, his Nixonian jowls bespeak a narcissistic bitterness that has only intensified with age, and made his continued reliance on his '60s material all the more unseemly. If anything, he seems to know less of himself and his place in the post-Reagan era than he ever has.