The Book of Bob
Bob Dylan is about to publish a remarkably candid, long-awaited memoir. He gave us the first excerpt, and we sat down for an extraordinarily wide-ranging talk
By David Gates
NewsweekOct. 4 issue – When I tell Bob Dylan he's the last person I'd have expected to turn autobiographer, he laughs and says, „Yeah, me too.“ It's not just that he guards his privacy so carefully that he's arranged to meet in a motel room someplace in the Midwest—which is all he'd like us to specify—to talk about his forthcoming book, „Chronicles, Volume One.“ (Dylan supposedly got in without being spotted, but there's a funny vibe here. Why is our pot of coffee on the house?) His early public persona was built on self-protectively enigmatic statements and artful misdirection, like the yarns he used to tell about being a traveling carny; even Robert Zimmerman's stage name was an invention. And the songs that made Dylan so burdensomely famous—exhibit A, „Like a Rolling Stone,“ with Miss Lonely, her diplomat and the Siamese cat on his shoulder—seemed to tell his personal truth, and a lot of other people's, by means of surreal evasion. „I'm used to writing songs,“ he says, „and songs—I can fill 'em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.“ He's clearly proud of the book, but he didn't enjoy writing the thing. At all. „Lest we forget, while you're writing, you're not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation? I don't find it that splendid.“
Dylan, 63, looks younger and healthier than he did when I spoke with him in 1997, the year his spooky, world-weary album „Time Out of Mind“ re-established him as a vital contemporary—after what he claims was a quarter century of artistic „downward spiral“—and introduced him to a new generation of listeners. Back then, he was just recovering from a near-fatal infection of the tissues around his heart. Now, sitting at a small table with a view of the parking lot, sad little suburban trees and a lowering sky, he seems like a wiry kid eager to get outdoors—but he's also perfectly happy, as before, to shoot the breeze about music. „When I was talking to you earlier,“ he begins—as if it had been a couple of hours ago, rather than seven years. He gives a shout-out to Elvis Costello („'Everyday I Write the Book'—I just did that“) and to Carole King: „'You've Got a Friend' on some level means more to me than a lot of my songs do.“ He testifies to his admiration for Bing Crosby and for Willie Nelson, his informed skepticism about hip-hop („There's a lot of clever minds behind that, no question about it. But you know, less is more“), and his overall pessimism about the present-day scene: „I don't think music is ever going to be the same as what it meant to us. You hear it, but you don't hear it.“ Like all modernists, he's a nostalgic—what else would you be modernist about?—but he's clearly excited about his own recent music. These days, he says, with that familiar rising inflection, „I'm sort of doing what I want to do? I mean not sort of what I want to do, I am doing what I want to do. Or what I believe I was put here to do.“ He's got six or eight songs toward a new album, and he hopes to finish more before he goes back on the road next month. Then he wants to start re-recording many of his old songs, this time „with the proper structures. A lot of these songs can have, like, a dozen different structures to them. I can't hope to do all that. But I can provide a few things for future generations.“ He takes another sip from his Styrofoam cup.
„Chronicles,“ which will be in stores Oct. 5, may have been a detour from Dylan's real work: it occupied him on and off for three years, writing on a manual typewriter in capital letters, to make it easier for an assistant to read and retype. But it's hardly an arty curiosity like his post-Beat, all-lowercase 1966 novel „Tarantula.“ It's an attempt by the most influential cultural figure now alive—no? who else?—to give us a straightforward look at his life. It comes along, coincidentally, at a moment when mainstream literary writers are busy arguing for Dylan's importance: in the British critic Christopher Ricks's study „Dylan's Visions of Sin,“ and soon in „Studio A,“ a collection of pieces on Dylan by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody and Sam Shepard, as well as Dylan himself. (Simon & Schuster has also issued an updated collection of Dylan's lyrics—and Scribner has reprinted „Tarantula.“)
„Chronicles,“ written at the urging of Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, is neither a cradle-to-one-foot-in-the-grave autobiography nor a true memoir, tightly focused on a single crucial period. Instead, as Dylan puts it, „It's like I had a full deck, and I cut the cards and whatever you see you go with that. I realize there's a great gap in it.“ What he saw ended up as an evocation of his early days in Greenwich Village, chapters on the genesis of two lesser-known albums, „New Morning“ (1970) and „Oh Mercy“ (1989), and a section on his forced retreat from his own celebrity. (It's the subject of the exclusive excerpt that follows this piece.) The Biblical title Rosenthal suggested made intuitive sense to Dylan. „'Chronicles' just means—I'm not sure what it means“—he laughs—“but it would seem to be some kind of thing where you can make right use of the past.“
Critics may complain that the book doesn't include the back pages they want most: his famous 1966 motorcycle accident gets a single sentence, and there's nothing about his 1977 divorce, his 1978 conversion to evangelical Christianity or the origin and the making of such masterworks as „Blood on the Tracks“ (1975), „Slow Train Coming“ (1979), „Infidels“ (1983) or „Time Out of Mind.“ (He did write about „Blood on the Tracks“; that chapter, and much more that he's written, may appear in subsequent volumes—“When I slink into the corner, maybe.“) But Dylan has a different sense of priorities. „I mean, I'm in possession of what really matters.“ And one thing that seems to matter overwhelmingly is other people. He's written sharp-eyed portraits of everyone from the poet Archibald MacLeish—who wanted Dylan to collaborate on a musical play—to the opium-smoking bohemian couple who put him up in the Village. Jack Dempsey even gets a cameo on the first page. „You know how I would remember stuff? I would remember people,“ he says. „Once I figured out who was there, I could make something of it. I didn't go strong on anybody, you know? I think I went rather light. But in saying that, I'm not a big fan of polite literature, so there would have to be an edge to it.“ Dylan's songs have always teemed with people, from the real-life Hattie Carroll and Hurricane Carter to such indelible figures as the clueless Mr. Jones in „Ballad of a Thin Man“ and the back-stabbing wanna-be in „Positively Fourth Street.“ But „Chronicles“ should dispel any notion that Dylan spends his real life exclusively absorbed in the splendid isolation of his private visions. While everybody was obsessively watching Dylan, he was watching them.
There's always been something uniquely strange about Dylan's fame, the often-creepy intensity with which people have been drawn to him—or rather, to his mystique. „The songs definitely had a lot to do with it,“ he says. Well, yeah. It went dangerously past ordinary adulation. At its worst, in the late 1960s and early '70s, Dylan experienced a disorienting, terrifying and downright infuriating combination of stalking and deification. As he writes in „Chronicles,“ „It would have driven anybody mad“—and it goes a long way toward explaining why arranging for an interview with him still feels like setting up a meeting to pass nuclear secrets.
As Dylan sees it, his fame distorted not only his life but his art; he reacted to it with new music calculated to baffle expectations, and he ended up baffling himself. „I didn't know what it was I was really doing. I was going on reputation. Which buys you a certain sum, but you're not in control. And until you gain control, you're never quite sure you're doing the right thing? In my case anyway? So I went for a long time precisely on that fame that we're talking about. But—it was like a bag of wind. I didn't realize it was slipping away until it had slipped away.“ And how long did this go on? „Artistically speaking, it would have to have begun sometime in Woodstock—not personally, but in a public way—till maybe when that 'Time Out of Mind' record came out.“ I command myself to keep my mouth shut. He's talking about the 25 years that produced „Blood on the Tracks,“ „Slow Train Coming,“ „Shot of Love,“ „Infidels“ and its sublime outtakes, and—no. Let's not argue with the man who's in possession of what really matters. I take another sip from my cup. A china cup. Not being Bob Dylan, I had no problem making a run to the restaurant down the hall, though the coffee was still on the house.
Outside the window, rain's now falling on the parking lot. Dylan must have seen so many of these gloomy Midwestern days when he was growing up in northern Minnesota. The photo on the cover of „Chronicles“ shows Times Square in 1961, the year he came to New York, but as a kid, he says, „I had no idea of what a city was like. And I think it probably made me who I am today. The country where I came from—it's pretty bleak. And it's cold. And there's a lot of water. So you could dream a lot. The difference between me now and then is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams.“ His early songs, he says, were visionary, however much they drew on his meticulous observation of the real world around him. „What you see in 'Chronicles' is a dream,“ he says. „It's already happened.“
You would have to be Bob Dylan—which is what all those stalkers must ultimately have wanted from him—to grasp fully what he's trying to tell you. But it must have to do with his having to accept the loss of his original mode of creation, in which the songs seemed to come to him without his knowing what he was doing. Does he still have that same access to—I don't know how to put the question. He helps me out. „No, not in the same way,“ he says. „Not in the same way at all. But I can get there, by following certain forms and structures. It's not luck. Luck's in the early years. In the early years, I was trying to write and perform the sun and the moon. At a certain point, you just realize that nobody can do that.“ In the myth that he's structured to explain himself to himself—and he really is the one in possession of that truth—“Time Out of Mind“ must mark the point of that acceptance. „Chronicles,“ the „dream“ in which he found himself constrained to tell the literal truth, is his attempt, at long last, to explain himself to us.
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Übersetzung folgt am 15.11.04 !!
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