PART FIVE
Interview
August 1997
I was in England in late May, trying to get people to read a book about Bob Dylan’s 1967 basement tapes recordings, when the story that Dylan might be near death from a rare heart ailment hit the papers. The queer thing about the news was the seeming eagerness with which it was reported. You could almost hear a sigh of relief: “My liege, I bring great news—the ’60s are over! Finally, we can close the book!”
You might figure that if the era wasn’t over by 1997, it never would be. That didn’t explain why what should have been straight news—diagnostic reports, information on the cancellation of Dylan’s then-imminent U.K. and European tours—was freighted with preemptive obituaries. In paper after paper, lengthy career summaries were appended to the medical updates. Some dailies ran full-page essays probing the likely longevity of the influence of the Voice of a Generation, if not the man, or the Generation itself. But it wasn’t just in the U.K. American papers, too, put out the call for obit writers. The network news shows wanted critics—not doctors—to draw deep breaths and wrap it all up. Showing its usual flair for matching the slick with the glib, Newsweek caught the mood with surpassing vulgarity, burning off the veil of solemnity adopted elsewhere: “The scary news blowin’ in the wind last week was that Bob Dylan might be dying . . . Bob Dylan’s heart in danger? It sounded like a death knell for the counterculture.” You can almost hear them salivating, can’t you? But why this breathless anticipation of a death that in truth took place long ago?
Part of it, I think, is a fear that a singer who once seemed able to translate the vague and shifting threats and warnings of his time into a language that was instantly and overwhelmingly understood might be able to do it again. Part of it has to do with what Gerri Hirshey, in a recent Rolling Stonestory on Dylan’s son Jakob (in the top ten with his band, the Wallflowers, for all of the spring of this year) called the “foolish cultural myopia that has long plagued this country: We don’t know what to make of artists who have the audacity to outlive their own revolutions.” There’s something more, though. As Dylan hinted in the basement tune “This Wheel’s on Fire”—theme song, rather frighteningly, for the BBC/ Comedy Central series Absolutely Fabulous, where it’s repeatedly keyed to Julie Driscoll’s sly, certain reading of the line “If your mem’ry serves you well”—artists who stick around after their putative moment has passed are troublesome reminders of promises their audiences, perhaps more than the artists themselves, have failed to keep. So you can almost imagine the elegiac, funereal editorial cartoon, picturing a scattering of ashes and a caption: “Now Bob Dylan, too, is blowin’ in the wind . . .”
Empowered media arrogance and arrant media stupidity bucked up against the perhaps little-known but immovable fact that, as this near-celebration was taking place, Bob Dylan, no matter how ill—he did say, on leaving the hospital, “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon”—remained not merely a real person, but an artist doing work that ranks with his very best. Throughout the 1990s he has been reshaping his music, honing a tight, cool little band, clearing his long-blocked throat with two dank, vitriolic, surreptitiously ambitious albums of traditional songs, and reinventing himself onstage, not as a prophet or a careerist or a ruined reminder of better times, but as a guitar player. His shows began to jump: when I last saw him, two years ago, the long shout that kicked off his first number was like a flag unfurling.
The man so hopefully buried, dead or alive, as a creature of the past, as a prisoner of a counterculture he left behind long before it disappeared on its own, has spent the better part of seven years biding his time. Earlier this year he recorded a new album, his first collection of original songs since 1990—unlikely to be released, I’d imagine, until Jakob Dylan makes room for it on the charts. If it does come out, it should be the first Dylan album in well over twenty years likely to get whoever might hear it wondering what in the world it is.
The record is not like any other Dylan has released, though the music isn’t unlike some he’s made: it has a dirt-floor feeling, with loose ends and fraying edges in the songs, songs that sound both unfinished and final. The music seems more found than made, the prosaic driving out the artful. It all comes to a head with “Highlands,” a flat, unorchestrated, undramatized monologue, wistful and broken, bitter and amused, that describes both a day and a life. The song, as I heard it one afternoon this spring in a Sony Records office in Los Angeles, is about an older man who lives in one of Ed Kienholz’s awful furnished rooms in the rotting downtown of some fading city—Cincinnati, Hollywood, the timeless, all-American Nowheresville you see in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet —getting up and going for a walk, maybe for the first time in weeks. In the course of the song he recounts his adventures, recalls the people he met and those he avoided. In a certain sense nothing happens; from another perspective, a life is resolved. The song is someone else’s dream, but as Dylan sings, you are dreaming it. And you can’t wake up.
“How long was that?” I asked the man who’d left me with the tape. “Seven minutes? Eight?” “Seventeen,” he said. This is from the man so many were ready to bury: a singer who, at the age of fifty-six, no longer a factor in the pop equation, can still beat the clock.