Down the Highway, page 53
The accusation of plagiarism had been levelled at Dylan before, as far back as the start of his career. As has often been observed, the melody of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ owes a debt to the spiritual ‘No More Auction Block,’ and there are other examples whereby Dylan songs seem to have been built upon older tunes, often age-old tunes originating with black artists. Victor Maymudes spoke critically of Bob borrowing music from other artists, especially African-American musicians. ‘There’s a whole horrible story there.’ Yet the adaptation of out-of-copyright melodies has always been part of popular music, especially in the traditions of folk, blues and country music. In fact, borrowing is common to all music, including orchestral work. Handel was a famous plagiarist. So was Igor Stravinsky, who once quipped: ‘A good composer does not imitate; he steals,’ meaning that major artists take what they need and use it boldly, making something distinctively new. Lesser artists create pastiches.
Just as there is a tradition of incorporating existing musical phrases and melodies in ‘new’ compositions, there is a long history of written works – plays, novels, poetry and song lyrics – using words penned by other writers, and the more one looks into this sort of borrowing the more layers are sometimes revealed, reaching far back in time. Take the Dylan song ‘Moonlight’ on ‘Love and Theft’ in which he sings ‘For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me‘. Hearing this, one might think first of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 book For Whom the Bell Tolls, and imagine that Bob had taken the phrase from the novel. But the phrase wasn’t original to Hemingway; he was quoting the poet John Donne, who wrote in 1624: ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ So was Dylan plagiarizing anybody here? Dylan is as free to quote Donne’s phrase as Hemingway was, with or without attribution. In the case of the song ‘Sugar Baby,’ although Dylan’s lyric about Gabriel blowing his horn may have been lifted from ‘The Lonesome Road,’ by Austin and Shilkret, they didn’t invent the image. Angels blowing horns and trumpets to herald judgment day is a stock image in art, music and literature going back to the Bible.
Although Dylan hasn’t discussed publicly what he did or didn’t borrow from Confessions of a Yakuza for ‘Love and Theft’, it is easy to understand why he might have been drawn to this little book, dealing as it does with a romantic outlaw with a personal code of honor, an archetype Dylan has long found attractive (Joey Gallo and ‘Hurricane’ Carter being two more examples). Dylan has also been a frequent visitor to Japan, and no doubt he has developed an interest in the culture over the years. Further more, it is important to note that the true crime book is a collection of transcribed conversations, rather than a work of the imagination. In quoting phrases from it Dylan was not lifting another writer’s prose, but taking inspiration from what was presented as the conversations of a real person, which gave him more licence. And, significantly, when the translator of Confessions of a Yakuza was alerted to the suggestion that Dylan may have used the work in this way, he said he was flattered to learn that the book had inspired the songwriter.
Like most writers, Dylan uses found words and phrases as jumping off points for his imagination, and in many ways this sort of quoting is a compliment, an act of love and theft. It can also be argued that Dylan has relied increasingly upon found material in recent years, linking borrowed lines with stock phrases and figures of speech, which he didn’t tend to do in his prime. Rather it seems that in old age, perhaps less able to conjure up as many new images as he once did, Dylan has adopted a collage method of composition. At the same time he has moved away from exploring specific situations and telling stories in his songs in favor of delivering a series of images in a high rhetorical style, usually relating to favorite themes. Love is Dylan’s all-time number one theme, usually misbegotten or lost love; the foolishness and mendacity of man is another popular topic; others include a vision of a lost America, impending mortality, and the divine judgment Bob clearly believes we will all face. He has been moving this way for some time. Wonderful though they are in many ways, ‘Dignity’ from 1989 and the more recent ‘Things Have Changed’ are examples of such rhetorical, list-like songs. Most of ‘Love and Theft’ has a similar quality, the music starting to blur together, too, now Dylan was recording himself with his road band, using and reusing the same old blues and country shuffles.
Dylan has always had a penchant for old music, and he has been candid about how extensively he uses out-of-copyright melodies, returning time and again to ‘old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations on the blues form,’ as he says. These were the antique chassis of the new songs he built. ‘I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head … That’s the way I meditate,’ he explained to the LA Times in 2004. ‘People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a [new] song.’ Dylan even got into the habit of bringing his old records into the studio to play for his band, so the boys knew what he was after. Little wonder that Dylan’s new songs sounded familiar. And of course the album title, ‘Love and Theft‘, was an acknowledgment of what he was up to, while the title itself is unique among Dylan’s albums in that it appears on the sleeve within quotation marks, possibly because he knew Love and Theft had already been used, by the author Eric Lott, as the title of a book about minstrel singers.
Methodology aside, is ‘Love and Theft’ any good? If one were to award the CD a star rating it would have to be four out of five stars, or three and a half, marked down slightly because of the over-familiar sound and the collage lyrics. It is a good second-division Dylan album, alongside Nashville Skyline, New Morning and Street-Legal. In interviews, the artist suggested listeners shouldn’t compare the work to his greatest albums, knowing he’d be hard-pressed to match what he’d done in the past. ‘Compare this album to the other albums that are out there. Compare this album to other artists who make albums,’ Dylan advised his critics. On that level, ‘Love and Theft’ stands apart from almost everything else on the market, as Dylan albums usually have, for the luminous quality of the lyrics, the beauty of the music, and the sincerity of the performance. Even when he is less than fully engaged Dylan is a more interesting singer-songwriter than just about everybody else in popular music. In any event, critics piled praise on ‘Love and Theft’ which sold well enough to make number five in the US album charts, number three in the UK, and won Best Contemporary Folk Album at the Grammy Awards.
ANYBODY WHO HAS PAID attention to Bob Dylan’s interviews over the years knows that, although he is a fascinating talker, with a highly original way of expressing himself, he doesn’t always tell journalists the gospel truth. He is enigmatic, playful and contradictory. In a promotional interview for ‘Love and Theft’ with the (London) Times, for instance, published on September 9, 2001, Dylan dismissed the idea that he would ever write an autobiography. A few days later came news that Bob was doing exactly that. Jeff Rosen had struck a four-book deal with Simon & Schuster, the highlight of which would be a volume of memoirs entitled Chronicles (also the name of two books in the Old Testament, interestingly). A second and third volume were envisaged, the other title in this multi-book deal being an updated edition of lyrics. The Dylan world was agog. Would Chronicles turn out to be a second Tarantula, poetic but frustratingly opaque as biography? Or was this secretive man finally going to tell his story straight in print? Fans could hardly wait. Indeed, the next ten years would be full of surprises for those who followed Dylan’s career.
Meanwhile, there was a new face in Dylan’s band when George Receli took his seat behind the drums. Dylan changed his band personnel regularly, with the exception of Tony Garnier who‘d been his bass player and musical director for a record thirteen years. As a result he spent much of his time on the road teaching material to the new boys, and there was a huge repertoire to learn. Very unusually for a ‘rock’ act, Dylan still mixed up his set list every evening, only deciding what he would play shortly before going on stage, reminding himself of his more obscure material by consulting books of lyrics kept in his star coach. He never listened back to the records.
As part of the 2002 summer tour, the star took his reconfigured band to the Newport Festival, his first appearance at Newport since he ‘went electric’ in 1965. The festival had changed over the intervening thirty-seven years. It was a smaller event nowadays, held in a different location, and Dylan was no longer the young innovator, tricked out in polka dots, leather and shades, his ‘hands on fire’ as he’d said to Maria Muldaur back in 1965. Although only sixty-one, Bob was transmogrifying into the grand old man of American popular music, his studiously serious public demeanor and fauxarchaic material making him seem almost ancient. And when Bob stepped to the Newport stage on Saturday August 3, 2002, he seemed much weirder than his younger self, choosing to perform in a wig and stick-on beard. Together with a white Stetson and black waistcoat, Bob appeared dressed for a Western, which was about the shape of it. He was trying on his outfit for a video of his song ‘‘Cross the Green Mountain,’ commissioned for a Civil War movie, Gods and Generals. Bob’s friend Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman praised ‘‘Cross the Green Mountain’ highly, wondering if Dylan had ever written better lyrics. It was later suggested that he’d borrowed some of the lines from the Civil War poet Henry Timrod.
The plagiarism debate was mostly of interest only to Dylanologists, writing to each other on the Internet, and in specialist books and magazines, and was of little concern to the general public, with whom Bob’s stock was high and kept rising. His audience continued to broaden, too, with fresh generations of teenagers discovering his music. These young fans were to be found night after night at the shows, alongside people of an age to be their grandparents, greeting ‘The Bobster’ enthusiastically when he led his cowboy band on stage. What did they see in the sexagenarian on stage, and what did they hear in his old records? It is interesting to take as an example Mike Apachee, a 15-year-old Native American living on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Mike discovered Dylan after hearing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in the car with his mother. ‘When I first heard that song I liked how it was sung with the harmonica playing. I asked my mom who sang that song when it was over. She said it was a man named Bob Dylan. After that I started listening to his music.’ Apart from liking the way he sang and played, Mike was in no doubt that Bob Dylan was ‘cool,’ almost half a century since that word had first been applied to the singing poet. That folk tunes recorded in bohemian New York in the 1960s appealed strongly to a teenager growing up on an Indian reservation in the twenty-first century, a boy young enough to be Dylan’s grandson, is a striking example of the transmigratory power of his songwriting.
It has long been commonplace to say Dylan’s voice is shot, with many a Philistine quick to assert that the star could never sing to begin with. In fact he had sung beautifully for much of his career, but increasingly Bob tended to speak his lyrics, putting his material over in a voice that had grown deep and croaky with age. Bob was rarely less than fascinating to watch and listen to, however, still capable of giving thrilling performances. As with his records, if one compared Dylan the showman to his contemporaries, rather than to how he appeared in his blazing youth, the concerts were a class apart. His shows were not the over-rehearsed, over-priced run-through of greatest hits his contemporaries favored. On the contrary Dylan’s concerts were organic, unpredictable musical events, often held in small theaters, with tickets set at reasonable prices. There is a sincerity, modesty and dignity to Dylan’s shows that does him credit.
Dylan did play arenas and stadiums, usually when he was on a double-header tour with another star who helped him draw a bigger crowd, but more often than not he was to be found away from the big cities heading down the back roads of America. So as not to keep visiting the same places Dylan was in fact obliged to travel far and wide, playing many small and out-of-the-way places. In the summer of 2002 the singer wended his way north through New England into Canada, playing Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Moncton and Saint John in New Brunswick, before returning to the States where, on August 15, he was due to perform at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, a place few people outside the state have heard of. The fairground’s rinky-dink grandstand was clearly not designed for a concert audience. Previewing the show, Buffalo News journalist Jeff Miers wrote an article that offered this thumbnail portrait of the artist at 61: ‘The poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ‘60s counter-culture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ‘70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to “find Jesus,” who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ‘80s, and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ‘90s.’
Dylan must have read this article, and been amused by it. His stage manager Al Santos, who had been introducing ‘Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan’ to audiences at the start of the show for some time, expanded his introduction at Erie County Fair to quote from the Buffalo News, placing sarcastic emphasis on key words in the article – ‘The guy who forced folk into bed with rock … who emerged to “find Jesus” …’ This quirky introduction became a fixture of the shows. Audiences were baffled at first, then started to enjoy and laugh at the introduction, as Dylan appeared to be laughing at the media perception of himself. Jeff Miers’s article was clichéd, but what he’d written was true. The story of Bob Dylan in these later years is the return of the has-been.
DYLAN HAD BEEN INTERESTED in films since childhood and had tried his hand at acting several times, firstly in the 1963 BBC production of Madhouse on Castle Street; later in the decade he worked with D.A. Pennebaker on Don’t Look Back and the aborted Eat the Document documentaries; after which came Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, in which Bob’s acting role was negligible, but his musical contribution significant; Renaldo & Clara in 1978 was valuable for its concert footage; while the 1987 picture Hearts of Fire was so bad on every level one wondered why Dylan had got involved. Victor Maymudes was of the opinion that Bob ‘would like to have been a movie star. He had all the same kind of weird aspirations that Elvis Presley had, you know.’ Victor also believed Hearts of Fire would be good for Bob, because it took him out of himself, ‘Because he had [almost] totally retreated, and he wouldn’t communicate with anybody, and I thought that was terrible.’ Unfortunately, the picture was one of the worst rock movies ever made. Fifteen years later, in 2002, Bob tried again to be a film star.
As in Hearts of Fire, Dylan was cast as a washed-up, but legendary, rocker in this new movie, Masked and Anonymous, such casting displaying a dire lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, which in this case meant Dylan himself. The star was cowriting the picture, along with writer-director Larry Charles, who‘d formerly made his career in television. The men cowrote the script, under the pseudonyms of Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine, between Bob making Time Out of Mind and ‘Love and Theft,’ the dialogue very much in the style of Dylan lyrics. Some lines intended for ‘Love and Theft’ actually ended up in Masked and Anonymous, the plot of which involved Dylan’s rock star character, Jack Fate, getting out of jail to play a benefit concert in a futuristic state torn by civil war. Charles described their film as ‘a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, film noir, spaghetti western, musical comedy,’ giving the impression he didn’t know what the hell it was about. Many well-known actors joined the cast, including Bob’s friend Jessica Lange, also John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke and Val Kilmer. Funded partly by the BBC, the picture was shot, between Dylan’s concert commitments, quickly and cheaply in Los Angeles, and looked it.
Masked and Anonymous premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2003, the preview audience giving Dylan a standing ovation when he walked into the room. Surprisingly, Bob seemed to be wearing a(nother) wig to his premiere, this time a little blond number under a woollen hat. He wasn’t looking well. The singer was very thin, his face deeply lined and pinched. It was getting hard to see the handsome young man he’d been. He didn’t look happy either, and little wonder. Film critic Roger Ebert noted that during the Sundance screening many of those who‘d stood to applaud Bob’s entrance got up and left while Masked and Anonymous was shown, so ‘The auditorium was half empty when the closing credits played to thoughtful silence.’ The picture was bad, very bad. ‘The enormous cast wanders bewildered through shapeless scenes,’ Ebert wrote, adding that Dylan’s enigmatic dialogue (much of it spoken as voice over) ‘uncannily evoke the language and philosophy of Chinese fortune cookies.’ Variety described the film as a ‘mess’ and a ‘botch,’ while Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice labelled it ‘pretentious.’ Although Dylan was rarely less than fascinating as a lyricist, the material he cowrote with Charles didn’t work as movie dialogue. Rather Dylan seemed to be flirting with his legend. The only saving grace was when Bob and his road band performed music in the movie, which they did with all the commitment they displayed on the road. As Michael Atkinson went on to write in the Village Voice: ‘Perhaps it’s not a movie at all, just an album with supplemental home video.’
When he resumed touring, Bob had a new guitarist in his band, Billy Burnette, who‘d taken over from Charlie Sexton, but lasted less than a month in the job, replaced thereafter by Freddy Koella (who lasted less than a year). Another change to the show saw Bob standing stage left at an electric keyboard. Dylan had played keyboards on stage since high school, but usually for no more than a couple of songs. From now on he spent most of the evening bobbing about at the keyboard, which he forsook occasionally to stand center stage, with or without his guitar, as he sang a number. His stiff movements seemed to indicate that he was suffering from a bad back, or a similar problem, which was to be expected in a man his age. Bob had always had a distinctive walk, but he moved more than ever like a Thunderbirds puppet. Bob at the keyboard was less of a spectacle than watching a rock star stalking the stage with his electric guitar, though the author Will Self enjoyed seeing Dylan perform this way in London, writing that Bob, ‘drove his magnificently tight, six-piece band from behind the electric piano as if he were a chariot racer lashing his team around the Circus Maximus.’
