reading

BOB DYLAN

Celebrities series

Series editor: Anthony Elliott

Published:

Dennis Altman: Gore Vidal’s America

Ellis Cashmore: Beckham 2nd edition

Ellis Cashmore: Tyson

Charles Lemert: Muhammad Ali

Chris Rojek: Frank Sinatra

Nick Stevenson: David Bowie

Lee Marshall is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he specialises in popular music. His ﬁrst book, Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry (2005) was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association’s Hart Early Career Prize.

BOB DYLAN

THE NEVER ENDING STAR

LEE MARSHALL

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The right of Lee Marshall to be identiﬁed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

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For Catherine, my fairest critic

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

The theoretical bit

Why looking at stardom is important for understanding Dylan. Different approaches to stardom, and the most important bits of the theories. How we hear songs. Whether words or voice are most important. How stardom affects the meaning of songs.

1 Introduction

2 Stardom, Authorship and the Meaning of Songs

Dylan’s sixties stardom

Dylan’s emergence in the folk revival and the contradictions of being a ‘folk star’. His move into rock, political individualism and the tensions between culture and commerce. Dylan’s withdrawal from the scene in the late sixties. His attempts to reclaim his stardom and their effect on the rest of his career.

Snapshot: The man of the people

3 Folk Stardom: Star as Ordinary, Star as Special

Snapshot: The chameleon poet

4 Rock Stardom: Reconciling Culture and Commerce

Snapshot: The retiring father

5 Beyond Stardom: Rock History and Canonisation

Dylan’s later stardom

Changing social values and Dylan’s problems in the 1980s. Dylan’s attempt to reconstruct the relationship with his audience. An overview of the Never Ending Tour and its key features. Debates about Dylan’s later work. Time Out Of Mind and the changes in Dylan’s stardom since 1997.

Snapshot: The rock legend

6 Declining Stardom: Nostalgia and the ‘Death of Rock’

Snapshot: The wandering minstrel

7 Redeﬁning Stardom: The Never Ending Tour

Snapshot: The soul of previous times

8 Never Ending Stardom: Dylan after Time Out Of Mind

Notes

Bibliography

List of Interviews

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I guess that the ﬁrst mention should go to my dad, as it was through his scratched LPs that I ﬁrst heard the music that has held me enthralled for so long (even if I was resistant at ﬁrst). Thanks should also be offered to the other members of my family, who are always wonderfully supportive, and to Catherine, who really does have to put up with far too much and attends more Dylan shows than necessary without complaint. On that subject, thanks to all those I have passed time with at gigs – Mike, Elaine, Pauline, Les, Step and Steve to name just a few. It is a remarkable feeling to arrive at a show alone in the safe knowledge that I’ll soon bump into someone I know. Following Dylan has given me some of my longest-lasting friends, even if (or is it because?) we only see each other a couple of times a year

It was series editor Anthony Elliot who ﬁrst asked me to write a book on Dylan. It was something I said I would never do, but in the end I’m glad I did, and so I am grateful for his request. Andrea Drugan at Polity has been very helpful and, unusually for a publisher in my experience, has actually shown an interest in the work. Several people have read draft chapters of this book, so my thanks go to: Catherine Dodds, Simon Frith, Dai Grifﬁths, Dave Hesmondhalgh, Gregor McLennan and Graham Stephenson. All of you offered very useful advice, most of which I was sensible enough to take. A particular mention should go to Keith Negus, who offered me engaged comments on many parts of the book and encouragement to persist with my ideas.

A NOTE ON REFERENCING

‘Song Titles’ are written in quotation marks; Albums in italics. Any substantive footnote is marked with an asterisk and given on the bottom of the page; endnotes, which are numbered,merely provide reference to academic sources.

INTRODUCTION

I have experienced many spellbinding moments at Bob Dylan’s concerts, but one stands out: Bournemouth, 1 October 1997. Dylan’s new album, Time Out Of Mind, had been released at the start of the week and many of us congregating on the front few rows were hoping to hear some songs from it. All through the main set, however, there was nothing new and by its end I had resigned myself to the fact that the new songs would have to wait, consoled that it had been a very good show regardless. Then, as he returned for the encores, the opening bars of ‘Love Sick’ creaked through the air, and Dylan stepped up to the mike and began the song. The moment was electric. The reason I remember it so clearly, however, is not just the excitement of hearing a live debut but, rather, a realisation I had during it. Towards the end of the song, Dylan sang:

I’m sick of love, I wish I’d never met you

I’m sick of love, I’m trying to forget you

I felt at that moment that Dylan was singing directly to us, the audience in front of him. That ‘you’ for which he expressed so much contempt was actually us. The love he was so sick of was that given to him by the thousands of fans around the world. There is a sting in this tale, though, for in the song’s ﬁnal lines, the singer himself capitulates:

Just don’t know what to do

I’d give anything to be with you

Whether or not I’m right in this reading of ‘Love Sick’, it is certainly true that Dylan’s relationship with his audience has always been marked by this kind of ambivalence. Around the same time as the Bournemouth show, he said in an interview that:

A lot of people don’t like the road but it’s as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortiﬁed to be on the stage but, then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. (Jon Pareles interview, 1997)

This ambivalence has been a deﬁning feature of Dylan’s career since he emerged as a star in 1962. Since then he has been involved in what at times seems like a constant battle with fans and media over what he should perform, how he should relate to others, how he should act, and more. Such ambivalence inhabits his songs:

People see me all the time, and they just can’t remember how to act

Their minds are ﬁlled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

(‘Idiot Wind’)

In short, Dylan has been in a battle about what the concept ‘Bob Dylan’ means. This book is about that battle. It is not, however, a biography detailing a poor, misunderstood singer harassed from all sides, constantly misinterpreted by the media. It is instead a sociological account of Dylan’s stardom. Dylan is a singer, a songwriter, a live performer, but, more than anything else, Dylan is a star. His stardom is an essential feature of his existence. It is the lens through which everything in his life is understood, not just his creative achievements but inherently personal things like fatherhood and divorce. Because Dylan is a star, his life has public meaning. This means that what ‘Bob Dylan’ stands for is open to social determination and not under the control of Dylan himself.

This project differs from existing work on Dylan in that it seeks to present a sociological account of his stardom rather than either a biography or a textual analysis of his lyrics (though both of these provide material for a sociological analysis). Conventional biographies take a ‘subjectivist’ approach to their topic, concentrating on the life of the star by looking solely at biographical detail. Such an approach tends to portray the star’s stardom as a series of discrete, visible, relationships (such as that between star and record label). These relationships are used to construct a coherent story of a life that is, to a greater or lesser extent, orchestrated by the star. This is problematic in a number of ways. Most signiﬁcantly, it places too much power in the hands of the star – the star’s career is seen as the result of decisions and actions taken by the star or her representatives. This is understandable because it tends to be how we view everyday life too – we see ourselves as the ‘author’ of our own lives. However, we are not the authors of our own lives, at least not totally. The chances of obtaining a high level of education, or good health, or a living wage, depend on a variety of factors such as class, race, nationality and gender which are beyond our control. Similarly, even though stars may be extremely powerful agents, what a particular star means or achieves depends on factors outside of their control, and may well happen ‘behind their back’ (including those just mentioned: think of the ten ‘greatest’ rock stars, and count how many of them are black and/or female). To take an obvious example, how a particular star is portrayed and understood depends on a relationship between media and audiences that is completely independent of the star’s control. This is a clearly observable phenomenon, but there are less observable factors too: how does Dylan’s stardom relate to the rise of consumerism, for example? Whatever we may like to think, Dylan is not famous just because of the quality of his work. Wider social factors have enabled his stardom to develop in certain ways and closed off other possibilities. In this way, he is no different from any other star.

This leads me to the second weakness of the subjectivist approach: it presumes that the star’s success is the direct result of skill or charisma. This is not true. Neither of these is a necessary or sufﬁcient condition of stardom. Many untalented people become stars, while many charismatic people do not. It is not inevitable that Dylan would be a success because he was talented; it was not inevitable that he would have such a long career in popular music. Charisma is not a natural trait, it is a social effect. This is not to imply that stars are not viewed as charismatic – some obviously are, and this is important – but a range of social conditions must be in place that enable an individual’s talents and personality to become recognised as skilful and charismatic. Concepts such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘skill’ and ‘charisma’ are socially organised, deﬁned and valued differently in different times and places. We need, therefore, to investigate the social circumstances in which Dylan emerged and has continued to exist as a star.

An overall criticism of the biographical approach would be to say that it seeks an explanation for the stardom of an individual solely within the life story of that individual. However, I think it is more effective to follow Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion: ‘We must . . . ask, not how a writer comes to be what he is . . . but rather how the position or “post” he occupies – that of a writer of a particular type – became constituted.’¹ Too often, biographies show an unwillingness to investigate important contextual factors, or to consider the similarities between their particular star and other stars. This conformity is also something that fans rarely consider. A star is assumed to be unique. Yet, actually, the life stories of stars share many things in common. Consider the following:

For the essence of his art has always derived from the tension between his impulse to truth and his instinct to hide.²

This will surely ring true to Dylan fans; it could have been pulled from any Dylan biography. It is, however, from Richard Schickel’s description of Marlon Brando and I could ﬁnd similar quotes in biographies of Robbie Williams, Kurt Cobain and hundreds of others. Despite the emphasis on uniqueness, stars’ stories are never unique. Complaints about misrepresentation, invasion of privacy, and conﬂicts with management are features of most stars’ lives. Stardom is something more than just the life stories of a bunch of famous people and this means that we need to consider stardom as a system, one with distinctive characteristics and effects. To do so gives us a much richer understanding of the star in question.

Dylan fans may have noticed that I haven’t talked much about Dylan yet. This is out of necessity, as this chapter outlines the theoretical map for how I’ll discuss Dylan later. At this juncture, it is probably useful to clarify some of the concepts I’m bandying about. You may think it odd to be considering Bob Dylan in a book series called ‘Celebrities’ because you don’t consider Dylan to be a celebrity. In contemporary culture, ‘celebrity’ often refers to people such as reality TV participants, quickly popular and quickly forgotten. Dylan, on the other hand, has had a career of over forty-ﬁve years and, you may reasonably think, deserves his success because of the work he has produced. That is why I have concentrated on Dylan’s stardom rather than celebrity. Evans suggests that ‘star’ is often used to describe an individual famous for their achievements in a particular ﬁeld,³ so we tend to talk of ‘ﬁlm stars’ and ‘pop stars’ rather than ‘ﬁlm celebrities’ or ‘pop celebrities’. To this I would add that a star is someone who produces a body of work that has some existence outside of the individual celebrity’s person (unlike, say, a reality TV participant). Dylan is thus a star rather than a celebrity in the conventional sense. His public existence shares things in common with celebrities but there are distinctive elements too, characteristic of a certain type of celebrity – stardom.

Dylan is not just a star, however, but a particular kind of star – a rock star. The ﬁrst sustained academic work into famous media ﬁgures concentrated on ﬁlm stars. This is mainly the result of ﬁlm emerging as the ﬁrst audio-visual mass media with an established ‘star-system’. It is surprising, however, given their signiﬁcance over the last ﬁfty years, that so little subsequent work has been conducted on popular music stars. Only one or two books have dealt with the speciﬁc phenomenon of popular music stardom, so while the literature on stardom is useful for this study, there are particularities of popular music that need to be considered. Popular music stars seem to me to fall somewhere in between ﬁlm stars and television personalities (such as Michael Parkinson and David Letterman). Unlike ﬁlm stars, TV personalities are generally assumed to be ‘being themselves’ on screen (Turner suggests that, for this reason, TV personalities are more characteristic of modern celebrity than ﬁlm stars).⁴ This is useful for considering rock stars because they too are often assumed to be ‘being themselves’ rather than playing a speciﬁc character – this is the subject of the next chapter.

There is one ﬁnal distinction I would like to make here, between ‘stardom’ and ‘star-image’, as I am using them to mean slightly different things. Star-image is relatively straightforward: it refers to all of the speciﬁc things we know or think we know about a particular star. The star-image is the ‘what is’ of a star. This does not necessarily mean the actual ‘this is what really happened’ biography of the star, because it can include inaccuracies, urban legends, malicious lies, images and distorted facts. A star’s star-image refers to everything – true and false – that is publicly known about that speciﬁc star. In this way, the star-image is similar to how Stephen Scobie deﬁnes Bob Dylan as ‘a text – made up of all the formal biographies, newspaper stories, internet statistics and just plain gossip that has entered into public circulation’.⁵ The star-image is thus an observable phenomenon which can be uncovered through empirical research (Clinton Heylin’s work, for example, adds to Dylan’s star-image by increasing the amount of biographical information we know).

While ‘star-image’ concerns the empirical, veriﬁable, onthe-ground elements of a particular star, ‘stardom’ is less easily recognised as it exists mainly at an ideological level.* With its intrinsic relationship to ideas such as individualism, meritocracy, democracy and personality, stardom plays a signiﬁcant role in reproducing the ideological structures of contemporary society. The fact that ideology is taken for granted, and the fact that it is not immediately visible to us makes it more problematic for studying it in relation to a particular star. Whereas ‘star-image’ is all about the individual star, stardom is (in one sense) not ‘about’ the star at all. It is, however, impossible to fully understand the star without understanding the ideology of stardom. Dylan’s star-image is structured (enabled and constrained) by his stardom, by the ideological elements of stardom more generally. We need an understanding of stardom’s ideology in order to understand how Dylan’s career has turned out as it has.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of Bob Dylan, we therefore need to draw on the insights of the literature on both stardom and celebrity, as well as the wider literature on popular music. I do not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of this work here, but I do want to emphasise the key elements as it provides the intellectual framework for the rest of this book. The following points are generally applicable to both stardom and celebrity, but they explain the overall system rather than describing speciﬁc individuals. To be a star, or a celebrity, it is not necessary to tick all of these boxes (some stars do, but it’s not an entrance requirement), but most stars will cover most of these points, which reﬂect the most important characteristics of celebrity and stardom in general.

Stardom is an inherently modern phenomenon Although ‘fame’ existed in pre-modern times, this was mainly associated with either royalty or as posthumous recognition for great achievements. The contemporary ideas of celebrity are a product of mass society and the emergence of a leisure culture since the eighteenth century, the result of deep-rooted ideological factors and technological advancement that accelerated in the twentieth century. The key characteristic of modern celebrity is what Schickel refers to as the ‘illusion of intimacy’,⁶ the idea that we ‘really know’ those who are famous, even though we have (in the main) never met them.

Stardom fulﬁls ideological functions As a modern phenomenon, stardom is intricately bound up with two key ideological pillars of modern society: individualism and democracy. Stars are the ultimate individuals who supposedly become famous because of their unique individuality (their ‘personality’, a word which gains its modern meaning from stardom). At the same time, however, they also highlight the meritocracy of modern society because fame is no longer dependent upon being born into the right family. Anyone can be a star if they work hard enough, are talented enough, or lucky enough.

Stardom fulﬁls industrial functions Rojek describes modern celebrity as a marriage of democracy and capitalism.⁷ One of the reasons that stardom exists is that it provides a means to transform unique personalities into commodities. In all of the media industries, stardom plays a crucial role in their organisational structure as they help control the inherent instability of media markets. Failure rates in media industries are high – around 90 per cent of released records fail to make a proﬁt – and creating stars is one way in which the industries can create a guaranteed audience. I’ll buy Bob Dylan’s next album without knowing what it sounds like because I am a fan. The central activity of a record label is not making records, but creating stars.⁸

Stars have a representative function By their very existence, stars always represent the ideals of individualism and democracy, but stars also tend to stand for, or symbolise, something more. It could be that they represent a cultural stereotype – the tortured artist starving in a garret, for example – and therefore serve to reinforce that stereotype. But a star could also represent something more tangible, like Black Power, or a particular geographical region, such as Liverpool. But in all cases, a star ‘always represents something more than him- or herself’.⁹

Stars unite subjectivities Because of their representative function, stars bring people together – sometimes literally (for example, Martin Luther King), more often emotionally, uniting people through belonging to a particular group, a particular audience. Some writers see this as a positive thing (for example: Rojek suggests that Sinatra ‘articulate[d] a basis for identiﬁcation and recognition [that is] the basis for developing collective consciousness’).¹⁰ Others see it as potentially dangerous, with Marshall suggesting that ‘the emergence of the celebrity is connected to . . . the strategies employed by various institutions to contain the threat and irrationality of the mass [audience]’.¹¹

These issues will receive further elaboration during the course of this book.

Recognising the systemic nature of stardom raises questions over the best way to study it. The biographical approach may pay inadequate attention to sociological factors, but we must be attuned to the individual circumstances as well. Stardom is not just structural, it is also the result of actions by individuals and social groups.¹² It does matter what individuals do. Social structures such as meritocracy and consumerism do not just reproduce themselves but are reproduced through the actions of individuals and groups. We therefore need to consider how stardom is reproduced through micro-social interactions (for example, how a particular manager talks to a particular magazine editor), while keeping in mind that stardom is produced within a speciﬁc social environment that constrains the ways in which the manager and the magazine editor can act (for example, whether interviewing a particular star could cause controversy and lead to revenue shortfalls).

If a charge can be laid against me in this book, it is that I have not paid enough attention to this type of micro-interaction. There is very little discussion of the strategies employed by Albert Grossman, Dylan’s ﬁrst manager, in amplifying Dylan’s early stardom, nor in how Dylan himself manipulated the media in his early days (Robert Shelton’s biography is good on this kind of detail). There is no doubt that Dylan would not have become as big a star as he did without Grossman, so his absence will be notable to some. Similarly, there is little direct discussion about how Dylan’s later stardom has been strategically managed, for example, by Jeff Rosen in determining what recordings are released as part of The Bootleg Series. The lack of emphasis on these issues does not indicate that I think they are unimportant. On the contrary, they are very important, and one of the problems of studying stardom is that, if such management strategies are well executed, then we see only their effects and not their implementation. However, they are not my focus in this book. This project is targeted slightly differently, in that I am looking at how the social meaning of Dylan’s star-image has developed and changed over his career. I am therefore approaching Dylan’s stardom in relatively broad terms. My goal is to provide an overall framework for how Dylan has been understood and interpreted throughout his career, based on ongoing documentary analysis (through my role as a fan) and the broader contextualisation of an academic sociologist. Dylan is a popular text and, as such, is open to many different ‘readings’. Such readings are not random, however, but structured and I want to map out that structure. Social relations are not just micro-social, they are macro-social too. My argument may seem exaggerated at times, but I would hope that most fans would agree with the general drift of my framework.

This book therefore looks at Dylan’s stardom in more holistic terms. Dylan has been a star for a very long time, and the meaning of his stardom has changed over that period. What affected his emergence and these changes? How was the meaning of his stardom facilitated by particular historical circumstances, and constrained by others? Why did a ‘Bob Dylan’ emerge in the sixties? What impact did his emergence have on others, or on his later stardom? At the same time, however, I have no intention of writing Bob Dylan out of Bob Dylan’s story, of turning him into a powerless individual at the whim of social forces, powerless to prevent the misinterpretation of what he represents. It is certainly true that I will concentrate on the details of Dylan’s life less than conventional biographies of him – this is a necessary counterbalance to accounts that give him too much power – but Dylan has actively negotiated his star-image; in song, in public appearances and performances, in interviews and, recently, in autobiography. This question of Dylan’s agency, of his power to shape his image, is important and features particularly heavily in two chapters which look at times when Dylan has deliberately attempted to reconstruct his star-image – the late sixties and the late eighties.

My overall argument is that Dylan’s stardom has been closely tied to the idea of ‘rock’. If stars always represent something other than themselves, the marker ‘Bob Dylan’ has often symbolised rock and the restless ideals of sixties youth. How rock itself is conceptualised therefore impacts on Dylan’s own star-image. After the more theoretical introduction (this chapter and chapter 2), the book follows a broadly chronological structure. There are three chapters that deal with the emergence of rock in the sixties and Dylan’s starring role within it. The third of these chapters (chapter 5) is a pivotal one; it discusses how Dylan’s stardom became ﬁrmly associated with the ideals of rock even as he attempted to move away from it. Dylan dropping out of the scene at the very moment that rock critics were canonising him as the most important ﬁgure in rock had a deﬁning impact on Dylan’s later stardom. The ﬁnal part of the book (chapters 6–8) concentrates on his later career. Dylan’s career beyond the sixties has received woefully inadequate coverage (for example, Howard Sounes’ biography has 300 pages on the sixties, 107 pages on the seventies, and 98 pages on the eighties and nineties combined). Some of the material in chapter 5 explains this imbalance, but I intend this book to partially rectify it. In particular, I look at how Dylan’s stardom was constructed in such a way that made it difﬁcult for him to shake off his mythical history. This problem was most acute in the 1980s, when Dylan seemed out of place in the remodelled music industry. His way of managing this problem was to begin the ‘Never Ending Tour’, an extraordinary project that successfully redeﬁned his stardom, resulting in a remarkable return to the limelight which began in 1997.

*The notion of ideology is extremely complex, and contested, but, brieﬂy, I would deﬁne it as the ideas and beliefs through which we, individually and socially, make sense of the world. Depending on one’s perspective, this can be an entirely neutral thing or it can be the way through which powerful social groups impose their own belief systems upon less powerful groups.

STARDOM, AUTHORSHIP AND THE MEANING OF SONGS

On 31 October 1964, Bob Dylan played a concert at the Philharmonic Hall in New York. He began to play the song ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night)’ with a shrill blast of his harmonica but stopped as his guitar was out of tune. ‘Don’t let that scare ya’, Dylan assured his audience, ‘it’s just Halloween. [pause] I have my Bob Dylan mask on.’ After another short pause he exclaimed, ‘I am mask-erading!’ and giggled, evidently pleased with his pun. Fast forward eleven years to another Halloween concert, the second night of his ﬁrst Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Without warning, Dylan appeared on stage wearing a plastic Richard Nixon mask, and wore it through the entire ﬁrst song, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’. Two years later, this performance would feature as the opening to Dylan’s movie Renaldo and Clara in which Dylan played the role of Renaldo while actor Ronnie Hawkins played ‘Bob Dylan’. Dylan’s estranged wife, Sara, played the role of Clara while another actress, Ronnee Blakeley, played ‘Sara Dylan’.

Dylan evidently likes playing around with the idea of Bob Dylan. This is perhaps unsurprising given his life as a public ﬁgure, as a celebrity. One of the major ways that we think about celebrities is through a discrepancy between the ‘public’ celebrity and the ‘private’ individual. Many celebrities have commented that they play up to their celebrity image, acting out that persona – becoming ‘Keith Richards’ – for the public sphere. Still more celebrities have bemoaned the lack of privacy afforded them. Indeed, we may perhaps consider whether celebrities are prohibited from having a ‘private life’ at all. Dylan seemingly understands his own public status this way. In 1986 he stated that ‘I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be’ and when asked who he was the rest of the time, replied ‘myself’.¹ There is much written on Dylan that takes this kind of approach. Heylin, for example, argues that the goal of his book is ‘to establish the relationship between [the] artist and the man’² while Larry David Smith goes further, arguing that ‘Bob Dylan’ is a consistent persona controlled by its creator Robert Zimmerman.³ These books offer evidence for Frith’s contention that the main role of pop biographies is to expose the ‘real’ individual that cannot be heard in their music.⁴ Frith’s comment, however, points to a further issue – the fact that there is not only the ‘private individual’ and ‘public ﬁgure’ to consider, but also a third, external, factor: the work. I said in the ﬁrst chapter that we must consider Dylan as a star rather than merely a celebrity because he has produced a body of work that in some ways stands apart from him. So how does this work relate to Dylan’s stardom, and vice versa? Discussing ﬁlm stars, Dyer states that, in general, ‘ﬁlms have a distinct and privileged place in a star’s image’.⁵ This is generally true for rock stars also (their music has a privileged place), but things are complicated by the fact that rock stars commonly perform ‘as themselves’. Dyer argues that, in analysing ﬁlm stars, we must distinguish between authorship of ﬁlms and authorship of star-image,⁶ but such a distinction is more problematic when analysing rock stars. Dylan is a star because of his songs just as Jack Nicholson is famous because of his ﬁlms, but those two uses of ‘his’ mean different things: the actor may add considerable qualities to a ﬁlm but, in most cases, he does not write the script and, while the actor’s presence in a ﬁlm is never completely subsumed by the character he is playing, the actor is famous for pretending to be other people. Dylan, on the other hand, became famous for performing songs he had written and the impression is that when he performs these songs he performs as himself. We are thus left with an entanglement of various concepts – private self, artist, singer, writer, star, work – that all coalesce in the ﬁgure of a 5 feet 8 inches tall, 65-year-old, Jewish American man. I don’t think these things can ever be disentangled, but in this chapter I want to pull them apart a little, not in order to uncover the ‘real’ Bob Dylan, but to better understand how we think about him, and stars and artists more generally.

AUTHORSHIP AND SONG MEANING

Let me begin by raising some familiar issues concerning Dylan as the writer of his own songs. Consider the following lines:

I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reﬂect from the mountains so all souls can see it

(‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’)

In fourteen months I’ve only smiled once and I didn’t do it consciously

Somebody’s got to ﬁnd your trail, I guess it must be up to me

(‘Up To Me’)

I used to care, but things have changed

(‘Things Have Changed’)

Can we ever assume that the ‘I’ is the person Bob Dylan? Do the words offer a glimpse into Bob Dylan’s personality? There are very few songs by Dylan in which he explicitly adopts the voice of a speciﬁc character (for example, in ‘North Country Blues’ he takes on the voice of a miner’s widow, while he adopts the character of a dispossessed worker in ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’). The majority of his songs feature an ‘I’ (one even features an ‘I and I’), that could be interpreted as the singer. So who is the I in these songs? Is it the songwriter himself?

There is certainly a common-sense way in which we take songs as an index of the writer’s innermost self. For example, in Howard Sounes’ biography, he states that Dylan ‘would occasionally open up to girlfriends. But it was in his songs that he really revealed himself’,⁷ while Paul Williams states that ‘Dylan’s true autobiography, as with any artist, is his work, in which he consciously and unconsciously shares everything that occurs in his inner and outer life’.⁸ Such an idea is part of the legacy of Romanticism, an ideology of art that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was developed most by poets.* M. H. Abrams’ detailed account of these ideas explains how the determination of a poem’s value shifted fundamentally during this period.⁹ In pre-Romantic times, art was understood as a mirror reﬂecting society. A poem was therefore deemed successful if it reﬂected the world around it. During the latter half of the eighteenth century this radically altered so that poetry came to be understand not as a ‘mirror’ but as a ‘lamp’, illuminating the deepest, most profound emotions of the author. What mattered now was not whether the work was an accurate portrayal of the world but whether it was an honest representation of its creator. These assumptions often colour how we perceive songs; if we assume that the song offers an insight into the real Bob Dylan, it is only a small jump to assuming that the ‘I’ of a Bob Dylan song must therefore be Dylan. Two albums in particular are prone to this sort of analysis: Blood On The Tracks (1975), which is widely considered to document the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage; and Time Out Of Mind (1997), which is conventionally understood as Dylan reﬂecting on his ‘brush with death’ earlier that year.* This kind of response, one that uses the author as the frame of reference for the work’s meaning, is criticised by many literary critics. In 1954, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an article called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in which they argued that we can never assume a text means what the author says it means – the text must stand alone. The intentional fallacy is part of a ‘new criticism’ that developed in literary studies from the 1920s and was most inﬂuential during the 1950s and 1960s. The central tenet of new criticism is that the only way to understand the meaning of a work is through close textual analysis of the work itself. The work says what it says; the meaning of a work is embedded in the words on the page and thus the new critics rejected any form of interpretation that relied on sources other than the work itself, and they were especially critical of any use of biography to explain what a text meant. Even if we can obtain detailed diary entries, or interview comments (for example, Dylan undertook many interviews in 1977 to try to explain what he was attempting in Renaldo And Clara), we cannot use them to infer any meaning in the text. According to this approach, only the text can show us what it means and we can only ﬁnd this out through forensic scholarship.

The ideas of the new critics bear some similarity to those outlined by Roland Barthes in his famous 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which also argues that the intentions of the author should not be used as a way of determining the meaning of a work. However, whereas ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ argues that the meaning of a work is inherent in the work itself, ‘The Death of the Author’ argues that the meaning of a text is generated by the act of reading. Rather than persist in close textual analysis, we need to see how readers create meaning by interpreting the work in relation to other cultural texts, ideas, beliefs, values and so on. This approach has the advantage of highlighting the social nature of how cultural meaning is reproduced and circulated. By concentrating on how the reader generates meaning, issues such as how, when and where the text is used become important.

As an example of how ‘reading’ generates meaning, consider the line ‘Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked’ from the song ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. The song was written in 1964, performed at concerts that year and the next and, in 1965, was released on the album Bringing It All Back Home. The line was not held up for special scrutiny and did not receive any special audience response. When he returned to touring in 1974, Dylan performed the song regularly. This time, however, the line elicited a speciﬁc response: a spontaneous cheer from the crowd because of the ongoing Watergate scandal, during which President Nixon was incriminated in a burglary of Democratic Party ofﬁces. Concerts from this tour were recorded and released as a live album, Before The Flood. This meant that a much wider audience became aware of the crowd’s reaction at these shows and for the next twenty years or so, the ‘spontaneous’ cheer became a standard response to the line whenever Dylan performed the song. In the late 1990s, to my ears at least, the meaning of the cheer changed once more, this time to irony, as then president Bill Clinton faced allegations of sexual impropriety. In more recent years, the cheer has perhaps gained a new political signiﬁcance as a response to George W. Bush’s presidency and the invasion of Iraq. This one particular line has thus had several different meanings in its lifetime: from generalised philosophical comment, to contemporary political statement, to rock cliché, to ironic joke, to contemporary political statement once more. It would be impossible to claim that all of these meanings were embedded in the words themselves, and nonsense to suggest that these later meanings could have been in any way intended by Dylan when he wrote the song in 1964 (though we could argue that he has chosen to play the song in concert at particular times for a reason). The meaning of the text changes because of its social circulation, because of how we as listeners have created meaning (we might also add here that because of this social circulation it is impossible for the line to mean in 2005 what it meant in 1964). In recognising this fact, Barthes’ exaggerated argument is that we can only ‘liberate’ the reader by ‘killing’ the author, by dismissing the ‘author-God’ as the originator of meaning.

During the course of the twentieth century, then, the author as the keystone of meaning within a work has been accosted on both sides – trumped by either the text itself or its readers. This has certainly had an impact on Dylan scholarship, and key principles of writers such as Day, Ricks and Scobie are not only that we can never assume the ‘I’ of a Bob Dylan song to be Dylan himself, but also that any biographical reading of a song is necessarily restrictive and inferior:¹⁰

What purpose has been served by determining a biographical reference? Does it really contribute anything worthwhile to our critical understanding and appreciation of the songs themselves?¹¹

Dylan himself has criticized those who offer biographical readings of his songs:

I read that this [‘You’re A Big Girl Now’] was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me ﬁrst before they go and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anyone else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are . . . Fools, they limit you to their own unimaginative mentality. (Cameron Crowe interview, 1985)

People say the record [Time Out Of Mind] deals with mortality – my mortality for some reason! Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general . . . I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently. (Mikal Gilmore interview, 2001) *

Dylan’s songs often seem constructed in ways that work against an author-centred reading. Firstly, he regularly inserts ﬁctional detail into seemingly autobiographical songs.¹² Scobie uses the line ‘They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy’ (from ‘Idiot Wind’) as an example of this. One further example would be ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, in which the singer’s loved one leaves for Spain, whereas the song was surely prompted by Dylan’s girlfriend leaving for Italy. Secondly, Dylan ‘refuses the role of omniscient narrator’.¹³ As Romantic thought developed in the eighteenth century, the work of art became conceptualised as a ‘heterocosm’, its own world subject to its own internal laws. The poet, as creator of this world, was obviously its all-seeing God.¹⁴ However, Dylan often subverts such an idea by emphasising that he never knows everything about the tale he is telling, that the view he can offer is always partial and can only be incomplete. For example, in ‘John Wesley Harding’, he sings:

John Wesley Harding

Was a friend to the poor,

He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand.

All along this countryside,

He opened a many a door,

But he was never known

To hurt an honest man.

This begins by sounding authoritative – Dylan is telling us what is, not what he thinks – but by the last lines, the narrator’s authority is undermined. He cannot deﬁnitively say that the outlaw never hurt anyone, only that he was never known to. This fragmentary knowledge is a convention in much folk music. As songs were passed down, and moved around, pieces of information were lost, misheard and so on. Knowledge in folk music is often uncertain and the narrator of a folk song often makes clear what is known and unknown. The difference here, however, is that Dylan wrote the song and is famous for writing his own songs. By adopting this convention, Dylan adds an inherent irony to the work, playing with the generic conventions and undermining the Romantic assumptions about works revealing things about their authors. For example, in ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’, the narrator tells us:

No one knew the circumstance but they say that it happened pretty quick

The door to the dressing room burst open and a Colt revolver clicked.

No one? Come on, Bob, you wrote the song – surely you can tell us!

HOW WE HEAR MUSIC: RECORDINGS, WORDS AND VOICE

Some Dylan critics thus argue that Bob Dylan’s life should not be considered the ﬁnal arbiter of the meaning of a song. I would not want to argue strongly against this but it fails to consider the effects that stardom has on the production and interpretation of songs. The criticisms of author-centred analysis have, in the main, emerged within literary criticism and it is notable that the three critiques I provided as examples (Day, Ricks and Scobie) are written by scholars of literature. Dylan is a particularly literary songwriter; from his earliest years, he was being described as a poet. I will discuss this in a later chapter but the question it raises for our current purpose is this: what should we be thinking about when discussing a Bob Dylan song? Is it only the words that matter? Is the meaning of the song to be found only in the meaning of the words?

This is certainly the way it seems to some people, both fans and critics. However, this literary approach produces a kind of disassociation of Dylan and the song that to me, as a fan, seems intuitively wrong. Let me try to explain by analogy. A poem written by William Wordsworth was intended to be read by an individual. Following the principles of new criticism, we could consider the poem to have some existence independent from that of its author – as words on a page. When the reader picks up the book containing the poem, their direct engagement is with a text and not with an author. In this instance, the literary argument about whether the words contain meaning intended by the poet, whether it is the words themselves that create meaning, or whether meaning is generated by the act of reading, seems to me a reasonable one in which to engage.

We may even be able to engage in a similar discussion regarding classical music. The development of written musical notation generated an idea of the musical ‘work’ outside of its performance. The musical score therefore exists independently of its creator. However, the idea of ‘the work’ in popular music (broadly conceived as a commercialisation of folk music facilitated by the invention of recording technology) is founded on the recorded performance. As an example, think of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of readers have just thought of the recorded version, maybe even heard the recorded song in their head – the opening snare drum, the swirling organ, the rolling piano, the conﬁdent voice.* There are certain elements of that performance – a performance that most people would think of as ‘the work’ – that cannot be adequately expressed in written form. In popular music the distinction between performance and score is unsustainable.¹⁵ We cannot fruitfully say that the song has any existence outside of its particular performance. Instead, the song is only instantiated, made real, by that particular performance. As such, it is inseparable from the singer.

In differentiating between songs and poems, I am not just pointing out that songs provide a ‘different system of punctuation’ for words than poems,¹⁶ important though that may be. More important is how the words are mediated through the voice (in this instance, the voice of a star) and the effects that this mediation has on our interpretations of authorship. We do not hear the words in isolation (unlike the Wordsworth poem), but only through Bob Dylan. This is crucial for understanding the meaning of Dylan’s songs, but is yet to be adequately addressed in Dylan literature. Writers such as Gray pay lip service to the idea that Dylan’s words are performed rather than read but still essentially treat the songs as poems, with the meaning of the song resulting from the words. It is notable that in the index to Gray’s 900-page analysis of Dylan,¹⁷ there is no reference for singing, vocals, voice or performance. Yet, as Allan Moore argues, if the meaning of a song can be reduced to its words, why bother to sing it?¹⁸ ^*

In trying to work out how songs create meaning, Simon Frith suggests that rather than treating songs ‘as poems, literary objects which can be analysed entirely separately from music’, we need to consider them ‘as speech acts, words to be analysed in performance’.¹⁹ Words are important to songs – there are few instrumental hit records – but research conducted on listeners suggests that what the words say – their ‘meaning’ – is actually an insigniﬁcant reason for liking a song.²⁰* What matters is not the content of the words, but their expression, their presentation.²¹ This is something Dylan has repeatedly iterated: