In 1956, rock and roll was busy being born. Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm had broken through five years earlier with a jump-blues hit called “Rocket 88”—a credible candidate for the ur-rock tune—but crooners and big-band acts lingered on the pop charts. Elvis scored a No. 1 Billboard hit with “Heartbreak Hotel”; Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra did, too, with “Lisbon Antigua.” But kids knew what spoke to them, and it wasn’t “Lisbon Antigua.” Robert Zimmerman, a pompadoured fifteen-year-old living in the Minnesota Iron Range town of Hibbing, was one of countless kids who went out and put together a rock-and-roll band. He called his the Shadow Blasters.
In his childhood and adolescence, he stayed up through the night, his head by the radio, absorbing everything being broadcast from nearby Duluth and from fifty-thousand-watt stations throughout the Midwest and the Deep South: R. & B., gospel, jazz, blues, and rock and roll. He was fascinated, as well, with the storytelling tricks and aural mysteries of radio dramas such as “The Fat Man” and “Inner Sanctum.” “It made me the listener that I am today,” he told an interviewer many decades later. “It made me listen for little things: the slamming of the door, the jingling of car keys. The wind blowing through trees, the songs of birds, footsteps, a hammer hitting a nail. Just random sounds. Cows mooing. I could string all that together and make that a song. It made me listen to life in a different way.”
As he was rehearsing with the Shadow Blasters, the most thrilling song in the air was “Tutti Frutti,” sung by a flamboyant piano player from Macon, Georgia, who had once gone by Princess Lavonne and now performed as Little Richard. And what Zimmerman was hearing he wanted to make his own. His father ran an appliance store in town and kept an old piano in the back. When Bobby was supposed to be sweeping the floor or stocking the shelves, he was trying out hand-splaying boogie-woogie chords on the piano instead.
On April 5, 1957, the Shadow Blasters played at a variety show organized by their school’s student council—Bobby Zimmerman’s début. “He started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano,” his friend John Bucklen recalled. “My first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.”
The Shadow Blasters soon broke up—high-school bands are as ephemeral as mayflies—and Zimmerman formed another group, the Golden Chords. He and his friends had fun playing Van Feldt’s snack bar and Collier’s barbecue joint, covering songs by Elvis, Jimmy Reed, and, always, Little Richard. But it was soon clear, as he put it later, that he’d been born in the wrong place. He was a middle-class Jewish kid far from everything he was tuned in to. He would need to leave town, change his name, and deepen his musical education to fulfill his outsized sense of destiny.
First in Dinkytown, the collegiate section of Minneapolis, then in Greenwich Village, Zimmerman, adopting the name Bob Dylan, shifted his attention away from rock and roll. He immersed himself in the vast lexicon of folk music and the blues: Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and the Dixie Hummingbirds; Odetta, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the Staple Singers; the Stanley Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Sometimes music further afield, such as “Pirate Jenny,” from “The Threepenny Opera,” caught his attention and fed his musical vocabulary. His hunger for the music was boundless, even larcenous. Ask the friends whose records he stole. Playing guitar now more than piano, he memorized the chord progressions, picking patterns, and lyrics for hundreds of songs: hillbilly songs, cowboy songs, traditional English and Scottish ballads, sea chanteys, church hymns, ragtime, barrelhouse, every variation of the blues. He was reading, too—Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues,” Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Homer, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Rimbaud. The Hit Parade could wait. “The thing about rock and roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough,” he said later. “ ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms . . . but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”
In the Village, Dylan apprenticed himself to older coffeehouse denizens like Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (both born in the Dust Bowl province of Brooklyn). He studied Alan Lomax’s field recordings and Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.” He played on any stage that would have him and quickly developed a persona that was a melding of Okie troubadour, Beat poet, and Charlie Chaplin. “For three or four years, all I listened to were folk standards,” Dylan has said. “I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere: clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I’d heard it just once.”
For all his earnest apprenticeship, not to mention the brazen theft of this one’s version of “House of the Rising Sun” or that one’s field-hand intonation, he was becoming something distinctly original. Like Walt Whitman, Annie Oakley, Gorgeous George, or Little Richard, he was doing that very American thing: inventing a public, performing self. And he was getting noticed. In September, 1961, Robert Shelton, of the Times, wrote a brief review of Dylan’s run at Gerde’s Folk City: “There is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.”
Dylan was twenty years old. Not long after his nights at Gerde’s, he signed a contract with John Hammond, an unerring talent spotter at Columbia Records, and began work on his first album. It came out in March, 1962, and consisted mostly of covers. A significant exception was “Song to Woody,” which was both an homage to Dylan’s dying idol and the announcement of his intention to carry the music into the future:
What happened next represents one of the great explosions of creativity in the twentieth century. Dylan wrote song after song in a kind of fever dream that lasted until 1966. “The best songs to me—my best songs—are songs which were written very quickly,” he said. “Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.” He claimed it took him ten minutes to write “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a political anthem that borrowed from the tune of a spiritual called “No More Auction Block for Me.” He merged the form of a seventeenth-century ballad, “Lord Randall,” with the ominous weather of Cold War confrontation to write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Sometimes typing furiously, sometimes scrawling lyrics on envelopes and cocktail napkins, he seemed to be an antenna of the Zeitgeist. He was capable of writing three songs in one day. There was no accounting for the originality of the songs or the speed with which they kept coming: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “To Ramona,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Desolation Row,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Visions of Johanna.” There were narratives, comedies, epics, and romances, some earthbound, some surreal, and they arrived with an expanding sense of ambition. In no time at all, he had progressed from “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues” to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
Many fans had a hard time keeping up; some didn’t want to. Folk purists, especially, resented his unwillingness to stay within bounds. During a tour of the United Kingdom, in the spring of 1966, he was applauded for his opening acoustic set but then booed—every night!—when he came out with an electric guitar and members of the Hawks (later, the Band).
One night, in Liverpool, a spectator shouted, “Where’s the poet in you? Where’s the savior?”
Dylan was having none of it. “There’s a fellow up there looking for the savior, huh?” he replied. “The savior’s backstage, we have a picture of him.”
But defiance was not enough. Dylan was struggling. Drugged up, worn down, razor thin, he was on the edge of a breakdown. In London, after the last show on the tour, John, Paul, George, and Ringo dropped by his hotel room. Dylan was too depleted to see them.
He was particularly weary of being a symbol, “the voice of his generation.” All his attempts to deflect, to joke his way through press conferences, to mock the requests for sage advice (“Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb”), his determination to lie to journalists and would-be biographers, telling them he’d been a runaway street hustler, not a bar-mitzvah boy, only heightened the mystique. And that mystique came to be untenable. Dylan had wanted to succeed Woody. He could accept being Elvis. But he sure as hell knew he couldn’t survive being a prophet.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he later wrote. “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese.”
In the summer of 1966, Dylan retreated to a house in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, Sara Lownds, and their children. One afternoon, he went out for a ride on his motorcycle, lost control, fell, and broke several vertebrae. He took the accident as a sign that he should prolong his retreat. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race,” he wrote. “Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on.” The foremost symbol of the sixties, the High Priest of Protest, more or less sat out the rest of the decade, making very few public appearances. He even skipped the biggest hullabaloo of all, the Woodstock festival, which took place just an hour and a half up the road from him. Dylan did not tour again for eight years.
More than half a century has passed. Dylan is eighty-one, still writing, recording, and performing on what’s long been known as the Never-Ending Tour. He is an object of study. A Dylan museum in Tulsa is now open to scholars and visitors. There are countless books about him—books focussed on Hibbing or the Village or his influences, on particular albums, phases, and songs. Christopher Ricks, a distinguished scholar of Victorian and modernist poetry, wrote a treatise that takes Dylan’s prosody as seriously as that of Tennyson or Eliot. Michael Gray has published three editions of his enormous study “Song & Dance Man,” as well as “The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.” There’s a book called “The Dylanologists,” about the hardy crew of fanatics who make the pilgrimage to the Iron Range, cruise by the singer’s Point Dume compound in Malibu, and vacuum up scraps and ephemera in pursuit of . . . clues.
If you’ve got the bug, you’ve got it bad. Recently, I’ve read memoirs by Louie Kemp, Dylan’s buddy from summer camp, and Suze Rotolo, an artist from a left-wing family, who was Dylan’s girlfriend in his Village days and the inspiration for “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and other lasting songs. There are many biographies. Two early ones, by Robert Shelton and Anthony Scaduto, are filled with the juicy fruits of access, and Clinton Heylin’s “Behind the Shades” is a work of heavy industry. But none of them are quite worthy of the subject on a musical or historical level—there’s nothing comparable to, say, Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Elvis Presley or Maynard Solomon’s life of Mozart.
The critical explorations have been ceaseless, from Ellen Willis’s 1967 essay in the magazine Cheetah on the tension between the public and the private Dylan to Greg Tate’s assertion thirty-four years later in the Village Voice that Dylan’s “impact on a couple generations of visionary black bards has rarely been given its propers.” The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus, who has written innumerable essays about the singer and the songs, including a book-length study of “Like a Rolling Stone.” No one alive knows the music that fuelled Dylan’s imagination better. Marcus just published “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.” It’s another ingenious book of close listening, but, as Marcus would be the first to say, it is not in any standard sense the full life story.
Early on, Dylan seemed to decide that, if he couldn’t make sense of his career, he would make sure that no one else could, either. He wasn’t about to be both artist and critic. In D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” Dylan, in his youthful wise-ass mode, is captured in conversation with an earnest middle-aged writer from Time, the dominant midcult magazine of the era. “I got nothing to say about these things I write,” he informs the interviewer. “I don’t write them for any reason. There’s no great message. I mean, if, you know, you wanna tell other people that, go ahead and tell them, but I’m not going to have to answer to it.”
One reason that Dylan might be suspicious of biographers at this point is that he is suspicious of his own memory—of any attempt, in fact, to recall the past with accuracy. In Martin Scorsese’s recent semi-fictional documentary about the gloriously shambolic Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Dylan starts out gamely answering questions about the events of 1975, until he breaks off and starts laughing at his own “clumsy bullshit”:
For years, there were rumors that Dylan was planning to tell his story himself. As an editor, I used to check in periodically with David Rosenthal, a former journalist who ran the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and who had a Dylan memoir under contract. In 2004, Rosenthal finally called and said, “I’ve got a manuscript.”
Rosenthal told me that I should also connect with Jeff Rosen, a friendly and musically erudite guy who had been running Dylan’s publishing, licensing, and other business concerns since the mid-eighties. I asked Rosen if I could read the manuscript. Maybe he could send it along?
Nothing doing. “I can’t let the manuscript out of my office,” Rosen said. He gave me an address and said I could come by to read it.
The next morning, I arrived at a commercial building near Gramercy Park. The buzzer at the door was not marked “Dylan Office.” Instead, in the manner of a C.I.A. front, it was called something like XYZ Carpets. A rickety elevator took me up to a huge newsroom-like space crammed with albums, tapes, disks, posters, T-shirts, jackets, books, endless Dylan stuff. I’d been listening to Dylan since stumbling on a compilation album called “The Best of ’66” as a kid. “I Want You,” from the “Blonde on Blonde” album, came just after John Davidson’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” I didn’t understand a word of “I Want You”—not on the level of language or desire—but that voice! I was hooked. For a long time, everything I cared about, every book or song, somehow came out of this obsession. So, if you had told me when I was fifteen that I could take up residence at the Dylan office and never leave, I wouldn’t have hesitated.
Rosen, tall and lean, led me to a small room where shelves were lined with Dylan books: biographies, songbooks, criticism, encyclopedias. There was a chair and a table, bare except for a stack of manuscript pages. “Take your time,” Rosen said, and left me alone with “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Like all good Dylan fanatics, I’d read his 1971 book “Tarantula,” a bewildering prose piece influenced by his reading of Rimbaud, Comte de Lautréamont, and the Beats. It had some of the same larkish spirit as John Lennon’s “In His Own Write,” but I haven’t been tempted to read it again. The anxiety among Dylanologists was that “Chronicles” would be “Tarantula Redux.” It wasn’t. As I read the opening chapter, about Dylan’s arrival in New York, I saw that this was the real thing—echt Bob, and yet a relatively straightforward narrative, not a musically inflected version of “A Season in Hell” or “Visions of Cody.” He was writing now in the plainspoken mode of Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory,” telling a story of self-creation. Though flecked with debatable details, it was a credible portrayal of his musical and sentimental education, with recollections of his first winter in the city, of the folk scene in the Village, and of listening to and learning from everyone from the Clancy Brothers to Carolyn Hester to the New Lost City Ramblers. His hunger for American music and his urge to master the tradition reminded me of W. H. Auden’s habit of sitting on a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, the better to raise his sights and absorb the language whole.
I stayed on my seat, too, reading the manuscript straight through, no breaks. Once I was done, I dropped by Rosen’s office and, trying to keep it casual, said that I was eager to publish an excerpt. After a few more conversations, Rosenthal and Rosen said that they would let The New Yorker run five or six thousand words a few weeks before the book’s publication. We all agreed that we’d be in touch sometime before that in order to square things away: fact checking, copy editing, and so on. I was delighted.
Late that summer, Rosenthal called to say that the book would be published soon. Were we ready? We certainly were.
“One last thing, though,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Bob wants the cover.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bob wants the cover. Of the magazine.”
“David, you told me that Bob loves the magazine. We don’t have celebrities on the cover. We don’t even have photographs on the cover!”
Rosenthal paused. Then he said, “Bob wants a cover.”
I got the message.
“So, David, what am I supposed to do?”
“If we don’t get the cover, I think we’re going to take the excerpt to Newsweek.”
That stung. A music magazine I might have understood. But Newsweek?
“Seriously? There’s a Presidential election going on”—Bush versus Kerry. “They’re going to put Bob Dylan on the cover four weeks before the election?”
“That’s what they promised.”
I’d been careless. We had only a vague agreement. And so that was that. Dylan appeared on the cover of the October 4, 2004, issue of Newsweek. By then he was in his mid-sixties and looked like Vincent Price wearing Hank Williams’s clothes: pencil mustache, white Stetson, and cowboy suit. I had other unkind thoughts. But what was the point?
More than a year later, I got a call from Jeff Rosen. “Bob’s got a new album,” he said. “We wondered if you want to hear it.”
There was no use in relitigating the past. And, yes, I wanted to hear it.
“Sure,” I said. “Can you send over a disk?”
“Can’t do that. Come hear it at the studio.”
I went over to a recording studio on the West Side. Someone put me in a room with an armchair between two speakers. I sat there alone and waited in silence for a few minutes, and then the album, “Modern Times,” came roaring out. What struck me then, and still does, is that Dylan seemed to realize that he would never again recover what he once called the “thin, wild mercury sound” of the mid-sixties. In his maturity, he continued to write lyrics of immense imagination, but the music, the song forms, were no longer breakthroughs. He wasn’t inventing contemporary music; he was revisiting the past, making it his own, showing his love. And so, on “Modern Times,” there’s “Thunder on the Mountain,” which plays with a Memphis Minnie tune called “Ma Rainey”; there’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” which is a Hambone Willie Newbern tune made famous by Muddy Waters; there’s “Ain’t Talkin’,” which takes bits and pieces from an Irish folk song and a Stanley Brothers tune. The album is filled with tributes, quotations, and inspired reinterpretations of moments in Jimmy Kennedy, Bing Crosby, June Christy, and even James Lord Pierpont, who, in 1857, wrote “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” better known as “Jingle Bells.” Dylan detectives soon discovered that he had adapted some lines from Henry Timrod, a nineteenth-century South Carolinian whom Tennyson supposedly referred to as “the poet laureate of the South.”
That’s the way creativity works, Dylan told Robert Hilburn, of the Los Angeles Times. You’re always writing into a tradition. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form,” he said. “What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. . . . I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to a song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”
The parts that readers enjoy most in “Chronicles”—the bits that I’d hoped to run in the magazine—are about his becoming Bob Dylan, the Village years. What’s curious is that, in a moment of pure Bob-ness, he then skips over most of his early fame. In a sixteen-month period, between March, 1965, and June, 1966, he put out three of the greatest albums of the era: “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde on Blonde.” We never hear about that period, much less his reëmergence from Woodstock, the collapse of his marriage, and the making of a masterpiece, “Blood on the Tracks,” in 1974. Instead, “Chronicles” goes deep into precisely that period which most fans would just as soon forget, the low point of Dylan’s creativity—the mid- and late-nineteen-eighties, when he was ready to give it all up.
“I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck,” Dylan writes. “Too much static in my head and I couldn’t dump the stuff. Wherever I am, I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. You name it. I can’t shake it.”
Dylan toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1986 and with the Grateful Dead in 1987, and though the concerts raked in plenty of money and he had a great sense of kinship with both bands, he felt distanced from his own work and struggled to write anything of consequence: “It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. . . . The glow was gone and the match had burned right to the end. I was going through the motions.”
Even in this relatively fallow period, Dylan wrote songs that were among his finest: “I and I,” “Dark Eyes,” “Ring Them Bells,” “Man in the Long Black Coat.” A song like “Blind Willie McTell,” in particular, hinted at what was to come, with Dylan’s gaze peering into the deep musical past. But his most ardent fans would have to admit that the albums of that period were spotty and the concerts, too often, were lacklustre. On any given night, his attention might wander; the performances could be rote. Some point to “Wiggle Wiggle,” on the 1990 album “Under the Red Sky,” as an artistic nadir, though that wasn’t a parlor game Dylan was prepared to tolerate. “You know, no matter what anyone says, I have written my share,” he said. “If I never write another song, no one will ever fault me.” And, of course, he was right.
In the early fifties, Randall Jarrell published a review of “The Auroras of Autumn,” Wallace Stevens’s last collection of poems. Jarrell finds the late work to be inferior to what Stevens had collected in “Harmonium,” which had appeared almost three decades earlier. But Jarrell doesn’t chastise the poet for the decline; he asks that we see it as natural. “How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon,” Jarrell wrote, “as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen—for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else.” Stevens followed the familiar pattern of self-imitation, Jarrell writes in his review, and yet the emphasis falls not on the failures of the late career but on the miracle that a phenomenon like Stevens happens at all: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”
The point is that, if Dylan had died of his injuries in Woodstock, he still would have left behind the richest catalogue of American songs of his era. At twenty-five, he could have declared himself retired, younger in age than Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding were when they died. Yet what makes Dylan so extraordinary is that the end of his early incandescence didn’t mark a sustained falling off. Since that brush with self-extinction and death-by-motorcycle, he has made more than thirty albums—all of them interesting, and many of them containing songs that rank among his best. It’s the pace that’s different.
“There was a time when the songs would come three or four at the same time, but those days are long gone,” he told Hilburn. “Once in a while, the odd song will come to me like a bulldog at the garden gate and demand to be written. But most of them are rejected out of my mind right away. You get caught up in wondering if anyone really needs to hear it. Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs. Let someone else write them.”
The first time I saw Dylan was in 1974, when he made his comeback with the Band. They toured behind a good album—“Planet Waves”—and then he went out and recorded one of his greatest, “Blood on the Tracks.” At concerts ever since, the casual fans—the ones who have Dylan pegged as an “icon,” a figure of the past—come to the hall hoping that he will sing “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Tangled Up in Blue” just the way they remember it from the records. Precisely because Dylan has continued to develop as an artist, they are invariably disappointed. The tempos have changed. Dylan’s voice has changed. Even the lyrics differ from night to night. You never know what you’re going to get. (In 1980, during his “born-again” phase, audiences got to hear Dylan, ordinarily as reticent as the Sphinx onstage, deliver apocalyptic sermons between gospel songs about the battle between the Antichrist and the Lord Jesus Christ.) Those casual fans wonder why he can’t be more like the Stones, unfailing jukeboxes of their earlier selves. They want to squint and see the young Dylan, with his Pre-Raphaelite hair and his Brando sneer. They want, at least for an hour and a half, a magic act: a man in his eighties who is a man in his youth.
There are some older performers who are able to pull off a worthy form of compromise with their audiences. Bruce Springsteen knows well that, at least on some level, his fans want him circa 1978, a performer determined to drive himself to the point of abandon, a Jersey guy singing about freeing himself from the grip of the nuns and family misery, finding love, and taking it on the road. The bargain, for Springsteen, his magic act, is that he’ll stay in shape, he’ll move like a younger man and he will sing you those hits, but he’ll also salt the performance with newer songs, about parenthood, aging, mortality—the work that interests him now. Everyone goes home happy.
Dylan is scarcely resistant to his role as an entertainer. When he last performed in the city, a year ago, he played a smattering of old favorites—“Watching the River Flow,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”—and he occasionally seemed to be having a good time. He’d grab the mike like an old-style crooner, cock a hip like Elvis, and even pause to make a joke worthy of Henny Youngman. But otherwise it was serious business. The concert was called for eight o’clock, and that’s when he took the stage. If you were five minutes late, it was like being at the opera; the ushers held you back from your seat until there was a break in the action. And he did what he came to do: he played nearly every song on his most recent album, the distinctly elegiac “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” For a long time now, Dylan has played piano rather than guitar, and, like a lot of performers these days, he doesn’t depend on memory for the lyrics. Most have teleprompters. Dylan leans over and sings off lyric sheets. You can hardly blame him. He’s older than Joe Biden, and the songs are often long. In the Whitmanesque “I Contain Multitudes,” Dylan sings about the multiplicity of selves in him, in anyone, and provides a litany of the voices, from Anne Frank to William Blake, from Poe to the Stones, that have haunted his imagination:
Dylan is hardly immune to the pink Cadillac. In fact, he’s done ads for Cadillac—along with Chrysler, I.B.M., and Victoria’s Secret. He’s got a line of bourbon and rye whiskeys on the market called Heaven’s Door, which he went on the “Tonight Show” to promote. Not long ago he sold off his catalogue for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now he’s in the N.F.T. business. But filthy lucre has not slowed him down. He doesn’t stand in the same place for very long. Eighty-one and still at it. Why? Or, better, how?
Which leads us to my Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan. The theory isn’t especially complicated or even novel. Greil Marcus has been pressing the case for years, and Dylan himself, always typed as “enigmatic” and “elusive,” has been trying to make these matters clear to us all along. In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source. When he was in Woodstock, recuperating and hiding from the world, he got together with the Band, in the basement of a house known as Big Pink, and played folk songs: folk songs they remembered, and folk songs they made up. That was “The Basement Tapes.” When he was struggling again, twenty-five years later, he recorded two albums of folk and blues standards—“Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong”—and four years after that he emerged, reënergized and backed by extraordinary musicians, to issue a string of highly original albums, “Time Out of Mind,” “Modern Times,” and “Together Through Life.” Many of the songs were about mortality, just as they were on the album he recorded when he was twenty and singing “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” But now they were felt on a deeper level. Shortly before “Time Out of Mind” was released, in 1997, Dylan heard a pounding on Heaven’s door—a heart ailment, pericarditis, which forced him to cancel a European tour and consider, once more, the end. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he said.
Dylan kept moving, even having fun. In 2009, he put out “Christmas in the Heart.” If you were stuck thinking of Dylan as a pure ironist, you were wrong; he sang Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus”––and made it his own––because he loved it. The record was all in the line of tradition: the Christmas albums of Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Elvis Presley. The same goes for what are known as his Sinatra albums—“Shadows in the Night,” “Fallen Angels,” and “Triplicate”—which featured Dylan paying tribute to the so-called American songbook. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, either. Dylan loves Frank Sinatra, and the feeling was mutual. In 1995, at Sinatra’s request, Dylan played his sunless yet defiant song “Restless Farewell” for the old man at a tribute concert. It’s not hard to tell why the last verse would appeal to the guy who often closed his concerts with “My Way”:
Those Sinatra standards replenished him and fed his imagination. They helped bring him to the songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” They allowed him to keep forcing himself forward. Long past the pressure to be a voice of anything or anyone, he has released albums that, though deeply self-expressive, speak to and expand what Leonard Cohen called “the Tower of Song.”
Dylan has replenished himself in other ways as well. From 2006 to 2009, he hosted “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a weekly program on satellite radio. With the help of a like-minded music nut, Eddie Gorodetsky, Dylan, aping the mannerisms, puns, and bromides of the d.j.s of his youth, proposed a theme for each program—blood, say, or money or mothers or flowers—and he’d intersperse songs with his Bobbed-out patter. The programs were hilarious, full of campy nostalgia. Most important, you got to hear the often forgotten music that helped form him in some way, like Buck Owens singing “I’ll Go to Church Again with Momma,” and “Kissing in the Dark,” by Memphis Minnie. And, just to let you know the old guy was keeping up and had a broad sense of an expanding tradition, he threw in tracks from Prince and LL Cool J.
And now there’s another exercise in engaging the tradition. Rather than follow the first volume of “Chronicles” with, you know, a second volume, Dylan has published a kind of extension of the radio show: a rich, riffy, funny, and completely engaging book of essays, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” The cover photograph features Little Richard, Alis Lesley, and Eddie Cochran, and it’s immediately apparent what you’re in for: Dylan wandering through the enormous record bin of his mind. What he tries to get across is the feel of these songs, their atmosphere and internal life. It’s at the end of his essay on Dion and the Belmonts’ version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When” that Dylan makes everything clear:
When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016, he got a lot of stick. The man wrote songs! But did he deserve the accolade? Leonard Cohen, one of his most literary contemporaries, had it right. Awarding Dylan the Nobel, he said, “is like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest for being the highest mountain.”
What makes Dylan’s career all the more remarkable is the way it has evolved, with peaks, declivities, crags—all in service to the music he began to revere in Hibbing. In his own way, he is reminiscent of Verdi, Monet, Yeats, O’Keeffe: a freak of creative longevity. Nicholas Delbanco writes about this phenomenon in “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age”; Delbanco’s teacher John Updike wrote about it in his essay “Late Works,” and exemplified it in the poems he wrote while dying of cancer in hospice care.
“I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us—you don’t write the songs anyhow,” Cohen said in his last meeting with reporters. “Your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”
Genius doesn’t owe explanations of itself. But perhaps the nearest Dylan came to explaining both his gift and its durability was in 2015, accepting an award from the charity MusiCares. Reading from a sheaf of papers in his hands, Dylan exploded the myth of sui-generis brilliance.
“These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said. “I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. . . . If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.
“All these songs are connected,” he went on. “I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.” ♦
