A new, extensive volume on Dylan’s career illuminates the mythic qualities of the man and his music.
A new, extensive volume on Dylan’s career illuminates the mythic qualities of the man and his music.
B ob Dylan is more myth than man. This is an impression that Dylan himself has cultivated for decades through constant changes of costume and persona: Woody-Guthrie-hobo-chic in the early 60s; flip-flop-wearing clean-cut dadcore in Woodstock, N.Y., in the late 60s; the Big-Top-carnival-barker-white-face minstrel of the Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid ’70s; the blazer-with-sleeves-rolled-up-and-left-ear-pierced “How do you do, fellow kids?” New Wave hipster of the mid 80s; the rhinestone cowboy of the 2000s. And through all these changes, he has written the best, most important, and most enduring music of the last century.
All this theatricality would seem to have little to do with Dylan’s life off-stage, and yet the temptation to connect the two is almost too strong for most mere mortals to resist. Thus most writing on Bob Dylan tends toward the biographical.
But much of this biography is not so much biography of Dylan as it is of the authors themselves. Dylan criticism, that is, is often an autobiographical genre. We Dylan obsessives create our own personal myths of Dylan, derived from various aspects of the public myth that Dylan’s career and music suggest, and then we write about them. Because of the weird alchemy of music and real life, these myths and the music that soundtracks them somehow become — everyone who has ever been a teenager will understand what I am about to say —part of our own stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves. Rather than resist this tendency (or at least pretend to), as custom would urge, I shall embrace it. What follows in this review of Mixing Up the Medicine, then, is part of my personal myth of Dylan.
When I saw Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, I immediately wanted a copy. After all, I am an unreconstructed Dylanophile: In my personal myth, even the plagiarism in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature is a heroic act, a hilarious send-up of the frequently farcical nature of such prizes worthy of Andy Kaufman. But that is not the only reason I wanted to add it to my collection of Dylan books.
Inside the front cover of Mixing Up the Medicine are these words: “Treasures from the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa, OK.” It is a book connected to a place, one where I’d been last October. The Bob Dylan Center is a wonderful place, both for the eyes and for the mind, not to mention the ears. (For the mouth, try the aptly named A.J.’s Heavenly Pizza in nearby Catoosa.) Much more than a collection of memorabilia, it is a monument to the most significant American artist of my lifetime and yours, taking you into his mind and work through photographs, notebooks, recordings, and the interpretation of other artists: Elvis Costello’s jukebox of songs that inspired Dylan, Dylan originals, and covers of Dylan compositions call for particular mention. Stand around and listen, and you’ll get an aural overview of how tradition works.
The book, assembled by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, is like the Center. As an aesthetic object, it is itself a work of art, containing over 600 beautifully reproduced images, mostly color, from all periods, not only of the man himself and his various collaborators over the past six decades, but also of drafts on hotel stationery and in little notebooks that allow the reader to see how Dylan worked at and refined his songs over long periods of time. It is easy to think of poetry and song lyrics coming in flashes of inspiration, and poets themselves often encourage such a belief. What you see in this book, as well as in the exhibits at the Center (and in the materials in the Archive, too: though I haven’t visited it, much in the book comes from its thousands of holdings), is what a hard and disciplined craftsman Dylan is. It’s not magic; it’s method.
Integrated with the copious supply of visual aids is text of various kinds. This text ranges from the editors’ informative summaries of Dylan’s activities and output at every stage of his career to short essays from Dylanology heavyweights such as Sean Wilentz (who wrote the “Introduction”), Greil Marcus, and Clinton Heylin, as well as a number of other writers and musicians. The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote the “Epilogue.”
The essays are uneven. For example, Tom Piazza’s, “American Dream #115,” which attempts an imitative homage to the wonderful and hilarious weirdness of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” the choice of which tells us something about his own personal Dylan myth, doesn’t come off. Joy Harjo’s entry on “Tangled Up in Blue” is so self-regardingly preachy in its all-too-fashionable peroration for “democracy” and against “sexism” and “racism” that one is reminded by contrast of the complexity of Dylan’s lyrical stances — very rarely could he be accused of falling into the trap Harjo does — and his almost unfailing capacity to surprise you. Suffice it to say, Harjo’s personal myth of Dylan (orthodox Boomer progressive à la Alex P. Keaton’s parents in Family Ties) is not the same as mine.
But other essays are wonderful, and even mesmerizing. In “Highway to the Sea: Dylan, Conrad, and the ‘Tombstone Blues,’” Griffin Ondaatje demonstrates beyond caviling that Dylan repeatedly made creative use of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory: An Island Tale over the course of at least a decade, from “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Tombstone Blues,” to (plausibly) “Shelter from the Storm,” to (most comprehensively) the album Desire (1976), whose back cover contains a drawing of Conrad.
“Reflections on ‘Dirge,’” by Raymond Foye, deals with a song that is, for me, not Dylan’s best work, though Foye (curiously) calls it “a perennial favorite of Dylan down through the years.” Yet even though I don’t love the song, Foye’s essay shows me why I should, treating Dylan as a “lyric poet” and connecting the song’s opening line, “I hate myself for loving you,” to Catullus’s justly famous Poem 86 (odi et amo, “I hate and I love”), as well suggesting the possibility of a more general link to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.” People might wonder who the song is about. Foye says this is “the most frequently asked question about” it, but doesn’t answer this question definitively; it may not be answerable in any case. Through examining the drafts of the song’s text, however, Foye discovers that Leonard Cohen was at least one of the people it was originally about, though he had disappeared from the lyrics by the time the song was recorded.
Dylan’s material from the late 1970s and ’80s currently looms large in my Dylan myth. These periods, including what Craig Danuloff in the current season of his tremendous podcast Dylan.FM has dubbed “Bob Dylan’s Five Worst Years,” 1984–88, are seldom praised. In Mixing Up the Medicine, Larry Sloman refers to Dylan’s “series of undistinguished albums in the 80s”; and on four different occasions the phrase “return to form” — gratingly cliché when applied to Dylan — is used, always with a passive verb: twice in reference to Infidels (thus dismissing the late ’70s and early ’80s) and twice in reference to Oh Mercy (thus dismissing the mid ’80s).
That is all unfortunate. Yet it should not obscure the fact that the book contains multitudes for readers interested in this comparatively neglected faux-nadir.
Here are some highlights from the book’s coverage of the period:
Alex Ross has a nice little essay on “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” a song written while Dylan was working on Shot of Love and then “unaccountably omitted from the original vinyl album,” only to be reinstated when Shot of Love came out on CD. Ross discusses its musical and lyrical permutations in drafts, recorded versions, and live performance, including the scorching version with Michael Bloomfield on guitar. One of his greatest songs, “Groom” has all the hallmarks of the simultaneously familiar and fantastical imagistic worlds that go a long way toward creating the quintessentially “Dylanesque.” At the song’s opening, “we could be,” in Ross’s vivid phrasing, “at the rundown casino of Herod the Great, where the protagonist has shacked up with Salome’s obese sister.”
Dylan has said that Shot of Love’s title track (another one of his all-time greats) was his “most perfect song,” defining where he is “spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else,” and showing where his “sympathies lie. . . . It’s all there in that one song.”
Shot of Love came out in 1981. Three years later, after another studio album (Infidels), Dylan released his fourth live album, Real Live. It is not, to put it mildly, one of his best-regarded albums, live or otherwise. But I love it. (My only criticism is that I wish it had more material from the first half of the ’80s on it.) One of the standout tracks on Real Live is a reworking of the aforementioned “Tangled Up in Blue.” This version, Dylan says, “is more like it should have been. I was never really happy with it.” Listen and decide for yourself.
Dylan released another live album in the ’80s, Dylan & the Dead (1989), which is perhaps even less-well-liked than Real Live. Dylan had never performed “Queen Jane Approximately,” from Highway 61 Revisited, until this tour. But its debut at that late hour seems to have marked a turning point in the song’s fortunes: To date, Dylan has now performed it 76 times, and it was one of a handful of songs to be featured on last year’s Shadow Kingdom, Dylan’s most recent release.
Shadow Kingdom belongs to another favorite period in my Dylan myth: 1997 on. The period doesn’t so much mark his return from the dead, as it is often interpreted to, as it is a return to critical favor, as well as the fruition of a series of aesthetic and compositional shifts that had been germinating for a while.
It might be the most productive period of his life. This fact really stands out in the book, in which we get over 100 pages (469–581) on these years. By my count, Dylan’s credits from 1997–2023 include: Six albums of original studio material, including one film soundtrack (Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” Modern Times, Together Through Life, Tempest, and Rough and Rowdy Ways), four albums’ worth of cover material (Christmas in the Heart, Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels, and Triplicate), and one album of re-envisioned material from the first half of his career (Shadow Kingdom); two books (Chronicles: Volume One and The Philosophy of Modern Song); one feature film (Masked and Anonymous); and one concert film (Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan). This has all been accompanied by near-constant touring.
To call the quality of his work over the past two decades “high” is to undersell it. One can understand why Jeff Slate’s essay quotes Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as saying, “We’re walking the earth and Walt Whitman is alive. We’re in Shakespeare’s lifetime. . . . We’re in the world with somebody like that.” Or Mike Campbell, another Heartbreaker: “When I might ponder the future, and how music will be remembered, I think it will be Beethoven, Mozart, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and maybe a few other people who will be remembered as historically essential artists.”
Some readers will doubtless call this hyperbole. But when one looks at what Dylan has done over the past 60-plus years, I think it’s defensible. Time will tell.
Dylan has only been able to accomplish what he has over such a long span by constantly reinventing himself. There’s a large placard at the Bob Dylan Center with a Dylan quotation from 2019 that sounds a Nietzschean note: “Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.” As an existential and moral statement, that is dangerously false. As an artistic and aesthetic statement, on the other hand, it’s a good description of how Dylan’s music has remained so incomparably alive. It’s hard to come away from Mixing Up the Medicine without that realization.
Because all that is so, one might demur from Allen Ginsberg’s statement, as quoted by Don Was, as quoted by Larry Sloman (get all that?) in his essay on Under the Red Sky’s “Handy Dandy”: “Everything that Bob writes is autobiographical. All these songs are about himself. He’s talking to himself about himself.” I’m not convinced that’s any truer of his music than it is of Chronicles: Volume One; it certainly isn’t true in any straightforward sense.
But I also don’t care. As I said at the outset, we use Dylan in the weaving of our own autobiographies, and we all make our own myths. For Gregory Peck, that makes Dylan “something of a Civil War type. A kind of 19th-century troubadour. A maverick American spirit.” For me, it makes Dylan the ultimate shape-shifting chameleon, behind whose constant costume-changes lies the constant of the artist at work, recapitulating and carrying further the entire spectrum of American popular song in the key of an idiosyncratic genius, frequently in ways that aren’t adequately appreciated until long after the fact.
But regardless of how our personal myths take shape, all of us who are Dylan fans have one thing in common: the music. Through the music, the world becomes at once more visible and more mysterious. Through the music, we see more; we see differently.
Mixing Up the Medicine can help us to do that, too.