Bob Dylan and the ageing of the West

Michael Karwowski

THE West is getting older fast, the result of fewer babies and longer life. Today, life expectancy throughout the Western world is around 80 years, compared to less than 50 at the beginning of the last century.

In the UK, the percentage of the population of pensionable age increased from 13 per cent in 1971 to 16 per cent, or almost one-in-six, in 2005, roughly equivalent to the rise throughout the European Union as a whole. Aptly named the Old World, the proportion of the EU's population aged over 65 will accelerate to almost one-in-three by 2050.

In the US, the proportion of the population aged over 65 rose from 9 per cent in 1967 to 12.3 per cent, or almost one-in-eight, in 2006. The number of over-65-year-old Americans is projected to rise further to one-in-five by 2030.

Far from fading away gently, however, many of today's old could hardly be characterised in terms of that patronising cliche of 'pipe and slippers'. Most of them don't smoke, for a start, and, as for slippers, walking boots might be more appropriate, since travelling around the world or exploring new experiences seems to be their favourite occupation.

Nowhere is this new interpretation of the old truer than with the 1960s rock aristocracy, those who have survived a life of excess, that is. They might have been the original pathfinders in establishing the 'cult of youth' in their own youth, but now, as they reach their sixties, they are proving that age is no bar to creativity. Pete Townshend, for instance, songwriter and lead guitarist of The Who, who penned the line 'Hope I die before I get old' in that quintessential '60s pop song, My Generation, recently wrote and recorded the band's first new album in 25 years, which includes a 10-song mini-rock-opera!

As for Bob Dylan, so-called leader of the alternative youth culture of the 1960s, who celebrated his 65th birthday this year, it would not be stretching the facts to say that he is enjoying a truly amazing creative--and popular--renaissance that seemed unlikely throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

A million-selling triple-Grammy-award-winning album, Time Out of Mind, in 1997 was followed by an Oscar-winning song, Things Have Changed, in 2000 and then another album, Love and Theft, released on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, which announced a completely new musical direction from this master of metamorphosis.

As if all this wasn't enough, Dylan then published the critically-acclaimed first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, in 2004, while the iconic film director Martin Scorsese, with Dylan's participation, made a biographical documentary, No Direction Home, which became the first-ever simultaneous broadcast, in September 2005, between two major public broadcasters, the BBC and PBS in America, which co-funded the film. Dylan then followed this up in 2006 with Modern Times, which promptly became his first US No1 album in thirty years--lots of firsts there for an old man who not long ago was seen as being on his last legs!

In such circumstances, Dylan's comment in the song Floater (Too Much To Ask) on Love and Theft comes as something of an understatement:

    The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
    On bad terms with the younger men
    But old, young, age don't carry weight
    It doesn't matter in the end.

Indeed, just as the '60s generation thought they were the first to create the 'generation gap' with their elders, so are they now in a perfect position to bridge that gap with the young of today as, once young, they are now old, even if still young at heart. More importantly, however, infinitely more importantly, they--and Bob Dylan in particular--are proving that genius, or the receipt of divine inspiration, bears no relationship to age. As Dylan writes, with studied irony, to his muse in Spirit on the Water on Modern Times:

    You think I'm over the hill
    You think I'm past my prime
    Let me see what you got
    We can have a whopping good time

Again, on the same album, in Ain't Talkin', we have:

    The fire gone out but the light is never dying
    Who says I can't get heavenly aid

--a profoundly inspiring notion that echoes English singer-songwriter David Gray's aptly-named Silver Lining on 1998's White Ladder album with its great line:

    Know that the light don't sleep.

But, and here's the beauty of pensioner power, whereas Dylan's first great period of creativity in the 1960s occurred in the midst of an insane rock celebrity turmoil that almost destroyed him when he was still only in his twenties, a lifetime's experience has now given him the relaxed perspective of distance in which he retains control while the truth he expounds in his songs is more considered and clear.

His three outstanding albums of the 1960s, after all, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde were all written and released in little over a year. The three most recent albums, on the other hand, were produced at a more leisurely pace over almost ten years.

Another difference between the two periods might also be considered characteristic of youth and age, respectively. For the first involved Dylan's invention of a completely new cultural medium, namely rock music, a marriage between poetical lyrics and that music of the rebellious young, rock 'n' roll. In contrast, the second involves a style that is a synthesis of the whole of American popular music from its earliest beginnings: just as the old are said to be more in tune with the distant past than with what happened the day before! This new expression even incorporates songs that are clearly influenced by the Great American Songbook favoured by crooners such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. It's as if the more mature Dylan is saying that there is nothing that cannot now be conscripted to his purpose. As he writes in Honest With Me on Love and Theft:

    I'm here to create the new imperial empire
    I'm going to do whatever circumstances require.

So what is the purpose of Bob Dylan's creative renaissance? It is nothing less than to reinterpret the perennial philosophy of mysticism in twenty-first-century terms, to bear witness to the fact that mysticism is not what the dictionary says it is, something related to a sacredly obscure attempt to achieve elevated religious feeling or ecstasy, but a philosophy that sets out to comprehend and explain the nature of reality as it relates to man. In this endeavour, Dylan is perfectly in tune with one of history's most famous mystics, St John of the Cross, who counselled against being distracted from the mystic's true purpose by any transfiguring experiences that might occur along the way.

The way in question is the road of truth, as encapsulated in Ain't Talkin':

    I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
    Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road.

The word 'faith' here has absolutely nothing to do with religious belief, hence 'no altars'. It relates exclusively to confidence, as in having faith in someone. In terms of the perennial philosophy, this 'someone' is the spirit of truth, which reveals the nature of reality and, hence, the meaning of life, since we cannot know why the world is, without first knowing what it is. As Dylan sings in Spirit on the Water on Modern Times:

    Life without you
    Doesn't mean a thing to me.

Again, on the same album, in The Levee's Gonna Break:

    When I'm with you, I forget I was ever blue
    Without you there's no meaning in anything I do

Bob Dylan's commitment to truth and, hence, to his chosen role as an artist in the true sense of that word, runs throughout his work from 1962's Blowin' in the Wind onwards. But there is no doubt that he lost his way in the 1980s and 90s, his vengeful born-again Christianity of the early '80s being a case in point. Then, three episodes straddling the change of millennium signalled a reformation that led to a renaissance.

The first was the musical return-to-form of 1997's Time Out of Mind, which begins with an eternal triangle of an original kind, Love Sick, in which Dylan reveals a profound world-weariness, a parallel fear of returning to an unconditional commitment to truth, and yet a longing for that return, a triple love-sickness.

Perhaps the most memorable song on Time Out of Mind is the epic, mesmeric, 16-minute-long Highlands with its surrealistic meeting between Dylan and a Boston waitress who tells him:

    'I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me!'

Dylan's reply testifies to his sense that his days as an artist are now behind him:

    'I would if I could, but
    I don't do sketches from memory'.

Indeed, Time Out of Mind reveals a man who is vividly aware that he has neglected his artistic vocation and who is trying to rediscover the simple faith in inspiration that he enjoyed in the 1960s and 70s. Considering that the first and most important step to any cure is the acknowledgement that something is amiss, this was encouraging to say the least.

In between recording the album and releasing it, Dylan received the urgent wake-up call he was seeking in the form of a near-death experience. He contracted pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart sac, which hospitalised him in June 1997 and later led to his commenting: 'I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon'. This explains the lines in Beyond the Horizon on Modern Times:

    There's always a reason
    Why someone's life has been spared.

His next pronouncement, Things Have Changed, a song written for the film Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas, announced the change of heart he had longed for in Time Out of Mind. The song's chorus expressed Dylan's state of mind at the time:

    People are crazy and times are strange
    I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
    I used to care, but things have changed.

Things Have Changed was later echoed in two passages in Dylan's autobiography. The first occurs in the aptly-named second chapter of the book, 'The Lost Land', which describes the lead-up to the explosion of creativity he enjoyed in the 1960s:

    I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me
    didn't affect me any more. I wasn't too concerned about people,
    their motives.

... of which, more later.

The second occurs in Chapter 4, 'Oh Mercy', which describes the making of his 1989 album of the same name. The album recorded, he noted record producer Daniel Lanois' disappointment that he hadn't written songs of the quality of his first golden period:

    I would have liked to have been able to give him the kinds of songs
    that he wanted ... but those kinds of songs were written under
    different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves.
    Not exactly. I couldn't get those kinds of songs for him or anyone
    else ... I had done it once, and once was enough. Someone would come
    along eventually who would have it again--someone who could see into
    things, the truth of things--not metaphorically, either--but really
    see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it
    was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious
    insight.

The title of his next album, Love and Theft, announced the fact that, no one else having come along, he would have to do it himself, but differently now, because he was different, older and wiser. As he expressed it on the album, in the song Mississippi:

    You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

The album title refers to the two constituents of the artistic or mystical life: love, in the shape of an unconditional commitment to the spirit of truth, and theft, the theft of human illusions, meaning the need for the 'hard words and vicious insight' necessary to achieve disillusionment, his own and everyone else's, cf. 'Sometimes I wanna take to the road and plunder' (Love Sick).

Disillusionment is essential to the artist because the human condition involves an imprisonment in illusion. The illusions in question arise from the human mind's susceptibility to a contrary force to that of the spirit of truth, which is that of the desire for power, which presents itself in terms of particular desires to each human mind, whose nature, in turn, depends on the human influences that have shaped the mind in question.

Just as the spirit of truth appeals to the human mind's need to know why, to discover the meaning or purpose of life, so, in contrast, the desire for power appeals to the mind's assertive pride in itself, which seeks justification in the world. And as the former leads the mind towards an understanding of the nature of reality, so does its contrary, the desire for power, lead the mind in the opposite direction, towards illusion, illusions that trap the mind by separating it from truth and, hence, reality. Note, for instance, Cold Irons Bound on Time Out of Mind:

    The walls of pride are high and wide
    Can't see over to the other side.

Or, again, Things Have Changed:

    I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range

--locked in tight by illusion and out of range of truth, that is.

Human illusions are characterised in Bob Dylan's songs, as they often are in literature, mystical writings, and even popular song, in terms of dreams or clouds, (e.g. Both Sides Now, sung by Judy Collins: 'It's cloud's illusions I recall'), which, as their nature depends on human influences, so in Cold Irons Bound, for instance, does he describe them as 'clouds of blood'. Another favourite Dylan image is that of 'eyes' to express illusions, since the human mind attached to desire and its illusions is what is truly meant by the term 'ego' or 'I', hence disillusionment involves the putting out of 'I's', or the desires for power the ego sees itself as trying to fulfil, hence 'eyes':

    I'm preachin' the Word of God
    I'm puttin' out your eyes.
    (High Water--Love and Theft)

This situation is an either/or, if-you're-not-with-me-you're-against-me alternative. There can be no compromise between truth/reality and desire/illusion; the mind must either be in the state of an attachment to the desire for power or of a commitment to the spirit of truth. There is no other way.

The upshot of this is that altruism, the caring for others that is the bedrock of much religious and humanist belief, is a complete illusion. The only true care for another's welfare is that of disillusionment, hence the 'hard words and vicious insight', hence the 'Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me any more. I wasn't too concerned about people', hence: 'People are crazy and times are strange ... I used to care, but things have changed', hence the line in Thunder on the Mountain, the first song on Modern Times:

    I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams.

To give way to the desire for altruism is to give way to the desire for power--since altruism bears no relationship to truth--and hence to be as lost in illusion as the person you are trying to save:

    'Don't reach out for me', she said
    'Can't you see I'm drownin', too?'
    (High Water)
    Try to make things better for someone, sometimes
    You just end up making it a thousand times worse
    (Sugar Baby--Love and Theft)

The artistic or mystical attitude to suffering is that it must be accepted as a corollary to freedom from illusion:

    Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
    Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain
    (Dirt Road Blues--Time Out of Mind)

Similarly, the idea of vicarious sacrifice on mankind's behalf--a central tenet of established religion--is another illusion. Where the imprisonment in illusion is concerned, each individual must free himself from the attachment to his desires for power by himself. That's where free will comes in. There is no other, easier, way.

    Gon' walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
    'Til there's nothing left to see, 'til the chains have been
    shattered and I've been freed.
    (Dirt Road Blues)

In contrast to the road of truth, Dylan characterises the straight and narrow way of established religion as a 'railway line' or 'train', precisely because it is viewed as an easy alternative--'the easy chair' of You Ain't Goin' Nowhere on 1975's The Basement Tapes--to the vocation of the artist or mystic, who trudges his weary way along his road. Dylan, however, sees established religion as merely another illusion, with the inevitably destructive consequences of illusion, which he characterises in terms of 'rain', as in A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album, or:

    The midnight rain follows the train
    We all wear the same thorny crown

    (When the Deal Goes Down--Modern Times)

The artist or mystic's vocation need not be all doom and gloom, however. Witnessing the bloody mess that is the consequence of the world's entrapment in illusion from the detached point of view of truth, it's also possible to draw attention to its absurdities with humour.

In this respect, while the title of Dylan's latest album, Modern Times, seems a misnomer, since the songs are so heavily influenced by old traditions of American popular music, it actually fits perfectly when we realise that it echoes Charlie Chaplin's famous film, which celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2006 and visualises absurdity in a modern, mechanistic setting, precisely Dylan's intention in the album.

In line with Charlie Chaplin or, indeed, the Zen Buddhists or the Theatre of the Absurd, Dylan's last two albums are full of such humour; indeed, it is the most memorable characteristic of many of the songs. Harmonising with the perennial philosophy, this playfulness often works by turning accepted standards onto their head, such as in Floater (Too Much to Ask):

    Romeo, he said to Juliet, 'You've got a poor complexion
    It doesn't give your appearance a very youthful touch!'
    Juliet said back to Romeo, 'Why don't you just shove off
    If it bothers you so much'.

Fortunately, humour, like genius, belongs as much to the old as it does to the young, which brings us back again to Dylan's comment that 'age doesn't matter in the end'. Rembrandt's last self-portrait, for instance, shows an old man having a good laugh at the ways of the world, even as he is about to leave the stage.

The Western world may be ageing, then, but, far from this amounting to a 'dying of the light', a case can be made for the very opposite, certainly where Bob Dylan's renaissance as an artist is concerned. Neither should age be confounded with a heavier tread. For while a perception and characterisation of the surreal nature of much of human life was a defining quality of Bob Dylan's first golden creative period in the 1960s, it's also a delightful characteristic of his artistic renaissance in the 'noughties' of the new millennium.

Dylan could hardly be said to have lived the life of a recluse over the last thirty years. He has toured relentlessly since 1975 in what has become known, since 1988, as the Never-Ending Tour: 'going from nowhere to nowhere', as he once memorably described it. But during that time his vocation as an artist has been intermittent at best and his reputation has suffered as a result. Now, in old age, following a life-threatening illness, he has re-discovered that vocation and is producing songs equal to the surreal classics of the 1960s.

Perhaps the process can best be summarised, therefore, by quoting one of Dylan's most amusing songs, Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance, included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, with the spirit of truth standing in for the more usual 'love interest':

    Well, I've been lookin' all over
    For a gal like you
    I can't find nobody
    So you'll have to do.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning