Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s

John Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317113010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Invisible Now describes Bob Dylan's transformative inspiration as artist and cultural figure in the 1960s. Hughes identifies Dylan's creativity with an essential imaginative dynamic, as the singer perpetually departs from a former state of inexpression in pursuit of new, as yet unknown, powers of self-renewal. This motif of temporal self-division is taken as corresponding to what Dylan later referred to as an artistic project of 'continual becoming', and is explored in the book as a creative and ethical principle that underlies many facets of Dylan's appeal. Accordingly, the book combines close discussions of Dylan's mercurial art with related discussions of his humour, voice, photographs, and self-presentation, as well as with the singularities of particular performances. The result is a nuanced account of Dylan's creativity that allows us to understand more closely the nature of Dylan's art, and its links with American culture.

PART ONE
Themes

I
‘Continual Becoming’

In Scorsese’s No Direction Home, Bob Dylan gives voice to the belief that the artist should remain in a ‘continual state of becoming’. As everyone knows, the idea of self-transformation is familiar and indispensable in all kinds of respects in discussing Dylan’s work and career. However, I think it is important to distinguish it from another, superficially similar, idea that recurrently attaches to it. This is the notion that self-change for Dylan has to do with him being a ‘protean’ or ‘chameleon’ figure. On this view, it is as if the dynamic or drama of selfhood involved were a matter of successively assuming identities, like taking off and putting on (or hiding behind) one mask after another. Speaking of the Hibbing days, Richard Williams writes that ‘[i]t was at this time that he began to try on other identities’,1 while Greil Marcus puts it memorably: ‘few performers have made their way onto the stage of the twentieth century with a greater collection of masks’ (Marcus, The Old Weird America, xviii).2 Stephen Scobie’s book places the idea at its centre: ‘What Dylan has always presented to us is a succession of “shifting masks”’ … Identity for Dylan is always hidden … mask or disguise’ (Scobie, 35). Michael J. Gilmour writes that ‘Bob Dylan has spent nearly fifty years as a pubic figure hiding behind masks’.3 Mark Polizzotti suggests that Highway 61 Revisited is an exception to the general rule that Dylan’s is an art of self-dissimulation:

Dylan has always presented a persona, which is to say (following the etymology of the word) that he has always worn masks – whether the clean-cheeked innocence of his folksinger days, the jawline scrub of his country period, or the more overt whiteface of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Highway 61 is perhaps the only moment where he shows us, and himself, what it looks and sounds like to be Bob Zimmerman, the rock n’ roll kid with the dark imagination and truckloads of attitude, not to mention crateloads of insecurity; the only time he challenged us to know just how it feels. (Polizzotti, 21)

Nicholas Roe lucidly makes a similar point, but in terms of vocal mimicry, a kind of ventriloquism:

Unlike nearly every other writer, for whom ‘finding a voice’ or unique verbal identity may be an imperative, Bob Dylan is apparently most himself as a sublimely capable alias, merged into a babel of others’ voices.4

Are we to take from this, though, that Dylan is a cipher whose face or voice is always changing as he rushes to imitate or merge with this one or another? As Roe says, Dylan has ‘no stable identity’, and indeed he can be seen as someone perpetually and calculatedly ‘recasting his image and music’, switching as ‘Guthriesque folk-protester’ becomes ‘electric rocker to ballad-preacher’, and so on.5 But, how are we to think of this impulse to self-change? Is Dylan a master of disguises, the mass-culture version of the men from the carnival who fascinated him as a boy, Napoleon or George Washington in blackface, and whom he discusses at the beginning of No Direction Home?

Broadly, my view is that the idea of a career made up of an imitative kind of identity-play is deeply misleading, though so prevalent as to constitute one of the most dominant clichés around. It is both the ready-to-hand shorthand passed on by every journalist as well as something of an orthodoxy among knowledgeable writers on Dylan. This is not to deny though some important truths wrapped in the idea: no-one doubts Dylan modelled himself on Guthrie, and his current persona cannily references something like the ‘Old, Weird America’ of which Marcus first spoke in Invisible Republic.6 Again, as Roe suggests, a virtue of the idea of disguise is that it highlights Dylan’s elusiveness. This apparent non-availability at any moment of his career is, after all, a key part of his abiding fascination, the sense that he is, like the girl in “Like a Rolling Stone”, somehow both ‘invisible now’, and with ‘no direction home’.7 Above all, it importantly highlights the fact that much of Dylan’s work has to do with a drama of identity – a process that is not only perpetually intriguing, mysterious, and surprising, but also unique in popular music, not least for the relations between the songs and the life.

The central problem with the trope of the mask, though, is that it reduces Dylan to a one-man Noh theatre (or one-man repertory troupe, perhaps), as if his creativity involved merely a kind of virtuosity in imitation, in rehearsing a series of static dramatis personae. Most importantly, the ideas of a mask or ventriloquism themselves distort and obscure the ways in which self-renewal works in Dylan’s songs and throughout his career. Against this, I would say that Dylan’s creativity obeys not a desire to hide behind impersonations, but an essential and recurrent temporal dynamic that leaves him always in motion between two incarnations of the self, past and future. There is the one to which he cannot return, and the one he has not yet reached.8 So, to begin with, one can admit that Dylan has clearly cultivated people’s fascination with his selfhood in many ways, as in the liner notes, for instance, to ‘Up to Me’ on Biograph, where he makes the link to Rimbaud’s famous dictum, ‘Je est un autre’: ‘I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan. It’s like Rimbaud said, “I is another”.’9 As suggested, though, if the self who sings Dylan’s songs is always partly ‘not there’, this is not because he is pretending to be someone else, but because the self is always divided, strung out, in time. Dylan’s best work always has this theatre and tension of a self who is illegible, caught between a discarded, rejected, or superseded version of who he has been, and a future self that he has not yet become. Indefiniteness and obscurity are internal to this transitional subjectivity, in motion between the no longer and the not yet. As Roe points out, the Latin meaning of alias was, originally, ‘“at another time”’ (Corcoran, ed., 88), and Dylan, one can say, is one who, like Hamlet, finds always that the ‘time is out of joint’.10

II
Humour

Many of Dylan’s comments in interview or press conferences – witty, barbed, enigmatic, fleet-footed, retaliatory, gnomic, unfathomable – are certainly reminiscent of Hamlet, as in the memorable remark in the February 1966 Playboy interview that ‘People have one great blessing – obscurity – and not really too many people are thankful for it.’1 It would not be an overstatement to say that Dylan’s career and work perpetually cultivate, in the face of world fame, this need for remaining, as it were, imperceptible in plain view. The need is to be not who you had been thought to be, to be an alias to the self, refusing to allow people to play on you like an instrument, as Hamlet puts it, or pluck the heart out of the mystery. So, the irrepressible, mercurial, laconic figure of the San Francisco press conference is mostly inviting and charming, as we have seen, though incapable of fitting himself to his audience’s lumbering, off-beam questions. Humour, wit, and personal openness weave momentary intimacies with the audience, but the point is the inverse ratio between these revelations of self, on the one hand, and the content of what he says, on the other. The aim of this teasing play is always a purposeful inaccessibility, a refusal to be identified or pinned down, to play the game of access, of comprehensibility. Often noted, this is neatly described by Polizzotti as Dylan’s ‘psychic tug-of-war with the press and the public’, his way of ‘pushing them away while doing his best to keep them coming back for more’ (Polizzotti, 14).

Indeed, Dylan’s quicksilver humour in its mid-60s heyday is so rich, so varied, so far-reaching and inventive a resource, that it could provide a study in its own right. Usually delivered straightfaced and deadpan, Dylan is like a matador deftly side-stepping the antagonist who wishes to impale him, before retaliating unseen. It is usually an expectation embedded in the question that is exposed by Dylan’s fugitive wit, and the laughter carries an exhilarating dividend, as the terms of the discussion are turned over and assumptions are laid belly-up. Often, the humour is further compounded by the confusion, pomposity, or obtuseness of the questioner who ploughs on, seemingly oblivious, but reduced now to coming across as merely condescending, or else desperately intent on ignoring the emptiness of his own words. This kind of verbal confrontation is clear in these exchanges from the opening minutes of the Los Angeles press conference of 16 December 1965.2 Dylan is noticeably less personable, and his humour more barbed, than in San Francisco not two weeks previously:

Interviewer 1: … I wonder if you could tell me, that among folk singers, or if you are properly characterised as a folk singer, how many, would you say, could be characterised as protest singers today?

Dylan: Hmmm … I don’t understand. Could you ask the question again?

Interviewer 1 (pedantically): Yeah. How many people who labour in the same musical vineyard in which you toil, how many are protest singers? (patronisingly) That is, people who use their music, use the songs, to protest the social state in which we live today – the matter of war, or the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.

Dylan: How many?

Interviewer 1: Yes, are there many?

Dylan: Yeah, I think there’s about a hundred and thirty six. [Laughter]

Interviewer 1: You mean exactly a hundred and thirty six?

Dylan: Uhhh – either a hundred thirty six or a hundred and forty two.

[…]

Interviewer 2: … Is it true that you’ve changed your name, and if so, what was your real name?

Dylan: My real name was Kunezevitch, and I changed it to … uh … to avoid obvious … uh … relatives that come up to you in different parts of the country, and … uh … want tickets for, tickets to the concerts and stuff like that.

Interviewer 2: It was Kunezevitch?

Dylan: Kunezevitch, yes.

Interviewer 1: That was the first or the last name?

Dylan: That was the first name. [Laughter and applause] I don’t really want to tell you what the last name was.

[…]

Interviewer 3: Bob? Do you have any movie plans coming up in the near future? Dylan: Yeah.

Interviewer3: What would you like to do?

Dylan: (aside) Uh, she’s very excited! Uh, it … uh … just make a movie.

Interviewer3: Would you play yourself or would you actually act, do something different than you are?

Dylan: No, I’m gonna play my mother [Laughter …]

Interviewer 3: What would you call the movie – any idea?

Dylan: Uh, No … Oh … Mother Revisited.

Dylan’s gift for straight-face repartee reveals what is socially determined in the question through an excess of definition or weirdness that blows the questioners’ circuits. He divests the interviewer’s words of their conventional supports, and reveals how coercive the questions actually are. In so doing, he both lays bare how desperate is the journalist’s blind need for definition and fact, while also showing how far this is bound up with paranoid fantasy and normative pressure. The interviewer is left like a cartoon character, panicking in mid-air as the ground disappears beneath his feet. Certainly, he is unable to emulate Dylan’s own virtuosity or agility in improvising, as the singer jumps stag-like from remark to remark, often capping himself in the process (‘No, I’m gonna play my mother’).

Undoubtedly the answers can be taken merely as trivial word-play bent on dismantling the generic apparatus of the interview, but there is also more going on. Dylan’s answers betray a mind intuitively working beneath the surface, often registering like sonar some hitherto undisclosed aspect while radically and secretly diverting the course of the discussion. Like Hamlet’s words or the free associative improvisations of Lenny Bruce, his rejoinders often carry a mysterious arsenal of implication. Nat Hentoff in March 1966 asks him how he gets his kicks these days, and Dylan replies: ‘I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick me’ (a fair enough account of his predicament, when one thinks of it). ‘And that’s the way you get your kicks?’ continues Hentoff, to which Dylan replies ‘No. Then I forgive them. That’s where my kicks come in’ (a fair enough parody of the middle-American Judeo-Christian ethic for the interviewer to chew on, when one thinks of it) (Artur, 321). Again in Los Angeles he is asked:

Interviewer 1: What does the word protest mean to you?

Dylan: To me? It means – uh – uh – singing, you know, when you don’t really want to sing.

Dylan gives the interviewer a more literal answer than he can handle: a protest singer is someone who sings under protest, under constraint … But though the facetious absurdity of the answer does its business on the surface, it is again true that there is a paradoxical underlying truth here, should the interviewer be capable of hearing it. After all, Dylan could be said to have spent so much of 1964 and 1965 cuffed to his former material. He was indeed someone singing what and when ‘you don’t really want to sing’. Such answers involve an abrupt shift of direction, a rapid change of co-ordinates. The exchanges resemble a card game in which Dylan backs himself to deal words and turn them over, trumping his opponent.

At times, though, Dylan’s attitude can be more openly exasperated or dismissive. Visibly weary, his answers at Los Angeles are much more astringent:

Interviewer 4: Do you really feel the things that you write and sing?

Dylan (riled): What is there to feel? Name me some thing […]

Interviewer 1: We are talking about standard emotions – we are talking about pain, or remorse, or love … do you experience those?

Dylan: I have none of those feelings at all.

Interviewer: What sort of feelings do you have when you write a song? […]

Dylan: I don’t have to explain my feelings. I’m not on trial.

[…]

Interviewer 5: Why are you putting us, and the rest of the world on so?

Dylan: I’m not, I’m just trying to answer your questions – you know – as good as you can ask them.

Dylan is still conducting an anti-interview, but is now needled into direct confrontation. His hostility is directed against the interview game itself. His answers target the set-up whereby he is supposed to owe an answer to questions that are stupid, intrusive, unanswerable, or badly framed. What appeared breezily zany and surreal now seems bitingly appropriate to a situation where genuine questions are not being asked – where journalists who have never heard the songs meaninglessly quiz him over and again about his methods, his intentions, his sincerity, his background, his politics, his earnings, his spending, his taste in cars, his haircut, his appearance, his drug use, the draft, the war, other singers, his thoughts on folk-rock and protest and other musical genres, his opinions on Danish girls and the Green Berets (‘I was thinking of joining them if they want me’ [Artur, 358]), on his possible status as a leader of the youth or of ‘Singers With A Message’, and whether he feels the songs, or means them.

In this context, Dylan is intriguing because he appears all at the same time unprotected and in control, highly sensitised yet wholly impervious. He is constructed as a monster of fame, to be poked, prodded, and locked up within the sort of cultural clichés that his work essentially unpicks. His answers imply that the only sane recourse is not to mime dialogue or offer ‘opinion’, so much as to put the skids under the whole process. Ironic side-spin, more or less concealed, is one element in his armoury in 1965, as when he imitates the nice young man with the High Sheriff’s lady in Don’t Look Back while her sons (‘David and Steven’ who have left their ‘terribly important’ exam revision) writhe in eviscerating embarrassment. In the encounter with the unimpressed Time magazine reporter in the same film, Dylan is openly confrontational. But in both kinds of case, he might be said to resemble one of the Gunsmoke cowboys or the anti-heroes that fuelled his adolescent imagination, and our investment is often to will his triumphant escape. He eludes a bum rap by using his wits to evade his captors and leave them tied up in their own ropes.

In the early days, though, humour had been a fundamental way of claiming attention rather than deflecting it (although it has always been integral to the songs). In the Greenwich Village coffee houses, it was a key resource in winning over his audience. Dave Van Ronk memorably described Dylan on stage:

Back then, he always seemed to be winging it, free-associating, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever seen onstage … He had a stage persona that I can only compare to Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Little Fellow’. He was a very kinetic performer, he never stood still, and he had all these nervous mannerisms and gestures. He was obviously quaking in his boots a lot of the time, but he made that part of the show. There would be a one-liner, a mutter, a mumble, another one-liner, a slam at the guitar. Above all, his sense of timing was uncanny: he would get all of these pseudoclumsy bits of business going, fiddling with harmonica rack and things like that, and he could put an audience in stitches without saying a word.3

Until the mid-60s, improvised humour was artfully employed to link the viewer to someone who cultivated the sense of being unguardedly at stake on stage, whose intensity and authenticity as a per...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part One Themes
• Part Two The 1960s
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index