Life And Life Only: Dylan Makes 61
by Mick Gold

He’s been recording for forty years, forty-three albums, never-ending tours. There’s something Shakespearean about the complexity of his work; so many points of view expressed so vividly, but where is the author’s voice? His intensely moral outlook is sung in so many frameworks: the stripped-down verities of folk-blues; the self-righteousness of ‘Masters of War’; the visionary ache of ‘Chimes of Freedom’ and ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’; the lysergic surrealism of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’; the exhausted amphetamine metaphysics of ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’.

The contrasts continue with the bleak parables of John Wesley Harding, set in a landscape constructed from black & white Westerns and Israelite watchtowers; the corniness of Nashville Skyline, wallowing in simple sentiments as unselfconsciously as a hog in shit; the picaresque confessional tone of Blood On The Tracks; the sensual Semitic muse of Desire; the brooding menace of Slow Train Coming, devoid of doubt or forgiveness; the dreamy terminal ramblings of Time Out Of Mind. This baroque edifice is continually subverted by a cracked laugh: ‘The love of my fans? John Lennon was shot by a fan who loved him.’

In suburban Wembley I was 16 when my sister showed me a feature in the Evening Standard about Bob Dylan’s forthcoming concert at the Festival Hall (17 May 1964). I liked the photo. Freewheelin’ had just entered the album charts. I bought it, dear reader, I bought a commitment that lasted my life-time. I was amazed by the poetry, politics, wit and musical exuberance. The deadpan sarcasm of ‘Oxford Town’ – ‘Two men died ‘neath the Mississippi moon. Somebody better investigate soon.’ The deluge of imagery on ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, which was balanced by the simplicity of ‘Girl from the North Country’.

And then there was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. I had somehow picked up the cliché that it was a ‘Civil Rights anthem’. But the more I listened to it, the less I heard Civil Rights. Instead I heard a series of oddly allusive images: doves, cannon balls, mountains washed to the sea, like a series of broken Biblical dreams. And the ‘answer’ the song seemed to provide to the many questions it raised – war, racism, the individual at odds with society – was utterly ambiguous; either the answer was so obvious it was right in your face, or the answer was as intangible as the wind.

After the romantic colour image of Dylan and Suze Rotolo on Freewheelin’, the black & white cover of The Times They Are A-Changin’ looked gaunt and haunted. By this time I had seen Mother Courage on TV, and realised that ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ could be called Brechtian – an insight into social mechanisms, songs about injustice that represented southern racists as another form of victim.

‘North Country Blues’ was even more impressive: the way in which Dylan’s rasping voice took on the role of a miner’s wife looking back on her life, ‘the cardboard filled windows and old men on the benches’ conveyed a sense of economic decline and small-town emptiness in two concise images. ‘It’s much cheaper down in the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing’ conveyed the forces of global capitalism and the decline of the American working class in a few words. It was so simple, it was breathtaking.

Another Side Of Bob Dylan threw me sideways. Dylan yammering away, one long complex song after another without any respite, or musical variety. It sounded oddly naked, Dylan without any musical clothes. He had dozens of images and ideas, but hadn’t found a musical language for them. He’d worn out the musical idioms of folk-blues but found nothing to replace them.

‘To Ramona’ was both generous and lyrical, it sounded like the way I would like to address a girl friend, if I ever got a girl friend. (By now I was 17, and seriously worried by lack of sexual progress.) ‘All I Really Want to Do’ was weirdly egalitarian. Through strange yodelling sounds borrowed from Jimmie Rodgers, Dylan conveyed a sense that sexual politics were A-Changin’. ‘Chimes of Freedom’ was a staggering downpour of images, a pantheistic account of imprisonment and release – ‘Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless, confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse, an’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe, an’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing’.

There was a sense of humanity in these lines that went beyond broad left politics, that embraced both neurotic students and vagrants sleeping on park benches, a community of the alienated. ‘Ballad in Plain D’ was awful. It was Dylan’s attack on Suze Rotolo’s sister who had thrown him out of her apartment, and whom he blamed for destroying his relationship. It was so mean-spirited, so self-justifying in such a pompous way. It was a surprise to realise that Dylan could fail on such a scale – maybe he was human after all. Dissatisfied, I drifted off listening to this self-pitying dirge.

Bringing It All Back Home was electric shock treatment. The speed-babble of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was as menacing and as incomprehensible as The Rolling Stones. I couldn’t make out the words but ‘twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift’ came across loud and clear. The moral certainty of CND and Civil Rights had been replaced by: ‘i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me’.

In the outside world something had been lost but, inside, even more had been gained. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was a major work of art. An intoxicating tune, images of energy and exhaustion which never went anywhere but which never stood still. ‘Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind’, Kerouac’s life on the road had somehow disappeared inside the skull.

Even more compelling (to my ears) was ‘It’s Alright, Ma’. It was endless, it was seven and a half minutes long, it turned the self-pity that marred ‘Ballad in Plain D’ into a black joke – I’m Only Bleeding. ‘Flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark… money doesn’t talk, it swears. Obscenity – who really cares?’ It was the soundtrack of a nightmare that you could still remember when you woke up. ‘It’s alright ma, it’s life and life only’ suggested that this verbal vomit was also a survival kit. Dylan would… we all would survive this madness.

On the radio I started to hear this strange song. It was a cascade of organ chords with Dylan shouting, ‘How does it feel? How does it feel?’ over and over again. I scanned every inch of Melody Maker and the music press, I learned that Dylan had made a six minute single but CBS were not sure that ‘it would be right for Britain or the European market’. They had no plans to release it. Obsessed, I was glued to the radio for hours on end with my finger on the record button of a primitive tape recorder. Occasionally I succeeded in capturing a few seconds of distorted sound. ‘How does it feel? How does it feel?’ Dylan kept shouting. I wasn’t sure if he was sneering at some loser in free-fall, or if he wanted us to share his exhilaration.

Fresh gossip about Dylan’s lethal personality suggested it was the former, but even as his voice got nastier, the music became more seductive, more apocalyptic. The distinction between gangsters and statesmen was breaking down. The song was trying to tell me something important, but I couldn’t make out the words! In a music shop in Charing Cross Road I found a copy of the sheet music. Napoleon in rags and the language that he used? I eyed the down-and-outs in the alleys of Soho. Of course! When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

I finally understood! You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. There was something exultant in his voice as he denounced this rich kid. In some Zen-like moment of illumination I realised that Dylan’s voice was sweeping us all over the edge. As if he was hurling himself into the abyss between success and failure. To lose your illusions was both frightening and liberating.

CBS managed to release the single. The album that followed was even more extraordinary. ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ fused a gothic organ to jagged horror movie piano chords. It was quite electrifying, ‘Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is…(sotto voce)..do you?’ The song implied Dylan had seen through the phoney values of our academic system: ‘You’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks, with great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks’. It was so insidiously non-specific, done with a sneer and a gorgeous backing band. ‘You’re very well read, it’s well known.’

1966. Dylan toured England with a bunch of rock musicians. People paid money to boo. I went to university. For the first time I was confronted by earnest students with acoustic guitars who accused Dylan of ‘selling out’ folk music. I was puzzled – whom had he betrayed? Had Muddy Waters ‘betrayed’ the cotton pickers of Mississippi by going electric? Within a year, these students were forming bands and thumping out electric versions of ‘With God On Our Side’.

Blonde On Blonde? I knew that Kasimir Malevich had painted White On White. Was this the Hollywood version? Suprematism meets Jean Harlow? Someone said the initials spelt Bob. The cover photo looked blurred to me. Didn’t anyone else notice? Was Bob losing his focus? In those days record shops had small booths at the back where you could sample the album of your choice. This one cost 50 shillings, an unprecedented sum. I went into a booth and heard this weird sound. The first song seemed to be recorded by a stoned Salvation Army band. Then it was a blues band who’d gone mad, all the precision and elegance of Highway 61 had been replaced by a blues band having a nervous breakdown.

I stumbled out of the booth disorientated and didn’t buy it. For days that weird sound stayed with me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Finally I had to buy the record, there was something insanely memorable about this sound. It took a long time to get used to these songs. They were complex yet abstract. ‘Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously’ – could that be Dylan? Or some put-down of his ‘rival’, Donovan? Could it be Dylan sneering at me and the rest of his hung-up audience? Eventually it seemed to resolve itself. There were grand themes of scorn and loss, of transience and eternity, of possessive relationships interspersed with emotional chaos. There were strange mood swings where time would accelerate, or slow to a tenth of its normal speed.

American society metamorphosed into a thuggish comic strip – ‘The senator came down here, showing ev’ryone his gun, handing out free tickets to the wedding of his son’. Acid? Hash? Speed? Heroin? People seriously debated which drug had inspired which song. But no drug could explain those exquisite moments that connected the mundane to the sublime – ‘We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.’ It wasn’t as immediately accessible as Highway 61, but eventually I had to acknowledge that the genius had done it again. Where could he go next?

Over the handlebars. The details were sketchy but Melody Maker reported his motorcycle wheel had locked, he’d flown through the air and fractured a vertebra. He would need a long time to recuperate. Everybody listened to Sgt. Pepper with its grandiose vision of society as a huge Lonely Hearts Club, with George Martin’s amazing production, those kaleidoscopic sounds and orchestral climaxes. Everybody must get stoned.

I had a girl friend at last. In winter she wore a coat that made her look like Suze Rotolo on the cover of Freewheelin’. I was smoking a lot of dope but still getting good grades, maybe everything would be alright. Dylan had been silent for a year and a half since his crash – an eternity in an era when the Beatles released a new album every six months. Rumours proliferated that he was paralysed, he was a vegetable, he was on a drug cure.

An underground newspaper reprinted an account by New York reporter Mike Iachetta who stumbled through the undergrowth in Woodstock to confront Dylan with these stories. ‘They’re all true!’ replied Dylan with a grin. Fragments of what purported to be new Dylan songs appeared in International Times. They resembled brain-damaged nursery rhymes – ‘well you can tell ev’rybody down in ol’ Frisco, tell ‘em Tiny Montgomery says hello’. Photos appeared of Dylan with a bunch of musicians playing at a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie. They all had moustaches, and wore baggy 1930s suits. Strange.

In January 1968, snow covered The Lanes of Brighton when John Wesley Harding appeared in the record shops, sporting a grey photo of Dylan on the front with three weird-looking men. It looked like the graduation photo from a mental institution. The back cover was also grey, and carried a story by Dylan about three kings who were trying to get into Mr Dylan’s new record. They consult an oracle called Frank.

‘And just how far would you like to go in?’ asks Frank. ‘Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there,’ said the first chief. This parable seemed to be Dylan’s snide enquiry to me and the other foot soldiers in the army of critics, journalists and freelance Dylan interpreters. Just how far did we want to go?

The music had a grey, monochrome quality. A band devoid of electricity or psychedelic flourishes. Dylan’s voice was clipped, shorn of extravagant metaphors. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ was two and a half minutes long but suggested an epic sense of civilisations faltering and falling. The understatement made it more ominous. A friend produced a Bible and pointed to chapter 21 of the Book of Isaiah and convinced us the two horsemen are bringing the message that ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.’

It felt like a winter album, set in some bleak frontier town: part Old West, part Old Testament, where characters from a B movie of the soul – a joker, a thief, a drifter, a landlord, a hobo, an immigrant – suffer the consequences of their actions. ‘There must be some way out of here…’ but the only exit the album suggested was in the last two songs – an exit into domesticity, into something safe and warm.

In April 1968 Martin Luther King was shot dead. In June it was Bobby Kennedy’s turn. Stoned and confused, we turned on the radio and John Peel began to play ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’. Even though this song had been recorded nearly three years earlier, it sounded insanely topical. ‘Well if I die on top of the hill, and if I don’t make it, you know my baby will.’

Was it Martin Luther King who died on top of the hill, after seeing the Promised Land? Was Dylan singing about the orphaned ideals of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King? At the end of the track, Peel started reading aloud the sleeve notes of Highway 61 Revisited. ‘We are singing today of the WIPE-OUT GANG. The WIPE-OUT GANG buys, owns and operates the Insanity Factory.’ Peel went on talking in a paranoid way: ‘It looks like the wipe-out gang have finally got here…’

Things were getting weirder, but Dylan was getting more mellow. Walt Disney died and Nashville Skyline had a colour photo of Dylan smiling contentedly. Had someone switched their brains? The music seemed both stately and simple-minded. ‘If there’s a poor boy on the street, then let him have my seat, ‘cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.’ Dylan was telling us he’d settled down. The scruffy Huck Finn character on the cover of his first album was now depicted as another person.

One of Dylan’s accomplishments had been the radical re-invention of himself on each new album. Now Self Portrait accomplished the dissolution of Bob Dylan’s ego. To call his album Self Portrait and then fill it with corny versions of other people’s hits was to use the Middle of the Road as his most radical stylistic move. There was even a recording of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from the Isle of Wight where you could hear Dylan forget the words of his own greatest song. ‘What is this shit?’ asked Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone.

I got a guilty thrill from Self Portrait because I found some of the music gorgeous. ‘Early Morning Rain’, ‘Let It Be Me’ gave me goose pimples, as if Dylan had a higher purpose; he was teaching us not to be afraid of our emotions. He was embracing vulgarity and sentimentality as part of life. Maybe he was acknowledging that the terminal ‘cool’ of the mid 60s was a kind of death trip. ‘i know there’re some people terrified of the bomb. but there are other people terrified t be seen carrying a modern screen magazine’ he had written on the back of Bringing It All Back Home.

He successfully dissolved the myth of Dylan – the avatar, the prophet, the spokesman of his generation. New Morning sounded like a bored married man trying to do an honest day’s work in the studio. The one quality Dylan had never previously lacked was conviction. ‘Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”, that must be what it’s all about.’ There was a slight crack in his voice as he sang the word ‘must’. Was he trying to convince us or himself? Perhaps he was suggesting that being a family man with kids was as illusory an achievement as being the spokesman of his generation.

It was hard to relate these songs to the snapshot on the back of the album – a 20- year-old Dylan in a recording studio with Victoria Spivey. ‘I is another’. In ‘Day of the Locusts’, Dylan sang an account of picking up an honorary degree at Princeton University, and he reached for that old apocalyptic imagery with almost palpable desperation. ‘The man standin’ next to me, his head was exploding, well, I was prayin’ the pieces wouldn’t fall on me.’ ‘We’ve got Dylan back,’ wrote a relieved Ralph Gleason in Rolling Stone. By this stage I no longer knew who Dylan was, so how could we ever get him back?

I thought of Auden’s obituary for Sigmund Freud: ‘To us he is no longer a person/ Now but a whole climate of opinion.’ But that gave Dylan a coherence he had eschewed, made him the cornerstone of an ideology when his ‘message’ simply seemed to boil down to ‘Stay free from petty jealousies, live by no man’s code’. He was living in New York with his wife and five children. A lunatic called A.J. Weberman went through his garbage at night, and published the results to prove that Dylan was a millionaire, Dylan was a junkie, Dylan had purchased extensive stock options in the military-industrial complex. We could no longer identify with Dylan. Increasingly,
A J Weberman seemed to resemble every obsessive fan hunting the real Bob Dylan.

I began to understand that what started as a journey of discovery had turned into a labyrinth. Dylan was six years older than me, so I had thought of him as some mythical older brother reporting back on how he saw the world, and his frame of mind. But he had done his work so fast and so radically that he had sketched out not a path but a universe, where every point of view contained its own opposite. From the stoned relativism of Highway 61 Revisited to the moral denunciation of ‘Masters of War’. From the free-floating hallucinations of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ to the shit-eating grin of ‘Country Pie’. From the limousine paranoia of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ to the abandoned landscape of ‘North Country Blues’. He had become his own cosmos.

The artistic maelstrom Dylan packed into those eight years would never be equalled. As Duchamp said of the early years of Surrealism, ‘It was the youth of the entire world.’ In 1971 Bowie made a plea to Dylan on Hunky Dory: ‘Give us back our unity, Give us back our family, You’re every nation’s refugee, Don’t leave us with their sanity.’ But the man himself had vanished, photographed like a ghost at Mariposa Folk Festival, gone to Durango with Sam Peckinpah.

Then after years of seclusion, raising children (and waiting for his contract with Albert Grossman to expire), he decided it was time to carry his goods to the marketplace again. Planet Waves arrived wearing Rimbaud-like sleeve notes: ‘Wild! Drinking the blood of Innocent people, Innocent Lambs! The Wretched of the Earth, My brothers of the flood, Cities of the flesh – Milwaukee, Ann Arbour, Chicago, Bismarck, South Dakota, Duluth!’ This was the sound of Dylan mustering his courage for his biggest tour, 39 shows in 21 cities in six weeks.

When Dylan hit the road, President Nixon was holed up in the White House devoting all his time and energy to stopping the US Senate from getting their hands on the White House tapes – Nixon’s recordings of himself instructing his Chief of Staff to obstruct the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in. Dylan and The Band rattled round America giving solid, uninspired versions of their greatest hits. But in ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ Dylan sang night after night that ‘even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked’. It was as if the song had been written for that moment.

The cry of ‘We’ve got Dylan back!’ gained new fervour after the genius of Blood On The Tracks. I’d finally split up with my girl friend after many anguished separations followed by reconciliation, forgiveness followed by recrimination. Miraculously, Blood On The Tracks seemed to view love through a prism, constantly revealing new insights and new perspectives.

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ captured the paradox of relationships perfectly. Tangled Up was involvement, Blue was loss. The two are inseparable. Relationships always involve surrendering part of your own ego, part of your freedom, to connect with another. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ was a picaresque narrative that never ended. The singer and his lover are falling in love, falling out, falling all over the place, lost to each other in time and space, yet constantly meeting up again. The last verse seems to lead straight back to the first. It is a relationship that can never be resolved, but can never be broken off either.

‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ wove intoxicating images of ‘Flowers on the hillside, bloomin’ crazy, crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme’ together with a sense of the loss that all relationships leave in their wake. ‘But I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass, in the ones I love, yer gonna make me lonesome when you go’. Commitment was inseparable from pain. ‘Like your smile and your fingertips, like the way that you move your hips, I like the cool way you look at me, everything about you is bringing me misery’.
‘Idiot Wind’ switched from generosity to contempt. ‘You’re an idiot babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.’ But the perspective had changed from an emotional close-up to a telephoto shot of the whole nation – from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol. The Idiot Wind was more than one man casting a hex, it was the press, it was Watergate, it was the daytime TV show of modern America.

Dylan’s album seemed to revolve around the breakdown of his marriage, but he was energized. He summoned up a sense of the community that folk music had once embodied, and went on the road with Roger McGuinn, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, and David Bowie’s lead guitarist to celebrate America’s Bicen-tennial. This Bohemian gypsy poetic community was playing Bohemian gypsy songs. Scarlet Rivera’s violin (‘Scarlet O’Hara’ as Dylan enthusiastically introduced her on stage) lay at the heart of the music.

Sinuous Semitic melodic lines lay at the heart of his album Desire, Dylan’s voice lifting ‘in Hebraic cantillation never before heard in US song, ancient blood singing’ as Allen Ginsberg described the sound in his sleeve notes. ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ seemed to be addressing the daughter of a gypsy king. ‘His voice it trembles as he calls out for another plate of food’ summoned up a society that was precarious, patriarchal but with an erotic heart.

Desire was a key term for the Surrealists as they plotted to transform the world by unleashing their dreams. In Freudian terms, the pleasure principle triumphed over the reality principle. (When the Surrealists published their map of the world in 1936, Easter Island became the biggest country, while the United States vanished completely.) One problem in opening your heart up solely to Desire was that by the mid 1970s it branded you as sexist, not sexy – a distinction that both Dylan and Spinal Tap struggled to come to terms with. It was impossible to decide whether he was being ironic when he asked his latest conquest: ‘Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow, do you understand my pain?’ in his ballad ‘Is Your Love In Vain?’, on Desire’s follow-up Street-Legal.

The Rolling Thunder Tour wasn’t just a bicentennial knees-up, or an attempt to spring Rubin Carter from jail. It was also an improvisational psychodrama filmed by Dylan and Howard Alk in an attempt to stage the American equivalent of Shoot the Pianist or Les Enfants du Paradis. Not surprisingly, the music in Renaldo and Clara was great but ‘all the women ended up playing whores’ – to quote Joan Baez. Ronnie Hawkins played Bob Dylan, David Blue played a pinball machine and talked about those good ol’ days back in the Village, while Bob Dylan played Renaldo, whoever he was. The film reached an embarrassing climax in a scene where Joan Baez and Sara Dylan wrestled over Dylan’s skinny torso while he consumed a bottle of brandy.

His wife left him. Newspapers ridiculed his avant-garde home movie. He got religion. The first time I heard Slow Train Coming I had this prickling sensation at the back of my neck. Mark Knopfler’s insidious guitar lines and Dylan’s fire and brimstone vision felt totally convincing. ‘I don't care about economy, I don't care about astronomy’ - Dylan seemed to be rejecting both Marxism and astrology as ways of making sense of the world.

Liking the record posed problems for a Jewish atheist like me. Nick Cave came up with a brilliant interpretation by suggesting that Slow Train Coming was the first record that did justice to the sheer nastiness of Christianity. This may have been true, but also the album wasn’t a break with Dylan’s past. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was a moment of moral denunciation. ’When the Ship Comes In’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ were written in the language of Biblical parables. Also, there was a sense of inevitability that after blues and country music Dylan would wholeheartedly embrace the third great steam of American traditional songs – Gospel.

Just like Elvis, his real religion was the music. But there was a glint of racial malice in Dylan’s account of ‘all that foreign oil controlling American soil’. Who were the guilty men? ‘Sheikhs walkin’ around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings, deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris’. His language was oddly reminiscent of neo-Nazi tirades about World Jewish Conspiracies. By the beginning of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s decade, the bizarre ego-games of Renaldo and Clara and the fundamentalist nastiness of Saved had thrown old fans like me off the trail. The scent had gone cold. ‘The ghost too was more than one person’ – as he had pointed out in Tarantula.

The 1980s were bad for Bob. Bad movies. Bad haircuts. Bad records… and yet, there were still moments of power that wormed their way into my unconscious to join Mr Jones, the Idiot Wind, the exhausted north country miners, the whole ghastly crew. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ perfectly encapsulated a Blakean vision of everyday events being blessed, of holding infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. Still more haunting was the spectre of Blind Willie McTell, the dead bluesman who was invoked to bear witness against the air-conditioned nightmares of modern America.

Through a sequence of sounds and smells and images – magnolia blooming, rebel yells, plantations burning, the ghosts of slavery ships – Dylan constructed his most sublime vision of American history. He seemed to suggest that the agony of slavery, and the dignity of the blues that it spawned, morally dwarfed contemporary America. But this masterpiece was left off of the album Infidels in favour of a clunky Zionist dirge (‘Neighborhood Bully’) with the strange excuse that he ‘didn’t think he recorded it right’. His genius might be intact, but all sense of quality control had gone.

And then he was on the road again – as if, from 1988, he was re-incarnated as a travelling musical salesman in the spirit of James Brown or B.B. King: one hundred and twenty shows a year, the hardest working metaphysician in showbiz. ‘…don’t be bewildered by the Never Ending Tour chatter. there was a never-ending tour, but it ended’ – he wrote in the sleevenotes of World Gone Wrong. On that album, he recorded an old ballad, ‘Delia’, and conjured up an almost magical sense of loss from the recurring chorus of ‘All the friends I ever had are gone’. It was the same chilling mix of hope and emptiness that I had first heard on Freewheelin’.

In February 1990, I saw Dylan at Hammersmith Odeon. He was brilliant. With guitarist G.E. Smith he had a sound that was supple, yet powerful. By the end of the show, his voice was disintegrating; but through intonation, through sheer will-power he could still inflect the world in a vocal phrase. I saw him again in the same venue a year later, and he was awful. A broken voice snarling out broken lines tangled up in phlegm. Everything was broken. I gazed in disbelief at the audience’s adulation – an army of sad middle-aged men cheering in the darkness.

What strange sect had I joined? Were we doomed to keep trying to believe in Bob, because if we gave up, we would somehow cease to believe in our own lives, in our own struggles and our own dreams? ‘When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?’ sang Bob over and over again. The song was so awful that I was hoping they would come and get him, and put him out of his misery. Had I become Judas?

Late Shakespeare, late Beethoven, late Dylan? Time Out Of Mind’s terminal ramblings seemed to bubble up out of the swamp of Daniel Lanois’s echo-laden production. A fatalistic far-away feel permeated the album, from the opening words ‘I’m walking through streets that are dead’ – to the 17 minute Alzheimer-bound story-telling of ‘Highlands’. A tale without any beginning or end or point, escaping from close encounters with avenging feminist waitresses, sustained only by simple-minded clichés; ‘Well my heart’s in the Highlands, gentle and fair.’
I found it touchingly remote. A narrative driven by a Charley Patton guitar riff but without any destination – except for those illusory Highlands. On ‘Not Dark Yet’, he recorded his most moving meditation on death. ‘Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day’. A wonderful sense of transience and stillness in the words and the quietly repetitive piano chords.

‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.’ In interviews, Dylan claimed he had read those words in the Psalms, or somewhere in the Bible, but he was never able to pin down the quotation. (In fact, it appears to be not from the Bible at all, but from the writings of Ellen G. White (1827-1915), the ‘prophetess’ of the Seventh Day Adventist church. Ed.) When critics wrote that Time Out Of Mind was Dylan writing his own epitaph, he responded: ‘It doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s the one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it?’

By the autumn of 2000 I was a family man with two daughters. One of them was 17 – the same age as me when I fell in love with Dylan’s bitter-sweet voice. Unfortunately every time I tried to share with her the beauty of Bob Dylan’s music, she left the room denouncing the sound of ‘an old man groaning like an adenoidal donkey’. I went back to Wembley (the suburb I’d grown up in) to see the great man still at work. I thought he was wonderful, though his voice walked a tightrope between ‘sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s description in 1971) and ‘a mucoidal otherworldly husk’ (Alex Petridis’s description in 2001).

He and his band tore into the opening number, ‘Duncan And Brady’, with self-deprecating grins as they over-emphasised the chorus: ‘He been on the job too-oo lo-o-o-ong!’ He hammed up the old-time sentiments of ‘Searching For A Soldier’s Grave’ with total conviction. He sang his first song – ‘Song to Woody’ – and he sang his last – ‘Things Have Changed’ – and somehow they seemed like different bits of one song. When he did ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, I realised that the president of the United States who sometimes had to stand naked was no longer Tricky Dicky holed up inside the White House. It was Bill Clinton eyeing Monica Lewinski’s thong.

Columbia Records announced a new Dylan album would be released on 11th September 2001 – "Love And Theft". Those three words filled me with foreboding. The old goat was still at it. All those love songs, all those women. Dylan appeared to cram his commitment to monogamy into seven or eight years (from the crash in 1966 to hitting the road again with The Band in 1974). Since then, he had been busy looking for love.

Nevertheless, on that fatal Tuesday, I felt compelled to visit the local Virgin store. As I left clutching my disc, I heard a radio announcing that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre had just collapsed. I started listening: ‘High water risin’, risin’ night and day, all the gold and silver are being stolen away… high water everywhere.’ Listening to Mr Dylan’s new album while watching silent images of suicide bombers blowing up the economic and military might of America, I felt like I was listening to a river of American music: hip-grinding R&B, banjos, jazz, Charley Patton. It felt like discovering a jukebox buried in a field some time between 1928 and 1958.

Dylan’s attempts to become a crooner at the age of 60 sounded embarrassing to my ears, but several songs delivered the conviction and the grace I associated with his best work. ‘Mississippi’ was another glorious account of weariness and renewal, of being trapped and breaking free. ‘Honest With Me’ sounded like an old codger happy to take his leave of the modern world. And ‘High Water (for Charley Patton)’ was appropriately apocalyptic. On the silent TV screen, the dust and rubble from the World Trade Centre was falling like snow over 4,000 bodies in Lower Manhattan. Out on Highway 5, Biblical fundamentalists were hunting for Charles Darwin. ‘“Judge says to the High Sheriff, I want him dead or alive. Either one, I don’t care.” High water everywhere.’ A few days after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, President George W Bush used the phrase ‘dead or alive’ in connection with the US getting their hands on Osama bin Laden. Old-fashioned gun law meets the new moral order.

Dylan still re-invents Bob Dylan every night. I think his voice has gone, but in a sense he was an old man when he started. ‘I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.’ he told us on the back of Freewheelin’. There’s a Joycean inclusiveness to Dylan’s many musical styles and political and spiritual constructs. Beyond the mystery and the mythology, he’s still saying Yes to America, and the universe. It’s life & life only.