Dylan Bob - Dylan : a biography

BOB SPITZ

DYLAN

A Biography

With a discography by
Jeff Friedman

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

For

Reid Boates

who presented the challenge,

and

Jenny Canick

who gave me the love and

encouragement to see it through

CONTENTS

Note: Some images in this e-book are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

The worst tragedy for a poet
is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Jean Cocteau
Le Rappel a lOrdre

No, 18,000 people yelling isnt
that much of a thing. Its
nothing new. See, I used to
sit in the dark and
dream about it.

Bob Dylan 1974

Tel Aviv, Israel

September 5, 1987

Damn that Arab sun! It was worse than hotit was a curse! All morning long the shop owners on Dizengoff fanned themselves with an almost stubborn perversity. Egypts revenge, they gibbered to a clientele of mostly geriatric browsers,... for the Ten Plagues. But their humor was deflated by the miserable conditions. The metallic drone of air conditioners, pressed into twenty-four-hour service, thrummed a subtropical fugue motif. Outside, ribbons of steam danced off the molten streets, and every hour or so a truck stopped long enough to help free disgruntled pedestrians who wriggled in the viscous tar like flies on a no-pest strip.

By noon, the city sagged under the roiling heat. The only signs of life were low-flying Phantoms and F-16s, back from hourly reconaissance missions over the Negev. And the steady procession of teenagers who, like their ancestors en route to Canaan, inched wearily past the boutiques toward Hayarkon Parkat the north end of the city.

Was this any way for the Chosen People to live? Especially after waiting all this time for the Messiah? For twenty-five years theyd expected Himtwenty-five years! And all the time they remained faithful, undoubting, singing his praise. Then, when he finally decides to show up

Damn that heat!

In fact, hed shown up much later than expected, on, of all things, a sightseeing bus from Cairo. Looking olive-tan and Sephardic, with a bosky growth of beard clinging to his chin, hair out like Struwelpeter, Bob Dylan arrived in Israel resembling an extra in a Charlton Heston epic. Hed been scheduled to fly in directly from Brussels, but a flight of fancy had diverted him to Egypts Nile delta, near Luxor, in search of the biblical prison where Joseph was held and the site where Abraham took Sarah before the Pharoah.

Dylan had never played in Israel before, although his popularity there was enormous. In Israel, he was a true folk hero, a living legend celebrated under two different names: Dylan, the elusive superstar, and Zimmerman, the elusive Jew. Robert Zimmerman one of the newspapers gushed with anticipation, the people of Israel, your countrymen, welcome you! After more than twenty-five years, Bob Dylan had come to perform. Hed agreed to play a pair of concerts in Israel, and the events were cause for celebration.

A good part of the commotion stemmed from Dylans peerage. The Sixties cachet was strong among the ranks of Israels teenagers who had come to romanticize a past that was alive in their present. The war in Lebanon had revived the familiar symbols of internal struggle: PEACENOT WAR signs were plastered on adobe-colored office buildings and schools; students trained to be conscientious objectors and plotted against the establishment; and all the movements old anthems were strummed and hummed to protest what Israelis had begun referring to as our Vietnam. Bob Dylans sudden appearance was interpreted as a public gesture of support for the country and its struggle for survival.

In that spirit, Dylan was accorded the type of reception normally reserved for visiting heads of state. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, up to his yarmulke in war plans, put aside an hour to meet with him. Mayor Shlomo Lahat prepared to personally guide him around Tel Aviv. City officials arranged a visit to the wailing wall in Bobs honor. And the administration planned for him to attend a traditional Shabbas dinner with prominent leaders. Israel hadnt witnessed such an extravaganza since... well, since Barbra Streisands visit in the early 1970s.

Except... who in his right mind would expect Bob Dylan to respond? How could they think hed conform to the whim of politicians or allow himself to be paraded around for people to gawk at, like a trained seal? He never gave a thought to what was expected of him never. Whenever he sensed contentment, whenever he began to observe a staleness about his work, or perhaps even a lapse into selfparody, chaos followed. Hed hook a U-turn and race madly toward some distant beacon, some Circean inner voice that beckoned him, without regard for approval or hostile criticism.

At the age of forty-six, Bob Dylan could already claim more phases to his career than most people twice his age, always conquering each before discarding them like an old toy. He had transformed folk music from a square, suffocating dirge into a frothing torrent of new ideas. He had reinvented rock n roll, exploding teenagers puerile fantasies, the bullshit moon-and-June, yeah-yeah-yeah utopianism it thrived on, and geezed them with the hip, acid-tongued abstractions of a paranoid world. He had converted to Christianity and became one of the most controversial apostles of fundamentalist cant. Persistent rumors of wanton drug-taking, sadism, a fake death-defying accident, adulterous affairs, wild ambition, and the spontaneous, go-go tempo of superstardom only added a delicious dash of mystery to his legend and made him seem all the more controversialDylanesque!

Reevaluating his kaleidoscopic career, Time had written in 1985: There was hardly a beat for transition, just an amphetamine rush of allusive imagery and electric boogie fused by will and some dark unknowable divining spirit. Bob Dylan not only lived on the margin, he was the margin.

The margin. It seems almost too narrow an appraisal of a man who, for years, pushed music and life to epic levels of imagination. Bob Dylans whole life has transcended margins and constraints in an attempt to move beyond the ruled lines of consciousness into the bohemian fringe of fantasy and illusion. For some other rock star, playing the Holy Land might have been a climax. But for Dylan, it was just another gig.

To thousands of fans, however, the impending concert was a spiritual event. Not even bad pressthe news articles deploring Bobs mannershad cast a pall over the celebration. His refusal to meet with Shimon Peres, his failure to attend the local functions, had insulted Israeli officials, and the papers were full of condemnation. But the fans themselves were forgiving. After all, Bob Dylan was the original rebel. Hed practically created the counterculture, epitomizing the American antihero who struggled to break free from almost every value hed been bred to accept. Fuck the Prime Minister! The fact that Bob had come to Israel to perform was enough to placate their fierce national pride.

By six p.m., the streets around northern Tel Aviv looked like a reenactment of the Exodus. Hundreds, thousands of people in bleached Jordache jeans, Gali sneakers on practically every foot schlepped along on foot or hopped out of double-parked Suburus, Citrens, Peugeots, Volvos, and Mercedes. Every five minutes the red-and-white Egged buses groaned to the corner, depositing more people into the park. Security police frisked potential terrorists for weaponsnot the least of which were the Jaffa oranges that had been used a month earlier to pommel Rod Stewart.

Inside the park, vendors competed like pushy garment salesmen for the crowds spare shekels. Teenagers waved silk-screened T-shirts in everyones face, shouting Dee-lon! Bobe Dee-lon! Stands selling hummus, falafel, and shwarma did a brisk trade. And drug dealers whose fist-sized chunks of hash were discounted due to the invasion of Lebanonworked the shadows like fireflies.