Paul Morley - You Lose Yourself You Reappear: Bob Dylan and the Voices of a Lifetime

The Sunday Times Bestseller

Paul Morley

You Lose Yourself You Reappear

Bob Dylan and the Voices of a Lifetime

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021

Copyright Paul Morley, 2021

The right of Paul Morley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-9514-3

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-9515-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-9516-7

e.s.p.

Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?

Blaise Pascal (16231662)

Because of how things change, this book does not begin as I once intended it to; this was not going to be the opening line. I wasnt completely sure what the opening line was going to be in the first weeks of 2020 as I planned the initial few pages, but it would have been the start of a different kind of book. 2020 was at the time a vastly different kind of year from the testing, fretful one it became.

There were a few possible first lines I could use to set up my introduction to a certain book making some statements and speculations about where Bob Dylan was, in his mind, in my mind, and in the mind of a world that had a lot of preoccupations but that was before time and history, and just your basic domestic life, seemed to split apart and all those possible first lines were now not going to work. Not necessarily because the world had stopped, but actually because Bob Dylan hadnt. It was a good job I hadnt planned the ending of the book but decided to let that take care of itself, once the Dylan in this biography had turned up, made his presence felt and in his own way taken over.

Before the world fell apart following a ruthless revision by nature, fate or whatever you want to call the powers of the universe, back when twentieth-century momentum seemed to be continuing into the twenty-first without any outrageous signs of absolute disruption just the usual warnings, complaints and apprehensions, the unthinkable shapes and forms of climate change and global warming, the accelerating problems with social media, systemic racism and Mark Zuckerberg, a riotous, poisonous, surely doomed, unreality television president and various new kinds of accelerating generation and gender gaps this was going to be a Bob Dylan book written when it seemed he might well have produced his final album of original songs.

His album discography seemed to have stopped in 2012 with Tempest, his longest ever studio album, released a tidy fifty years after his debut album, plainly called Bob Dylan because he then needed to be clearly, unambiguously introduced; he hadnt yet paid his dues and earned his spurs as artist, star or even much more than a minor local cult. That first record didnt sink like a stone or disappear without trace, but the world was unprepared for it. Bob Dylan needed a little getting used to. His odds at the time to win the Nobel Prize in Literature within sixty years would have been astronomical, if some Las Vegas betting shop had cared to take the bet. Revered, all-conquering Americans like ONeill, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Bellow, the Big Dogs, became Nobel Laureates, not someone who mostly sang his words, apparently cheapening their effect through performance.

Pop albums at the time werent yet works with their own innate, abstract significance deserving to be titled like novels or films. Solo singers didnt have the power or even the motivation to title their own albums as though they were something other than commercial song collections. Dylan was soon working on both things, which over time would start to reduce those Nobel odds.

Fifty-eight years after Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan with little fanfare began a series of records unequalled in recording history for their artistry, adventure and ravishing ambition, Dylanologists one of the main consequences of those records logging in at the beginning of 2020 for an annual preview of events reluctantly accepted that as a new decade dawned they were unlikely to be hearing any new music from their man. It seemed this part of his discography was a settled fact, and there would be no follow-up to Tempest. His pilgrimage towards some form of nirvana was over. Songs didnt come to him like they once did. He wasnt able to boast, to tap into volatility, and reveal his soul, in quite the same way. He wasnt even so sure what had caused those songs in the first place. There was nothing he could do about it; it was bound to happen sooner or later. His thoughts were drifting elsewhere. In time, even stars burn out.

Tempest was, or so it seemed to me, a harrowing, heart-breaking last-gasp batch of buoyant pessimism, sublime divination, opaque self-reflexivity, transcendent nostalgia, stray thoughts, frayed nerves, unscheduled appointments, disaster stories, shipwrecked dreams, unpunctual adventures, tantalising elusiveness, exaggerated thought, from a place where nothing is what it seems and a chill wind is always blowing through, a place where the history of pop music goes from William Blake to John Lennon, and from Bob Dylan to Bob Dylan. On the side it gave us a few lessons in humour, even as he was still using his talents to destroy or correct the structures of world history as we know them.

As always he was everywhere present in his work, starring in his own stories, but nowhere apparent, rummaging through his memories, acting his age but a number of others as well. There was still no sign that he was ridding himself of the need to continually decipher his own life, no sense he had given up on singing the meaning of things. You seem to know whats going to happen in each and every song even before you hear it, and this sense of whats going to happen foreshadows impending doom, which has been there since he started recording albums.

Dylan, drawn to the unknown, up to no good in a good way, put forward his latest concerns which were more or less always his concerns: the world has gone wrong, time to change names and hide out somewhere, loves there for the losing, our hearts break, accidents happen, whats done is done, it was fun while it lasted, its the best I could do, the best I could be, careful what you wish for, grit your teeth, the nights playing tricks, time to make amends, all things have run their course, ancient footprints are everywhere, lets sit tight, lets just move on. Whatever happens, make sure you come back alive. You never know, his heart might have been at peace. Songs emerged out of dreams nursed in darkness, there was a pervading sense of danger, a certain sort of strength was being concentrated and preserved. Stories emerged quickly and often disappeared into themselves, becoming other stories, which got replaced by others, often in the space of one song. He freely mixes the serious and the comic, the sacred and profane, the eminent and the ordinary.