by John Kendall Hawkins
The dream is over
What can I say?
- John Lennon, "God" (1970)
A few decades ago Bob Dylan took Joyce Carol Oates for a ride and she almost never came back, but when she did she dedicated a creepy short storyto him, "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" A girlygazer past his prime (i.e., over 30) pretends to be of teenage vintage to lure a pretty waywarder into his vehicle, there's resistance, at first, then one day ... see story title.
Recently, I came across a scene from Hearts of Fire, a Dylan vehicle that crashes out in Hank Williams country, where the doggone rivers are dry, and sees him, with guitar, stealing in on a young lass sleeping among hay roostin' hens in a barn, where he proceeds to serenade her, Milli-Vanilli style, with "Couple More Years" (a line straight from JC's story!), with a girlygazer-past-his-prime song that lures her into going for a short ride down a long Life. (Spoiler Alert!) They say the director never worked in Hollywood again. And it made you wonder about Dylan's road experiences, the Never Ending Tour, the needle in search of new hay. And, I thought, what did JC Oates know, and when did she know it?
It seems like aeons, now, since I turned on the car radio and heard the opening lines of Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust" : Well, I'll be damned / Here comes your ghost again. Joan hearing Bob's voice on the telephone from "a couple of light years ago." Ten years, she said. So, a light year back then was 5 years, I'm thinking. (An aeon, if you're keeping track, is 10 of those Baez light years.) Madonna was laying into Bob for his "obscurity" and "keeping things vague" and being "nostalgic" and something about the time the cufflinks broke. Damn, that was one basted lamb of a song. But Dylan keeps coming back, like Bill Halley's comet, a shooting star that just won't burn out. A recurring eternalist. A not-so-leitmotif. A needle in my haystack I stopped looking for ages ago.
I stopped regularly following Dylan's work after Time Out of Mind (1997), for which I wrote a review, praising his "wizened if not wiser ways" and enjoying Alan Ginsburg's nomination of Bob for the Nobel prize (he would eventually win in 2016). But I was seriously bummed out by a couple of dangerously depressing lyrics from "Trying To Get To Heaven": When you think that you've lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more and I'll close my eyes and I wonder / If everything is as hollow as it seems.
And, teary-eyed, I listened to Dylan sing in "Highlands," my favorite song on the album:
There's a way to get there and I'll figure it out somehow
Well, I'm already there in my mind, and that's good enough for now.
Even a true, diehard Dylan fan, like moi, can only take so much 12-string homesickness for eternity, and I had to give up Dylan for years to find a way to cope with the picture of the world he painted (and probably plagiarized, too).
Like everyone else, I barely noticed when Love and Theft was released on the day the towers fell in NYC. And Tempest, inexplicably released on 9/11 (2012), left me unimpressed; the picture Dylan himself conjured up of sitting there watching James Cameron's Titanic and him writing the title song, a limp last waltz with the ship's band, with no mention of a causal iceberg, the onboard battle between the 1% and the 99, and me wondering why the reference to Shakespeare's Tempest. Did I miss something?
Now, it's eight years later, a Baez light-year or so ago, since his last studio album (the ones with the 'messages' and themes), and here it is, we'll be damned, Rough and Rowdy Ways. He baited us for a couple of months, releasing singles off the album, luring us in for a ride. The album comes after the Impeachment failed and Covid-19 muscled in on the culture while everyone was busy watching the Super Bowl (no Bob Lite ads this year). Dylan's Never Ending Tour has stopped, maybe permanently; it may be years before crowds can gather, masked and anonymous, in significant numbers to enjoy his gloom.
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