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Perhaps most obviously, it is a matter of technique. In Chronicles, Volume 1, which in 2004 became the first in what will hopefully be a series of published memoirs, Dylan briefly recalls a breakthrough he made in the late 1980s, when he developed a new system of chords and a different way of controlling his voice. “A few months earlier something out of the ordinary had occurred and I became aware of a certain set of principles by which my performances could be transformed,” he writes. “By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave.” Like a magician who won’t reveal his secrets, Dylan does not elaborate on what those new principles might be or how specifically they might affect his music; instead, he indulges a literary sleight of hand, showing you less than you think you see.
That evasiveness marks nearly every page of Chronicles, which forgoes big events in favor of small moments of creative decision-making. He barely addresses the motorcycle crash that sidelined him in the late ‘60s, for example, and doesn’t mention any of the biographical details that have arisen in the past few years, such as his secret marriage, his heroin addiction in the mid-60s, or his thoughts of suicide. Instead, he describes in great detail the recording of two of his more obscure albums (New Morning and Oh Mercy) and spends an inordinate amount of time hanging around a tourist shop outside of New Orleans. At times Dylan comes across purposefully vague, constantly calculating how much information to dispense and which details to reserve, but that bob-and-weave with the reader’s expectations can be incredibly entertaining and instructive, hinting at an active mind and a sharp wit processing so many memories.
Dylan is tinkering with the very idea of Dylan, redefining himself in prose just as he does in music, and his late career has been defined by unpredictability and surprise. Before 2004, who would have thought they’d see Dylan shilling for Victoria’s Secret, sporting a pencil-thin mustache and leering at Adriana Lima as “Love Sick” played in the background? And who could have predicted that the man with the froggiest voice in all of rock and roll would make such a compelling radio DJ on XM Satellite Radio’s “Theme Time Radio Hour”? Did anyone actually think he would pen an ode to r&b singer Alicia Keys or eulogize Judy Garland by quoting “Candle in the Wind”? At times over the past decade, it has seemed like Dylan was having a good laugh at our expense.
This sort of defiance in regard to expectations and orthodoxies has, of course, defined Dylan’s behavior pretty much from the time he settled on Bob Dylan as his new identity: He has projected a public figure that doesn’t necessarily resemble the flesh-and-blood Robert Zimmerman. Perhaps more than any new vocal or lyrical technique, what has enabled this new chapter in Dylan’s career is the realization that his public figure is malleable, adaptable, changeable. The only constants are the name and the man playing the role. Everything else about Dylan is a fiction, which gives him a great deal of freedom in this self-written, self-cast role.
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Time Out Of Mindhas proved to be an outlier in Dylan’s catalog, as he immediately traded the swampy haze of Lanois’ production for a crisper sound that gently updates the folk, jazz, country, and blues of the early twentieth century. Lyrically, Dylan backed way off the first-person pronouns: If Time sounds unguarded, then the follow-ups show Dylan taking a step back and filtering his thoughts, significantly, through other sources.
Dylan’s debts to Beat and French Romantic poets are well documented, and even Time Out Of Mind contains veiled references to Robert Burns and John Keats, among other writers. But 2001’s “Love and Theft” and 2006’s Modern Times further refine Dylan’s modular approach to songwriting and borrow phrases and occasionally entire lines from a wide range of sources: an obscure Civil War poet, a contemporary business best-seller, a largely forgotten jump-blues number. Even the title Love And Theft was allegedly borrowed from a book on blackface minstrelsy by University of Virginia English professor Eric Lott, which makes the quotation marks seem like a wink or smirk.
In his 2010 book Dylan In America, Sean Wilentz, the historian-in-residence for Dylan’s website, delved deeply into the album’s labyrinth of allusions. Drawing from Delta bluesmen as well as upcountry pickers, Dylan “has been a minstrel, or has worked in the same tradition as the minstrels,” Wilentz writes. That tradition involves “copying other people’s mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and utterly transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie, and cherry, pumpkin, and plum pie, too.”
Whether intentional or not, these songs contain a well-stocked library of Americana, suggesting a reading list for Dylan’s more probing listeners and implying a vast system of language, ideas, and traditions – all of which can be inverted and subverted from one situation to the next. The past remains infinite, the usable sources inexhaustible. They provide the raw material with which he can construct his public persona. To listen to these late-career albums, especially back to back, is to hear an artist construct himself from whole cloth, yet what raises the music above the merely academic is the obvious joy Dylan takes in the project, whether he’s quoting a line from a New Orleans travel guide or cracking a corny vaudeville joke like “I’m sitting on my watch, so I can be on time.” For the first time in a very long while, it looks like it might actually be fun to be Bob Dylan.
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Towards the end of Chronicles, Dylan relates a half-remembered conversation he had with Bono in the late 1980s. “I told him that if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minnesota,” Dylan writes. “I tell him that’s where the Vikings came and settled in the 1300s, said that there’s a wooden statue of a Viking in Alexandria and it doesn’t look anything like a dignified founding father of America. He’s bearded, wears a helmet, strapped knee-high boots, long dagger in a sheath, holding a spear at his side, wearing a kilt – holding a shield that says, ‘The birthplace of America.’”
It’s a strange, funny passage, especially since he seems to be sending Bono on a wild goose chase. He doesn’t say so in the book, but Dylan, who grew up in nearby Hibbing, Minnesota, would certainly be aware that Alexandria is famous for the Kensington Runestune, which was unearthed nearby in 1898 and purported to be proof that Scandinavians explored North America as early as the 1300s. The authenticity of the runestone is still hotly debated, yet it is almost certainly a hoax, which makes the Viking statue Dylan describes a monument to old, weird American fakery.
Whether or not Dylan was having a laugh at Bono’s expense, the scene resonates because it explains so much of Dylan’s interest in history. He is not concerned with the actualities – the dates, places, and personalities – but in the useful myths that everyday people create and perpetuate. His America might never have truly existed, but that makes it no less real than the America of history books. In that regard, Dylan becomes a hoax himself – what P.T. Barnum might call a humbug or a genuine fake. He has constructed a persona out of these patchwork pieces of the past, a composite of archetypal riverboat gamblers, hucksters, rounders, charlatans, sages, carnival barkers, and snake oil salesmen who roam the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In that regard, I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ 2007 film in which six actors play Dylan at various points in his career and mythology, may be one of the most trenchant pieces of Dylan criticism, if only because Haynes treats the hoax as real and the real as hoax.
Dylan derives his power from that slippage between the man and the legend, and in fact, much of his newfound creative zeal springs from the dissonance between the two. In fact, the hoax allows Dylan to recover some of his own humanity that celebrity and its attendant pressures sap, to preserve a bit of himself from the public eye. Of course, we as listeners appreciate the intricacy of the persona and the squirrely quality of the music it produces. In short, we love the game of Dylan. “Folks songs are evasive – the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn’t be comfortable with it any other way,” he writes in Chronicles. “A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”
