“That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said, ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars 100 years to solve them’.”
With the centenary of his masterwork arriving in 2022, Joyce has perhaps been proved right. Whether it will take as long to decipher Dylan’s extensive oeuvre – 600-odd songs, 39 studio albums, a novel, a memoir, one film as director, several more as actor, a half-dozen documentaries, innumerable concerts, a cache of paintings – seems doubtful given the critical and biographical weight already bearing on him as he approaches his 80th birthday on 24 May. The anniversary coincides with a burgeoning of the Dylan industry being led as much by US academia as by Dylan’s faithful following of “Bobcats”. Next month sees the publication of three major new books and one reissue: a new account of Dylan’s early life by his renowned biographer Clinton Heylin; a collection of new writing on Dylan, edited by Latham; an idiosyncratic reassessment of Dylan’s life and work from the writer Paul Morley; and a re-edited version of Robert Shelton’s 1986 biography, No Direction Home.
The principal motor of the Dylan industry remains the man himself, who has long shown an aptitude for the business side of the music biz, having been, like so many, financially stung early in his career. Last year he sold the rights to his entire back catalogue to Universal Music for an estimated $300m, before which he had licensed songs for commercials for, among others, Apple, Cadillac, Pepsi, Budweiser, IBM and Victoria’s Secret, appearing in the last himself, apparently summoned by a seductive, scantily clad angel. These days Dylan markets his own brand of liquor, Heaven’s Door Whiskey, alongside prints of his artwork (about £5,000 a pop). In the Latham book, Devon Powers argues that “Dylan became a brand because brands aspired to become more like him: to matter, to delight, to enrapture and, above all, to last”. (...)
Dylan has certainly lasted extraordinarily well, rebounding from a career low in middle age – his role as a washed-up rock star in 1987’s Hearts of Fire and on disc with the Grateful Dead the same year marked his nadir – into a creative renaissance during his “third act”, a time when most pop stars have long since hung up their rock’n’roll shoes. A revival that began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind has continued with Love and Theft (2001) Modern Times (2006), Tempest (2012) and last year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, a quartet interspersed with three albums inconsequentially covering the great American songbook (ie Porter, Sinatra and co), a somewhat preposterous Christmas record and a sizeable memoir, 2004’s Chronicles Volume One, not forgetting his brilliant radio series, Theme Time Radio Hour. All have arrived against the background of the “never-ending tour” that Dylan declared back in 1988 and which has since delivered more than 3,000 shows, its progress halted only by the Covid pandemic.
It’s an astonishing work rate that has surely taken its toll. Arthritis means that Dylan can no longer hold a guitar; onstage he plays, and is propped up by, an electric piano. His voice – rarely a thing of beauty and most often an abrasively compelling affair described by David Bowie as “like sand and glue” – is in tatters, obliging him to abandon singing altogether for gravelly, dramatic declamation on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yet like Matisse, forced to give up oils and canvas for cut-outs around the same age, Dylan remains obstinately true to his art, “refusing to let his career become embalmed” as Paul Morley puts it in his new book, out next month. Once you stop creating, you’re in the past.
by Neil Spencer, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
