Peter Higginson
Bob Dylan once said, following Gurdjeff, that you should ‘work out your mobility daily’. What he meant was that you shouldn’t be predictable or stick to any routines or dogmas, and should let your Will do the talking. It’s a lot easier to do this obviously if you have a large and independent personal income because then you don’t have to work regular hours to feed your family and can improvise your existence hourly if you like so long as the bank balance supports this. But that commercial reality aside, the problem with living by the will is that when it’s working you look like a genius, and when it goes wrong you not only look like a chump but your entire working history starts to look like a garbled mess precisely because it never had any coherent structure to it.
As the writers of ‘The Thick of It’ (BBC series 3) so wisely observed, Dylan has (like Malcolm Tucker) to keep moving like a shark because when he stops he will sink to the bottom of the ocean and face cultural death. This is the drama of the personal will- it has to forge ahead on an horizon of unpredictable change, challenge and obstinacy. It makes for great drama while it’s moving but when it stops, it risks oblivion. All charismatic leaders have this problem- Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, you name it. Dylan has had an amazing run but now it’s over and the symptom of this is that the garbled, rasping mayhem of the half-empty concert-halls is bringing out the original randomness and incoherence of the songs themselves. Who now really cares what Jokerman was ‘really’ about? When you try to think back on what it was all for you can’t find a single point of coherence except the mobility of Dylan himself.
The deal has gone down, and the deal with charismatic leaders is that we tolerate their egoism, rudeness and profit because they provide us with a story, something to follow and to do. They inspire a big hobby if you like and in our gratitude we let them get away with all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff until the point comes when the bubble bursts and then, and this is a cruel fact about fans, we turn on them and gobble them like sharks ourselves. The people walking out of Dylan’s concerts now are trying to finish him, and though while I too think there is a central problem in Bob’s work- namely that there isn’t anything actually there- I would like to see him get out now, for old times’ sake before he gets personally hurt by the crowd’s contempt.
As I’ve argued in other essays, there is a hollowness to Bob’s work which is partly due to the fact that all recorded media generates an illusion that the artist is ‘present’ or cares for us in what we hear. But the void is also down to the fact that Dylan has run the story of being a very wise spiritual and intellectual observer, using themes of God, politics and mystery throughout his career, and then disowned these themes as ‘just songs’- an impossible position- a bit like the priest saying at the end of Mass that the prayers were ‘just prayers’. It’s fundamentally warped as a position and it’s now run its course. Dylan doesn’t really exist- in either name, presence or philosophy and it’s time for him to withdraw from the illusion that he does, and retire to private life.
What makes me angry about the legend’s wilful disregard for the audiences in these recent tours is that he is trying to improvise a primitive sound to get at the spiritual edge he seeks. But whilst he refuses to entertain video, hides behind the piano and gargles away, he has done precisely nothing about the front of house reality: £100 tickets, rip-off burgers and beers, extortionate merchandise, aggressive security, bad p.a. etc. If you want to be part of the folk-blues tradition you have to do something to keep the gigs primitive as commercial experiences too, otherwise you are just setting up another delusional hollowness. My feelings of nihilism after I leave a Dylan concert are enormous. This used to be bad when the gigs were ok (banal but ok) but now I should imagine the American audiences are just feeling ripped off- a disaster for a spiritual intellectual like Bob. The will to continue is delusional. Somebody in his entourage has got to find the guts to tell him it’s over.
When I think back on it all, in all honesty, I am grateful for having enjoyed the Dylan hobby. It has given me a lot of structure in my cultural life and he has been a great fantasy companion- like a sort of pop secular Christ (who also doesn’t exist but has similarly given us plenty to think about). I remember certain terrific moments like ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Changing of the Guards’ and ‘Things Have Changed’ (I’m too young to have experienced the 60s consciously). There have been a couple of exciting events (the 1978 Earl’s Court concerts, a moment or two at Hammersmith Odeon in 1993), and I will always remember his panache in interviews, the gorgeous looks he had in close-up and the value of one or two of his thoughts, my favourite being: ‘toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last round-up’- a truly wise statement from ‘World Gone Wrong’. But as the disasters pile up- the bad gigs, the plagiarism of the paintings, the refusal to engage the audience at even basic levels of respect- it’s time to get out before the sinking Titanic that is ‘Bob Dylan’ drowns the man who may or may not be Robert Zimmerman.
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