Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s "Time Out of Mind"

By Graley Herren

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These dreams overlap and intermingle, but three primary levels of meaning emerge. On one level, the singer/dreamer envisions himself as a killer awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the song-cycle functions as religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in associations with the minstrelsy tradition and debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Time Out of Mind marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785278488

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Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind

Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind

Graley Herren

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Graley Herren 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936786

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-846-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-846-0 (Hbk)

Cover image: Bob Dylan, Dark Dressing Room Portrait, Germany, 1996 (c) Sam Erickson. Used with permission of Sam Erickson.

This title is also available as an e-book.

In loving memory of my mother

Bonnie Herren

(1945–2021)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1.Dreams and Dialogues

A Series of Speeches

Production

Reception

A Series of Interviews

Dreaming in Dylan

A Series of Dreams

Parameters and Approach

2.Murder Ballads

The Murder Ballad Tradition

Dylan’s Murder Ballads

Love Sickness

Somnicide

Sleepwalking to the Gallows

Defanging the Big Bad Wolf

3.Religious Allegory

Allegory and Allegoresis

Dylan’s Allegories

From the Red River to the Red Sea

The Pilgrim’s Progress and Regress

The Ballads of Job and Lucifer

The Crucifixion Blues

Crossing the Metaphysical Midlands

4.Race in America

Emmett Till – Then and Now

Essentialism ↔ Appropriation ↔ Hybridity

Seeing, Hearing and Telling the Blues

Marching and Dreaming

Fugitive Slave Narrative

The Land Where the Blues Began

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement, inspiration and support of many people. I first want to thank the students at Xavier University who have taken my various courses on Bob Dylan, beginning in the fall of 2015 with my annual First-Year Seminar, and continuing with upper-level courses in the summer of 2018 and the spring of 2020. I have learned more about Dylan’s work as a teacher than I ever figured out on my own as a fan, and I owe most of those discoveries to discussions with my students.

I am also grateful to colleagues at Xavier for feeding the fires of my Dylan enthusiasm. My thanks go out to Paul Colella, Dan Dwyer, Alice and Norman Finkelstein, Steve Frankel, Ken Gibson, Mike Graham, Jacki and Michael Lyon, Tim Quinn, David Reid, Alison and Byron Russell, Tom Strunk and many others for countless talks over the years about all things Dylan. I also owe debts of gratitude for timely institutional support from Xavier. I wrote this book in the fall of 2020 during a faculty development leave, for which I have English department chair Carol Winkelmann, college dean David Mengel and provost Melissa Baumann to thank. The global pandemic posed all sorts of challenges when it came to getting hold of necessary research materials. I am eternally grateful to the staff at Xavier’s McDonald Library, especially Sidnie Reed, Alison Morgan, Meg Martin and Debbie Meyer, for their dedication and ingenuity in helping me find what I needed.

Beyond Xavier, a number of fellow Dylanologists have been instrumental in shaping this book. At the top of the list is Rob Reginio. In retrospect I can see the contours of my project already beginning to take shape over long discussions at the James Joyce Pub and The Horse You Came In On Saloon in Baltimore at the Comparative Drama Conference. Our debates over the relative merits of Time Out of Mind and John Wesley Harding planted the seed, and we’ve nurtured it though several email exchanges over the years since then. Jim Salvucci has also been enormously generous as a great supporter and ambassador to Dylan studies, first in Baltimore and later in Tulsa. I have also benefitted from the insights and friendship of other Dylan devotees including Erin Callahan, Court Carney, Gerry Joyce, Sara Martinez, Tony Maxwell, Laura Tenschert, Katherine Weiss and Marco Zoppas. Dylan puts it best (doesn’t he always?) in Mississippi: I’ve got nothin’ but affection for those who’ve sailed with me.

I am tremendously grateful to Anthem Press for publishing this book. Megan Greiving has been encouraging and helpful at every stage of the process. Her early interest in the project gave me the motivation I needed, and series editor Stan Gontarski helped to cheer the proposal across the finish line. I also thank Tom Strunk and Rob Reginio for helpful feedback on my book proposal, and Kevin Barents, Barry Faulk, and Nina Goss for enormously useful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of my book manuscript. No scholarly work on Dylan would be worth a farthing without quoting from his songs, so I am deeply appreciative to David Beal at Special Rider Music for kindly providing those permissions. I also want to offer my warm thanks to Sam Erickson, the photographer who shot the haunting image of Dylan on the cover, for allowing me to use it for the book.

Bringing it all back home, my deepest gratitude goes to my family. My parents, Charles and Bonnie Herren, always provided a foundation of love and support. My mother died as I was completing this project, and this book is dedicated to her. I owe my greatest thanks to my wife Cathy and our son Dylan—yes, named after Bob Dylan. Before the pandemic hit, we were fortunate enough to nab front-row tickets to see Bob Dylan and his magnificent band in top form at Northern Kentucky University on November 8, 2019. As I basked in the glow of the stage, supercharged by a radiant Bob Dylan only a few feet away, and flanked by Cathy and Dylan beaming on either side of me, I realized how amazingly lucky I was to be in that place at that moment, surrounded by people who have brought so much light to my life.

Chapter 1

DREAMS AND DIALOGUES

Bob Dylan creates in threes. In the mid-sixties he revolutionized popular music and dismayed folk purists by going electric in a trilogy of legendary rock albums: Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). Following his surprising conversion to Christianity in the late-seventies, he astounded most followers and alienated many fans with a trilogy of religious albums: Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981). Tired of being ripped off by pirated versions of his studio outtakes, Dylan launched The Bootleg Series in the nineties with a three-disc set of previously unreleased gems spanning the first three decades of his career (1961–1991). Confounding audiences again in the twenty-first century, he released a series of three albums covering pop standards, from Shadows in the Night (2015) to Fallen Angels (2016) and culminating in the triple-album Triplicate (2017). In his memoir Chronicles, Volume One (2004), Dylan reflects upon a difficult stretch in the eighties when he worried that his playing days were over. He claims to have rejuvenated his guitar work by adopting an unusual technique based upon triplets: It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes. […] I realized that this way of playing would revitalize my world. He goes on to declare, I’m not that good at math, but I do know that the universe is formed with mathematical principles whether I understand them or not, and I was going to let that guide me. According to this theory, Dylan asserts, the number three reigns supreme: I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is.¹

Trusting that threes are a charm when it comes to Dylan, this study of Time Out of Mind (1997) begins with a triptych, a three-paneled display of interconnected and revealing public declarations from the latter part of his career.

A Series of Speeches

Speech #1: The 33rd Annual Grammy Awards, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, 20 February 1991. Dylan was depleted and directionless at the time he received a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement. He had followed up the resurgent Oh Mercy (1989) with the critically panned Under the Red Sky (1990). Although he could not have known it at the time, this was the beginning of a protracted slump during which he would not release a full album of original material for seven years. A career achievement award is unquestionably an honor, but it is an accolade generally reserved for those whose heyday has passed and whose contemporary relevance has ended. Remarkably, Dylan was only forty-nine years old at the time. In hindsight we can see that at least a third of his career still lay ahead of him, a span which would include some of his greatest work. None of this seemed likely in 1991.

Dylan amused the audience with a very brief, and seemingly intoxicated, acceptance speech. The assembled celebrities responded with laughter, but Dylan hinted at his own despondency: "Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me too much. He was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot. But what he told me was this. He did say, ‘Son,’ he said … [long pause]. He said so many things, you know [audience laughter]. He’d say, ‘You know, it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.’ Thank you."²

These fatherly words of wisdom augur a state of abjection seemingly at odds with the pomp and spectacle of the occasion. Dylan suggests at this moment that he didn’t feel honored by the award so much as diminished. However, the proverb professes faith in God and in an individual’s capacity for personal transformation. The passage attributed to Abe Zimmerman is actually drawn from Psalms 27:10: When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Dylan echoes, with a precision that cannot be accidental, the nineteenth-century German rabbinical scholar Shimshon Rafael Hirsch’s midrash on this scripture: Even if I were so depraved that my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, God would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways.³ In other words, though he seemed to be rambling incoherently like a drunken icon of yesteryear, Dylan’s remarks were calculated, clear-eyed and intertextual. He drew upon inspirational texts to provide a sober commentary on his defeated state and to testify that he wasn’t finished yet. He could still mend his ways; he still retained a capacity for rebirth. Making good on that vow, Dylan would soon rededicate himself to traditional music through two superb cover albums, Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). This return to the wellspring of traditional music would revitalize his flagging creativity and point the way forward to Time Out of Mind.

Speech #2: The 40th Annual Grammy Awards, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, 25 February 1998. Dylan’s appearance at the 1998 Grammy ceremony will chiefly be remembered for the notorious Soy Bomb incident, when Michael Portnoy snuck onto stage, Soy Bomb scrawled across his naked torso, and writhed around during a live performance of Love Sick before being escorted away by security. Dylan and the band never missed a beat.⁴ This debacle has overshadowed some revealing remarks delivered after Time Out of Mind was named Album of the Year—the first and only time Dylan has ever won the music academy’s top honor.

Following the obligatory roll-call of thanks to Columbia executives and studio musicians, Dylan credited the success of Time Out of Mind to an unexpected source: "I just wanted to say that one time when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory. I was three feet away from him, and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was—I don’t know how or why—but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way. He closed with a shout-out to his greatest blues mentor: In the words of, you know, the immortal Robert Johnson, ‘the stuff we got’ll bust your brains out,’ and we tried to get that across. Producer Daniel Lanois spoke next, and he also acknowledged inspiration from ghosts—namely, those harbored inside Dylan himself: When Bob read me the lyrics to this record, we were in a hotel room here in New York City. The words were hard, were deep, were desperate, were strong, and they came from having lived a number of lives, which I believe Bob has. So that’s the record I wanted to make."⁵

These cryptic acceptance speeches by the album’s necromancers reinforce the listener’s visceral experience that Time Out of Mind, with the macabre acronym TOOM, is haunted. Dylan has mentioned his admiration for Buddy Holly in several interviews over the years, but he never publicly shared his intuition of mystical connection to Holly until reflecting upon Time Out of Mind.⁶ He is clearly referring to more than mere influence here. Dylan’s remarks at the 1998 Grammys haltingly express what he would eventually describe more fully as the experience of transfiguration. These comments also gesture toward his crucial use of metempsychosis as a compositional strategy throughout the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind.

Speech #3: 2016 Nobel Lecture in Literature, recorded in Los Angeles, 4 June 2017, submitted to Swedish Academy in Stockholm, 5 June 2017. When Bob Dylan was selected as recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first singer-songwriter ever so honored, reactions worldwide were divided between delight and scorn, celebration and outrage. Dylan himself remained silent on the subject for several days, then he ended up skipping both the Nobel banquet and the awards ceremony. He never lobbied for this honor—never even imagined he was eligible—and he seemed at times just as doubtful as his detractors that a literary prize, the most august of them all, was appropriate for his work as a songwriter, musician and vocalist. Ultimately, however, he did accept the award in absentia, and at the last possible moment he delivered his Nobel lecture (a mandatory requirement of all recipients) in the form of an audio recording.

The bulk of the lecture focuses on three (of course) major works of literature that inspired him: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer’s The Odyssey. He begins and ends, however, with an emphasis upon music. In the opening section he revisits that 1959 Buddy Holly concert in Duluth. At the 1998 Grammys, he credited the early rocker as his spirit guide for Time Out of Mind, but in the Nobel lecture he goes further, recognizing Holly as the herald for his entire musical odyssey. Staring up from the audience at Holly on stage, Dylan recalls, Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.⁷ Dylan believes a signal was conveyed in this momentary contact, and some torch was passed. As if anticipating that his own days were numbered, Holly divested his musical power and entrusted it to the kid in the crowd. Through this revelation of vocational destiny, so the story goes, Holly consecrated Dylan as his successor.

In a thoroughly Dylanesque gesture of self-mythology, he traces the fateful consequences of this life-altering experience: I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody—somebody I’d never seen before—handed me a Lead Belly record with the song ‘Cottonfields’ on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.⁸ The biblical allusions are freewheelin’ here. This is his road to Damascus epiphany, when young Bobby Zimmerman sees the light and is transformed into Bob Dylan. By proposing a direct link between these two events, he constructs a gospel of his art founded upon a divine trinity. Dylan positions himself as son of Lead Belly, the African American incarnation of folk and blues music, and of the holy ghost Buddy Holly, the animated white showman who reincarnated these musical traditions, transubstantiated them into rock and roll, and dispensed this sacrament to the heir apparent. Dylan didn’t fully articulate this gospel until his Nobel lecture. But these tenets were already on display in his profound artistic output since the mid-nineties. This hybrid amalgamation of the personal, spiritual and intertextual began in earnest with Time Out of Mind.

Production

At some point in the mid-nineties Dylan began writing new songs. He told Edna Gundersen of USA Today, I had the songs for a while, and I was reluctant to record them, because I didn’t want to come out with a contemporary-sounding record. I didn’t feel that type of sound would be useful for these songs. He added, There was no pressure on me to write these songs. There was no one breathing down my neck to make this record.⁹ Dylan painted a starker picture to Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone: I really thought I was through making records. I didn’t want to make any more. […] But then you go out and play live shows, and you do get thoughts, and you do get an inspiration here and there. So I just reluctantly started writing things down.¹⁰ Clinton Heylin identifies jam sessions with the touring band in the summer of 1996, but Dylan hadn’t fixed upon definite arrangements by the time he first shared the lyrics with Daniel Lanois in June 1996.¹¹

Dylan had previously worked with Lanois on the highly regarded comeback album Oh Mercy, a tempestuous experience about which he devotes an entire chapter in Chronicles.¹² He was wary of Lanois’s volatility and knew from experience that they did not always share the same artistic vision. Nevertheless, Lanois’s passion, commitment, innovative technological expertise and sonic sorcery were unmatched by any of Dylan’s previous producers. Dylan wanted an old-sounding record for this spectral brew of new songs, a throwback in defiance of modern studio practices and prevailing musical sensibilities. He trusted Lanois more than anyone to rediscover this bygone sound. After their initial meeting, he gave the producer homework, as Lanois recounts in his memoir Soul Mining: I left with inspiration and a list of records that Bob recommended as good rock ’n’ roll references: Charlie Patton, Little Walter, Arthur Alexander, and others. I listened to these records and I understood. […] Bob wanted that sound, and I felt I knew how to get it.¹³

Dylan recorded demos in September and October 1996 at Lanois’s Real Music Studios, a converted movie theater better known as the Teatro, in Oxnard, California. Working only with the producer and a skeleton crew, Dylan and company laid down several tracks, generally favoring sparser arrangements sung in a higher register than the songs ultimately released on Time Out of Mind. Lanois was quite pleased with the early results, but Dylan insisted that he could not work effectively at a studio so close to home, so the production team relocated to Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida. This move was accompanied by a greatly expanded lineup of musicians. Those involved in the Criteria recording sessions in January 1997 describe the atmosphere as cluttered and combative. Veteran piano player Jim Dickinson recalls that "there was an awful lot of music going on. Six guitar players, y’know, people just sitting there ready to play. And barely able to get a note in. It was a curious situation. Sometimes, when it was all going on, it would be chaotic, for an hour or more. But then there would be this period of clarity, just five or eight minutes of absolute clarity, where everybody in the room knew we were getting it. It was unlike any session that I’ve ever been on."¹⁴ Tempers occasionally flared as Dylan and Lanois clashed over creative differences. There were times when the two weren’t even on speaking terms according to engineer Mark Howard.¹⁵ By Dylan’s own account, his disagreements with Lanois became so heated at one point that the pair almost came to blows in the studio parking lot.¹⁶

Despite these bristling tensions—or perhaps in part because of them—the Criteria sessions yielded an amazing collection of songs. By the time recording wrapped up in January 1997, the collaborators had produced eleven tracks that made it onto the album, and ten additional outtakes were later issued on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs (2008).¹⁷ Dylan added some vocal overdubs in March, and post-production fine-tuning was completed over the summer. Time Out of Mind was released on the last day of September 1997. Daniel Lanois is billed as co-producer along with Jack Frost, an alias Dylan would continue using as he assumed the role of sole producer on his future work.

Dylan’s time was almost up before Time Out of Mind ever appeared. Between the completion of recording and the album’s release, he contracted histoplasmosis, a fungal infection caused by breathing in spores from the river beside his Minnesota property. The result was an acute case of pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart. The ailment was severe and potentially fatal. Dylan entered the hospital in May 1997 and received treatment there for a week. He continued to experience symptoms, including dizziness and fatigue, for weeks afterward. He eventually made a complete recovery, resuming his touring schedule by August and remaining extraordinarily active in the years since. Nevertheless, Dylan’s brush with mortality deeply impacted popular and critical responses to Time Out of Mind.

The album abounds with references