Bob Dylan and the Carnival of America
We need to actually live our lives in our world if we hope to save either
Nothing is ever just one thing and all of life is rife with contradiction, sentiments embodied no less in Bob Dylan as in America itself. It’s impossible to watch The Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese’s new Dylan documentary on Netflix, without getting an overwhelming sense of a uniquely American spirit now lost. This is made all the more stark by the fact that the whole point of the 1975 tour depicted in the film seems to have been to resurrect that spirit, already at that early hour lost.
Maybe. The documentary is partially fictional, without apology. We don’t entirely know what’s “real” and what isn’t — including the spirit of America itself. This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise to anyone with a cursory knowledge of Dylan; that his autobiography, published as Chronicles: Volume One with no apparent intent to write additional volumes, is filled with exaggerated and imaginary events is widely accepted, and he has more generally throughout his life exerted considerable effort toward remaining maddeningly undefinable.
Watching Rolling Thunder, however, I feel as though I’m getting some tiny flashes of the truth. There are times in which he’s a total liar and times in which he seems to be baring his soul entirely for all to see, and much haziness in between, but there’s obviously a man in there somewhere and quite possibly a method in all this madness. It’s easier to see if you can keep in mind that, to Dylan, the truth is not the same as the facts, and the truth always supersedes.
There are layers upon layers to the story shown in the film,many of which are not explained on screen. Basically, Dylan had split from his wife Sara and hanging out in some of his old haunts with musician types and got inspired to do this crazy carnival traveling show sort of tour. Instead of venturing forth backed by The Band as he had in 1974, he recruited a different, seemingly more freewheeling troupe of musicians, including many recognizable names — though none more notable than folk monarch and former flame Joan Baez, with whom he was quite likely still in love.
Even this fanfic-caliber power couple reunion tension romance is complicated. Not only is it unclear whether any such reunion actually took place offstage, but by many accounts, Dylan was in no way over his estranged wife. Though the album would not be released until the following year, he had already recorded Desire, which includes the track “Sara.” In the song, he very bluntly evokes images of the golden years of raising a young family and the passion of lovestruck songwriting in an open attempt to win Sara back. (Go and listen to it, there’s no way you would say no to that song — no one would. Sara didn’t either, and they reconciled in 1976 before divorcing forever in 1977. Shrug emoji.)
If that isn’t weird enough, Dylan had the tour filmed and made a movie out of it, a four-hour disaster called Renaldo and Clara. It stars, apparently, himself, Joan, and Sara and depicts a love triangle between himself, Joan, and Sara. Which parts of this are real and which are not? Is there necessarily a distinction between the two? The lines blur further in the new documentary because nearly all of the tour footage is from Renaldo and Clara, something nobody ever bothers to tell us. Also, you won’t see Sara anywhere.
You won’t hear the song, either, although “Sara” and the rest of the songs on Desire played a prominent role in the setlists each night. Outside the film, you can hear them on the 2003 Bootleg Series, Volume 5, along with a good many classic tunes that he plays with renewed, unrestrained, almost shocking vigor.
And that’s really the heart of the matter. Whatever the hell is factual or accurate in this documentary or even in the events themselves, what’s undeniably true is that the Dylan seen here is a man possessed, a man filled with deep cosmic fire, imbued with the highest passions — he’s a man fully alive and he’s alive in a way that seems designed to sock us with more truths freed from the facts. He’s telling us you can always catch that fire, that resurrections and reunions are possible, along with adventure and love and continuous spontaneous creation. He’s telling us we can still go forth and explore the world as though for the first time, to make it our own.
He tells us as much at the beginning of the film, speaking in the present day, in a line that’s as much a wink about the film’s fictional elements and a moral admonition: “Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything; it’s about creating yourself.”
When I say nothing is ever just one thing, that is to say that nothing is ever just good or just bad. Everything is good in some ways and bad in others. Some things are good and bad at the same time, in what seems like an impossible contradiction. I mean, it IS a contradiction, but that’s okay. The truth and the meat of everything lies at the site of those contradictions, in the dynamic interplay between the two contradictory forces as they work in tandem and in contrast with one another.
People sometimes ask me how I can possibly “like America.” When I was younger, I would have been able to definitively answer the question — and I’d have given you a completely different answer depending on what time in my life you’d asked. Given what I just said above, I’m no longer sure it’s a question that can be answered. Tempting as it might be, we cannot reduce something like the United States to a singular thing that can either be supported wholly or condemned outright. Just like Dylan.
This has been, of course, a particularly touchy subject during this year’s Fourth of July season, with immigrant concentration camps fresh on everybody’s minds. Leaving aside for a moment the notion that very little of what is currently happening is new or unique to Trump, there is a fair question buried in all of this: how can anyone celebrate the birth of a nation that today (and so, so often in the past) is engaged in such blatant evil and atrocity?
What even IS the United States? A slave state founded on “stolen land” and genocide? A bourgeois democracy that has suppressed ordinary working people — often brutally — at every turn, that has denied basic rights and dignity to a whole host of oppressed people? A nightmare surveillance state controlling the world — imprisoning wide swaths of it, cruelly oppressing others, and watching everyone’s every move? The most complete empire the world has ever seen?
I can’t deny any of that, which surely should prove the vaguely “American” spirit of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue to be wholly bullshit, and my impression and regard for this spirit at least one step worse than that. How can one speak of opportunity and freedom, of adventure and new horizons, of unique creative potential, in such a land as this?
We’ve seen the words before, probably often enough that we’ve lost the expectation that they actually mean something:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
We do take these words for granted, on all sides of all debates, and the first consequence is that we are blinded to the novel and utterly revolutionary character of these words. This was the first time any such thing would ever be written into the founding document of a nation. Now we forget, as we struggle against the capitalist-bourgeois dictatorship, that in 1776 it was coming to wholly overthrow the aristocratic order that had preceded it for centuries. We shouldn’t forget what a big deal it was (and IS) to unleash upon the world a nation founded not on genealogy and royalty or even ethnicity but bold human principles. Rights. Aspirations. Intentional commitments to a higher way of living.
Is all that bullshit because the men who wrote and signed it talked of freedom while owning slaves? Are the words themselves invalidated by the flaws of their authors? Will we only accept good ideas from the pure?
Many people today, seem eager to answer these questions in the affirmative, but this is mainly a very recent view. This answer was not obvious to all the many revolutionaries who’ve appeared across the globe since 1776, most of whom held a very favorable (if nuanced — always nuanced) view of the American Revolution. Here at home, it was not obvious to a socialist like Eugene Debs or the Black Panther Party.
It was not even obvious to Frederick Douglass, himself of course a former slave. It’s quite fashionable for radicals to share his brilliant “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” on or around Independence Day, but those who do so believing they share a wholesale denunciation of the USA seem not to have read it. It does Douglass and his words, in fact, a great disservice to reduce his message to something so much smaller than it actually was.
“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory. . .Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final”; not slavery and oppression. . .Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!”
Just prior to this, he writes:
“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”
Douglas’ point is much fuller and certainly much more difficult than the way it is commonly caricatured. Far from simply spitting on the founding documents and principles for their apparent hypocrisy, the message is instead an exhortation to live up to those principles. If those principles and ideals have only partially been true this far, and have often failed to materialize altogether, this isn’t proof that none of it was real. It’s proof that we need to finish that work. That’s our job.
That’s difficult and maybe impossible. It’s also exciting. It’s adventure, with a carnival flair. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s the potential for creation.
What, then, amid all of this, is Bob Dylan if not a microcosm of the confusing mixture of shades and contradictions that we find in the world? As a man and an artist, he is so many things, sometimes something different at a different time, sometimes many different things all at the same time. So it is with all of us and with everything, but he’s obvious about it. He makes it so that we have to look at it. We ordinary mortals run from these contradictions and challenges but the Bard of Our Time lives all his days willingly in their tight embrace.
I discovered Dylan myself about twenty years ago, when I was fifteen. There was something so striking, almost hypnotizing, about the batshit level of disdain and scorn I heard in “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was very appealing to a teenager — who am I kidding, it’s still appealing now. I remember this moment when the girl who later became my high school sweetheart kinda dumped me or rejected me for the first time (or something like that) and I found such profound comfort, amid my ache, in “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I can still feel that now, and I’ve felt it consistently throughout these past decades.
Of course, he’s still alive and touring, and being so fond of live music, it seems almost a travesty that I haven’t made the pilgrimage to one of his shows. He even comes to New Hampshire sometimes. The truth is, I’ve always been warned not to, even by superfans. The shows are almost always reported to be dull, uninspired, unintelligible, the performer himself reticent and unfriendly. I can do without it.
Even aside from these reports, I’ve heard plenty of the officially released live stuff, along with the recordings from the tour he did in 1987 with the Dead. They’re fine, most of them. Not very exciting, but fine. Even the Before the Flood album, recorded on a tour with The Band the year prior to Rolling Thunder, is something I would call good but not great. And I LOVE The Band and even the songs themselves. There’s just something a little bit less than inspiring about it.
What can you do? It’s probably not a complete accident. Dylan does what he wants, and it’s almost never what you want him to do. People fell in love with his protest songs and his acoustic folk and he abandoned them both. He was the voice of a generation until he had a motorcycle accident and went into hiding playing roots music for years. He’s been a practicing Jew, a born-again Christian, a post-born-again spiritual seeker of some kind, and who knows what else. He’s changed styles more times than even a half-century career should allow, he’s refused to explain who he really is or what he thinks or wants, or even to tell the truth in his own autobiography. And he won’t perform the way we want him to, either.
That’s why Rolling Thunder was so revealing to me. It’s amazing, particularly given that the recording I can’t stop listening to came out way back in 2003, that all of this had escaped my radar until the Netflix doc came out. Aside from “The Hurricane”, I didn’t even know any of these songs on Desire. When it comes to 70s Dylan, I have a habit — a bad one, it turns out — of skipping right to Blood on the Tracks.
The most glaring thing about this tour is the performance itself, because it’s incredible. It’s flawless. It’s everything that even the best live Dylan I’ve watched or heard is not. Dylan here is a man possessed, a man with a raging fire in his belly. The songs are played with a bold and unrepentant tempo and his singing and guitar are way out there in front. It’s as though he almost always holds back, almost always keeps some number of layers of guard up at all times, except for this one moment in time when he chose to let us see it all. He means it, every word of every song, every strum of that guitar — and when he plays the harmonica, there’s this aggression behind it I’ve never before heard from that instrument. The energy of all of Dylan’s full power is positively blazing off of the stage in every single one of these pieces, and it’s astounding to see.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it before, not like this, and it’s only now that I know for sure what I’ve long suspected: Bob Dylan really can do absolutely anything that he wants to, and he proves it. It’s just probably almost never gonna be exactly what you or I want it to be.
And when he takes this moment to reveal his spirit in all its fragility and flaws and whole humanity, what does he choose to do? He chooses to make this very point, that we really can do anything, that we can create ourselves, create festivity, create love and romance and rich life.
That we can have adventure and take responsibility for shaping the world.
The myth that Dylan and Scorsese seem to have conspired to tell in this film is in this regard utterly true, regardless of how factual it may or may not be. Mike Hogan, writing for Vanity Fair, said it all much better than I can:
“So feel free to sit back and let the film’s mythology wash over you like a pull from a good joint. A flawed hero but a hero all the same, Dylan was lost, and then he found himself again. With a little help from his friends. He picked up the pieces of his own broken legend, and found a new way to put them back together. Along the way he entertained thousands of people, and gave them hope that the dream of the ’60s didn’t have to die with Kennedy or Watergate or Altamont or whatever. He also started his Never Ending Tour, which gave shape and focus to the rest of his career. If he could do all that, maybe we could do something like it too. And maybe there’s a dream that we shouldn’t give up on yet, despite what we see on the news each night.
It’s a nice idea if nothing else. Something to hang our hopes on. After all that’s what myths are for.”
Figuring out the significance and best application of this myth might well be the critical task of our time. All too often, we seem to default to the rote repetition of the fact that our task is “to save the world,” without much consideration for what that might require.
We can hardly hope to save much of anything if we lack boldness of spirit, if we are too timid or fragile to unapologetically live the great romances of our lives, to accept the paths before us and take responsibility for the steps. We cannot be so afraid of risk or paralyzed by past mistakes or injustices that we preclude any future justice with an inability to move forward. We must love life and love the world, dare to bare ourselves within and upon them both, dare to believe in our potential — past and present — and take on the task of turning it into reality in the future.
We cannot accomplish the feat of creation if we are too scared, if we don’t believe ourselves worthy, if we fear desire and pleasure and passion and pain.
We haven’t got shit if we cannot see the world before us as a traveling carnival just waiting to be staged — waiting for us to stage it. That’s what it’s all about.
Perhaps what Dylan says so abstractly through his life and his tour and this documentary, we can find in the simple words of the Rankin/Bass animated Hobbit, in its main theme:
“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead,
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said,
The chances, the changes are all yours to make,
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”
We need to actually live our lives in our world if we hope to save either. So get your flowered hat and white face paint and let’s go.
