Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan Read Online Free

Loaded
and
Down in the Groove
would follow: knocked down, then out. Such was the standard verdict. Most talented performers in popular music start out as small fry, as ‘cults’, and proceed with luck, work and judgement to achieve fame. Dylan was heading in the opposite direction. To all appearances, he was a spent force.
    Did he care? Did he notice? Stray comments from the period suggest a stoical acceptance that his moment as an unlikely star had come and gone. For all that, whether obliged by contract, financial need or stubborn defiance, he continued to release those derided albums. The 1980s would see seven such artefacts emerge from the recording studios.
Infidels
and
Oh Mercy
might each have redeemed Dylan’s reputation, but each was defaced – another unavoidable word – by its maker and those around him. The rest were very easy to forget.
    In one sense, it needn’t have mattered. On any fair reading Dylan’s reputation would have been secure thanks only to the songs composed and sung between 1962 and 1978. In his business, particularly at the artistic end of the trade, a 16-year career is nothing at all to be ashamed of. Plenty of performers have made money for decades from work achieved in less time. The Beatles, those reproving deities, had hung together for barely seven years as recording artists, after all. Elvis had counted out most of his days among the living dead. But the seeming creative extinction of Dylan in the late 1980s was peculiarly poignant because it seemed both complete and inexplicable.
    He had been perplexing for long enough. As far as the forgiving fans who stuck around were concerned, that was part of the contract. In 1969, there was the ‘country’ singer of
Nashville Skyline
; in 1970, the baffling anonymous artist of
Self Portrait.
After two of his most successful works,
Blood on the Tracks
and
Desire
, Dylan had ended the 1970s by surrendering his autonomy to God and evangelical Christianity. But at no time had he seemed wholly lost to art, bereft of ideas or a sense of direction. It hardly mattered, when the rot set in, that bootlegs told a more complicated story. As far as most listeners were concerned, Dylan drifted aimlessly through the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. His records were poor or worse and few cared. Nothing important of him remained.
    This meant, among other things, that it became silly to talk of Dylan the artist, Dylan the poet. Much attention was still being given to what he had done in better days, but by the 1980s many of the books and articles being published were sounding an elegiac note. The first edition of Robert Shelton’s long-delayed
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
appeared in 1986, when those liable to wonder what all the fuss was about were being offered
Knocked Out Loaded
. In 498 pages of text, the biography contained only 13 pages dealing with Dylan’s activities between 1980 and 1985. It ended by wondering whether the artist would follow ‘Rimbaud’s route’ – and throw in his hand – or whether he would manage the Yeatsian path to ‘even greater creativity toward old age’. Shelton was not prepared to guess.
    The music business can offer at least ten comebacks for every penny. Most draw their inspiration from the creative agency of accountants, from managers sniffing a moment ripe for nostalgia or from the chance to exploit another greatest-hits package. Only rarely do performers renew themselves. Writers, equally, are reluctant to be reborn in late middle age. Lazarus never did explain how the trick was done. Nevertheless, Shelton covered his bets well enough. The late poetry of W.B. Yeats might certainly count as one parallel with Dylan in his second coming; all those old or ageing blues players who were ‘rediscovered’ in his youth could stand as another set of precedents. Equally, you could dismiss all such comparisons. When Dylan rose again, he did it on his own terms.
    Among his