“I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will.”

Time Out of Mind at 25

Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind is 25.  It can qualify for a quarter life crisis.  It is old enough to finish its MFA, or to be in the last year of coverage by its parents’ health insurance.  It is as old as Dylan was when he released Blonde on Blonde.   

Some albums are good, some are great, and some are so astonishing, they make you rethink an artist’s entire oeuvre.  For me, for a lot of people, Time out of Mind is in that final category.  Oh, Mercy, an album filled with miracles, is 32.  It introduced us to Dylan’s late style via auteur producer Daniel Lanois, but Time Out of Mind went deeper, so deep, it was clear that this was not a phase.  That Dylan of “We are the World,” where he follows Quincy Jones’s direction and belts in a strained mid tenor, that Dylan would still hang around for concerts here and there, when he felt like it, but this would become the Dylan of Record.  Lanois brought many tricks—filters, echoes, to give that voice a little Sun Sessions Elvis.   With Oh, Mercy, Dylan at 48 learned to trust his lower register.  On Time Out of Mind, Dylan at 56 went all the way down.  Everything about this Dylan was elegiac—lost youth, lost love, and though he doesn’t come right out and say it, lost Jesus.  Many people in their 50s are still trying to prove their genius.  Dylan did it in his early 20s, and this genius thing was not delivering happiness.   Freaks were digging through his garbage for answers.  He kept disappointing people who were expecting someone else.  When he recorded Shot of Love at 40, he was sure it was the best thing he had ever done, but the world had mostly moved on.  His concerts kept selling, but most paying customers just wanted the old hits.

By the time he got to Time Out of Mind, Dylan was done confusing us with phases. This mask would stay on.  He would keep getting older, but this die would be cast.  He was born here and he’ll die here against his will.  This is true for all of us, but Bob Dylan is the one who wrote it.

Shortly before the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan was hospitalized for a fungal infection of the heart called histoplasmosis.  The tabloids went insane, and reports read like obituaries.  For most people, this would be like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral, except that Dylan had heard it all and didn’t care.  When Dylan came out of the hospital, he said, “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.”  At that point, it had been seven years since Dylan had released an album of new material, since he was 50, the longest period of silence of his entire career thus far.  No one knew what would happen. 

Time Out of Mind was recorded before the hospitalization, released shortly after.  It occurred to everyone that Dylan was mortal.  If the collection resembled anything, it was Oh, Mercy.  But when you hear it, you don’t hear the guy on Highway 61.  His heart was actually in the midst of a potentially lethal condition, and heartbreak was the general theme.  He was heartbroken on Blood in the Tracks, of course but he still had some fight and snarl in him.  Time Out of Mind is surrender.  It’s the last drink before closing time.  There’s a woman he’s singing about, but that woman is a repetition of other women: layers and layers of disappointment.  He’s a Rolling Stone, that’s just how it goes.  But then some women might not consider it a blessing to be tethered to Bob Dylan for too long.  Some women want a life.

Dylan tried all that—marriage, kids, girlfriends on the side.  Then a secret marriage, another kid.  Now all of life is on the side.  His personal life is a rumor at this point, but it is his preoccupation.  He must spill everything while revealing nothing.

Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
In the dark land of the sun

One woman is special, and the other is consolation, though they could trade places.  He sounds so wrecked and broken down, you believe him.  There are gaps in this story, of course, but the feeling is real.  We are locked into his emotional world.  Are the details selective?  Of course.  In the Bob Dylan Show, they are called lyrics.

Shortly after this album came out, I was at the 68th street 6 station, and imagining everyone in the station as the stars of their own movies.  They all had their own heartbreaks, their moments of heroism, and their feelings were front and center.  Now imagine that times everything, and you are in “Tryin’ to get to Heaven.”  We are all trying to get to heaven before they close the door, even if we don’t believe in it.  Dylan’s habit of cobbling together other people’s lines made it here, but the result is Definitively Dylan:

People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin'
Like pendulums swinging on chains
When you think that you lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I'm just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door

That is life.  You think you’ve lost everything, but there’s another rung.  It’s still not last call yet.  “Going down the road feeling bad” is from a Memphis Minnie song, but this is someone who thinks in an archive.  He’s sleeping in a parlor, among the train gamblers and midnight ramblers.  He’s been to sugar town, he shook the sugar down.  It’s Act V, and someone is going to die first.  Was Othello jealous?  Was Hamlet indecisive?  Is regret Dylan’s brand?  How many women were involved in the making of this album?  We will never know.  They probably have their own songs of bitterness, but not like these, and they know it.  It’s what delivered them to Dylan in the first place.

I was born here and I'll die here against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there

There was a place Dylan got away from, and that was sweeping his father’s electrical appliance store in Hibbing, Minnesota. Then he heard Elvis and he knew he would never work for anyone.  But then, like all of us, he kept trying to get away from other things, the folk audience, the rock audience, the Christian audience, the tribe of his fathers, the stalkers and freaks.  When we hear a devastating work like Time Out of Mind, we hear everything ending in real time.  If we’re lucky, we can document it and give others something to keep.  It’s last call for everyone.  We come in, we go out, against our will.  Some of us try to take care of our model bodies, and some don’t make it.  So many of the people who played with Dylan are gone—Manuel, Danko, Helm, Garcia, Harrison, Petty.  The road is a goddamn impossible way of life, yet Dylan is still on it, an 81-year-old Nobel Laureate.  He sold his catalogue to Universal for $300 Million, and the cash register keeps ringing.  He’s a billionaire who started out imitating Woody Guthrie, bard of the hobos.  The Dylan Museum and the Woody museum are staring each other down in Tulsa.  “Love Sick” is a Victoria’s Secret ad.   He’s made mad stacks, and you can’t have any of it. 

But put something up, and you can still see the man delivering what he has left, which, I can attest, is unreal.  The lights are low.  Everyone is in chiaroscuro.  You really don’t know where you are ending up tonight, and you don’t really care. Your heart is in trouble. All those women who broke it could only stand so much.  It’s all borrowed time.  Everyone has come to hear you.  You will keep moving on from Time Out of Mind.  Lanois, who gave you that sound, never returns.  All subsequent records are produced by Jack Frost, a pseudonym, folks.  Things get weird—Christmas songs for charity, Sinatra songs, but in the midst there are still songs worthy of Time Out of Mind—“Mississippi,” an outtake that resurfaced later, “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Key West,” and so on.  No one has ever gotten this old doing this, but then no one has ever done this at any age, ever.

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it’s not like the sun that used to be
The party’s over and there’s less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

This is from “Highlands,” a 16-and-a-half-minute song that Dylan wanted to be even longer.  And maybe he’s working on one now, longer than “Murder Most Foul.”   He could spend the rest of his life on it, a never ending tour of the mind.  The party’s over and there’s less and less to say.  Eventually, but it’s not dark yet.

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