Dylan plays it straight from the heart—just his own voice, guitar, and harmony carrying the reverie, as if it were a dark madrigal. Over wistful staccato chords, and in a lovely high voice, Dylan looks back and ahead at the same time, and directly into the specter of unforgettable memories that seem indivisible from an uncertain future. “I live in another world,” he sings, “where life and death are memorized . . . /Oh time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies/A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.” In the mid-1980s, “Dark Eyes” sounds to me like the music Bob Dylan might yet make, when he would again care enough to forget the vagaries and vogues of the modern pop scene.
Of course, Dylan has his own views about all this talk of decline and renewal. A little later in the evening at the Topanga studio, while various musicians are working on overdubs, he sits in a quiet office, fiddling with one of his ever-present cigarettes and taking occasional sips from a plastic cup filled with white wine. We are discussing a column that appeared in the April issue of
Artforum,
by critic Greil Marcus. Marcus has covered Dylan frequently over the years, but in 1986 he is less than compelled by the artist’s recent output. Commenting on Dylan’s career, and about a recent five-LP retrospective of Dylan’s music,
Biograph,
Marcus wrote: “Dylan actually did something between 1963 and 1968, and . . . what he did then created a standard against which everything he has putatively done since can be measured. . . . The fact that the 1964 ’It Ain’t Me, Babe’ can be placed on an album next to the 1974 ’You Angel You’ is a denial of everyone’s best hopes.”
Dylan seems intrigued by Marcus’s comments, but also amused. “Well, he’s right and he’s wrong,” he says. “I did that accidentally. That was all accidental, as every age is. You’re doing something, you don’t know what it is, you’re just doing it. And later on you’ll look at it and . . . ” His words trail off, then he begins again. “To me, I don’t have a ’career.’ . . . A career is something you can look back on, and I’m not ready to look back. Time doesn’t really exist for me in those kinds of terms. I don’t really remember in any monumental way ’what I have done.’ This isn’t my career; this is my life, and it’s still vital to me.
“I mean, I never really dwell on myself too much in terms of what I’ve
done.
For one thing, so much of it went by in such a flash, it’s hard for me to focus on. I was once offered a great deal of money for an autobiography, and I thought about it for a minute, then I decided I wasn’t ready. I have to be sat down and have this stuff drawn out of me, because on my own I wouldn’t think about these things. You just go ahead and you live your life and you move on to the next thing, and when it’s all said and done, the historians can figure it out. That’s the way I look at it.”
He removes his sunglasses and rubs at his eyes. “I feel like I really don’t want to prove any points,” he continues. “I just want to do whatever it is I do. These lyrical things that come off in a unique or a desolate sort of way, I don’t know, I don’t feel I have to put that out anymore to please anybody. Besides, anything you want to do for posterity’s sake, you can just sing into a tape recorder and give it to your mother, you know?”
Dylan laughs at his last remark. “See,” he says, “somebody once told me—and I don’t remember who it was or even where it was—but they said,
’Never
give a hundred percent.’ My thing has always been just getting by on whatever I’ve been getting by on. That applies to that time, too, that time in the sixties. It never really occurred to me that I had to do it for any kind of motive except that I just felt like I wanted to do it. As things worked, I mean, I could never have predicted it.”
I tell
Of course, Dylan has his own views about all this talk of decline and renewal. A little later in the evening at the Topanga studio, while various musicians are working on overdubs, he sits in a quiet office, fiddling with one of his ever-present cigarettes and taking occasional sips from a plastic cup filled with white wine. We are discussing a column that appeared in the April issue of
Artforum,
by critic Greil Marcus. Marcus has covered Dylan frequently over the years, but in 1986 he is less than compelled by the artist’s recent output. Commenting on Dylan’s career, and about a recent five-LP retrospective of Dylan’s music,
Biograph,
Marcus wrote: “Dylan actually did something between 1963 and 1968, and . . . what he did then created a standard against which everything he has putatively done since can be measured. . . . The fact that the 1964 ’It Ain’t Me, Babe’ can be placed on an album next to the 1974 ’You Angel You’ is a denial of everyone’s best hopes.”
Dylan seems intrigued by Marcus’s comments, but also amused. “Well, he’s right and he’s wrong,” he says. “I did that accidentally. That was all accidental, as every age is. You’re doing something, you don’t know what it is, you’re just doing it. And later on you’ll look at it and . . . ” His words trail off, then he begins again. “To me, I don’t have a ’career.’ . . . A career is something you can look back on, and I’m not ready to look back. Time doesn’t really exist for me in those kinds of terms. I don’t really remember in any monumental way ’what I have done.’ This isn’t my career; this is my life, and it’s still vital to me.
“I mean, I never really dwell on myself too much in terms of what I’ve
done.
For one thing, so much of it went by in such a flash, it’s hard for me to focus on. I was once offered a great deal of money for an autobiography, and I thought about it for a minute, then I decided I wasn’t ready. I have to be sat down and have this stuff drawn out of me, because on my own I wouldn’t think about these things. You just go ahead and you live your life and you move on to the next thing, and when it’s all said and done, the historians can figure it out. That’s the way I look at it.”
He removes his sunglasses and rubs at his eyes. “I feel like I really don’t want to prove any points,” he continues. “I just want to do whatever it is I do. These lyrical things that come off in a unique or a desolate sort of way, I don’t know, I don’t feel I have to put that out anymore to please anybody. Besides, anything you want to do for posterity’s sake, you can just sing into a tape recorder and give it to your mother, you know?”
Dylan laughs at his last remark. “See,” he says, “somebody once told me—and I don’t remember who it was or even where it was—but they said,
’Never
give a hundred percent.’ My thing has always been just getting by on whatever I’ve been getting by on. That applies to that time, too, that time in the sixties. It never really occurred to me that I had to do it for any kind of motive except that I just felt like I wanted to do it. As things worked, I mean, I could never have predicted it.”
I tell
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