Suspended at the End of Time: Bob Dylan and Me, a Quarter Century after Time Out of Mind

Joel A. Rogers

I was awake. Or maybe I was still dreaming, I’m not sure. It was hard to tell if minutes had gone by, or if it had been hours. I would wake up, listen to the music for a while, have another sip of beer, and then drift back to sleep; that happened about a thousand times, and it felt like the night was never going to end. In the room there was a CD player that would play a disc over and over; I had just bought Bob Dylan’s new album, Time Out of Mind, and it played all night long.^[1] The night was a suspended dreamscape, just outside of time, and stayed that way -- even long after the morning sun came up over the window sill and the garbage trucks filled the streets with noise.

It was October of 1997. In August, I had returned to Brooklyn after living for several months on the Korean Peninsula; I was teaching English to children and high school students at a school in Seoul. In my final months in Asia, it was growing increasingly apparent that my marriage (to an American woman) was coming unglued. She and I had been negotiating with the Head Teacher of a school in Bangalore for a new faculty post, but we had been arguing between ourselves. She wanted to go and spend time in New York before we left for India, and I didn’t. I was convinced that if we went back to New York, we’d never leave. She’d get wrapped up with her family in the East Village and we’d run out of money, like we always did, which would mean we’d have to go back to working in restaurants, like we’d always done through college and beyond. We’d never get to India.

She won that debate; we weren’t back in Manhattan even a month when we sat in a mostly empty bar late one night and began the irreversible task of imagining possible futures for ourselves -- neither including the other. Suddenly, both of us were not only broke but beginning the process of getting divorced; I’d definitely never get to India now. When we left the bar that night, she went to her mother’s apartment on East 10^th Street, and I called a friend and asked to sleep for a while on his floor in Park Slope. On the way to the train to Brooklyn, I stopped for a beer at the old Kettle of Fish -- still on West 3^rd Street then -- and made a casual remark to the bartender about my “ex-wife,” just to see how it felt.

Now, two months later, I was still set up with a little rat’s nest of frayed blankets and a half-broken lamp on the rough floorboards of that apartment on Sterling Place. I felt so holy there, reading Hesse’s Siddhartha for the first time, and Kerouac’s alcohol-soaked Satori in Paris for the seventh.^[2] On an orange autumn afternoon I went down to a record shop on Flatbush, close to Seventh Avenue, and bought Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s thirtieth studio album; it would become his first to win an “Album of the Year” Grammy. The CD cost me around fifteen dollars, which I put together from a couple of crumpled bills and a large handful of nickels and dimes. At the register I was met with audible impatience.

I was not, of course, part of the original generation of Bob Dylan fans. Dylan had appeared on the scene in the early 1960s with history making performances in Greenwich Village spots like Gerdes Folk City and Café Wha?; he was the same age as my mother. By the time I was born in 1969, he had already recorded some of his most famous records. Songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin” had invited critics to call him the “voice of a generation,” while his intense performance of “Ballad of a Thin Man” on electric guitar at Manchester, England in May of 1966 had caused one fan of his early folk sound, quite famously, to call him ‘Judas!’^[3] By the time I was a teenager growing up in the Hudson Valley in the 1980s, his biggest hit, released on the record Highway 61 Revisited twenty years earlier, was in regular rotation on the local rock-and-roll station; the unmistakable opening strike on the snare and ascending organ on “Like a Rolling Stone” were already both iconic and clearly recognizable as sounds from a time gone by.^[4] When he released his great masterpiece album, Blood on the Tracks, I was four.^[5]

But by the time I bought Time Out of Mind in 1997, I had been hooked on Dylan for ten years. I had been a freshman Drama student at NYU in the fall of 1987 -- a brooding young actor inspired, maybe, by a fiery John Malkovich, whose acrid stream of effeminate fuck yous had spoken to me in a production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This on Broadway, or maybe by William Hurt, who was on stage at Circle Rep that fall; I don’t know what play that was, but I remember that I couldn’t believe the star of Body Heat and Broadcast News was skeptically and condescendingly squinting his signature, skeptical and condescending squint just ten feet from where I was sitting in the theater.^[6] At age 18, I too was all filled with fuck you’s and skeptical, condescending squints, and the day I sat in a café somewhere on MacDougal and first heard Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street,” the venom of his lyrics gripped me by the throat. “I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes / and just for that one moment I could be you,” he hissed. “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes. / You’d know what a drag it is to see you…”^[7] I left the café and went straight to Tower Records on Broadway and bought my first Bob Dylan cassette, hands stiff and red from a brittle November afternoon.

That tape stayed with me even as I dropped out of NYU, even as I went off into the Navy for lack of a more creative response to restlessness, and even as I left the Navy and returned once more to New York, this time to study Philosophy and poetry at Brooklyn College. There, in Brooklyn, a friend brought a record over and we drank beers and listened to “Tangled Up In Blue,” and I knew that life would never be the same. Dylan’s deeply personal, narrative lyrics were tied up with the taut, cold, steely strum of the guitar, and we closed our eyes and scrutinized every word and sound. I obsessed over a subtle “chick” of the high-hat in the second stanza: “We drove that car as far as we could / abandoned it out west / split up on a dark, sad night / both agreeing that it was best.<+>”^[8] I was sure I had glimpsed some deep, transcendent secret in the music.

I spent several seasons as a college student and working as a cook in dingy Manhattan kitchens. I listened to a rotation of tapes in my cassette Walkman. The first summer was Another Side of Bob Dylan -- austere, slow numbers with nothing but a thick guitar to accompany his young voice: “My friends from the prison / they ask unto me, / ‘How good, how good, does it feel to be free?’ / And I answer them / most mysteriously: / ‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?’”^[9]

In the autumn of that same year, I woke up early seven days a week. Three days I went to class and on the other four I was cooking. I was also working nights, and there were many midnights when the B train would stop at Atlantic Avenue and a thousand of us would wait for a connecting train for more than an hour -- water dripped from somewhere and the air filled with diesel fumes from work trains that tied up the tracks for long periods of time. I had long hair and a full beard, greasy from stoves and fryers. I must have made quite a picture, sitting on the concrete steps of the subway station reading T.S. Eliot in those narrow, overnight hours.

Through that season, until the snow came that same year, and even until it left the following Spring, I listened mostly to Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. Highway 61 was all energy, with its rollicking guitar licks and driving, cut-time pounding on the drums; I listened to it at top volume as I walked from my apartment in Ditmas Park over to the college in Midwood. The vocals positively careened, way out ahead of the beat: “Mama’s in the fact’ry, she ain’t got no shoes / Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for food / I’m in the kitchen with the Tombstone Blues!”^[10] Bringing It All Back Home was much more subtle -- deft and nearly hypnotic acoustic tropes all wrapped up in poetry and prophecy: “Darkness at the break of noon / shadows even the silver spoon / the handmade blade, the child’s balloon / eclipses both the sun and moon / to understand you know too soon / there is no sense in trying.”^[11]

By the mid-1990s, I was digging deeper and listening to records that critics were repeatedly saying no one could love; 1978’s Street Legal, for example, with its low production values and thoroughly unexpected gospel backup singers -- a record I had bought on vinyl some years earlier but couldn’t understand at all -- now sat on my turntable for months at a time. This one was made up of peculiar lilting melodies and exhilarating lyrics full of both political critique and weirdness: “In the Federal City you’ve been blown and shown pity in secret, for pieces of change. / The Empress attracts you, but oppression distracts you; / it makes you feel violent and strange.”^[12] But though these were rich years for me as a Dylan fan, Dylan himself had largely ceased to produce studio albums of original music. Those days appeared as if they might be gone.

In early 1997, my wife and I were living in a small apartment with linoleum floors, a little two-burner stove, and a refrigerator that always smelled like garlic, above an auto-body shop in the Karak-2 neighborhood of Songpa, in Seoul. Every morning I would take the Number 68 bus an hour across the city to Daichi, in Kangnam. The first time I ever took that bus ride in the other direction -- on my way home from the school where I had found a teaching post -- I realized I had no idea where to get off. I had lived in the city for only two days, and there was not a single sign that was intelligible to me; there were only the incomprehensible lines and circles of the Hangul alphabet. Just as I was despairing of ever finding my way back to my new home, the bus turned a corner in the city and I caught sight of a familiar flashing neon lobster above a restaurant door. I hit the stop request above my seat; it played an electronic rendition of Für Elise, like the sound of a cheap child’s toy, and I got off.

We did our best to immerse ourselves in Korean life in the months that we lived there. Though it is exhausting to live in a country where you can neither speak nor read the language, we were trying to learn it. We ate foods in neighborhood restaurants -- every sort of raw fish you can imagine -- and even stopped at the street vendor to try beondegi, a snack of steamed silkworm pupae, which is served in Styrofoam cups and eaten with chopsticks. We only did that once. I bought Korean novels -- in English translation -- to try to get a deeper feel for the culture. As for music, we were surrounded by K-pop (or gayo), a musical form populated by young, attractive singers and dancers with mics wired to their faces, singing in a style driven by the fluidly modulated vowel sounds that are peculiar to the Korean language which, to the Western ear, can sound oddly plaintive and imploring. The season’s biggest hit, a song by JuJu Club with the English title “Ah!” with an elemental beat, driving bass line, and delightfully soulful guitar licks wailed at us in every store and coffee shop in town.^[13]

But, in the midst of all of that, I still had my cassette Walkman and was still listening to Bob Dylan. A friend back in Brooklyn had turned me on to Desire, a record Dylan had released in 1975, a year after Blood on the Tracks had been such a critical success. Its desert melodies -- punctuated by Scarlet Rivera’s western-style violin accompaniments and sometimes Spanish-language lyrics -- were oddly juxtaposed with my Asian surroundings. I would open my window on the stifling Number 68 bus across the city and, predictably, one of the older women boarding the bus at a later stop -- these Korean women of a certain age are called Ajumma --would reach across me and clack it vigorously shut. (Why did they always do this? I have no idea.) I would endure the heat, while sounds of a conjunto squeeze box and mariachi horns surrounded Dylan singing outlaw strains about Mexico in my ears. “Was it me that shot him down in the cantina? / Was it my hand that held the gun? / Come let us fly, my Magdalena, / The dogs are barking and what’s done is done…”^[14]

Sometime in May, a friend from the US sent me an edition of the New York Post; the cover story was titled “Bob Dylan Heart Mystery.” Dylan had been suffering from pericarditis caused by a potentially fatal fungal infection called histoplasmosis, which caused him to cancel all his tour dates.^[15] Two important people in my life had already died that April. One was Allen Ginsberg, who for several years had been the great poetic hero of my life, and towards whom I behaved with an absurd -- no doubt comical -- worshipfulness when he and I became acquainted at Brooklyn College. The other was my father, who had died in the Philippines. He had had a brilliant technical mind, with an advanced degree in Mathematics, and had enjoyed a successful career at IBM, but mental illness had led him to bankruptcy and charges of tax evasion from the IRS, which he decided to address by disappearing to the other side of the planet. When his heart began failing, I tried to work with the State Department to get him back to the US for treatment, but a doctor in Cagayan de Oro City in Mindanao was holding his passport as collateral against money he owed, and that was that. My father died penniless on a city bus trying to get himself to the hospital. So, when Bob Dylan got sick I was worried that the silly aphorism about people dying “in threes” was about to prove itself less silly.

Instead of dying, however, Dylan was suddenly preparing to release Time Out of Mind, his greatest record in over twenty years. Although so-called “Dylanologists” claimed that it was his heart condition that had caused him to pen such deeply introspective lyrics -- obviously contemplating not only the perennial endings that occur during a lifetime, but also the final one -- in truth, the lyrics had been written during the previous winter at his farm in Minnesota. Studio sessions began in January of 1997, also before the pericarditis had set in. But the error was certainly understandable. This record appeared to be Dylan’s farewell.

For me, my time in Korea had ended, my marriage was over, and my father was gone. Now in October of 1997, I sat on my makeshift bed roll on a floor in Brooklyn, drinking cheap beer -- all I could afford -- and listening to this record. It was the first time I had ever listened to one of Dylan’s studio albums when it was actually released. Bob Dylan appeared to be saying goodbye in real time.

The record itself is as atmospheric as they come; it is, paradoxically, both lean and kind of over-mastered. Produced by Daniel Lanois -- who had also produced Dylan’s Oh Mercy in 1989 -- it is dark, bordering on ominous.^[16] The vocals on the first track, “Love Sick,” were recorded on a Sony C37A microphone, placing them at the very surface of the song; it is as if Dylan is choking directly into a ‘70s-era Panasonic tape recorder. The effect is stark: It’s a voice full of suffering, which feels almost as if it comes from beyond the grave. “I see / I see lovers in the meadow. / I see / I see silhouettes in the window. / I watch them ‘til they’re gone / and they leave me hanging on / …to a shadow.”^[17] Because the production is uneven, the next track, “Dirt Road Blues,” places not only the instruments, but even Dylan’s voice, off in the distance. He almost seems lost in it. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded from across the street. You can’t help feeling as if Dylan is receding into the mists.^[18]

True to its title, Time Out of Mind provides stark commentary on time itself. Science tells us, of course, that time is not the linear thing that we perceive. But it sure does seem that way. One obvious but still startling result of that perception is that, at any given moment, we appear to be perched right at the very end of time -- at least time so far. Everything that has ever happened -- in the whole history of the world! -- has already happened. Nothing that is going to happen has happened yet. And it certainly isn’t obvious that anything that has yet to happen is going to happen necessarily. It even seems possible that maybe nothing more will ever happen. That’s how this album feels.

This is not to say that it’s all so stark; there are some energetic, toe-tapping rockabilly references in it. Of course, nothing can be called both “rockabilly” and forward-looking. Those parts of the album that provide its energy are looking entirely back in time. Dylan is acknowledging a sound he would’ve heard listening to AM radio as a teenager growing up in 1950s Minnesota. These tracks feel like an artist paying a debt, perhaps before it’s too late.

What was genuinely mesmerizing about Time Out of Mind, however, was the sense of finality, or near finality, coming from its brilliantly brooding and lugubrious tracks. Their message, perched at the end of time as they were, seemed undeniable. All of the world had already happened. All of Bob Dylan had already happened, and quite likely would never happen again. And there was nothing left but to wrap it all up into a mournful farewell. This is certainly how it felt to me, sitting on the floor in Park Slope, surrounded by everything I owned: two bottles of beer, some pocket change, a stack of paperbacks, a small notebook full of my own songs, a beat guitar I couldn’t play them on because of a missing B string, and a gold wedding band I would soon sell. Anything from my father that might have had sentimental value was lost in the Philippines. I had a few other belongings, but they were all packed into three cardboard boxes, sitting in the cargo hold of a ship somewhere on the Pacific, taking the slow route home from Seoul. I hadn’t had enough money when I left Korea to ship the boxes by plane.

Certainly, my own state of endings and brokenness may have contributed a context as I listened to the album over and over that night. But I wasn’t making it up. Dylan was explicit. Of course, some of the lyrics were ostensibly about nothing more than the forlorn loss of love; a million records are about that. But his take has a bleak, existential peculiarity, like these lines from “Standing in the Doorway”:

When the last rays of daylight go down,

Buddy, you’ll roll no more.

I can hear the church bells ringin' in the yard;

I wonder who they're ringin' for.

I know I can't win.

But my heart just won't give in.

Last night I danced with a stranger,

But she just reminded me you were the one.

You left me standin' in the doorway cryin'

In the dark land of the sun.^[19]

Darker still, are these lines from the fifth track, suggesting a much greater loss than just the most recent love affair:

Gonna sleep down in the parlor, and relive my dreams.

I close my eyes and I wonder,

if everything is as hollow as it seems.

Some trains don't pull no gamblers,

No midnight ramblers like they did before.

I been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down,

Now I'm tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door.^[20]

This song, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” is so loaded with debt-paying lyrical tropes that it feels like one last attempt to settle a tab. Several lines in each stanza call back to Dylan’s most important early musical references. Just in this single stanza, there are two obvious examples. The line “some trains don’t pull no gamblers” comes from the old gospel song, “This Train is Bound for Glory.” Woody Guthrie’s partly fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory takes its name from this tune.^[21] Some versions of the song include the lyrics “This train don't carry no gamblers / No hypocrites, no midnight ramblers / This train is bound for glory, this train.”^[22] The lyric “I been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down” has its origins in the nineteenth century folk tradition. One version of the old Alabama tune “Big Eye Rabbit” includes these lyrics: “I wanted sugar very much / I went to Sugar Town / I climbed up that sugar tree / An’ I shook that sugar down.”^[23] But beyond these debts is the fact that Dylan appears to be paying them on his way out. The door to heaven is closing; these are his farewell moments. On the other hand, at least there’s still a doorway into heaven in this song. Consider the nihilistic despair of “Not Dark Yet,” by contrast, which leaves no room at all for hope:

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 vacant 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.^[24]

My memories of listening to these songs are suspended in time for me, because I felt --sitting there among the tattered blankets -- genuinely suspended in time. Everything around me spoke of endings, and nothing spoke of the future. Korea had ended. My marriage had ended. Allen Ginsberg had ended. My own father’s life had ended, and I could not shake the image of his body sitting on a bus, riding lifeless through the city. The year was nearly ended, the twentieth century was nearly ended, the second millennium of the Common Era was nearly ended. And now Bob Dylan appeared to have ended -- his last will and testament, the album Time Out of Mind. There I sat, among the blankets on a dusty wood floor in Brooklyn, listening to this record and peering into the abyss -- the vacuum that had once been time. There I sat, myself, at the very end of time.

***

An astute reader is likely to observe that, indeed, time did not end in late 1997. The last of the falling leaves gave way to a particularly cold month of December, and then it was 1998. But even then, a great many things that now look like basic features of our world had not only not yet happened, but had not yet even been imagined. What hadn’t happened? Well, 9/11. There’s that. The 3,000 people who would die that day -- including a few I knew, and a couple I knew well -- were still living their lives like the rest of us. Two seemingly endless U.S. wars in the Middle East hadn’t happened, and a nearly catastrophic global financial crisis had not yet been narrowly averted, even as it washed away the Wall Street icons Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 hadn’t happened, nor had myriad school and other public shootings occurred at a mind-numbing frequency that made such tragedies seem almost a commonplace. The U.S. hadn’t yet elected its first Black Chief Executive to two terms in office, and hadn’t yet followed that era of hopefulness with the bizarre election of a Gotham City archvillain to the very same office. And there was also that small matter of a global pandemic that shut down much of the world and which -- according to the World Health Organization -- killed about seven million people. That hadn’t happened yet either.

What else hadn’t happened yet as the winter of early 1998 moved slowly towards another Spring and another Summer? Twenty-five years of my own life is what -- not sitting suspended in time on a nest of blankets on a floor in Park Slope. And through those twenty-five years of life, I have found myself accompanied, almost unbelievably, by another twenty-five years of Bob Dylan.

One September, I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a new Dylan album in the mail. All at once we seemed to be buying books and music online; the bricks-and-mortar Tower Records on Broadway was still open, but would close within five years. The delivery address on my package was the New York City office where I was working, having parlayed my teaching experience and philosophical interests into a role working in government ethics. The CD was supposed to arrive on a Tuesday, but the US Mail had been suspended that day and it didn’t arrive until the next. That evening, I took the package home with me to my apartment in Sunset Park and slipped the CD into my stereo. I was incredibly glad for the company of Dylan’s voice. There was no TV or radio available in my living room that night; the transmitters that carried local media signals in New York had been destroyed the day before, and my apartment was filled with the smell of burning fuel, metal, and horror. I started listening to the album Love and Theft on the evening of September 12, 2001.^[25]

Suddenly, Bob Dylan was back. The music sounded different this time around – more rockabilly but with punctuations of a mellow electric, cut-time, soft shoe kind of a sound, brushes on the skins. The lyrics were full of narrative vignettes, like these strange, wonderful, and optimistic lines from the song Po’ Boy: “I say ‘how much you want for that?’ I go into the store, / Man says ‘three dollars’ ‘All right,’ I say, ‘will you take four?’ / Poor boy -- never say die / Things’ll be all right by and by…” Or this: “Othello told Desdemona ‘I’m cold cover me with a blanket’ / ‘by the way what happened to that poison wine?’ / She said, ‘I gave it to you -- you drank it.’ / Poor boy, layin’ ‘em straight/picking up the cherries fallin’off the plate.”^[26]

I listened with a guarded delight while the world around me burned, and only stopped to scrutinize one song carefully -- the one with the out of place, straight up, common time rock-and-roll beat. The song “Mississippi,” it turned out, was an outtake from the Time Out of Mind recording sessions, and had a sound so different from the other tracks on Love and Theft that its appearance on the record was kind of perplexing. I knew the song, which was first released on a Sheryl Crow record called The Globe Sessions in 1998 (I could tell that there was something ingenious about that song the first time I heard it, long before I read her label and learned that it was written by Bob Dylan), but now, the day after the terror attacks in New York City, it resonated with a startling prescience.^[27] “Got nothing for you / I had nothing before / Don’t even have anything for myself anymore,” he said. “Sky full of fire / Pain pourin’ down / Nothing you can sell me / I’ll see you around.”^[28]

The next time I waited for a Dylan CD to arrive by mail, it was five years later. In September, 2006, my new wife of three years and I had just bought our first house on the Jersey Shore. We had met in December of 2001, when New York City was still stumbling towards recovery, and it became almost immediately obvious that life was about to change very rapidly for both of us.

Carole and I married in the summer of 2003, and before the following year was out we had welcomed twin daughters into our lives. When the girls were born we had to give up our little studio apartment on West End Avenue, and we bought a co-op apartment up in Riverdale. Shortly after we moved there, however, I took my experience in government and turned it into a career working in the private sector, and suddenly I was genuinely doing that thing they call “making a living.” I moved to a consulting firm in New Jersey, and we sold the apartment in the Bronx.

Now, during our first month in the house, a small brown cardboard package arrived. I opened Modern Times and found a Bob Dylan that had settled into his recent, signature, ancient sound; a piano, autoharp, and an electric guitar or two that are likely to be hanging way back in the arrangement. This Dylan feels nostalgic, but still strong and healthy, still sorting out his relationships, and still hanging onto his personal ethics. “Workingman’s Blues #2” takes on the voice of an honest laborer with decades under his belt, still trying to get it right:

Well, they burned my barn and they stole my horse;

I can't save a dime.

I got to be careful, I don't want to be forced

Into a life of continual crime.

I can see for myself that the sun is sinking;

How I wish you were here to see.

Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking

That you have forgotten me?^[29]

In 2009, two more records were released. One, Together through Life, was another album of original music.^[30] Weirdly, the other was a Christmas album. Some of Christmas in the Heart is made up of standard Christmas hymns; Dylan famously went through a period in the 1980s during which he produced several records containing only Christian songs and, although he stopped doing that explicitly, he clearly still counts himself among the faithful. Never content to do what might be expected of him, however, Dylan -- astonishingly -- dug into the catalogue of extreme, American Christmas schlock. The best example comes in the form of a raucous, polka version of “Must Be Santa,” a song first released in 1960 on a Columbia recording by Mitch Miller.^[31] It’s greasy kids’ stuff at best: “Reindeer Sleigh! / Come My Way! / Ho Ho Ho! / Cherry Nose! / Cap on Head! / Suit That’s Red! / Special Night! / Beard That’s White! / Must be Santa! / Must be Santa! / Must be Santa, Santa Claus!”^[32] In a bizarre video accompanying the song, Dylan is shown presiding over a disturbing, domestic, yule-tide bacchanal, wearing a strange long wig and Santa Hat. He and his inebriated guests gleefully call out the names of Santa’s reindeer: “Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon! / Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton!”^[33] That December I was driving down I-95 on my way to Washington D.C. for a meeting at the World Bank, listening to NPR on the radio. A music reviewer came on the air to talk about Dylan’s Christmas record. “Dylan [makes] his slow, deliberate version of ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ sound more like a threat than a promise,” he said.^[34]

Through these years, and for the next decade, Dylan would remain intensely active as an artist. Though there weren’t a bunch of albums of new material, he regularly published records full of his new interpretations of old standards. He has a particular interest in the catalogue of Frank Sinatra. But in addition to making these recordings, Dylan spent three years hosting his XM-Satellite Radio show the Theme Time Radio Hour, during which he would play recordings of music across many genres, along a particular theme.^[35] Themes might include Love, Money, or Automobiles. In addition, he emerged during this time as a very prolific painter and sculptor, working with industrial scraps and his welder. He also threw his lot in with a whiskey distiller, and they produce and market a line of spirits called Heaven’s Door.

In 2020, proving his musical creativity as alive as ever, he published a beautiful album of original music called Rough and Rowdy Ways. The song “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” which sounds like what Offenbach’s Barcarolle would’ve sounded like had it been composed in a 1950s working class social club, shows a Dylan who, remarkably, at the age of 81, still seemed to be making new distinctions, new decisions, and finding new love:

From the plains and the prairies -- from the mountains to the sea,

I hope that the gods go easy with me.

I knew you’d say yes -- I’m saying it too,

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.^[36]

During those years, my own life expanded. My children grew from being toddlers into beautiful young women, off in college. My wife Carole became an accomplished and award winning painter. And I have had the great fortune to enjoy a significant degree of professional success. After a couple of years living and working in the United Kingdom and traveling throughout Europe and Asia, my family and I moved back to New Jersey and I started a new company. When the stars had aligned for enough success, I sold it. Then I went back to graduate school to study history, ready to do something entirely different for a while.

***

On the afternoon of Friday, November 30, 2018, my then-13 year old daughter, Jacqueline, and I boarded a New Jersey Transit train to Penn Station in New York. Bob Dylan had, for several years, been settling in at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side for a several night residency right around Thanksgiving, and Jackie and I would make the trip. Some years we went in twice. Jackie and her sister Olivia are both performers. Olivia has been a ballerina since the age of about four, while Jackie followed more closely in my own footsteps (and her mother’s, too), and became an actor in school and community theatrical productions; she was also a Classical Voice major at her high school.

On this evening in 2018, she was in a state of anxious anticipation; the cast list for her middle school production of Mary Poppins was to be released at 7:00 p.m. Dylan’s show started at 8:00. We settled into a French restaurant on the corner of 79^th and Amsterdam, waiting for her audition results and for Dylan’s Friday night show. At about seven minutes after 7:00, I received a text from Carole. I put the phone down. “Congratulations, Jax,” I said. “Looks like you’re Mary Poppins.”

Jackie beamed. She had worked hard for this. I continued to eat, but she could barely stay in her seat. As I looked at her, swelling with pride myself, I was suddenly overcome with the powerful memory of sitting on the floor of that apartment in Brooklyn, listening to Time Out of Mind. Until this moment, that memory had always felt so jagged -- wrapped up in barbed wire and empty of possibility. Now, surveying what had happened in the ensuing twenty years, I was overcome in a new way. Somewhere along the line, my life had become very full. I had a wife and two daughters -- all artists -- whom I loved so dearly. We had a comfortable home in a great community. And I had enjoyed tremendous professional and personal opportunities that took me around the world and allowed me to feel wildly successful.

I felt, in some sense, like I could trace my whole life back to that moment, just before the turn of the new millennium, the turn of the new century, the turn of the new year from 1997 to 1998. It was the beginning of my new life away from my first marriage, the beginning of my new life back in New York, Korea behind me. It was the beginning of the time when I learned to live life on the earth with my father gone, as the pain of that loss began to recede. And that record, Time Out of Mind, is forever linked to that singular moment for me. There we had sat, me and Bob, among the tattered blankets, on a floor in Brooklyn, teetering on the precipice -- perched headlong, as it turns out, right at the beginning of time.

Jackie and I finished dinner and walked down Amsterdam to the Beacon. Dylan and his band were half shrouded in darkness, inside a ring of theater lights from maybe the 1940s. His first seven songs came from across his catalogue -- songs from the 1960s through the 2010s, and most decades in between. He played old familiar numbers like “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” and more recent tunes like “Cry A While” and “Honest With Me.”^[37] Song number eight that night was from Time Out of Mind. I felt something shift within me as Bob Dylan began to sing “Trying to Get to Heaven.” His voice had remained strong, but deeply scored by fifty-five years of performing. He was hard to understand, but I knew the lyrics.

When I was in Missouri,

They would not let me be.

I had to leave there in a hurry --

I only saw what they let me see.

You broke a heart that loved you,

Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore.

I've been walking that lonesome valley,

Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.^[38]

I reached across the seat and took my daughter’s hand. I sat very still, and cried.

Bibliography

1. Bob Dylan. Another Side of Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1964.
2. Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. CBS, 1967.
3. Bob Dylan. Blood on the Tracks. Columbia, 1974.
4. Bob Dylan. Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.
5. Bob Dylan. Christmas in the Heart. Columbia, 2009.
6. Bob Dylan. Desire. Columbia, 1975.
7. Bob Dylan. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1963.
8. “Bob Dylan Heart Mystery,” New York Post, May 29, 1997.
9. Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia, 1965.
10. Bob Dylan. Love and Theft. Columbia, 2001.
11. Bob Dylan. Modern Times. Columbia, 2006.
12. Bob Dylan, “Must Be Santa (Official Video).” YouTube Video, 2:49. November 24, 2009. https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8qE6WQmNus
13. Bob Dylan. Oh Mercy. Columbia, 1989.
14. Bob Dylan. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020.
15. Bob Dylan. Street Legal. Columbia, 1978.
16. Bob Dylan. The Times They Are a-Changin’. Columbia, 1964.
17. Bob Dylan. Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 1997.
18. Bob Dylan. Together through Life. Columbia, 2009.
19. Bob Dylan and Eddie Gorodetsky, Theme Time Radio Hour. Radio Series. Sirius XM, 2006-2009.
20. Body Heat. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan (Warner Brothers, 1981).
21. Broadcast News. Directed by James L. Brooks (20^th Century Fox, 1987).
22. Dave Jackson, Klaus Neuhaus, and Martin Hörster. Englishce Kinderliederhits. Hör Neu Musik, 2014.
23. Guthrie, Woody. Bound for Glory. Plume, 1983. [originally published in 1943.]
24. Hesse, Herman. Siddhartha: A Novel (Bantam, 1982). [originally published in 1922].
25. Holiday Classics of the 60s. (Various Artists). Sony Music Entertainment, 2023.
26. JuJu Club. 16/20. RockRecordsTaipei, 1997.
27. Kerouac, Jack. Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966).
28. Lifton, Dave. “A Look Back at Bob Dylan’s Infamous ‘Judas’ Concert.” UCR: Ultimate Classic Rock. May 17, 2016. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-judas-concert/
29. Sheryl Crow. The Globe Sessions. A&M, 1998.
30. Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “This Train.” YouTube video, 5:31, January 6, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrhjgt-_Qc.
31. Tucker, Ken. “Is Dylan’s Heart Really In This ‘Christmas’?” Fresh Air. NPR. October 27, 2009. https://www.npr.org/2009/10/27/114204279/is-dylans-heart-really-in-this-christmas
32. Wilson, Lanford. Burn This. New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1998.

Notes

1. Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

   ↑

2. Herman Hesse, Siddhartha: A Novel (Bantam, 1982) [originally published in 1922]; Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966).

   ↑

3. Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Track 1 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963 [originally released in 1962]; “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Track 1 on The Times They Are a-Changin’, Columbia, 1964; “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Track 5 on Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965. Dave Lifton, “A Look Back at Bob Dylan’s Infamous ‘Judas’ Concert.” UCR: Ultimate Classic Rock. May 17, 2016. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-judas-concert/

   ↑

4. Bob Dylan. Track 1 on Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965,

   ↑

5. Bob Dylan. Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1974

   ↑

6. Lanford Wilson, Burn This (New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1998); Body Heat, directed by Lawrence Kasdan (Warner Brothers, 1981); Broadcast News, directed by James L. Brooks (20th Century Fox, 1987).

   ↑

7. Bob Dylan, “Positively Fourth Street,” Track 9 on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, CBS, 1967.

   ↑

8. Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up In Blue,” Track 1 on Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1974.

   ↑

9. Bob Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D,” Track 10 on Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1964.

   ↑

10. Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues,” Track 2 on Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965.

    ↑

11. Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” Track 10 on Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, 1965.

    ↑

12. Bob Dylan, “No Time to Think,” Track 3 on Street Legal, Columbia, 1978.

    ↑

13. JuJu Club, “講真Ah!,” Track 2 on 16/20, RockRecordsTaipei, 1997. Other instances of this song, like live recordings, can be found online with the English title “I am I” (for some reason). I remember asking one of my students what the name of the song was, and this is the title she gave me. That title is usually accompanied by Hangul characters, not the Chinese characters you see here. If I understand these characters correctly (and it’s likely that I don’t), they mean something like “truthfully” or “honestly.” So these might be good English language titles for this song as well. Anyway, even if you listen to none of the Dylan tracks I have provided in the Complete Spotify Playlist for this book, listen to this song by JuJu Club. It will give you a genuine taste of a wildly popular bit of culture in South Korea from the late 1990s.

    ↑

14. Bob Dylan, “Romance in Durango,” Track 7 on Desire, Columbia, 1975.

    ↑

15. “Bob Dylan Heart Mystery,” New York Post, May 29, 1997, 3-4.

    ↑

16. Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy, Columbia, 1999.

    ↑

17. Bob Dylan, “Love Sick,” Track 1 on Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

    ↑

18. Bob Dylan, “Dirt Road Blues,” Track 2 on Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

    ↑

19. Bob Dylan, “Standing in the Doorway,” Track 3 on Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

    ↑

20. Bob Dylan, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” Track 5 on Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

    ↑

21. Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (Plume, 1983) [originally published in 1943].

    ↑

22. Woody Guthrie’s version of this song doesn’t seem to be on Spotify. That’s great news for you and me, because it caused me to go look for something else to include in the Complete Spotify Playlist for this book, and the result was the most glorious rendition of this tune performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who calls it “This Train.” YouTube also has a version of Tharpe’s rendition as a digitally remastered video from 1964. I’ll make you this promise: if you listen to it once, you’ll listen to it again and again. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “This Train,” YouTube video, 5:31, January 6, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrhjgt-_Qc

    ↑

23. I’ve included a rendition of this old tune on the Complete Spotify Playlist for this book. It’s by Dave Jackson, Klaus Neuhaus, and Martin Hörster, and recorded under the title “Buck Eye Rabbit.” Dave Jackson, Klaus Neuhaus, and Martin Hörster, “Buck Eye Rabbit” Track 4 on Englishce Kinderliederhits (Hör Neu Musik, 2014).

    ↑

24. Bob Dylan, “Not Dark Yet,” Track 7 on Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997.

    ↑

25. Bob Dylan, Love and Theft, Columbia, 2001.

    ↑

26. Bob Dylan, “Po’ Boy,” Track 10 on Love and Theft. Columbia, 2001.

    ↑

27. Sheryl Crow, “Mississippi,” Track 9 on The Globe Sessions, A&M, 1998.

    ↑

28. Bob Dylan, “Mississippi,” Track 2 on Love and Theft, Columbia, 2001.

    ↑

29. Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2,” Track 6 on Modern Times, Columbia, 2006.

    ↑

30. Bob Dylan, Together through Life, Colubmia, 2009.

    ↑

31. Mitch Miller, Track 46 on Holiday Classics of the 60s, Sony Music Entertainment, 2023. [originally released in 1963]

    ↑

32. Bob Dylan, “Must Be Santa,” Track 10 on Christmas in the Heart, Columbia, 2009.

    ↑

33. I guess with “Ford” it doesn’t scan. Bob Dylan, “Must Be Santa.” Youtube Video, 2:49. November 24, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8qE6WQmNus.

    ↑

34. Ken Tucker, “Is Dylan’s Heart Really in this ‘Christmas’?” Fresh Air. NPR. October 27, 2009. https://www.npr.org/2009/10/27/114204279/is-dylans-heart-really-in-this-christmas

    ↑

35. Bob Dylan and Eddie Gorodetsky, Theme Time Radio Hour, Radio Series, Sirius XM, 2006-2009.

    ↑

36. Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” Track 4 on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Columbia, 2020.

    ↑

37. Bob Dylan, “It Ain’t Me Babe,” Track 11 on Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1964; Bob Dylan, Track 2 on “Simple Twist of Fate,” Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1974; Bob Dylan, “Cry A While,” Track 11; “Honest With Me,” Track 9, on Love and Theft, Columbia, 2001.

    ↑

38. Bob Dylan, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” Track 5 on Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 1997.

    ↑