With Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan bid an angry, ragged farewell to his wife

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Bob Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks,” which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboards album charts beginning on March 1, 1975.

Despite the common perception, Blood On The Tracks is not an album about divorce. It’s easy to confuse it for one because Dylan eventually did call it quits on his marriage, but that came years later. Blood On The Tracks is actually a lot more like a temper tantrum mixed with a pity party. It’s an album about the withering thrills of early romance, and it lashes out against it. As the children of the ’60s grew into adulthood and the cold realities of life piled up, the voice of that generation was once again echoing back to them what they already felt. Blood On The Tracks is what happens when hope and optimism turn to pain and confusion.

Bob Dylan first met his future wife Sara Lownds sometime in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband, the photographer Hans Lownds, and while Dylan was still romantically linked to fellow folk singer Joan Baez. The ethereal Sara was working for Time Life and was an old friend of Sally Buchler, the reclining model in red featured on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home who would go on to marry Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. There was an immediate chemistry between Lownds and Dylan, and within a year or so of their initial encounter, they’d both ditched their significant others and had taken up with one another. After a very low-key 18-month courtship, the duo tied the knot on November 22, 1965, while she was pregnant with their first child, Jesse.

One of the seminal moments of Dylan’s artistic narrative came shortly after the nuptials on July 29, 1966 when he crashed his Triumph Tiger motorcycle riding around his home in Woodstock, New York. Almost overnight, the paragon of social justice, the voice of generation, went silent. Around the world, people speculated on the nature and the degree of his injuries, wondering when or even if he’d ever be able to recover. Of course, as history proved, the accident was nothing more than an albatross; an excuse to draw back from the impossible pressures that his audience exerted on him. The public continuously clamored for him to become more than he ever wanted to be himself.
As he wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, “I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everyone and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”

For roughly the next seven years, Dylan, at the height of his cultural import, traded in his rock-star status to become a better husband and father. Rather than becoming a recluse, he recorded and released six albums in that span—to decreasing critical acclaim—in addition to his work with the Band on the renowned Basement Tapes. But outside of one-off gigs like The Johnny Cash Show in 1969 or the Concert For Bangladesh in 1971, he kept close to home.

In 1973 and after many years, Dylan ditched his longtime label Columbia and signed a new deal with the emerging David Geffen-headed Asylum Records. Shortly thereafter he reunited with the Band, recorded the album Planet Waves, and embarked on a massive, 40-date North America “comeback” tour that kicked off on January 3, 1974 in Chicago. From a commercial standpoint, the outing was a gigantic success, but Dylan remained unhappy. Planet Waves flopped and when he returned home, his relationship with his wife grew increasingly distant until they became completely estranged.

Oddly, a lot of the tension stemmed from a home remodeling project. In 1973, the Dylans packed up and moved to Point Dume, California. Initially, Sara wanted to add an additional bedroom onto their new home. From that small idea the project grew increasingly large and more elaborate, growing to include a new fireplace, rippling out on an almost weekly basis. The couple that had hardly ever argued about anything were now in each other’s faces about everything. Bob then took off for the road, his eye began to wander, and pretty soon, his marital vows went out the window and he began cheating on Sara with a record executive named Ellen Bernstein.

By the summer of 1974, Dylan’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. He started drinking and smoking again and Sara had had enough. The husband and wife decided to go their separate ways, and Bob settled down in a farmhouse back in his home state of Minnesota. A short while later he called up his mentor John Hammond and told him that he planned to record a number of “private songs” come the fall.
On September 16, 1974, Dylan entered Studio A at A&R Studios in New York and got on with it. It was the same room he’d worked on so many of his classic records in, and as he began work on what would turn into his next album, he returned to the studio in hopes of recapturing those heralded sounds. Acclaimed engineer Phil Ramone, who bought the space from Columbia in 1968, was enlisted to man the boards, and brought along his assistant Glenn Berger to lend a hand.

For the backing band, “Phil chose Eric Weissberg, banjo and guitar player extraordinaire, and his ‘Deliverance Band,’ a bunch of top session players,” Berger later explained. “I set up for drums, bass, guitars, and keyboard. I placed Dylan’s mics in the middle of the room. In the midst of the hubbub, Dylan skulked in. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.”

For five days, Dylan hunkered down in that vaunted studio and let loose on tape with thoughts and ideas that often only made sense to him. He wasn’t striving for musical perfection. Drunk as he often was on wine, brevity became the watchword of the sessions in general. He eschewed going back and correcting obvious mistakes and often wouldn’t even pay attention as Ramone hit him with the playbacks. Most of the time, he failed to even clue the band in on the chord structures of the songs before the red light flashed on. “It was weird. You couldn’t really watch his fingers ’cause he was playing in a tuning arrangement I had never seen before,” Weissberg remembered. “If it was anybody else I would have walked out. He put us at a real disadvantage. If it hadn’t been that we liked the songs and it was Bob, it would have been a drag. His talent overcomes a lot of stuff.”

With 12 tracks completed and in the can, Dylan went back to Minnesota. The record company penciled in a Christmas Day release and began making test pressing when he suddenly experienced a change of heart. After listening to the tapes with his brother David, Dylan paused. In the liner notes to his Biograph collection, Dylan wrote, “I had the acetate. I hadn’t listened to it for a couple of months. The record still hadn’t come out, and I put it on. I just didn’t… I thought the songs could have sounded differently, better. So I went in and re-recorded them.”

Just two days after Christmas, Dylan convened with a number of local session musicians at Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis and re-recorded five of the albums 10 tracks, including its emotional core, “Idiot Wind.” A little over three weeks later, on January 20, 1975, Blood On The Tracks was finally released. Two months later it hit No. 1 on the Billboard album charts.

1975 really was a weird, transitional time for America. The last troops were just being pulled out of Vietnam and the nation was still reeling from the embarrassment of the Watergate scandal. The hippie generation that had grown up in the ’60s had long lost their innocence and many had lost their way entirely. Unwittingly, Dylan had created a record that perfectly conformed to the mood of the moment. It was one whose themes and attitude dovetailed with so many of the feelings that his most ardent fans and casual supporters were experiencing in their own lives. They still nodded their head in unison with the music, but now it was with resignation rather than youthful determination.

The initial reception to the record by the critical elite was mixed. Jon Landau writing for Rolling Stone at the time allowed that “in returning to his role as disturber of the peace, Dylan hasn’t revived any specific phase from the past, only a style that lets his emotions speak more freely and the state of mind in which he no longer denies the fires that are still raging within him and us. But also knocked the album for its overall sound. “The record itself has been made with typical shoddiness. The accompanying musicians have never sounded more indifferent. The sound is generally no more than what Greil Marcus calls ‘functional,’ a neutral environment from which Dylan emerges.”

While the critics argued about what the album meant as an expression of Dylan the artist, the record-buying public understood that Blood On The Tracks meant more as an expression of the Dylan the man. While the specific messages within the record remained opaque, songs like “You’re A Big Girl Now,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” and “Shelter From The Storm” spelled out in a pretty obvious way that Dylan had an intended audience, or alternatively, an intended target in mind for this music. Jakob Dylan would in later years describe Blood On The Tracks sounding like “his parents talking.”

The album ultimately sparked a new career renaissance for Dylan. Later that year he wrote one of his most celebrated songs “Hurricane” about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was sent to prison under dubious conditions thought to be motivated by racism. The next year he would release that song on the record Desire that would also hit No. 1 on the charts and achieve double-platinum status. That album closed out with the track “Sara” where—in direct conflict with his feelings on Blood On The Tracks—Dylan tried to woo back his wife. It worked and it didn’t. The couple reconciled for a time, but eventually, Sara filed for divorce on March 1, 1977. The matter was settled by June 30 with a settlement rumored to number $36 million.

In later years, Dylan, a man who sometimes considers facts flexible, vehemently battled against even the slightest insinuation that Blood On The Tracks was in any way autobiographical. In an interview with Cameron Crowe a decade after the album’s release, Dylan said, “I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks these interpreters sometimes are… I don’t write confessional songs.”

In another interview with Bill Flanagan that same year, he was just as dismissive, saying, “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind’… I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn’t... I didn’t feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same thing, I don’t know.”

When pressed, Dylan eventually conceded that the album was at least a little bit about his personal life, “Yeah. [It’s] somewhat about that. But I’m not going to make an album and lean on a marriage relationship. There’s no way I would do that, any more than I would write an album about some lawyers’ battles that I had. There are certain subjects that don’t interest me to exploit. And I wouldn’t really exploit a relationship with somebody.”

No matter how vigorously he’d like to claim otherwise, that’s exactly what Dylan did, and it’s one of the reasons why Blood On The Tracks ranks among his greatest works. Dylan is an artist who, nearly to the point of self-sabotage, follows his muse. Throughout his entire career he has blindly followed those intrinsic internal urges and allowed them to shape his music and move his pen. His best art comes when those urges overlap with his own thoughts and feelings, or alternatively square with the mood of the times. With Blood On The Tracks, they did both.

Read More

Seven Questions for Bob Dylan

How do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?*

You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his way from the bus to the stage. If you play at one of the arenas where he plays—if, like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, you're a fellow musician, sharing a bill—then you have a decision to make, occasioned by the privilege and problem of proximity. You'll be standing around and suddenly there he'll be, and you have to figure out if you're allowed—if you allow yourself—to behold Bob Dylan.

* We asked Mr. Dylan's representatives what he eats for breakfast. Their response: "Next question."

Tweedy didn't think he was when he was traveling last summer on Dylan's Americanarama tour. "First or second show of the tour, I was standing out in the middle of the dressing-room area—you know, a bunch of trailers in a U-shape. The show was about to start for Dylan, and he came through with his dressed-to-the-nines gang. He saw me, and I figured I was just supposed to avert my eyes, because I didn't think I was supposed to be where I was, standing in the way."

Tweedy was about to stare at the ground when he heard Dylan say, "Hey, Jeff, how's it going, man?"

That's all he said and all he had to say. "It was the biggest thrill of my life," Tweedy says. "I was like, I hope people saw that—that it was real."

How do you sleep at night, Bob Dylan, How do you sleep at night? The morning sun's so bright, Bob Dylan, Your band is still so tight, Bob Dylan. So how do you sleep at night?**

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither. He has been giving interviews—albeit contentious ones—for as long as he's been making music, and he's been making music for more than fifty years. He's seventy-two years old. He's written one volume of an autobiography and is under contract to write two more. He's hosted his own radio show. He exhibits his paintings and his sculpture in galleries and museums around the world. Ten years ago, he cowrote and starred in a movie, Masked and Anonymous, that was about his own masked anonymity. He is reportedly working on another studio recording, his thirty-sixth, and year after year and night after night he still gets on stage to sing songs unequaled in both their candor and circumspection. Though famous as a man who won't talk, Dylan is and always has been a man who won't shut up.

** We asked Mr. Dylan's management about Dylan's sleeping habits. The response: "Next question."

And yet he has not given in; he has preserved his mystery as assiduously as he has curated his myth, and even after a lifetime of compulsive disclosure he stands apart not just from his audience but also from those who know and love him. He is his own inner circle, a spotlit Salinger who has remained singular and inviolate while at the same time remaining in plain sight.

It's quite a trick. Dylan's public career began at the dawn of the age of total disclosure and has continued into the dawn of the age of total surveillance; he has ended up protecting his privacy at a time when privacy itself is up for grabs. But his claim to privacy is compelling precisely because it's no less enigmatic and paradoxical than any other claim he's made over the years. Yes, it's important to him—"of the utmost importance, of paramount importance," says his friend Ronee Blakley, the Nashville star who sang with Dylan on his Rolling Thunder tour. And yes, the importance of his privacy is the one lesson he has deigned to teach, to the extent that his friends Robbie Robertson and T Bone Burnett have absorbed it into their own lives. "They both have learned from him," says Jonathan Taplin, who was the Band's road manager and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. "They've learned how to keep private, and they lead very private lives. That's the school of Bob Dylan—the smart guys who work with him learn from him. Robbie's very private. And T Bone is so private, he changes his e-mail address every three or four weeks."
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

How does Dylan do it? How does he impress upon those around him the need to protect his privacy? He doesn't. They just do. That's what makes his privacy Dylanesque. It's not simply a matter of Dylan being private; it's a matter of Dylan's privacy being private—of his manager saying, when you call, "Oh, you're the guy writing about Bob Dylan's privacy. How can I not help you?"

Hey, do you eat meat, Bob Dylan, Will you eat some meat? You're on the Mercy Seat, Bob Dylan. You're selling "The Complete Bob Dylan," Pledged to your own defeat, Bob Dylan, So will you eat some meat?***

It's because of us, of course—because of us that he practices privacy as an art, because of us that he abjures politics, because of us that he retreats from us, because of us that he no longer talks to us from the stage. "What the hell is there to say?" he has asked, adding that no matter what he says, we would want him to say more. We would want him to lead us. We would want him to tell us the meanings of his songs. We would want him to play his songs the same way every night, the same way he played them on his records. We would want him to join our causes. We would want him to deliver prophecies. We would want him to tell us about his family, and if he didn't answer, we'd reserve the right to go through his garbage cans.

*** We asked if Dylan is a vegetarian. The response: "Next question."

"I've always been appalled by people who come up to celebrities while they're eating," says Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer who has taken pictures of Dylan, Springsteen, and just about every other god of the rock era. "But with Dylan, it's at an entirely different level. With everybody else, it's 'We love you, we love your work.' With Dylan, it's 'How does it feel to be God?' It's 'I named my firstborn after you.' In some ways, the life he lives is not the life he's chosen. In some ways, the life he leads has been forced upon him because of the way the public looks upon him to be."

That's the narrative, anyway—Dylan as eternal victim, Dylan as the measure of our sins. There is another narrative, however, and it's that Dylan is not just the first and greatest intentional rock 'n' roll poet. He's also the first great rock 'n' roll asshole. The poet expanded the notion of what it was possible for a song to express; the asshole shrunk the notion of what it was possible for the audience to express in response to a song. The poet expanded what it meant to be human; the asshole noted every human failing, keeping a ledger of debts never to be forgotten or forgiven. As surely as he rewrote the songbook, Dylan rewrote the relationship between performer and audience; his signature is what separates him from all his presumed peers in the rock business and all those who have followed his example. "I never was a performer who wanted to be one of them, part of the crowd," he said, and in that sentence surely lies one of his most enduring achievements: the transformation of the crowd into an all-consuming but utterly unknowing them.

"We played with McCartney at Bonnaroo, and the thing about McCartney is that he wants to be loved so much," Jeff Tweedy says. "He has so much energy, he gives and gives and gives, he plays three hours, and he plays every song you want to hear. Dylan has zero fucks to give about that. And it's truly inspiring. The joke on our tour was that his T-shirt should say PISSING PEOPLE OFF SINCE 1962. If you dropped people out of a vacuum from another planet and planted them in a field somewhere so that they could study us, and there's a guy half-decipherably singing jump-blues songs almost in the dark, and there's people watching him—well, it wouldn't make any sense… ."

It makes sense only in the terms that Dylan has established for himself: His life and his art have combined to create the oral and written parts of a continual test that most of us fail. The only way to pass is to go to the shows, for as Dylan told Rolling Stone a few years ago, "The only fans I know I have are the people who I'm looking at when I play night after night." He's notorious for creative disruption—for rendering the old chestnuts unrecognizable—but as he's gotten older, so have his fans, and the test has grown more rigorous still. He's not only "chosen not to deliver the set that his old fans would like to hear," as one of his longtime promoters, John Scher, says. "He's chosen to play in a stand-up situation, which is not a situation that his older fans enjoy." That is, when booking his tour, his agent prefers that the shows are to be general admission, with no seating. That is, he makes the geezers stand, as if to say, in Scher's words, "If you can't stand up, you shouldn't be there."

It is not that Dylan is necessarily more private than McCartney or Van Morrison or Neil Young or Bono—we know as little of their lives as we do of his. It is that Dylan has perfected the dynamic that makes his privacy simultaneously possible and intolerable: The poet needs the asshole. The asshole needs the audience. And when you go to a Dylan show, both the poet and the asshole have you right where they want you.

How do you get your mail Bob Dylan, How do you get your mail? You've put yourself in jail, Bob Dylan, Are you still chasing tail, Bob Dylan? That's been your third rail, Bob Dylan, So how do you get your mail?****

Here is a Dylan story, featuring neither poet nor asshole. Tweedy heard it from his bass player. His bass player heard it from a girl he knows. The girl lived it. She was walking down the street in Memphis, Tweedy thinks it was. "She looked into the basement windows of a hotel, and she saw Bob Dylan swimming in the pool with his bodyguard. She decided, 'Let's go see what happens if I say hi.' She walked into this hotel, and she walked over to the pool and said hi, and he took pictures with her. She said that she was a big fan and he said, 'How many times have you come to see me?' She said, 'Twenty-five.' And he said, 'Oh, man, how can you take it?' "

**** We asked if Dylan uses e-mail. His representatives would only say that he might. Or might not.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There are a lot of stories like this—Dylan with the carapace of celebrity removed; Dylan like a girl, pretty and lonely, finally asked out by a suitor uncowed; Dylan the shy midwesterner; Dylan taking extra time to sign autographs, hesitating

only when someone asks him to sign vintage vinyl, because he knows he's being used; Dylan posing with the daughter of a father who's waited by the wings of the stage; Dylan dutifully and graciously going about the business of fame; Dylan gratified to be finally treated as another human being. There are enough of these stories to prompt the question: Is being treated as just another human being all that Dylan wants?

The answer is probably no, for Dylan is also known for staring straight ahead, stone-faced as a judge, when people approach him, until they go away.

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go. For instance, last summer Wilco and My Morning Jacket went on tour with him. Both were led to believe that they'd be playing with him, but only Jim James of My Morning Jacket expected to hang out with him and, like, jam. The result, though predictable, played out like a metaphor for the vagaries of salvation: Jim James, with his expectations, had his expectations dashed; Jeff Tweedy, with his resignation, came home with stories to tell, such as the time, waiting in the wings, when Tweedy told Dylan that Mavis Staples said hello. Tweedy had produced Staples; Dylan had been friends with her since the Greenwich Village days, so he responded with one of those utterances he specializes in, gnomic and innocent, with the same surprising spin as the lines of his songs:

"Man, tell Mavis she should have married me!"

The question of who Dylan will or won't speak to is one of the animating questions of his public life; and neither friendship nor eminence have anything to do with the answer. He is rumored not to have spoken to his pal Willie Nelson on a recent tour, and Ron Delsener, who's been promoting Dylan for decades, says that when he arranged a Dylan–Van Morrison tour through the UK in 1998, he eventually had to approach Dylan's road manager with a plea: "He's got to talk to Van." Hell, when Dylan accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, he wore shades and barely stuck around for the postceremony reception.

There is not a person in the world who is not at his feet, and that his humanity exists as the last beating heart inside the last inner circle of celebrity is what makes his humanity perishable and perhaps beside the point. It's the question people have been asking for centuries: How human does the king want to be? More specifically, how human does the king permit himself to be? It's not hard to find out: All you have to do is ask him the same questions you'd ask any other human being, and you'll get your answers soon enough.

How do you do the deed, Bob Dylan, How do you do the deed? You're a walking centipede, Bob Dylan, Oblivious to need, Bob Dylan. You're as old as Harry Reid, Bob Dylan! So how do you do the deed?*****

What do we want from Bob Dylan that he hasn't given us already? The answer is axiomatic: We want that which he won't give. "The list of stupid questions you can ask Bob Dylan is endless," says John Scher, and, of course, the most stupid is the one question he has never answered: How does he live? The things we can find out about almost anyone in the world, including the president, are precisely the things we can't find out about Dylan. Does Dylan use e-mail? Does he have a smartphone? Does he eat meat? Does he sleep through the night? Is he kind? "Oh, my God, this is Bob Dylan you're talking about," says someone who knows him well. "How can you ask these questions?"

***** We declined to ask about Dylan's romantic life.

So this is what we know about how he lives. He has homes all over the world, one of which, a manor he owns with his brother in Scotland, is for rent. He lives primarily in Malibu, on a promontory leaning into the Pacific called Point Dume. He has a lot of land surrounded by a corrugated-metal fence, with a horse ring for relaxation and a guardhouse for vigilance. There are junked cars and large commercial shipping containers parked out front as a sort of intentional eyesore, an impediment to prying eyes. He has six children and ten grandchildren, and is said to be very proud of them. He's in shape; he likes to swim and box when he's on the road, and so do members of his band. He's a dog guy. He wears hooded sweatshirts and either combat boots or running shoes. He wore a wig for Masked and Anonymous and kept wearing it when filming was over, at least for a time. Though there are rarely any Dylan sightings, he is not unreachable. When Ron Maxwell, the director of Gods and Generals, got it into his head to ask Dylan for an original song, his music coordinator laughed at him. But when he asked, he got a reply from Dylan's management right away, and both Maxwell and his wife wound up listening to "Cross the Green Mountain" with Dylan and his band at a studio in the Valley. "He was there in his New Balance shoes," Maxwell says. "He was a bit shy, I want to say. We said hi and shook hands. When they played the song back, he was looking away. I heard the whole thing, taking notes. At first I was thinking, 'That's a lot of verses.' Then it was finished, and I stood up and he looked at me. I said, 'I really like it.' He said, 'You do? You like it?' I said, 'I more than like it—are you kidding?' And he relaxed and all the band members relaxed. The tension left the room. They let me know they were all fans of [Maxwell's first Civil War movie] Gettysburg and watched it over and over again on the bus."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

He spends a lot of time on the bus for a string of engagements dubbed the "Never-Ending Tour" by the press but called a variety of names by Dylan, one of which is the "Why Do You Look at Me So Strangely Tour?" He rides in a star coach; his band rides in a tour bus; they stay on the ground floors of chain motels, where Dylan can smoke; they use the pool; Dylan doesn't eat where members of his or other bands eat; he doesn't use the dressing rooms; he goes surprisingly light on security, but his security detail is bracingly efficient getting him to and from the bus, as his bus driver is bracingly efficient getting him close to the doors.

His life is often portrayed as an allergic reaction to fame; but he is a creature of fame no less than he's a creature of music and art. Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left. The best answer came from Arthur Rosato, his production manager in the mid-seventies and early eighties: "He lives his own life, and that's it. You deal with what's in front of you with him and that's it. He's his own person. He has opinions, but he's not opinionated. He's open, but he doesn't broadcast a lot of stuff. I've had issues, and when you confront him, he listens. He's a different kind of person, because you could say whatever you want to him. He's pretty much one-on-one. In group things, he'll slip into the background. No matter who the people are, he's the same, and he's very attentive to them. That's how he gets along."

That's also how he keeps his privacy without having to talk about it. He knows that the people around him are loyal, and they know that if they weren't loyal, they wouldn't be around him. They not only know not to talk; they also wouldn't think of talking. They listen, then issue their gentlemanly demurrals; when a potential source called Dylan headquarters to ask if he should comment for this story, he was not told no, but rather asked, "What do you think you should do?" It's an honor system, left to the participants to uphold, even when the participants are far from the inner circle. "I didn't get any sense of how he lives," Tweedy says, "and the sense I did get … Well, anything that I did learn, I almost feel like I'm betraying him to share."

It's also a system of omertà, enforced by the threat of expulsion. Those who say that Bob Dylan has never ordered them not to speak also say that if they did speak, they would never be able to work for him again. A member of a band that once opened for Dylan recently published a piece recounting how a friend of Dylan's was banished from the tour for revealing that Dylan had caught a cold; in a recent interview, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos fretted that Dylan hadn't called him since Hidalgo had revealed that he had been in the studio with Dylan, working on a new album. Dylan doesn't say anything because he doesn't have to say anything; he communicates his expectations concerning his privacy in the same way that he communicated to Jim James and Jeff Tweedy how he wanted them to come onstage and play the cover of "The Weight," which he played in the final shows of the Americanarama tour. "We played that song in a different key every night," Tweedy says. "It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, 'It's in A flat tonight.' Or we'd already be out onstage, and we'd talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he'd say, 'A flat.' And that's in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out."

What kind of car do you drive, Bob Dylan, What kind of car do you drive? You're good at staying alive, Bob Dylan. But the bee dies in the hive, Bob Dylan. So what kind of car do you drive?******

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around. He had to become Bob Dylan, after all, and the ceaseless force of that becoming has been what has given life to his music for as long as he's been making it. Who else is like Bob Dylan? Any human being growing old finds himself in a depopulated world, but Dylan's world was depopulated to begin with—he has remarked that when he was growing up, he felt like he'd been born in the wrong place, to "the wrong parents." The people who know him say they like him, and that he laughs and cries like any other man. But they never say that he's like any other man. And so his community is a community of saints: He loved George Harrison; of course he did—George was a Beatle. George stayed in Dylan's house when George went to L. A. to get experimental treatment for his cancer; but then George died. Dylan also loved Jerry Garcia. And when Jerry died, an addict rather than a seer, Dylan went to the funeral and on his way out told Jerry's advisor, John Scher, "That man back there is the only one who knew what it's like to be me."

****** We asked what car Dylan drives. The response: "Next question."
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There is nothing about his life that has not been foretold in his songs. He is an old man now; believing, he says, in "a God of time and space," he sings almost exclusively of memory and loss. Oh, sure, he might be singing about the Duquesne whistle in one song and about a woman named Nettie Moore in another, but those are all just MacGuffins—they all just allow him to sing about his own comic persistence and the fulfillment of his own strange fate.

Who's that on the bus, Bob Dylan, Who's that on the bus? It sure ain't one of us, Bob Dylan. You've never had no trust, Bob Dylan. Your sleep never rusts, Bob Dylan. You'll never slake our lusts, Bob Dylan. But who's gonna carve your bust, Bob Dylan, If not one of us?*******

A few years ago, he was picked up by the police in Long Branch, New Jersey, for the crime of walking in the rain, dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, and peering into the window of a home for sale in a dodgy neighborhood. The news was greeted with a lot of predictable headlines—NO DIRECTION HOME, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, etc. But here's the obvious question, asked by a friend of his: "Do you really think that's the first time that he's done that? He does a lot of walking no one would expect. He'll walk through neighborhoods undetected and talk to people on their front porches. It's the only freedom Bob Dylan has—the freedom to move around mysteriously."

******* This is a rhetorical question.

People say that a lot about Dylan: His privacy is all he has. It's an odd thing to say. It assumes he's powerless and needs to be protected. But Bob Dylan has never been powerless. Even when his songs stood up for the powerless, he was always pioneering new ways to use the power of his fame, of which the two-way mirror of his privacy is the ultimate expression. Yes, it's cool when Ron Delsener says, "I've seen Dylan walk down Seventh Avenue in a cowboy hat and nobody recognize him. I've seen him eat at a diner and nobody come over to him"—it makes you think that Dylan is out among us, invisible now, with no secrets to conceal, and that at any time we might turn around and see him. But we never do; nobody ever does, even where he lives. What a woman who works the tunnel between the buses and the backstage area at an arena outside of Atlanta remembers about Dylan is not that she saw him; what she remembers is "I was not allowed to look at him."

He was, of course, on his way to the stage when he passed her averted eyes—on his way to be looked at and listened to. It sounds like a paradox typical of Bob Dylan, worthy of Bob Dylan, but it's really pretty straightforward as an exercise of star power. The crossed relationship between Bob Dylan and his audience is the most enduring one in all of rock 'n' roll, and it keeps going—and will keep going to the last breath—because from the start he laid down a simple and impossible rule:

Read More