Bob Dylan

The Never Ending Star

Lee Marshall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745636429, 9780745636412
• eBook ISBN: 9780745639741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bob Dylan's contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock's one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today.

As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star – iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time.

Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan's songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan's emergence as a star in the folk revival (the "spokesman for a generation") and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music – rock – and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan's later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom.

The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan's stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.

1

INTRODUCTION

I have experienced many spellbinding moments at Bob Dylan’s concerts, but one stands out: Bournemouth, 1 October 1997. Dylan’s new album, Time Out Of Mind, had been released at the start of the week and many of us congregating on the front few rows were hoping to hear some songs from it. All through the main set, however, there was nothing new and by its end I had resigned myself to the fact that the new songs would have to wait, consoled that it had been a very good show regardless. Then, as he returned for the encores, the opening bars of ‘Love Sick’ creaked through the air, and Dylan stepped up to the mike and began the song. The moment was electric. The reason I remember it so clearly, however, is not just the excitement of hearing a live debut but, rather, a realisation I had during it. Towards the end of the song, Dylan sang:

I’m sick of love, I wish I’d never met you

I’m sick of love, I’m trying to forget you

I felt at that moment that Dylan was singing directly to us, the audience in front of him. That ‘you’ for which he expressed so much contempt was actually us. The love he was so sick of was that given to him by the thousands of fans around the world. There is a sting in this tale, though, for in the song’s final lines, the singer himself capitulates:

Just don’t know what to do

I’d give anything to be with you

Whether or not I’m right in this reading of ‘Love Sick’, it is certainly true that Dylan’s relationship with his audience has always been marked by this kind of ambivalence. Around the same time as the Bournemouth show, he said in an interview that:

A lot of people don’t like the road but it’s as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage but, then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. (Jon Pareles interview, 1997)

This ambivalence has been a defining feature of Dylan’s career since he emerged as a star in 1962. Since then he has been involved in what at times seems like a constant battle with fans and media over what he should perform, how he should relate to others, how he should act, and more. Such ambivalence inhabits his songs:

People see me all the time, and they just can’t remember how to act

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

(‘Idiot Wind’)

In short, Dylan has been in a battle about what the concept ‘Bob Dylan’ means. This book is about that battle. It is not, however, a biography detailing a poor, misunderstood singer harassed from all sides, constantly misinterpreted by the media. It is instead a sociological account of Dylan’s stardom. Dylan is a singer, a songwriter, a live performer, but, more than anything else, Dylan is a star. His stardom is an essential feature of his existence. It is the lens through which everything in his life is understood, not just his creative achievements but inherently personal things like fatherhood and divorce. Because Dylan is a star, his life has public meaning. This means that what ‘Bob Dylan’ stands for is open to social determination and not under the control of Dylan himself.

This project differs from existing work on Dylan in that it seeks to present a sociological account of his stardom rather than either a biography or a textual analysis of his lyrics (though both of these provide material for a sociological analysis). Conventional biographies take a ‘subjectivist’ approach to their topic, concentrating on the life of the star by looking solely at biographical detail. Such an approach tends to portray the star’s stardom as a series of discrete, visible, relationships (such as that between star and record label). These relationships are used to construct a coherent story of a life that is, to a greater or lesser extent, orchestrated by the star. This is problematic in a number of ways. Most significantly, it places too much power in the hands of the star – the star’s career is seen as the result of decisions and actions taken by the star or her representatives. This is understandable because it tends to be how we view everyday life too – we see ourselves as the ‘author’ of our own lives. However, we are not the authors of our own lives, at least not totally. The chances of obtaining a high level of education, or good health, or a living wage, depend on a variety of factors such as class, race, nationality and gender which are beyond our control. Similarly, even though stars may be extremely powerful agents, what a particular star means or achieves depends on factors outside of their control, and may well happen ‘behind their back’ (including those just mentioned: think of the ten ‘greatest’ rock stars, and count how many of them are black and/or female). To take an obvious example, how a particular star is portrayed and understood depends on a relationship between media and audiences that is completely independent of the star’s control. This is a clearly observable phenomenon, but there are less observable factors too: how does Dylan’s stardom relate to the rise of consumerism, for example? Whatever we may like to think, Dylan is not famous just because of the quality of his work. Wider social factors have enabled his stardom to develop in certain ways and closed off other possibilities. In this way, he is no different from any other star.

This leads me to the second weakness of the subjectivist approach: it presumes that the star’s success is the direct result of skill or charisma. This is not true. Neither of these is a necessary or sufficient condition of stardom. Many untalented people become stars, while many charismatic people do not. It is not inevitable that Dylan would be a success because he was talented; it was not inevitable that he would have such a long career in popular music. Charisma is not a natural trait, it is a social effect. This is not to imply that stars are not viewed as charismatic – some obviously are, and this is important – but a range of social conditions must be in place that enable an individual’s talents and personality to become recognised as skilful and charismatic. Concepts such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘skill’ and ‘charisma’ are socially organised, defined and valued differently in different times and places. We need, therefore, to investigate the social circumstances in which Dylan emerged and has continued to exist as a star.

An overall criticism of the biographical approach would be to say that it seeks an explanation for the stardom of an individual solely within the life story of that individual. However, I think it is more effective to follow Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion: ‘We must . . . ask, not how a writer comes to be what he is . . . but rather how the position or “post” he occupies – that of a writer of a particular type – became constituted.’¹ Too often, biographies show an unwillingness to investigate important contextual factors, or to consider the similarities between their particular star and other stars. This conformity is also something that fans rarely consider. A star is assumed to be unique. Yet, actually, the life stories of stars share many things in common. Consider the following:

For the essence of his art has always derived from the tension between his impulse to truth and his instinct to hide.²

This will surely ring true to Dylan fans; it could have been pulled from any Dylan biography. It is, however, from Richard Schickel’s description of Marlon Brando and I could find similar quotes in biographies of Robbie Williams, Kurt Cobain and hundreds of others. Despite the emphasis on uniqueness, stars’ stories are never unique. Complaints about misrepresentation, invasion of privacy, and conflicts with management are features of most stars’ lives. Stardom is something more than just the life stories of a bunch of famous people and this means that we need to consider stardom as a system, one with distinctive characteristics and effects. To do so gives us a much richer understanding of the star in question.

Dylan fans may have noticed that I haven’t talked much about Dylan yet. This is out of necessity, as this chapter outlines the theoretical map for how I’ll discuss Dylan later. At this juncture, it is probably useful to clarify some of the concepts I’m bandying about. You may think it odd to be considering Bob Dylan in a book series called ‘Celebrities’ because you don’t consider Dylan to be a celebrity. In contemporary culture, ‘celebrity’ often refers to people such as reality TV participants, quickly popular and quickly forgotten. Dylan, on the other hand, has had a career of over forty-five years and, you may reasonably think, deserves his success because of the work he has produced. That is why I have concentrated on Dylan’s stardom rather than celebrity. Evans suggests that ‘star’ is often used to describe an individual famous for their achievements in a particular field,³ so we tend to talk of ‘film stars’ and ‘pop stars’ rather than ‘film celebrities’ or ‘pop celebrities’. To this I would add that a star is someone who produces a body of work that has some existence outside of the individual celebrity’s person (unlike, say, a reality TV participant). Dylan is thus a star rather than a celebrity in the conventional sense. His public existence shares things in common with celebrities but there are distinctive elements too, characteristic of a certain type of celebrity – stardom.

Dylan is not just a star, however, but a particular kind of star – a rock star. The first sustained academic work into famous media figures concentrated on film stars. This is mainly the result of film emerging as the first audio-visual mass media with an established ‘star-system’. It is surprising, however, given their significance over the last fifty years, that so little subsequent work has been conducted on popular music stars. Only one or two books have dealt with the specific phenomenon of popular music stardom, so while the literature on stardom is useful for this study, there are particularities of popular music that need to be considered. Popular music stars seem to me to fall somewhere in between film stars and television personalities (such as Michael Parkinson and David Letterman). Unlike film stars, TV personalities are generally assumed to be ‘being themselves’ on screen (Turner suggests that, for this reason, TV personalities are more characteristic of modern celebrity than film stars).⁴ This is useful for considering rock stars because they too are often assumed to be ‘being themselves’ rather than playing a specific character – this is the subject of the next chapter.

There is one final distinction I would like to make here, between ‘stardom’ and ‘star-image’, as I am using them to mean slightly different things. Star-image is relatively straightforward: it refers to all of the specific things we know or think we know about a particular star. The star-image is the ‘what is’ of a star. This does not necessarily mean the actual ‘this is what really happened’ biography of the star, because it can include inaccuracies, urban legends, malicious lies, images and distorted facts. A star’s star-image refers to everything – true and false – that is publicly known about that specific star. In this way, the star-image is similar to how Stephen Scobie defines Bob Dylan as ‘a text – made up of all the formal biographies, newspaper stories, internet statistics and just plain gossip that has entered into public circulation’.⁵ The star-image is thus an observable phenomenon which can be uncovered through empirical research (Clinton Heylin’s work, for example, adds to Dylan’s star-image by increasing the amount of biographical information we know).

While ‘star-image’ concerns the empirical, verifiable, onthe-ground elements of a particular star, ‘stardom’ is less easily recognised as it exists mainly at an ideological level.* With its intrinsic relationship to ideas such as individualism, meritocracy, democracy and personality, stardom plays a significant role in reproducing the ideological structures of contemporary society. The fact that ideology is taken for granted, and the fact that it is not immediately visible to us makes it more problematic for studying it in relation to a particular star. Whereas ‘star-image’ is all about the individual star, stardom is (in one sense) not ‘about’ the star at all. It is, however, impossible to fully understand the star without understanding the ideology of stardom. Dylan’s star-image is structured (enabled and constrained) by his stardom, by the ideological elements of stardom more generally. We need an understanding of stardom’s ideology in order to understand how Dylan’s career has turned out as it has.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of Bob Dylan, we therefore need to draw on the insights of the literature on both stardom and celebrity, as well as the wider literature on popular music. I do not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of this work here, but I do want to emphasise the key elements as it provides the intellectual framework for the rest of this book. The following points are generally applicable to both stardom and celebrity, but they explain the overall system rather than describing specific individuals. To be a star, or a celebrity, it is not necessary to tick all of these boxes (some stars do, but it’s not an entrance requirement), but most stars will cover most of these points, which reflect the most important characteristics of celebrity and stardom in general.

Stardom is an inherently modern phenomenon Although ‘fame’ existed in pre-modern times, this was mainly associated with either royalty or as posthumous recognition for great achievements. The contemporary ideas of celebrity are a product of mass society and the emergence of a leisure culture since the eighteenth century, the result of deep-rooted ideological factors and technological advancement that accelerated in the twentieth century. The key characteristic of modern celebrity is what Schickel refers to as the ‘illusion of intimacy’,⁶ the idea that we ‘really know’ those who are famous, even though we have (in the main) never met them.

Stardom fulfils ideological functions As a modern phenomenon, stardom is intricately bound up with two key ideological pillars of modern society: individualism and democracy. Stars are the ultimate individuals who supposedly become famous because of their unique individuality (their ‘personality’, a word which gains its modern meaning from stardom). At the same time, however, they also highlight the meritocracy of modern society because fame is no longer dependent upon being born into the right family. Anyone can be a star if they work hard enough, are talented enough, or lucky enough.

Stardom fulfils industrial functions Rojek describes modern celebrity as a marriage of democracy and capitalism.⁷ One of the reasons that stardom exists is that it provides a means to transform unique personalities into commodities. In all of the media industries, stardom plays a crucial role in their organisational structure as they help control the inherent instability of media markets. Failure rates in media industries are high – around 90 per cent of released records fail to make a profit – and creating stars is one way in which the industries can create a guaranteed audience. I’ll buy Bob Dylan’s next album without knowing what it sounds like because I am a fan. The central activity of a record label is not making records, but creating stars.⁸

Stars have a representative function By their very existence, stars always represent the ideals of individualism and democracy, but stars also tend to stand for, or symbolise, something more. It could be that they represent a cultural stereotype – the tortured artist starving in a garret, for example – and therefore serve to reinforce that stereotype. But a star could also represent something more tangible, like Black Power, or a particular geographical region, such as Liverpool. But in all cases, a star ‘always represents something more than him- or herself’.⁹

Stars unite subjectivities Because of their representative function, stars bring people together – sometimes literally (for example, Martin Luther King), more often emotionally, uniting people through belonging to a particular group, a particular audience. Some writers see this as a positive thing (for example: Rojek suggests that Sinatra ‘articulate[d] a basis for identification and recognition [that is] the basis for developing collective consciousness’).¹⁰ Others see it as potentially dangerous, with Marshall suggesting that ‘the emergence of the celebrity is connected to . . . the strategies employed by various institutions to contain the threat and irrationality of the mass [audience]’.¹¹

These issues will receive further elaboration during the course of this book.

Recognising the systemic nature of stardom raises questions over the best way to study it. The biographical approach may pay inadequate attention to sociological factors, but we must be attuned to the individual circumstances as well. Stardom is not just structural, it is also the result of actions by individuals and social groups.¹² It does matter what individuals do. Social structures such as meritocracy and consumerism do not just reproduce themselves but are reproduced through the actions of individuals and groups. We therefore need to consider how stardom is reproduced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 2: STARDOM, AUTHORSHIP AND THE MEANING OF SONGS
• Chapter 3: FOLK STARDOM: STAR ASORDINARY, STAR AS SPECIAL
• Chapter 4: ROCK STARDOM: RECONCILING CULTURE AND COMMERCE
• Chapter 5: BEYOND STARDOM: ROCK HISTORY AND CANONISATION
• Chapter 6: DECLINING STARDOM:NOSTALGIA AND THE ‘DEATHOF ROCK'
• Chapter 7: REDEFINING STARDOM: THE NEVER ENDING TOUR'
• Chapter 8: NEVER ENDING STARDOM:DYLAN AFTER TIME OUT OF MIND
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of interviews
• Copyright acknowledgements
• Index