Dylan at Eighty - Ageing, Artists and a Bit of Bob
I’ve wanted to write something about artists and ageing for a while now. Now seems as good a time as ever. Bob Dylan turns 80 tomorrow and I first started thinking along these lines at one of his concerts in 2017. Dylan had just launched into Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, when the man standing beside me turned to his friend and said, “this is awful. He doesn’t sound like himself anymore.” Two songs later they upped and left. I stayed for the rest of the gig. I’m from Ballymena. If I pay eighty euro for something, there’s no way I’m leaving before the bitter end. It was actually a pretty great gig. Having come to live Dylan late in the game, I’ve only been able to see him a handful of times. He was particularly animated and engaged that night. All the way home on the Dublin Aircoach I kept picking over what the rude man had said. How could Dylan not sound like himself when he was using his own voice to sing a song which he himself had written himself? If he didn’t sound like himself, then who on earth did he sound like? (Pardon my use of multiple himselves, but there’s a point I’m trying to make).
Last week, in anticipation of the birthday celebrations, I began reading Paul Morley’s excellent new book on Bob Dylan: You Lose Yourself, You Reappear- Bob Dylan and the Voices of a Lifetime. Anyone who knows me will understand I was in desperate need of another Dylan bio to add to the forty odd versions I already own. I can only assume that Morley has also found himself standing, or perhaps sitting, (for he’s significantly richer and better connected than I am), next to some similarly wankerish men at a Dylan gig because in the opening chapters he also addresses the subject of fans who can’t cope with contemporary Dylan. “There were those pleading with him to stop, to end the never-ending, as though he was ruining his own legacy, cruelly sabotaging the accepted transcendent beauty and power of his own songs…It was as though the Dylan they had loved so much was now betraying them because he was old and weary-seeming… bringing his old songs into the current conditions of his life.”
Bob Dylan and his never-ending tour have been on the road since June 7th 1988. That’s 33 years. A whole Jesus Christ. Or three quarters of me. Dylan was 55 when he first took some of these songs out on the road. He’s now 80. Of course the songs don’t sound like they used to sound. Dylan isn’t who he was 33 years ago. None of us are. (Though arguably Dylan does shapeshift at a dizzying rate). It would be more strange and suspicious if the songs hadn’t evolved or changed at all. If they’d remained frozen in time like museum exhibits, it would actually feel stagnant, as if they lacked the vitality to keep up with life. And yet, it’s common enough to hear Dylan’s listeners, (I can’t bring myself to call them fans), complaining about how he now performs his own songs. Morley again - “it was as though they were the owners of the songs – they had taken them from him, and he had no right to reach back into them and make them something else.” This gets right to the heart of what bothered me so much about the two men I overheard.
You can say what you want about Bob Dylan but you have to acknowledge he hasn’t stopped evolving for fifty years. He rarely plays songs the same way twice, while songs like Masters of War and I’m Not There have enjoyed multiple different sets of lyrics across the years. Furthermore, Dylan understands, as all great artists do -especially those who cut their teeth in the folk tradition- that the art always transcends the artist. Dylan isn’t precious with his music. Throughout his career he’s been happy to let other musicians cover his songs so long as they serve the songs well. He’s even favoured other artist’s versions -such as Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower- if he thinks they’re superior to his own. There’s undoubtedly a layer of ego to Bob Dylan but there’s enormous humility in how he tends and views his own back catalogue. The idea that a Dylan tune should have a fixed and static identity, established back in the 60s or whenever it was first recorded, seems like a flawed understanding of both Bob Dylan and the very essence of music itself. Music, as I understand it, is a fundamentally fluid thing.
Which leads to me to the question of ageing and artists. There’s undoubtedly a double standard at work within the creative world. I’m a writer. I’m 41 years old. If my literary heroes are anything to go by, I can anticipate another 40 or perhaps 50 more years of creative output. Writers rarely get to retire or are afforded the luxury of cruising on work written decades ago. Writers are literally expected to be uttering fresh profundities on their deathbeds. This is probably no bad thing. I plan to follow the example set by Edna O’Brien and Alice Munro and Agatha Christie and continue writing well into old age. In the literary world we venerate our elders. (Cast your eye over the Nobel prize list from the last fifty yeas). We wait patiently for older writers’ latest poems and novels to emerge. We expect them to continue having fresh thoughts and new directions. It would be ludicrous to demand that a writer at 80 should write and present their work exactly as they did in their twenties. It would feel like something in them had been repressed or blocked.
The same seems to go for visual artists and film makers. In fact, when I think about how ageing is viewed across the creative sector, it is chiefly seen as problematic within the area of performative arts -musicians, actors and dancers- people, like Dylan, who are expected to present their work live in an immediately engaging way. Perhaps audiences don’t want to be confronted with the reality of an ageing body, an ageing voice or -dare I say it- an ageing mind. Which makes me suspect that it isn’t Dylan’s inability to sound “like himself” which annoys his critics, so much as the fact he sounds too like himself, which is to say like an 80 year old man. Bob Dylan’s always had a “unique” kind of voice. Sandpaper to some, honey to others, over the years it has morphed and fractured, frequently sounding as if it is coming from some strange, disembodied part of him. Why can’t people accept the older, most recent version of Dylan as just another one of his many voices, another incarnation of a multifaceted man?
I’ve spent the last decade studying artists who developed dementia towards the end of long careers. The novelist, Iris Murdoch. The composer, Ravel. The abstract expressionist, Willem de Kooning who lived with dementia for the last ten years of his life and during this period experienced a burst of extreme creativity. His latter paintings are markedly different in style from his early work, yet are not viewed as a decline of talent, so much as a new direction in his work. As a die hard Agatha Christie fan, I subscribe to the now-common belief that she was also living with dementia during her final few years as a writer. I will say this might explain why Postern of Fate, the final novel Christie managed to write, is a little bonkers. But I still think it’s an enjoyable read and a fascinating insight into a part of her creative mind I don’t see explored in any of her other 65 crime novels.
Artists who continue to create whilst living with dementia often exhibit more extreme changes in style or technique. However, almost all artists’ work is impacted by the physicality of the ageing process. At 70 or 80, (hell, even at 41) your eyesight isn’t what it was at 20. Neither is your hearing, your voice, your motor responses or ability to access memories or retain thoughts. However, this is not to say your work is diminished by the ageing process. I, and many older artists I know, prefer to view the trajectory of our creative careers as a constant process of evolution. Our work is impacted and frequently enhanced by life experience and even those limitations which age eventually throws at us all. Work produced in later life, if markedly different from earlier output, is simply a new direction the artist has come to explore.
And this kind of thinking resonates far beyond the artistic world. Too often, we view older people as lesser versions of their former selves. We talk in terms of who they were and what they did when they were younger. We don’t stop to see who they currently are or the new perspectives and different contributions they can bring to the final years of their lives. It’s why I often get frustrated by the assumption that older people love reminiscence projects. Reminiscence work, if done ethically and creatively, can be an incredible tool for allowing older people to express ideas and share their experiences. Frequently, however, it acts as a kind of unspoken assertion that the older person’s worth and meaning exists in the past. As a community arts facilitator, I prefer older people’s projects where a lifetime of skills and experience is allowed to flourish in the present: trying new things, engaging in the contemporary, existing in community. Over the years I’ve seen older people record their first radio dramas, make films and have a go at urban arts. I’ve even helped a man, to hang his first photography exhibition at the ripe old age of 101. Whether we’re talking art or just plain real life, permitting a person at 80, 90 or 101 to be a different version of who they were at 20 doesn’t undo their earlier brilliance. I’d argue, it’s just basic humanity.
So happy birthday Bob Dylan. Thank you for all the songs which have shaped my life. I hope you keep singing them for a long time yet. You don’t need anyone to tell you, you’ve every right to do whatever you want with your songs. You’ve been ignoring the haters for the last 80 years. I think it’s only fair that you get the last word in this rant, so here’s Bob himself in 2015 addressing the critics who say he can’t sing. Unsurprisingly he says it much better than me. “I get the blame for mangling a melody, but I don’t really think I do that. I just think critics say I do. Sam Cooke said this when he was told he had a beautiful voice. He said, “Well, that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead, they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.”
Image, recycled from Bob Dylan’s 75th birthday.