Writer and critic Luc Sante examines the relationship between Bob Dylan and
photographer Barry Feinstein, and explores the lost book that brings their
work together
In 1966, beginning in February, Bob Dylan played 43 concert dates in locations
ranging from Kentucky to Australia to Paris. The best known part of the
tour, on which he was backed by the Hawks, was the European leg,
particularly the May 17 show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester,
recordings of which were long erroneously identified as the “Royal Albert
Hall” show. That same month he released Blonde on Blonde. He
faced a further 64 scheduled concerts that year, but on July 29 he suffered
a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, New York, which sidelined him for a
considerable time. Although the initial rumours had it that Dylan was
seriously injured, possibly in life-threatening ways, it has since been said
that the crash may have actually saved his life, since he was dangerously
overworked and exhausted.
Barry Feinstein photographed the 1966 European tour, resulting in indelible
images: Dylan playing with children in the streets of Liverpool, strutting
onstage in Paris in his houndstooth “rabbit suit” with a giant American flag
behind him, wearing dark glasses in the back of a limousine whose windows
are filled with the squashed faces of fans peering in. Earlier Feinstein had
taken the dramatic angry-young-man portrait for the cover of The Times
They Are A-Changin’. He had also done a good deal of magazine
work, been still photographer on a number of movies, and the following year
would be a cameraman for Monterey Pop.
Sometime in 1964 Dylan wrote a suite of 23 poems inspired by Feinstein’s
photographs of Hollywood, a spectacular collection taken over the course of
the early Sixties. Although the photographs were made for a variety of
assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable
consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood.
The studio system and all that went with it, the industry that had created
the movies as we knew them from the Twenties onwards, had reached its
terminus at last. It was a subject that clearly resonated with Dylan. He was
a major part of the wave of change that was in the process of overthrowing
the old guard, but then again, as he wrote in Chronicles about 1941,
the year of his birth, “If you were born around this time or were living and
alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was
like putting the clock back to when BC became AD. Everybody born around my
time was a part of both.”
And obviously Dylan carried Hollywood within him, maybe even more so than the
average citizen of his generation. He undoubtedly learnt how to pose from
them – he was a movie star long before he ever made a movie. He feels like
Jayne Mansfield and Humphrey Bogart (as well as Sleepy John Estes and Murph
the Surf) in the notes to Bringing It All Back Home. And Jean Harlow
memorialised by Louella Parsons lies just under his hand on the cover. And
in the 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Paul Newman says, “You
don’t know what love is. To you it’s just a four-letter word.” And in Don
Siegel’s movie The Lineup (also 1958), a character says, “When
you live outside the law you have to eliminate dishonesty.” In the European
tour pictures of 1966 you can sense Dylan and Feinstein conspiring to make
an epic silver-screen performance – if in stills, and only partly
premeditated.
So it’s hardly surprising that Dylan knew very well what to make of pictures
of Gary Cooper’s funeral, and Marilyn Monroe’s house the day of her death,
and Marlon Brando being counterpicketed by racists while he marched on
behalf of equal housing – as well as of pictures of casting agents and
wardrobe department shelves and homes-of-the-stars map pedlars and the
unemployment bureau and the Hal Roach Studios slated for demolition. He
could inhabit the landscape from one end to the other.
And indeed the poems are not descriptive, but come from within the
photographs, as if the pictures themselves were speaking. Now and then there
are echoes of Dylan’s songs: “touch me mama/ it’s all right/ it doesn’t
matter/ it’s been too well proven/ that even I, myself/ am not really here.”
Or “on lease/ get piece/ sucked in/ on a habit/ gotta have it/ promised by/
the prostitute/ destroyed ruins/ tilt the day” – which could be sung to the
tune of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Overall, though, the voice
sounds closest to that of “11 Outlined Epitaphs” (the notes to The
Times They Are A-Changin’) and “Some other kinds of songs…” (the
notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan). Here as there the lines are
skinny, the rhythms abrupt, the language sparse and telegraphic and
abbreviated, the situations jarring and dreamlike, the comebacks frequent
and snappy. There are laments, complaints, musings, skits (a hilarious
screen test, for one), parables (converting those wardrobe department
shelves into a repository of human lives), nightmare scenarios (the lurching
paranoid fantasy that begins “after crashin the sportscar / into the
chandelier” and sounds like a hellish rewrite of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”),
and plenty of dry tombstone epigraphs.
The one graphically autobiographical item is the last. Apparently inspired by
photographs of William Wyler’s Oscar for Ben Hur (1959), Dylan
considers what happened on December 13, 1963, when he was given the Tom
Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. On the dais without
a prepared speech, he had failed to attend the protocol of the liberal
worthies in the room, particularly offending them by saying, “… I have to be
honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President
Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where – what he thought he was
doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too – I saw some of myself in
him.” He was booed; some of those present broke off with Dylan.
It makes sense that Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric is not just the
collaboration of two great artists, but also the overlay of two crashing
trains: the collapsing feudal system of old Hollywood and Dylan’s eventual
disillusionment with the world of celebrity. This is not to say that the
outlook is sour. Quite to the contrary, Dylan can see the humour and fancy
involved as well as the death and dread. But he can appreciate Hollywood
from the inside by now, seeing it as a system that requires an elaborate
mandarin code of behaviour in exchange for a reward that, like Stephen
Crane’s ball of gold in the sky, looks a lot more like clay when viewed up
close. Perhaps writing these poems was for Dylan an early step in the long
and arduous process of making his peace with fame and realising that he
could not ever stop being Bob Dylan.
yes mama i’m an actor
the difference being my contradiction
that i
do not really wish t be remembered
for my smile
nor for my costume
but in complete reversal
as i look around
i realize
that i will be
‘It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The
song disappears into the air, the paper stays’ Bob Dylan
Poet and academic Billy Collins analyses Dylan’s verse
