DYLAN'S LOST HIGHWAY

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Worse, still, than losing a lover is losing a muse. Gently, lovingly, at other times with parasitic intention or vampiric intensity, men have turned to women for inspiration. F. Scott Fitzgerald had Zelda, Rodin had Camille Claudel, Picasso had a distaff palette; and Bob Dylan, one of the most intriguing, important, irascible figures in rock, had whom? On Time Out of Mind, his first CD of new, self-penned material in seven years and his most consistently rewarding album since the '70s, Dylan seems to be haunted by an imaginary, unnamed muse who has come and gone, leaving him loveless and listless, feeling out of fashion and out of time. The situation is desperate, but the album is cathartic and ultimately hopeful: there is salvation, and it comes from within. Dylan's fortunes may be changing in the '90s.

But can time really be divided into neatly defined decades? More likely it is for historical neatness's sake that we stuff trends into boxes, like books shelved by the Dewey decimal system, so that we can comprehend the world and categorize its contents. And yet Dylan's career divides easily into decades: the folk ingenue of the '60s, fresh-faced from Hibbing, Minn., drawing from Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Woody Guthrie, busting with old blues, freshly learned folk songs and rock-fueled new ideas he was on the verge of unleashing. Then the folk-rock mystery rebel of the '70s, releasing insurgent basement tapes, performing benefits for Rubin ("Hurricane") Carter (a convicted murderer whose guilt he questioned). And then the fading master of the '80s, toying with gospel-inspired backup singers, collaborating with playwrights like Sam Shepard, embracing a born-again evangelistic tone, losing some of his edge, his vibrant outsider insolence.

And in the '90s, what? Punk poets came and went, Kurt Cobain chief among them, and a folk-rock movement arose again--neo-folkies like Beck, Indigo Girls, Laura Love, all charged with youth but drawing on the past. Where was Dylan? His albums in the '90s have been mostly cautious retoolings--CDs laden with aged, unreleased material or dusty covers of traditional folk songs.

But something promising has been happening. In concert, Dylan has been regaining strength. At the 25th anniversary of Woodstock in 1994, on his MTV Unplugged album in 1995 and in concert recently at Jones Beach, outside New York City, Dylan displayed a renewed focus and grace. He has also been touring with stars of the new folkie set--punk-folk rocker Ani DiFranco and pop-folk star Jewel have opened his shows. One wonders: Does he stand in the wings and watch these young women perform? What does he feel as he sees his son Jakob, of the folk-rock band the Wallflowers, ascend the charts? Does he see where he has been or where he has to go?

The Dylan of the sad, shadowy Time Out of Mind is a man on the move--seeking, searching, existentially never finding, like some tragic traveler in a Beckett play. "I'm walking through streets that are dead" are the first words of the quiet, portentous opening song, Love Sick; "Gonna walk down that dirt road till someone lets me ride," he rasps again on the front-porch stomper Dirt Road Blues. The clocks are melting, the ants are crawling, and time, the lack of it, is a constant concern. "I hear the clock tick," Dylan sings on the opening track, and on the final one, the 16-minute talking-blues epic Highlands, he confesses, "I wish someone would come and push back the clock for me."

Again and again, he sings of reconciling with some lost love, but with an anguished ambivalence. "Don't know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you," he sings on the wistful Standing in the Doorway. And again and again, he hints at writer's block and creative barrenness, subtly linking it to his lost love. "I'm strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind," he laments on Can't Wait; "You took a part of me that I really miss," he sings on Million Miles.

As listeners, we still miss the freewheelin' social commentary of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; we long for the wild poetry of Like a Rolling Stone. But the old Dylan is gone; we have only the older Dylan, plotted by cartographers onto the cultural map. On Sept. 27 he will perform for Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna; on Dec. 7 he will be a Kennedy Center honoree for lifetime achievement in the arts. When, earlier this year, he suffered, and recovered from, a potentially fatal infection of the lining of his heart, we began to miss him in advance. Time Out of Mind's best songs--like the nakedly yearning Make You Feel My Love--remind us why. Dylan has found purpose in his inner battle to reignite his imagination. Turning the quest for inspiration itself into relevant rock--that is alchemic magic.