Bob Dylan and The Circus: Travelling shows, mysterious disappearances, and little white lies
A young Bob Dylan stands in a field somewhere in Minneapolis. A dust of normality has settled upon the dizzying sights of the circus that surrounds him because he’s been among them that long. Overworked clowns having a smoke out the back of the tent, depressed elephants taking their toilet break, and a knife thrower sharpening his prop blades sweep by him in a single backstage glance — all so morbidly commonplace to him now that he’s barely moved to see the poetry in it. And in that milieu, Dylan himself, a child of 13 years with fuzzy hair and the disposition of a lonely 50-year-old steeplejack, is a fixture so nondescript that he’s barely noticed.
For six years, from 13 to 19, perhaps the greatest artist to ever walk amongst us drifted about the plains of America’s vast expanse, travelling with a carnival. He swept up whatever filth was there to be swept, he fed the animals, fixed the rides, chatted with the other pariahs floating under starry skies with full-face make-up, and occasionally, he strummed a guitar somewhere well out of earshot of the masses.
Or at least that’s the yarn that Dylan spun when he first broke onto the scene. One of his very first recorded appearances on radio saw him tell Cynthia Gooding, “I was with the carnival off and on for six years. [I was doing] just about everything. I was a clean-up boy. I used to be on the main line on the Ferris Wheel, just run rides.” He was raised just about as normally as it gets. Working-class but very comfortable, schooled, fed and free to play. Hell, it’s not even clear whether he even went to a carnival as a punter.
Nevertheless, he ran with this travelling narrative until he found out it was high tide he’d get found out. The whys and wherefores often get put down to a young kid having a bit of fun. But it seems pertinent that some 13 years later in his professional career, the ‘voice of a generation’ tag now an achievement he had long since surpassed (imagine that), the great Sam Shepard would venture out onto the road as part of Dylan’s own travelling carnival with The Rolling Thunder Revue and write about the great storyteller in his midst.
“Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not to the head,” he eventually wrote when he made it to the other side of the tumultuous roving folk show. “It moves us into an area of mystery. Some myths are poisonous to believe in, but others have the capacity for changing something inside us, even if it’s only for a minute or two.”
That air of legend has always been there in the welter of the wavering ways that make up the original vagabond. “Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us,” Shepard continues. “The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us.” As Dylan said himself: “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” When he first broke onto the folk scene, authenticity was held uber alles, so to have spun a little white lie about a circus was essentially his first punk move. He was orchestrating something better than authenticity.
But why the circus? Why this antiquated farce now tainted by ‘freak show’ insensitivities? Well, it’s part of the American tradition, and it’s laden with mystery. In its pomp, flyers would arise in old towns in advance of the carnival, pasted onto taverns by some shady horseman, advertising chickens who can do math, the bear lady, trapeze artists and the Great Dante. There was drama, daring and a sense of hauntological tradition to this mysterious travelling show that would pop up and disappear just as quickly.
For Dylan’s latest whistle-stop concerts, as part of his Never Ending Tour, the posters sport a skeletal circus master and two silhouetted tango dancers. However, this ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ sentiment is far from the forefront of Dylan’s fiction. Nope, his circus fascination seems to be more closely related to the notion of disappearing.
This is something he mustered literally when he tumbled from his motorbike at the height of his fame and wasn’t seen for a year as he shed his old skin as a political force. The circus allows for such disappearing acts to happen seamlessly. And whether it’s Annie Oakley transforming from a humble southern belle into a rifle shooter so sharp she could blast the cigarette out of her husband’s mouth while galloping side-saddle, kissing goodbye to her responsibilities to become a lauded hero, or the much more macabre; myth, reinvention and the extraordinary are all on display at the circus. Dylan’s work dabbles on both sides.
Macabre like the tale of Robert Wiene’s 1920 silent classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. As the backstory for the film goes, writer Hans Janowitz was startled one day while at the carnival when he saw a strange man lurking in the shadows of circus tents. The next day, Janowitz read about the murder of a young girl at the same carnival and decided to attend her funeral. Therein, once again, he saw the same suspicious character lurking in the shadows of the graveyard.
As it happens, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was one of David Bowie’s favourite films, and he seems like a pertinent touchstone when it comes to Dylan’s own myth-making. “I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human,” Bowie once said. “I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman’.” Dylan’s own reinvention has never stretched to such celestial heights; he’s always grounded himself on skid row, but the need to be something other than himself, to be more than four chords and a croaky voice, to be a fixture of an unfurling roadshow of history and culture has always been there, and so, in all truth, you can happily claim that he’s been in the circus a lot more than six years now.
From his early fictional childhood to the paint he sported upon his face during The Rolling Thunder Revue as Renaldo, and now the nonstop tour he takes around the globe, he is the circus master, and the whole of modern culture lies under his tent. But meanwhile, Dylan himself is still the unknowable outsider, sweeping up backstage, bumming a cigarette from a contortionist temporarily trapped in a birdhouse, and gazing clear-eyed through a crack in the striped tarpaulin at the carnivalesque show of civility dancing therein.
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