The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [178]
I think that’s why people say Time Out of Mind is sort of dark and foreboding: because we locked into that one dimension in the sound. People say the record deals with mortality—my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? . . . You know, I’m not really quite sure why it seems to people that Time Out of Mind is a darker picture. In my mind, there’s nothing dark about it. It’s not like, you know, Dante’s Inferno or something. It doesn’t paint a picture of goblins and goons and grotesque-looking creatures or anything like that.
It was during the final stages of the album that you were hit with a serious swelling around your heart and were laid up in the hospital. You’ve said that that infection was truly painful and debilitating. Did it alter your view of life in any way?
No. No, because it didn’t! You can’t even say something like, “Well, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Even that excuse didn’t work. It was like I learned nothing. I wish I could say I put the time to good use or, you know, got highly educated in something or had some revelations about anything. But I can’t say that any of that happened. I just laid around and then had to wait for my strength to come back.
Do you think that the proximity of your illness to the album’s release helped account for why reviewers saw so many themes of mortality in ‘Time Out of Mind’?
When I recorded that album, the media weren’t paying any attention to me. I was totally outside of it.
True, but the album came out not long after you’d gone through the illness.
It did?
Yes. You were in the hospital in the spring of 1997, and ‘Time Out of Mind’ was released in autumn that same year.
Okay, well, then it could’ve been perceived that way in the organized media. But that would just be characterizing the album, really.
I want to step back a bit, to those years preceding ‘Time Out of Mind.’ First, I’d like to ask you about an occasion at an earlier Grammy Awards, in 1991, when you received a Lifetime Achievement Award. At that point, America was deep into its involvement in the Gulf War. You came out onstage that night with a small band and played a severe version of “Masters of War”—a performance that remains controversial even today. Some critics found it rushed and embarrassing, others thought it was brilliant. Then, after Jack Nicholson presented you the award, you made the following comment: “My daddy [once said], ‘Son, it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.’ ” I’ve always thought that was one of the more remarkable things I’ve heard you say. What was going through your mind at that time?
I don’t remember the time and place my father said that to me, and maybe he didn’t say it to me in that exact way. I was probably paraphrasing the whole idea, really—I’m not even sure I paraphrased in the proper context. It might’ve been something that just sort of popped in my head at that time. The only thing I remember about that whole episode, as long as you bring it up, was that I had a fever—like 104. I was extremely sick that night. Not only that, but I was disillusioned with the entire musical community and