Newspaper articles, writings, perspectives and personal fan points of view...
To Barry Williams, From Charlotte Carlin, Denmark.
Written in response to Barry Williams’ call for papers in connection with his PhD dissertation on Bob Dylan’s fan-base
Dear Barry,
Before you get “My Bob Dylan Story” I would like to discuss, briefly, what the word “fan” means to me. I’m NOT suggesting that you use another word, far from it; I’m only trying to clarify to myself why I feel strangely uneasy about the word and also trying to find out what would be the word I would rather use to describe myself. Well, not my entire self (!) but my huge interest in Bob Dylan.
As you will discover from my story, that huge interest was not always there. Dylan was always there, in the air, in the environment, and somewhat important in my younger years, but it took an almost life transforming experience to become what you would describe as a fan. It was an experience that was to lead me into an exploration of the whole of Dylan’s oeuvre, an enterprise that is still a work in progress. Where at the outset I had no idea what my project was about, I’m now beginning to understand what Michael J. Gilmour talks about, when, under the caption “Spirituality in Popular Culture”, quoting theologian Don Saliers, he writes: “Bob Dylan’s music moves many listeners out of themselves, out of their “habitual, common-sense world.” Falling under his dancing spell, we end up chasing the shadow he sees. This escape from the common-sense world leads a few listeners to something approaching religious meaning. Their thoughts might turn, no matter how far removed from organized religion, to the idea of justice, to the idea of a divine being, to the idea of reliable, meaningful, enduring love.” (Gilmour: The Gospel According To Bob Dylan p.40).
Still far removed from organized religion, it nevertheless took just one incident, one afternoon – and a certain stage in life, I suppose – for me to fall under Bob Dylan’s dancing spell and keep chasing the shadow he sees.
A Bob Dylan fan?
Am I really a Bob Dylan fan? I hope not, because I can’t really relate to that word. When people ask me, these day, what I’m doing I tell them that I’m writing. ‘Oh? About what?’ I’d rather not answer this second question because I know, I just know the expression on their faces when I say that I’m writing about Bob Dylan. I get this indulgent smile barely hiding that they find this a most bizarre occupation – as if to say “you can’t be serious” or the downright incredulous “you’re writing about a pop star!!!!” One reaction was even “do you still listen to that kind of music?” as if, by now, at this stage in life I should, long since, have switched over to classical music. I know the instant I answer this second question I have already taken a few steps down their estimation ladder. I wish my answer had been Ginsberg, Whitman, Brecht, or even Shakespeare, because, although some of these guys only died recently, they are dead, a fact that seems to give them an added value. As a sort of back up and proof that I’m in good company and not at the bottom of some kind of respectability ladder I want to name quite a few professors of poetry, history and theology who have written erudite tomes on Dylan, but…no point. They obviously don’t know that I’m writing about one of the greatest… one of the most… the guy who…
The smile is still on their faces and I play my ultimate trump card by saying that the object of my interest has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year since 1996 - hoping that by the time he gets the prize I’ll be vindicated!
Such was my reaction a couple of years back. In self-defence I later developed a more condescending attitude, something like: why should I even bother to convince you if you’re that far behind, if you really don’t know where it’s at? I didn’t say that out loud, of course.
These days I just get bored.
Oh, it was that word ‘fan’. Yes, that sums it up. That’s what I felt reduced to. Some screaming teenager at a rock concert. That was probably how they saw me, the smiling people. Even the other day, when Bob Dylan, on his official website, in a very unprecedented way addressed his, err, fan base, I felt a bit taken aback. “To my fans and followers”, he writes. I don’t consider myself a fan and I’m not a follower, but I would like to be included. I know that to real aficionados (is that the word, then? Nah, just hiding behind the Spanish word for fan that’ll soon acquire the same connotation) the man can do no wrong, and, gosh, who am I to suggest to the poet laureate of rock that he use another word, but couldn’t he have said “To my audience”?
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to be called an “audience”! Especially since I’ve never been to a Dylan concert. Yes that is the dreadful truth: Dylan and I just never happened to be in the same city at the same time. Last year my husband and I crossed the USA on a Harley to see him perform in Seattle on the 4th of September, but something came up, and we only made it to San Francisco.
What am I then? A student? A scholar? I guess that distinction only has to do with whether you’ve got your degree or not, for hopefully you’re still a student. I’ve got my degree, all right, but Dylan scholar? Arrrgghhh! Where’s the fun? Where’s the song and dance, man?
Robert Shelton calls us “an army of Dylanites, Dylanologists, Dylantantes, Dylan interpreters, fans, freaks, and followers”. Dylantante? The word is cute, but it makes you think of dilettante and in Danish the word “tante” means aunt, and the connotation is someone who really doesn’t know where it’s at. A Dylanologist? I know that the Weberman connotation doesn’t really apply anymore and that the word has come to mean a serious Dylan… err…. aficionado. But every newspaper on the planet, it seems, has some quiz going on these days leading up to Dylan’s 70th birthday, where you can test yourself and find out whether you are a “dylanologist or a neophyte” and if you can’t answer a silly question as to whether there are 1) 50 or more, 2) 100 or more, 3) 150 or more covers of “Blowin’ In The Wind” you’re out. I thought 50 or more would sort of cover the whole spectre and hence be the more intelligent answer, but no. Stuff them - all those newspapers only wanting to cash in on the event! They just succeeded in trivializing the word.
Dylanite, then? I think so. I like the sound connotation to dynamite. Not to speak of Dylan Night – of which I have, so far, experienced none, alas. Charlotte Carlin, Dylanite. That’s it. Now I can finally try and write my Dylan story.
The Life of a Dylanite
“I grew up with him” people say. Or, “I came late to Dylan” other people say. Both statements apply to me, sort of; only it feels like Dylan came to me. He fell into my lap five years ago and he has stayed there ever since, despite the occasional effort to forget him – for a while.
Yes, I did grow up with him - in Denmark. He was there, all around, together with SO MUCH MUSIC in the sixties. He was, I think, for me at least, mainly there in the form of Pete Seeger’s, Peter Paul and Mary’s and The Byrds’ renditions of his songs. I do remember happily singing along to Dylan himself, to the words “how does it feeeeel…” not because I actually knew what the song was about, but because it was such a good feeeeeling to belt it out loud together with whoever else was there.
I’m seven years younger than Bob Dylan and my English wasn’t so good then, but I remember the self-contradictory credo “Don’t follow leaders”. I didn’t so much hear it as see it written on somebody’s wall. I don’t think I realized that what followed was “Watch the parkin’ meters”, because the sentence kept puzzling me: on the one hand there was this wise advice that fitted so perfectly with the whole counter culture of the times, but on the other hand the sentence was in the imperative form – didn’t that in itself make the guy wanting to be a leader? Was that a genius stroke of language or was it a way of fooling us? I wish the sentence that followed had been there on the wall, too! Dylan was difficult for a nice and somewhat timid young Danish woman who had preferred Cliff to Elvis and The Beatles to The Rolling Stones (I don’t really like to admit this - things have changed: today I also find the Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds’ renditions somewhat lame compared to Dylan’s).
Later, having moved away from home to a rented room somewhere in the big city, I remember the release of “Nashville Skyline”. The radio presenter explained Dylan’s new voice as a result of Dylan having stopped smoking, and I also seem to recall his mentioning of a motorcycle accident a couple of years back - an event I only learnt about then. I loved “Nashville Skyline”– it was probably as much as I could chew at the time. “Self Portrait” too, for that matter – and “New Morning”. I got married around that time and my husband and I lived and raised a child in the quaintest little thatch-roofed cottage in the country. In hindsight - because I only saw the photos some years ago - it was right out of Elliott Landy’s photographs from the Dylans’ residence in Byrdcliff. I even wore the same kind of headscarf as Sara, baby in my arms too.
I think “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” passed me by completely – I wasn’t in the least into westerns; my turf was Ingmar Bergman, Visconti and French cinema nouveau.
Then came “Planet Waves”, my first Dylan record as newly divorced. I’m standing at the turntable in my little flat in the city intensely listening to “Wedding Song”. Again and again and again and again until I have the lyrics down on paper. That song mesmerized me but I remember a kind of disappointment when I finally saw the lyrics on paper. They weren’t that great, I thought, and for the first time I realized that what made Dylan so great and so special was not always the lyrics on their own, not always the music on its own and not the voice, but the combination of all three components. That, on the other hand, went right through to your soul.
“Blood On The Tracks”? Maybe too painful, unconsciously, for someone whose springtime had turned all too quickly into autumn. I knew the songs, of course, how could I not, they were in the air, but somehow they didn’t penetrate. Dylan has later expressed that he didn’t understand how anybody could enjoy an album born of so much pain. I, for one, obviously couldn’t.
By “Desire” I was finally free. I had kissed goodbye to the howling beast and suddenly I saw Dylan, the man, on the cover, in all his raging glory. On none of the other covers had Dylan’s picture appealed to me, but this one, my word! He was the epitome of hip – much more so than in his hipster days in the sixties. That hat, the jacket, the scarf, the handsome face, the sharp profile – I danced the night away to “Hurricane”, “Mozambique” and “Romance In Durango”. Skipped the needle when it reached “Joey” and loved “Sara” whoever she was. I didn’t know. An artist’s private life was of no concern to a student of New Criticism.
A short spell with a classical pianist who read poetry made me realize, although it was still mostly Dylan the musician and not yet Dylan the poet who caught my attention, that Dylan had something no one else had. I did not read poetry – well, I did when I had to - but it was not something I chose for leisure. But Dylan, surely, although I didn’t really know it yet, had something that put him up there with the poets, but in a very different way from other poets. If you didn’t understand that – well maybe understand is not the right word - if you didn’t feel that, if you didn’t get it, you certainly weren’t where it’s at. And my friend wasn’t, so the relationship didn’t last very long.
The following I kept mostly to myself: whenever reincarnation was discussed I thought of Dylan. He, for me, was the closest you could come to proof of that phenomenon. However else could one explain his vast knowledge of the human condition at such a young age? He sang as if he knew, as if he had lived through it all and just knew.
The rest is silence. Life became seriously adult. “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, a song I didn’t know at the time, describes the loss I felt at having moved away from friends and culture to another country where Dylan was never heard of. Or any other poet for that matter. Well, maybe that is not exactly true, but that is how it felt. Music itself, my music, the expression of youth and ideas; the source of great discussions – that great river of life – seemed to have dried up. Metaphorically speaking the move to another country was the day the music died. The country I had moved to with my second husband was Greenland and it was cold. You didn’t walk home in the wee hours of the morning after endless talks and laughter with your friends listening to new music. You stayed home, indoor, after work, doors closed to influences from the outside world.
I did hear on the news up there in the North that John Lennon had been shot in New York. I heard it one early, dark December morning and went into the bedroom, where the love of my life was still asleep. I was in shock and just had to break the news to him, asleep or not.
“And so what?” was the drowsy answer. Even more chocked by such an insensitive answer coming from the man I otherwise shared everything with, I didn’t want to share my next thought with him: if it could happen to Lennon it could happen to Dylan. If that were to happen the loss to the world would be inconceivable, in-con-ceivable. My sense of a possible loss was not based on any great knowledge of the man and his music/poetry, nor his private life, which I knew absolutely nothing about. As described above my knowledge was somewhat superficial. Rather, and in hindsight, the sense of a possible loss was based on the fear of the loss of self. Because the feeling that permeated everything was that Dylan in some odd way represented me. Not Dylan the man, but Dylan the idea, the concept of him and what he stood for represented my youth, my generation. Without it being a conscious perception the death of John Lennon somehow triggered the feeling that Dylan represented the formative years that had shaped who I was, and who I am to this day.
I didn’t yet realize that I had already lost. I thought for a long time that the restless farewell of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” would one day turn into a happy reunion with the old friends. I didn’t realize that the river that was my music had stopped flowing, and when we finally returned to Denmark, after nine long years, the music in the air was no longer mine. Maybe that was one of the reasons why we kept moving. Life just kept taking us from one extreme end of the world to the next. One evening, in South Africa, we were visiting a family of friends. The ANC had come to power a few years before and discussions ran high around the table between two generations, of which the younger blamed the elder for not knowing, or seemingly not knowing, what had been happening during apartheid. The dad left the table to go watch TV and who of all people appeared on the screen? A very young Bob Dylan starring as Alias in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”! As I said the album passed me by and I didn’t know that a movie had been made, but I recognized Dylan! It was obviously not a programme the dad wanted to see, and no one in the family realized who it was, so there was a quick switch to another channel. But I had seen him! However briefly he had been there. A part of my culture had visited the room. It put into perspective the colossal distance between European life of the sixties and seventies and, on the other hand, the lives of apartheid we had just been listening to. It was the distance between freedom and the long walk towards it. The struggle for civil rights in The USA, which coincided with the very beginning of Dylan’s career, took another 30 years in South Africa.
My next Dylan “incidence” happened a couple of years later when my daughter and future son-in-law came to visit and with them, as a present to us, brought “Time Out Of Mind” – an album for which Dylan had just received a Grammy. I presume the reason for choosing that specific album had more to do with the news value of it than it had to do with any knowledge of our musical taste. Our future son-in-law, whom we at that point met for the first time, turned out to be a big Dylan fan, and he had chosen the present. In the evening, around the dinner table, he would entertain with stories of Dylan’s life and career, and I remember being very surprised that Dylan still appealed so strongly to the younger generation. I also remember being surprised that Dylan himself was still releasing albums, let alone that he was still alive. As for me, “Desire” was still my last frame of reference - except for a brief stint of the unavoidable Travelling Wilburys and the likewise unavoidable “Live Aid Concert” - and when I listened to “Time Out Of Mind” it left me cold. That old man’s raspy voice rang no bell at all, it reverberated no strings of connection between the world and me. After listening a few more times, though, I was intrigued by the 16 minutes long “Highlands”. The sheer audacity and originality of it was Dylan, all right, but I was no longer there.
Proverbial seven years later our son-in-law was at it again. Had I not told him, then, that “Time Out Of Mind” didn’t really do it for me? Maybe not. Maybe he was now trying to influence my husband who for his birthday got “No Direction Home”, Martin Scorsese’s biopic on Bob Dylan.
The DVD was still in its cellophane wrap quite some time after my husband’s birthday when he was away on a trip. It was a warm and very sunny afternoon in Cape Town, when I decided that it was probably OK for me to unwrap it and have a look – he wouldn’t mind me unwrapping his present, would he? I drew the curtains in the bedroom, found my newly acquired Bose headset, lay down on the bed with my laptop, inserted the disc into the drive – and was gone from the world.
At one point the phone rang. I didn’t answer – it hadn’t rung in the world I was in, had it? My world was inhabited by Woody Guthrie, The Clancy brothers, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary – all protagonists from a very early youth – and a bunch of other people I didn’t yet know. And it was, for 208 minutes, inhabited by a young Bob Dylan I had never known: neither the young small town guy who made it to New York nor the Carnaby Street hipster who made it to the world. I also had no idea about the older Dylan who was now telling his story. Who was the Dylan then that I had known? A voice, an idea? I knew that he went from Zimmerman to Dylan, and I knew that he wrote “protest” songs and love songs like no one else, but I didn’t know what had made a 22 year old from Hibbing write “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”.
The song accompanied the credits, as I was getting ready to return to the outside world. But all of a sudden that had to wait. What was I hearing? A song I had never heard before, sure, but what was it? My eyes were again glued to the screen as strange, solemn emotions ran through my body. What was this? I’m sure I didn’t catch all the words by that first listen yet the song had a very strong emotional effect that stayed with me for days. Later when I read the lyrics and listened to the song again I was amazed by the similarity to an old Danish hymn by H.A. Brorson from 1734. Not a similarity in tune or lyrics but in concept: the idea of the presence of God in every grain of sand. With every listen tears ran down my cheeks. The same happened every time I dared mention the experience or the song to someone I trusted: my throat started contracting and tears filled my eyes. Even now, years later, writing these lines, my eyes well up.
If the movie had made me curious, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” made it compelling to find out more about this whole new other side of Bob Dylan.
The awesome simple beauty of the lyrics, and the young poet’s urge to express these kinds of sentiments, puzzled me. I was mystified as to what would drive a young person to write a song like that. And not just any young person, but one whose persona up until then, for me at least, had been the voice of a generation who cared more about social conditions than he cared about the existence of God.
Who was Bob Dylan, really?
Did I say that Dylan came to me, that he fell into my lap? Well, he certainly fell into my laptop. Shortly after the “No Direction Home” experience – and exactly 30 years after the release of “Desire” – our personal lives changed direction, yet again, and we moved out of the big city to an olive farm in the middle of a semi dessert, the olive trees fed by the water from a wide river running through at the far end of the land. Thanks to the internet and amazon.com I was able to divert my attention from watching the river flow, and I began a systematic research: I wanted to know every single song and I wanted to know about the personal life that accompanied the creation of those songs. I wanted to know if there was any research done on Bob Dylan (!!!) and found that amazon.com alone could come up with around 1750 titles, give or take. I became a daily addict to expectingrain.com from which I learned that Dylan had, just a couple of months before, started a career as disc jockey on a space radio. Not the fastest gun on a computer I managed to subscribe to a 14 days trial period on Sirius XM satellite radio, figured out what the time would be in South Africa, when Dylan went on the air in the USA on a Wednesday morning at 10.00 A.M. Happy to find out that it would be afternoon my time and not in the middle of the night (I would have set the alarm for 3 A.M. if need be!) I donned the headset and…there he was! Almost in person! Unbelievable! The raspy voice delivered not only a string of musical pearls, but also a dry humour that kept the headset glued to the ears. At times his humour was more juicy than dry, like when he introduced The Ramones “Do You Wanna Dance” he went: “Do you wanna buck ‘n wing, do you wanna bolero, do you wanna conga or do you just wanna f…s…trot”. After that episode my computer skills improved at an incredible rate: I just had to find a way of getting hold of all the 100 episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour. Who on earth would want to purchase the later, lame 2008-release audio CD with lots of good music, all right, but no voice?
I read Dylan’s autobiography “Chronicles Volume I”, finished the last page and started all over again, straight away. Who were all these people? Dylan was married? To whom? He had five children? The man had a life? I read Clinton Heylin three times, because there was just too much information for a neophyte to comprehend in one go. I cursed Greil Marcus for his half-a-page long sentences and at the same time envied him for having witnessed first hand the times and life of his subject. I started writing the beginning of book in Danish about Dylan’s life and work before I realized, halfway through, that that book had already been written. It had escaped my attention because my researches never lead me to any titles in Danish. Slightly disappointed – and by this time I had made it as far as “Desire” – I decided that it was maybe a good thing. The English language is full of Dylan biographies, so why write one in Danish when all the Dylan aficionados surely read the English ones (I know, I know, my reasoning was a way of consoling myself!) Anyway, the fact compelled me to do something else - if I wasn’t to abandon the project altogether – so I started going deeper into the lyrics instead, an exercise that proved a lot more rewarding. Michael Grey was a frightening colossus of knowledge, and Christopher Ricks became my hero: his knowledge was frightening too, especially to someone who had spent her life not studying English, but French and Spanish language and literature, but Ricks had an incredible intellectual playfulness in his writings that set me free of all the university years of sporadic and varied theories on literary criticism. Ricks was one epiphany after another; he had the audacity and joyfulness of the true erudite scholar; Ricks was lots of fun. Thanks to him I suddenly trusted myself to just go with it, to trust that whatever baggage I had, intellectually and emotionally, it was good enough for writing what I did. Imagined ghosts stopped looking me over the shoulder, inner voices stopped criticizing me and on the whole I enjoyed a freedom in writing that I had never experienced before. Thank you, professor in poetry, Christopher Ricks!
Five years down the line after that literally life transforming experience of “No Direction Home”, I still keep on keepin’ on. Having by now, with regard to analyzing the lyrics, only gotten as far as 1990 and “Under The Red Sky” I suppose Bob Dylan will keep me occupied for the rest of my life. In the beginning I swore to stick only to his 34 studio albums – that is: no official bootleg series, no illegal bootlegs, no live albums and no compilation albums – but, come on, am I a Dylanite or am I not a Dylanite? My iPod lists five versions alone of “Idiot Wind” so one or two illegal versions of songs must have sneaked in over the years.
I think the love of my life has gotten used to my new occupation by now. In the beginning he would raise an eyebrow every time I needed to buy a new book on Dylan. Not because he didn’t want me to have it, but in sheer disbelief: did I not by now know everything?
Finally, I must admit that it took a deep breath and quite some time to cross the line between the known and the unknown: to go from “Desire”, that is to go from what I had lived with and experienced first hand, so to speak, to “Street Legal” and what I now had to deliberately study. It was a transition that felt more like an act of will rather than a natural flow, and I had to get used to a voice that was not of my – young – generation any more. I had to grow up with and get used to a new Dylan and slowly, very slowly grow to love the new, old raspy voice. I had to get used to Dylan being the voice of another generation, of my other, middle and older generation, the one that wasn’t dark yet, but getting there. Eventually I began to understand that what had so impressed me when I first heard “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” and later “Every Grain Of Sand” was that Bob Dylan had, in the blunt words of Bob Johnston, one of Dylan’s early producers, not been tapped on the shoulder by God - he had been kicked in the ass. A “fact” that explained why Dylan, at the age of 22, had been able to reach across the generations to what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegård described as the third stage of human life: the religious stage. What, as a young person, I had thought of as “proof” of reincarnation I now, at this third stage in life, understood as a deep sense of spirituality that had permeated Dylan’s oeuvre since the start of his career. The new encounter with Dylan’s music, thirty years later on, had, in Gilmour’s words, moved me out of myself.
Charlotte
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"THE NET SPINNER" April 2nd, 2011 (English translation)
Karl Erik Andersen
Favorite song: "Angelina"
It's a dark afternoon and it's snowing outside the window of Karl Erik Andersen's apartment in Mo i Rana. As usual there is a blue light shining from the computer - an iMac where he edits the web site to which the planet's most eager Dylan aficionados log in around the clock. Expectingrain.com is the world's most visited Dylan site, and even Dylan's official home page recommends the web site that is edited in Mo. The web site is found in all the information books and rough-guide-to-Dylan-literature, the music magazines Rolling Stone and Mojo point to it and author Nick Hornby writes of it in the book "31 Songs", "I have a friend who stays logged on to the Dylan website Expecting Rain most of the day at work - as if the website were CNN and Dylan's career were the Middle East." When something special happens in Dylan's life, such as when his first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, died in February, the page gets close to 30,000 unique daily visitors. - It has become a way of life. If I don't update the page twice a day, there is full confusion among the users. I publish links to reviews, concert recordings, discussions and news.- I grew up in a remote place, in Valnesfjord between Fauske and Bodø. On the radio there was only a half hour of pop music a week, but I did hear some songs and liked him well enough to order his albums in the mail. After a few years he disappeared from view, and when he started with his Christian records, I lost interest. It was a girl who reminded me of him again in 1991. I listened to "Oh Mercy" from 1989 and "The Bootleg Series 1-3" and I was hooked. Then as now, I worked as an archivist at the National Library in Mo, and we had Internet access before 1994. I located newsgroups that discussed Dylan and got in contact with a fellow at Cambridge University Library who has been a mentor in international circles. He gave me the responsibility for carrying on "The Bob Dylan Who's Who" and "The Bob Dylan Atlas". So I collected all I could find about people around Dylan and catalogued information about people and places - and put it all on a web server. For a few years I ran it from work, but as traffic increased, in 1997 I rented server space and opened expectingrain.com. I can't live off the web site, but I have a donation drive twice a year, and I get 5-6% commission from what is sold via links to Amazon. This means I don't lose on the time I spend - a couple of hours a day. I am driven by interest. I already have a paying job. - When I was young, I listened to Dylan to learn English, and I also liked the music. Today I listen to his roots. In a way he is the whole musical history of the 20th century.
- How long will you keep up the site? - I have updated it for more than ten years, and I seldom have less than 10,000 unique daily visitors. I expect I will keep on a long as Bob lives, and then some.
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"It is quite peculiar how a certain individual can be connected to your life without sense of acknowledgement. Bob Dylan has been interwoven into the raveled patchwork of my own childhood. Growing up in the small, riverboat town of Alton, Illinois has the potential to destroy the soul of the most ambitious artist. Unfortunately, however, I discovered Dylan through my own wanderings and interests. I have always been deeply fascinated by the early folk-music scene, listening to these strangely archaic songs that reflected that “all too real” ghost of America. Folk songs capture the ghost of apathy and force such a ghost to haunt our minds with topical issues and truth. Such songs could only force a man to weep as opposed to turning over stones and shrugging. I purchased Rolling Stone: The Covers when I was 13 years old. The face of Dylan glared out at me and his eyes spoke of truths most men will never know or could ever possibly understand. Here was a guy who managed to reach into America’s chest cavity and extract her heart and put it on display.
After September 11th, 2001, my disconcerted generation fell to the power of fear, manipulation, vast Government, and recession. Bob’s earlier tracks from Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Other Side of Bob Dylan spoke about mythological characters, Civil Rights, the eloquent American landscape and historical/religious figures that danced with chaos and spoke out against the false idols and plastic dolls sold in store windows. Looking back on that time, I realize how intimate I had been with Dylan’s songs. “And I hope that you die/ And your death'll come soon/ I will follow your casket/ In the pale afternoon/ And I'll watch while you're lowered/ Down to your deathbed/ And I'll stand over your grave/ 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.”
After listening to Masters of War, I felt as if the song could have been played on the radio and understood by all Americans. It was late in 2002 when Americans slowly became crippled by the political climate and the Bush Administration. The songs on Dylan’s earlier records spoke of similar themes, comparable wars, dictatorial leaders and an absence of understanding and concern. Dylan’s albums have always been significant photographic glimpses into the psyche of America. Musicians like Dylan do not simply walk the borderland (that promising avenue often occupied by the most articulate and impressively dynamic of artists) without losing their minds first. To understand Dylan is to not understand Dylan. After memorizing nearly every song on Dylan’s albums that came from the womb of the 1960s, I began to listen to Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Joan Baez. I realized early on that Dylan’s profile could be seen in American Literature as well as in the foundation of contemporary music. I fell into the Beatnik world and started reading Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey.
The intimate connection between Dylan and the Beatnik scene was clear and I felt just like Ginsberg and Dylan and Kerouac. I was not interested in people who yawned or fell ill to the dreary empty space of boredom. My mind walks and talks too much to be plagued with yawns. The Beat scene and Dylan’s music began to define a time that looked similar to my own time and yet was missing the most essential elements. Dylan pulled me into the labyrinthine world of folk music, beat literature, philosophy, and life. I began to understand life the more I dared to listen to Dylan’s words and rhythm. Songs like Tangled Up In Blue, Shelter From The Storm, and You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere make me feel attached to the old, weird America, that place that was colored like a painting by Andrew Wyeth and oozing with supernaturalism like a Gypsy circus. It was that difficult and yet profound time in America when locomotives and screeching ghost trains filled the West, when men and women gathered in open fields, along roads, between buildings and stores to shout at the moon, sing songs, tell stories, laugh, cook, and talk about the wonders and eerie beauties of the ancient world.
Dylan’s songs remind me of that place in America where we all struggled to live and to be useful. However, Dylan is one of those musicians that taught me not only how to live and how to widen my own eyes, but he also allowed me to learn more about America and her sweetness and her sourness. These elements have always made themselves present in Dylan’s lyrical expression. I have often thought about the various complex interpretations of Dylan’s songs and I am quite certain such interpretations hold some validity. But, the most essential thing with his songs is to move along with them, to listen to their life, their voice and trickery.
Dylan will be the soundtrack of my own consciousness and life until I take my last breath."
--Thanks for reading!
-- Jeffrey
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Written in response to Barry Williams’ call for papers in connection with his PhD dissertation on Bob Dylan’s fan-base
Dear Barry,
Before you get “My Bob Dylan Story” I would like to discuss, briefly, what the word “fan” means to me. I’m NOT suggesting that you use another word, far from it; I’m only trying to clarify to myself why I feel strangely uneasy about the word and also trying to find out what would be the word I would rather use to describe myself. Well, not my entire self (!) but my huge interest in Bob Dylan.
As you will discover from my story, that huge interest was not always there. Dylan was always there, in the air, in the environment, and somewhat important in my younger years, but it took an almost life transforming experience to become what you would describe as a fan. It was an experience that was to lead me into an exploration of the whole of Dylan’s oeuvre, an enterprise that is still a work in progress. Where at the outset I had no idea what my project was about, I’m now beginning to understand what Michael J. Gilmour talks about, when, under the caption “Spirituality in Popular Culture”, quoting theologian Don Saliers, he writes: “Bob Dylan’s music moves many listeners out of themselves, out of their “habitual, common-sense world.” Falling under his dancing spell, we end up chasing the shadow he sees. This escape from the common-sense world leads a few listeners to something approaching religious meaning. Their thoughts might turn, no matter how far removed from organized religion, to the idea of justice, to the idea of a divine being, to the idea of reliable, meaningful, enduring love.” (Gilmour: The Gospel According To Bob Dylan p.40).
Still far removed from organized religion, it nevertheless took just one incident, one afternoon – and a certain stage in life, I suppose – for me to fall under Bob Dylan’s dancing spell and keep chasing the shadow he sees.
A Bob Dylan fan?
Am I really a Bob Dylan fan? I hope not, because I can’t really relate to that word. When people ask me, these day, what I’m doing I tell them that I’m writing. ‘Oh? About what?’ I’d rather not answer this second question because I know, I just know the expression on their faces when I say that I’m writing about Bob Dylan. I get this indulgent smile barely hiding that they find this a most bizarre occupation – as if to say “you can’t be serious” or the downright incredulous “you’re writing about a pop star!!!!” One reaction was even “do you still listen to that kind of music?” as if, by now, at this stage in life I should, long since, have switched over to classical music. I know the instant I answer this second question I have already taken a few steps down their estimation ladder. I wish my answer had been Ginsberg, Whitman, Brecht, or even Shakespeare, because, although some of these guys only died recently, they are dead, a fact that seems to give them an added value. As a sort of back up and proof that I’m in good company and not at the bottom of some kind of respectability ladder I want to name quite a few professors of poetry, history and theology who have written erudite tomes on Dylan, but…no point. They obviously don’t know that I’m writing about one of the greatest… one of the most… the guy who…
The smile is still on their faces and I play my ultimate trump card by saying that the object of my interest has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year since 1996 - hoping that by the time he gets the prize I’ll be vindicated!
Such was my reaction a couple of years back. In self-defence I later developed a more condescending attitude, something like: why should I even bother to convince you if you’re that far behind, if you really don’t know where it’s at? I didn’t say that out loud, of course.
These days I just get bored.
Oh, it was that word ‘fan’. Yes, that sums it up. That’s what I felt reduced to. Some screaming teenager at a rock concert. That was probably how they saw me, the smiling people. Even the other day, when Bob Dylan, on his official website, in a very unprecedented way addressed his, err, fan base, I felt a bit taken aback. “To my fans and followers”, he writes. I don’t consider myself a fan and I’m not a follower, but I would like to be included. I know that to real aficionados (is that the word, then? Nah, just hiding behind the Spanish word for fan that’ll soon acquire the same connotation) the man can do no wrong, and, gosh, who am I to suggest to the poet laureate of rock that he use another word, but couldn’t he have said “To my audience”?
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to be called an “audience”! Especially since I’ve never been to a Dylan concert. Yes that is the dreadful truth: Dylan and I just never happened to be in the same city at the same time. Last year my husband and I crossed the USA on a Harley to see him perform in Seattle on the 4th of September, but something came up, and we only made it to San Francisco.
What am I then? A student? A scholar? I guess that distinction only has to do with whether you’ve got your degree or not, for hopefully you’re still a student. I’ve got my degree, all right, but Dylan scholar? Arrrgghhh! Where’s the fun? Where’s the song and dance, man?
Robert Shelton calls us “an army of Dylanites, Dylanologists, Dylantantes, Dylan interpreters, fans, freaks, and followers”. Dylantante? The word is cute, but it makes you think of dilettante and in Danish the word “tante” means aunt, and the connotation is someone who really doesn’t know where it’s at. A Dylanologist? I know that the Weberman connotation doesn’t really apply anymore and that the word has come to mean a serious Dylan… err…. aficionado. But every newspaper on the planet, it seems, has some quiz going on these days leading up to Dylan’s 70th birthday, where you can test yourself and find out whether you are a “dylanologist or a neophyte” and if you can’t answer a silly question as to whether there are 1) 50 or more, 2) 100 or more, 3) 150 or more covers of “Blowin’ In The Wind” you’re out. I thought 50 or more would sort of cover the whole spectre and hence be the more intelligent answer, but no. Stuff them - all those newspapers only wanting to cash in on the event! They just succeeded in trivializing the word.
Dylanite, then? I think so. I like the sound connotation to dynamite. Not to speak of Dylan Night – of which I have, so far, experienced none, alas. Charlotte Carlin, Dylanite. That’s it. Now I can finally try and write my Dylan story.
The Life of a Dylanite
“I grew up with him” people say. Or, “I came late to Dylan” other people say. Both statements apply to me, sort of; only it feels like Dylan came to me. He fell into my lap five years ago and he has stayed there ever since, despite the occasional effort to forget him – for a while.
Yes, I did grow up with him - in Denmark. He was there, all around, together with SO MUCH MUSIC in the sixties. He was, I think, for me at least, mainly there in the form of Pete Seeger’s, Peter Paul and Mary’s and The Byrds’ renditions of his songs. I do remember happily singing along to Dylan himself, to the words “how does it feeeeel…” not because I actually knew what the song was about, but because it was such a good feeeeeling to belt it out loud together with whoever else was there.
I’m seven years younger than Bob Dylan and my English wasn’t so good then, but I remember the self-contradictory credo “Don’t follow leaders”. I didn’t so much hear it as see it written on somebody’s wall. I don’t think I realized that what followed was “Watch the parkin’ meters”, because the sentence kept puzzling me: on the one hand there was this wise advice that fitted so perfectly with the whole counter culture of the times, but on the other hand the sentence was in the imperative form – didn’t that in itself make the guy wanting to be a leader? Was that a genius stroke of language or was it a way of fooling us? I wish the sentence that followed had been there on the wall, too! Dylan was difficult for a nice and somewhat timid young Danish woman who had preferred Cliff to Elvis and The Beatles to The Rolling Stones (I don’t really like to admit this - things have changed: today I also find the Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds’ renditions somewhat lame compared to Dylan’s).
Later, having moved away from home to a rented room somewhere in the big city, I remember the release of “Nashville Skyline”. The radio presenter explained Dylan’s new voice as a result of Dylan having stopped smoking, and I also seem to recall his mentioning of a motorcycle accident a couple of years back - an event I only learnt about then. I loved “Nashville Skyline”– it was probably as much as I could chew at the time. “Self Portrait” too, for that matter – and “New Morning”. I got married around that time and my husband and I lived and raised a child in the quaintest little thatch-roofed cottage in the country. In hindsight - because I only saw the photos some years ago - it was right out of Elliott Landy’s photographs from the Dylans’ residence in Byrdcliff. I even wore the same kind of headscarf as Sara, baby in my arms too.
I think “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” passed me by completely – I wasn’t in the least into westerns; my turf was Ingmar Bergman, Visconti and French cinema nouveau.
Then came “Planet Waves”, my first Dylan record as newly divorced. I’m standing at the turntable in my little flat in the city intensely listening to “Wedding Song”. Again and again and again and again until I have the lyrics down on paper. That song mesmerized me but I remember a kind of disappointment when I finally saw the lyrics on paper. They weren’t that great, I thought, and for the first time I realized that what made Dylan so great and so special was not always the lyrics on their own, not always the music on its own and not the voice, but the combination of all three components. That, on the other hand, went right through to your soul.
“Blood On The Tracks”? Maybe too painful, unconsciously, for someone whose springtime had turned all too quickly into autumn. I knew the songs, of course, how could I not, they were in the air, but somehow they didn’t penetrate. Dylan has later expressed that he didn’t understand how anybody could enjoy an album born of so much pain. I, for one, obviously couldn’t.
By “Desire” I was finally free. I had kissed goodbye to the howling beast and suddenly I saw Dylan, the man, on the cover, in all his raging glory. On none of the other covers had Dylan’s picture appealed to me, but this one, my word! He was the epitome of hip – much more so than in his hipster days in the sixties. That hat, the jacket, the scarf, the handsome face, the sharp profile – I danced the night away to “Hurricane”, “Mozambique” and “Romance In Durango”. Skipped the needle when it reached “Joey” and loved “Sara” whoever she was. I didn’t know. An artist’s private life was of no concern to a student of New Criticism.
A short spell with a classical pianist who read poetry made me realize, although it was still mostly Dylan the musician and not yet Dylan the poet who caught my attention, that Dylan had something no one else had. I did not read poetry – well, I did when I had to - but it was not something I chose for leisure. But Dylan, surely, although I didn’t really know it yet, had something that put him up there with the poets, but in a very different way from other poets. If you didn’t understand that – well maybe understand is not the right word - if you didn’t feel that, if you didn’t get it, you certainly weren’t where it’s at. And my friend wasn’t, so the relationship didn’t last very long.
The following I kept mostly to myself: whenever reincarnation was discussed I thought of Dylan. He, for me, was the closest you could come to proof of that phenomenon. However else could one explain his vast knowledge of the human condition at such a young age? He sang as if he knew, as if he had lived through it all and just knew.
The rest is silence. Life became seriously adult. “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, a song I didn’t know at the time, describes the loss I felt at having moved away from friends and culture to another country where Dylan was never heard of. Or any other poet for that matter. Well, maybe that is not exactly true, but that is how it felt. Music itself, my music, the expression of youth and ideas; the source of great discussions – that great river of life – seemed to have dried up. Metaphorically speaking the move to another country was the day the music died. The country I had moved to with my second husband was Greenland and it was cold. You didn’t walk home in the wee hours of the morning after endless talks and laughter with your friends listening to new music. You stayed home, indoor, after work, doors closed to influences from the outside world.
I did hear on the news up there in the North that John Lennon had been shot in New York. I heard it one early, dark December morning and went into the bedroom, where the love of my life was still asleep. I was in shock and just had to break the news to him, asleep or not.
“And so what?” was the drowsy answer. Even more chocked by such an insensitive answer coming from the man I otherwise shared everything with, I didn’t want to share my next thought with him: if it could happen to Lennon it could happen to Dylan. If that were to happen the loss to the world would be inconceivable, in-con-ceivable. My sense of a possible loss was not based on any great knowledge of the man and his music/poetry, nor his private life, which I knew absolutely nothing about. As described above my knowledge was somewhat superficial. Rather, and in hindsight, the sense of a possible loss was based on the fear of the loss of self. Because the feeling that permeated everything was that Dylan in some odd way represented me. Not Dylan the man, but Dylan the idea, the concept of him and what he stood for represented my youth, my generation. Without it being a conscious perception the death of John Lennon somehow triggered the feeling that Dylan represented the formative years that had shaped who I was, and who I am to this day.
I didn’t yet realize that I had already lost. I thought for a long time that the restless farewell of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” would one day turn into a happy reunion with the old friends. I didn’t realize that the river that was my music had stopped flowing, and when we finally returned to Denmark, after nine long years, the music in the air was no longer mine. Maybe that was one of the reasons why we kept moving. Life just kept taking us from one extreme end of the world to the next. One evening, in South Africa, we were visiting a family of friends. The ANC had come to power a few years before and discussions ran high around the table between two generations, of which the younger blamed the elder for not knowing, or seemingly not knowing, what had been happening during apartheid. The dad left the table to go watch TV and who of all people appeared on the screen? A very young Bob Dylan starring as Alias in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”! As I said the album passed me by and I didn’t know that a movie had been made, but I recognized Dylan! It was obviously not a programme the dad wanted to see, and no one in the family realized who it was, so there was a quick switch to another channel. But I had seen him! However briefly he had been there. A part of my culture had visited the room. It put into perspective the colossal distance between European life of the sixties and seventies and, on the other hand, the lives of apartheid we had just been listening to. It was the distance between freedom and the long walk towards it. The struggle for civil rights in The USA, which coincided with the very beginning of Dylan’s career, took another 30 years in South Africa.
My next Dylan “incidence” happened a couple of years later when my daughter and future son-in-law came to visit and with them, as a present to us, brought “Time Out Of Mind” – an album for which Dylan had just received a Grammy. I presume the reason for choosing that specific album had more to do with the news value of it than it had to do with any knowledge of our musical taste. Our future son-in-law, whom we at that point met for the first time, turned out to be a big Dylan fan, and he had chosen the present. In the evening, around the dinner table, he would entertain with stories of Dylan’s life and career, and I remember being very surprised that Dylan still appealed so strongly to the younger generation. I also remember being surprised that Dylan himself was still releasing albums, let alone that he was still alive. As for me, “Desire” was still my last frame of reference - except for a brief stint of the unavoidable Travelling Wilburys and the likewise unavoidable “Live Aid Concert” - and when I listened to “Time Out Of Mind” it left me cold. That old man’s raspy voice rang no bell at all, it reverberated no strings of connection between the world and me. After listening a few more times, though, I was intrigued by the 16 minutes long “Highlands”. The sheer audacity and originality of it was Dylan, all right, but I was no longer there.
Proverbial seven years later our son-in-law was at it again. Had I not told him, then, that “Time Out Of Mind” didn’t really do it for me? Maybe not. Maybe he was now trying to influence my husband who for his birthday got “No Direction Home”, Martin Scorsese’s biopic on Bob Dylan.
The DVD was still in its cellophane wrap quite some time after my husband’s birthday when he was away on a trip. It was a warm and very sunny afternoon in Cape Town, when I decided that it was probably OK for me to unwrap it and have a look – he wouldn’t mind me unwrapping his present, would he? I drew the curtains in the bedroom, found my newly acquired Bose headset, lay down on the bed with my laptop, inserted the disc into the drive – and was gone from the world.
At one point the phone rang. I didn’t answer – it hadn’t rung in the world I was in, had it? My world was inhabited by Woody Guthrie, The Clancy brothers, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary – all protagonists from a very early youth – and a bunch of other people I didn’t yet know. And it was, for 208 minutes, inhabited by a young Bob Dylan I had never known: neither the young small town guy who made it to New York nor the Carnaby Street hipster who made it to the world. I also had no idea about the older Dylan who was now telling his story. Who was the Dylan then that I had known? A voice, an idea? I knew that he went from Zimmerman to Dylan, and I knew that he wrote “protest” songs and love songs like no one else, but I didn’t know what had made a 22 year old from Hibbing write “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”.
The song accompanied the credits, as I was getting ready to return to the outside world. But all of a sudden that had to wait. What was I hearing? A song I had never heard before, sure, but what was it? My eyes were again glued to the screen as strange, solemn emotions ran through my body. What was this? I’m sure I didn’t catch all the words by that first listen yet the song had a very strong emotional effect that stayed with me for days. Later when I read the lyrics and listened to the song again I was amazed by the similarity to an old Danish hymn by H.A. Brorson from 1734. Not a similarity in tune or lyrics but in concept: the idea of the presence of God in every grain of sand. With every listen tears ran down my cheeks. The same happened every time I dared mention the experience or the song to someone I trusted: my throat started contracting and tears filled my eyes. Even now, years later, writing these lines, my eyes well up.
If the movie had made me curious, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” made it compelling to find out more about this whole new other side of Bob Dylan.
The awesome simple beauty of the lyrics, and the young poet’s urge to express these kinds of sentiments, puzzled me. I was mystified as to what would drive a young person to write a song like that. And not just any young person, but one whose persona up until then, for me at least, had been the voice of a generation who cared more about social conditions than he cared about the existence of God.
Who was Bob Dylan, really?
Did I say that Dylan came to me, that he fell into my lap? Well, he certainly fell into my laptop. Shortly after the “No Direction Home” experience – and exactly 30 years after the release of “Desire” – our personal lives changed direction, yet again, and we moved out of the big city to an olive farm in the middle of a semi dessert, the olive trees fed by the water from a wide river running through at the far end of the land. Thanks to the internet and amazon.com I was able to divert my attention from watching the river flow, and I began a systematic research: I wanted to know every single song and I wanted to know about the personal life that accompanied the creation of those songs. I wanted to know if there was any research done on Bob Dylan (!!!) and found that amazon.com alone could come up with around 1750 titles, give or take. I became a daily addict to expectingrain.com from which I learned that Dylan had, just a couple of months before, started a career as disc jockey on a space radio. Not the fastest gun on a computer I managed to subscribe to a 14 days trial period on Sirius XM satellite radio, figured out what the time would be in South Africa, when Dylan went on the air in the USA on a Wednesday morning at 10.00 A.M. Happy to find out that it would be afternoon my time and not in the middle of the night (I would have set the alarm for 3 A.M. if need be!) I donned the headset and…there he was! Almost in person! Unbelievable! The raspy voice delivered not only a string of musical pearls, but also a dry humour that kept the headset glued to the ears. At times his humour was more juicy than dry, like when he introduced The Ramones “Do You Wanna Dance” he went: “Do you wanna buck ‘n wing, do you wanna bolero, do you wanna conga or do you just wanna f…s…trot”. After that episode my computer skills improved at an incredible rate: I just had to find a way of getting hold of all the 100 episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour. Who on earth would want to purchase the later, lame 2008-release audio CD with lots of good music, all right, but no voice?
I read Dylan’s autobiography “Chronicles Volume I”, finished the last page and started all over again, straight away. Who were all these people? Dylan was married? To whom? He had five children? The man had a life? I read Clinton Heylin three times, because there was just too much information for a neophyte to comprehend in one go. I cursed Greil Marcus for his half-a-page long sentences and at the same time envied him for having witnessed first hand the times and life of his subject. I started writing the beginning of book in Danish about Dylan’s life and work before I realized, halfway through, that that book had already been written. It had escaped my attention because my researches never lead me to any titles in Danish. Slightly disappointed – and by this time I had made it as far as “Desire” – I decided that it was maybe a good thing. The English language is full of Dylan biographies, so why write one in Danish when all the Dylan aficionados surely read the English ones (I know, I know, my reasoning was a way of consoling myself!) Anyway, the fact compelled me to do something else - if I wasn’t to abandon the project altogether – so I started going deeper into the lyrics instead, an exercise that proved a lot more rewarding. Michael Grey was a frightening colossus of knowledge, and Christopher Ricks became my hero: his knowledge was frightening too, especially to someone who had spent her life not studying English, but French and Spanish language and literature, but Ricks had an incredible intellectual playfulness in his writings that set me free of all the university years of sporadic and varied theories on literary criticism. Ricks was one epiphany after another; he had the audacity and joyfulness of the true erudite scholar; Ricks was lots of fun. Thanks to him I suddenly trusted myself to just go with it, to trust that whatever baggage I had, intellectually and emotionally, it was good enough for writing what I did. Imagined ghosts stopped looking me over the shoulder, inner voices stopped criticizing me and on the whole I enjoyed a freedom in writing that I had never experienced before. Thank you, professor in poetry, Christopher Ricks!
Five years down the line after that literally life transforming experience of “No Direction Home”, I still keep on keepin’ on. Having by now, with regard to analyzing the lyrics, only gotten as far as 1990 and “Under The Red Sky” I suppose Bob Dylan will keep me occupied for the rest of my life. In the beginning I swore to stick only to his 34 studio albums – that is: no official bootleg series, no illegal bootlegs, no live albums and no compilation albums – but, come on, am I a Dylanite or am I not a Dylanite? My iPod lists five versions alone of “Idiot Wind” so one or two illegal versions of songs must have sneaked in over the years.
I think the love of my life has gotten used to my new occupation by now. In the beginning he would raise an eyebrow every time I needed to buy a new book on Dylan. Not because he didn’t want me to have it, but in sheer disbelief: did I not by now know everything?
Finally, I must admit that it took a deep breath and quite some time to cross the line between the known and the unknown: to go from “Desire”, that is to go from what I had lived with and experienced first hand, so to speak, to “Street Legal” and what I now had to deliberately study. It was a transition that felt more like an act of will rather than a natural flow, and I had to get used to a voice that was not of my – young – generation any more. I had to grow up with and get used to a new Dylan and slowly, very slowly grow to love the new, old raspy voice. I had to get used to Dylan being the voice of another generation, of my other, middle and older generation, the one that wasn’t dark yet, but getting there. Eventually I began to understand that what had so impressed me when I first heard “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” and later “Every Grain Of Sand” was that Bob Dylan had, in the blunt words of Bob Johnston, one of Dylan’s early producers, not been tapped on the shoulder by God - he had been kicked in the ass. A “fact” that explained why Dylan, at the age of 22, had been able to reach across the generations to what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegård described as the third stage of human life: the religious stage. What, as a young person, I had thought of as “proof” of reincarnation I now, at this third stage in life, understood as a deep sense of spirituality that had permeated Dylan’s oeuvre since the start of his career. The new encounter with Dylan’s music, thirty years later on, had, in Gilmour’s words, moved me out of myself.
Charlotte
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"THE NET SPINNER" April 2nd, 2011 (English translation)
Karl Erik Andersen
Favorite song: "Angelina"
It's a dark afternoon and it's snowing outside the window of Karl Erik Andersen's apartment in Mo i Rana. As usual there is a blue light shining from the computer - an iMac where he edits the web site to which the planet's most eager Dylan aficionados log in around the clock. Expectingrain.com is the world's most visited Dylan site, and even Dylan's official home page recommends the web site that is edited in Mo. The web site is found in all the information books and rough-guide-to-Dylan-literature, the music magazines Rolling Stone and Mojo point to it and author Nick Hornby writes of it in the book "31 Songs", "I have a friend who stays logged on to the Dylan website Expecting Rain most of the day at work - as if the website were CNN and Dylan's career were the Middle East." When something special happens in Dylan's life, such as when his first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, died in February, the page gets close to 30,000 unique daily visitors. - It has become a way of life. If I don't update the page twice a day, there is full confusion among the users. I publish links to reviews, concert recordings, discussions and news.- I grew up in a remote place, in Valnesfjord between Fauske and Bodø. On the radio there was only a half hour of pop music a week, but I did hear some songs and liked him well enough to order his albums in the mail. After a few years he disappeared from view, and when he started with his Christian records, I lost interest. It was a girl who reminded me of him again in 1991. I listened to "Oh Mercy" from 1989 and "The Bootleg Series 1-3" and I was hooked. Then as now, I worked as an archivist at the National Library in Mo, and we had Internet access before 1994. I located newsgroups that discussed Dylan and got in contact with a fellow at Cambridge University Library who has been a mentor in international circles. He gave me the responsibility for carrying on "The Bob Dylan Who's Who" and "The Bob Dylan Atlas". So I collected all I could find about people around Dylan and catalogued information about people and places - and put it all on a web server. For a few years I ran it from work, but as traffic increased, in 1997 I rented server space and opened expectingrain.com. I can't live off the web site, but I have a donation drive twice a year, and I get 5-6% commission from what is sold via links to Amazon. This means I don't lose on the time I spend - a couple of hours a day. I am driven by interest. I already have a paying job. - When I was young, I listened to Dylan to learn English, and I also liked the music. Today I listen to his roots. In a way he is the whole musical history of the 20th century.
- How long will you keep up the site? - I have updated it for more than ten years, and I seldom have less than 10,000 unique daily visitors. I expect I will keep on a long as Bob lives, and then some.
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"It is quite peculiar how a certain individual can be connected to your life without sense of acknowledgement. Bob Dylan has been interwoven into the raveled patchwork of my own childhood. Growing up in the small, riverboat town of Alton, Illinois has the potential to destroy the soul of the most ambitious artist. Unfortunately, however, I discovered Dylan through my own wanderings and interests. I have always been deeply fascinated by the early folk-music scene, listening to these strangely archaic songs that reflected that “all too real” ghost of America. Folk songs capture the ghost of apathy and force such a ghost to haunt our minds with topical issues and truth. Such songs could only force a man to weep as opposed to turning over stones and shrugging. I purchased Rolling Stone: The Covers when I was 13 years old. The face of Dylan glared out at me and his eyes spoke of truths most men will never know or could ever possibly understand. Here was a guy who managed to reach into America’s chest cavity and extract her heart and put it on display.
After September 11th, 2001, my disconcerted generation fell to the power of fear, manipulation, vast Government, and recession. Bob’s earlier tracks from Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Other Side of Bob Dylan spoke about mythological characters, Civil Rights, the eloquent American landscape and historical/religious figures that danced with chaos and spoke out against the false idols and plastic dolls sold in store windows. Looking back on that time, I realize how intimate I had been with Dylan’s songs. “And I hope that you die/ And your death'll come soon/ I will follow your casket/ In the pale afternoon/ And I'll watch while you're lowered/ Down to your deathbed/ And I'll stand over your grave/ 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.”
After listening to Masters of War, I felt as if the song could have been played on the radio and understood by all Americans. It was late in 2002 when Americans slowly became crippled by the political climate and the Bush Administration. The songs on Dylan’s earlier records spoke of similar themes, comparable wars, dictatorial leaders and an absence of understanding and concern. Dylan’s albums have always been significant photographic glimpses into the psyche of America. Musicians like Dylan do not simply walk the borderland (that promising avenue often occupied by the most articulate and impressively dynamic of artists) without losing their minds first. To understand Dylan is to not understand Dylan. After memorizing nearly every song on Dylan’s albums that came from the womb of the 1960s, I began to listen to Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Joan Baez. I realized early on that Dylan’s profile could be seen in American Literature as well as in the foundation of contemporary music. I fell into the Beatnik world and started reading Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey.
The intimate connection between Dylan and the Beatnik scene was clear and I felt just like Ginsberg and Dylan and Kerouac. I was not interested in people who yawned or fell ill to the dreary empty space of boredom. My mind walks and talks too much to be plagued with yawns. The Beat scene and Dylan’s music began to define a time that looked similar to my own time and yet was missing the most essential elements. Dylan pulled me into the labyrinthine world of folk music, beat literature, philosophy, and life. I began to understand life the more I dared to listen to Dylan’s words and rhythm. Songs like Tangled Up In Blue, Shelter From The Storm, and You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere make me feel attached to the old, weird America, that place that was colored like a painting by Andrew Wyeth and oozing with supernaturalism like a Gypsy circus. It was that difficult and yet profound time in America when locomotives and screeching ghost trains filled the West, when men and women gathered in open fields, along roads, between buildings and stores to shout at the moon, sing songs, tell stories, laugh, cook, and talk about the wonders and eerie beauties of the ancient world.
Dylan’s songs remind me of that place in America where we all struggled to live and to be useful. However, Dylan is one of those musicians that taught me not only how to live and how to widen my own eyes, but he also allowed me to learn more about America and her sweetness and her sourness. These elements have always made themselves present in Dylan’s lyrical expression. I have often thought about the various complex interpretations of Dylan’s songs and I am quite certain such interpretations hold some validity. But, the most essential thing with his songs is to move along with them, to listen to their life, their voice and trickery.
Dylan will be the soundtrack of my own consciousness and life until I take my last breath."
--Thanks for reading!
-- Jeffrey
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Not Dark Yet: Bob Dylan at 70 - Remembering to appreciate a cultural treasure.
Published on April 18, 2011 by Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Otterbein College and a practicing clinical psychologist in Columbus, Ohio.
Once in a while one wishes to take a break from the brokenness of life and turn one's mind to the goodness of it--its delicate pleasures; the art, the music, the poetry.
To my mind, no other person in the last half-century has contributed as much in this realm as one Robert Zimmerman, more commonly known as Bob Dylan, who's now quite the sage as he reaches his 70th birthday in May.
Old Bob is one of these rare individuals whose life you can rightly and happily envy. The man has done extraordinary things in his field, has seen extraordinary times, and has kept his creative spirit, curiosity, and good sense in tact.
Dylan transformed folk music in his early years and brought it renewed energy and relevance. Then he famously went electric and brought rock-n-roll out of its teen-induced stupor and into cultural and political relevance. In the ensuing years he has remained restless; musically, he has explored and incorporated gospel, country, jazz, and swing influences. Religiously, he detoured into Christianity (as reflected in the inferior ‘Slow Train Coming') and back (in the superior, ‘Infidels').
Dylan was never easy to access. He refrained from composing beautiful melodies, insisted on writing songs about things other than young love, played mostly in the minor key, and created verbal smokescreens in interviews. In his notoriously unpredictable live performances, he has tinkered incessantly with his enormous songbook, often playing new--at times incomprehensible--versions of his old tunes. Still, from the beginning his artistic voice was immediately singular, at once old and new, transparent and opaque, intimate and canonical. He shape-shifted much over the years, but not in the callow, trying-to-survive-by-adopting-the-latest-trend kind of way. Rather, he changed organically, in the way of true explorers, by following his own curiosities and questions. His themes have changed to reflect not his audience's taste or pop culture's dictates but his own journey.
Unlike many of his generation, who died or became nostalgia acts, Dylan remains active, innovative and relevant. He has continued to make new music, and his new music is often more urgent, more probing than before, exploring various aspects of Americana--its interior and exterior landscapes.In a world where most artists have one good song, or at best one good record in them, Dylan has made multiple masterpiece recordings in each one of the last five decades, creating undoubtedly the deepest, richest, and most influential songbook in the history of adult American pop music.
His influence and longevity are even more startling given the fact that he's never sold that many records; he has sold less than the Spice Girls, less than Cher. He's never been a heartthrob, never shook his hips or pouted. He never starred in the tabloids, never did the talk show thing, the ‘reality' thing, the rehab thing. His children and ex-wives have never been paraded in the media. The only thing he's known widely for is his art.Dylan never had a great singing voice, and in recent years his voice has deteriorated further. He'd never ‘make it to Hollywood' as an ‘American Idol' aspirant. Yet he is a great singer, with unique phrasing, timing, and energy. Lyrically, he has been unequaled among contemporary American songwriters and poets, with superior range, erudition, inventiveness, playfulness, and depth of feeling.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Published on April 18, 2011 by Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Otterbein College and a practicing clinical psychologist in Columbus, Ohio.
Once in a while one wishes to take a break from the brokenness of life and turn one's mind to the goodness of it--its delicate pleasures; the art, the music, the poetry.
To my mind, no other person in the last half-century has contributed as much in this realm as one Robert Zimmerman, more commonly known as Bob Dylan, who's now quite the sage as he reaches his 70th birthday in May.
Old Bob is one of these rare individuals whose life you can rightly and happily envy. The man has done extraordinary things in his field, has seen extraordinary times, and has kept his creative spirit, curiosity, and good sense in tact.
Dylan transformed folk music in his early years and brought it renewed energy and relevance. Then he famously went electric and brought rock-n-roll out of its teen-induced stupor and into cultural and political relevance. In the ensuing years he has remained restless; musically, he has explored and incorporated gospel, country, jazz, and swing influences. Religiously, he detoured into Christianity (as reflected in the inferior ‘Slow Train Coming') and back (in the superior, ‘Infidels').
Dylan was never easy to access. He refrained from composing beautiful melodies, insisted on writing songs about things other than young love, played mostly in the minor key, and created verbal smokescreens in interviews. In his notoriously unpredictable live performances, he has tinkered incessantly with his enormous songbook, often playing new--at times incomprehensible--versions of his old tunes. Still, from the beginning his artistic voice was immediately singular, at once old and new, transparent and opaque, intimate and canonical. He shape-shifted much over the years, but not in the callow, trying-to-survive-by-adopting-the-latest-trend kind of way. Rather, he changed organically, in the way of true explorers, by following his own curiosities and questions. His themes have changed to reflect not his audience's taste or pop culture's dictates but his own journey.
Unlike many of his generation, who died or became nostalgia acts, Dylan remains active, innovative and relevant. He has continued to make new music, and his new music is often more urgent, more probing than before, exploring various aspects of Americana--its interior and exterior landscapes.In a world where most artists have one good song, or at best one good record in them, Dylan has made multiple masterpiece recordings in each one of the last five decades, creating undoubtedly the deepest, richest, and most influential songbook in the history of adult American pop music.
His influence and longevity are even more startling given the fact that he's never sold that many records; he has sold less than the Spice Girls, less than Cher. He's never been a heartthrob, never shook his hips or pouted. He never starred in the tabloids, never did the talk show thing, the ‘reality' thing, the rehab thing. His children and ex-wives have never been paraded in the media. The only thing he's known widely for is his art.Dylan never had a great singing voice, and in recent years his voice has deteriorated further. He'd never ‘make it to Hollywood' as an ‘American Idol' aspirant. Yet he is a great singer, with unique phrasing, timing, and energy. Lyrically, he has been unequaled among contemporary American songwriters and poets, with superior range, erudition, inventiveness, playfulness, and depth of feeling.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Bob Dylan: The way he sang made everything seem like a message
Monday 02 May 2011
Telegraph.co.uk
Bob Dylan, who turns 70 next month, is the most obsessively scrutinised and discussed artist in pop history. Yet the man himself resists being mythologised. Mick Brown recalls the day he met the singer in an unexpectedly candid mood.
Of all the several hundred songs that Bob Dylan has recorded over the past 50 years there is one which I have found myself playing a lot lately. A relic from Dylan’s distant past, it seems somehow to be a song that vividly prefigured his future.
I Was Young When I Left Home was recorded in December 1961, one of two dozen that Dylan recorded in the apartment of a girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher, when he was returning home to Minnesota after his first year in New York. Dylan was just 21, but he had already created a stir on the New York folk scene, and a month earlier had completed his first album for Columbia Records, which would be released in March 1962.
I Was Young When I Left Home is a reinterpretation of a standard, 900 Miles. It is a song far beyond his years, and it carries portents of some of the themes that would come to define Dylan, with its intimations of twists of fate, the need to move on and not be tied to the past – not be tied to anything – the sense, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, that you can’t go home again. “Gonna make me a home out in the wind,” as Dylan sings.
Dylan’s voice is not yet fully formed – there are whoops and slurs that he seems to have borrowed from somewhere else that he is trying on for size – yet it is utterly distinctive, that plangent, high, lonesome, nasal twang that became his first identifying thumbprint, and that when I first heard it made me think, like most people, who the hell is that?
Beecher would later describe how, after recording the songs, Dylan had told her that she should never let anyone else make copies of the tapes, “so that when someone from the Library of Congress asks you for them, I want you to sell them for $200”. As a mixture of prescience and audacity it is hard to beat. “What kind of remark is that to make,” Beecher wondered, “to somebody that is shoplifting food for someone who is so incompetent that he can’t even shoplift his own food?”
Beecher did not get her $200 from the Library of Congress. The tape was apparently stolen and I Was Young would go on to become a staple on any number of Dylan bootlegs. (It eventually received a bona fide release, 40 years after it was recorded, on a limited edition of Love and Theft.)
I first encountered the song through a CD burned by a friend, a collection of “almost and never released” tracks – the bootleg of all bootlegs, if you will – a beautifully designed and packaged artefact, with photographs and meticulously researched sleeve-notes that would put most professionally produced CDs to shame; in short, a labour of obsessive devotion.
It occurs to me that only Dylan fans do this. Not only is he the most bootlegged artist in the history of popular music, as demonstrated by the academic conference at Bristol University that marks his 70th birthday on May 24, he is also the most avidly discussed, the most rigorously scrutinised, the most fervently admired. Everybody has their own version of Bob Dylan, and everybody thinks they know him better than anybody else.
There is a marvellous section in Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles Volume One, where he describes a period in New York in the early Sixties spent crashing in the apartment of a friend named Ray. Dylan describes poring over his friend’s bookshelves; Gogol, Balzac, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Pericles’s Ideal State of Democracy and Thucydides’s The Athenian General – “a narrative that would give you thrills”. There are books on Amazon women, Frederick the Great and Clausewitz, the philosopher of war, who “looks like Montgomery Clift”. As he thumbs through Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ray tells him: “The top guys in that field work for ad agencies. They deal in air.” “I put the book back,” Dylan writes, “and never picked it up again.”
Whether or not the account is creative fiction, as much of Chronicles is said to be, its story points to a larger truth of a mind avid for knowledge and understanding, sucking up myriad influences – classical literature, the poètes maudits, folk, country and Fifties rock ’n’ roll: somebody cutting himself from whole cloth and resolving to be his own man and nobody else’s.
“All the great performers had something in their eyes,” Dylan writes in Chronicles. “It was that 'I know something you don’t know’. And I wanted to be that kind of performer.”
Chronicles is a marvellous book, probably the only one you really need to read about Dylan. It is a masterful example of Dylan telling you exactly what he wants you to know, and nothing more; a book that casts extraordinary light on his upbringing, his creative processes and the artistic forces that shaped him – and possibly his talent for fabrication – while remaining opaque about his personal life and circumstances.
Dylan realised early on that the best way to cope with the heavy burden of his own mythology – and to avoid being the prisoner of other people’s expectations – was to throw up a smokescreen, and give away as little as possible.
“Do not create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will not change. It will follow you the rest of your life,” he wrote in a 1964 prose poem, “Advice For Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday”, concluding with the command, “When asked t’give your real name… never give it.”
The following year, asked at a press conference whether it was true that he’d changed his name, he confessed that indeed he had. His real name, he said, was actually Knezelwitz. “Knevevitch?” the reporter asked. “Knevovitch, yes,” Dylan replied. “That was the first name. I don’t really want to tell you what the last name was.”
The sly evasion, the straight-faced put-down and the outright lie became his first line of defence. Dylan may be, as one friend put it, a man with “so many sides he’s round”. But then again, how can anybody get an angle on a circle?
What is important, as Dylan himself says, has been “for me to come to the bottom of this legend thing, which has no reality at all. What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work”. If Dylan had died in that famous motorcycle accident in 1966, his legacy would still surpass by a country mile that of any other performer in post-war music: the brilliant creative flowering of the early years, the protest (or, as he put it, “finger-pointing”) songs, the amphetamine poetry of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – three of the greatest albums in the pop music canon released in the space of just 18 months in 1965 and 1966 – nobody could possibly have sustained that.
The way Dylan sang made everything seem like a message about something, as if he was in touch with some place or feeling beyond the mundane – an artist with “power and dominion over the spirits”, in Dylan’s own words.
The songs of social protest, personal love and religious faith have all, in a sense, been of a piece. What Dylan has always been is an uncompromising moralist.
Critics, academics and home theorists have picked their way through the layers of allegory and ambiguity in his songs – is Like a Rolling Stone about Joan Baez? Edie Sedgwick? Dante’s Beatrice? Or Dylan himself? Biographers have attempted to hack through the thickets of his tangled love life (“There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring,” he sings on Sugar Baby – and Dylan, one thinks, has had his share), his substance abuse and personal peccadillos. But for all that he is the most scrutinised artist of the last 50 years, he remains the most inscrutable. Do you know where Bob Dylan lives? Who he is married to? How many children he has? Neither do I.
I have met him only once. It was 1984, a time when Dylan was emerging from his born-again Christian phase which had so bewildered his fans. Infidels, released the year before, had been welcomed as a return to secular themes of love and loss – with a little geopolitics thrown in. Dylan was performing in Madrid and I had been sent by a newspaper in the (very slim) hope of securing an interview.
After making contact with his management I was told to stay in my hotel room and await a call that might or might not come. At the moment when it finally became clear that I would not be interviewing Bob Dylan, the telephone rang. I was told to be at the Café Alcázar at 7.30pm. It was 7pm. I arrived at 7.40pm. No sign. Obviously he had come and gone (I have no idea what made me think Dylan would be a fastidious timekeeper). Forty minutes late, he came through the door, alone. A slight, grizzled-looking figure, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat that looked like a disguise. He walked quickly to my table, head down, looking neither left nor right.
He ordered coffee and lit a cigarette – the first of a stream he would smoke over the next hour. His manner was courteous and accommodating. Every question he had heard before, but he treated them all with good grace.
“For me, none of the songs I’ve written have really dated,” he said. “They captured something I’ve never been able to improve on, whatever their statement is. People say they’re 'nostalgia’ but I don’t know what that means really. A Tale of Two Cities was written 100 years ago; is that 'nostalgia’? This term, 'nostalgic’,” he said, “is just another way people have of putting you some place they think they understand” – another one of the labels that people had been putting on him since he started out – “and not one of them has ever made any sense.”
“Born-again Christian” was another one. Why all the furore about his religious views, he wanted to know. “Like I was running for Pope or something. I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel’s religious views are, right? What does it matter to people what Bob Dylan is? But it seems to, right? But why? Why only me? I’d like to know.”
The tone was of a mocking, faux incredulity.
“What it comes down to is that there’s a lot of different gods in the world against God – that’s really what it’s all about. There’s a lot of different gods that people are subjects of. There’s the god of Mammon. Corporations are gods. Governments? No, governments don’t have much to do with it anymore, I don’t think. Politics is a hoax. The politicians don’t have any real power. They feed you all this stuff in the newspapers and this is what you think is going on, but that’s not what’s really going on.
“I believe that ever since Adam and Eve got thrown out of the garden that the whole nature of the planet has been heading in one direction – towards apocalypse. It’s all there in the Book of Revelation, for me anyway, but it’s difficult talking about these things because most people don’t know what you’re talking about anyway, or don’t want to listen. But then again, I don’t think that makes me a pessimistic person. I think a pessimistic person is someone who walks around with their head in their pocket and thinks everything is great. I’m a realist. Or maybe a surrealist.”
What struck me then was the sense of a man at odds with the modern world: mass communications, popular culture, the “sameness of everything”, as he put it.
He talked enthusiastically about poetry – Yeats and Shelley – and the gospel music he loved – the Swan Silvertones, the Highway QCs and Sister Rosetta Thorpe. When I asked what he was reading right now he replied, “Seneca, Cicero, Machiavelli.” He paused. “Last year I read John Stuart Mill.
“I don’t feel obliged to keep up with the times, I’m not going to be here that long anyway. So I keep up with these times, then I gotta keep up with the Nineties… Jesus, who’s got the time to keep up with the times?
“People talk about the Sixties as a romantic time, and it was to a certain degree. You could be different then. For me, my particular scene, I came along at the right time. Ten years later, 10 years before, it wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think. And I understood the times I was in. If I was starting out now I don’t know where I’d get the inspiration from, because you need to breathe the right air to make that creative process work.”
In the Sixties, he would write a song like Masters of War and move on to the next one without a second thought. He sighed. “If I wrote a song like that now I wouldn’t feel I’d have to write another one for two weeks. There was something at that time with that particular song that I’ve never been able to improve on. None of these songs I’ve ever been able to improve on, whatever their statement is.
“There’s still things I want to write about, but the process is harder. The old records I used to make, by the time they came out I wouldn’t even want them released because I was already so far beyond them. I was always moving on to something else, and I always felt that calling. Not because I wanted to be different, or change, or was looking for the next new thing. I never was looking for nothing. But I discovered it all. I never dreamed that I would hit upon what I did hit upon.
“But back then it was easier to do it, because there wasn’t any obstruction in the way to doing it. That’s all there was to do. Then you get separated from the air you need to breathe to make that creative process work.” Listening back to the tape of our conversation now, I am struck by how sure he was of himself, and how candid he was. There was no attempt to self-mythologise, or to mystify. Only when I asked about his personal circumstances did he become vague. He had a farm in Minnesota, he said, and a house in Malibu where he had moved to raise his children – “good schools nearby” – but seldom used since his divorce from Sara Lowndes. He had recently visited Israel, for his son Jesse’s bar mitzvah: “his grandmother’s idea”. Israel interested him from “a biblical point of view”, but he had never felt that atavistic Jewish sense of homecoming. He had a 63ft sailing boat in which he cruised the Caribbean “when I can’t think of nothing else to do.
“There’s never really been any glory in it for me,” he said. “Being seen in the places and having everybody put their arm around you, I never cared about any of that. I don’t care what people think. For me, all it is is doing it. That’s all that really matters.”
As we talked, so more people in the café had come to see through the disguise. A steady stream had made their way to the table, scraps of paper in hand. Dylan signed them all in carefully deliberate hand – as if he was practising – but his discomfort at being on view was becoming more apparent. As suddenly as he had arrived, he rose from the table and made his excuses and left.
It was a few years later that he set off on the so-called “Never Ending” tour, which continues to this day – proof that for Dylan, performing is less a living than a life. “Gonna make me a home out in the wind” indeed…
Has the much-vaunted folk revival brought him a new following? Not much, I think. For the most part, the people who go to Dylan concerts now are much the same people who have always gone to Dylan concerts. For them, Dylan is inseparable from all the multiple layers of meaning and myth in his life – the prophet, the poet, the protester – and from all the stations in their own – a man, as he once said of Woody Guthrie, that “you could listen to his songs and learn how to live” – or how not to.
Whatever expectations people may have of him, Dylan at least has proved utterly faithful in his determination to confound them, whether it’s advertising women’s lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, or suddenly popping up as the host of his own radio show – a delightful illustration of his dry humour and impeccable musical taste.
When the controversy blew up recently over his appearances in China and Vietnam, with fatuous accusations that he had “sold out” by not performing Blowin’ In the Wind – as if it was Dylan’s responsibility to be the conscience of the world – I was reminded of something he had told me sitting in that café in Madrid.
“What you gotta understand is that I do something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that’s great; if they can’t, that’s fine, too. But I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. Because what I’ve done and what I’m doing, nobody else does or has done.
“And when I’m dead and gone people will realise that, and then they’ll try to figure it out. There’s all these interpreters around, but they’re not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody’s come close.”
By Mick Brown
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/mick-brown/
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Telegraph.co.uk
Bob Dylan, who turns 70 next month, is the most obsessively scrutinised and discussed artist in pop history. Yet the man himself resists being mythologised. Mick Brown recalls the day he met the singer in an unexpectedly candid mood.
Of all the several hundred songs that Bob Dylan has recorded over the past 50 years there is one which I have found myself playing a lot lately. A relic from Dylan’s distant past, it seems somehow to be a song that vividly prefigured his future.
I Was Young When I Left Home was recorded in December 1961, one of two dozen that Dylan recorded in the apartment of a girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher, when he was returning home to Minnesota after his first year in New York. Dylan was just 21, but he had already created a stir on the New York folk scene, and a month earlier had completed his first album for Columbia Records, which would be released in March 1962.
I Was Young When I Left Home is a reinterpretation of a standard, 900 Miles. It is a song far beyond his years, and it carries portents of some of the themes that would come to define Dylan, with its intimations of twists of fate, the need to move on and not be tied to the past – not be tied to anything – the sense, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, that you can’t go home again. “Gonna make me a home out in the wind,” as Dylan sings.
Dylan’s voice is not yet fully formed – there are whoops and slurs that he seems to have borrowed from somewhere else that he is trying on for size – yet it is utterly distinctive, that plangent, high, lonesome, nasal twang that became his first identifying thumbprint, and that when I first heard it made me think, like most people, who the hell is that?
Beecher would later describe how, after recording the songs, Dylan had told her that she should never let anyone else make copies of the tapes, “so that when someone from the Library of Congress asks you for them, I want you to sell them for $200”. As a mixture of prescience and audacity it is hard to beat. “What kind of remark is that to make,” Beecher wondered, “to somebody that is shoplifting food for someone who is so incompetent that he can’t even shoplift his own food?”
Beecher did not get her $200 from the Library of Congress. The tape was apparently stolen and I Was Young would go on to become a staple on any number of Dylan bootlegs. (It eventually received a bona fide release, 40 years after it was recorded, on a limited edition of Love and Theft.)
I first encountered the song through a CD burned by a friend, a collection of “almost and never released” tracks – the bootleg of all bootlegs, if you will – a beautifully designed and packaged artefact, with photographs and meticulously researched sleeve-notes that would put most professionally produced CDs to shame; in short, a labour of obsessive devotion.
It occurs to me that only Dylan fans do this. Not only is he the most bootlegged artist in the history of popular music, as demonstrated by the academic conference at Bristol University that marks his 70th birthday on May 24, he is also the most avidly discussed, the most rigorously scrutinised, the most fervently admired. Everybody has their own version of Bob Dylan, and everybody thinks they know him better than anybody else.
There is a marvellous section in Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles Volume One, where he describes a period in New York in the early Sixties spent crashing in the apartment of a friend named Ray. Dylan describes poring over his friend’s bookshelves; Gogol, Balzac, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Pericles’s Ideal State of Democracy and Thucydides’s The Athenian General – “a narrative that would give you thrills”. There are books on Amazon women, Frederick the Great and Clausewitz, the philosopher of war, who “looks like Montgomery Clift”. As he thumbs through Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ray tells him: “The top guys in that field work for ad agencies. They deal in air.” “I put the book back,” Dylan writes, “and never picked it up again.”
Whether or not the account is creative fiction, as much of Chronicles is said to be, its story points to a larger truth of a mind avid for knowledge and understanding, sucking up myriad influences – classical literature, the poètes maudits, folk, country and Fifties rock ’n’ roll: somebody cutting himself from whole cloth and resolving to be his own man and nobody else’s.
“All the great performers had something in their eyes,” Dylan writes in Chronicles. “It was that 'I know something you don’t know’. And I wanted to be that kind of performer.”
Chronicles is a marvellous book, probably the only one you really need to read about Dylan. It is a masterful example of Dylan telling you exactly what he wants you to know, and nothing more; a book that casts extraordinary light on his upbringing, his creative processes and the artistic forces that shaped him – and possibly his talent for fabrication – while remaining opaque about his personal life and circumstances.
Dylan realised early on that the best way to cope with the heavy burden of his own mythology – and to avoid being the prisoner of other people’s expectations – was to throw up a smokescreen, and give away as little as possible.
“Do not create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will not change. It will follow you the rest of your life,” he wrote in a 1964 prose poem, “Advice For Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday”, concluding with the command, “When asked t’give your real name… never give it.”
The following year, asked at a press conference whether it was true that he’d changed his name, he confessed that indeed he had. His real name, he said, was actually Knezelwitz. “Knevevitch?” the reporter asked. “Knevovitch, yes,” Dylan replied. “That was the first name. I don’t really want to tell you what the last name was.”
The sly evasion, the straight-faced put-down and the outright lie became his first line of defence. Dylan may be, as one friend put it, a man with “so many sides he’s round”. But then again, how can anybody get an angle on a circle?
What is important, as Dylan himself says, has been “for me to come to the bottom of this legend thing, which has no reality at all. What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work”. If Dylan had died in that famous motorcycle accident in 1966, his legacy would still surpass by a country mile that of any other performer in post-war music: the brilliant creative flowering of the early years, the protest (or, as he put it, “finger-pointing”) songs, the amphetamine poetry of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – three of the greatest albums in the pop music canon released in the space of just 18 months in 1965 and 1966 – nobody could possibly have sustained that.
The way Dylan sang made everything seem like a message about something, as if he was in touch with some place or feeling beyond the mundane – an artist with “power and dominion over the spirits”, in Dylan’s own words.
The songs of social protest, personal love and religious faith have all, in a sense, been of a piece. What Dylan has always been is an uncompromising moralist.
Critics, academics and home theorists have picked their way through the layers of allegory and ambiguity in his songs – is Like a Rolling Stone about Joan Baez? Edie Sedgwick? Dante’s Beatrice? Or Dylan himself? Biographers have attempted to hack through the thickets of his tangled love life (“There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring,” he sings on Sugar Baby – and Dylan, one thinks, has had his share), his substance abuse and personal peccadillos. But for all that he is the most scrutinised artist of the last 50 years, he remains the most inscrutable. Do you know where Bob Dylan lives? Who he is married to? How many children he has? Neither do I.
I have met him only once. It was 1984, a time when Dylan was emerging from his born-again Christian phase which had so bewildered his fans. Infidels, released the year before, had been welcomed as a return to secular themes of love and loss – with a little geopolitics thrown in. Dylan was performing in Madrid and I had been sent by a newspaper in the (very slim) hope of securing an interview.
After making contact with his management I was told to stay in my hotel room and await a call that might or might not come. At the moment when it finally became clear that I would not be interviewing Bob Dylan, the telephone rang. I was told to be at the Café Alcázar at 7.30pm. It was 7pm. I arrived at 7.40pm. No sign. Obviously he had come and gone (I have no idea what made me think Dylan would be a fastidious timekeeper). Forty minutes late, he came through the door, alone. A slight, grizzled-looking figure, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat that looked like a disguise. He walked quickly to my table, head down, looking neither left nor right.
He ordered coffee and lit a cigarette – the first of a stream he would smoke over the next hour. His manner was courteous and accommodating. Every question he had heard before, but he treated them all with good grace.
“For me, none of the songs I’ve written have really dated,” he said. “They captured something I’ve never been able to improve on, whatever their statement is. People say they’re 'nostalgia’ but I don’t know what that means really. A Tale of Two Cities was written 100 years ago; is that 'nostalgia’? This term, 'nostalgic’,” he said, “is just another way people have of putting you some place they think they understand” – another one of the labels that people had been putting on him since he started out – “and not one of them has ever made any sense.”
“Born-again Christian” was another one. Why all the furore about his religious views, he wanted to know. “Like I was running for Pope or something. I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel’s religious views are, right? What does it matter to people what Bob Dylan is? But it seems to, right? But why? Why only me? I’d like to know.”
The tone was of a mocking, faux incredulity.
“What it comes down to is that there’s a lot of different gods in the world against God – that’s really what it’s all about. There’s a lot of different gods that people are subjects of. There’s the god of Mammon. Corporations are gods. Governments? No, governments don’t have much to do with it anymore, I don’t think. Politics is a hoax. The politicians don’t have any real power. They feed you all this stuff in the newspapers and this is what you think is going on, but that’s not what’s really going on.
“I believe that ever since Adam and Eve got thrown out of the garden that the whole nature of the planet has been heading in one direction – towards apocalypse. It’s all there in the Book of Revelation, for me anyway, but it’s difficult talking about these things because most people don’t know what you’re talking about anyway, or don’t want to listen. But then again, I don’t think that makes me a pessimistic person. I think a pessimistic person is someone who walks around with their head in their pocket and thinks everything is great. I’m a realist. Or maybe a surrealist.”
What struck me then was the sense of a man at odds with the modern world: mass communications, popular culture, the “sameness of everything”, as he put it.
He talked enthusiastically about poetry – Yeats and Shelley – and the gospel music he loved – the Swan Silvertones, the Highway QCs and Sister Rosetta Thorpe. When I asked what he was reading right now he replied, “Seneca, Cicero, Machiavelli.” He paused. “Last year I read John Stuart Mill.
“I don’t feel obliged to keep up with the times, I’m not going to be here that long anyway. So I keep up with these times, then I gotta keep up with the Nineties… Jesus, who’s got the time to keep up with the times?
“People talk about the Sixties as a romantic time, and it was to a certain degree. You could be different then. For me, my particular scene, I came along at the right time. Ten years later, 10 years before, it wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think. And I understood the times I was in. If I was starting out now I don’t know where I’d get the inspiration from, because you need to breathe the right air to make that creative process work.”
In the Sixties, he would write a song like Masters of War and move on to the next one without a second thought. He sighed. “If I wrote a song like that now I wouldn’t feel I’d have to write another one for two weeks. There was something at that time with that particular song that I’ve never been able to improve on. None of these songs I’ve ever been able to improve on, whatever their statement is.
“There’s still things I want to write about, but the process is harder. The old records I used to make, by the time they came out I wouldn’t even want them released because I was already so far beyond them. I was always moving on to something else, and I always felt that calling. Not because I wanted to be different, or change, or was looking for the next new thing. I never was looking for nothing. But I discovered it all. I never dreamed that I would hit upon what I did hit upon.
“But back then it was easier to do it, because there wasn’t any obstruction in the way to doing it. That’s all there was to do. Then you get separated from the air you need to breathe to make that creative process work.” Listening back to the tape of our conversation now, I am struck by how sure he was of himself, and how candid he was. There was no attempt to self-mythologise, or to mystify. Only when I asked about his personal circumstances did he become vague. He had a farm in Minnesota, he said, and a house in Malibu where he had moved to raise his children – “good schools nearby” – but seldom used since his divorce from Sara Lowndes. He had recently visited Israel, for his son Jesse’s bar mitzvah: “his grandmother’s idea”. Israel interested him from “a biblical point of view”, but he had never felt that atavistic Jewish sense of homecoming. He had a 63ft sailing boat in which he cruised the Caribbean “when I can’t think of nothing else to do.
“There’s never really been any glory in it for me,” he said. “Being seen in the places and having everybody put their arm around you, I never cared about any of that. I don’t care what people think. For me, all it is is doing it. That’s all that really matters.”
As we talked, so more people in the café had come to see through the disguise. A steady stream had made their way to the table, scraps of paper in hand. Dylan signed them all in carefully deliberate hand – as if he was practising – but his discomfort at being on view was becoming more apparent. As suddenly as he had arrived, he rose from the table and made his excuses and left.
It was a few years later that he set off on the so-called “Never Ending” tour, which continues to this day – proof that for Dylan, performing is less a living than a life. “Gonna make me a home out in the wind” indeed…
Has the much-vaunted folk revival brought him a new following? Not much, I think. For the most part, the people who go to Dylan concerts now are much the same people who have always gone to Dylan concerts. For them, Dylan is inseparable from all the multiple layers of meaning and myth in his life – the prophet, the poet, the protester – and from all the stations in their own – a man, as he once said of Woody Guthrie, that “you could listen to his songs and learn how to live” – or how not to.
Whatever expectations people may have of him, Dylan at least has proved utterly faithful in his determination to confound them, whether it’s advertising women’s lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, or suddenly popping up as the host of his own radio show – a delightful illustration of his dry humour and impeccable musical taste.
When the controversy blew up recently over his appearances in China and Vietnam, with fatuous accusations that he had “sold out” by not performing Blowin’ In the Wind – as if it was Dylan’s responsibility to be the conscience of the world – I was reminded of something he had told me sitting in that café in Madrid.
“What you gotta understand is that I do something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that’s great; if they can’t, that’s fine, too. But I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. Because what I’ve done and what I’m doing, nobody else does or has done.
“And when I’m dead and gone people will realise that, and then they’ll try to figure it out. There’s all these interpreters around, but they’re not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody’s come close.”
By Mick Brown
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/mick-brown/
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Bob knows his music, by John Desmond, USA
Bob probably knows more about music of the past 60 years than just about anyone out there. And he alludes to that stuff. I heard him sing Moon River the day after Stevie Ray Vaughn was killed in an accident. You know Stevie is on Under the Red Sky. I'd stood outside with Dylan for about an hour before that show in Merriville, IN here in USA. Dylan looked grey. The show wasnt good. It was hot as hell out and he wore a coat and a painter's hat. He stood by the bus for a long time. Fans were coming by him and a few recognized him but he wouldn't shake hands. He looked bad. But in the show he sang Moon River which was a treat. I think Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics. Maybe Mancini wrote the melody. But Im sure Dylan even enjoys reruns of the Lawrence Welk show if you know what that is. And if you don't know the recordings, listen to Tom Paxton or the recordings that congressional stuff that library of congress stuff recorded by Alan Lomax of Woody. Or Odetta. Or the Carolyn Hester record Bob is on. Great record. Or the Victoria Spivey record he is on. Old stuff. She's on the back cover of New Morning. I'll give you a clue: dont overlook SelfPortrait. That record was well beyond its time. I know it like the back of my hand. That really was a selfportrait but too many people didn't understand that /dylan was eclectic and liked all kinds of things. His cover of Early Morning Rain by Lightfoot, and his cover of the Boxer by Paul Simon are amazing. And you have to love Blue Moon. You can't overlook the content and musical depth of that record. It tells you who Dylan is musically. And he's only grown since. and what is also overlooked is the range of Dylan's melodies. No two songs sound the same. Funny, I heard him say that he writes the melody first then the lyrics. and so many people in so many areas of music have covered his songs. Frank Sinatra could have done a beautiful version of Most of the Time from Oh Mercy. It is a song that alludes to I Get Along without You Very Well. Maybe Mercer wrote that too. Very similar. Chet Baker's cover is brilliant. Anyhow, to really write about Dylan music you have to know quite a bit about the old folks. Bukka White, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Woody, you know, where Dylan's mind is coming from. Keep me posted. If I can give you anything let me know. I think your project is interesting.
Bob as a person, and media representations:
- from John Desmond, USA
Hi. Personally I think far too much is made of Bob Dylan. It's turned into a mess. He's haunted by nuts. He likes to play. But he doesn't deserve to be treated like a specimen. His family. His religion, etc. It's crazy. He's over rated as a star. But under rated for all he knows about popular music. Most people today are totally ignorant of Rev Gary Davis or Johnny Mercer. Nor have they read Bound for Glory. Dylan is a guy out of the midwest USA. He plays guitar and piano, sort of, and has writtent alot of songs. His singing voice is strange. But not bad considering his 'genre'. But he has a way with words. and is poetic. and he respects all that. so most Dylan fans are empty They only think of pop not of Bach or Mozart. The world does not revolve around bob dylan. I've been a fan of his since I was a kid. Yeah, I met him the day he made the video for Political World. It was in Bloomington, IN USA in November I think. I was standing with a small group of people who were looking at him and he saw me and came over and started talking to me. I was kind of shocked that he was so friendly. Although he did have a hood on. Later that day I saw him outside standing alone and i went out and approached him. I put my hand out and we shook hands. He was not effusive or gregarieous but he was not impolite at all. He didnt know me, and I didn't know him. He refused to give me an autograph but he was not rude. we talked about some things briefly but often it was just silence. But he didnt try to run away and he was not rude or arrogant etc. He was very human. He is not a freak etc. He is not Howard Hughes. it's the media et al that have turned him into a wierdo. He's a nice guy from Minnesota who is a bit of a hustler etc. But a nice guy. Finally his body guard saw us together and came outside and took him away. All I said was take it easy. I don't think he is at all what the mdiea or so called scholars make him out to be. He writes songs and plays them and hangs out with musicians. he is not a wierdo. very down to earth.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Bob probably knows more about music of the past 60 years than just about anyone out there. And he alludes to that stuff. I heard him sing Moon River the day after Stevie Ray Vaughn was killed in an accident. You know Stevie is on Under the Red Sky. I'd stood outside with Dylan for about an hour before that show in Merriville, IN here in USA. Dylan looked grey. The show wasnt good. It was hot as hell out and he wore a coat and a painter's hat. He stood by the bus for a long time. Fans were coming by him and a few recognized him but he wouldn't shake hands. He looked bad. But in the show he sang Moon River which was a treat. I think Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics. Maybe Mancini wrote the melody. But Im sure Dylan even enjoys reruns of the Lawrence Welk show if you know what that is. And if you don't know the recordings, listen to Tom Paxton or the recordings that congressional stuff that library of congress stuff recorded by Alan Lomax of Woody. Or Odetta. Or the Carolyn Hester record Bob is on. Great record. Or the Victoria Spivey record he is on. Old stuff. She's on the back cover of New Morning. I'll give you a clue: dont overlook SelfPortrait. That record was well beyond its time. I know it like the back of my hand. That really was a selfportrait but too many people didn't understand that /dylan was eclectic and liked all kinds of things. His cover of Early Morning Rain by Lightfoot, and his cover of the Boxer by Paul Simon are amazing. And you have to love Blue Moon. You can't overlook the content and musical depth of that record. It tells you who Dylan is musically. And he's only grown since. and what is also overlooked is the range of Dylan's melodies. No two songs sound the same. Funny, I heard him say that he writes the melody first then the lyrics. and so many people in so many areas of music have covered his songs. Frank Sinatra could have done a beautiful version of Most of the Time from Oh Mercy. It is a song that alludes to I Get Along without You Very Well. Maybe Mercer wrote that too. Very similar. Chet Baker's cover is brilliant. Anyhow, to really write about Dylan music you have to know quite a bit about the old folks. Bukka White, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Woody, you know, where Dylan's mind is coming from. Keep me posted. If I can give you anything let me know. I think your project is interesting.
Bob as a person, and media representations:
- from John Desmond, USA
Hi. Personally I think far too much is made of Bob Dylan. It's turned into a mess. He's haunted by nuts. He likes to play. But he doesn't deserve to be treated like a specimen. His family. His religion, etc. It's crazy. He's over rated as a star. But under rated for all he knows about popular music. Most people today are totally ignorant of Rev Gary Davis or Johnny Mercer. Nor have they read Bound for Glory. Dylan is a guy out of the midwest USA. He plays guitar and piano, sort of, and has writtent alot of songs. His singing voice is strange. But not bad considering his 'genre'. But he has a way with words. and is poetic. and he respects all that. so most Dylan fans are empty They only think of pop not of Bach or Mozart. The world does not revolve around bob dylan. I've been a fan of his since I was a kid. Yeah, I met him the day he made the video for Political World. It was in Bloomington, IN USA in November I think. I was standing with a small group of people who were looking at him and he saw me and came over and started talking to me. I was kind of shocked that he was so friendly. Although he did have a hood on. Later that day I saw him outside standing alone and i went out and approached him. I put my hand out and we shook hands. He was not effusive or gregarieous but he was not impolite at all. He didnt know me, and I didn't know him. He refused to give me an autograph but he was not rude. we talked about some things briefly but often it was just silence. But he didnt try to run away and he was not rude or arrogant etc. He was very human. He is not a freak etc. He is not Howard Hughes. it's the media et al that have turned him into a wierdo. He's a nice guy from Minnesota who is a bit of a hustler etc. But a nice guy. Finally his body guard saw us together and came outside and took him away. All I said was take it easy. I don't think he is at all what the mdiea or so called scholars make him out to be. He writes songs and plays them and hangs out with musicians. he is not a wierdo. very down to earth.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Some Direction Home: Following Dylan Down the Old Plank Road (by Chris Floyd, USA)
There's a legend in my family that we are kin to Uncle Dave Macon. We are for certain distant cousins to the Macons of Wilson County – and Uncle Dave lived in the next county over. My parents met him once, driving to his farm one afternoon when they were teenagers, not yet married. This was not too long before his death.
They found him sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. He greeted the young strangers like the kinfolk one of them might well have been, invited them into the house, showed them his memorabilia, and gave my mother – definitely one of "them pretty girls from Tennessee" he sang about so often – a small, delicate glass deer as a memento of the visit. Back out on the porch, he picked up his banjo and did a couple of comic numbers from the rocking chair, feet keeping time on the wooden boards. There looked to be some whisky in his friendly manner, they said; perhaps a noonday dram before they had arrived.
It was all over soon enough, but a photograph survives to record the event, a black-and-white print taken with my mother's camera. Uncle Dave is in the rocking chair, legs crossed, battered hat perched on his head, banjo in his lap. His face is puffy, pitted, cadaverous; the fire that had stoked him since his hot young days – in the still-churning wake of the Civil War – is finally going out. A dying man, from a dying world.
But he played for the young folks anyway, out of courtesy, for the hell of it, conjuring up another reality out of rhythm, strings and joyful noise, then letting it dissolve into the air. "Won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, way down the old plank road…"
***
Despite the reputed kinship and this ancestral encounter, the first Uncle Dave Macon song I ever actually heard was one recorded by Bob Dylan: "Sarah Jane." This was on the "revenge" album of out-takes and studio warm-ups that Columbia Records put out after Dylan temporarily left the fold in the early Seventies. When I first heard the song, I thought Dylan had written it himself; certainly the line, "I got a wife and five little children," sung with such full-throated exuberance, seemed like straight autobiography. I didn't realize then the kind of alchemy Dylan could work on other people's songs, how he could make them his own, right down to the marrow.
Like most people who get into Dylan, at first I was dazzled by the originality of his vision, his words, the brilliant fragments of his own kaleidoscopic personality as they were lit up in turn by each new style, each different take or tonal mood. His work seemed a perfect embodiment of the Romantic ideal: art as the vibrant expression of the self – defiant, heroic, fiercely personal. But while that stance is as valid as most of the other illusions that sustain us, it only takes you so far. What I've come to realize over the years is that Dylan's music is not primarily about expressing yourself – it's about losing yourself, escaping the self and all its confusions, corruptions, pettiness and decay. It's about getting to some place far beyond the self, "where nature neither honors nor forgives." Dylan gives himself up to the song, and to the deeper reality it creates in the few charged moments of its existence. We can step through the door he opens to that far place and see what happens.
Dylan's words – original, striking, piercing, apt – are marvelous, of course. Like Shakespeare's, they knit themselves into your consciousness, become part of the way you see and speak the world. But the alchemy lies in the performance. The phrasing is more important than the phrases, no matter who happened to write them. The grain in his voice – the jagged edge that catches and tears at the weave of life as it flies past – is what moves us through that open door. Along with the music, obviously: the mathematical and emotional interplay among the musicians, shaped by Dylan's guiding will. When it all works, and it usually does, it's artistry of the highest order. As they say back home, you can't beat it with a stick.
***
You can follow Dylan through many doors, into many realms: the disordered sensuality of Symbolist poetry, the high bohemia and low comedy of the Beats and Brecht, the guilt-ridden, God-yearning psalms of King David, the Gospel road of Jesus Christ, the shiv-sharp romance of Bogart and Bacall. There's Emerson in there, too, Keats, Whitman, even Rilke if you look hard enough: fodder for a thousand footnotes, signposts to a hundred sources of further enlightenment.
But if you go far enough with Dylan, he'll always lead you back to the old music. This is the foundation, the deepest roots of his art, of his power. For me, as for so many people, he was the spirit guide to this other world, this vanished heritage. He has somehow – well, not just "somehow," but through hard work and endless absorption – managed to keep the tradition alive. Not as a museum piece, not like a zoo animal, but as a free, thriving, unpredictable beast, still on the prowl, still extending its range.
Early on, Dylan realized that the essence of the old music was not to be found in the particular styles of picking and singing rigorously classified by the ethnographers and carefully preserved by purists. Traditional music was idiosyncratic, created by thousands of unique individuals working their personal artistry on whatever musical materials came to hand, in cotton fields, coal mines, granges, churches, factories, ports, city streets and country roads. Who else in the world ever sounded like Roscoe Holcomb or Charley Patton? Their art was as distinctive as that of Beethoven and Chopin, who also drew on traditional elements to make their music.
No, what the old music held in common, what made it penetrating and great, was not some mythological collective origin or expression of sociocultural mores; it was a shared DNA of fundamental themes, fundamental truths – the double helix of joy and mortality, threaded like twine, tangled like snakes, inextricable, irresolvable. It was this genetic code that Dylan used to grow his own art, in its own unique forms.
Joy and mortality: the psychic pain of being alive, your mind and senses flooded with exquisite wonders, miraculous comprehensions – and the simultaneous knowledge of death, the relentless push of time, the fleeting nature of every single experience, every situation, every moment, dying even as it rises. There's pain waiting somewhere – from within or without – in every joy, a canker in every rose we pluck from the ground of being.
This awareness shadows the old music – deepens it, gives it the bite of eternal truth. It's there even in the joyful noise of Uncle Dave Macon, so happy that he whoops out "Kill yourself!" in manic glee as he gallops down the old plank road. Yet in the songs that deal directly with this shadow, such as the blues, full of hard knowledge, hard pain, the very act of singing that pain gives rise to a subtle joy, and a kind of solace. The old songs, and the ones Dylan has built upon them, create another reality, an impossible reconciliation, where time stands still, life and death embrace, decay is banished, and all our pettiness, our evil urges, our confusions are arrested and transcended. Until, of course, the song itself, being mortal, fades away as the music ends.
***
Dylan's music can provide a doorway out of yourself – "a pathway that leads up to the stars" – but it can also help bring you back to yourself, to what you should be doing with your life: attending to these eternal truths, trying to take that code and carry it forward, pass it along, using whatever materials – musical or otherwise – that your life and history and inclinations have given you. In this case, Dylan brought me back to my own heritage; it was decades after hearing his "Sarah Jane" that I first mentioned Uncle Dave Macon to my father and heard the story of that long-ago visit, and was given the photograph to keep, and pass on.
Perhaps the kind of transcendence I've talked about here only works if you're a certain kind of person, with your nerves aligned in a certain way, attuned to a certain signal. Perhaps it's all a happenstance of biochemistry. I don't know. In a world where every understanding, no matter how profound, is provisional, temporary, clouded and corrupted, I wouldn't make universal claims for any particular path. I do think that the experience of the heightened reality offered by Dylan's music – and by all the places he leads us to – holds out the promise of a rough-hewn wisdom, something that can make us feel more alive while we're living, while our brief moment is passing.
Anyway, it works for me!
There's a legend in my family that we are kin to Uncle Dave Macon. We are for certain distant cousins to the Macons of Wilson County – and Uncle Dave lived in the next county over. My parents met him once, driving to his farm one afternoon when they were teenagers, not yet married. This was not too long before his death.
They found him sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. He greeted the young strangers like the kinfolk one of them might well have been, invited them into the house, showed them his memorabilia, and gave my mother – definitely one of "them pretty girls from Tennessee" he sang about so often – a small, delicate glass deer as a memento of the visit. Back out on the porch, he picked up his banjo and did a couple of comic numbers from the rocking chair, feet keeping time on the wooden boards. There looked to be some whisky in his friendly manner, they said; perhaps a noonday dram before they had arrived.
It was all over soon enough, but a photograph survives to record the event, a black-and-white print taken with my mother's camera. Uncle Dave is in the rocking chair, legs crossed, battered hat perched on his head, banjo in his lap. His face is puffy, pitted, cadaverous; the fire that had stoked him since his hot young days – in the still-churning wake of the Civil War – is finally going out. A dying man, from a dying world.
But he played for the young folks anyway, out of courtesy, for the hell of it, conjuring up another reality out of rhythm, strings and joyful noise, then letting it dissolve into the air. "Won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, way down the old plank road…"
***
Despite the reputed kinship and this ancestral encounter, the first Uncle Dave Macon song I ever actually heard was one recorded by Bob Dylan: "Sarah Jane." This was on the "revenge" album of out-takes and studio warm-ups that Columbia Records put out after Dylan temporarily left the fold in the early Seventies. When I first heard the song, I thought Dylan had written it himself; certainly the line, "I got a wife and five little children," sung with such full-throated exuberance, seemed like straight autobiography. I didn't realize then the kind of alchemy Dylan could work on other people's songs, how he could make them his own, right down to the marrow.
Like most people who get into Dylan, at first I was dazzled by the originality of his vision, his words, the brilliant fragments of his own kaleidoscopic personality as they were lit up in turn by each new style, each different take or tonal mood. His work seemed a perfect embodiment of the Romantic ideal: art as the vibrant expression of the self – defiant, heroic, fiercely personal. But while that stance is as valid as most of the other illusions that sustain us, it only takes you so far. What I've come to realize over the years is that Dylan's music is not primarily about expressing yourself – it's about losing yourself, escaping the self and all its confusions, corruptions, pettiness and decay. It's about getting to some place far beyond the self, "where nature neither honors nor forgives." Dylan gives himself up to the song, and to the deeper reality it creates in the few charged moments of its existence. We can step through the door he opens to that far place and see what happens.
Dylan's words – original, striking, piercing, apt – are marvelous, of course. Like Shakespeare's, they knit themselves into your consciousness, become part of the way you see and speak the world. But the alchemy lies in the performance. The phrasing is more important than the phrases, no matter who happened to write them. The grain in his voice – the jagged edge that catches and tears at the weave of life as it flies past – is what moves us through that open door. Along with the music, obviously: the mathematical and emotional interplay among the musicians, shaped by Dylan's guiding will. When it all works, and it usually does, it's artistry of the highest order. As they say back home, you can't beat it with a stick.
***
You can follow Dylan through many doors, into many realms: the disordered sensuality of Symbolist poetry, the high bohemia and low comedy of the Beats and Brecht, the guilt-ridden, God-yearning psalms of King David, the Gospel road of Jesus Christ, the shiv-sharp romance of Bogart and Bacall. There's Emerson in there, too, Keats, Whitman, even Rilke if you look hard enough: fodder for a thousand footnotes, signposts to a hundred sources of further enlightenment.
But if you go far enough with Dylan, he'll always lead you back to the old music. This is the foundation, the deepest roots of his art, of his power. For me, as for so many people, he was the spirit guide to this other world, this vanished heritage. He has somehow – well, not just "somehow," but through hard work and endless absorption – managed to keep the tradition alive. Not as a museum piece, not like a zoo animal, but as a free, thriving, unpredictable beast, still on the prowl, still extending its range.
Early on, Dylan realized that the essence of the old music was not to be found in the particular styles of picking and singing rigorously classified by the ethnographers and carefully preserved by purists. Traditional music was idiosyncratic, created by thousands of unique individuals working their personal artistry on whatever musical materials came to hand, in cotton fields, coal mines, granges, churches, factories, ports, city streets and country roads. Who else in the world ever sounded like Roscoe Holcomb or Charley Patton? Their art was as distinctive as that of Beethoven and Chopin, who also drew on traditional elements to make their music.
No, what the old music held in common, what made it penetrating and great, was not some mythological collective origin or expression of sociocultural mores; it was a shared DNA of fundamental themes, fundamental truths – the double helix of joy and mortality, threaded like twine, tangled like snakes, inextricable, irresolvable. It was this genetic code that Dylan used to grow his own art, in its own unique forms.
Joy and mortality: the psychic pain of being alive, your mind and senses flooded with exquisite wonders, miraculous comprehensions – and the simultaneous knowledge of death, the relentless push of time, the fleeting nature of every single experience, every situation, every moment, dying even as it rises. There's pain waiting somewhere – from within or without – in every joy, a canker in every rose we pluck from the ground of being.
This awareness shadows the old music – deepens it, gives it the bite of eternal truth. It's there even in the joyful noise of Uncle Dave Macon, so happy that he whoops out "Kill yourself!" in manic glee as he gallops down the old plank road. Yet in the songs that deal directly with this shadow, such as the blues, full of hard knowledge, hard pain, the very act of singing that pain gives rise to a subtle joy, and a kind of solace. The old songs, and the ones Dylan has built upon them, create another reality, an impossible reconciliation, where time stands still, life and death embrace, decay is banished, and all our pettiness, our evil urges, our confusions are arrested and transcended. Until, of course, the song itself, being mortal, fades away as the music ends.
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Dylan's music can provide a doorway out of yourself – "a pathway that leads up to the stars" – but it can also help bring you back to yourself, to what you should be doing with your life: attending to these eternal truths, trying to take that code and carry it forward, pass it along, using whatever materials – musical or otherwise – that your life and history and inclinations have given you. In this case, Dylan brought me back to my own heritage; it was decades after hearing his "Sarah Jane" that I first mentioned Uncle Dave Macon to my father and heard the story of that long-ago visit, and was given the photograph to keep, and pass on.
Perhaps the kind of transcendence I've talked about here only works if you're a certain kind of person, with your nerves aligned in a certain way, attuned to a certain signal. Perhaps it's all a happenstance of biochemistry. I don't know. In a world where every understanding, no matter how profound, is provisional, temporary, clouded and corrupted, I wouldn't make universal claims for any particular path. I do think that the experience of the heightened reality offered by Dylan's music – and by all the places he leads us to – holds out the promise of a rough-hewn wisdom, something that can make us feel more alive while we're living, while our brief moment is passing.
Anyway, it works for me!