“…as if sandpaper could sing…”
“And I hope that you die/And that 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 death bed/And I’ll stand over your grave/’Till I’m sure that you’re dead.”
— Bob Dylan
Masters of War
Bob Dylan let the protest movement adopt him in the early 1960s, and his career was born. With his guitar and harmonica in hand, his girl (Joan Baez) at his side and his warbly voice, he rose to fame as a champion of the poor and downtrodden. Just two years later he angered his supporters by strutting out in Carnaby Street style and playing loud electric rock.
At a 1966 concert in London’s Albert Hall, a disbelieving audience member cried out, “Judas!”
Dylan’s response? “I don’t believe you; you’re a liar!”
Bob Dylan was enigmatic before that, but afterwards too, people still tried in vain to label him, psychoanalyze him, attribute a particular persona to his ‘act’ and rationalize his lyrics in ways that would explain who he was. The less he did to encourage these presumptions, the more they persisted. Acclaimed as the voice of a new generation, he was clearly baffled. All he avowedly ever wanted to do was to write and perform his music.
And music it most certainly was. In comparing him with Milton, Keats and Tennyson, Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks casts him convincingly as a poet. However, Dylan doesn’t recite his compositions; he sings them. He can keep a tune; he has great timing, but he never sounds pretty. In fact, his voice may have turned off more people than ever learned to like him — and yes, learning is the key.
Unlike pop musicians, Dylan makes no attempt to quickly grab listeners’ attention. Instead, he tells stories in American vernacular — rife with ‘bad’ grammar, run-of-the-mill phrases and stock clichés — but he messes with them, too. In ’Til I Fell In Love With You, his house isn’t burning to the ground, but to the sky. His lack of pretense is as real as it is crafted, and makes for vivid imagery. Assuming nothing, his gravelly voice amplifies the effect; it’s as expressive as an actor’s. He flips his tunes with the ease of a chameleon, recasting something that was born as a Country and Western dirge into rock-and-roll, reggae or Mexican folk; you never know. Dylan’s art rewards close attention. His fans don’t just listen to his work; they mine it.
For these very reasons, he’s often underestimated and overlooked, for example by music blogger Aiden Curran.
Bob Dylan, c 1963
a clean-cut kid
Bob Dylan, c 2008
“Just because you like my stuff doesn’t
mean I owe you anything.”
I personally place great stock in someone’s first take on Bob Dylan; most people either jump back from his voice in horror, or lean forward, intrigued. How the hell did a singer with a voice like that become successful?
Actually, he’s more than successful. Hundreds of artists have recorded his songs and count him as a primary influence. He’s also indisputably in it for the music, not just for fame or money. Since June 7, 1988 to date (July 2010), he’s been on The Never Ending Tour, performing roughly a hundred dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s. He turned 69 in 2010; depending on the lighting and his mood, he looks anywhere between fifty and a hundred.
Bob Dylan gave me a love of the vernacular. I already had a love of storytelling, but he enhanced it immeasurably. His work is a gift that you can’t take for granted. As J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, “Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock ’n’ roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world’s first and greatest rock ’n’ roll beatnik bard and then—having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning—vanish into a folk tradition of his own making.”
For more about the influence of Bob Dylan and others on the mercurial — now rapidly aging — Baby Boomer generation, read The Novice, by Stephen Schettini.
From It's All Good (2009)
Keeping abreast of clichés that define the times:
Well widows cry, the orphans plea
Everywhere you look there's more misery
Come along with me babe, I wish you would
You know what I'm sayin'? It's all good.