By Neil McCormick
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/author/neilmccormick/
Last updated: May 24th, 2011
Musician and producer Dave Stewart knows a lot of famous people (indeed, he’s pretty famous himself). But he has one friend who has almost gone beyond fame, into a kind of mythological realm usually the preserve of the deceased. As an icon of modern popular culture, Bob Dylan occupies the same kind of territory as Elvis Presley and John Lennon, something that was brought home to Stewart when he set out with Dylan on an impromptu stroll through Camden Market in the early Nineties. No one approached them for autographs or photographs. Instead people would go pale, stop in their tracks and gesticulate open mouthed, as if they couldn’t believe what they were witnessing was real. Stewart described the experience to me as “like walking with a ghost”.
I had my own encounter with the ghost many years ago. I was backstage at a massive open-air Dylan concert in Ireland, chatting with two young American guys I had just met, when I noticed this weird looking fellow sidle up alongside us, his jowly face caked in orange make-up and baggy eyes ringed with thick black liner. I didn’t actually recognise him at first, perhaps because he bore so little resemblance to the skinny beatnik with the tangled psychedelic curls whose poster adorned my bedroom wall. But eventually it dawned on me that this paunchy, wrinkled old peach making small talk in a stoned drawl was Bob Dylan. I gaped at this strange vision, simultaneously amazed and disappointed. “He looks so old!” I whispered to my new American friends, before babbling some nonsense about it being better not to meet your heroes. They turned out to be Dylan’s sons, Samuel and Jakob. Not my finest moment.
That was in 1984 and Dylan was all of 43. Today, he turns seventy. It would no doubt have astonished my naïve younger self to know that Dylan would still be rocking at such a venerable age, still producing work of the highest order. And that I would still find him as a relevant and fascinating as ever.
“Contrary to what some so called experts believe, I don’t constantly reinvent myself. I was there from the beginning,” Dylan said in 1985. Well, maybe. But he has certainly changed over the years and he started by changing his name. Robert Zimmerman came out of the Midwest like an updated Huck Finn, leather cap, battered boots and harmonica, a precocious, firebrand folkie who greeted the world with a self-titled debut album in 1962. A contemporary likened his voice to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”, but the songs, dazzlingly poetic, scornful of conformity and tuned in to the spirit of the age, changed the face of popular music forever. Since then we’ve been treated to Dylan the amphetamine-fuelled rocker of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, the countrified spiritual seeker of ‘John Wesley Harding’, the broken hearted gypsy troubadour of ‘Blood On The Tracks’, the deeply troubled soul of ‘Street Legal’ (Dylan’s most underrated album, play it now, I urge you), the sharp-tongued Christian soldier of ‘Infidels’, the disillusioned romantic of ‘Oh Mercy’, the careworn curmudgeon of ‘Time Out of Mind’ and the inscrutable, mischievous old veteran of ‘Modern Times’. Frankly, it seems a hell of a long way from the optimistic, revolutionary idealism of his 1963 classic ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ to the scornful, frightening ambiguity of 2009’s ‘It’s All Good’ but one song doesn’t transplant or negate the other, rather they enrich each other, strands of a complex, contradictory, argumentative, provocative whole, a human life in song.
Dylan is the greatest living figure of popular music, not because he has the loveliest voice (David Bowie once compared it to “sand and glue”), or the greatest way with melody (Dylan favours simple, repetitive chord patterns and borrows liberally from generic song forms), or the most original sonic approach (he has little patience for gimmickry or experimentation), but because he took popular song from the inside, reaching back into its past (of deep folk tradition) and firing off into the future (opening up vistas of language, philosophy and emotion), and in the process investing it with unsuspected depth and gravity, the possibility that something as simple as a song could be a complete vehicle for individual artistic expression. Despite aberrations and periods of decline, a late flourish of substantial albums enriches and deepens our appreciation of his entire oeuvre, a body of work over five decades without compare. This is music to grow up with and grow old to, songs and performances of such depth they reveal ever more with repeated listening. On the best of Dylan, melody and lyric effortlessly mesh together, all those cascading cadences and tripping internal rhymes swept along by tunes of surprising dimensions and perfectly served by Dylan’s dramatic vocal delivery, resounding with heartfelt if often poignantly understated emotion.
Dylan helped invent the generation gap in the Sixties but the vitality and resonance of his work effortlessly bridges it, holding original fans spellbound while continually drawing in new generations of listeners. I was a teenage punk rocker when I discovered Dylan for myself, attracted at first to his Sixties hipster period, when he looked like the coolest cat on the planet with an attitude to match. I played ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ over and over, revelling in the way he heaped passionate, surreal scorn on the straight world, sneering “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?”
“I do know what my songs are about,” the young bard insisted to a sceptical middle-aged journalist from Playboy in 1966.
“And what’s that?” queried the hack.
“Oh,” replied Dylan, “some are about four minutes, some are about five and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.”
Bob Dylan: The Way He Sang Made Everything Seem Like a Message
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.
By Mick Brown
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
01 May 2011
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.”
