Dylan turns 75 on 24th May. For millions of devotees like myself—many of whom consider him the world’s greatest living artist—it is a moment of celebration tinged with apprehension. Joan Baez, his most significant early anointer-disciple (Joan the Baptist), best expresses what might be described as “the Dylan feeling” in the excellent Martin Scorsese 2005 documentary when she says: “There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls, anything, between what pours out of Bob’s hand on to the page and what is somehow available to the core of people who are believers in him. Some people would say, ‘not interested,’ but if you are interested, he goes way, way deep.” I love this for lots of reasons but most of all because it captures not only the religious devotion that many who love him feel, but also the bemused indifference of the sane and secular who do not.
Of course, the first order of business when writing about Dylan is to urge readers to ignore writers who write about Dylan. We are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, forever tramping door to door with our clumsy bonhomie and earnest smudgy leaflets; in all honesty, you would be much better off seeking out the resonant majesty of the actual work. Indeed, you’ll be relieved—and possibly endeared—to hear that Dylan himself considers his disciples to be deranged. “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy?” Dylan asked in a recent interview for Rolling Stone. “What the fuck is the matter with them?”
I should say in passing that I am only mildly afflicted by comparison. There are tens of thousands of Dylan fans who are in a far more advanced state of insanity. Fervent purveyors of set-lists and bootlegs and best-of-performances; the blue-faced blogging battalions; the tens of millions who watch YouTube footage of him changing the lyrics to a song here or performing an unreleased track there. Soon these poor folk will be sifting the brand new 6,000-piece literary archive of his ephemera (acquired in March by the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a rumoured $60m) for clues as to his state of mind sequestered in the addenda to his legal contracts. There are already hundreds of “Dylanologists” who like to listen to individual instrumental tracks of his gazillion bootleg recordings—“stems” as they are called—so as to focus in on his rhythm guitar playing or keyboards. Then there are the serial show-goers stretching all the way back to the Gaslight Café in New York in 1962. There’s no other songwriter that comes anywhere near this kind of… what? Devotion, loyalty, study, analysis, contemplation, regard, fixation.
There are many answers as to why this might be (answers to Dylan’s own question) but the most straightforward is found in the lyrical texture and complexity of his early work. Like TS Eliot or Walt Whitman, his words mesmerise, occlude and invite interpretation. The whole crazy-devotional interpretative approach to his oeuvre began with people simply trying to decode the meaning of his songs—something approximate to parsing “The Waste Land” or “Leaves of Grass.” Over time, that inquisitorial dynamic spread beyond the art and on into the artist himself until it had intensified to the point of absurdity.
And yet not quite absurdity with regard to the songs. Because Dylan rewards meditation and repeated listening like no other. Very few of his stanzas succeed as on-the-page poetry—he is a performing artist—but when he sings, he imbues his words with a significance that is somehow rich with multivalent meanings, many of which feel just out of reach. This is something to do with the startling originality and range of his poetic imagination as expressed through the quality and skill of his word selection and the tone and timbre of his sung delivery. As Baez implies, the listener either wheels away wincing or they must be forever drawn in deeper and deeper seeking to further understand, savour and construe. (In this way, Dylan’s work is a bit like Ludwig van Beethoven in classical music: it’s all or nothing and you can’t have him on in the background.)
To put it another way, there are hundreds of Dylan’s lines that precisely capture or enact deeply personal human feelings that then turn out to be capacious enough to capture or enact entirely different human feelings decades later. Some of this effect is the accidental by-product of his staggering facility with the language, but a lot more than he pretends is consciously designed. Certainly, it’s why people began to study him in the first place. To quote the man himself: “What drives [us] to you is what drives [us] insane.”
But I don’t want to attempt to unpack the mighty genius of Dylan’s writing here; that’s a subject for another lifetime… Instead, by way of celebration and in an attempt to explain to non-believers, I want to offer up for consideration some other aspects of Dylan’s life and work that are not routinely considered: five qualities that I find inspiring and that I have come to admire since his 60th when I last wrote about him in a birthday context. (...)
Self Reliance
Dylan is famously indifferent to what his critics, audience or commentators think, say, feel or want. Actually, indifference is an understatement since it suggests a relationship—even if denied. Dylan’s attitude towards the press and public might be more accurately characterised as being something approximate to the attitude of Pluto as to whether humankind decides to classify it as a planet or not. Indeed, the last time I saw him—at the London shows in autumn 2015—I realised midway through that there was nobody in the Royal Albert Hall who was less interested in Dylan than the man himself. Which is probably why he was singing so much Frank Sinatra.
To my ear, these were the worst concerts I had seen him do for many years. (Contrary to popular perception, Dylan diehards are more acutely aware than the critics about how awful he can be; we know—we were there.) Why croon for two hours when you yourself were the man who rid the world of all this saccharine Sinatran slush the first time around? And, if you must croon, why not deploy your own back catalogue, which contains dozens of far more beautiful and sophisticated love songs? The point is that Dylan doesn’t care what anyone thinks—least of all his audience—and probably hasn’t since roughly 1965.
Those of you who know something of Dylan lore might dimly recall that this is when he “went electric” and fans starting booing and hissing and screaming “Judas!” (In fact he’d been electric before he was folk.) But Dylan didn’t just exasperate and lose his audience once. He’s done the same more or less every five years: he annoyed folk fans with rock music; rock fans with country music; country fans with cover-song crooning (Self Portrait in 1970 was the first time around for the crooning-Bob); cover-song-crooning-lovers with a caustic bitter-sweet divorce album; bitter-sweet-Bob-lovers with a Christian-gospel-rock; Christian-gospel-rock fans with a Zionist phase; the entire Live Aid world audience by using the moment to get drunk and draw attention away from Africa to the plight of American farmers; the remaining loyalists with a “comeback” that then subsided into two albums of finger-picking early blues covers featuring songs like “Froggie Went A Courtin’.” And so on. And so on.
He only really stopped annoying people in 1997 when he released the first of his late masterpieces, Time Out Of Mind. And that’s only because from around that date onward, people finally realised that he was always going to do whatever the hell he liked. In 2009, incidentally, Dylan put out an album of Christmas carols, which in my estimation has strong claims to be the worst album released by any artist in the history of recorded time.
Of course, the first order of business when writing about Dylan is to urge readers to ignore writers who write about Dylan. We are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, forever tramping door to door with our clumsy bonhomie and earnest smudgy leaflets; in all honesty, you would be much better off seeking out the resonant majesty of the actual work. Indeed, you’ll be relieved—and possibly endeared—to hear that Dylan himself considers his disciples to be deranged. “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy?” Dylan asked in a recent interview for Rolling Stone. “What the fuck is the matter with them?”I should say in passing that I am only mildly afflicted by comparison. There are tens of thousands of Dylan fans who are in a far more advanced state of insanity. Fervent purveyors of set-lists and bootlegs and best-of-performances; the blue-faced blogging battalions; the tens of millions who watch YouTube footage of him changing the lyrics to a song here or performing an unreleased track there. Soon these poor folk will be sifting the brand new 6,000-piece literary archive of his ephemera (acquired in March by the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a rumoured $60m) for clues as to his state of mind sequestered in the addenda to his legal contracts. There are already hundreds of “Dylanologists” who like to listen to individual instrumental tracks of his gazillion bootleg recordings—“stems” as they are called—so as to focus in on his rhythm guitar playing or keyboards. Then there are the serial show-goers stretching all the way back to the Gaslight Café in New York in 1962. There’s no other songwriter that comes anywhere near this kind of… what? Devotion, loyalty, study, analysis, contemplation, regard, fixation.
There are many answers as to why this might be (answers to Dylan’s own question) but the most straightforward is found in the lyrical texture and complexity of his early work. Like TS Eliot or Walt Whitman, his words mesmerise, occlude and invite interpretation. The whole crazy-devotional interpretative approach to his oeuvre began with people simply trying to decode the meaning of his songs—something approximate to parsing “The Waste Land” or “Leaves of Grass.” Over time, that inquisitorial dynamic spread beyond the art and on into the artist himself until it had intensified to the point of absurdity.
And yet not quite absurdity with regard to the songs. Because Dylan rewards meditation and repeated listening like no other. Very few of his stanzas succeed as on-the-page poetry—he is a performing artist—but when he sings, he imbues his words with a significance that is somehow rich with multivalent meanings, many of which feel just out of reach. This is something to do with the startling originality and range of his poetic imagination as expressed through the quality and skill of his word selection and the tone and timbre of his sung delivery. As Baez implies, the listener either wheels away wincing or they must be forever drawn in deeper and deeper seeking to further understand, savour and construe. (In this way, Dylan’s work is a bit like Ludwig van Beethoven in classical music: it’s all or nothing and you can’t have him on in the background.)
To put it another way, there are hundreds of Dylan’s lines that precisely capture or enact deeply personal human feelings that then turn out to be capacious enough to capture or enact entirely different human feelings decades later. Some of this effect is the accidental by-product of his staggering facility with the language, but a lot more than he pretends is consciously designed. Certainly, it’s why people began to study him in the first place. To quote the man himself: “What drives [us] to you is what drives [us] insane.”
But I don’t want to attempt to unpack the mighty genius of Dylan’s writing here; that’s a subject for another lifetime… Instead, by way of celebration and in an attempt to explain to non-believers, I want to offer up for consideration some other aspects of Dylan’s life and work that are not routinely considered: five qualities that I find inspiring and that I have come to admire since his 60th when I last wrote about him in a birthday context. (...)
Self Reliance
Dylan is famously indifferent to what his critics, audience or commentators think, say, feel or want. Actually, indifference is an understatement since it suggests a relationship—even if denied. Dylan’s attitude towards the press and public might be more accurately characterised as being something approximate to the attitude of Pluto as to whether humankind decides to classify it as a planet or not. Indeed, the last time I saw him—at the London shows in autumn 2015—I realised midway through that there was nobody in the Royal Albert Hall who was less interested in Dylan than the man himself. Which is probably why he was singing so much Frank Sinatra.
To my ear, these were the worst concerts I had seen him do for many years. (Contrary to popular perception, Dylan diehards are more acutely aware than the critics about how awful he can be; we know—we were there.) Why croon for two hours when you yourself were the man who rid the world of all this saccharine Sinatran slush the first time around? And, if you must croon, why not deploy your own back catalogue, which contains dozens of far more beautiful and sophisticated love songs? The point is that Dylan doesn’t care what anyone thinks—least of all his audience—and probably hasn’t since roughly 1965.
Those of you who know something of Dylan lore might dimly recall that this is when he “went electric” and fans starting booing and hissing and screaming “Judas!” (In fact he’d been electric before he was folk.) But Dylan didn’t just exasperate and lose his audience once. He’s done the same more or less every five years: he annoyed folk fans with rock music; rock fans with country music; country fans with cover-song crooning (Self Portrait in 1970 was the first time around for the crooning-Bob); cover-song-crooning-lovers with a caustic bitter-sweet divorce album; bitter-sweet-Bob-lovers with a Christian-gospel-rock; Christian-gospel-rock fans with a Zionist phase; the entire Live Aid world audience by using the moment to get drunk and draw attention away from Africa to the plight of American farmers; the remaining loyalists with a “comeback” that then subsided into two albums of finger-picking early blues covers featuring songs like “Froggie Went A Courtin’.” And so on. And so on.
He only really stopped annoying people in 1997 when he released the first of his late masterpieces, Time Out Of Mind. And that’s only because from around that date onward, people finally realised that he was always going to do whatever the hell he liked. In 2009, incidentally, Dylan put out an album of Christmas carols, which in my estimation has strong claims to be the worst album released by any artist in the history of recorded time.
by Edward Docx, Prospect | Read more:
Image: John Cohen/Getty Images
