"would someone please explain bob dylan?"

so, a friend of mine just sent me a link to a page where a friend of his says this:

“Would someone please explain Bob Dylan to me? Thanks in advance.”

first of all, i assume by the use of “explain” that there must be something to “get,” & that our friend TRev perceives that other people seem to “get” whatever “it” is. Now, this may or may not be true, but it seems to be a popular perception, this idea that there is something to this cat called bob dylan.

I would like to say one thing first off about bob dylan, & I would like to say it via Joan Baez: she’s in Scorcese’s doc “No Direction Home” about dylan through mid-1966, and she basically says that there are tons of people out there who couldn’t care less about bob, in fact they don’t like him AT ALL, but for those people out there who really do like him, he reaches a space inside those people that is almost overwhelming (those are all my words, not joan’s, for the record, but i stole the idea from her).

that being said, I must also admit that I am one of those people, the ones who he really reaches right into their soul.. right around the time i went to college, like my 18th & 19th years on this planet this go-round, the words (sung words, that is) of bob dylan hit me like a sledgehammer. i had heard some of his stuff -- “like a rolling stone,” “rainy day women #12 & #35” (the “everybody must get stoned” song), of course “blowin’ in the wind” & “the times they are a-changin’” & some later stuff like “tangled up in blue.” but somebody gave me a cassette tape with “highway 61 revisited” on one side (“desolation row” cuts off at the 2nd casanova mention) and “blood on the tracks” on the other side (“buckets of rain” didn’t make it, as i recall). something in there really just got to me, like i had been forcibly removed from my homeland & somebody was playing the native songs that we all learned as kids, but had forgotten when they shipped us out, & here were these songs, these incredibly dense, full songs with references that could mean different things on different days.

& i started reading about bob dylan, about who he was & how he came to be the recording artist that he is. to be totally & brutally honest, bob dylan was the first figure that i ever encountered that made me so insanely jealous that it was painful. i didn’t see any way to top what he was writing, even if it were separated from the music. every paper i wrote in college had a bob dylan quotation somewhere in it, because the things he was saying were like a bible to me. right at this time, the bootleg series vols 1-3 came out, with unreleased songs & what not, & the second disc of that set really did change my life completely. these songs, written by this amphetamine-jacked, beaujolais drinking kid from minnesota, felt thousands of years old to me; it’s like taking the pain & suffering & all the shit of the world, describing it with words & setting it to simple music, & the end result just transports you right out of that shit & into some other place. i like to describe it as being sort of like earth, but not exactly the same.

listening to the live takes & development of songs on the bootleg series & then the basement tapes, you hear this cat bob dylan, with the whiney voice, whiney harmonica, simple piano, & basic guitar (not so basic, more on that some other time), playing these songs with these throw together bands of really great musicians who MUST have seen something in what this guy was doing, & these songs are just off the charts, in my book. listen to “i shall be released” from the bootleg series, or “up to me” off of biograph (the first real box set), or even the truncated “i’m not there (1956)” off the now available complete basement tapes. if those songs don’t get you, then i’d say that’s it. bob’s just coming from a different place than you want to look at, kind of like how i feel about a lot of contemporary “r & b.”

it’s hard for me to even write about any of this, because i’ve read so much about dylan & what he was doing between say 1959 & about 1980, that i could hardly be a disinterested or objective observer. the thing that has really driven home for me the notion that he must be something of a great artist is the number of people who are singers and songwriters who are simply amazed at the abilities he has to write songs. those original basement tapes were nothing more than samples of songs that were intended to be disseminated to other artists for them to record. and artists literally would do anything to get ahold of some of those songs: just google “bob dylan basement tapes cover versions” & something should come up. i’ve got links, but i’m writing this in a word processor & don’t feel like making it a real blog entry with all those links & stuff.

there’s plenty of “respected” critics who fawn over dylan regularly, but i don’t usually put much stock in music critics, even high-level ones like greil marcus; writing about music really is like dancing about architecture.

but bob dylan’s songs -- not all of them, & to varying degrees -- all contain something that creates an emotional response in me that i haven’t been able to find anywhere else, ever. maybe the poetry of breyten breytenbach comes close. but when i heard “isis,” the second song on “desire,” i FELT a response to it, & still do to this day. literally goosebumps for some of his songs, like the acoustic “idiot wind” off of the bootleg series vol. 2. the album “blonde on blonde” (first double album in the rock genre) i could listen to over & over again for the rest of my life. just “stuck inside of mobile with the memphis blues again” & “sad-eyed lady of the lowlands” could carry me for months. i don’t really know why, i guess the truly honest way to put it is that his songs & music make the thoughts of suicide recede in the distance, because i’m not really alone, or maybe being alone isn’t so bad, maybe we are all alone together & the best way to deal with it is to put together some songs that give us a collective identity. when bob came to new york in 1961, being an “american” was a very strange thing. bob picked up a guitar for the same reason every kid picked one up in the ‘50s -- to be a rock star, to be elvis presely, to move & shake people like those guys did. somewhere, he discovered woody guthrie, & realized that one of the few things truly indigenous to the US was folk music (blues included). these songs of the people spoke to bob dylan the way they speak to any of us who feel trampled on, the way they speak to The Man being in charge, society being complacent, & even individual people living in fear & ignorance. bob’s got one of those musical minds that hears a song, then knows it, then can somehow re-do it, re-interpret it as it were, & make it something simultaneously newer & older than the original.

listen to his radio show, if you have to. he probably knows more about the history of american music than anyone else on the earth. his record collection alone is rumored to be in the middle 6 digits, counting the ‘45s. there’s a coupla books you could read, but again, you could also dance about architecture.

i’ve “converted” a number of people, & also failed to convince the same number. the only reason i agreed to marry my wife was her falling for dylan because i showed it to her -- not as hard as me, & i’m sure she gets sick of dylan way faster than i do, but she loves him nonetheless. when i played her “i’m not there (1956)” the other night, i didn’t think she got it the same way i did, or rather i thought that it didn’t affect her the same way it affected me. 24 hours later, she said, “hey, play that ‘i’m not there’ song again” . . . thank god.

then there’s also the massive amount of self-mythologizing going on with dylan. he came in, embraced the folk scene, got well known, & got himself set up so that he could basically do whatever he wanted to in the studio. which for most of the ‘60 was simply play live in the studio, with or without a band. give yourself fifty-one minutes to listen to the album “another side of bob dylan,” & consider the fact that it was recorded in 6 hours, in one night. how much time had he spent writing those songs? the rumour is that bob can just sit down & write a song without even thinking about it. now, some could argue that you can hear that in the simplicity (read: infantilism) in some of the writing, but what gets me about bob is that as good as a wordsmith as he is, sometimes he knows when words that are wrong -- sung wrong, mispronounced, whatever -- are actually better that way, & therefore “more right” for the feel he’s trying to get.

back to the self-mythologizing: i think bob wanted a certain sort of mystery surrounding himself, & cultivated that -- which is a great way to get people talking about you. apparently he was a real asshole to a lot of people, but when i think about it, in 1965, when he was at the height of popularity, he was 24. if every person who i came into contact with told me i was the greatest thing since. . . well, ever, i shudder to think how my 24 year old self would have treated people. i was an asshole, & i wasn’t even remotely famous, or even talented.

but we should also remember that when bob dylan hit the scene, there were no real “music critics;” the papers just sent these beat reporters trying to cover the culmination of the Beats. they didn’t even know what they were dealing with, no questions to ask really. in the scorcese doc, dylan now says that back then they were asking him about why his lyrics were “surreal” & he says “really, the whole thing was kinda surreal.” so there was no road map for how to deal with this stuff, so he just sorta tried to be this renaissance court jester, things like carrying around a big-size light bulb. . . which, by the way, sells records.

but man are those records amazing. ask the beatles. & if you really want to know what i think about dylan and the sixties, listen to “ballad of a thin man” off of  “highway 61 revisited.” then, go listen to “norwegian wood,” which was, in part, john lennon’s response to the lyrical methods of bob. then, go listen to “4th time around,” by bob, off “blonde on blonde.” that’s HIS response to lennon’s song, & the rumour is that he wrote it at the piano in the recording studio and got it in one take. i already think he’s a minor deity, & i have no desire to convince anyone of that, but just give some of those songs a listen.

one final point: anybody that wants to try to “get” bob dylan is welcome to ask me to make them a CD. you just have to come eat lunch or dinner at fishmonger’s to pick it up.

cheers,
mitch

Comments

[Joe]

BTW, thanks. I thought you might like doing this. :)

[Julian Martlew]

Great post señor! Never has a songwriter managed to say as many things to as many people with so few words as Dylan. The greatest songs are perfect when you are angry, sad, celebrating, heartbroken whatever. They mean what you need them to mean, when you need them.

[David Felton]

Preach it brother. I swear I wrote a comment on your post of 9 January. Oh well, I must have typed it and then hit the wrong button...
I'm sure I didn't say anything of great interest. Happy birthday, while I'm at it, may you have many more. Keep listening to Bob and knowing that we are all all alone together.