were telling stories
much better than I ever could,
I decided to stick to my own mind…–Bob Dylan
I want to be Bob Dylan.
From Mr. Jones by The Counting Crows
How can anybody talk about Bob Dylan and avoid mouthing lyrics, poetry, love, life, death, mercury mouths, ghosts of electricity, Italian poets from the 13th century, corpse-evangelists, desolation rows, assorted myths, streetcar visions, warehouse eyes, sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands, and ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind. The answer known only to "10,000 talkers whose tongues are all broken." We all have our "personal Dylans" that overlap, contradict, corroborate and get tangled up with each other. Bob the protest singer. Bob the electric bard. Bob as Judas. Bob who accepted Jesus as his own personal saviour. Bob as the lonesome cowboy. Bob the recluse. Bob the joker-man. Bob the uneasy rider. Masked and anonymous Bob. Bob the forever tourist on a never-ending tour. Bob the shape-shifter. Thus, writing an article about Bob Dylan is like trying to recall your 115th dream.
Even Bob Dylan himself is as guilty as biographers and hallucinating rock journalists in propagating the myth about Bob Dylan. The American folk-rock icon’s Chronicles, Vol. 1 is a great read (better than the whole cosmos of Dylan bios), but is as "autobiographical" as one of his songs. And don’t ever go near his Tarantula, or else be mired in a sticky web of wordplay.
The first time I heard a Bob Dylan record (Like A Rolling Stone) I thought someone gargling razorblades was sagely singing about how it is to be "on your own with no direction home like a rolling stone." It was like hearing The Beatles or the Stones for the first time, or falling in love on the eve of the Apocalypse. A key moment. A turning point. It was as if – as Bruce Springsteen appropriately put it – somebody kicked the back door to my mind wide open. And the song began with the words "Once upon a time…" Like a hallucinogenic fairy tale that hasn’t ended, yet. A rolling stone still gathering myth.
I went back to his other songs after that. Blowing in the Wind is his own sermon on the mount of a broken-down America. (How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is better than all the eve-of-destruction songs combined. The late great Beat poet Allen Ginsberg said he wept when he heard it for the first time. And Ginsberg – for those who are too busy figuring out which one is Orange and which ones are Lemons in O&L – wrote the incendiary "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…"
What about Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues with its stream of consciousness and lake of trippy imagery? ("You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.") Dylan also excels in ambivalent ballads like Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Nothing more evocative than Girl From The North Country or If You See Her, Say Hello. I Shall Be Released has a we-shall-overcome feel to it. Makes you so goddamn happy to be on the same planet as Dylan.
There’s also That’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) with its immortal maxim "That he not busy being born is busy dying." It would take no less than Jimi Hendrix to conjure the fire and brimstone out of Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. It would take Guns N’ Roses to bring out the outlaw appeal of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. (Eric Clapton did a terrific reggae rendition; Avril Lavigne sang it like a bummed-out mall-rat.) Somebody asked Bob what does Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 mean. Predictably, Bob answered, "I’m not sure." Everybody must get stoned, indeed.
One of Dylan’s lyrical triumphs is Visions of Johanna with Symbolist lines like "Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial/Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while/But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues/You can tell by the way she smiles." It is a cut from the brilliant "Blonde on Blonde," my favorite Dylan record (along with "Blood on the Tracks" – the best breakup album of all time).
Unlike other ’60s icons contented with rehashing past glories like a broken jukebox, Bob is still at it.
"Time Out Of Mind," with its dark and brilliant ruminations on love and mortality, was a comeback of sorts. Afterwards, he recorded "Love & Theft"; was featured on the film aptly titled Masked & Anonymous; and came up with Chronicles. Which brings us to the best DVD released in 2005: Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home.
Imagine spending New Year’s eve in a small condo unit in Makati. Fireworks and drunken banter sound-tracking the environment. No food on the fridge. No money in the wallet. No other person around. No discernable future. A big fat nothing. Except Bob’s riveting story (from 1961 to 66) as presented by one of America’s best directors (also responsible for the brilliant concert movie The Last Waltz, featuring Dylan’s former backup band).
There is not one humdrum moment in the documentary. During the interviews, Bob is frank, articulate, and coherent (not like the younger Dylan who made buffoons out of reporters in press conferences). He comes across as someone not afraid of contemplating his "back pages."
The "story" moves from Hibbing, Minnesota (Dylan’s roots) to Greenwich Village (Dylan’s journey as a coffeehouse folkie to iconic protest singer) to assorted crossroads. One of the highlights of the documentary is when Dylan gets booed for going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, for not being folkie enough. How preposterous. And how fitting it is that one song Dylan performed that night was Maggie’s Farm. They sing while you slave and I just get bored. He also gets heckled as "Judas" in the UK tour that followed. Dylan was deemed a sell-out for playing with a rock n’ roll band.
There are also great performances of songs like Man of Constant Sorrow, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Mr. Tambourine Man, and One Too Many Mornings.
Great insights from Dylan’s associates – friends and fellow artists. Folk singer Joan Baez looks back on her relationship with Dylan. She recalls how he wrote a song one day and completely forgot about it. Baez recorded the song, and when Bob heard it over the radio, he remarked, "That’s a great song." Baez promptly told him, "But, Bob, you wrote it." Guitarist Al Kooper shares how he was able to sneak into the Like A Rolling Stone sessions as a keyboard player. You could never imagine that song now without those organ notes. D.A. Pennebaker looked back on the Dylan docu Eat the Document. There is also Suze Rotolo, Pete Seeger, Pete Yarrow, and Allen Ginsberg.
In the DVD interview, Ginsberg recalls the meeting between Bob and The Beatles. Must be nirvana to be in the same room as those icons with their conversations about rock n’ roll, hash and William Blake.
So Scorsese has expounded on that period in Dylan’s life from ’61 to 66. How about the rest of the truth, the myth and everything else in between?
Ah, Bob Dylan. To say anything substantial about him, we must use his words.
May he build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung, and may he stay forever young.