In Praise of Bob Dylan - Page 3

Dylan became the darling of the folk crowd. Everyone sang his songs, youth across America embraced him as a spokesman for their beliefs, they could point to Bob and prove to their elders that the current youth had depth and compassion and hope, yet a  deadly serious outlook toward their own future. Bob was a folk messiah, he carried the banner of Purpose and Change and Freedom and the only problem was, Bob wasn’t a political person, and while he cared deeply about human rights and the betterment of people’s lives, he didn’t care about politics and the processes that create political change, except as an outsider, an observer who could smell the wind and tell us all what was blowing in it. Bob confounded his legions by abdicating the throne and concentrating on being what he was, an artist, a craftsman, a songwriter.

It’s hard to believe that when Another Side of Bob Dylan first came out, with songs such as “Chimes of Freedom” and “My Back Pages” included, it was berated by the folk press, for its lack of ‘protest’ songs, its veering away from the political purism of its predecessor, “The Times They Are a Changin’” Then it got worse. Bringing It All Back Home was partly electric (as if electric blues, which the folk community embraced, wasn’t being played at the same time) and filled with strange imagery, the surrealism of “Mr Tamborine Man” and “Gates of Eden.” By the time Highway 61 Revisited. appeared, it was an all out war, well documented in Martin Scorcesse’s, No Direction Home and many other sources, where Dylan and band were booed all across the country as soon as they tarted plugging in the guitars for the second set. There hasn’t been anything like it, again, before or since, in American musical history.

At the time, Dylan remarked that those so-called fans must have a lot of money to buy
tickets and come just to boo. The music itself was incandescent because of the atmosphere it was played in – white-hot, snarling, ferocious, magnificent. If after the trials of that electric tour Dylan had died in his legendary motorcycle accident, he would have gone down as music’s most heralded and beautiful martyr, an impossible combination of James Dean, Arthur Rimbaud and Martin Luther King. But, instead, he managed to live. Someone I know once said they’d wished Dylan had died in the motorcycle accident, because the symmetry of it would have been so perfect. This was the world Bob Dylan inhabited, one where people who loved him and his music could wish him dead because it’d be cooler.

Article Author: Will Brennan

Will Brennan lives in Salem, MA with his love Andrea, their dogs Chloe and Raven, and their cats Jake and Roxy. His first novel, Love in Vain Blues, is being considered by several publishers. Along with writing, he really likes music.

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