There’s only one person in pop who is not fascinated by the myth of Bob Dylan and that’s Bob Dylan. Now approaching 60 and with an Oscar in his grasp, he remains infuriating and elusive. What keeps him keeping on? Sean O’Hagan investigates ‘It’s not a question of breaking the rules, don’t you understand?” the 25-year-old, amphetamine-fuelled, stick thin, impossibly cool Bob Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton in 1966. “I don’t break rules because I don’t see any rules to break. As far as I’m concerned there aren’t any rules.”
As a statement of intent, it was suitably fearless, consummately self-confident and, as pop history would prove, utterly self-fulfilling. It was also Dylan willing himself into pop history as the first avatar of a new kind of cool, the first truly modern pop icon, standing, unchallenged, at the epicentre of a seismic pop cultural shift, the reverberations of which are still being felt today.
And, back then, of course, Bob Dylan was breaking all the rules, and doing it with a momentum that was both breathtaking and almost arrogantly casual in its iconoclasm. He was not a new Elvis Presley, oozing untrammelled sexual energy, speaking the inchoate language of pure rock and roll. He was something else entirely; something new, unforeseen: a visionary, a surrealist of sorts. “What made you decide to go the rock and roll route?” Nat Hentoff asked him in a famously suppressed 1966 interview for Playboy. To which Dylan answered: “Carelessness.” From the start though, as the unlikely self-styled heir to dustbowl balladeer Woody Guthrie, Dylan was someone who saw the bigger picture, and his place within it. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, son of a middle-class Jewish shopkeeper, in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 he grew up in Hibbing, a mining area already in terminal decline that would later become the setting for songs like North Country Blues. In 1959 he attended the University of Minnesota, where he immersed himself in the burgeoning coffee-house folk circuit.
There, he changed his name in homage, he said later, to the western hero Matt Dillon. By 1962 Dillon had become Dylan, in deference to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
After dropping out of college he lived in Dinkytown, the bohemian quarter of Minneapolis, and absorbed the heady atmosphere of the time: beat poetry, radical politics and protest folk. Around this time, too, Dylan started reinventing his past, passing himself off as a hobo musician in the mould of his hero, Guthrie. In 1960 he made a pilgrimage to New York, turning up unannounced at the ailing singer’s house. They talked; the baton of history and tradition was passed, and the following year, on his spartan, eponymous debut album, Dylan recorded Song To Woody, a farewell song to his mentor.
By 1964 he had triumphed at the Newport Folk Festival, formed a romantic liaison with Joan Baez, leading light of American musical liberalism, and recorded The Times They Are a-Changin’, an album that pushed him into the vanguard of the protest folk movement. The following year, though, he released Another Side of Bob Dylan, which included My Back Pages, another farewell song, with the refrain, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. This time he was saying goodbye to the folk genre he had done so much to revitalise.
In DA Pennebaker’s film of his 1965 British tour, Don’t Look Back, Dylan is restless, confined, cool to the point of dismissive of those around him. You can see Baez shrinking into the background, as a newer, more ruthless Dylan emerges: a man with a mission to rearrange the contours of the popular song, to make history by riding roughshod over the past.
Even he, though, could not have anticipated the furore and the scenes of mixed up confusion that would attend his reinvention as a rock demi-god. When he walked on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, trailing a hastily assembled pick-up band and carrying an electric guitar the way some people carried a gun, nonchalantly but with latent intent, the world of pop shifted on its axis.
To howls of disapproval and disbelief that were to be echoed across the US and Britain on his subsequent tour with the Hawks, (soon to become The Band), Dylan single-highhandedly blasted protest folk, a form he had already redefined, into oblivion.
In 1965 and 1966 he unleashed a clutch of songs that were nothing short of revelatory: the jangled-up thrust of Subterranean Homesick Blues; the rolling, tumbling electric poetry of Like A Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street; the cryptic, multi-layered allusion of Visions of Johanna. These were brash, fearless, declamatory songs, that, in their majestic newness, heralded the birth of the modern rock era and the end of the pop song as a signifier of a certain kind of teen innocence. This “wild mercury sound”, as Dylan would later describe it, was the sound of the future breaking, confused and uncertain and unstoppable.
In retrospect we can see how this new, electric music and strange, druggy poetry, surging along on the momentum of discovery, pitched popular music, lyrically and tonally, into a brave new world where, to one degree or another, it has remained ever since. A world where the humble pop song, until then a vehicle for untainted romance and a certain kind of inarticulate but potent teen frustration, suddenly became a medium of infinite possibility. This intense mid-Sixties burst of creativity has remained unmatched in modern music.
The young Dylan rewrote the rules of pop like no one before or since, and, one way or another, we have been living with the legacy ever since.
And so, of course, has he. “Everybody works in the shadow of what they have previously done,” he said in 1989, “but you have to overcome that.” More than any other postwar performer, Bob Dylan has done his best to demolish his own mythology, at first retreating into blissful domesticity in rural Woodstock in the late Sixties, then doing his best to simply ignore his iconic standing throughout the Seventies, then actively dismantling it in the Eighties with certain records that were so ugly and unlistenable, so perfunctory and perverse, even the most obsessive Dylanologist and, believe me, there is no bore like a Dylan bore had to shake their head and cover their ears in dismay. “Bob took his art so low,” his one-time accomplice Cesar Diaz once remarked, “that all he had to do to come back was just to throw out a signal that he was still alive.” Along the way, too, he has embraced cocaine and booze, Judaism and born-again Christianity, the latter with a self-righteous fervour that astonished and alienated all but his most faithful fans. And, latterly, he has toured and toured, and then toured some more, as if over-familiarity, alongside a wilful perversity when it comes to the choosing and reinterpreting of his own songs, might dispel the myth. He has toured so much it made him ill. Then, having recovered, he has toured some more. If he wasn’t playing somewhere on Sunday night, it was only because he was picking up an Oscar for Best Song (for Things Have Changed from The Wonder Boys).
It has been that way for the past 10 years or more: a series of ever-changing performances Dylan never plays the same song the same way twice in a series of depressingly similar, soul-destroying mid-size arenas across the globe. The Never Ending Tour, he calls it, without a trace of irony.
“A lot of people don’t like the road,” he said in 1997, “but it’s as natural to me as breathing. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity. I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.” ” I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity.” Think about that for a moment. Then think how long Dylan has thought about it. He said it when he was 56 30 years after retreating from his initial celebrity (though it was not called that back then), and after a decade of dogged globetrotting in pursuit of some ideal of ubiquitous anonymity. He must surely have had John Updike’s darkly prescient remark echoing in his head: “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” For a while back there, when Dylan shows had reached a nadir of sorts in the bleak, sleek Eighties, he even took to appearing on stage behind a mask, his kohl-rimmed eyes staring out of a haggard face caked in pale make-up. I am a performer, he seemed to be saying, not a myth; an actor, not a celebrity.
And in a way, through sheer force of will, he has hauled himself to a place that is outside of, or beyond, what we now understand by the word “celebrity”. In his often startling sleeve notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong album one of what I would call the great critically misunderstood Bob Dylan albums, alongside 1969’s Nashville Skyline and 1979’s Slow Train Coming he wrote, apropos of the traditional song, Stack A Lee: “What does the song say exactly? It says no man gains immortality through public acclaim … fame is a trick.” What World Gone Wrong, like many of Dylan’s late albums, spoke of most loudly, though, was his disgust at the world, and the world of pop culture in particular. Bob Dylan, as he has told us over and over again, in one way or another, does not fit. Bob Dylan belongs somewhere else: outside of pop, outside of fame, outside, even, of time as it is now measured in pop terms. And yet, Bob Dylan lives on in pop, and pop legend: inviolate, iconic and enduringly mysterious, despite himself. “I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.” This, too, is where Dylan is at right now. His view of his work, and, by extension, of himself, is as wildly out of step with the broad thrust of contemporary pop culture as his self-styled “wild mercury sound” was with the prevailing tameness of the pre-electric pop Sixties. Again, he wills it this way.
Whatever else his trawling through beliefs, styles and traditions, and his myriad often grotesque re-readings of his own classics may tell us, they speak most loudly of a sustained restlessness, a refusal to stay put, in musical terms, but, more importantly, in terms of pop history’s idea of him.
He is governed by the true artist’s dictum, which, as the poet Paul Muldoon points out, was best articulated by Yeats’s line, “Myself I must remake”. Thus, Dylan keeps on moving, tries his best not to stand still long enough to be canonised, or reduced and, in a way, they are the same things by pop history and pop tradition as it is defined by a now middle-aged industry intent on endless, essentially insecure self-aggrandisement. When Dylan, looking not so much uncomfortable as demoralised, reluctantly received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1991 Grammys, he held it at arm’s length like a diseased rag and made the most cryptic yet chillingly apposite short acceptance speech ever: “My daddy once said to me, he said, ‘Son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this world that your own Mother and Father will abandon you. If that happens, God will believe in your own ability to mend your own ways’.” God will believe in your own ability to mend your ways . That is so effortlessly Dylanesque, yet so dripping in Biblical resonances, you have to wonder whether he ad-libbed it or rehearsed it in his head beforehand. Either way, his response speaks of a profound distaste for the trappings of contemporary music culture, and a healthy disregard for the protocol of pop’s industry-led celebration of itself.
The late period Dylan, like the early Dylan, but in an altogether different way, is a moralist. Disgust, though, has replaced righteous anger just as iconoclasm has long since given way to wilful perversity.
Dylan the contrary first surfaced after his initial flight from fame in 1966. Riding his beloved motorcycle to the repair shop in Woodstock, he came off on a corner, was knocked unconscious and taken to hospital wearing a neck brace. The accident turned out to be not that serious, but the ensuing year-long silence from Dylan fuelled rumours that he had been seriously hurt, even disfigured. In his absence, the myth grew accordingly. The chastened singer, meanwhile, retreated behind the gates of his rambling house in Woodstock in upstate New York.
He had just completed his gruelling 1966 tour, every electrified performance a battle of wills with an audience still in thrall to his increasingly labyrinthine, but reassuringly acoustic, songs; an audience unknowingly resisting the tidal sway of pop history, who were playing out an age-old drama centring on the battle between the almost new and the truly, terrifyingly new.
Combative concert performances like the one captured on the now infamous Manchester Free Trade Hall bootleg, where one irate audience member cries out “Judas” just before the thunderous intro to Like A Rolling Stone, had left Dylan and The Band exhausted and demoralised, limping back to America without the stamina, nor indeed the will, to persevere with their great sonic adventure. In Pennebaker’s unreleased tour film, Eat the Document, a visibly strung-out Dylan trades acid one-liners with John Lennon in the back of a limo before suddenly turning pale and pleading with the driver to take them back to the hotel. He looks wounded and fragile, panicky and close to breakdown, the psychic cost of his unparalleled surge of creativity visible in every twitch and stammer.
Behind Dylan the icon, the arbiter of new cool, behind that mask of seeming invincibility, there was an uncertain, even desolate individual. “People live with hope for green trees and beautiful flowers,” his first serious girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, would later say of this time, “but Dylan seems to lack that simple hope, at least he did from 1964 to 1966. This darkness wasn’t new to me, but it became stronger as the years passed by.” The motorcycle crash, though not serious, seems to have pulled him back from a bigger abyss. For a while, as the pop world waited for guidance from its most revered sage, Dylan, approaching 30, found solace in the simple comforts of home and hearth. Outside, America raged in a fitful war with itself; the psychedelic era, which he had prefigured as far back as 1965 with Mr Tambourine Man, came and went while Dylan rediscovered his folk roots and delved deep into country.
A plushly packaged photographic book, Dylan in Woodstock by Elliot Landy, surfaced last year: it shows a bucolic family man, his hair and beard trimmed, his filled-out features smiling mischievously for the camera. Whether bouncing on a trampoline in his back garden or shopping at the local store, Dylan, looking like a country rabbi, seems for once utterly content, free from the weight of his own myth, at one with himself. He has never seemed anywhere near as content since.
The root of his enduring unhappiness, it would appear, lies in his divorce in 1977 from his long-suffering wife, Sara, mother of five of his children. Their protracted break-up followed a long, volatile period where Dylan’s immersion in booze, cocaine and a series of casual adulteries fractured the short-lived calm of the family-centred Woodstock years.
Both 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, his last truly great album, and its successor, Desire (1976), had mapped out his obsessive devotion to Sara who, even as he let her slip away, exerted an almost mystical hold on him. She remains an enduring muse, and seems as palpably present on his most recent album, 1999’s Time Out of Mind, as she did on the plaintive lost love song that bore her name on Desire.
For a while, the void left by Sara’s departure was filled by reckless, seemingly obsessive womanising: he even shacked up briefly with their children’s nanny. By 1979, and the release of Slow Train Coming, it was clear that another unlikely shift of consciousness had occurred: Dylan had done the unthinkable and embraced born-again Christianity.
On the subsequent triumvirate of Christian albums, Saved (1980), Shot of Love (1981) and Infidels (1984), he raged and fulminated against the wickedness of the world and the folly of those who did not share his post-conversion world view.
His performances, uneven at the best of times, were now punctuated with long semi-extemporised, disturbingly self-righteous sermons. The master of irony and symbolism had, for a time at least, become a born-again bore. “Happiness is not on my list of priorities,” he told a reporter in 1986. “I just deal with day-to-day things… it’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly’.” And yet sparks of greatness remained. Today, Slow Train Coming has, as the initial shock of its unfashionable, god-fearing message has faded, come to be regarded as a powerful if uneasy testament. A God album that manages to sound as bitter and twisted, and indeed ungodly, as some of his old spleen-venting songs like Positively 4th Street. On Shot of Love he sang Every Grain of Sand, a secular song that, for me, stands head and shoulders in its craft and spare poetry above many of the inflated, symbolist outpourings like Desolation Row, which always seem, bafflingly, to precipitate those weary old Is Dylan Better Than Keats? debates that surface from the bowels of academia every so often.
The late period Dylan, too, has surprised all but the most faithful: 1989’s No Mercy, and 1999’s Time Out of Mind, garnered ecstatic reviews, though the consensual chorus of approval that greeted the latter album, which followed on his recent health scare and hospitalisation, seemed to suggest a collective mild hysteria rather than reasoned thinking. Last year’s European tour, though, often approached the revelatory, despite Dylan looking frail and suddenly old on stage, his gaunt frame in silhouette a cruel echo of the stick-thin, seemingly immortal Dylan circa 1966.
Thus, he perseveres, changes, yet remains essentially the same: a voyager, an artist following no one’s rules but his own. In a strange but no doubt conscious way he has become his heroes the old folk singers and gospel singers, the itinerant balladeers and bluesmen whose legacy of love songs, death ballads, spirituals and moral tales he steeped himself in as a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota.
The endless touring, the insistence that performance is a job like any other, that music is essentially a craft that must be practised, honed, forever reinvented, are old-fashioned ideals. Their currency precedes a time not just before samplers and digital recordings, but before pop as we know it.
Dylan at 60 seems to be saying what he has always, even at his most self-destructive, said: that he is part of a longer, deeper lineage, that encompasses the whole sweep of American music, of American experience as it was rendered through the ballad, the blues song, and the folk song, as well as the pop song. He is bigger than pop, and his music is bigger than any of these generic terms. In his ragged voice, and in the range of his poetry, from the freeform surrealism of that iconoclastic mid-Sixties moment when he was young and fearless, to the busted, frail beauty of a song like the valedictory Not Dark Yet, you can hear echoes of other American poets like Herman Melville and Woody Guthrie, Mark Twain and Robert Johnson; you can hear echoes of America, old and young, innocent and defamed.
And Dylan, in his way, is as unfathomable and indefinable as America itself. When he was asked by a journalist in 1985 whom he would like to interview, he plucked, as if from thin air, names like Hank Williams, Apollinaire and Paul the Apostle. “I’d like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind,” he explained, “who left people for ages with nothing to do but speculate.”
He could have included himself at the top of that list. As he approaches 60, one feels that the speculation is only just beginning. In an age where music has all but surrendered its ability to startle, Dylan remains the template for a certain, increasingly rare, kind of artistic reinvention: endless, ongoing, unpredictable. Long may he continue to question our assumptions about the Bob Dylan we think we know.