Bob Dylan is 70 today and thankfully,despite all the mountains of literature and analysis, he still remains an enigmatic and fascinating figure.
The fact that he keeps the media circus at arm’s length means that he has cleverly remained aloof from all the usual trappings associated with the cult of celebrity.
He seems to understand, perhaps instinctively, that, most of the time, the more you know about your heroes, the less interesting they become. In your imagination you can create a compelling persona that could easily be destroyed by dull facts. One of the point of .Todd Haynes’ movie ‘I’m Not There’ is that everyone has their own idea of who the ‘real Bob Dylan’ is.
Dylan was not the voice of my generation. I put Joe Strummer and Steven Morrissey on this pedestal. They were the ones singing about the issues I could relate too – a loathing for the Thatcher regime and Royals, an understanding of the tiresome weight of boredom, small-minded prejudice and suburbia.
It was not so surprising that I didn’t immediately identify with Dylan’s protest songs. Martin Luther King was shot in 1968 on my 10th birthday and this was the same year that American involvement in the Vietnam War reached its peak. It is possible to protest against the US invasion or civil rights abuses retrospectively but it’s not the same thing.
I was aware of Dylan’s iconic status, of course. My older brother had his first albums and grew his hair into an untidy afro in time to go to the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. But the more I heard people say he was a true poet and visionary genius the more I was inclined to ignore him.
It’s a bit like Shakespeare for teenagers. I had to study Othello for what were then called ‘O level’ English literature exam. Teachers seemed oblivious to the fact that we spotty adolescents were not interested in the insidious scheming of Iago or the jealous torment of The Moor; we were more preoccupied by the question of if/when we were ever going to get laid.
I came to appreciate Shakespeare much later and my blindness to Dylan started to fade even sooner. This began when an old flame introduced me to John Wesley Harding and I was struck by the fact that there was nothing like what David Bowie called the voice the “sand and glue”. I was also intrigued by a set of songs that seemed rooted in Americana yet had mystical dimensions too.
The clouds of ignorance were swept aside completely when I first heard the album Highway 61 Revisited. This wasn’t just because it opened with Like A Rolling Stone (although that didn’t harm his cause either). What swung it for me was the fact that in these songs Dylan is plainly adopting a stance from outside the mainstream culture without taking up any fashionable causes or resorting to predictable sloganeering.
On Ballad Of A Thin Man, Dylan sneers against ‘Mr Jones’ : “with great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks” and needed only to use the word ‘lawyers’ for us to know what he thought of highly paid legal experts.
None of the lyrics to the songs on this album can be easily deconstructed or explained away but the defiant attitude towards the ‘square society’ was unmistakable. He flattered us that we were above the intellectual level of one of the characters in Tombstone Blues of whom he sings : “I wish I could write you a melody so plain ……..to cease the pain of your useless and pointless knowledge”.
These are searing songs of perfectly controlled, sophisticated venom and after this I was converted . I was sold to the notion that he deserved the his status as the epitome of cool even though I haven’t necessarily been won over by every album he has made.
The bottom line is that Dylan’s fierce intelligence and astonishing body of work is an achievement against which all singer-songwriters are measured.
Happy birthday, Bob!
