Regards, Ivan
Posted on 10/08/2004 3:48:45 PM PDT by MadIvan
HE WANTED to be called Robert Allyn, even though it made him sound like a second-hand car dealer. His inspiration was a 210lb wrestler called Gorgeous George; his automatic jukebox choice was a cheesy anthem by Judy Garland; and sometimes, when making records, he was pleased to sound like Barry White.
After four decades, the music industry’s biggest secret is out: Bob Dylan is not cool.
In fact, the “Holden Caulfield of Hibbing, Minnesota” — who invented the confessional pop song; the off-key “sand and glue” rock vocal; and the stream-of-consciousness lyric — was bordering on the unhip. He even admits to owning a World’s Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker.
In the nervously anticipated Chronicles: Volume One, published this week, Dylan gives a frank insight into his inspirations during the early stages of his career and explains why he later rejected the counterculture he helped to invent.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he writes.
“I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics, and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion . . . the Duke of Disobedience.”
As a last resort, Dylan, 63, considered giving up music and going into business. Typically, it was not a conventional career that tempted the great rock bard. He wanted to open a wooden leg factory.
The book’s publication comes after Dylan, real name, Robert Zimmerman, was once again passed over for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His nomination has repeatedly caused controversy over whether song lyrics count as works of literature. Chronicles, however, may help his cause.
It has startled some American critics, largely because it avoids the druggy rock star pretension of Dylan’s previous literary effort, Tarantula, scrawled during the hallucinatory late 1960s.
“As the sphinx holds forth with what is, to put it mildly, atypical frankness, he admits to remarkably unhip tastes and unlikely points of reference,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, published a list of the most unlikely statements by Dylan in Chronicles, including, “polka dances always got my blood pumping”, and, “what I was fantasising about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the back yard.”
Although Chronicles does not have a traditional linear structure, it is separated into clear accounts of three periods of Dylan’s life: his days as a folk musician in Greenwich Village; his paranoid late 1970s faze (when he describes his fans as “scarecrows” and “creeps thumping their boots across our roof"); and the recording of 1987’s acclaimed Oh Mercy.
“I don’t think Barry White could have done it any better,” he said after the recording.
Fans also get glimpses of the young, deeply odd Dylan, who read biographies of great war leaders and fantasised about enrolling in the West Point military academy.
“I’d always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed,” he writes. “I asked my father how to get into West Point and he seemed shocked, said that my name didn’t begin with a ‘De’ or a ‘Von’ and that you need connections and proper credentials to get in there.”
Alas, music beckoned.
Dylan knew he had made the right choice when he played at the National Guard Armory in Hibbing during a visit by the star wrestler Gorgeous George. The wrestler looked at Dylan as he played and mouthed the phrase, “you are making it come alive”.
Dylan writes: “Whether he said it or not, it was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come.” Later, Dylan decided to change his name. “What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen. It sounded like the name of a Scottish king and I liked it,” he writes.
Then, after reading about the West Coast saxophone player David Allyn, he decided to alter his new name to Robert Allyn. A poetry book by Dylan Thomas made him think again, but “Bobby Dylan sounded too skittish to me and besides, there already was a Bobby Darin, a Bobby Vee, a Bobby Neely and a lot other Bobbys.”
He settled on Bob Dylan.
As if this is not proof enough of Dylan’s lack of cool, he writes that his favourite song is Moon River, before wondering why he never joined the deeply naff Peter, Paul and Mary folk troupe.
By calling his book Volume One, Dylan implicitly promises more. But it may be a long wait. As he said: “Lest we forget, while you’re writing, you’re not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation? I don’t find it that splendid.”
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
I'm not his biggest fan -- I enjoy the stuff on classic radio, but have none of his records.
But as a musician, I have always respected and applauded the fact that he blows his own horn.
And, he's a damn good interview to read.
I went to the same Jewish summer camp in upstate New York as Dylan (though many years later). his name (Zimmerman) was etched into one of the bunk beds in my cabin.
Before I forget -- a joke, kind of related to the subject of hippies and music:
Q: What did the deadheads say at the Dead concert, after they ran out of dope?
A: Dude, this sh*t sucks...
A bump for Christian gun owners.
Saw him in concert in Houston a few years back with Paul Simon. Dylan is definitely NOT cool. But he sure wrote some great tunes. He does look like a LITTLE nerd.
Bob Dylan might be a poet, but how would anyone know? I sure can't understand much of his lyrics.
For my money. the poet is Bob Seger!
Then he's an obvious fraud, since I have a coffee cup proclaiming ME to be the World's Greatest Grampa.
This is one of the best rock films of all time. Cameras follow him around in his first visit to England in 1965.
"Blood on the Tracks" is the best pop album, and Bob might be the pop artist with the cleanest heart of all. His music was fine, and not designed to hurt people, except for "Masters Of War", which isn't an antiwar song - it's an anti-war profiteering song. I'm glad he's been around, and produced so much, and didn't "waste anybody's precious time."
I think Dylan's cool....all those times he was singing next to the likes of Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, George Harrison....
OwlEagle, being from MI, I'm a fan of Bob Seger too!
There's room for you both to be the best!
D.A. Pennebaker's breakthrough film before he did "Monterey Pop." "DLB" is a striking snapshot of the Sixties before the "hip" media turned it into over-hyped psychedelic drivel.
It's always amazing to me just how little Bob actually likes... anything. The guy mastered the "been there done that" attitude before he'd actually been anywhere or done anything. An impressive feat. And it is amazing how much of a non-hippie this hippie icon is. Favorite album is Blood on the Tracks, so thuroughly depressing in each and every song that it's almost unlistenable, I know life's not going well when I'm humming "Tangled Up in Blue", remind me.
Favorite album? oh disc, I'm still trying to think of a favorite song!
it's almost unlistenable lol,...(is that a word?)
Bob did a nice nod to Seger here in Detroit last march, playing a hot Get Out of Denver to end his show - the same day I think Seger went into the r'n'r hall of fame. Dylan is a fantastic performer, amazing songwriter, and has opened the doors of appreciation to all kinds of older more obscure music to many many people.
Ever hear his song Union Sundown? About the way the unions are dragging down the country. Or Neighborhood Bully, standing up for Israel. Or Catfish, a great song about a great baseball player. Or the great song he wrote for the movie Gods and Generals... Cross the Green Mountain.
Anyway, it's mostly a matter of taste. ;^) Enjoy what you like!
At this juncture in making the TusCon schedule I spend a lot more time on line, checking e-mails. And now I'm back at work, a very exciting week.
Being a big fand of The Band I'm also quite fond of the Dylan/ The Band stuff. Two great musical forces.
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