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| THE ANTI-HERO Dylan came into the music mountain and leveled it to the ground |
“Goodbye is too good a word, babe, so I just say fare thee well.”
Bob Dylan, Don't Think Twice, It's Al Right
WE TEND TO IMMORTALIZE PEOPLE when they are gone. That must have
been our normal reaction when someone is dead. When we are faced with the reality
of not seeing them again. Some of us might have some fond memories of that
person, others would go so far treating it as good riddance, especially when
there’s some notoriety attached to it. Besides, it’s quite easy to put someone
on the pedestal when they’re dead, that is, assuming they have been cremated.
But that is more or less doing injustice to the person if indeed
that person had made a great impact in your life. You wouldn’t do that to your
real-life heroes, though. That would put some strain on your fanaticism, or
maybe even put your faith on them in the balance. So, if you can help it, you
might want to start shelling out some praise to the person who had made some
impact in your life while they are still at it. It would be too late, however,
if you’re doing it when they’re gone.
For years I have been digging the sounds of Bob Dylan with
curiosity. Not that he had this great influence on me since I started strumming
the guitar, but that his genius did work some magic on my sensibilities, so
profound that I still hold on to my artistic efforts even when there’s no one
listening or paying attention to it. And it is only fitting that he should be
given praise while he’s still around. He deserves that acclaim, no less.
Bob was born in a typical Jewish family. He dropped the rest of
his name in favor of a more lyrical Dylan, maybe as a response to the death of
a famous Welsh poet, who died in the early 50s. But he was the antithesis to
the hero of that era that goes by the name of Elvis. And since then, he went
straight to the top by the sheer audacity of his acoustic guitar and with a
voice that was anything but superficial.
Dylan is very much alive these days. He even recorded a song
recently. I don’t want him to go just yet, not this year. Not too long ago, the
deaths of Scott Weiland, Chris Cornell, and Chester Bennington left a void on
those who listened to their songs, and that there is no tune worth humming
anymore as a result. Dylan might be generations apart from those superstars,
but his influence did leave an imprint on those who listened to him.
Leading the Tribe
I think of Bob Dylan as an insult to the music industry. But a
very good insult, nonetheless. He didn’t look the part, at least from the
standards of rock stardom, or even in folk circles. When I first saw him, he
looked more like a stressed-out lesbian on the verge of a nervous breakdown,
which made even believable when Cate Blanchett portrayed him on the big screen.
That was a delight of a movie. But Dylan looked every inch an unassuming
formula on a mathematical equation, or better yet, an indispensable side note
on a musical scale.
But a “Tambourine Man” is someone who peddles illegal stuff,
mostly on drugs. He popularized that song when exotic drugs were a rarity still
in an already stoned 60s America, and for obvious reasons, Dylan was the
ultimate Tambourine Man there is: self-effacing, street-smart, and raw. These
are the qualities that made him so relevant even if, to use his popular phrase, the times they are a-changing. Since his ascension into music
lore, his lyrics and his oftentimes erratic posse had brushed off on his
generation and even beyond it.
Dylan influenced a generation without even trying. And that’s a
middle finger waving on a particularly wholesome picture. That means it wasn’t
supposed to be there. He seemed like an aberration to the counterculture
movement, saved for his poetry and wit, however, that he was able to weave
himself into that crowd, without looking particularly awkward, because he was.
Nevertheless, he had a resounding tambourine across the
counterculture scene in that he helped shape the careers of some of the
heavyweights in that era. Artists such as The Byrds, Joan Baez, The Band, and
Jimi Hendrix all covered some of his songs as if their own, and made a fortune
out of it. Somehow, he made a template of how to make it through the night,
regardless if some of these freaks were making love or expecting some rain.
He tore to pieces any conventions of a music artist, leading
them to take a serious look on their talents instead of puffing it up in front
of the camera. People usually look at Dylan, not as a superstar, not even a
practicing Jew, but a curiosity shop with lots of valuable items in it. What he
was doing was something illegal. A music icon isn’t supposed to look like that,
much less sound like him. If in case, you’re wondering why he’s still making some noise lately,
with tons of rock casualties falling over the years, it is because he was more
than just words and music, he came into the scene as if he was out to disturb
it.
Along the Watchtower
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| MEETING OF THE MINDS Dylan and Ginsberg reading in front of Jack Kerouac's grave |
THE STORY GOES THAT WHEN recording the 80s classic, We Are the World, producer Quincy Jones spent a
lot of time trying to lace Dylan’s portion of the song, despite the latter’s
unusual difficulty of recording with other artists during that ensemble. He was
not in his best element singing a few lines of that song live, but because he
is Bob Dylan himself and the clout he has on his sleeves, any producer, let alone
the venerable Jones, would cast his lot on that, regardless if it’s a tall
task.
Dylan’s wit is a rare commodity in music. If you listen to his
earlier songs such as Desolation Row or Subterranean Homesick Blues, and even the more mainstream Like a Rolling Stone, he seemed to have labored so
much time arranging the words to fit in with his oftentimes dissonant sound.
Dylan always wanted to put some emphasis on his lyrics at the expense of
sounding coarse, which makes him a virtuoso on that musical sheet, not minding
at all if he sounded good or not. He reminds me of a more enlightened Arlo
Guthrie, or a younger version of Pete Seeger, singing songs on top of that
trailer among these sun-weary peasants.
But Dylan is a poet at heart. His music at times came in almost
as an afterthought. What the Beat Generation had failed, Dylan had capitalized
on it, as such that it was no surprise that his collaboration with Allen
Ginsberg did take place, and with perfect timing, at the time when the Beats
were a bit off in the news. Ginsberg saw in Dylan a kind of transition, a rite
of passage, of bringing the message of his Zen cliques into mass consumption,
because Dylan seemed to have the facility to elucidate a complicated idea into
a popular tune, of which Ginsberg or even a William Burroughs had tried on a
page for years.
His seminal book, Tarantula, is a testimony to his silliness
and complexity. At that period, he was pressured to finish it on time, despite
his once full schedule. When it came out, it met with mixed reviews, but he
showed his creativity and originality in that book, a smorgasbord of stories,
poems, and personal essays that could be arranged into songs. If most of his
tunes sounded like a riff off from his earlier compositions, his lyrics, as
always, is an improvement on top of each other.
There’s something about his music that resonated so well with
other artists and that they had made him as their Pied Piper, proclaiming in
part that they wanted to be like Bob (of course, if you consider his montage of
controversial boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, which was a bit
partisan). So convincing Dylan is with his protestations that he was given a
rare recognition straight from Sweden itself when he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature some years ago. That seldom happens with artists who had
the propensity of lazily strumming his guitar in front of an audience who
barely understands what he was talking about. Much like a tambourine blending
itself in the music, we are then quick to recognize that it’s sound always
rings a bell.
No Direction Home
DYLAN MIGHT BE DABBLING ON some high art with his music, but he
is, in every sense of the word, relatable. He did commit some deplorable
mistakes along the way, assuring us that he’s one of us. And some of these
mishaps were head-scratching, like when he did profess his newfound faith in
Christianity. Although there is nothing particularly wrong with pledging your
allegiance to the Nazarene, only that Dylan was forcing himself on it, prodding
his way through on everyone at that time to accept Jesus as their personal Dr.
Phil. He became a sort of a pariah out of it. And not even the Traveling
Wilburys, with all of its connections and familiarities, could save him from
being an outsider.
He bounced back in the mid-90s with an album that won a Grammy, Time Out of Mind. But before and after these acts,
Dylan interloped from being the talk of the town to a complete flop. You could
even point out that at one point he didn’t have any direction at all, as
exemplified with that infamous club tours in the mid-70s and his rambling
response in an interview with Ed Bradley, where he said he had aligned his
calling as an artist to this anthropomorphic Master, whoever that is must have made
an impression on Dylan why he seemed offbeat for much of his career.
But I prefer to remember his free-wheeling days when he produced
albums as if his unearthing the gold rush again, collections such as Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding, albums that had defined Dylan
more than anything else. Never mind if his transition to the electric guitars
from his ubiquitous acoustic handle was unanimously dissed. I’m
leaving the electric guitars to his son Jakob instead.
For what it’s worth, the good thing about Dylan is his
consistency. Maybe his latest song, I Contain Multitudes, bears some clue to that. In it,
He went back to his roots of throwing a lot of allusions in this song, this
time from William Blake to Indiana Jones (never mind if it sounded so worn-out
a tune). And if you dig deep enough, you would notice a pattern quivering on
top of his music since he immortalized that Tambourine Man. That he was blowing
in the wind then, with no direction home at all, and now he had turned himself
into multitudes. Somehow, Dylan had come full circle.
Perhaps I might stop listening to his songs when he’s gone
because a lot of the music artists since then had taken up some of the reigns
that Dylan once championed. It is enough that we once celebrated his songs as
anthems of a generation. And like a legitimate Tambourine Man, he isn’t
supposed to stay longer than he should on a particular joint, that would make
him an easy target, a predictable one, as is the case of most artists lately.
His business is already done. He has to fade away at some point. And I’m
imagining he would have said his famous line by now, “There must be some way
out of here.”
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| THE NEW COOL Breaking away from the normal is always Dylan's posse
photos: LA Times, Rolling Stone Magazine
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