By Mark Lepage
As you celebrate in Club Soda tonight, some thoughts on Zimmy…
We were walking down Clinton Street one miserably rainy November morning, and all the Louds of New York were honking and shrieking even though it was not yet 7 a.m., but my daughter had to be put onto the subway for school. A slick rainy open-aired staircase down to the ticketing agent and the platform. Backpack-encumbered, she was deep in thought as we cruised past Lot-Less Home Basics and all the other semi-opened shops, holding hands in the light drizzle. She was deep in thought, and she said:
“Papa? You know, my favourite Bob song used to be It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. But I think now it’s Visions of Johanna.”
As she nearly skipped, and I lurched, past the window display with all the too-early Christmas flotsam, I recall looking down at her in a kind of pre-caffeine coma. I probably mumbled something, because my brain felt like a suitcase nuke had gone off in there. It was a large thought. The subway steps were slick, and off she went with a massive idea in her head, that I was trying to keep up with.
As I lurched back home, I thought about the lyrics. To both songs my kid liked.
Don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flagging down the “Double E?”
Don’t the sun look good goin’ down over the sea?
Don’t my gal look fine when she’s comin’ after me?
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
And then:
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Visions of Johanna
And all I could really think was “Well. That was fast.”
That was a quick transition for a child/teen, from liking a very cool bluesy shuffle about a train (winkwink) to the fullest efflorescence of the guy’s poetry. From a great track for nighttime highway driving, to this kaleidoscope of abstract yet specific imagery. My 13-year-old kid was already moving as deeply into Bob albums, and having the songs as move deeply into her own consciousness, as I had. And that was a big thought for someone who hadn’t yet had a coffee.
I’ve seen Bob Dylan perform live at least a few times in every decade of my adult life, from outdoors at Lanaudière to Prospect Park, minor league baseball diamonds to college campuses, the old Montréal Forum to the old Jarry Park to the Beacon Theater. But hey, that’s a fan (and a critic, so: some free tickets in there…). And whenever I took my kid on a long drive, some Bob would at least feature on the playlist. So sure, Dad’s influence, whatevs. But I still wondered. Dylan is not for everyone, but when someone’s been as famous for as long as he has, you could end up liking a few hits here and there as part of the fogey soundtrack. Why would a kid in this millennium want to dig into the songbook like that?
It’s certainly not just celebrity. Bob Dylan’s level and capital-letters type of fame have a handful of analogies, but that’s all. Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles. They’re all likely as eternal as well, but unlike them, Dylan did not hit the fame radar because of Bobbysoxxers. There was no real “teenybopper” phase to it. Even later icons like Michael Jackson and Madonna don’t match up. Their mega-fame came later in the game when record industry machinery had a pervasive global reach. Again – this is in no way to suggest that teen fandom is some less valid. Every one of the artists mentioned above is major. But nobody tweeted MJ or Madonna to denounce her for going electric. Bob Dylan has not just been famous since he was 21, he has been a kind of psychic avatar. Very few popular music figures have to mean something; still fewer manage to do it. He’s also funny as hell.
But needless to say, that “serious artist” designation (also a marketing tool, by the way) has a negative side. The seriousness of Bob Dylan’s fame and work are largely the construct of his fans. And that has led to some of the most insufferably pretentious fans in cultural history.
Dylanologist, anyone? It’s one thing to want the rip out a hank of you idol’s hair or part of his shirt. It’s another to scrounge through his garbage looking for the Secrets of the Universe. And you haven’t lived until you’ve heard someone try to parse the, uh, Baudelairean insights of “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, rattle and shake / Wiggle, like a big fat snake.”
At the Prospect Park show in 2008, I remember the beardysomething sitting in front of me ponderously explaining the lyrics of every song in the set to the woman he’d obviously kidnapped to the show. Every. Song. When he dug into the geopolitical hoohah of Masters of War, he magisterially told her that Dylan probably wouldn’t play it. Leaning forward, I said “Yeah, he’s just kicked it off, so can we listen?”
So, yes, some people go too far down the rabbithole. There are something like 800 or 900 books about him in English. There’s one in Albanian. But for all the pretentio-devotion, there’s an opposite side to the coin. The people who just won’t have it. The ones who say Yeahyeahyeah great lyrics but let’s face it he can’t fucking sing. Without belabouring the point, that comment is the hillbilly cousin to ”Every Bruce song is about picking up JaneyWendy in a beat-up Ford”. Or “I hate country/rap/insertgenre”. Such comments are pointless although it is true most Emo is certainly bad.
If anything about Dylan is underrated, it is his talent as a melodicist. And among the reasons to appreciate Bob Dylan, there is the decided lack of stupidity. Once he started writing his own history, it was smart and funny. More to the point, as a Boomer legend, he’s made very few if any generationally obtuse pronouncements. Plenty of artists of his era mocked hip hop; Dylan embraced it with Kurtis Blow – perhaps because you can make the case for Subterranean Homesick Blues… but let’s leave that aside for book 901 someday.
It’s futile to try to scan the entirety of what is easily the most expansive and voluminous stylistic songbook of the Twentieth (and Twentyfirst) century; or maybe the Anythingth century. And trust me, I can name the terrible albums. So can Bob Dylan. We could argue about Knocked Out Loaded, Under the Red Sky or Down in the Groove, but why bother. So let’s go beyond music to the overarching notion of being part of the culture of your time. For those… unsure about Dylan’s voice or his songbook, think of it this way. In cultural terms, going to see a Dylan concert, with his largely new band who apparently play just as burnished gold and silvery as the last one: you are going to a Shakespeare play. That play used to be Hamlet. Now it is King Lear. But the key component, when Dylan plays, is that the director is Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is in the starring role. An octogenarian, Dylan has spent a good 15 years refining a new way to sing. You might almost say he is singing better than ever. But in either case, it is impossible to name another artist in the same context. But he’s not for everyone. Never has been. And that is the point, really. So on that rainymorning November walk, it became clear that he remains a symbol of a kind of creative and personal freedom, even for the young’uns. Especially, perhaps, for them. This is a rock star who has been famous for 60 years, and nobody quite knows where he lives or how many kids he has. In terms of shape-shifting, Bob Dylan had morphed from baby-faced folk revivalist to protest singer to electric rock’n’roll sellout and amphetamine genius to burnt-out hermit to country crooner – all before David Bowie and Ziggy came to represent the “chameleon” in pop music.
He’d gone from “Voice of a generation” to “What is this shit?” before the decade was out. And that was before he went “Fat Elvis” and then Christian. If any force seems to have guided those changes, it is a natural DNA-level refusal to be defined – in personal, life, philosophical, political, artistic, instrumental, matrimonial, clothing direction, or even by your very birthname – by anybody or anything. If you think about the shape-shifting, the only thing left for Bob Dylan is a left-turn into the Islam songbook. Insha’allah.
But really, if you want to ride the highway of diamonds, you are following him. Do the work. Be ready for New York. Then wing it. Sleep on the couches of future greatness. And keep doing the work to be great.
Bob Dylan makes the best sense to anyone who values the individual way, and the individual voice. Let’s say, if you want to write your own songs, your way. Like, say, a young daughter walking down a Lower East Side street, with her own ideas about trains and visions.
