The Last Authentic Cult Figure Of The 20^th Century Music

Bob Dylan
Knocking on Heaven's Door

      With his drawl, monotone and at times even whining voice he sung his verses which will one day be taught and studied at universities and which will provide the legitimacy to the synthesis of music and literature.

      Born a Gemini, on May 24, 1941, Robert Zimmerman (he changed his name to Dylan in 1962 after Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet) is an exceptional and the most important solo artist R'N'R music has ever known.

      Regardless of whether he sung protest songs or introspective ballads, he left a trail of the enlightened who would themselves become big but at the same time he also left a trail of petty wannabes.

      Frequent and impulsive changes of style have marked his career that's spanned through four decades. Some of those styles were revolutionary; some in turn were just an itch for his personal appetites and as soon as lurkers would go ecstatic about how Dylan had faded and ended up with no inspiration, he would come back to ram those smiles down their throats (most recently in 1997 with his brilliant Time Out Of Mind).

Dylan The Folk Singer

      Seemingly incapable of delivering when not in conflict with the world around him, Dylan put his folk singer coat on at the very beginning greatly inspired by an American legend - Woodie Guthrie - by whose side in NYC young Dylan stood to the end back in 1961. 

      Dylan easily became the prophet of the Greenwich Village folk commune, the predecessor of the hippy movement. Nevertheless, in 1965 he threw it all away by attacking the most sacred taboo of the whole, by then hopelessly lost, folk movement by a simple act of plugging his electric guitar into the amp.

      "Judas!" - his old fans would scream but to Dylan that wouldn't be of any importance. Rock 'n' Roll the way we know it was born that same summer of '65 - singer/songwriter tradition bonded with RNR and opened the door to something new. With his monotone, drawl and at times even whining voice he sung his verses that will one day be taught and studied at universities and which will provide the legitimacy to the synthesis of music and literature. They will also send the message that the voice is not important as long as it has something to say (the rest of the world would embrace this attitude years later with punk rock).

The Apostle of Rock and Roll

      The mid-sixties were marked by the three LPs that are regularly found among the top 20 albums of all times - Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and the double LP Blonde on Blonde.

      The newly discovered energy was promoted on the road with the back up of The Hawks who would soon change their name and be called simply - The Band. Befriending The Beatles (and yes, he made Lennon write more serious stuff), the general acceptance of his ideas by the hippies...and if he decided to stop there and then he would still remain one of the RNR icons more so because of his 1966 motorcycle accident after which he retreated into a two-year long recovery during which he would together with The Band record some twenty songs that were to see the light of day in 1975 - like The Basement Tapes - the first bootleg ever to be released at the request of the fans.

      By the end of the sixties Dylan had lost his faith in the hippy philosophy while the rest of the USA was preparing for Altamont and the biggest hangover ever. He released two country-oriented albums John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline (the latter featuring Johnny Cash), seemingly making a cession to the simple, small town people, which was in fact his unwillingness to directly engage the generation he helped to be born.

New Sensibility

      After a few pretty unpleasant disagreements with Columbia Records and his acting debut in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garret And Billy The Kid, Dylan makes a series of mature and intimate albums with a relatively good Planet Waves and continues with the exceptional Blood On The Tracks, Desire and, finally, Street-Legal.

      The highest point in Dylan's entire opus - at least in the opinion of this writer - came with the aforementioned trio which was free of political messages and 'activism'. Here, Dylan sings about love, despair and imminent disappointment (Blood...), wandering, real-life stories and fates that haunt and, undoubtedly, get to us at the end of the day (Desire). He finally manages to make peace between his political side and his sensibility (Street-Legal, especially Changing Of The Guards and Señor /Tales of The Yankee Power/).

      You may be cynical towards the songs such as Times They're A Changin' and Blowin' In The Wind disregarding them as hollow anthems of the wasted years; you can swear by the independent scene despising Dylan for being a sell-out rebel but with these, often underrated, albums made in the time of Punk and Disco, he overgrew all the existing criteria for rock artists and all his sins were forgiven in advance.

Peacekeepers In The Service Of Satan

      And there was a lot to forgive. Exhausted from touring, playing and the world that was sinking, in 1979 Dylan accepted fundamentalism and over the next three years he went on to record three "Christian" albums: Saved, Slow Train Coming and Shot of Love.

      Although not left without good tunes, the audience, not accustomed to moralising, was confused by Dylan who, like some TV-Evangelist, preached about sin and hell that awaits us all if we're not redeemed. Luckily, this phase didn't last long and in 1981 Dylan turns to Judaism and releases a cynical and phenomenal Infidels (with Mark Knopfler as the producer and guitarist) on which he will, elegantly, offer us his thoughts regarding the religion. (Good intentions can be evil/hands can be full of grease/I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace).

The Biggest Rock Poet

      Through the rest of the 80s, Dylan would make a disappointing album here and there but would also make a great collaboration (the supergroup Travelling Willburys) and in 1990 he released another great album - Oh, Mercy - which was followed by a somewhat bleak Under A Red Sky. The 90s had seen cover albums World Gone Wrong and Good As I've Been To You and, to some extent, inappropriate MTV Unplugged.

      And just as everyone wrote him off, when he was past tense to everybody, Dylan came back with the smashing Time Out Of Mind - which at the end of the century reaffirmed his position as the greatest rock'n'roll poet.

      What else to say...? There are loads of books on Dylan (to those interested I'd gladly recommend Song And Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan by Michael Gray) which should come in handy as you're listening and understanding his songs.

      Although in recent years rarely cited as an important factor, Dylan is guilty as charged and should be thanked for all those who tried to change the world with guitar and lyrics. With his dark glasses and messy hair he was the first of all the icons which RNR is full of... and at the same time - he might as well be the last cult-figure of the music of the 20^th century.

Vasa Curcin
Copyright Rock Express