Millions of young people once wanted to be Bob Dylan. God forgive me, I was one of them. Many of them are dead now, and almost none of them, least of all me, have the wild hair, much less the slender waists, of our Dylan-worshipping days.
I tell you this because the Dylan era will soon end, and those who come after will find it impossible to understand.
It is expressed most beautifully on the cover of what we then called an LP: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which I think I saw for the first time, when I was 14, on Christmas 1965.
In this image, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature walks down a scruffy New York City street in the middle of the mud.
It’s obviously very cold. He is quite unattractive and seems to have jumped out of his wardrobe. But he has the girl.
That girl, the lovely Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo, is clutching his left arm tightly with both of them, while smiling (he’s not smiling).
They say that if you’ve never been hugged by a woman in this particular way, you haven’t really lived, and I think that’s true.
So that’s the key to everything. Pseudo-intellectual, skinny, radical wannabe poets can get the girl. You don’t have to be a sports hero or classically handsome or well-dressed. It is not even necessary to have a car.
The cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan LP, featuring the singer walking down a New York street in the bitter cold with his girlfriend, American artist Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo.
Some of Dylan’s best songs were about his long, disastrous romance with Suze. You can still feel the passion and loss in them despite their unappealing whiny voice.
But there is also something else, or at least there was.
I first heard him sing on the little ivory Ferranti transistor radio I shared with my brother, permanently tuned in those days to Wonderful Radio London, 266 on Medium Wave. This was one of the pirate stations that hypnotized an entire British generation and, in my opinion, changed the world for the worse.
But, like the children who listened to the Pied Piper and, as Robert Browning said, “stumbled and jumped, ran joyously after the wonderful music with shouts and laughter,” we were fascinated as we rushed toward our moral and political doom.
In those days you used to hear about new music stars before you read them, and I remember at first assuming the man’s name was ‘Bob Dillon’. Not that it mattered, because his real name was Robert Zimmerman.
Much of the action in the clever and funny new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.
It deftly evokes the bohemian, slightly seedy, deeply political and pretentious world in which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of “protest” anthems like the awful, clichéd and stupid The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin . ‘ in the Wind (Dylan himself got tired of singing it, and who can blame him?).
But the film glosses over the true importance of folk superstar Pete Seeger and Suze Rotolo, although it spends a lot of time on how they helped a young Dylan rise to fame.
Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which is set in the years before most people in Britain had heard of the singer.
Seeger, later famous for his liberal “peace” songs, had at one time belonged to the small, ultra-Stalinist Communist Party of the United States.
At that time I was not so interested in peace. When sensible people were very much in favor of fighting the Nazis, from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been something of a pacifist.
Worse still, he and his folk group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made an album of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Oh!
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.
They took the album out of the stores and visited those who had bought it (fortunately not many people) asking them to return it. In 1942, they beat their drums and banged their banjos announcing war.
The seductive Suze had a similar background. She was a born communist, whose Italian-American parents were both committed members of the Communist Party USA. This involved much more than paying dues. His mother even worked as a courier for the communist-backed International Brigades in the Spanish civil war.
It was after meeting Suze that Dylan began singing – a lot – about the threat of nuclear war, racial segregation and other left-wing causes to which he seemed to have joined.
And then he left them, turning away from politics and protests for a completely different type of music.
It was after Dylan met Suze that he began singing about the threat of nuclear war, racial segregation, and other left-wing causes he seemed to have embraced.
The film portrays this as a mere dispute in the music world over whether folk singers should use electric instruments. But I’ve always thought it was about politics.
Millions of Dylan’s political followers regarded him then and after as a lost leader, even a traitor, and the great cloud of myth that has surrounded him ever since has something to do with this.
What is Dylan and what was he? The revered Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, a leading literary expert, has argued that some of his work is actually serious poetry.
I’m inclined to agree, although I suspect I misheard many of the best lines, such as “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of his face.”
Not being a poetry expert, I can’t determine if it means something profound or if it means nothing at all, but is simply beautifully expressed.
It was certainly much better than ‘I want to hold your hand’, ‘Painted black’, ‘Turn around and scream!’, ‘I hope I die before I get old’ or the rest of the things we had to do. hold on, which really shouldn’t have lasted at all.
Still, I’m pretty sure Dylan (now 83) is making fun of us all and has been for decades, showing up at concerts and gleefully butchering his best-known songs so that his devoted fans have a hard time recognizing them.
His best prank of all was accepting the Nobel Prize and then not showing up to collect it, making the awards committee look absurd.
They had decided to worship stardom, presumably in the hope that it would rub off on them. And the superstar kept his praise to himself and walked away without looking back.
But somewhere within this bewildering figure is a real person, the real Robert Zimmerman, who grew up amid the grim iron hills of Minnesota, where the winds whipped hard on the frontier, and who occasionally wrote about his homeland. .
For me, their best and truest song will always be North Country Blues about the death of an iron ore town, whose people are told their mine must close because iron is “so much cheaper in the towns of South America , where miners work for almost nothing”. ‘.
It contains in a few short verses a complete tragedy, fully understood by its heroine, abandoned with three children, surrounded by thousands of desolate square miles of forests and frozen lakes, with nowhere else to go and winter approaching. When everything else is forgotten, I believe he will be able to survive.