“There’s
times when I wish I was where I was when I used to wish I was here.” Bob Dylan
Like anyone
born in the mid 1950’s with an interest in the music of their time, Bob Dylan
has been a significant presence in my life, fading in at times, fading out at
others. Nowadays Dylan constantly inhabits my imagination. Often unexpectedly, one
of his brilliant sung phrases rises up into consciousness to give poetic form
to a particular moment, thought or experience. Dylan also, from time to time,
inhabits my dreams, appearing as a kind of benign spirit presence - a faint, bleached
out image under a blistering sun, wearing a white hat, in a dusty location I
tend to think of as Tangier. The great man exchanges a couple of words or a
half-sentence. Never more.
Around the time of its release (1967) Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album appeared in the small record collection I shared with my two older brothers. It’s still a bit of a mystery how it got there. My oldest brother was a big Jimi Hendrix fan so he may have bought it to listen to All Along the Watchtower, which Hendrix had covered. But I also vaguely recall he won it as a prize at our local youth club.
No one played it much at first. Then after my big brother had gone off to university there wasn’t much left to listen to in our LP collection because he’d taken most of it with him. But he left the Dylan album with the drab olive/grey cover and the weird group photo on the front - four men and some trees. Dylan in the middle, smiling, hands in his jacket pockets. Two oddly-dressed guys either side of him. A stern-looking older man in a baseball cap just behind.*
And from
time to time my other brother and I would give this strange, austere sounding record
a listen, almost as a joke. We’d laugh at the lyrics of The Ballad of
Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, a seemingly linear story which becomes
increasingly surreal and elliptical as it progresses. We’d impersonate Dylan’s
delivery. And we probably considered his version of All Along the Watchtower inferior
to Hendrix’s, which we thought of as the original.
The first
Dylan album I truly came to appreciate in my early youth was New Morning
(1970.) I became acquainted with it in the way you often did in those days – on
cassette, away from home, with little else available to listen to. My cousin
brought it along on a family holiday in Spain where, as I recall, we only
really listened to two albums, New Morning and Neil Young’s After the Gold
Rush (1970.) My cousin must have edited out some of the Dylan tracks when
transferring it to cassette, as I have no recollection of hearing If Dogs
Run Free until years later. Over the course of two hot and sunny weeks we
must have listened to the New Morning album fifty times. It’s definitely one of
Dylan’s more accessible works. My favourite songs on it are Time Passes
Slowly, Sign on the Window, Father of Night and New Morning.
In the
mid-seventies I spent five months on a kibbutz in Israel with my girlfriend at
the time. We took my old Phillips portable cassette player and a tiny selection
of tapes, which included the recently released Blood on the Tracks (1975.)
For part of our stay on the kibbutz we shared living quarters with three guys. She
and I had our own curtained-off section at the back and the three guys slept up
front. One of them, a slightly older, funny hipster dude from Portland, Oregon,
a chef on sabbatical, became obsessed with the album, insisting we play it over
and over. Blood on the Tracks was the soundtrack to those five months. Hipster
dude particularly relished the phrase “like a corkscrew to my heart” (in You’re
a Big Girl Now) and as it approached he’d take a big breath then sing along
loudly with that line, following it up with a hearty laugh and much head
nodding. He must have been getting over a painful break up, like Dylan was when
he wrote it.
I learned
all the lyrics to Blood on the Tracks from repeated listening, and you don’t
forget Dylan lyrics once they’re stamped in your memory like that. Blood on the
Tracks was really my gateway Dylan album, as it was for lots of fans,
converting me once and for all into a true believer.
In the
years that followed, Dylan released Desire (1976) an album I love, and Street
Legal (1978) which I didn’t much take to on its release, but which I listen
to a lot these days. I saw Dylan and his band at Earls Court just after the
release of Street Legal - the only time I’ve seen him play live. Dylan is
famous for constantly moving on and defying expectations – it’s part of what
makes him the great artist he is. But at the time I went to see him onstage I
had a conservative attitude towards the artists I liked, as a lot of fans do. I
expected the Blood on the Tracks Dylan. And when I saw he’d shape-shifted and
become Big Band Dylan – two guitarists, drums, percussion and keyboards, a horn
section and three backing singers - Dylan as Elvis in Vegas – Dylan in a
gleaming white suit – I couldn’t accept it and enjoy the performance for what
it was. How I’d love a second chance now! My favourite tracks on Street Legal
are Seńor (Tales of Yankee Power) and True Love Tends to Forget.
The thing
that really got me fired up about Dylan again more recently was watching the Martin
Scorsese film “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” (2019, Netflix.)
It’s full of fascinating scenes from life on the road on that tour, very funny
at times, and the concert footage is absolutely electric. I won’t go into
detail, just watch it!
My revived
interest in all things Dylan then led me to the terrific Is it Rolling Bob?
podcast, hosted by Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare, both actors and massive Dylan
enthusiasts. They describe the podcast as “not about Bob Dylan, but about being
a Bob Dylan fan.” In each episode they chat to a guest, who opens the podcast by
quoting their favourite Dylan lyric. All the podcasts are worth a listen (there
are 49 to date), but episodes I particularly liked were those featuring Michael
Gray, Geoff Dyer, Rob Stoner, James Shapiro and the Yorkshire poet Ian
McMillan. McMillan tells a very sweet story about his late father objecting to
the lyrics of Lay Lady Lay on the grounds that the line “lay across my
big brass bed” was physically implausible. He laid a fork across a plate while
the two of them were doing the dishes together, demonstrating how if you laid across
a bed, parts of you would hang over the edge.
Being in
the company of really hardcore Dylan fans can seem a bit intimidating at times.
The hosts of Is it Rolling Bob and most of their guests, have a vast
encyclopedic knowledge of Dylan’s creative output. Michael Gray, for example,
wrote the huge three-volume analysis of Dylan’s work “Song and Dance Man” along
with numerous other Bob-related books. He runs Bob Dylan discussion weekends at
his home in South West France. Conversation on the podcast might zero in on which
of six live recorded versions of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol is
the best, Dylan’s phrasing on a particular lyric at a particular concert, or exactly
how Dylan’s current touring band enter and exit the stage.
But that’s
what I like about being a relatively junior Dylan fan. There’s still so much to
discover. So many more records and great songs - certainly enough to keep a
person of my age engaged for life. And I haven’t even begun talking about the
Dylan story, his self-invention and re-invention, his silence and myth-making.
Like The Beatles, his is one of the great stories of my (our) time. I just find
him so damn interesting!
*The
cover photograph of John Wesley Harding shows a
squinting Dylan flanked by brothers Luxman and Purna Das, two Bengali
Bauls, Indian musicians brought to Woodstock by Dylan's manager,
Albert Grossman. Behind Dylan is Charlie Joy, a local stonemason and
carpenter.
A list of
my favourite Bob Dylan albums, in no particular order:
The
Basement Tapes (1975)
Blood on
the Tracks (1975)
Desire
(1976)
New Morning
(1970)
Blonde on
Blonde (1966)
Street
Legal (1978)
O Mercy
(1989)
Time Out of
Mind (1997)
Tell Tale
Signs – The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (2008)
John Wesley
Harding (1967)
Love and
Theft (2001)
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