Bobcat Nation:
Memoirs of a Young
Bob Dylan Fan
by Adam Selzer
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE:
By Way of Introduction
CHAPTER TWO:
A Brief Dylan Bio
CHAPTER THREE:
I Was a Teenage Bobcat
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Old, Weird America
Dalton and Atlanta GA, 2001
CHAPTER FIVE
Love, Theft, and Dutch Sailor's Eyes
Nashville 2001
CHAPTER SIX
Adam and Mike's Excellent Adventure
Newport Folk Festival 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN
Risking Your Life for the Rail
The Atlanta Lightning Storm, 2003
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cowboys and Hippies
Dylan and the Dead 2003 tour
CHAPTER NINE
We Can All Be Famous
For Fifteen People
Chicago and Atlanta, 2004
DYLAN REVIEWS
2005-Present
Chapter Two:
The Briefest Dylan Bio I Can Manage
Poets have to make a living, too.
Walt Whitman spent years earning a living by travelling from town to town, reading and selling copies of Leaves of Grass. Whenever I hear about this, I picture some of the locals, seeing him coming down the road through a tavern window and thinking "oh, great. Here comes that one guy again!"
In order to get by, some of the best poets the English language has produced chose to focus on writing in other forms altogether. Shakespeare, for example, mainly wrote plays; most of his poems were not written for money at all, as far as we can tell. His great sequence of sonnets circulated only privately among his friends for at least ten years, and, when they were finally published in 1609, it was almost certainly without his permission (like Dylan, Shakespeare was an early example of an artist plagued by bootleggers; short-hand-writers would transcribe his plays, badly, and print and sell copies).
Bob Dylan never set out to be a poet. Indeed, while he's often been listed as one of the 20th century's greatest, and certainly most influential, poets, most of his work takes the form of songs that simply don't work nearly as well on the page, separated from he music (though they do generally work better as poems than Metallica songs). While he has been known, over the years, to write a poem when the situation demands it, he has always been, first and foremost, a songwriter.
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, and spent most of his youth in nearby Hibbing. In the mid 1950's, he became one of the first kids in town to become fascinated with rock n roll music, and spent his high school years playing in a series of local rock bands. In his senior yearbook, he wrote that his ambition in life was to "join Little Richard."
It was during his brief stay in the University of Minnesota that he first became fascinated with folk music. After reading Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound For Glory, Guthrie became a hero to Bob. It was around this time that he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan and decided to leave school and go to New York City.
Some have said that Bob went to New York to "make it" as a folksinger, but that would have been fairly silly, as no other New York folksinger had hit it particularly big at the time. In reality, his main purpose was probably to meet Woody Guthrie, who had spent the previous several years hospitalized with the nerve disease Huntington's Cholera in a facility in East Orange, New Jersey. It's certainly true that he went to the hospital almost immediately after arriving, and, soon after, began to attend parties at the home of The Gleasons, local Guthrie fans who were allowed to bring Woody himself from the hospital to their home on weekends, where, while far too weak to play anything himself, he was able to listen to other people sing his songs.
While some have claimed that, by then, Woody was too sick to recognize anyone from week to week, the story goes that Bob became Woody's favorite among the regular guests. Several biographers have claimed that Woody said "That boy's got a voice... Maybe he won't make it with his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it."
Dylan's nasal voice has been his trademark almost from the beginning, prompting the ubiquitous claims that he can't sing. In reality, the voice began as an affectation; prior to starting to emulate Guthrie, Dylan had a lower, softer voice, which he would start to use on albums in the late ‘60's.
Dylan stayed in New York, living on a series of couches and becoming a part of the booming folk music scene in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village. Sometime around 1961, he began to do something that virtually no one else on the scene was doing – writing his own songs.
At that point, the big thing to have as a folk singer was "authenticity." Singers were expected to sing old songs, exactly the way they'd been sung originally, even imitating the rough dialect of some songs, which led to a long period in which every coffeeshop featured a well-dressed, well-educated guy singing songs that used the word "gwain" instead of "going." Obviously, if a song was an original composition, it wasn't authentic (unless you were an old black man or Woody Guthrie, in which case exceptions were made). Writing your own songs was little better than cheating.
Almost immediately, Dylan began creating a mythical biography from himself. When he spoke to interviewers, or people around the Village, he was not Robert Zimmerman, a middle class Jewish kid who had grown up in Minnesota. He was Bob Dylan, a part-Sioux orphan from New Mexico who had run away from various foster homes and spent years performing in a traveling carnival. Whether he said this because it was a better story than the truth or because he didn't think his personal life was anyone's business is a matter of speculation, but it was probably both.
Even before his own songs became known, Dylan moved through the folk ranks quickly. He'd only been in New York for a few months when Robert Shelton wrote an ecstatic review of him in the New York Times, and, on the strength of that review, he was signed to a contract with Columbia records.
The first album, Bob Dylan, consisted primarily of old folk and blues songs, and only sold about 5000 copies. Just months after its release, Bob was already brushing it off as "not where I'm at." He'd started writing his own songs in earnest, and his songs were good. By the time he was ready to record his second album, he had an impressive catalog of songs – "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Masters of War," "Girl From the North Country," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."
Of these, "Hard Rain" serves as the best testament to just how far he'd come as a songwriter. In it, Dylan re-worked an old folk song called Lord Randall.
Where have you been, Lord Randall my son?
Where have you been, my handsome young man?
Make my bed, mother, I've a pain in my head and I want to lie down
"Lord Randall" goes on for several verses, in which the mother gradually draws the story out of Randall – he's been off eating boiled eels with his lover, who, he suspects, has poisoned him.
&nbs "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it looked as though the country could be nuked at any minute. Taking the basic structure of Lord Randall, Dylan used a serious of surrealist imagery to paint a picture of a nuclear holocaust without ever mentioning the word "bomb."
&nbs Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
&nbs Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
&nbs I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
&nbs I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
&nbs I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
&nbs I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
&nbs I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
&nbs And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
&nbs And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
As the song goes on, Dylan goes on to have the "blue eyed son" describe what he's seen ("a black branch with blood that kept dripping....a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,") what he's heard ("the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,") who he met, ("a white man who walked a black dog....a young girl whose body was burning,") and what he plans to do next.
The song was, in its time, downright revolutionary, so much so that beat poet Allen Ginsberg claimed that he cried the first time he heard it, because he knew that "the torch had been passed." It was poetic, relevant, surreal, and intellectual, all of which were qualities that were universally not a part of folk music at the time (with the possible exception of surrealism – if a young man eating boiled eels with his lover in the woods isn't surreal, I don't know what is).
Freewheelin' didn't sell particularly well on its own, but the songs made Dylan a star. Peter, Paul and Mary's version of "Blowin' in the Wind" became a number one hit. He began to date Joan Baez, whom TIME had dubbed "The Queen of Folk," and she began bringing him onstage at her concerts. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, Dylan was being referred to as "the most important folk artist in America today." Not a bad start for a kid from Minnesota who was barely 22.
Freewheelin' was followed with two more folk albums. In January of 1964, he released The Times They Are a-Changing, a stark, moody album filled with protest songs such as "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol" and "Only a Pawn in their Game," which Dylan had played at the 1963 March on Washington, at the same podium where Martin Luther King, Jr. made his "I have a dream" speech later the same day.
As the crown prince of folk music, Dylan was a particularly huge hit among workers in the civil rights movement. His "protest" fans were shocked when, just eight months after Times, he released Another Side of Bob Dylan, which featured no real protest material, focusing instead on introspective songs about relationships. Immediately, some of his fans began to cry "sell out," a cry that would follow him throughout his career.
But by the end of 1964, Dylan was one of the most talked-about artists in the world. He was not only considered, already, to be one of the century's great poets, but was the very definition of "hip." He introduced The Beatles, who were big fans of his, to the delights of marijuana. It was no accident that, after his tour of Europe in early 1965, many bands like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones started to grow up a bit.
But the bigger shock to the folk scene was still to come, when the first side of Dylan's 1965 album, Bringing it all Back Home, was recorded with an electric rock backup band, and, a few months later, Dylan played three songs at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar, backed by an hastily-rehearsed rock band. That particular night went down in history as the night Dylan changed the music scene forever by "going electric."
The folkies were furious. Folk music may not have been intellectual in and of itself, but listening to it and studying it were intellectual things to do. Folk music had a purpose; rock, to them, was just stuff for the kids. Dylan had "sold out." What they didn't seem to realize was that Bob was doing to rock what he had done to folk just two years before – introducing to it the concepts of poetry, politics, and surrealism. On Bringing it All Back Home, "Maggie's Farm" and "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" made great protest songs, "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" were among the most poetic love songs he had written, and "Gates of Eden" was just as surreal as anything else he'd done.
Only a few months later, he released Highway 61 Revisited, which opened with the seven minute epic "Like a Rolling Stone," which became a #2 hit in a time when rock songs were generally given a three minute limit. Only a few months after that came the double album Blonde on Blonde, which further established Dylan as an unequaled songwriter who as groovy as all get-out.
Meanwhile, however, the pressure on Dylan was mounting. Columbia and his manager, Albert Grossman, were constantly asking him for more. More albums, more tours. He was under contract to star in a movie (this became the documentary of his 1965 tour, Don't Look Back, in which Dylan became, according to some scholars, the first man to use the word "fuck" in a movie) and a book or two. Shortly after his 1966 tour, on which he was backed by The Hawks (who would later become The Band), he got into a motorcycle accident near his house in Woodstock, and used that as an excuse to retreat from the public eye to rest and be with his new wife, Sara.
After that, there was one more great album, John Wesley Harding, which featured a more stripped-down, acoustic sound and was full of surreal songs full of imagery from The Bible, and one live performance, playing three songs at a tribute to Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall shortly after Guthrie's death in 1967.
For most of the next seven years, Dylan was generally a reclusive artist, staying at home and painting. He released a country and western album (Nashville Skyline, 1969) a double album that consisted mostly of cover songs (Self Portrait, 1970), and a quiet, pastoral album (New Morning, 1970). Between 1967 and 1973, he didn't tour at all, and, outside of a few guest appearances at other's concerts, only played one real gig, an hour-long set at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969. The music he was recording couldn't have sounded more different from the wild, revolutionary tone of his earlier music.
He stayed in this semi-retirement until 1974, when he did a 40 day U.S. tour with The Band and released Planet Waves, his strongest album since John Wesley Harding. In the eight years since going into seclusion, he had ceased to be a pop icon and become a legend. All told, there were about 600,000 seats available for the tour, and about 5.5 million people requested tickets.
Dylan was clearly apprehensive about doing the tour at all; being called a legend wasn't easy on him. People had begun to talk about him as though every word he said was loaded with extra meanings, some even referred to him as a prophet. That sort of pressure would be hard for anybody to deal with. Tellingly, Dylan opened the first night of the tour by performing "Hero Blues," an unreleased song from the early 1962
&nbs The gal I got I swear she's the screaming end
&nbs she wants me to be a hero so she can tell all her friends
The message was clear: Dylan was just there to play music, not to be a hero or savior. This point was again made when, on several shows on that tour, Dylan opened with "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)," then closed by playing it again.
That summer, now separated from his wife, Dylan began composing the songs that would make up what many have called his greatest album, 1975's Blood on the Tracks, and, mere months later, he recorded Desire (1976), which included the song "Hurricane," about the plight of boxer Rubin Carter, who had been imprisoned on a murder conviction and swearing that he was framed, years earlier.
In autumn of 1975, Dylan embarked on a tour of primarily smaller venues in the Northeast. This tour, The Rolling Thunder Revue, also featured Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Joni Mitchel, and a host of other great songwriters. Dylan performed loud, screaming versions of some of his early folk songs, such as "It Ain't Me Babe," and "Hard Rain." To this day, many consider it, and the 1976 follow up, to be the greatest Bob Dylan tours of them all.
In 1978 he released the bizarre Street Legal, which featured female backup singers and a huge band that included horns and strings, and embarked on his first world tour since 1966. In Europe, his big-band sound was a huge hit, in America, Rolling Stone said he had "never been more fake."
Towards the end of that tour, Dylan converted to Christianity, and from 1979-1981 he released three albums of Christian songs. The late ‘79-early'80 tour was, musically, a triumph, but was a huge turn-off to most of Dylan's audience at the time, since he refused to play any of his older songs. The old songs began to creep back into the set in late 1980, and the religious songs were taking a back seat to the "hits" by the end of the 1981 tour.
The rest of the eighties were a mixed bag. 1983's Infidels had some great moments, but the best songs recorded for it, such as "Blind Willie Mctell," Dylan's best song of the eighties by most accounts, were left off of the final album. His 1984 tour of Europe had some great nights and some not-so-great nights, and the reviews of his 1986 and 87 tours were almost universally bad, as were the reviews of his mid-eighties albums.
1988, however, brought on what came to be known as The Never-ending Tour. Since 1988 up until the present, Dylan has played roughly 100 shows a year, constantly reworking and rearranging his old songs, something he's actually been doing since at least 1964, and which keeps him from seeming like an Ultimate Oldies act. The first 1988 shows were terrific, but the five years that followed were uneven, to say the least. The rearrangements got wilder, the band got sloppier, and sometimes, in the early 90's, it was hard to be sure that Dylan and his backing band were playing the same song. While there were a handful of really great shows from 1989 through 1992, shows from that period are still generally poorly thought of in Dylan circles, and were blasted by the critics who had blasted everything he'd done for years.
Throughout this period, as he had been all his life, Dylan remained as enigmatic as ever, rarely saying anything onstage and refusing to give interviewers a straight answer to much of anything (on the rare occasion that he gave interviews at all). After the release of Infidels, no one was even sure whether he was still a Christian, had reverted to Judaism, or become something else altogether. He even managed to keep the fact that he was married to one of his backup singers from 1986-1991 a secret until ten years after the marriage ended.
Things began looking up in 1993. The shows got tighter, Dylan became more focused, and at the end of the year, four short acoustic sets were played at the tiny Supper Club in New York. This, combined with the generally good reviews of 1994's MTV Unplugged set and his appearance at Woodstock '94, began to salvage his critical reputation, which had been hurting ever since Street Legal.
By 1995, the shows had gone from being generally bad to generally outstanding. By the time of his well publicized near-fatal heart disease in May of 1997, during which countless Dylan fans became the official expert on histoplasmosis (an infection of the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart) around the office overnight, the critics, in whose eyes he had seemed able to do no right since 1978, forgave him. His 1997 album Time Out of Mind was a resounding success with critics and went on to win a Grammy for Album of the Year, and the next song he released, "Things Have Changed," which was written for the Wonder Boys soundtrack, won him his first Oscar. His next album, 2001's Love and Theft, was similarly hailed as a masterpiece, leaving Dylan perhaps the only one of his contemporaries who can play a show at which most of the audience hopes most of all to hear recent material. At most concerts by classic rock artists, such as the Rolling Stones, the dreaded words "here's something from our new album" are most of the audience's cue to go get a beer; but when Dylan strikes up a new song (always without introduction), the crowd cheers just as loudly as they do for the greatest hits.
But this sounds like just another biography of a successful rock star. What is it about Dylan that has inspired such passion? What about him makes people call him a prophet, even the Messiah?
Hell, I don't know.
But I, and dozens of others, have the same idea: if we go to enough concerts, maybe we can find out.
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