Knock, knock, knockin' on Dylan's door
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/bob-dylan-in-america-by-sean-wilentz/article1790098/
REVIEWED BY JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN
Nov. 09, 2010
Rock star Bono once wrote that when, as a teenager, he first heard
Bob Dylan's voice, it "felt strangely familiar" to him as an
Irishman, for it "was at once modern, in all the things it was
railing against, and very ancient. … We thought America was full of
superheroes," but Dylan was singing about far "humbler people,"
especially those against whom great injustices had been done. Dylan
fundamentally changed popular singing, Bono said, and we've been
living in a world shaped by him ever since.
Dylan's genius lay in part in his ability to place the stories of
deeply wronged human beings within the elevated American myths of
valour, patriotism, freedom and immense natural beauty. "The land
that I live in has God on its side," he sang, simultaneously mocking
and embracing the sentiment.
Yet Dylan's obsession with America's promise alongside its failures
facilitated the misunderstandings, anger and recriminations that
fastened onto his work almost from the start. After their initial
worship, fans booed him at Newport, at Carnegie Hall, in Paris, in
Liverpool, in London. Following his truly hostile reception in
London's Festival Hall, Dylan is filmed by Martin Scorsese saying,
"God, I hate it when they boo. I can't get in tune when they boo. How
do they buy up the tickets so fast?" His enraged fans spent a
remarkable amount of money to show their contempt.
He provoked his fans discarding his folk base, playing electric
guitar and rock, backing himself with a commercial band, displaying
the American flag wherever he went and his fans provoked him back.
(Not that he took abuse quietly. "Just because you like my stuff
doesn't mean I owe you anything," he said more than once.)
Who is Dylan? "The country I came from is called the Midwest," he
famously sang in 1964, having got himself out of there ("the
wilderness") just as fast as he could, heading to New York's
Greenwich Village. It's likely that few people he encountered in the
Village had ever heard of his hometown, Hibbing, Minn., bordered by
the largest open-pit mine in the world. He was the elemental
outsider, searching for his true home. "I was born very far from
where I was supposed to be," he said, a familiar attitude in North
America, a continent populated by immigrants and displaced persons.
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's new book, Bob Dylan in America,
tries to wrestle to the ground the many North American influences
that drove Dylan. "What does America tell us about Bob Dylan and
what does Dylan's work tell us about America?" he asks. The challenge
lies in Dylan's "paradoxical and unstable combination of tradition
and defiance."
This neatly summarizes the central problem. Dylan is not and
probably never was a man of the left, in the earnest tradition of
his sometime pals Pete Seeger, Richard Farina, Joan Baez et al.
Instead, he was something more essentially American: a rebel, a
dissenter, an admirer of outlaws, whose insolence in the face of
authority and privilege was unrelenting. "I have dined with kings,
I've been offered wings. And I've never been too impressed," he sang.
Wilentz starts, fairly convincingly, with Aaron Copland and the
politically radical composers of the 1930s who were part of the
Popular Front. Copland's development of what he called "imposed
simplicity" set up the context for the world to come, mingling his
symphonic work with folk music and his leftish sensibilities in a way
that, Wilentz says, became the very embodiment of American democratic culture.
As Wilentz notes, both Copland and Dylan were descended from Jewish
Lithuanian immigrants, both were drawn to legends of criminal
underdogs like Billy the Kid, and both soaked up the music of the
American past including balladry and the mythos of the Southwest
which they then incorporated into their own music.
But, of course, the far more familiar influences on Dylan were the
Beats, especially Kerouac, and the folk revivalists, especially Woody
Guthrie. The Beats were more compatible with Dylan's persona than
most of the post-Guthrie folk singers, in part because of what
Wilentz calls their "rebellious disaffiliation and poetic transcendence."
Like the Beats, Dylan was never going to bow to any authority ("Don't
follow leaders," he sang). He marched to his own drummer, leaving
behind friends, lovers, admirers, fans in nearly compulsive fashion,
and repeatedly abandoning one form of music for something entirely
new. He sang in many keys: "I find C major to be the key of strength,
but also the key of regret. E major is the key of confidence. A-flat
major is the key of renunciation." Far more than Sinatra, Dylan did
it his way in strength, in regret and often in renunciation.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
