By clothing-bag, 15/11/2022

Bob Dylan turns 80: portrait of the artist who invented and fought his own legend

The American musician, singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan, one of the most important cultural figures in history, turns 80 this Monday, May 24, having become one of the great legends of popular music.

Myth, cult figure, cultural icon, rock star, Nobel Prize winner, central protagonist of the hectic '60s, deep rapporteur of love, disappointment, pain, loss, disagreement and as many human emotions as there are. So far, all certainties.

There are a few more, throughout a long life in which the vocation for contradiction, if not the outright lie, seems to be one of the greatest. "I don't think it's tangible for me. I mean, I think one thing today and another tomorrow," she once told Newsweek.

And in case it was necessary to expand, he completed the idea. "I change during the course of the day. I am one person when I wake up, and when I go to bed I know for sure that I am a different person. I don't know who I am most of the time. And I don't care."

It is also a certainty that the man who was Robert Allan Zimmerman until the end of '59, to then become Bob Dillon, had taken his first artistic steps together with some school friends as a member of The Shadow Blasters first, with The Golden Chords later and as leader of Elston Gunn & the Rock Boppers later.

And that after those attempts to rock out in the style of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, the next step was to play on some local radio stations as part of The Satin Tones and later, in Fargo, as pianist for The Shadows, a band led by Bobby Vee, with whom he had shared the experience of the Boppers.

Only with Vee at the helm, the Shadows were called upon to fill the gap left on the scene by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, in the plane crash that occurred on February 3, 1959, and the Zimmerman's skill at the piano seemed to please no one.

The end of prehistory

Gone were their first children with their father Abram and mother Beatrice in Duluth, Minnesota, where their father worked as an official for Standard Oil; the move to Hibbing, a mining town with more past than future, after Abram lost his job and joined his brothers in a family business there; and a more or less regular schooling.

Also the first melodies on the guitar, inspired by Hank Williams, the "king of country music", as his ideas began to be inspired by the rebellion without a cause of James Dean, which earned him a stay in a special school of Pennsylvania for troubled teens, which only served to get him to ratify them.

Surely if young Zimmerman had heard then that "when you're growing up in a small town/you know you're going to grow up in a small town/There's only one good use for a small town/you hate it, and you know you'll love it." You're Gonna Have to Go", which Lou Reed sang on the Songs for Drella album three decades later, would have made a fine cover.

But since that song wasn't written, when it was Dylan he said it his way in his North Country Blues. "My children will leave/as soon as they grow up/Well, there's nothing here now to keep them," she sang, putting her voice at the service of a mother who incidentally recounted that, for the same work, South America paid less .

The next step was, then, to leave his town. The excuse was the University, in Minneapolis; reality, the decision to immediately leave the academy to get into the local bohemia by dint of the folk songs that he had as a repertoire.

There, one David Whtaker advised him to listen to the Dust Bowl Ballads album, by one Woody Guthrie, and to read his biography, Bound for Glory. To do so and to want to meet that man who "with his family decimated by tragedy and disease, left home at 16, wandered the country in boxcars, played food until he was on radio in California" and became a the voice of the oppressed, as Phil Sutcliffe tells it in a Dylan bio published by Mojo, was one thing.

To achieve this, he had to travel to New York, where he arrived on January 24, 1961. One more certainty from young Dillon, who thought then that it would be good to have a story that would attract attention. And he got to work.

In his new life, Dillon was already Dylan, hailing from Oklahoma, having lived through a childhood marked by the loss of his parents and meeting Guthrie at age 10 in California, while touring with a carnival where. Any resemblance to Guthrie's bio was surely no coincidence.

The interesting thing is that the thing worked. Who knows which of his stories he told Guthrie, but the truth is that the folk icon opened the doors of his world, where Dylan shared folk evenings with Pete Seeger and other glories of the genre.

That's where his Song for Woody came from, the first song of his own that Bob performed live, and right there too, at Gerde's Folk City, the almost newcomer to the city opened for John Lee Hooker in his New York professional debut. The step was taken, and he would no longer turn back.

A past tailored to the occasion

-You must be in your 20s by now.

-Yeah, I must be 20...

This is how Dylan responded to Cynthia Gooding, a famous folk singer who had a show on WBAI radio, just beginning their interview, in 1962, during which the boy recounted that he had come to Minneapolis from a city in South Dakota, in a new version of his past.

But among those inventions, he gave some hints of how he projected himself the day after, refusing to recognize himself as a folk singer as much as a son of rock and roll, and defining his own as "contemporary songs." Perhaps the most ecumenical definition that fits his work. To the one of then and the one of always.

Shortly thereafter, American writer Studs Terkel would speak of Dylan's lyrics as "a combination of Guthrie's folk spirit with some of (Arthur) Rimbaud's demonic imagery and even a dose of (Yevgueni Yevtushenko's) social criticism." ".

The Freewhelin' Bob Dylan, the troubadour's second album, had recently been released, and true to his story as a wandering childhood boy, Dylan spoke to Terkel about Guthrie's influence and explained that A Hard Rain's a -Gonna Fall did not speak of any "nuclear fallout".

Instead, he recounted the last verse of the song, in which he talks about little balls of poison flooding the water, to "the lies with which people are bombarded from the radios and newspapers." "They're trying to brain people out, and maybe they already have," she added, well in step with the times. Those, and these too.

The Freewhelin' Bob Dylan also included Blowin' in the Wind, another of Dylan's songs that time would consecrate as an anthem for one, or several generations. The weather, and the singer's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.

The photo is compelling. On one side, Peter, Paul & Mary, who had just recorded a version of Blowin'... that would sell over 300,000 copies in two weeks; on the other, the always combative Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers and old Seeger. Everyone, singing We Shall Overcome together.

Dylan's songs fit perfectly with what the moment demanded. Few suspected, as the journalist Stuart Bailie noted, that "his name was false, that his personal history was concocted to fit the myth, that his voice and manner had been borrowed from elsewhere..."

As part of a script he had to respect, Bob participated in the march where Martin Luther King shared his famous dream with more than 200,000 people, and also garnered a torrent of applause with his rendition of The Times They Are a -Changin' at the concert he gave on November 23, 1963.

"Something had gone crazy in the country. And I couldn't even understand why they (the audience) were applauding, or why I wrote that song," Dylan later said. He had plenty of reason for considering such a dilemma: John F. Kennedy had been assassinated the day before. Times of change, yes. But what changes?

Change, everything changes... And Dylan too

Just in case, or out of conviction, the artist began to shed his skin. Or at least that's what he hinted at. Another Side of Bob Dylan showed that process, which he himself confirmed in an interview he gave to the Long Island Press in 1965.

"I never wanted to write songs about current affairs. That gave me my opportunity. There was a little publication in the Village called Broadside, and with a song on a current issue you could get in there," she said during the interview.

And he confessed without filter: "I wasn't getting very far with the things I was doing songs like the ones I write now, but Broadside offered me a way to start." Yes, it's true that Noel Gallagher also said a few days ago that he hates Wonderwall, which was the topic that makes us still talk about him the most today.

The difference is that Bob reneged on what had gotten him where he was shortly before kicking the dash on the second night of the Newport 65, when he came on stage with a defiant electric set that garnered cheers and boos.

Dylan thus cut his cord with the world of the protest song, if he had ever had one. Though, like almost everything in his life, he didn't do it in such a sharp way that he didn't allow her to address it again and again, throughout his long future trajectory.

Opinions were divided on the matter. According to Bailie, "instead of the guarantees of politics, songs about current issues and collective action, Dylan chose a world that the poet Louis MacNeice called 'irretrievably plural.' A loss for the protest song, perhaps, but a very good contribution to rock and roll".

The singer, of course, did not agree with that look that supported the idea of ​​his "pass" from folk to rock. "I performed all the folk songs with a rock attitude. That's what allowed me to cut through all the confusion and be heard," he once said.

Meanwhile, while everyone was trying to find a name for what Dylan did and what he did so well with, the artist closed an exclusive sales agreement for his album Live At the Gaslight 1962 with... Starbucks! Long before poor Charly had to put up with the criticism of some fool for having "sold out" to Fiorucci.

And he continued with two other essentials from his discography: Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. The first, published in 1965; the second, in 1966, as a closure in addition to four years in which Dylan showed what he could be capable of. The rest was just a matter of time.

Like Leda Valladares, but there in the North

The time to come, which had a subscription scheduled for him for the position of legend, and the ancestral time, to which he went again and again in search of of resources to, paradoxically, inject new energy into his music. That of going back even a little to push yourself forward again.

"There is a matter of obsessive learning, of absorbing all styles. Bob Dylan is close to ancestral wisdom. He is closer to Leda Valladares or Leabelly, to make a parallel. That is like an intransmissible medium", explained the journalist and musician Claudio Kleiman to Télam, in a wise comparison.

"Dylan has a point where interiority and exteriority are constantly mixed. That is, there is sensoriality, the emotions of love and a self that builds a voice appear, but it immediately materializes in urban elements, situations. There is a constant going from the outside to the inside, and vice versa," added Kleiman.

"Then there's this fame thing. I know it's going to go away. It's got to. This so-called mass-crowd fame is caused by people who are attracted to something for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when stop doing it, he won't be famous anymore," Dylan said in '64.

The forecast turned out to be quite wrong. Watch: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Blowin' in the Wind, Murder Most Foul, Lay Lady Lay, Positively 4th Street, Jokermen, Visions of Johanna, Rollin' and Tumblin', All Along the Watchtower, Mother of Muses, Like A Rolling Stone and The Times They Are A-Changing.

Let's continue: Mr. Tambourine Man, Isis, Knocking on Heaven's Door, High Water (For Charley Patton), I Shall Be Released, Hurricane, I Contain Multitudes, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Pay in Blood, Oh, Sister, Make You Feel My Love... How do you stop being famous after writing such pieces?

It is true that the accident he suffered aboard his motorcycle, in 1966, may have added points for the artist to put aside his fondness for provocation a bit. Or he understood that, for the moment, much of what was important had been done.

A Dylan for every taste

"Fathers, don't try to manage your children who can't understand you, because times are changing. We take that to heart. 'We are free, let's do whatever we want.' That was the cultural message. Then there was the political, anti-war message, but that was the main cultural message that we supported and it gave us a boost," poet and journalist Pipo Leornoud told Télam.

Probably the dear friend Pipo from the false identity of Don Zimmerman was not there either. But what did it matter, if that served to feed the utopia of a better world than the one left behind by those who still pulled the strings of power.

After all, what did a lie do more to a story that its own protagonist insisted on filling with questions and falsehoods, like when after giving a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, he told a journalist that He had lost contact with his family and that he had not heard from them for years, while his father and mother proudly attended from the audience the sweet moment that their son was living.

Or when he went out to say in Rolling Stone magazine, in 2011, that he had never used any illegal substance, 15 years after declaring to the same publication that drugs had been a habit for him and he ended up spending 25 dollars a day to buy it.

A problem that, according to El Mundo, he had already made public in 1969, when he told Rolling Stone that he had been very drugged and that he no longer wanted to continue with that rhythm of life.

There were also rumors that Like A Rolling Stone had written it after taking a couple of "measures" of LSD, and much better known is the story that The Beatles told a thousand times about their first meeting, at the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue.

There, at the invitation of the Fab Four to take a couple of pills, the journalist and organizer of the meeting, Al Aronowitz, suggested smoking a few joints and Mr. Bob was surprised to learn that the boys from Liverpool had never tried one.

And what about the Martin Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Thunder tour, from 1975, in which Dylan talks about an alleged meeting with a 19-year-old Sharon Stone who would have joined as a wardrobe assistant, and to whom he would have sung Just Like a Woman backstage, even though none of that happened in reality.

That 1975, which saw Dylan back on stage, also saw what would be the end of his marriage to Playboy girl Sara Lownds, mother of his first five children, approaching.

The outbreak would have come one morning in 1977, 12 years after they were married, when the model went down to her kitchen and found her husband and children having breakfast with a stranger who had spent the night at their house.

Ultimately, Sara sued Dylan for domestic violence and accused the singer of repeatedly cheating on her, giving her full custody of the children.

Numbers and awards and surprises

Against those inaccuracies, the repeated inaccuracies and the deliberate falsehoods that punctuate the story of Dylan's life, the 45 albums he recorded, in studio and in alive, plus the countless Bootlegs and the occasional recording that gets lost.

Record works that exceed 125 million copies sold, and that make up a catalog that the artist recently sold to Universal for an estimated sum of more than 300 million dollars.

The level of influence that this repertoire exerted and exerts on its own -Andrés Calamaro, León Gieco and company- and others such as the eternal Patti Smith, who brought the artist's verses to Stockholm, to celebrate the certainties also plays in favor of certainties. a Nobel for Literature that Dylan accepted after a novel that occupied spaces in the portals for as long as those of the doubt about Messi's permanence in Barcelona.

Precisely Smith, who claims to have been his admirer since he was a teenager, dedicated a concert to him this weekend at the Kaatsbaan festival in Tivoli, upstate New York; while Hynde has just released a covers album, Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde sings Bob Dylan.

The Nobel was not the only award that Dylan received, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, throughout his career. The list includes 12 Grammys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a Prince of Asturias Award, a Pulitzer Honorary Award, Barack Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, received the French Legion of Honor and the MusiCares Person of the Year award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

The fascination for the man is such that even a university, Tulsa (Oklahoma), has an Institute for Bob Dylan Studies and these days it holds a symposium with "dylanologist" experts such as his main biographer, Chris Haylin, who he has just published The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966.

With dylanogy the order of the day, it's no surprise that Bob Dylan is also being reissued, in an expanded edition. The biography, by Howard Sounes, which has sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide.

In addition, the Broadway "show" Girl in the North Country, based on her songs, which premiered shortly before the pandemic forced the closure of the theater mecca in the United States, is still pending return. time for the singer-songwriter to go anonymously and be moved, according to what he said.

It seems that it is true that Dylan gets emotional, although he hardly uses concerts as a space for any "friendly" dialogue with the public other than through the songs that he includes in the list of songs that, yes They always keep a little place -or lugaresote- for surprise.

In this field, that of the unexpected, fit both his participation in that fantastic society called The Traveling Wilburys and his successive conversions to Christianity first -hence the very good album Slow Train Coming and the forgettable Saved and Shot of Love- , to Judaism later and to atheism or something like that later.

Not to mention his second marriage, to the point that not even the neighbors were aware that Bob Dylan's second wife since 1986, Carolyn Dennis, lived next door with their daughter Desiree Gabrielle.

Just after six years of union, the biography Down the Highway, written by Howard Sounes, revealed the existence of both, to the immense astonishment of their fans. One day after the media explosion, Dennis herself decided to speak to the press and thus defend her ex-husband.

"Bob and I made the decision to keep our marriage private for a very simple reason: to give our daughter a normal childhood. To say that Bob 'hid' his daughter is malicious and ridiculous. That's something he never would. He's been a great father to Desiree," she told People magazine in 1988.

Little given to interviews, in keeping with a discreet personal life away from the cameras, last year he revealed to The New York Times: "Songs seem to know themselves and know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They write themselves and they count on me to sing them".

The interview accompanied the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first album of unreleased tracks in eight years, which received stellar reviews under the banner of Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute song that condenses American history and culture. A kind of The Disappeared House, by our Rodolfo Páez, two decades later.

Before, Dylan had dedicated three truly fantastic albums, Shadows in the Night -focusing on 10 tracks recorded by Frank Sinatra between the late '50s and early '60s-, Fallen Angels and the triple Triplicate - to classic compositions from the American Songbook.

Happily, Dylan seems to have long since resolved his relationship with the "system" and the establishment, if he ever had a problem with it at all. In 2004, in an unprecedented agreement with the underwear brand Victoria's Secret, the singer agreed to film a commercial surrounded by "angels" dancing in bikinis.

The criticism he received for having made that decision does not seem to have caused any kind of change in his point of view, and 10 years later he recorded a commercial again: this time for the Superbowl and promoting Chrysler.

"He is neither an idealist nor an activist. The phrase 'the voice of a generation' is a media cliché and ultimately limits an artist of such talent. He is much more than that," said his biographer Howard Sounes, this Last Saturday at La Tercera, from Chile.

"Elusive, oblique, mercurial, and always on the move, he has resisted both in his life and in his work being categorized, encapsulated, conventionalized, canonized, and deified," writes American journalist Jonathan Cott in the introduction to the unmissable anthology of Dylan On Dylan interviews.

And it is Bob himself, the same one who once said "God, I'm glad it's not me", who quoted in those pages says: "I can understand lust and greed, but I can't understand the values ​​of definition and confinement. Definition destroys."

Sources: EFE/Nora Quintanilla - Télam

E.S.

See also

Bob Dylan reached 80: how Argentina was “nationalized”

The day Bob Dylan boxed in Almagro: bag, gloves and a particular interest in Perón, Evita and Monzón

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