robert zimmerman

I've been wanting to write about my recent education on Bob Dylan and subsequent obsession with all things related but I've had trouble trying to figure out how to do so without being boring. Perhaps someone out there may be thinking, why abandon boredom now after such a consistent track record of incomplete and uninteresting posts with no real purpose other than killing time between episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Wipeout? The answer: I dunno. This is mostly a conversation I have in my own head. There is a voice that says, "No one cares about any of this." Then there is another that replies, "I don't care. I'm writing for me." This discussion goes on for a bit until I'm finally able to quiet the first voice and go about the business of putting thoughts into words. Perhaps it's narcissistic. I'd prefer to think of it as an exercise in mental health or an experiment in vocabulary. At any rate, I've managed to completely ignore the subject of this post so far…Bob Dylan.

Like many other legendary artists, Dylan's significance is deeply rooted in history. Had he been born twenty years later, we may never have heard of Robert Zimmerman. Lucky for us he was born in 1941 and learned music during a time of great transition for the nation, which would serve as the inspiration and motivation for much of his early work. A couple of weeks ago I watched the excellent documentary No Direction Home from film giant Martin Scorsese. Prior to watching this film I knew embarrassingly little about the music and career of Bob Dylan. I was never really drawn to his music and to be honest, I never understood why he was such a revered artist. In one of my undergrad courses at Temple we spent a brief moment discussing the impact Dylan had on folk music, but it wasn't enough. I didn't get it. He decided to plug-in his guitar at some folk festival and made a bunch of people angry. So?

No one bothered to explain to me that Dylan was a master song writer. Scorsese did a great job of setting the scene for each stage of Dylan's early career, starting with Robert's youth in Minnesota, his journey to Greenwich Village, up to his transition into rock music in the late '60s, when much of the world felt as if he had betrayed them. Dylan had a unique talent for writing lyrics that were not topical yet relevant and timeless at once. After arriving in New York and playing old folk traditionals for a time, he began to separate himself from the other musicians collected in the city by writing his own material. Much of that material sounded as if it could have been written years earlier by more experienced men and a lot of those songs became new anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements. He was 22 when he wrote "Blowin' the Wind" but it was obvious his soul was much older. In the film, Mavis Staples remembers how hard it was for her to understand how this young white boy was able to write a song that so completely captured what black people were experiencing at the time. Needless to say, this completely shook up the folk movement that was happening in the late '50s and early '60s and propelled Dylan to fame.

One of the things that really struck me about Dylan's music is how much of it has been covered by other artists. What really separated him from his peers, besides the superior song writing, was the parallel success others had with his songs. "Blowin' in the Wind," for example, was made into a world-wide hit by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1963, not by Dylan himself. The Byrds made "Mr. Tambourine Man" a #1 hit in 1965, the same year Dylan released the song on his own album Bringing It All Back Home. Both Johnny Cash and The Turtles made hits out of "It Ain't Me Babe" in 1965 even though Dylan had released it a year earlier on Another Side of Bob Dylan. Before I watched Scorsese's documentary I knew that Jimi Hendrix did not write "All Along the Watchtower." Bob Dylan did. It was originally recorded in 1966 and then made into a rock classic by Hendrix in '68. In each of these instances Dylan recorded and performed these songs with a straight forward folk sound while his fellow artists dressed them up and made them into pop hits. The way Dylan tells it in the documentary, he decided at one point he'd like to have a hit song himself so, he made a ten page letter written in anger to an unknown recipient into "Like a Rolling Stone" and hit the charts himself. It was that easy.

I love the stories of how Dylan upset the mass folk following he had acquired in the early '60s by reinventing himself into a rock musician with electric guitars and drums (gasp!). He toured the UK in the mid '60s with The Beatles and audiences made it clear they did not care for the new electric Bob Dylan, regularly booing and heckling during the non-acoustic portion of his set. People were really upset about this. They took it personally, feeling as if he had sold out and had deceived them all in the process. Why wasn't he rescuing them from injustice and oppression as they had expected? It didn't seem to matter what the the lyrics to songs like "Maggie's Farm" or "Tombstone Blues" were. The music was too loud and a lot of folks missed the message as a result. But they kept listening. They kept buying records and concert tickets. It is the most inspired and well crafted "sell out" in the history of music. I think most folks get that now. You have to admire how Dylan did not let this strong opposition to his development as an artist stop him from being who needed to be creatively.

So, it's true, No Direction Home has turned me into a Bob Dylan fan. I have been loving pretty much everything he did between '63 and '66 (he released 6 albums during that period, including the double LP Blonde On Blonde). Some of my favorites songs so far are "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" from '63s The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "When the Ship Comes In" and "Only A Pawn In Their Game" (about the assassination of Medgar Evers) from '64s The Times They Are A-Changin', "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" from Bringing It All Back Home, "Tombstone Blues" from '65s Highway 61 Revisited and all of Blonde On Blonde is brilliant but my favorite tracks are "Visions of Johanna" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again."

As it turns out, Robert Zimmerman is a true American legend. It kind of makes me wonder about what the rest of us have been born to do. I don't think Dylan set out to change folk music or write anthems against injustice. I think his talents just took him there. His obvious discomfort with super-stardom confirms his only interest is in writing and playing what he's inspired to. In a lot of ways I hope it works out that for all of us, that we find what we're good at and just keep doing it the best way we know how while growing, learning, changing and persevering through doubt.