|
| Bob on Bob | | Date Created: Sep 02, 2006, 08:49 PM |
I've always thought Bob Dylan was tough to figure when it comes to interviews or talking about himself. He seems to know everything and nothing. Was it an act? Did he just have a way with melodies and used words to fit? There was even a story that he bought the song "Blowing in the Wind" instead of writing it.
Initially unrelated, I thought there were three types of people when it comes to music: listeners, musicians, and critics. Isn't Bob Dylan a musician? Well yes, but...
But after reading an essay by Louis Menand in the latest New Yorker, called "Bob on Bob -- Dylan Talks", I now understand why Dylan is the way he is and I've had to add a fourth category to the types of people who deal with music. The essay is a review of The Essential Interviews by Jonathan Cott and Rolling Stone publishing, but like a good review, it's no longer necessary to read the book under review and I learned something I probably wouldn't have learned by reading it. Plus there's some other suggestions of books to read.
So here's some excerpts from the essay. The fourth category is "songwriters" and probably should include music producers.
BOB ON BOB
by LOUIS MENAND
Dylan talks.
Issue of 2006-09-04
...“The discrepancy between Dylan the interview subject and Dylan the musician is not an artifact of celebrity. It seems to have been part of the deal from the start, and it’s almost the first thing that people who knew him mention when they’re asked about their initial impression...People who have this experience with Dylan tend to conclude that he is a complicated human being, but the logical conclusion is the opposite one... “Dylan is a genius, that’s all,” Weber said. “He is not more complex than most people; he is simpler.” On most subjects that normal people talk about, Dylan seems either not to have views or to have views indistinguishable from the views of everyone else who’s hanging around the coffeehouse. His conversation is short and not always sweet. But there is one topic he does like. He is a songwriter. He likes to talk about songs. When interviewers figure this out, the work gets easier...but Dylan does not think that songs were meant to be interpreted, so this line of questioning can lead to some ugly dialectical moments.
...Dylan was nineteen and very raw when he began playing in Village coffeehouses. By all accounts, though, he was a fantastically quick study. He picked up songs and techniques from everyone...
Protest songs were a natural outgrowth of the folk revival, in the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger’s Almanac Singers. Rock and roll was not. Dylan’s big leap, the stuff of much myth and misinformation, was the one he made in 1965, when he went electric, and released, in a fourteen-month period, three albums without peers: “Bringing It All Back Home” (March, 1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (August), and the double album “Blonde on Blonde” (May, 1966)... A lot of critical labor has gone into proving that Dylan was not selling out but pursuing the road of musical correctness.
The labor is misplaced, because there is no road of musical correctness.
Some fans did boo Dylan in 1965, but the reaction seems to have been a good deal less ideological than it was later taken to be... Many Village musicians resented Dylan’s success; unlike most of them, Van Ronk had a reason to...he had this to say:
I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.
He happened to come of musical age at a moment when rock and roll was moribund—Frankie Avalon stuff, songs for high-school sock hops. If you were serious, you played folk songs. And to become a folkie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe, anyway: it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers... Artifice was the price of authenticity.
When Dylan left Minnesota, he had no idea that folk was the royal road to anything. If you were a folk singer in New York, you played in coffeehouses and passed around a basket for tips. No one got rich imitating Woody Guthrie. When Dylan cut his first records, though, folk was just becoming the ascendant pop musical genre... Hammond didn’t sign Dylan on a whim; he signed him (as Prial strangely neglects to say, but as Hajdu makes clear in “Positively 4th Street”) because he had had a chance to sign Baez and lost her to Vanguard. His reputation for picking winners was in jeopardy; folk was hot, and he needed a folk singer.
The standard folk sound was the Seeger-Baez sound: earnest, reverent, acoustic, and completely sexless, everything Elvis was not. Dylan’s music, in this context, had a snarly, disrespectful edge that cut...Then, in February, 1964, the Beatles came to America, and rock and roll rose from the dead... within minutes of the conclusion of the Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the acoustic sound was pop history. The first time Dylan heard the Beatles, he was in a car somewhere and they came on the radio. He almost fell out the window. He loved them, and he must have seen, alert student that he was, what he could do with the electric sound.
Dylan wasn’t thinking about the direction of popular music in 1964, and he wasn’t thinking about the direction of the Zeitgeist, either. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he says in his remarkable autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume I” (2004), and you believe him. He was, as usual, thinking only about his sound. It is always the sound that interests Dylan about a song, and one of the reasons that he is only semi-articulate in interviews is that you can’t really describe a sound... It was a lonesome sound; he knew he could get it... He didn’t “come out of” any tradition. He was a magpie.
Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do... the subject of Dylan’s sound: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ album,” Dylan says. “It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.”
Van Ronk thought that Dylan was sloppy, that he wrote his songs too fast... Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”
Ninety per cent of musicianship is phrasing, and the easiest way to appreciate Dylan’s genius for phrasing is to listen to him, on bootlegs or on the late albums of traditional songs, perform songs that he didn’t write...
You can refute Hegel, Yeats said, but not the Song of Sixpence.
|
|
|
|
|
|
