My strange encounter with Bob Dylan
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By Neil McCormick
Musician and producer Dave Stewart knows a lot of famous people (indeed, he’s pretty famous himself). But he has one friend who has almost gone beyond fame, into a kind of mythological realm usually the preserve of the deceased. As an icon of modern popular culture, Bob Dylan occupies the same kind of territory as Elvis Presley and John Lennon, something that was brought home to Stewart when he set out with Dylan on an impromptu stroll through Camden Market in the early Nineties. No one approached them for autographs or photographs. Instead people would go pale, stop in their tracks and gesticulate open mouthed, as if they couldn’t believe what they were witnessing was real. Stewart described the experience to me as “like walking with a ghost”.
I had my own encounter with the ghost many years ago. I was backstage at a massive open-air Dylan concert in Ireland, chatting with two young American guys I had just met, when I noticed this weird looking fellow sidle up alongside us, his jowly face caked in orange make-up and baggy eyes ringed with thick black liner. I didn’t actually recognise him at first, perhaps because he bore so little resemblance to the skinny beatnik with the tangled psychedelic curls whose poster adorned my bedroom wall. But eventually it dawned on me that this paunchy, wrinkled old peach making small talk in a stoned drawl was Bob Dylan. I gaped at this strange vision, simultaneously amazed and disappointed. “He looks so old!” I whispered to my new American friends, before babbling some nonsense about it being better not to meet your heroes. They turned out to be Dylan’s sons, Samuel and Jakob. Not my finest moment.
That was in 1984 and Dylan was all of 43. Today, he turns seventy. It would no doubt have astonished my naïve younger self to know that Dylan would still be rocking at such a venerable age, still producing work of the highest order. And that I would still find him as a relevant and fascinating as ever.
“Contrary to what some so called experts believe, I don’t constantly reinvent myself. I was there from the beginning,” Dylan said in 1985. Well, maybe. But he has certainly changed over the years and he started by changing his name. Robert Zimmerman came out of the Midwest like an updated Huck Finn, leather cap, battered boots and harmonica, a precocious, firebrand folkie who greeted the world with a self-titled debut album in 1962. A contemporary likened his voice to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”, but the songs, dazzlingly poetic, scornful of conformity and tuned in to the spirit of the age, changed the face of popular music forever. Since then we’ve been treated to Dylan the amphetamine-fuelled rocker of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, the countrified spiritual seeker of ‘John Wesley Harding’, the broken hearted gypsy troubadour of ‘Blood On The Tracks’, the deeply troubled soul of ‘Street Legal’ (Dylan’s most underrated album, play it now, I urge you), the sharp-tongued Christian soldier of ‘Infidels’, the disillusioned romantic of ‘Oh Mercy’, the careworn curmudgeon of ‘Time Out of Mind’ and the inscrutable, mischievous old veteran of ‘Modern Times’. Frankly, it seems a hell of a long way from the optimistic, revolutionary idealism of his 1963 classic ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ to the scornful, frightening ambiguity of 2009’s ‘It’s All Good’ but one song doesn’t transplant or negate the other, rather they enrich each other, strands of a complex, contradictory, argumentative, provocative whole, a human life in song.
Dylan is the greatest living figure of popular music, not because he has the loveliest voice (David Bowie once compared it to “sand and glue”), or the greatest way with melody (Dylan favours simple, repetitive chord patterns and borrows liberally from generic song forms), or the most original sonic approach (he has little patience for gimmickry or experimentation), but because he took popular song from the inside, reaching back into its past (of deep folk tradition) and firing off into the future (opening up vistas of language, philosophy and emotion), and in the process investing it with unsuspected depth and gravity, the possibility that something as simple as a song could be a complete vehicle for individual artistic expression. Despite aberrations and periods of decline, a late flourish of substantial albums enriches and deepens our appreciation of his entire oeuvre, a body of work over five decades without compare. This is music to grow up with and grow old to, songs and performances of such depth they reveal ever more with repeated listening. On the best of Dylan, melody and lyric effortlessly mesh together, all those cascading cadences and tripping internal rhymes swept along by tunes of surprising dimensions and perfectly served by Dylan’s dramatic vocal delivery, resounding with heartfelt if often poignantly understated emotion.
Dylan helped invent the generation gap in the Sixties but the vitality and resonance of his work effortlessly bridges it, holding original fans spellbound while continually drawing in new generations of listeners. I was a teenage punk rocker when I discovered Dylan for myself, attracted at first to his Sixties hipster period, when he looked like the coolest cat on the planet with an attitude to match. I played ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ over and over, revelling in the way he heaped passionate, surreal scorn on the straight world, sneering “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?”
“I do know what my songs are about,” the young bard insisted to a sceptical middle-aged journalist from Playboy in 1966.
“And what’s that?” queried the hack.
“Oh,” replied Dylan, “some are about four minutes, some are about five and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.”
The Telegraph
By Neil McCormick
Musician and producer Dave Stewart knows a lot of famous people (indeed, he’s pretty famous himself). But he has one friend who has almost gone beyond fame, into a kind of mythological realm usually the preserve of the deceased. As an icon of modern popular culture, Bob Dylan occupies the same kind of territory as Elvis Presley and John Lennon, something that was brought home to Stewart when he set out with Dylan on an impromptu stroll through Camden Market in the early Nineties. No one approached them for autographs or photographs. Instead people would go pale, stop in their tracks and gesticulate open mouthed, as if they couldn’t believe what they were witnessing was real. Stewart described the experience to me as “like walking with a ghost”.
I had my own encounter with the ghost many years ago. I was backstage at a massive open-air Dylan concert in Ireland, chatting with two young American guys I had just met, when I noticed this weird looking fellow sidle up alongside us, his jowly face caked in orange make-up and baggy eyes ringed with thick black liner. I didn’t actually recognise him at first, perhaps because he bore so little resemblance to the skinny beatnik with the tangled psychedelic curls whose poster adorned my bedroom wall. But eventually it dawned on me that this paunchy, wrinkled old peach making small talk in a stoned drawl was Bob Dylan. I gaped at this strange vision, simultaneously amazed and disappointed. “He looks so old!” I whispered to my new American friends, before babbling some nonsense about it being better not to meet your heroes. They turned out to be Dylan’s sons, Samuel and Jakob. Not my finest moment.
That was in 1984 and Dylan was all of 43. Today, he turns seventy. It would no doubt have astonished my naïve younger self to know that Dylan would still be rocking at such a venerable age, still producing work of the highest order. And that I would still find him as a relevant and fascinating as ever.
“Contrary to what some so called experts believe, I don’t constantly reinvent myself. I was there from the beginning,” Dylan said in 1985. Well, maybe. But he has certainly changed over the years and he started by changing his name. Robert Zimmerman came out of the Midwest like an updated Huck Finn, leather cap, battered boots and harmonica, a precocious, firebrand folkie who greeted the world with a self-titled debut album in 1962. A contemporary likened his voice to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire”, but the songs, dazzlingly poetic, scornful of conformity and tuned in to the spirit of the age, changed the face of popular music forever. Since then we’ve been treated to Dylan the amphetamine-fuelled rocker of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, the countrified spiritual seeker of ‘John Wesley Harding’, the broken hearted gypsy troubadour of ‘Blood On The Tracks’, the deeply troubled soul of ‘Street Legal’ (Dylan’s most underrated album, play it now, I urge you), the sharp-tongued Christian soldier of ‘Infidels’, the disillusioned romantic of ‘Oh Mercy’, the careworn curmudgeon of ‘Time Out of Mind’ and the inscrutable, mischievous old veteran of ‘Modern Times’. Frankly, it seems a hell of a long way from the optimistic, revolutionary idealism of his 1963 classic ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ to the scornful, frightening ambiguity of 2009’s ‘It’s All Good’ but one song doesn’t transplant or negate the other, rather they enrich each other, strands of a complex, contradictory, argumentative, provocative whole, a human life in song.
Dylan is the greatest living figure of popular music, not because he has the loveliest voice (David Bowie once compared it to “sand and glue”), or the greatest way with melody (Dylan favours simple, repetitive chord patterns and borrows liberally from generic song forms), or the most original sonic approach (he has little patience for gimmickry or experimentation), but because he took popular song from the inside, reaching back into its past (of deep folk tradition) and firing off into the future (opening up vistas of language, philosophy and emotion), and in the process investing it with unsuspected depth and gravity, the possibility that something as simple as a song could be a complete vehicle for individual artistic expression. Despite aberrations and periods of decline, a late flourish of substantial albums enriches and deepens our appreciation of his entire oeuvre, a body of work over five decades without compare. This is music to grow up with and grow old to, songs and performances of such depth they reveal ever more with repeated listening. On the best of Dylan, melody and lyric effortlessly mesh together, all those cascading cadences and tripping internal rhymes swept along by tunes of surprising dimensions and perfectly served by Dylan’s dramatic vocal delivery, resounding with heartfelt if often poignantly understated emotion.
Dylan helped invent the generation gap in the Sixties but the vitality and resonance of his work effortlessly bridges it, holding original fans spellbound while continually drawing in new generations of listeners. I was a teenage punk rocker when I discovered Dylan for myself, attracted at first to his Sixties hipster period, when he looked like the coolest cat on the planet with an attitude to match. I played ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ over and over, revelling in the way he heaped passionate, surreal scorn on the straight world, sneering “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?”
“I do know what my songs are about,” the young bard insisted to a sceptical middle-aged journalist from Playboy in 1966.
“And what’s that?” queried the hack.
“Oh,” replied Dylan, “some are about four minutes, some are about five and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.”
The Telegraph
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