“Don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters”, warned Bob Dylan on “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.
Some people are intuitive and it’s something that they are born with or acquire- that all seeing, all-knowing and powerful Third Eye.
With a resurgence of interest in the music and career of Bob Dylan because of the interest in the film “A Complete Unknown”, starring today’s most popular and talented young star in Timothee Chalamet.
The film focuses on the early years of the legendary singer-songwriter, listening again to his songs like “Masters Of War”, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, “Blowing In The Wind”, “The Times They Are-A-Changing” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” could have been written about the very brittle times that we’re living in today.
These are the days where we are in the hands of leaders with feet of clay, and those false prophets who have been elevated to the roles of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and “influencers”, who feed on gossip and “network” for information which passes itself off as “social media”.
This is both Fake News and The New Journalism- but not what Tom Wolfe predicted. It’s about feeding on and rolling in tattletales and being okay with untruths because maybe everyone have their own games to play- and eventually get caught out.
Bob Dylan might have created his own version of his early life about hanging out with hobos and a travelling circus and dining with kings and queens and that in between world where fact and fiction merged, but he was a storyteller and was creative enough to know how to be so oblique that the mainstream media and his followers filled in the holes according to their own scripts.
From the trailers of “A Complete Unknown”, there are parts of his life that are not there-his marriage to the Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, his role as a father, his divorce, his heartbreak over it in songs like “I Threw It All Away”, the adulation, and trying to explain those early years and how those songs came to be to Ed Bradley on the famous 60 Minutes interview.
Maybe this is a good thing as none of this is really known and forces one to think about all this for themselves.
Did he really write “I Want You” for French chanteuse Francoise Hardy?
What was that motorcycle accident all about, and did it change his life and inspire the John Wesley Harding record while changing and continuing to completely change the ways he interpreted his old songs?
What inspired his newer songs he composed on piano that were even covered by Adele and with one remembering his religious period and him visiting Israel and the Wailing Wall?
Who knows and maybe that’s how it should be- continue being a complete unknown even when one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
How and why did he agree to become one of the Travelling Wilburys?
Why was and is this “complete unknown” revered by so many of his contemporaries?
Because just maybe he really was a song and dance man and only revealed what he felt was enough?
At a time when I don’t suffer fools gladly and that Third Eye sees right through the words and actions of the shoeshine people, Bob Dylan’s voice and words ring loud.
Like the chimes of freedom, they ring out with a new relevance and truth that cuts through the crap shovelled in our direction by the fakers, bakers and full-time corporate shakers.
Like the man said, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.
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