Making me pretty much put my life on Hold and think back to how I arrived at this point in time, has been the almost nonstop news feeds about Bob Dylan.
This surrounds the relentless marketing of “A Complete Unknown”, the film that takes audiences from Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village to visit a dying Woody Guthrie and establish himself as a folkie to plugging in and “going electric” in 1965.
It forces one to think what might have happened if he didn’t go electric?
The “going electric” phase was with the release of three consecutive albums including “Highway 61 Revisited” that began with the long, loud, snarling and cynical “Like A Rolling Stone”.
This one amazing track that remains as relevant as ever today inspired me to actually wanna go out and DO and learn about things- though what these might have been wasn’t clear. But, “Like A Rolling Stone” and Dylan’s voice and those words inspired me enough to writing my own songs- not trying to, but jumping into the middle of it all.
This Dylan phase wasn’t just talking about maybes, but having a mind map without even realising it.
It was about being mindful not to repeat myself, and, instead, listen, study and remember what people say and see what adds up, what doesn’t and who are the keepers.
Even though the role of Bob Dylan- a fictionalised version of Dylan played by Timothee Chalamet, but possibly close enough to the original who was a composite as obtuse as one of Dylan’s songs like “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” or “Ballad Of A Thin Man”-“A Complete Unknown” is a reminder of those times and the importance of Bob Dylan as a chameleonic character who rewrote and rearranged life’s furniture for himself, and without knowing it, probably for some of us.
Who didn’t want Joan Baez as a muse?
This re-arranging of life’s furniture started at a very young age for him and which is something forgotten- and how mature Dylan was for his years.
Did ANYONE ever know the arrogantly precocious and all-seeing Bob Dylan who often used his words as bullets?
Robert Allen Zimmerman, perhaps did, and maybe so did his folks, who are rarely mentioned in any retelling of his past, but all this was before he created who he wanted Bob Dylan to be- and why.
Everything in his life before that was almost deleted. It was opening on Chapter 2.
These early days of The Bob were having a huge influence in Hong Kong when two best friends at KGV, the very international secondary school in the city, were drawn to the looks of the artist and his storytelling through his songs, and which challenged us to change without knowing we were changing.
Steve started growing out his Afro. I started wearing drainpipes.
Decades later, when in London, a couple of girls from those school days and who I met up with in a restaurant for dinner mentioned how Steve and I were the “cool guys” and “rebels”.
Really?
Steve, a brilliant world class drummer, was my best friend when in school and with whom I was with at the Dicken’s Bar of the Excelsior Hotel.
Then in his early twenties after years playing professionally in Honolulu and Japan, Steve was back in Hong Kong trying to figure out next steps.
He mentioned some of these while we were listening to a visiting band from Africa before he left for somewhere else and accidentally checked out of his first life’s journey later that night.
Thinking back, maybe we were “rebels” compared to others our age in school?
We had picked up guitars in our early teens and went from copying hits to writing our own songs.
The words to these were getting more and more personal. We experimented with stuff that maybe we shouldn’t have, and seemed to attract more experienced girls- female tourists on their way to some ashram in India, backpackers, Australian showgirls, mothers of girls we knew etc.
They taught us what many of the old Bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Mr Chuck Berry were singing about: Blues and Rock’N Roll songs about Nadine, Carol and Johnny B Goode, being a King Bee and a Hootchie Cootchie Man with a hootchie cootchie mama on the side.
As for Bob Dylan, he was in his early twenties, and tackling heavier subjects that had to do with how the times were changing, why the answers were blowing in the wind and warned us not to follow leaders and watch our parking meters.
Time was ticking into the future.
I don’t think we really understood what he was saying, but understood his restlessness to get to where he was going.
We saw this need to understand his journey as homework and far more important than learning about algebra or dissecting rabbits and frogs.
The Beatles were happening at the time and we liked their songs and I wanted to be something like a George, but Bob Dylan, being American, and the British Beat Boom having taken over mainstream pop culture, his arrival, especially in London, positioned him in his own revered time in space- and the starstruck UK media did the rest.
Thinking about it, they had an idea of who they wanted him to be- and maybe Bob Dylan played them at their own game?
Him being seen with John Lennon sold stories, but I wonder how tight their friendship was and whether Dylan saw him as a groupie and copyist?
Listen to his “You Got To Hide Your Love Away” and “Norwegian Wood”, two songs with the Beatles.
Interesting was his extremely long friendship with George Harrison and eventually being part of the Travelling Wilburys with him and appearing in The Concert For Bangladesh.
Watching videos recently of his early press conferences in America on YouTube, there was the zigzagging between naive journalists trying hard to look hip or wanting to trip him up, and Dylan playing the role of the aloof Jokerman, chain smoking, maybe stoned, and throwing out obtuse lines that could have meant anything.
He was very much the James Dean of this new music and new generation .
What he said sounded smart and cool and made some of us check out those he mentioned- Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Rimbaud, Willie Dixon, Ledbelly… and Francoise Hardy who was another muse back in the mid sixties.
Some of his songs, we understood and those that we didn’t, we told ourselves we did.
I had no idea what “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was about, but the video was very cool.
How? It just was.
Something like “The Eve Of Destruction” by Barry Maguire tried too hard to jump on the protest music bandwagon, but it was awful and trite- and seemed sung by an angry old guy.
Still, it was a hit and which showed The American Protest Movement was gathering momentum albeit in an unhip and kinda superficial way.
There was the British Dylan- Donovan-who was a safer and sweeter version of the original and seemed to be another groupie who became a flower child and hung around the cult of the American whenever he was in London.
With the arrival of the underrated Byrds and their cover of Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”, this “movement” became something much larger and changed the world forever.
With the jangling twelve string guitar of Jim/Roger McGuinn and the harmonies built around the lead vocal, folk rock was born and the songs of Bob Dylan reached a mainstream pop audience.
The Byrds covered quite a few of them as did some who were part of the British Beat Boom. This was when the band Manfred Mann had a healthy run of number one hits with covers of “Pretty Flamingo”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” and “The Mighty Quinn”.
Bob Dylan kept being the enigma he was becoming.
With the girl I was trying to date and kinda dated sporadically when wanting something more permanent, his song “Positively Fourth Street” played a major role in her finally succumbing and moving in with me.
This had quite a bit to do with me requesting the song to her on a radio programme and her being taken aback by the words of very probably the most cynical putdown song heard at the time.
She was intoxicated and attracted to what the song was saying- and the balls of someone who saw her like this and not being that innocent.
She and I moved into together with my cat, got married, adopted a dog, had a daughter, and who, when she was in her early teens, took to see Bob Dylan in concert in Hong Kong.
It wasn’t exactly a brilliant concert. The band seemed to be new, the playing was ragged, songs were rearranged to be unrecognisable and performed in a shabby and half hearted manner. Maybe he was in a bad mood.
Our daughter looked at me and seemed happy that she had seen one of my musical heroes.
I was happy that she had and also to have seen him in concert after so many years.
When he might have been a complete unknown to many, Steve and I had discovered him.
The complete Bob Dylan storybook changed us by inspiring us and making me look at people and things in a very different way to those around me.
When I start having doubts about people, perhaps seeing what had been skipped over before, all I have to do is listen to “Like A Rolling Stone” and everything is okay and alive again.
These are my back pages, and my world is less boring because that emotional weight I was carrying with me has been lifted.
There’s a clearing without any Mr Jones standing there. And those answers that have been blowing in the wind have found their way home.
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