Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Having spent a good forty-five years musing on various aspects of the cultural phenomenon formerly known as Robert Zimmerman I think I’ve just about got him figured out. That might seem like a big call, what with the chopping and changing that has gone on through thirty-five studio albums and fifty years of twists, turns and changes of disguise. Given that chopping and changing the first thing you’re tempted to do when faced with a new Dylan album is to figure out where it fits into the jigsaw puzzle. I’m inclined to go back to the formative era of the fifties and look at what followed filtered through a sensibility of a bloke who plays some guitar and a bit of piano, writes stuff and has a go at vocalising it.
Much of the prodigious output of written commentary that has emerged over the five decades he’s been with us has, I think, come from the multitude of proto-Dylans you’d have found scattered across the countryside sitting in dimly lit bedrooms, bedsits and college dormitories, reading the Beat poets and their antecedents, musing on various forms of mysticism and tapping things out on typewriters under the influence of whatever substances they were using to fuel their visions.
Most of them, in one sense or another stayed there mentally, many of them forced to modify the old bohemian tendencies by the need to earn a living and provide for wives and children but one of the multitude of proto-Dylans didn’t, and that’s where things get complicated.
A combination of opportunism, manipulation, plagiarism and fusion shaped a career that progressed to the point where Dylan has been able to do more or less what he likes, and what he delivers is misunderstood and misinterpreted by a multitude of thought they could have beens who base their reaction to Dylan on what they think they would have thought, done, written and sung in the same perceived position.
So when Duquesne Whistle kicks off Tempest with a jaunty Western swing most of us are left scratching our heads, wondering if there’s anything more to it than meets the first glance and, when we decide there must be, trying to figure out what it is.