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Dec. 7, 2007
The musical chameleon returns
For the last 50 years, musician Bob Dylan has been shifting from one identity to another.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Bob Dylan, unquestionably one of the two seminal figures and icons of popular music, has been credited with "freeing the mind," just as Elvis Presley "freed the body." Dylan's frequent changes of style, content and image have both fascinated and mystified generations of listeners. Critics see them as a quest for "something different" or simply the product of personal confusion.
His folk music style has been compared to that of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, the top performers in this genre in 20th-century America. But while they remained folk singers during their entire performing lives, Dylan has had several "incarnations," ranging from rock and roll and soft pop to country and blues. Writing and performing in different styles, he has retained his inimitable voice, somewhat coarse and nasal, occasionally grating and with a word-slurring style that makes his delivery unique and has inspired countless imitators (and lampooners).
Dylan is now the subject of a new film, called I'm Not There, in which six different actors, as dissimilar as Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett, portray the ever-shifting icon as he moves from one persona to another in his 50 years in the eyes of the world.
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., in 1941. When he was six his family moved to a mining town in the iron ore-rich Mesabi Range, where his father owned an appliance store. Dylan did more than change his name, he invented and re-invented his past, claiming, among other things, to have been orphaned as a child, ridden the rails, jammed in strip joints, anything that could add to his well-fashioned mystique.
His youth was not an easy one. He was a loner who seemed unable to determine his own authenticity. Painfully shy, he first took on the style of James Dean, the short-lived Hollywood actor who became an icon of the dispossessed but tough greasers and other cultural icons of the '50s. But most of all, Dylan was influenced by the modest but "guruistic" Guthrie.
As Dylan's career skyrocketed, he seemed to be trying on "different suits." The cover of one of his albums shows him in the guise of a Chassid. Dylan also dabbled in Christianity and in 1979 he became a born-again Christian, although more recently his Christianity seems to have abated and he has become more attached to the Judaism of his family. His son, Jesse Byron, was bar mitzvahed in Israel and Dylan has donated considerable sums of money to the Jewish state.
This type of wide-ranging exploration is not unique among pop stars: Madonna, for example, has publicized her interest in kabbalah. Their quest for a mystical, religious experience, at times eased and lubricated by the use of psychogenic drugs, has led some of them into what some people of the West often see as the more spiritual climes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Suffiism.
As early as 1961, Dylan, 20 years old at the time, had reached his first great step on the road to super-stardom when the legendary producer John Hammond Sr. predicted his rise to fame and he was signed on at Columbia Records. At first his star rose in a more or less desultory fashion, but his 1962 album Blowin' in the Wind was almost on a par with We Shall Overcome as the standard of the civil rights movement in the American South.
At times, his music and words took on a mystical aura comparable to that of the English Enlightenment period poet, mystic and artist William Blake, who inveighed against "the dark satanic mills" of the then new Industrial Revolution. Dylan's fame flourished at a time when LSD was the psychedelic drug of choice, influencing the Beatles, for example, in their Yellow Submarine movie.
Dylan became the hero of countless idealistic college students unhappy with the state of the world and hoping for significant change but having no clear ideas about how to effectuate it. His popularity was particularly based on his own songs, which expressed the anger of many young people in America during the war in southeast Asia and the frustrating resistance to the integration of African-Americans. As Guthrie had been associated with the old left (essentially communist), Dylan helped shape the culture of the new left: essentially pacifist, anti-racist, anti-poverty but largely, if not completely, concerned with protesting ills rather than offering realistic solutions.
Dylan's clever and artful lyrics and his style of delivery, an image in which he re-created himself, appealed to the new left's sensibilities. The Times They Are A-Changin', a collection of protest numbers, was remarkably evocative and quintessential of the sentiments of his growing audience. More recently, he has repudiated the political ideology associated with his early days and now allegedly favors a vague version of anarchism.
Dylan experimented with but resisted the style known as "psychedelia," in which there is deliberate electronic distortion of the music to a kind of shriek of ventilated anger, something Jimi Hendrix rode to fame before his early death from drug overdose.
The lyrics Dylan wrote were often evocative without the syntactical and lexical meanings one usually associates with language. He always refused to explain the meanings of his songs. This device, allowing his fans to insert their own interpretations in their own fashion, is similar to the language of many sacred texts that speak in allegory and imagery.
In 1970, Dylan came near the heights of "respectable" acknowledgement when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Princeton University. Four years after that, he released a new album and did a nationwide tour to promote it, performing in one of the decade's most successful series of rock concerts.
Even allowing for the often bizarre lifestyles and the highly publicized indulgences of America's top entertainers, Dylan's life is odd. He deliberately created a persona and changed it as often as impulse and who knows what other factors impelled him to. The "real Bob Dylan" is perhaps a phantasmagoria covered by enigmas that he has personally crafted. It is impossible to say what motivated him. Perhaps, with his fame and fortune and with a febrile imagination, he made these changes simply because he was able to. Dylan, agile in his talent and fluid with his identity, is still the chameleon of popular music.
Eugene Kaellis is a freelance writer and retired academic living in New Westminster.
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