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Knocking Down Nobel’s [email protected]
In his twenties, he was called Judas for plugging in an electric guitar, much to the chagrin of the folk bri-gade. In his thirties, he found Jesus
to the chagrin of the rock brigade. In 2011, he performed a set in China to the chagrin of those who still expected him to be the conscience of the world. In 2004, he appeared in a Victoria’s Secret com-mercial, and in 2014, in a Super Bowl commercial, much to the chagrin of many who cried ‘sellout’. What hasn’t changed is that even at 75, the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel is the most talked-about musician on the planet.
And he certainly walks the talk. He still tours with a frequency that would kill artistes half his age. He’s been on the road since June 7, 1988. By the end of 2016, his ‘never-ending tour’ will have comprised 2,812 concerts. Take a look at the numbers — 37 studio albums, over 520 songs, 12 Grammys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and two doctorates (he fell asleep during one cer-emony). All this and more, before the No-bel came along. And with the Nobel came the critics, again, with many keyboards around the world firing at Dylan.
Few musicians in rock ‘n’ roll his-tory have had their lives scrutinized so closely as Dylan. There are hordes of self-proclaimed Dylanogists, led by AJ Weber-man, “the king of all Dylan nuts”, who was beaten up by the singer for going through his garbage to find clues to deconstruct the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman. This was the ’60s, when Dylan’s ‘finger-pointing’ lyrics chronicled an era of social unrest in America, marked by the Civil Rights move-ment and Vietnam war. ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, which was later named the greatest song in rock ‘n’ roll his-tory, became anthems that echoed the con-temporary conscience.
But he has never really cared about what people think of him. Even in the ’60s, when he “struck the chords of American history”,
as Bill Clinton described it, he wasn’t pretty rock star material. He didn’t have Joan Baez’s vibrato, Jimi Hendrix’s passion or Jim Morrison’s aura. His hair was messy, his voice strange, and his habit of routinely taking up ‘political’ issues unheard of. But instead of grooming himself to be what a rock star was expected to be, he created an image and personality entirely his own. Rock music, which was described as “a bunch of raving shit” by Lester Bangs, sud-denly had a heavy dose of intellectualism injected into it. Primarily responsible was the “unwashed phenomenon”, Bob Dylan.
Yet, like the times he sings about, his music too keeps chang-ing. The clean-shaven man who used to sling an acoustic over his shoulder has taken country, blues, rockabil-ly, folk, swing and jazz in his stride. In 2009, he released a charity Christmas album, con-founding critics, as he has done consistently for 50 years. His life has been such a montage of continuous reinven-tion that when the time came for a biopic, it took six actors to por-
tray him (I’m not there, 2007). The political lyrics have mellowed in
his recent works. His writings now sug-gest that he’s an ageing rocker coming to terms with the injus-tices of the world. ‘Big politi-cian telling lies/Restaurant kitchen, all full of flies. . . Wives are leavin’ their hus-bands, they beginning to roam/ They leave the party and they never get home / I wouldn’t change it, even if I could/ You know what they say man, it’s all good.’
To his legion of follow-ers, he is all good. He’s done all a singer-song-writer can do. Even if he retires, or passes on without another song, the Tambou-rine Man’s songbook will stay forever young.
75 And Still Electric Robert Allan Zimmerman is born in Minnesotato Lithuanian and Russian immigrants
1961 | Arrives in New York to sing at Cafê Wha? Meets Woody Guthrie, his lifelong idol. Signs his first record contract with Columbia. Writes ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, his most famous work to date
1963 | Releases second album, the ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, an instant classic
1964 | ‘The times they are a-changin’ releases, cementing his reputation as a protest singer
1965 | Marries Sara Lowndsin a ceremony attended by two people
1966 | Called ‘Judas’ for using an electric guitar, crashes his motorcycle near Woodstock
1969 | The youngest of four children, Jakob, is born. He’s grown up to be a musician in his own right
1971 | Plays an all-star concert for Bangladeshrefugees at Madison Square
1977 | Sara files for divorce, citing Dylan’s“bizarre behaviour”
1978 | The Jesus phase. Silver cross thrown on stage. Dylan says King of kings and Lord of lords appeared to him
1980 | Starts another tour, spreads evangelical messages, doesn't sell well. Wins first Grammy.Thanks the Lord for it
1985 | Contributes four lines to ‘We are the world’
1988 | The Never-Ending Tour begins in California
1990 | Plays his longest ever gig, in Connecticut, 50 songs in over 5 hours
1991 | Grammy lifetime achievement award
1997 | Plays for the Pope, because “You don't say no to the Vatican”
2001 | Wins an Oscar for ‘Things have changed’
2011 | Plays drab gigs in communist Vietnam and China, sparking protests
2012 | Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from one of his biggest fans, Barack Obama
2016 | The Bootleg SeriesVol. 11 wins the Grammy for the Best HistoricalAlbum, his 12th Grammy
LIKE A ROLLING STONEG R E A T E S T H I T S
10 EVERY GRAIN OF SANDI have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night /In the violence of
a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light“It’s like one of the great Psalms of David,” Bono said about the song
Dylan is so brilliant. To me, he makes Shakespeare look like Billy Joel —GEORGE HARRISON, Beatles
Dylan once said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man’.”... That’s what he’s like. It’s true but I’d like to hear Bob Dylan sing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ —MICK JAGGER, Rolling Stones frontman
He is a very tenacious character. Underneath all the so-called eccentricity, which I think is just a mask, there’s a very true person...Every songwriter after him carries his baggage
—BONO, U2 frontman
It almost makes me furious sometimes how good his lyrics are...
—DAVE MATTHEWSFrontman, Dave Matthews Band
Source: Dylan’s top 10 as judged by Rolling Stone magazine on the laureate’s 70th birthday in 2011
1LIKE A ROLLING STONEGo to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse/When you ain’t got
nothing, you got nothing to loseRolling Stone magazine called it ‘a screenplay distilled into one song’, Dylan’s sneer turning “the wine to vinegar”
2A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALLHeard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’/ Heard the song of a
poet who died in the gutter/ Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alleyGrateful Dead’s Bob Weir said, “It’s beyond genius. I think the heavens opened and something channeled through him”
3TANGLED UP IN BLUEShe lit a burner
on the stove/ Andoffered me a pipe/ “Ithought you’d never say hello,” she said/ “You look like the silent type”Before playing the song in concerts, Dylan often said: “[This song] took me 10 years to live, and two years to write”
4JUST LIKE A WOMANNobody feels any
pain/ Tonight as I stand inside the rainThe song was about his turbulent love life
5ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke/“There are many here
among us who feel that life is but a jokeJimi Hendrix’s rendition of the song influenced the way Dylan himself plays the song
6I SHALL BE RELEASEDThey say ev’rything can be replaced/ Yet ev’ry distance is not nearStory of a prisoner yearning for freedom, experts say, was part of
Dylan’s conscious effort to move away from his mid-Sixties masterpieces
7IT’S ALRIGHT, MA(I’M ONLY BLEEDING)Suicide remarks are
torn from the fool’s gold mouthpiece/the hollow horn plays wasted words/proves to warn that he not busy being born is busy dyingWritten in Woodstock in the summer of 1964, when JoanBaez and Mimi and Richard Fariña were his houseguests
8MRTAMBOURINEMAN Yes, to dance
beneath the diamond sky/with one hand waving free/silhouetted by the sea/circled by the circus sands/with all memory and fate/driven deep beneath the waves/ Let me forget about today until tomorrowThe Byrds version of the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and on the UK Singles Chart9 VISIONS OF JOHANNA
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues/ You can tell by the way she smiles
“It still stands up now as it did then. Maybe even more in some kind of weird way,” Dylan said of the song in 1985
24 May,1941
@SALMANRUSHDIE: From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice
@IRVINEWELSH: I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies
@harikunzru | This feels like the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush
@crushingbort | Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize in literature because everyone who listens to his music gets bored and decides to pick up a book instead
@FrankmcnallyIT | 52 years after rhyming “road” with “knowed”, Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature
INTERNET WAS DIVIDED MUSIC GREATS ON THE LEGEND
How this Nobel has redefined literature
9 reasons why he is a pop-culture icon
‘The Prize came 20 years late’
India’s Dylan, Lou Majaw, writes about his inspiration Amit Varma
It’s rare that when a prize is given to someone, it is the prize that is elevated, not the recipient. That is exactly what has happened with the
Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Bob Dylan is an artistic legend who needs no validation — but the Nobel Prize itself has taken a lurch towards relevance.
The first thing to note is that Dylan did not get the prize for his ‘poetry’. Instead, according to the Nobel Prize citation, he got it “for having created
new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The Nobel committee did not force-fit his lyrics into an existing category, but accepted that literature exists outside the conventions typically assigned to it. This renders criticisms of Dylan’s lyrics from a poetic standpoint moot, because they weren’t written as stand-alone poems, but as songs set to music. The Nobel Prize cita-tion recognises them as literature, never-theless — and that’s spot on.
What is literature? Definitions are troublesome, but I love Franz Kafka’s description of an ideal book as an “axe for the frozen sea within us.” For more than half a century now, Dylan has been wielding that axe and reaching into mil-lions of frozen seas. His songs range from the political to the deeply personal: he captured the spirit of the times with the same acuity with which he wrote about his own existential struggles. His art evolved as he aged, and some of his meditations on ageing and death (listen to ‘Not Dark Yet’) are as powerful as any literature you will read.
Dylan’s impact is incomparable: He changed the landscape of popular music in America, influencing genera-tions of songwriters, but his influence goes beyond the world of music. He is the most cited songwriter in US judicial opinions, showing how deeply his songs permeated into the culture. No previous winner of this prize has moved so many people to tears or rage or joy or wonder.
If you Google a definition for litera-ture, the first one you will come across reads: “written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artis-tic merit.” This is the crux of much crit-icism of this award: Dylan wrote great songs, but they’re not primarily written
words, so how are they literature? Here it must be asked: Why “written words”, and not just “words”? Long before print-ed books existed, epic poets wrote their poems to be performed. We consider them literature today. William Shake-speare, in fact, wrote little that was meant for the printed page; and yet, if his plays are not literature, nothing is. Writing or print is merely one medium for words: surely the medium does not matter, and the words themselves do.
I am going to stretch that argument further. Shakespeare’s plays were basi-cally screenplays for theatre produc-tions, so how are they different, in
terms of category, from screenplays for movies? The most powerful art form of our times, in fact, is the TV series, so what about those?
Would Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), William Goldman (All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) and David Simon (The Wire, Treme) be future candidates for a Nobel Prize for Literature? What about stand-up comedy? The greatest artistic genius of our times, in my opinion, is Louis CK. His masterpiece, the TV series ‘Louie’, cracks open my frozen sea time and again. Is his work literature? Could he win the Nobel some day?
The merits of specific artists are irrelevant to this discussion, though. What matters is that the Nobel Prize Committee, with this bold award to Bob Dylan, has acknowledged that literature exists outside the narrow confines of past conventions. For this, they must be congratulated.
Varma is a novelist based in Mumbai
The decision of the Nobel com-mittee does not come as a sur-prise to me. Dylan should have got the Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture 20 or 30 years ago. But then, it is nev-er too late. People who listen to his songs
will know exactly what I mean.
I encountered his music when I was an impres-sionable teenager in 1965. Today, I am 69 years old. The first song of his which inspired
me was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. It pierced the heart, soul and minds of the people, especially in the heady days of the civil rights movement.
I sincerely hope that the leaders of the world understand why this man has been conferred the Nobel Prize. If they imbibe his message, they will realize that there is no need for war. Life should not be ‘uglified’ in any way.
We will celebrate Dylan’s Nobel win not with any fanfare but through a mean-ingful celebration of his writings. This Sunday, we will organize a get together to celebrate his works at Café Shillong. We have been celebrating Dylan’s birth-day since 1972. I don’t know if the man himself knows this. This was the 45th year of celebration.
Dylan is not an influence, he is an in-spiration. The light that Dylan has been carrying within him and in his songs is being seen now.
As told to Manosh Das
Dylan once claimed to have been a trapeze artiste
Painted the cover of his 1970 album, Self Portrait
After Elvis Presley died, Dylan didn’t speak for a week
Also wrote a stream-of-consciousness novel, Tarantula (1971)
Dylan appeared in a 2004 Victoria’s Secret commercial
Swedish researchers say at least 727 bio-medical papers refer to his lyrics
ON STARTING OUTJohn Hammond, the great talent scout, brought me to Columbia Records. I was nobody. It took a lot of faith to do that, and he took a lot of ridicule, but he was his own man
ON HIS CROAKY VOICESome of the music critics say I can't sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t these same critics say similar things about Tom Waits? They say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. Why don't they say those things about Leonard Cohen? What have I done to deserve this treatment?
ON WRITING Last thing I thought of was who cared about what song I was writing. I was just writing them. I didn't think I was doing anything different. I thought I was just extending the line. Maybe a little bit unruly, but I was just elaborating on situations
BOBON BOB
SUZE ROTOLO | She is the girl clinging to Dylan on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) album, his muse in the early years
Because he made teenagers interested in poetry again. He offered a route into symbolists like Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and City Lights beats like Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti
Because he rescued folk music from the grasp of bearded guys in cable-knit sweaters fantasising about being sailors or soldiers
Because he wrote ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, the world’s first anti-love song
Because he made nasty lyrics accept-able. Until Dylan released ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Positively 4th Street’, pop sin-gles had generally toed the lovey-dovey romantic party-line
Because he had the balls to take an electric blues band on stage with him at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dy-
lan’s marriage of rock music and folk literacy effectively laid the blueprint for the soundtrack to the whole counter-cultural experiment
Because The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was such a huge influence on The Bea-tles. “We just played it, just wore it out,” said George Harrison
Because that classic mid-Sixties Dylan look — bird’s-nest hair, dark shades, pipe-cleaner legs, Chelsea boots, razor-sharp cheekbones — is the coolest look ever
Because he redefined what was ac-ceptable, and possible, in pop singing. Though widely derided at the time as a tuneless whine, his style was a highly ar-ticulate, emotive blues delivery
Because he made the harmonica fash-ionable
SARA LOWNDS/DYLAN | ‘Sad Lady of the Lowlands and Sara’ — Dylan’s first wife is said to be the subject of these songs
JOAN BAEZ: Dylan’s tempestuous relationship with Baez inspired songs that spoke of their times together. Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ is said to be written for her. Baez was far more upfront in To Bobby and Diamonds and Rust
EDIE SEDGWICK | The fashion model and socialite was probably Dylan’s muse in ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ (1967) and ‘Just Like a Woman’ (1966)
No. of times he was quoted in
US legal proceedings186
The Independent
Womenwho
inspired his lyrics
If I wasn’t Bob Dylan,
I’d probably think that
Bob Dylan has a lot of
answers myself
Yet, like the times he sings about, his music too keeps changing.
The clean-shaven man who used to sling an acoustic
over his shoulder has taken country, blues, rockabilly, folk, swing and jazz in his stride
MusiCares Person of Year speech 2015
Flavorwire.com and various websites
17THE TIMES OF INDIA, MUMBAIFRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2016 TIMES SPECIAL | Hail Mr Tambourine Man*
