By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-01-22 17:56:24 | Updated at 2025-01-22 20:51:53
3 hours ago
Millions of young men once wanted to be Bob Dylan. God forgive me, I was one of them. Lots of them are dead now, and almost none of them, least of all me, have the frantic hair, let alone the slender waists, of our Dylan-worshipping days.
I tell you this because the era of Dylan will soon be over, and those who come after it will find it impossible to understand.
It is most beautifully expressed on the cover of what we then called an LP: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which I think I first saw, aged 14, at Christmas 1965.
In this picture, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is walking down a scruffy New York City street in the slush.
It is obviously freezing cold. He is pretty unappealing, and seems to have got his wardrobe out of a skip. But he has got the girl.
That girl, the enchanting Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo is holding tightly on to his left arm with both of hers, while smiling (he isn’t smiling).
They say that if you’ve never been embraced by a woman in this particular way, you haven’t really lived, and I think this is true.
So that’s the key to it all. Pseudo-intellectual, scrawny, radical, would-be poets can get the girl. You don’t have to be a sporting her or classically handsome or well-dressed. You don’t even have to have a car.
The cover of the LP The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with the singer walking down a New York street in the freezing cold with his girlfriend, American artist Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo
Some of Dylan’s best songs were about his long, disastrous affair with Suze. You can still feel the passion and loss in them despite his unappealing moaning voice.
But there is something else as well, or at least there was.
I first heard him singing on the tiny ivory-coloured Ferranti transistor radio I shared with my brother, permanently tuned in those days to Wonderful Radio London, 266 on the Medium Wave. This was one of the pirate stations which hypnotised an entire British generation and, in my view, changed the world for the worse.
But, like the children who listened to the Pied Piper, and as Robert Browning put it ‘tripping and skipping, ran merrily after the wonderful music with shouting and laughter’, we were entranced as we hurried off to our moral and political doom.
In those days you tended to hear of the new music stars before you read of them, and I remember assuming at first that the man’s name was ‘Bob Dillon’. Not that it mattered, because his real name was in fact Robert Zimmerman.
Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.
It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin' in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).
But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.
Timothee Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him
Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.
He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.
Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.
They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.
The beguiling Suze had a similar background. She was a cradle Communist, whose Italian-American parents were both committed members of the US Communist Party. This involved much more than paying dues. Her mother even worked as a courier for the Communist-backed International Brigades in the Spanish civil war.
It was after he met Suze that Dylan started singing - a lot - about the threat of nuclear war, and racial segregation, and the other Left-wing causes he seemed to have joined.
And then he left them, switching away from politics and protests to a completely different sort of music.
It was after Dylan met Suze that he started singing about the threat of nuclear war, racial segregation and other Left-wing causes he seemed to have joined
The film portrays this as just a row in the music world, over whether folk-singers should use electric instruments. But I have always thought it was about politics.
Millions of Dylan’s political fans regarded him then and later as a lost leader, even as a betrayer, and the great cloud of myth which has surrounded him ever since has something to do with this.
What is Dylan and what was he? The revered Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, a major expert in literature, has argued that some of his work is actually serious poetry.
I’m inclined to agree, though I suspect I misheard a lot of the greatest lines such as ‘the ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face’.
Not being an expert on poetry I cannot work out if it means something profound, or whether it means nothing at all but is just beautifully expressed.
For certain, it was all a lot better than ‘I wanna hold your hand’, ‘painted black’, ‘twist and shout!’, ‘I hope I die before I get old’, or the rest of the stuff we had to put up with, which really oughtn’t to have lasted at all.
Even so, I am fairly sure Dylan (now 83) is mocking us all and has been for decades, turning up at concerts and cheerfully mangling his best-known songs so that devoted fans struggle to recognise them.
His best joke of all was to accept the Nobel Prize and then not turn up to collect it, making the award committee look absurd.
They’d decided to worship superstardom, presumably in the hope it would rub off on them. And the superstar pocketed their praise and sauntered off without looking back.
But somewhere inside this puzzling figure there is a real person, the actual Robert Zimmerman who grew up amid the bleak iron hill ranges of Minnesota, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline, and who occasionally wrote about his homeland.
For me his greatest, truest song will always be North Country Blues about the death of an iron ore town, whose people are told their mine must close because iron is ‘much cheaper down in the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing’.
It contains in a few short verses a complete tragedy, fully understood by its heroine, left alone with three children, surrounded by thousands of bleak square miles of freezing forest and lakes, with nowhere else to go and winter coming on. When all the rest is forgotten, I think it may survive.
