I wish I could get away with a jew-fro but unfortunately I always end up looking like Ronald McDonald. Until recently, Bob Dylan has eluded me. I had heard the greatest hits, the standards, but nothing really connected. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 made it on to some of my earliest mix tapes but only because I loved his play on the word "stoned" and the fact that you could hear people cheering him on, like they do with Muddy Waters on Mannish Boy. I had seen Scorsese's brilliant attempt to get to the bottom of Mr. Zimmerman. Still, it didn't click for me. I was viewing No Direction Home for the filmmaking. The day after Heath Ledger died, Fozzie and I went to see I'm Not There. My ticket, once again, primarily had to do with filmmaking, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, and of course, Heath.
Haynes transported me into a world of myth and magic unlike any I'd ever dreamed of. He showed me how Dylan wasn't blowin in the wind, he was the wind. Hell, he still is. I was enamored with the idea that he wasn't a protest singer, or a voice of a generation, but a storyteller. A very good one. So good that his own story has remained shrouded in mystery and continues to be retold by countless interpreters. It seems no one will ever know the full story. That's what makes him so compelling. Heath was difficult to watch, as we were all still mourning. But when Ms. Blanchett held the frame, synapses in my brain fired in a way they never had. She redefined my understanding of the way things are, and should be. A woman playing a man is irrelevant to me. That's about as obtuse as saying you're voting for Barack because he's black or Hillary because... well I don't know why you'd do that. What she does with such precision and delicacy is show us a Dylan in crisis. At a crossroads. A man split between who everyone thinks he is and who he thinks he wants to be.
The experience I had at the film was the seed for a number of incubations: The Foz hands me Greil Marcus's book Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At the Crossroads. My sister's iPod in her car shuffles to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. My friend, Kahn, leaves a number of Dylan cd's in my car. And finally, youtube provides me with excellent search results for "Bob Dylan". Let's start with quite possibly the greatest 49 seconds ever captured on film. With every word containing such power, arrogance, and tangible friction, it's no wonder lesser mortals blog about him.
When the kick drum announces the first chord of what Rolling Stone Magazine calls the greatest pop song ever written, my heart explodes, my body jerks, and my soul screams, "YES!" I've since compiled a playlist of my favorite Dylan videos so that I can readily access them when I'm hankering for a fix.
In his book, Greil Marcus discusses Dylan with a philosopher's tongue, rambling on glowing tangents and following threads to their passionate conclusions. One notion I love is that no matter what Bob Dylan does, he will never be able to escape the cultural perception of who he is. Whether he likes it or not, Blowin' In The Wind will be the first song mentioned in his obituary and he will historically be referred to as a protest singer. This causes me to think about how we all form our perceptions about one another. Dylan didn't begin with songs like Blowin' In The Wind and it is certainly not his best song. But it's what people remember. Before that, he was trying to be Woody Guthrie. Before that, he was trying to be a leather-clad rock and roller. But Blowin' In The Wind struck a chord with the country, and created an expectation in the ears of those who became his fans after hearing it.
We all have parts of ourselves that those around us use to define who we are. What we all fail to recognize is that those parts make up a gestalt. Thinking of Bob Dylan as only a protest singer with a guitar is like seeing a man in a wheelchair only as handicapped. Maybe Dylan doesn't want a label at all. Someone like Madonna reinvents herself not to avoid labels, but to have the label of "reinvention". When Dylan shifts gears, its because he feels like it. Dylan's brilliance is that he refused to give you what you paid for. Sure, that pissed a lot of people off, and still does. But you're ticket doesn't say Mr. Tambourine Man it says Bob Fucking Dylan.
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