FOREVER YOUNG…
The blurb looked promising – a television play about a boarding house full of wacky misfits. Obsessed as I was at the time with the entire beat & hipster mythos, the prospect of an evening in communion with les bas fonds was a much more attractive prospect than two hours of History revision.
43 years later I remember only the title of the play – The Madhouse on Castle Street - & the name of one of the performers, a skinny, artfully unkempt folksinger named Bob Dylan who sat on the stairs & sung a song called The Swan on the River. He was utterly captivating. He shrugged & twitched & shuffled & he sung in a dry, creaky, nasal voice, a distillation of all the black & white American blues’n’roots singers to whom I was utterly in thrall at the age of 16.
Most beguilingly, he seemed impossibly young – a cross between a cherub & a beatnik, as Robert Shelton famously described him in the New York Times. And that extraordinary synthesis of downy youth & road-wise savvy was the ultimately seductive factor. Suddenly my own callow gawkiness, my shifty, spiky persona, part guilt, part shame, all self-conscious awkwardness, was transformed from handicap into style. I already had the guitar. All I needed now was a corduroy cap, a harmonica harness & a tankful of attitude.
The cap I bought at Millett’s, the army surplus & industrial clothing store. The harmonica harness I twisted out of two coat hangers. The attitude I synthesised from On the Road, hours of careful observation of the art students who sat amongst the tombstones playing guitars in Kingston churchyard, &, of course, the master himself.
Initially, I was on my own in suburban Kingston-upon-Thames. Few of my friends had seen that early television appearance & those who had remembered only a scruffy oik who couldn’t sing in tune. Meanwhile, I hid my comb, distressed my clothing & learned how to play barre chords. For a short while, I confounded friend & stranger alike. Dismissing them all as irremediably square, I felt myself to be – for that very short while – the real deal. And then, when the first Dylan album arrived in the shops, suddenly, far from being a prophet due honour in his own time, I was merely another shallow copyist clambering aboard an overloaded bandwagon.
Sadly, any early credibility as a visionary that might have been my due took a further caning when, in 1964, Dylan summarily shed the dusty Guthrie garments & emerged as a polka-dot-&-Rayban-wearing post-Swinging London butterfly. I was horrified. My anguish was compounded by the impenetrable & serpentine lyrics that took the place of the radical Americana that had orchestrated nascent student protest in the States & Britain. However, by the time Dylan had broken the hearts of the homebrew folkies & alienated the politicos, I’d boned up on my Rimbaud & Verlaine & I’d bought a bass guitar so I was on side for Like a Rolling Stone & the electrical storm that carried Dylan forward into his next incarnation.
As the years passed my musical tastes broadened & deepened. Additionally, I must have managed a little – largely accidental – growing up. My perception of Bob Dylan & his works adopted an objectivity of perspective & with that some hierarchy of taste & judgement established itself.
However, the man’s iconic status was in no way diminished. Eschewing heroes as I did (my natural anarchism running deep), my relationship with Dylan as a key figure in that movement of souls that gathered us up in the ‘60s & dumped us, high & dry, somewhere in the middle of the ‘70s was never one of acolyte. Rather he represented for me a symbol of detached individualism. He followed his own trail, not because some imp of perversity had him flouting the protocols, but because he was driven by creative forces over which he had no control. In an era of largely spurious non-conformity, in which fashion & popular cultural diktat functioned significantly at the behest of commercial concerns, Dylan walked alone. Drawn by his eccentric star, he entered the forbidden realms of country music, recorded utterly unsuitable cover versions, embraced the suffocating sterility of fundamentalist Christianity, & then – his voice shot & with blood in his eye – he returned to the timeless blues, ballads, rags & hollers of his seminal years.
Ever the maverick, evading the obsessive efforts of the media finally to bind him to the ground like Gulliver, Dylan has maintained triumphantly an inviolable uniqueness amongst his many peers. Inhabiting as he has for so long a bewildering multitude of roles & identities, each drawing deep on America’s rich resources of popular culture, he has enjoyed a measure of creative freedom & self-determination experienced by very few artists.
I haven’t seen Dylan live for nearly 30 years. My last sighting was at the ‘hippies’ graveyard’ concert at Blackbushe Airport in 1978. I’ve been tempted to shell out for increasingly expensive concert tickets each time he has toured. But somehow, after all these years, from beatnik cherub to ageing troubador, it’s simply enough to know that he’s out there.
10 DYLAN SONGS – A PATTERAN PANTHEON
Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Mr Tambourine Man
Like A Rolling Stone
Idiot Wind
Jokerman
Not Dark Yet
Delia
Mississippi
9:54:47 AM 
|
|
