The opinion that I have that probably annoys the most amount of people (Bob Dylan)

The opinion that I have that probably annoys the most amount of people has two components. The first is that between 1962 and 1966 Bob Dylan had the greatest run of any popular musician in modern history. The second is that nothing he made after that is any use. Every three or so years I make the decision that I will listen to Blonde on Blonde, Together Through Life, The Basement Tapes, everything in between and it will all begin to make sense and I will appreciate versions of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ that I do not recognise until it’s nearly over, but every time I’ve tried this, none of it has convinced me that there is not an absolute break in 1966.

The earnest folkies who shouted ‘Judas’ when Dylan broke out the electric guitar are legendary in the history of philistine audiences who missed the point. We see them as uptight, backwards, earnest in that slightly off-putting way some of the heads in Pete Seeger’s orbit could be, enemies of individual expression (possibly Moscowites?) and though I’m obviously not necessarily among them - I do include Highway 61 Revisited here - I think there is a lot more to the substance of their critique than is conventionally allowed.

The first and most important thing I get out of Dylan is the feeling that you’re catching a glimpse of the sheer vibe of whatever universal force he is the conduit for. A tiny minority of artists are capable of just getting this vital receiver in tune, either at the beginning of a short career (Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain) or at the end of a long one (Martin Scorcese, Hilary Mantel) and those who land it just have to do justice to it until it burns out, or whatever confluence of forces that brought it to them closes. Joan Baez has a story about the writing pouring out of Dylan around this time, to the extent that she was able to peel a few off and perform and record them without him noticing (though of course there were other dynamics at play here). I do not have much to say about what it is that makes these albums great other than just the quantity and scope and power of songs like ‘Desolation Row’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, ‘Love Minus Zero / No Limit’, ‘Girl From the North Country’, over such a compressed timeframe, a feat that I think only billy woods is coming close to matching or exceeding, and of course in an idiom that is very different.

Whenever I’m having any discussion about what an artist’s responsibilities should be, I always present the disclaimer that in the final instance, they always have to be allowed to go their own way. I say the same thing when talking about a future state in which private property is abolished, or at least no longer represents such an insuperable blocker on so many people’s lives, and there is some parallel at work when I say ‘oh of course freedom of assembly, speech, democratic elections are all non-negotiable’. Some instances of aesthetic greatness are condensed out of getting something you did not necessarily want and being forced to sit in that ambivalence and work at finding yourself in it. Perhaps the abolition of the sphere of necessity will be characterised by that same sense of negation, but in the less romantic frame of mind in which I spend far more of my time I do not think individual freedom can or should be an absolute. My own preferences are for artists which are, willingly or otherwise, in dialogue with their place and time. Solipsism, self-indulgence, gimmickry, technique brought to the level that it becomes indistinguishable from hygiene, are things which characterise a lot of the books, films or poems which turn me off, and it might just be possible that for the period of time Dylan was at what I regard as his high-point, that was the period of time within which something like him was possible and it was not afterwards. After all, the second crucial aspect of Dylan’s work for me is that he generates some of the most profound and moving reflections on injustice (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’), the possibility of its abolition (‘When the Ship Comes In’, ‘Chimes of Freedom’), what I regard as the definitive musical statement on intellectual or artistic engagement (‘A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall’), and somehow, in his fucking twenties, a world-weary prophecy of his moment’s failure (‘Song to Woody’, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, his slow cover of ‘This Land is Your Land’).

From reading Van Ronk and other histories of the time we know that Dylan is of course a function of his context. The folk revival that had been underway for some years after he got to New York. His propelling himself into that scene by making proprietary use of its ethic that was collectivist both logistically - because it was about collecting, sharing and versioning old songs - as well as politically; a lot of these people were Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists. Hoovering up Brecht, Rimbaud and others Rotolo put him onto. Further bolstering his myth by dramatising his turn away from this scene in two bitter songs that I also number among his best (‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Positively 4th Street’). When I say there is something dishonest in the iconic status Dylan pulls down for himself here I mean to say something as evaluative as it is pejorative. Dylan represents this bridging gap into a more mindless rock n’ roll individualism.

As I write I realise that this is a branch off the story Adam Curtis tells in Hypernormalisation and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, the one about the sixties laying the groundwork for the epoch of self-absorption and narcissism to follow. (Then again could we not say that this sweeping up of influences into a tall-tale swirling mass of inputs is fundamental to American art? The more we look for Walt Whitman in American cultural production since the late nineteenth century the more we see him, Thomas Pynchon, Hermann Melville, the Coen Brothers, Tarantino, Don DeLillo, Kendrick Lamar…) This is too easy of course, and focuses on the trajectories of a lot of successful middle-class entertainers, hippies and businessmen rather than the broader forces mobilising for social transformation being beaten back, defeated, or even the bought off working class, where this story could move beyond its limitations as a moral fable, but the defining failure, or the point I get to in Dylan’s discography when my determination start to flag and I am beginning to realise that the result will be the same as every other attempt I have made to date, is around the time I get to his work with The Band. This for me the nadir of music: classic rock, with its flatulent, witless licks after every lyric, alternately blaring or twiddling organs, the word baby, Anglophilia, fade-outs, glossy production, the only group I like that comes out of this is Creedence Clearwater Revival and this could be in large part because I’m reading them retrospectively through The Minutemen. It is just a crashing shame that Dylan goes from the rawness, the rootedness, the invention and the engagement of his early career to wind up doing eight minute versions of ‘I Shall Be Released’ with guys who in a documentary about their farewell show talk to the camera about the rigours of ‘the road, man’.