25 May 2024
The big event of the week was of course that Bob Dylan celebrated his 83rd birthday yesterday (if anybody that age still actually celebrates birthdays).
It seems impossible to believe that it’s some 65 years since he left the mining towns of the mid-West and headed for New York with his guitar and complete confidence. What’s even more impossible to believe is that, like Keith Richards, he’s survived so many drugs that are supposed to leave us all toothless and dead.
I first came across him in a TV play called ‘Madhouse on Castle Street’. The BBC – as was the policy in those days – wiped the tape and recorded something else on top of it so no copy of it remains and the Holy Grail of his fans is to find somebody who’d taped it as it was shown and has the tape in an attic somewhere. The only thing that sticks in my mind about the play is that one of the characters didn’t say anything but just sat on the stairs and picked away at a guitar and I liked his music so much that I remembered his name.
Actually, I misremembered his name and thought for a while he was Bob Yellin of the Greenbriar Boys but a friend then lent me Dylan’s first two albums. I wasn’t that impressed by his voice and returned the records but the songs stayed with me and, looking back, I wonder if it was the sheer energy of his first album. A guy in his late teens had the chutzpah to take old blues and folk songs, make enough changes to get his name on the record as writer, pick up a guitar and harmonica and blast them into the microphone with the power of a Little Richard.
His second album was mostly songs he’d written himself although, even back then, he was more a lyricist than a composer and re-used old tunes for some of his words (‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ uses the tune of ‘Lord Franklin’ and ‘Masters of War’ uses ‘Nottamun Town’). It also included what’s probably his most famous song, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, although this was made famous by Peter, Paul & Mary.
His disdain for reporters and press conferences became obvious very early when he gave answers to stupid questions, One hack asked him how many real folksingers he thought there were and he came straight back with “A hundred and thirty seven” (if I remember the number correctly).
He’s been through umpteen incarnations and still has the ability to surprise everyone by producing a good album after years of rubbish. His voice hasn’t improved on the way and is now so wrecked that his latest albums involve his doing little more than talking his way through the lyrics to the accompaniment of a cello, a guitar and soft percussion.
His lyrics have always been his real strength and he is often a sublime wordsmith. He even got a Nobel prize for literature and what is widely believed to be his neuro-divergence / Asperger’s left him not knowing how to respond. He’s certainly never given any signs that he cares what anybody else thinks of him and even a “thank you” at the end of a gig is now pretty rare.
There is a theory that, because he often changes words and adds or omits new verses in performance, he’s a perfectionist and constantly trying to get exactly the right word; others (like me) thinks he just tries different words because it seemed a good idea at the time. He sometimes even seems not to decide on a word until he’s singing it: in ‘Series of Dreams’, he sings “Past the – tree of smoke” and there’s a microsecond pause before “tree” as if he didn’t know what the word was going to be until he sang it.
The other argument against perfectionism is that he’s written some really terrible lyrics and just left them as they are. Strange really how he’s become so godlike to some fans. Why His Bobness and not, say, The Boss?
Anyway, Bobbie, happy birthday for yesterday.
The other, comparatively minor, bit of news this week was that we’re going to have a general election on the 4th of July, Independence Day in America. Perhaps we can remember all the achievements the Conservatives have wrought over the last 14 years and choose our own independence from them. But let’s recall their achievements before we vote: Dave introduced the disastrous austerity years and then asked the wrong question about Brexit, thereby getting the wrong answer, and resigned; Theresa drew red lines which were likely to be drawn in blood in Northern Ireland and resigned; Boris didn’t take Covid seriously until far too late and resigned; Liz tanked the economy and resigned and Sunak vowed to “Stop the Boats” by deporting people to Rwanda. This last pledge has been so effective that the thought of being deported to Rwanda has led to a record number of people crossing to the UK so far in 2024.
The day after his announcement of the date, all four of the serious papers – the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times – ran banner headlines on the front page that used the words “bet” or “gamble”, despite Sunak’s new pledges to delay his £500m scheme to fly nasty people to Rwanda till after the election, and to stop his brilliant no-smoking plans that would have been so profitable for the free-black-market.
Sunak even stooped so low as to visit a warehouse where a number of people wearing hi-vis jackets so they looked like workers asked some questions. It turns out they were actually Conservative councillors and asked really tough questions like “Do you agree you’re the best person to be the next prime minister?” (Nobody asked if we are all better off after 14 years of Conservative misrule but we all know the answer to that: according to umpteen surveys and analyses, it’s “No, unless we were already rich and overpaid in 2010”.)
This was after he’d abused Keir Starmer and the Labour party for a lack of policies and solutions to all the problems that had arisen during the last 14 years of his own party’s government. I sometimes think Sunak isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box.
Lesser Mutterings 