Better Late than Never

That Bob Dylan has attained the Biblically-allotted span of years is itself remarkable, given the life he’s lived, but mere survival is the very least of his achievements. As a reason for celebrating his seventieth birthday, it is of little interest to anyone but his nearest and dearest. Anyone else who has lived through the latter half of the twentieth century should be able to come up with several much better ones. My own are a bit unusual, because – despite having been a teenager in the Seventies – his music was largely unknown to me till I was middle-aged and Dylan himself was an old man.

Growing up in Sri Lanka, where records were hard to come by, TV didn’t exist and the one State-controlled radio station seemed to know nothing of Dylan apart from ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, I managed to become a to-the-core rock fan, rock geek and even a rock musician without every seriously listening to Bob Dylan. Absurd, but these things happen. Our handful of hopeful Colombo longhairs, looked upon with dislike by adult authority and out of the mainstream of our contemporaries’ musical taste, passed precious albums from hand to hand (singles were never even thought of) and transcribed them, much worn, to tape as soon as cassette technology made that possible. My family weren’t rich enough to afford lots of LPs, so I was largely dependent on this network for new music. It just so happened that none of my friends were keen on Dylan; it was usually either heavy rock or campy Broadway fodder for them. And so I went through my teens without ever connecting with His Bobness. 

Like I said: absurd.

Mind you, the little I heard of his work didn’t encourage me to investigate further. I couldn’t dig what anyone saw in that voice – not just nasal and raspy, but with that nasty insinuating tone to it, like he was sneering at us. And when he took the clothespeg off his nose for ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’, it sounded like he was baying instead. A woman would have had to be nuts to lay across that big brass bed (but of course, as we now know, quite a few of them were).

There were other things not to like, as well. That damn’ harmonica, for a start. And the songs seemed to have too many verses. The music behind the vocal was often a poorly-recorded, shoddily-produced mess. ‘Hurricane’ was the first Dylan song I honestly liked; I liked the way he sang it too, but it kept getting faster and faster till he was just gabbling the words to get them out, and the notoriously lousy Street Legal production turned it all to mush anyway... You’ll note that these were impressions gained from a handful of songs, mostly heard on the radio. I was still ignorant, still saying the ignorant things that people who don’t get Dylan say about him, like ‘Bob Dylan is a great poet but he can’t sing,’ and ‘I like his songs when other people do them.’ Did I mean Peter, Paul and Mary’s saccharine rendition of ‘Blowin' in the Wind’, I wonder, or Manfred Mann’s cover of ‘Quinn the Eskimo’? What the hell did I mean?

Bob and I had a couple of near misses. Aged about twenty-one, I somehow contrived to learn all of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and often sang and played it thereafter on appropriate occasions. How did this happen? It must have been included on a tape somebody compiled for me. I liked the trippy words, man... Then, a couple of years later, I heard ‘Isis’ for the first time. I was surprised to be told it was by Dylan (I’d never heard that version of The Voice before), and the lyrics sounded intriguing. But this happened at a social gathering of some kind, and I couldn’t listen properly because I was in a conversation and couldn’t break away.

And so it went, until I was about (I blush to confess) forty and at a serious disjuncture in my life. After a painful separation and divorce, followed by illness, I had moved to Dubai to start again. I was pretty bruised but not without hope; I also had, as a result of that divorce, a record collection to rebuild. Unlike most men of forty I was not much interested in replacing long-cherished teenage favourites. My rock-geekhood had metastasized over the years and my tastes with it, so I was now qualified to assemble a representative selection of the best rock and roots-music albums of the last forty-odd years – modified by personal taste, naturally, and helped along not a little by a subscription to Q. It was at this time that I started listening intensively to Bob Dylan. It is when I first heard Blood on the Tracks.

Ah, do I see you nod knowingly? You’ve been there, then. You’re a Dylan fan who’s been through a happy marriage followed by a nasty separation, and you know just what I’m talking about. All the thoughts and feelings you ever wanted to express through those years and the ones that followed, as well as all the ones you never dared confess to, are on that album, presented in a way that makes you live through them intensely all over again – and be drained, as well as a little healed, by the experience.

As for Dylan the artist, I got him immediately, of course. It would be more correct to say that he got me, just as he will get anyone who is willing to put aside first impressions and listen without prejudice. I mean, come on – after forty years and forty thousand imitators, how shocking or fundamentally offputting can a funny voice and a scratchy harmonica still be? What do these people do when they hear Tom Waits? Have a seizure?

Still, perhaps the holdouts are on to something, because it changes you, being got by Bob Dylan. As the allegedly born-again report of their own experiences, the whole world looks different afterwards. I think the effect is the same no matter what age it happens at, though your reaction will surely be more vigorous if you are younger. For a near-codger like me, discovering Dylan was largely a case of hearing hard-learnt truths piercingly and humorously stated; for someone in their teens and early twenties, it’s probably more like hearing the news.

There’ll be enough analyses of Bob Dylan, his music and his influence being written and read today. I don’t plan to add to them – beyond stating that, in my considered opinion, he is the greatest artist of the second half of the twentieth century. I came to this conclusion all by myself, but have since seen it repeated in a quality British newspaper. To those who would challenge the assertion, I reply as the author of that article did: if not Dylan, then who? Answers on a postcard, please.

Today, this is what I am celebrating: the fact that, about twenty years too late by personal chronology, I finally discovered, experienced and appreciated the genius of Bob Dylan. It was a near thing, and my life would be considerably poorer if it hadn’t happened. I’m celebrating my lucky escape.

 ¶

To my friends who still resist listening to him, I say: you guys don’t know what you’re missing. And besides, you’re wrong. He’s not a lousy singer and his songs never sound better when covered by other people, they almost invariably sound worse – you can count on some limb of sense or feeling having been amputated. Bob Dylan is not a great poet – his verse struggles on the page – but he is a great songwriter, the greatest of all time. And then there’s that allegedly terrible voice. Nobody else can articulate the scope of meaning and depth of emotion that live in a Bob Dylan song anything like as well as the man who wrote it. It doesn’t even end there: as an interpreter of lyrics, other people’s as well as his own, Bob Dylan has – when he can be bothered – no equal. No Fitzgerald, Sinatra or Caruso could ever do what he did routinely in his pomp; none of them would ever dare to tackle lyrics as artistically dense as ‘Visions of Johanna’ or ‘Tangled up in Blue’, or work from an emotional palette as broad as that which includes ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Every Grain of Sand’, ‘Romance in Durango’, ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. Remember when Nina Simone covered Just Like A Woman and got the words all wrong? Jack White did, and poked well-deserved fun at her tin-eared butchery of Dylan in Little Acorns.

Popular singers before and after Dylan sound completely different. Ever wonder why?

There are sublime aesthetic experiences to be had throughout Dylan’s recorded oeuvre – literally dozens of them. There is a shedload of insight and wisdom, most eloquently expressed. There are barrels of laughs. His tunes, of course, are largely unoriginal – adapted from the commonwealth of twentieth-century song – but if you object to that you had better quit listening to jazz, too. As with jazz musicians, it’s the use to which he puts those tunes that counts.

There is something more than this as well, something that makes the experience of listening to Dylan qualitatively different from that of listening to music made by other musicians. It has had its imitators and its vassals, but the original is still matchless, unique. Still, it comes with a price of entry attached: you may have to rearrange your preconceptions before you can appreciate it. That, of course, is just what great art is supposed to do. You will be a better person for the change, and a whole world of music beyond Dylan’s own marvellously catholic oeuvre will open up to you as well. Could there be any better reason for celebrating anyone’s seventieth birthday?