For many people of my generation, the musical universe began and ended with Bob Dylan.
I remember watching CBC television with my dad, who was a huge folk music fan, and seeing a scrawny waif, with a corduroy cap cocked at a weird angle, strumming a guitar that almost dwarfed him. He was wearing a weird contraption around his neck that made him appear to have been attacked by a deranged orthodontist. (It was a harmonica rack, of course.)
His appearance may have been ridiculous at first glance but when his mouth opened, the results were sublime.
Mind you, the voice took some getting used to. The songs, however, were the work of someone with a mature world vision who had something to say.
In those days, Dylan was channeling his musical hero, Woody Guthrie. He endeared himself to my father immediately with a line in Song To Woody that mentioned many of the musicians he particularly admired (“Here’s to Cisco, and Sonny and Leadbelly too”).
We bought his first album and we were hooked.
Even then, you could tell that this guy had the magic turn of phrase, (“Once loved a woman, a child I am told”) and the dead aim (Masters Of War) that would make him an icon.
His songwriting got more visionary, more symbolic and more subject to interpretation as he went along. Dylan’s classic period of the early to mid-’60s has been the focus of Martin Scorcese’s documentary, No Direction Home, that has run for the past two nights on PBS.
In fact, understanding Bob’s songs became an industry in itself and I, like many other fans, have the stacks of old magazines and books to prove it.
So, after years of avoiding the spotlight, it is fascinating to see Dylan co-operate with what appears to be almost an official video biography. Appears is the key word. As always, the mask slips only as far as Bob wants it to.
He has always been the mystery tramp who plays tricks for you, hasn’t he?
He writes incredibly evocative lyrics that are open to endless analysis and re-analysis.
One of Dylan’s best songs, Ballad Of a Thin Man, says, “something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”
Is the question addressed to the head-in-the-sand bigot who refuses to see the civil rights revolution on his doorstep, or to the parent who can’t accept his children’s different values, or to the music critics who can’t understand the clear message of lyrics that should stand for themselves?
More likely it’s addressed to the audience who want a definitive explanation of an art that can’t be defined.
Something is happening here, and, no, you aren’t supposed to know exactly what it is.
Which is probably a good thing. Now we’ll just have to dig out all those albums again and keep listening to all those brilliant, elusive songs.