Self-Portrait of Bob Dylan as a Young Man
Some sixty years ago, suburbanite Bob Dylan stumbled through the door of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Dylan’s quiet life thus far gave him little in common with the legendary folk musicians of the 1930s and 40s, who penned their stories as they drifted across the United States. But even the inexperienced Dylan could recognize that those itinerant poets were the model, and so quickly began crafting himself in their image. If Dylan ever realized that everyone at the Village was doing the exact same thing, he wisely kept it to himself.
Dylan’s presentation in these early years of his career, by then still an unfinished construction, was scruffy in a manner that few believed to be intentional. Dylan donned his newly acquired workwear and often appeared unbathed, optimistic that this helped him embody a young Woody Guthrie. Close friends, if it can be said that anybody was close to Dylan, generally erred on the side of the more immediate explanation, which was that the young man neglected to clean himself without his mother around.
Dylan presented a boyish clumsiness on stage and spoke-sung into his fretting hand as he, like many young people, circulated throughout the coffeehouses and hangout spots of the Village. When Dylan raised his face to meet his audience, he scrunched his features, being as literally near-sighted as much as he lacked a clear vision for his songs. Dylan’s listeners at this point were anybody he could get in front of, and most, in recalling him, noted his awkward visual appearance first and his musicianship second, rendering his initial recordings strikingly difficult to advertise to audiences outside of New York.
The reigning queen of the folk revival, in contrast, required no explanation to her artistry as she grabbed listeners from coast-to-coast. There was vastness beneath the wrought precision of Joan Baez’s vocals and her mercurial vibrato, which shifted and rippled with a life of its own. Baez’s fluid guitar style gave her arrangements a brightness that contrasted well with their often somber lyrical material. Contemporary listeners describe Baez’s early live sets as though she subtly glowed in those dimly lit shotgun coffeehouses.
Baez’s fate as an enduring icon was sealed with an unexpected and particularly enthralling performance at the first ever Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Baez’s debut album, released a year later, would quickly become the then-best-selling folk album by a woman in history, most significant in the annals of history either because it was so lucrative for her record label or because it cemented the position of folk in popular culture. Dylan, who started performing for live audiences a few years after Baez did, had to work double-time to cut a niche worthy of such an audience.
To this end, Dylan realized the value in turning away from well-trodden traditional folk standards that his contemporaries were covering as he pivoted towards writing songs that mirrored his time. The acerbic precision and moroseness of Dylan’s initial protest songs, in contrast to the fragility underpinning his fish-out-of-water demeanor, took many by surprise. Baez was hardly the only folkie shocked that the Dylan she knew was capable of a profound song; most were still unbelieving that someone of Dylan’s stature could produce a cogent verse. Perhaps this creative tension was essential in fostering the legacy of Dylan as a man of unseen depths.
Dylan took the newfound attention from his contemporaries in arrogant stead, acting as though the God that oversaw Greenwich wrote through his hand. It did not go unnoticed that Dylan was incessantly borrowing most any element of his songs besides the words themselves – and sometimes he grabbed those too. Friends from the Village were undoubtedly not keen on hearing their melodies or original arrangements on Dylan’s albums before they themselves got a chance to record, especially as Dylan rose to stardom on the back of his supposedly self-penned material. Some looked the other way, not realizing that their popular legacy would eventually come down to a footnote in Dylan’s career. None of this should come as a surprise from the man who, rather than articulate his influences, absorbed them into his own image.
The protest songs Dylan was writing certainly could have been born out of an earnest desire to change the country through art, rendering Dylan’s collaging a utilitarian act. But even with all of his words, he still had to adopt a message. His sheltered background gave him little understanding of the political moment beyond knowing that something, somewhere, was changing. It was fortunate then that Dylan’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo was raised in a union family, and was fluent in the social messaging that Dylan possessed only a rudimentary grasp of. Dylan discovered unexpected rewards of writing protest music beyond supporting his burgeoning career if he could also impress Rotolo, or any woman within earshot, with his conscientiousness.
While Dylan was gradually appearing to his contemporaries as not quite a joke, he still utterly lacked a following. Fortune would have it that Baez was so impressed by the newfound substance of Dylan’s songs that she started bringing him up as a surprise guest at many of her shows, even past the point of it being remotely surprising to see him on her stage. Baez’s fans initially struggled to find the harmony between the masterful Baez and the haphazard Dylan, but repeated performances gave him his much-needed foot in the door, both with an audience and a new lover.
As Dylan’s interest in writing the songs of the times waned, and Baez only grew more interested in publicly leveraging her career in the name of protest, their songwriting grew thematically apart. Dylan looked upon Baez’s songwriting as trite, and Baez looked on warily at the newfound cynicism and myopia of the songs that would become Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). This didn’t necessarily push Dylan and Baez apart as companions; we can credit that to Dylan’s newfound habit of mercilessly needling Baez in front of her loved ones until she left otherwise benign conversations in tears.
When discussing his transition away from protest songs, Dylan would cite his latest belief that nobody could change the world through art, nor reach out to any one in particular, and he could only hope to depict what was inside him. When Baez was asked why she began writing her own songs in the first place, specifically protest songs, she cited Dylan’s. Perhaps the nihilism of the post-Vietnam 70s has unfairly vindicated Dylan for his sentiments, but this is assuming that Dylan actually grew alienated from protest music to begin with. It’s unknowable whether Dylan’s earnestness can be found buried in his protest songs or the introspective, impressionistic albums that followed. But that Dylan sounds at his most confident on his brattiest tracks speaks well to the expression “write what you know,” where each line sung pierces like an arrow, just as he managed in conversation.
Dylan matched the obtuseness in his newest songs with a refusal to admit anything about his past for as long as curious friends still bothered to ask. Endless non-sequiturs, mixed metaphors, and his grappling with figures from Napoleon to Santa Claus – all of this worked to capitalize on the existing confusion of onlookers. The difficulty listeners have in pinning any of Dylan’s post-electric lyrics to any lived experience was useful in rendering him as a sort of paranoia-flecked reflection for anyone who needed someone to back them in their beliefs, political or otherwise. Nobody knew anything about Dylan, so any message was possible.
The rest of Dylan’s legacy is well-attested. Dylan endured ceaseless controversy as he pivoted towards rock and roll, warping the folk idiom and songs alike of his anti-capitalist idols, like a leader of his own revolution. Or so some have depicted. But Dylan, like his folk contemporaries, was drawing heavily on the blues which had experienced its own electric revolution some two decades earlier. Emphasizing this fact, the raucous roar of the blues had been performed at the Newport Folk Festival plenty before Dylan made an appearance. The most novel innovation Dylan brought to Newport may have been not knowing how to fret an electric guitar.
In considering why Dylan shifted away from the acoustic guitar and cemented his image around supposed apoliticism and folk-rock, perhaps writers have previously obfuscated the most readily apparent explanation, in order to embolden the unknowable nature of Bob Dylan that Dylan reveled in. But imagine one could pitch a knife at Dylan, and stick him to the wall by his collar, and see him, not as a projection of the 1960s American cultural consciousness, but as himself.
Think on, not the Dylan built from the guitar up, but the person behind the sunglasses. The boy born Robert Zimmerman modelled himself on the rock and roll legends of his teenage years, glorifying their raw beauty and ephemeral existences, as young men did, or do. But by the time Dylan’s own musical career was getting off the ground, most of rock’s legends had stepped aside, and the scene was now stuffed with comparative little leaguers.
Dylan had a choice in front of him. He could continue with the recently popular but ultimately timeless folk being played at the Village, or perform the rock music he obsessed over just a couple years earlier. And Dylan possessed a literate songwriting style that suited a generation of young people trying to epitomize their own intellectual identities. These were young people who similarly shunned their earlier tastes in rock once the excitement had bled out. So perhaps rock wasn’t dead – perhaps it just needed Dylan’s kick in the pants.
Decades of eulogizing Dylan, the enduring figurehead of the folk revival, is perhaps rooted in a desire to prove that folk was different from the other popular music of the time. American folk music from its inception professed profound emotions through channeling one’s own experience within the American element. But by the release of Bringing it All Back Home (1965), the folk-rock breakthrough which followed up Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan no longer needed his idols. He made the rock poet the new model, and folk could be left to the old souls.
In trying to depict the “real” Bob Dylan beneath the idea that Dylan came to represent, I have constructed my own concept of Dylan as seen through the prism of his legacy. And in doing so, I have done what audiences have done, to Dylan’s benefit, for the last sixty years. Dylan’s legacy reflects whatever the audience requires it to reveal; thus, my most confident conclusion is that understanding Bob Dylan is ouroboric. It is a structure without a foundation, self-consuming and collapsing into itself.
Future generations of listeners will make the same mistakes as me. They will struggle to read between the lines of Dylan’s poetry and come up with something inherent. They will look fruitlessly for Dylan’s point in biographies or biopics, perhaps not realizing there was no conclusive point to begin with. But the counterculture generation some sixty years ago, seemingly, were comfortable not knowing the point. All they needed was the belief that, somewhere, the point existed.
Anecdotal references were pulled from the book Positively 4th Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña by David Hajdu, and the essay Where the Kissing Never Stops by Joan Didion.
Photo credit (thumbnail): The Guardian, photo credit (body): Far Out Magazine UK.