The State of the Dylan AddressAn annual tradition.
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006, at 1:10 PM ET
Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, readers of Slate, distinguished Fraysters, fellow citizens. Sixty-five years ago today, our Dylan was busy being born. He's older than that now. As he becomes a contender for the cover of AARP Magazine, it is my duty to report on the state of the Dylan.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponIt is true that money doesn't talk, it swears. Nevertheless, over the last six years, we have brought new economic growth by investing in our Dylan. According to the Office of Billboard and Budget, the Dylan's last CD of new material, Love and Theft, sold 754,000 copies, and the Dylan made $1 million in royalties from the book Chronicles Vol. 1. Now we move into a new age of technology: the Dylan's iTunes music store and XM Radio's Theme Time Radio Hour, hosted by the Dylan. Add to this the upcoming Twyla Tharp dance spectacle, a Todd Haynes biopic where seven different actors will play the Dylan, a new CD ready to hit stores, Michael Gray's comprehensive and up-to-date Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and the perennial fact that he's still on the road, headin' for another joint, and it is unassailably clear: My fellow Americans, the state of the Dylan is strong. (Applause.)
Yet we are still, in the words of our founders, striving to form a more perfect Dylan. Anyone following the state of the Dylan will recognize the character in Jonathan Cott's Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, published this month. This is the Dylan who eviscerated a Time reporter and immortalized him as the clueless "Mr. Jones" of "Ballad of a Thin Man." The book charts four decades of exchanges: We get the yarn-spinning Dylan of the early '60s, the combative, elliptical drugged-out icon of the mid-'60s, the oracular converso of the late '70s, the embittered burnout of the '80s, the ailing comeback kid of the '90s, and the sexagenarian swami of the 21st century. The Dylan of XM Radio's Theme Time Radio Hour, however, is a Dylan both familiar and startling.
Listening to Dylan's show, we hear the chimes of freedom on the march. Back in 1966, Dylan was still battling uptight forces, even when confronted with the hep Nat Hentoff, who quoted him saying that people "hang out on the radio." Dylan corrected him: "I didn't say that people 'hang out' on the radio, I said they got 'hung up' on the radio." Forty years later, Dylan is definitely hanging out on the radio. There will be, as usual, the nattering nabobs of Dylanology ascribing monumental significance to every utterance he makes, but they would be missing the spirit of the show. Dylan is wisecracking, relaxed, and open on these satellite waves, rasping like Tom Waits' DJ character in Down by Law. Each show has a theme; so far they've included "Weather," "Mother," "Drinking," and "Baseball." With each theme, Dylan has an excuse to spin records he likes, intone song lyrics like a gnomic bluesman, crack jokes, and reveal minor clues about his influences, such as when he kicks off his first show with Muddy Waters' "Blow, Wind, Blow," a "Blowin' in the Wind" source that bypassed most Dylanographers. On the "Baseball" episode, he even sings "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
The Dylan, aided by an international coalition of researchers and probably reciting his patter from a tour bus or hotel room, tells a little anecdote about each artist he plays—the more obscure the better. But you can understand every word and, lo and behold, he actually seems to be enjoying himself. "Here's Sonny Rollins, covering all the bases," he rasps, introducing Rollins' "Newk's Getaway," breaking in just before Rollins' solo to interject, "Let's get goin'." By the time he gets to the third episode, "Drinking," he seems light-years away from the stonewalling Delphic oracle we know. The state of the Dylan might actually be getting mellower with age, but he is not in a malaise. Five years ago, when Mikal Gilmore asked him about his history with alcohol, Dylan snapped: "I can drink or not drink. I don't know why people would associate drinking or not drinking with anything that I do, really." But get the man behind the mic, and he'll offer his recipe for a mint julep (after Lenore from Cincinnati asked for it and he played "One Mint Julep" by the Clovers) and aphorize that "Alcohol will kill anything that's alive and preserve anything that's dead."
So, my fellow Americans, what is the state of the Dylan? He's playing around 100-odd concerts a year, has switched from guitar to piano, is snarling "Like a Rolling Stone" from the casinos of Arizona to the ruins of Italy, and keeps close watch on his iconic image. He saw the dangers of his fame 40 years ago, back when he was badgering Hentoff, and ran as far as he could from the hippies parachuting onto his lawn and the freaks digging through his garbage. But we now live in an age of possibility. Dylan at 65 can let loose, spinning records, cracking bad jokes, and revealing his affection for the odd LL Cool J and Prince tune amid his dusty old Folkways reissues.
Could this finally be the kindler, gentler Dylan? And do the Dylan's best days still lie ahead? The man who was born 65 years ago today asked how many roads a man must walk down; he still keeps the questions coming. Now we must rise to the decisive moment, to make a Dylan and a world not gone wrong, but better than any we have known. We stand at the edge of a New Morning—the morning of unfulfilled hopes and 115 dreams, where the tour is never ending. Senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the Dylan. And may you stay forever young.
Obama's Small Masterpiece of a Speech at Fort Hood
Can Death Row Convicts Have Whatever They Want for Their Last Meal?
Does Rupert Murdoch Really Hate Google?
The Crops That Are Secretly Terrible for the Planet
The Three Kinds of Liberals Who Could Bring Down the Health Care Bill
Short Sayings That Make Me Happy
Remarks from the Fray:
Bob Dylan went on tour with the Grateful Dead when the Dead were on their Touch of Gray tour. I saw them at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon.
Dylan's backup band was the Grateful Dead. Before you choke to death laughing, I have to tell you they were very good. Their somewhat unstructured playing went perfectly with Dylan's raspy voice and mumbled pronunciation of his lyrics.
Jerry Garcia did a perfect fusion of his own style and that of Jimi Hendrix for "All Along the Watchtower." Dylan seemed to really get into it. You could even understand most of the words, perhaps because we've all heard them a billion times.
Of course, he sang "Rainy Day Women 12 & 35." As you would expect, when he sang, "I would not feel so all alone. Everybody must get stoned," an enormous cloud of sweet smelling smoke arose from the stadium. It looked like a small atomic weapon had been detonated.
Happy birthday, Bob.
--Arlington2
(To reply, click here.)
Kudos for the clever structure of the "State of the Dylan", replete with song lyric references. While delivered in some respect tongue in cheek, a national address reflects the stature of Dylan belonging to all of us -- he may be the quintessential music artist of America. A young boy from the Midwest taken with the folkie ballads of the nineteenth century as well as Negro spirituals, religious music and iconography, blues and jazz. Dylan absorbed all real American music that had emerged before his birth, hymnals to Tin Pan Alley, and created a new hybrid art form that has always been classically American. Like Philip Roth, his canvas has been America and her promise, and her failure to live up to that promise. Dylan loves America and its cultural depictions, down to the Western clothing he sports presently. His persona that he projects to the public has always been rooted in American culture from the Midwest -- farmer, cowboy, folkie, bluesman, salesman, traveler, vagabond, Lincolnesque propet. He has single-handedly explored America's religious blend, from his own mild Judaism to its more Orthodox stream, to flirtations with Orthodox and fundamentalist Christianity. His music really reflects America's public religion, a deistic basis of faith in a natural God, but also our cultural fascination with a judging and at times harsh and at times loving God. His religion is rooted in morality, a civic and public morality. [...]
I find so many critics of Dylan trying to portray him as a poser, when in reality I think they missed his immediate appeal -- his distinctly American voice, not only in his poetry but in his actual voice, its averageness and its emotional honesty. This seems particularly so when one considers that the literary quality of much of his canon is lost on the majority of the public who listens to a Dylan song -- but not its themes. Nor should one be surprised by Dylan's relative conservatism -- he is not a radical and has never been so, other than in creating new musical forms. His vision, even in the sixties, was reflective of the mood and vision of the times and this country, like him, at war with itself. Dylan has done in music what Roth has done in literature -- taken all of America and reflected it back to us through an amazing prism.
It is hard to believe Dylan is 65. He still seems as vital musically today as in 1960. He still writes with passion, intellect, humor and insight. He has a body of original work unrivaled by any American artist other than perhaps Gershwin or Ellington. And he continues to do what he does very much in a humble approach; while other contemporaries make grand "farewell" tours or high budget, high gross concerts, Dylan follows his muse and his fans.
One day Dylan will have his true critical appreciation, apart from the fanatical interest in his personas or masks, but for his pure artistry and poetic voice, for the unrivaled contribution he has made to our national cultural heritage. For now, for today, it is enough to say Happy Birthday, Thank You, and Many More.
--lawmarks
(To reply, click here.)
Time for St. Dylan to get off the cross ... and it's equally time for harried pop culture chroniclers to quit wallowing in the constructed ironies about the spokesman for the youth culture getting old and oddly more cryptic in his advancing years. Greil Marcus has pretty much exhausted every possible Big Idea and ancillary literary tidbit in his four and half decades worth of impressionistic remarks about Dylan's work that the gathering vapors and gas he's summoned up in ostensible praise of him in fact obscures what it was which attracted us in the first place.
The cottage industry of Dylan books has performed the basic function of the buzz kill. I say this as someone who has offered his diminished opinion over many, many years; call it a matter of recovery, but it was important that I maintain a memory, rich and vivid, of the excitement I had over discovering the snaking surrealism of the lyrics , and became aware that my contant inspection of the work, obsessive, detailed, repititive, obscene in its relish, was making the art vanish , and the pleasure along with it.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
(5/25)