HOW DOES IT FEEEEEEEELLLLL? Mark Steyn on Bob Dylan:
When he emerged in the early Sixties, he was supposedly a drifter who had spent years on the backroads of America picking up folk songs from wrinkly old-timers, and who provoked Robert Shelton of The New York Times to rhapsodize about “the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.” Actually, he’d toiled instead at the University of Minnesota – a Jewish college boy, son of an appliance store manager. The folk songs he knew had been picked up not from any real live folk, but from the records of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Ramblin’ Jack had rambled over from Brooklyn, dropping his own Jewish name – Elliott Adnopoz – en route. “There was not another sonofabitch in the country that could sing until Bob Dylan came along,” pronounced Ramblin’ Jack, with a pithiness that belies his sobriquet. “Everybody else was singing like a damned faggot.” It’s one of the more modest claims made on Dylan’s behalf.
His first album was composed almost entirely of traditional material. But by the second he was singing his own compositions, pioneering the musical oxymoron of the era, the “original folk song”: No longer did a folk song have to be something of indeterminate origin sung by generations of inbred mountain men after a couple of jiggers of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. Now a “folk song” could be “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or “The Times They Are A- Changin'”. I’m reminded of that episode of, appropriately enough, “The Golden Girls”, when Estelle Getty comes rushing in shouting, “The hurricane’s a-comin’! The hurricane’s a-comin’!”
“Ma!” Bea Arthur scolds her. “A-comin’?”
With Dylan, the songwriting styles they were a-regressin’, the slyly seductive archaisms and harmonica obbligato designed to evoke the integrity of American popular music before the Tin Pan Alley hucksters took over.
“Without Bob the Beatles wouldn’t have made Sergeant Pepper, the Beach Boys wouldn’t have made Pet Sounds,” said Bruce Springsteen. “U2 wouldn’t have done ‘Pride in the Name of Love’,” he continued, warming to his theme. “The Count Five would not have done ‘Psychotic Reaction’. There never would have been a group named the Electric Prunes.”
But why hold all that against him? If rock lyrics wound up as clogged and bloated as Dylan’s pericardial sac, that’s hardly his fault. Bob, for his part, has doggedly pursued his quest to turn back the clock. He’s on the new Sopranos soundtrack CD, singing Dean Martin’s “Return To Me”, complete with chorus in Italian. Just the latest reinvention: Bob Dino, suburban crooner.
When I began my obsession with rock as a kid in the 1970s, my father had literally thousands of big band records, including LPs, 78s and ultra-rare shellac “transcriptions” of radio recordings (from when AM radio meant Glenn Miller, not Rush Limbaugh), reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes of the big bands stored in the finished basement of our suburban home. With the oldest material I was listening being from the middle of the previous decade, it seemed so bizarre at the time to think he was listening to music that was recorded prior to World War II, stuff that was 30 or 40 years old. It sounded so alien, melodies, chord progressions and sentiments trapped from behind the pre-rock Berlin Wall of pop culture.
Earlier this month when I was on the East Coast, I stopped by the house of the other guitarist in my college-era rock band. We played drums and bass in his basement home recording studio behind his son (named Dylan), now 17, as he and his girlfriend harmonized beautifully on Beatles tunes such as “Dear Prudence” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” He’s a high-tech kid; we discussed various Photoshop applications, video making on Adobe After Effects, and multitrack recording on Apple’s Garage Band app.
But if it seemed strange to me as a teenager to hear my old man’s tunes from 30 years ago, how is it that kids today think nothing of listening to music from a half century ago? It’s fascinating that even as audio and video production technology advances ever-forward, the Internet has completely fractured mass culture, and the pre-Internet icons such as the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones, and at the movies, Batman, Superman, the Marvel Comics gang, Star Wars, Star Trek and James Bond continue to hold sway. How else can Hollywood and what’s left of the major record labels continue to reliably sell to large audiences? But how long will pop culture remain so freeze-dried?