Dylan – A personal history

  On a busy afternoon I received a text message on my phone from my friend, which I thought was a prank.  Bob Dylan wins the Nobel winner for literature. Then there were frenzied phone calls from friends of college network. It took some time to sink in. I had a nice hearty laugh. All you magic realists, Polish/Hungarian writers with un-pronounceable names, the little known poets who make political statements in obscurity. Eat your heart out.  Your time has come and gone. It is almost as though one among us, shorn of pretensions, has won it, finally.

            This was the original vagabond who cast a spell on the grass-induced stupor of our youth. The listeners of Dylan were a niche crowd. Bearded worthies in jeans and kurta, who rolled joints, read Camus and generally led an aimless life full of existential angst. (Most of them could be spotted driving swanky cars and leading professional lives today: that’s a different story altogether) They were the cerebral ones with heightened musical sensibility. It was nice to belong to that crowd. It was also a means to escape from reality of a rural, conservative society.

   For a generation that has access to Youtube videos and internet, it may not be very easy to understand how difficult it was to collect Bob Dylan songs in early 80s living in the outback of a Kerala town. I remember getting hold of an NRI friend who had the LPs of Dylan songs. I got them all recorded using a microphone in a cassette tape recorder. The quality wasn’t great, but our expectations of audio quality were pretty basic. Lossless audio was unknown to us. But we would listen many times and get a hang of the lyrics, which didn't make much sense.  

          But the Tambourine Man defined us. There was wild imagery, symbolism of a lost generation. The early songs were iconic. The lyrics were quoted in casual conversations, basement hash parties, love letters etc.  My mom would enter my room, listen for a while to that nasal, rheumy voice and ask me “Is he singing or saying?” Many unsuspecting mothers might be led to believe so, as he crooned “It aint me, Babe” or “All along the watchtower” that he was really just saying something against the background of guitar, harmonica and cymbals. If it was easier to listen to the melody of a Beatles song or the harmony of a Simon & Garfunkel, it took some time for Dylan to grow on you.

     Unbeknownst to most of us at that time, Bob Dylan would be reborn repeatedly in our life time. He had already gone electric when I started listening to him. But I would like to think of him as the rebel who crooned “The Times they are a-changing” at Newport folk festival with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica hung around his neck. A one man band, truly. The unwashed phenomenon who strayed into my life, said Joan Baez of Dylan, in that greatest love song “Diamonds and Rust”. What kind of man would leave a dusky attractive woman who wrote a great love song like that?   He is the one who is too good with words and keeping things vague, according to her. And her poetry was lousy , he said. I must have heard “Diamonds and Rust” a thousand times and imagined how this romance between two bright, talented minds blossomed and died.

       Years later, I would read his autobiography (Chronicles, Vol 1) and would be surprised to learn that he was always breaking the rules. Somewhere he talks of Picasso, who wasn't just loafing about on crowded sidewalks. He had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was a revolutionary and Dylan wanted to be like that.

        He wrote some of the greatest Love songs. “Sara” (from the Desire album) “If you see her, say hello” (Blood on the Tracks) were some that carry that tinge of sadness of Love, unrequited or broken. There was a strong political sub-text in “The times they are a-changing, Desolation Row, and Blowing in the wind. There is the signature stamp of a hash-induced message when he says “Everybody must get stoned”or  Biblical overtones in the Slow Train coming. Dylan could come from nowhere and surprise you.  But then unpredictability was his forte. One could never slot him into the silos in the minds of listeners. Dylan would always break free and reinvent himself. Religion, war, Love, life itself, was a rediscovery for him. He reincarnated in many avatars that the rest of us took time to catch up. I had grown out of my obsession for his music by the time he won the Grammy award for “Modern Times”. I listened briefly to the album and decided that I am too old to keep pace with this 70 year old man.

   Leaonard Cohen next ?