DYLAN/ Time Playing Tricks With Tradition

There is something about Bob Dylan being 70 that changes everything. When I was a boy, 70-year-old men seemed as though they’d been here since the beginning of time. They wore caps or soft hats, and smoked pipes. It is strange to think of their ranks being joined by someone so indelibly associated with “youth culture”. It is nice to think that there is now at least some evidence that rock ‘n’ roll can grow old gracefully.

We talk about rock ‘n’ roll as if it set out to change the world and succeeded but Dylan himself has spent much energy trying to deflect this analysis, perhaps because, like the rest of us, he eventually twigged that he was himself growing older. He, more than anyone, has represented the conscience of what, loosely, we call rock ‘n’ roll – not because of any stances he adopted but because he remained interested in staying true to his own experiences and seeing what came out.

There is a passage in his 2004-published Chronicles, Volume One, in which he attempts to debunk the idea that he was a spokesman for his generation. While there is a necessity to be watchful for Dylan’s tendency to lay false trails and confuse the posse, the passage is interesting in that it so flatly contradicts the conventional wisdom:

“I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I’d left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn’t vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilisation. Being true to myself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.”

It is downright weird to think how far this is from the idea we have of Dylan, appropriated by every two-bit political huckster and ideological movement seeking to “change” everything. Dylan felt no necessity to present himself as “progressive’, “radical” or left-leaning. Instead, he saw himself inhabiting a traditional idiom and recreating it in a modern context. He was at pains to place himself with Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson rather than Elvis and the Beatles.  It is hard to think of another cultural figure who is so determinedly a "traditionalist" while being taken for the opposite even though he was always, and quite openly, taking tradition to make new friends in new places.