7 : blonde on what?

I have a confession: I’ve never been a Bob Dylan fan. Number of Bob Dylan albums I’ve purchased: zero. Prior to this essay, I’ve never even sat down and listened to a Bob Dylan album in its entirety. Sure, I’m familiar with the hits and may not disapprove when a Dylan song crosses my ear path, but any approval I muster is usually silent and accompanied by a shoulder shrug of ambiguity. I mean, what’s the big deal with Bob Dylan? Sure, I am aware that Mr. Dylan is important in the grand scheme of certain things—certain things being 20^th century American popular music and rock history—but I’ve always had him filed away in a classic rock canon of stuff I appreciate for its perceived influence and historical value but never actually listen to for enjoyment.

So I’ve never purchased a Dylan album, but I do possess the album Blonde on Blonde and have possessed it for years. It’s technically my dad’s copy and it sat in its sleeve on the shelf with my other records, untouched and unplayed until a few months ago. Why did I have it if I’ve never bothered to listen to it? Well, it’s generally considered a classic album. Once when I told a friend—a real Bob Dylan fan who had been admiring my vinyl copy—that I had never actually listened to the album, he literally fell against the wall in disbelief. I then scrambled for a winning response, saying I’d heard the album, of course I’d heard it, but I just never listened to that copy.

So why did I feel the need to lie about never listening to this album? Who cares, it’s just some classic rock album, big f-ing deal. I guess I felt that admitting that never listening to the supposed masterpiece that is Blonde on Blonde would severely tarnish my cred as a serious, card-carrying music connoisseur. I mean, this was supposedly essential material.

So why the resistance? Why has it taken me so long to give Bob a chance? I’ve boiled it down to three reasons:

Reason #1: A 1960’s hippie/roots rock stigma

I realize now that this is totally wrong and unfair to Dylan, but like a lot of 1960’s/1970’s classic rock, I tended to associate Dylan—and I suppose 60’s rock music in general—with a certain brand of unwashed, Birkenstock-wielding pothead dude dancing in the park while taking clandestine tokes of some serious hydroponic shit out of an oversized Grateful Dead bong. Again, I cannot stress how unfair this is to Dylan.

Also, I had this pre-conceived notion that his music would sound brown—somewhere in between a burnt sienna and a nice shit brown—and dusty, like an old western film. I know that sounds strange, but that’s the best way I can describe it. And like an old western film, the thought of sitting down and listening to a Bob Dylan record provoked in me a feeling of resigned boredom. I pegged it as safe, tasteful folksy roots music, overplayed and cliché 60’s protest music, dull and sonically unadventurous bar-band blues rock, and/or baby boomer nostalgia soundtrack. Flat, brown and dusty, musty tunes for family picnics. Golden oldies for the middle-aged. Background outdoor festival music. Bob Dylan Matthews Band. In other words, kind of boring.

Reason #2: The issue of generational ownership

Bob Dylan is my dad’s music. Sure, I could appreciate and enjoy it, possibly even love it, but it would never ‘belong’ to me. Nirvana was ‘mine’. Radiohead is ‘mine’. Granted, Bob Dylan is still around and has remained sort of relevant, but Dylan came of age in an earlier era, well before I was born. He had his earliest peak in the 1960’s and his greatest contribution to modern music (and most popular songs) stems from that time period. That music sounds like the 60’s. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but I have to admit it’s something that had kept me from truly connecting to the music.

Reason #3: The “Clapton is God” syndrome (a.k.a. Beatlemania disease)

In the school of rock, it is customary for serious students to acknowledge Bob Dylan’s importance, and I’ve never actively denied that importance. However, there is a certain threshold of universal praise and hype that often gets crossed with artists like Dylan (i.e. baby boomer rock icons). There are only so many times you can hear about how the Beatles are ‘the greatest band of all time’ or how the Rolling Stones are ‘the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band’ before the eyes glaze over and a jaded annoyance sets in that essentially dooms any chance of enjoying the music of either band on its own merits. I hated the Stones for years because of this. I think Dylan suffers a bit from this sort of overzealous canonization.

Speaking of praise and hype, Dylan is pretty much universally lauded for his songwriting. More specifically, he’s praised for his lyrics, which are often compared to high-grade poetry. Those kinds of comparisons tend to make me yawn and, as a person who has played music and written songs, I know that writing a song is not the same thing as just writing lyrics. Lyrics are just words, and a song is a combination of those words and instrumentation and usually things like melody into an arrangement of sound. While Dylan’s lyrics may be great—and I’ll admit that they often are—you need more than great lyrics to write and produce a great song.

So some questions I wanted to answer were: Are the songs themselves compelling regardless of the alleged lyrical brilliance? Are they sonically interesting? Are they melodically interesting? Do the lyrics, instrumentation and Dylan’s voice combine into something greater than the sum of their parts? Will it all just be kind of boring?

I decided it was high time to expand my knowledge.¹ This was the project. So I borrowed my dad’s dusty, tattered collection of Bob Dylan records—a greatest hits collection, an impressive chronological run of five 1960’s classics, and one from 1975—and fired up the turntable for a few days of intense listening.²

I began with Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1, since I was familiar with most of these songs and I figured it was an easy way into his discography. Immediately, revelations occurred. I realized that I’d never heard Dylan’s version of his own song “Mr. Tambourine Man”; I’d only heard the Byrds’ (and William Shatner’s) version. I’ve always known it was a Dylan song, and I think that fooled me into thinking I’d heard his version. 

The electric guitar countermelody bouncing pleasantly under that song is quite intoxicating, and already I sensed that these early stripped-down acoustic songs were going to win me over with little effort. I mean, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” are two of the most ubiquitous, overplayed and over-referenced 60’s folk protest songs, and I didn’t find them boring in the least. They sounded fantastic, in fact. The songs seemed to come alive in the private setting of my kitchen—where all of this listening took place—as opposed to the more communal listening experience that these songs were probably kind of designed for.

The melody of “Positively 4^th Street” stuck in my head for days, sounding so breezy and easygoing that it took me several listens before I realized the song is an angry diss to former friends. The only sort-of clunker was “Just Like A Woman”, which is hard for me to hear and not think of that scene in Annie Hall when Shelley Duvall dreamily recites the main refrain while Woody Allen disdainfully rolls his eyes. I have to admit that it’s not one of Dylan’s best songs and that lyrical refrain does have an irksome quality. Still, Dylan’s sense of melody and cadence—something I never gave much attention before—imbues even that song with a catchy quality. It’s no surprise that these were hits.³

Bring It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited were my immediate favorites of his proper albums, and I was compelled to go back to them for several repeat listens. These are where a raw, bluesy, mono-record clatter truly comes to the fore.⁴ I love the hard split between electric and acoustic sides; the idea of an album being split into sides being one of the vinyl record’s most brilliant characteristics. 

The acoustic side of Bring It All Back Home, in particular, had a power that surprised me. “Power” is a good term. Acoustic folk music can easily go twee and delicate, but there is a raw, unpolished timbre and visceral oomph to this music that gives it some muscle.

“Like a Rolling Stone”—certainly the most well-known and influential track from Highway 61 Revisited—is a song I’ve heard maybe 39 times but never really listened to with any depth. Plus, the prominent organ in it was something that I actually kind of hated before. Throughout my adolescence and twenties, the electric organ in rock songs always struck me as having a cheesy quality, like the sound of saxophone in the 1980’s. I think differently now, and that organ is key to the song’s traveling caravan-esque vibe. “Ballad of the Thin Man” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” were other favorites, the latter of which I recognized for its sampled use in a Beastie Boys song.

Okay, Blonde on Blonde. The big one. Supposed double-album masterpiece. It begins with a song that has a lot going against it in regards to winning me over. “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35”—with its famous refrain that has been shouted countless times in dorm rooms and frat houses and probably the homeless shelter in Haight-Ashbury—has the stigma of being a worn-out stoner anthem but revealed itself to be an amusingly warped romp. Dylan’s delivery of that refrain, although obviously meant to be a double entendre, nevertheless reeks of some serious hydroponic grade-A authenticity.

I more or less enjoyed the rest of Blonde on Blonde. It has a sprawling grandeur that I certainly appreciate, but I have to admit it didn’t quite grab me as much as I expected. Perhaps that was the problem; I expected little from the earlier records and got a lot, while I expected a lot from this one and it was, dare I admit it, a smidge of a let down. Still, it’s obviously meant to be a slow burner so I may return to it for further study.

The next two records were the relatively modest records John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. John Wesley Harding provided yet another case of a Dylan song (“All Along the Watchtower”) famously covered (by Jimi Hendrix) that I don’t think I had heard in its original form. That record lacks some of the immediacy of the earlier records but started to grow on me after a handful of listens. An okay, solid record.

On Nashville Skyline, I was initially taken aback at how different it sounds from the others. I had read—via Wikipedia—that this was Dylan’s foray into pure country music, which didn’t sound like that huge of a stretch on paper. This truly is full-blown mid-century country music in all its crooning, galloping pedal steel glory. It also has the song “Lay Lady Lay”, a hit that I never liked that much and frankly sounds almost like a novelty song. This was also my least favorite album of the bunch, but it showed Dylan’s willingness to change shape and form in uncompromising ways and I respect that quality in an artist.

The final record: Desire.⁵ Released in 1975, this album includes the song “Hurricane”, which was prominently featured in a scene in the 1993 film Dazed and Confused and is perhaps the first Dylan song I actively liked and even played on a jukebox occasionally. This song always had a certain drive that I perceived as missing from other Dylan songs (yet another flawed perception, I’ll admit now). It’s a bit odd comparing this record to the more raggedy 60’s albums, as the album possesses the rich, polished sheen of 70’s AOR production and is a completely different animal. This was also fairly solid, I think, but I think listening fatigue was setting in at this point so “Hurricane” is the only song that really stuck in my head. The violin player on this record kicks some serious hydroponic derriere, however.

So what have I learned from all of this? For starters, I’m a fool, but I realized that this whole Bob Dylan project wasn’t really about Bob Dylan; ultimately, it was about me. It wasn’t about questioning whether or not the general cultural consensus regarding Bob Dylan is right; it was about proving myself—that less than likable part of myself that jumps to conclusions and pigeonholes and judges and stereotypes and has pre-conceived notions and needs to be punched sometimes—totally fucking wrong.

I’m happy to say that the goal has been achieved: I was totally fucking wrong about Bob Dylan. His music is not sonically dull or hippy-dippy roots music or safe or tasteful or anything of the sort. As an artist, he's a shape-shifting one who does what he wants and isn't afraid to fail, and those are my favorite kind. I finally get it now. My earlier statement about not really being a Dylan fan is no longer accurate, and now I actually want to listen to Bob Dylan's music for dare I say actual enjoyment. I should do this more often. What’s next?

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¹ I began working on this Bob Dylan listening project and essay just as the hoopla surrounding Dylan’s 70^th birthday was in full effect back in May. This was pure serendipity. If I weren’t such a slow ass, this would have been finished on his actual birthday.

² The entirety of my dad’s record collection sat haphazardly piled in two tall stacks within a open, wood-paneled cubby hole in the corner of my parents’ basement. I grew up in this house, and there’s a bit of something to be said about finally exploring the nature of artifacts that sat within an arm’s length throughout my entire childhood. It’s like finding a cigar box of old baseball cards under the floorboards in your old room and discovering that they, uh, play music. Or something like that.

³ The song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was not included here, which was a bummer because it was one of the two Dylan songs—the other being “Hurricane”—that I genuinely liked on a personal enjoyment level even previous to this project/essay.

⁴ The earlier four of these records were “mono” recordings and the later three were “stereo”. Now I know this is audiophile territory and ‘normal’ people won’t notice much if any difference in the sound, but my discerning ear does find the “mono” records to be more appealing in a way that’s hard to explain. There’s a rough and intimate quality, especially when playing the records on my portable suitcase player in the kitchen. The sound is appealingly cramped, with all voice and instruments blending together into a soulful clatter. Apparently, “mono” is the way these early records were recorded, so they are apparently meant to be heard that way according to many audiophiles and rock historians. I really have no technical authority to argue that point one way or the other, so I guess I’m sold on that.

⁵ Yes, I do realize I’ve omitted Blood on the Tracks, which is generally considered to be one of Dylan’s greatest works. Three reasons for this: 1. It was not to be found in my dad’s record collection. 2. I liked the idea of listening only to the records chosen by a true, was-there-at-the-time Dylan fan (i.e. my dad), meaning that: 3. This had to be a vinyl-only affair to maintain authenticity (i.e. listening to the records in their original format i.e. the way they were ‘meant’ to be heard) so I couldn't resort to a digital copy.