Up until the age of 20 I don't think I'd ever heard a Bob Dylan song that wasn't Like A Rolling Stone or Mr Tambourine Man. To me, a callow fellow with narrow pop-punk musical tastes, Dylan was just that slightly boring singer from the sixties. Older people liked him but I wasn't interested. Then one day in the record shop where I then worked someone played the Bringing It All Back Home album out on the shopfloor. I didn’t even know what it was. “What’s this?”, I blurted out. “Bob Dylan, of course!”. “Really? Sounds really good. I didn’t think he was like this.” Looking back, I'm surprised I didn’t get kicked out of that job. Anyway, what caught my attention that slack Wednesday afternoon (probably) was the delirious brilliance of the lyrics and the amped-up blues of Subterranean Homesick Blues, Outlaw Blues, On The Road Again and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream. Fuck, man! Such amazing surreal-blues trips. Given how good this sounded to me back then, I probably should have become some dull Dylan-head, buying all the bootlegs and live albums, and getting massively excited at snagging a super-expensive ticket to see him at somewhere awful like Wembley Stadium (I knew someone at university like this). But no, I think I was getting assailed by new (to me) stuff every week back then and this didn't particularly stick. Dylan being so famous and revered probably didn't help - how was boring Bob supposed to compete with discovering the boptastic Mighty Mighty at a gig in Birmingham or the wonderfully-swoonsome Felt at Warwick University? But wait! What's this meandering blog even about? Surely it's not just about how I, Niluccio, failed to properly appreciate Dylan first time around and now... er, I do? Yeah, I guess so. Or my own slightly tortured version of that. I think in reality it's been a slow thing - going from initial enthusiasm for one particular Dylan "sound", forgetting about him, taping the odd album during the next 20-30 years (but not playing them much), but in recent years gradually rediscovering him. Anyway, more or less by accident, I've now acquired this little collection of CDs.
Modest, really, and only early stuff (post-sixties Dylan remains off my personal music map*). As recently as a year or two ago I would probably have said I had "about two" Dylan CDs and wouldn't have been able to remember which ones they were. Now I'm my own mini-Dylan obsessive, pleased to have all these early recordings - all very strong except, in my opinion, the fairly lacklustre John Wesley Harding. The other week I saw a cheap The Times They Are A-Changin' CD in a charity shop and then got all annoyed with myself for not buying it ("surely I've got this one"). Yeah, early Dylan has got me. In my on-off-on again appreciation of the mighty Zimmerman, I think it's his first seven - seven! - albums that show how good he is. Not-giving-a-fuck wild, tender, playful, blues-y (far more than I'd initially realised) and able to knock out some amazing lyrics. Also his bullhorn voice is surely punk before punk. By '64-65 he seems to have been hanging out with (or dropping in on) the Factory crowd, with Warhol saying that Dylan had developed a distinctive "anti-act" style ("even when he was standing he was all hunched in"): polka-dot shirts, high-heeled boots and a famous determination to alienate the folk crowd. Seems pretty punk to me. Yeah, back on that record shop afternoon, I really should have spotted the punk-ness of early-electric Dylan and in a way I think I did. And Beefheart is surely similar - something so raw and strange as to be punk before punk. Anyway, one final example of my extreme Dylan naivety. About 20 years ago I was watching then-faves Herman Düne (André era). After an already excellent set - in a weird abandoned office space in Berlin - they started doing an encore with something I'd never heard them play before, a song which appeared to be called Desolation Row. Again, I had no idea it was Dylan. As it happens, I now reckon Herman Düne’s version was much better than the original - slow, epic and moving, and also infused with the vibes of a memorable night in Berlin. Dylan may be great if you can get a handle on him, but as we all know, the pump don't work because the vandals took the handles ...
*Except maybe Blood On The Tracks, all those years later in 1975, which I must admit is very good, especially Idiot Wind, and I guess forms part of my own little Dylan canon.
Comments
Post a Comment