Thanks to reader Jason for his very gracious e-mail:
I haven’t familiarized myself enough with your work on Bob Dylan but have found [your website] quite interesting. I’m kinda a fan of Dylan’s music and left of center politically. But what I was wondering is why the left or “left” and the counterculture of the 1960s–and to this day–consistently misunderstood and misinterpreted Dylan in thinking he was “one of them” so to speak. I mean, clearly in many ways he was not, as your website successfully demonstrates. And secondly if people had come to terms with Bob Dylan’s lack of interest in politics or political engagement, or agreement with them on various issues of the day–and OK I just mean looked at him more from the perspective you bring to us (as for as I thus far can tell) on [your website], well then how would that have affected his legacy? Would Dylan have had the following and the impact, or as many fans if the young people–up until today–didn’t continue to sort of make him “theirs”? And put words in his mouth even. I enjoyed your take on the election night concert, btw. I found the idea that Dylan would mean things are going to change because Obama has been elected very weird. I voted for Obama but that didn’t seem to make sense to me that Dylan would say something like that.
The relevant part of my reply:
You ask a couple of good questions. As to why Dylan is claimed by some on the left as one of their own, or claimed by anyone — I personally think it’s due to an appreciation of the depth and power of his songs, and the desire to enlist them for the cause. It’s much the same reason that people quote scripture for their own purposes, even when they don’t regularly read scripture or believe in it themselves.
As to whether, if this hadn’t happened to such an extent, it would have affected his legacy: I guess so, depending on how you define his legacy. It’s very hard to separate all of that out now and imagine a world where Dylan didn’t emerge during the 1960s and wasn’t claimed, unwillingly, as a leader of a general counterculture and anti-war movement. Without all of that, I suppose, he wouldn’t be as well known or attract as much attention in everything he does. On the other hand, his songs might be better appreciated by some for their qualities as songs, rather than political statements. It is something I’ve thought about, and it’s an interesting way of considering his songs –especially the ones from the early 1960s that have all that cultural baggage. It’s interesting to imagine Dylan emerging and the songs being heard for the first time in some other decade — the 1940s, the 1950s, or the 1970s or 1980s. How would they have been heard differently? We’ll never know, really, but it’s interesting to consider.
I now remember that I did play one of those mind-games — imagining a Dylan song being heard in a different decade — in a review of Greil Marcus’s book “Like A Rolling Stone” for The Weekly Standard. It was in response to some of his writing that book, i.e. his consideration of the song very much in the context of historical events of the time.
Everyone knows the context of the mid-sixties–it’s the most belabored and overconsidered time period of modern American history, after all. It would be far more interesting, surely, to take Dylan’s work completely outside the old clichés of time and place and see how it stands for the ages, assuming the writer believes that it does.
Imagine, if you will, that Dylan had not appeared on the recording scene in 1962. He shows up, instead, 10 years later, in 1972, and, following the same chronology, releases his breakthrough “Like A Rolling Stone” in 1975. Would we now be treated to a book by Greil Marcus telling us how perfectly the [song] summed up the mood of post-Watergate America? “When Bob sings (‘You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal!’) he is almost chasing Richard M. Nixon into that helicopter!”
It would be as valid as any of the juxtapositions of historical events–such as the Watts riots and the Vietnam war–with Dylan’s musical output as Marcus makes here. And that’s a tribute to the timelessness and power of Dylan’s work to the same degree as it is a criticism of Marcus’s strategy.
So, I guess that little mind-trick might demonstrate that while you might take Dylan out of the 1960s, you still couldn’t prevent people from trying to co-opt his work into their political agenda. There’s always a way, when the desire to do it is sufficiently strong. And Dylan’s work has demonstrated itself to be a supremely tempting target. However, I think that outside of the context of the 1960s, the myths so created wouldn’t have the same power and longevity.
