A review of “I’M GLAD I’M NOT ME” by Ethan Warren
Published by Columbia University Press. Review by Tony Attwood
These days the view seems to be that by and large everything Dylan does is significant. But I have been wondering for some time if that’s actually true in itself, and indeed, if Bob thinks that’s true. Or indeed, given the way Bob speaks, writers and hides himself, how could we ever know?
And from that question it is only one simple step to realise that “I’m glad I’m not me” means, “I am glad I am not the Bob Dylan who is portrayed in films and reports.”
Now that rather interesting rejection of what reports and reviews say, fits in with the notion that the Bob Dylan songs that we know so well are not about Bob. When he sings “I” in a song, it doesn’t mean himself, any more than than when an actor in a film says “I” is talking about himself.
As a result, when we listen to the music, we can ask ourselves, “What does the music say to me?” And come to that “What does the music say to Bob?” But although we might answer the former question, we can’t answer the latter because Bob never tells us.
Of course this can make the comparison of performances of songs more difficult, because we have a very limited set of clues as to what each song means, or who the song is talking about. Which in turn gives us difficulties in answering the question, “How do we compare artists? How do we compare music? How do we compare performances?”
And yet comparisons are made all the time, most annoyingly (from my perspective) by journalists who seem to know very little about Bob’s evolution as a composer and performer.
It’s a bit like a person reciting a poem in Vietnamese – how do you judge the work if you don’t speak the language? And these journalists mostly don’t speak the language that Dylan has evolved over the decades. They know bits of Dylan, but not Dylan’s work inside out as many of his fans do but still they make judgements.
So what do we make of the statement, “Dylan was bored, very bored, with being a ‘folk’ performer”? which is a comment that I came across in Pennebaker’s “Don’t look back.” I guess it can be answered in two ways.
On the one hand, the film maker felt he couldn’t make much of a film out of Bob’s concert performances so he had the idea of making a film about Bob offstage. But then, maybe that is what drew the film maker to Bob. “He didn’t want to be doing folk,” Pennebaker observed, “but he’d created it, and he had to do it. That’s one thing that made it hard for him. . . . At the time of the filming, it seemed to me that he had to face a very heavy decision in his life. I could sense it coming.”
Now that is quite interesting, although I am dubious about the “I could sense it coming” bit. Most of the people I’ve met don’t talk about what they can sense in the future, with any level of accuracy. But later they can suggest the opposite, suggesting that they could “sense it coming,” all the time.
But then, does it matter? Bob Dylan is famous because of the songs he has written and in some cases performed. But people like me who’ve spent a while considering the work at perhaps a deeper level than most, sometimes find ourselves heading for more unexpected conclusions.
But then, as we know, Bob can be rather perverse about his songs – some he performs a lot, others (which may well have turned up on albums, he performs not at all. Indeed it looks very much as if he has deliberately chosen not to perform certain songs, while endlessly repeating others. Although it is hard to understand why or indeed to know whether it matters or not.
Maybe some of those songs that he has written but has never performed live, really are, in retrospect no good, in Bob’s view. But that can’t always be the case. I’d pick “No time to think” as one example – I love that song, he wrote it but won’t perform it.
Yet by partnering with Pennebaker, Dylan suggested he wasn’t interested in the way rock musicians express themselves in films. He chose to be the subject of a film, rather than an actor within the film, and that took us elsewhere.
The view that reporters know what’s what and ask reasonable questions when they meet Dylan hardly reflected that however: the first question shown being posed to Dylan upon his arrival in the United Kingdom—amid a crush of fans and press at Heathrow’s arrival gate—was: “What’s the reason for the change this time? Why are you so big this time?”
And that’s where I suddenly realised what “I’m Glad I’m Not Me” was about Dylan never has been the person that journalists want to shout questions at and write about. As when Bob sings “eleven dollar bills,” the card reads 20 dollar bills). We start from the premise that actually, nothing makes sense any more. Why do I like Dylan’s music so much? Because like the world, it doesn’t make sense.
Which is why the journalists who write about Bob always get it wrong – they keep trying to make it make sense and are relevant to today’s world. But Dylan counters this; he doesn’t seem to care what people say about his work, because he is interested in his work, not what others say about it.
Reporters and commentators turn up at interviews with perceptions about Dylan which have no relationship with the way that many people feel and hear Bob’s music. So many of those who write about Dylan or comment upon his work, find themselves out of touch with those who truly admire his work.
In keeping this site running, I simply hope that this is not the case here. Those of us who write for this site do so because we love Dylan’s work, not because anyone pays me to fill a set number of column inches. That’s why our commentaries tend to be different from those in some other media. For me “I’m glad I’m not me” doesn’t get that point, and that’s why I feel the book doesn’t work. But then I am not sure I am an average Dylan fan. Maybe I’m too far gone.