DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA
by Wouter van Oorschot; Translated by Brent Annable
Previously in this series…
- Amuse bouche
- Who the book is (not) for – part 1
- Who this book is (not) for – part 2
- Anything but idolatry – part 1
- Anything but idolatry – part 2
- Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
- Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
- Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
- Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
- The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1
- The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2
- What was the public to do? – part 1
- What was the public to do – part 2
1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides
What do most people want from you? They want your autograph. Nobody knows me and I don’t know them. You know. They walk up and think they know me because I have written some song that happens to bother them in a certain way and they can’t get rid of, you know in their mind. That ain’t got to do with me, they still don’t know me and I still don’t know them. So they woke up you know, as if eh… we’re long lost brothers or sisters or somethin’, what’s that have to do with me, none of that I can prove in any court.
(1986: Christopher Sykes – interview ‘Meet Bob Dylan’, part 3 of 4, 2:12–2:44)
Three pivotal months in my youth were March 1962, when I made my first acquaintance with pop music because we got our first television set; September-October 1963, when three people close to me passed away; and September 1964, when I started secondary school. These three jolts to my adolescent brain lay at the foundation of my embryonic grasp of Dylan’s art, which came about in February 1966. I gave forewarning of my historically-tainted perspective on Dylan’s work, and here I serve up these seismic events honestly and openly, for your delectation.
Until 1987, commercial television was prohibited in the Netherlands as it was regarded as a threat to democracy. Anybody who has witnessed the plebian Donald Trump – who was intent on the gradual destruction of democracy in his country not only during his presidency (2016-2020), but throughout his life – as he was supported by the far-right commercial television station Fox News, cannot deny the Dutch legislator its prophetic judgement. And in spite of the adage by German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘If the world ends, I shall go to the Netherlands – there everything always happens fifty years later’, only thirty years after the introduction of commercial television into the country, its pestilent influence on our political system was already noticeable. Caution is therefore advised, the more so for our friends in the United States now that Bob Dylan is not present to point the way…
When the television arrived in our home in March 1962, I was ten years old. At that time, our diminutive nation had only one channel, which was to be shared between public broadcasters of various ideological persuasions. I was taking piano lessons and already knew who the great composers were, but my introduction to young people’s music took place during the monthly (yes, monthly) television broadcast Top or Flop, a pop-music programme made by the only progressive broadcaster of the day. It believed that even teenagers deserved some representation at least once a month, during which time an ‘expert panel’ passed judgement on recently-released 45s. For a full half hour, if you please!
I experienced my first three deaths in 1963 within the space of four weeks, at the start of my final year of primary school. I was eleven-and-a-half. First the father of one of my classmates died; the fact that such a thing could just come out of the blue left a deep impression on me. Shortly thereafter, our schoolteacher was away from school for a whole week because her husband had died, which had an even deeper impact, since she ‘belonged’ to all of us.
Lastly my brother Guido, who was eight years my senior, committed suicide. There was lots going on with him, but let us leave the primary cause at a serious heartbreak. It was thus that on 7 October 1963 I became not ‘an’ only child, but ‘the’ only child, as our parents had made the wise decision to stop at two. It took some getting used to. An eight-year age gap, however, did mean that Guido and I had not spent an awful lot of time together. I still lived at home, and he had already moved out when he decided to end things. I had schoolfriends, he had a relationship (which had also ended), I listened to the music we had at home, while he bought jazz records and smoked.
Returning briefly to the international context: the murder of president Kennedy in the United States, which took place hardly a month later, was to me little more than a television event. I had never before realised that there was even such a thing as a president, and by the time I did, this one was already gone. My experience of it ended there, although I did notice that my parents were quite shaken by it all. So it did merit some thought. And when little John Kennedy junior saluted his father’s passing coffin, for a moment I was keenly aware that I had also lost my own brother. Not until later did I realise that Death, after my threefold personal encounter with Him, had crowned himself with yet another morbid accolade. Murder most foul it was, yes indeed, just like the movie that had been named after an Agatha Christie novel starring Margaret Rutherford as the original Miss Marple, which appeared shortly after Kennedy’s murder (March 1964) and may have been the inspiration for Dylan, who used the title for the final song on his 2020 album Rough and rowdy ways.
The third event that had a powerful impact on my young life was my entry into secondary school in September 1964. I was twelve-and-a-half, and had made my first modest forays into puberty. It was partly for this reason that my interest in pop music had grown rapidly, and I can say that A hard day’s night had me completely hooked: my mother accompanied me to the cinema to see the Beatles movie.
Shortly beforehand, at the primary-school farewell party, five of us boys had lip-synced some Beatles songs on stage (‘All my loving’ and ‘Twist and shout’, that’s how behind we were) without worrying too much about the words, which – despite the above demonstrations of their adolescent simplicity – we hardly understood anyway. At secondary school, however, I was now taking twelve subjects, including three hours of English per week, which rapidly improved my understanding of the countless pop songs that were flooding into the Netherlands, mostly from England.
I searched for and found pop stations on my transistor radio, and also purchased a weekly pop magazine with some regularity that included two entire pages of lyrics from the most popular songs at the time, but which we as non-English speakers could not dismiss as unimportant for any other reason than that we simply could not understand them. Whenever I heard a song on the radio that I liked, then those two pages were useful to me at least. And if I found the lyrics in question, I would mutter or sing along to them, and if I was able to purchase the single, I stuck the lyrics to the cover to be sure I would not lose them. In this manner, I learned English more effectively than from my textbooks, and thanks to a good auditory memory, I knew a great many songs by heart right up until my death (I consider that ‘knew’ to be a sublime form of anticipation).
But that is nothing compared to the knowledge that goes to our graves with us when we die. It represents an unparallelled loss of capital, so in that sense I do have some sympathy for the tech companies that are eager to document our every thought. Only it is prohibited because those are our thoughts and not theirs, and there you have it: how many times must the adage ‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’* be repeated, do you suppose?
These three elements – pop music, an awareness of death, and English classes – constituted the substrate in which Bob Dylan’s work would germinate and take root in late December 1964. My parents took me to visit family in Amsterdam one day, and because I quickly grew bored in my uncle and aunt’s living room, I slipped away and requested an audience with my cousin, Yonty, in his bedroom. Yonty was seven years my senior, and had a friend to visit, but I was granted entry. The hour that I spent with them was, alas, marred by the single record they played ad nauseum with nothing but nasal bleating and tiresome guitar chords, to which I took an immediate and fervent dislike. I had no idea who it could have been and understood nothing of what was sung, except for one line that consisted entirely of words that I had already picked up in my English classes: ‘All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.’
To me, a child in the throes of development, drawn equally to charming boys and to sweet girls, but above all ‘the’ only child, that line fit me like a glove. Though I was barely conscious of it at the time, there on the eve of my thirteenth birthday he had expressed my innermost romantic feelings: All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you. I was unaware of it, but that line carved itself firmly into my subconscious.
You may, of course, decide that these personal outpourings have nothing to do with you, and for as long as you and I are spared each other’s company, dear reader, you are absolutely right. Provided you harbour no delusion that you can read any other books about Bob Dylan that are not coloured by the personal backgrounds and histories of their authors, for they most certainly are, despite best efforts to maintain an air of objectivity. I, at least, am honest about it.
(continued: 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 2 – Untold Dylan)
*Editor’s translation, just in case you skipped a few classes during the discussion of Cato: “What’s more I consider Carthage needs to be destroyed”, perhaps more simply put, “We need to do this.” But beware: editor’s translations are not always reliable.)
Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:
Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol
We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks