DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA: 1965: Teenager finds a hero –part 3

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

1965: Teenager finds a hero –part 3 (continued)

One final musing on my discovery. While Dylan’s switch from acoustic folksongs to a rock band was indeed a shocking development, outside the United States – and excepting a handful of English fans – we saw nothing but a completely unknown folksinger materialise as a pop star out of nowhere on the firmament. To us, Dylan the folk singer had simply not existed, let alone Dylan the ‘protest singer’ (except to precious few). We were suddenly introduced to an astonishing, unprecedented underground sound that would shortly thereafter be dubbed folk rock. And though times do change, they do not do so due to the proclamation thereof on the B-side of a single in a few European countries. As a side note: that acoustic-guitar business of his was, at least to Europeans such as myself, nothing new. We had had minstrels and troubadours aplenty for centuries, including some of the very best, such as Georges Brassens in France.

What Americans need to learn and understand, is that the Dylan whom many of them considered a turncoat when he abandoned the noble folk movement and ‘went electric’, only then became visible to the rest of the world, and as a folk rocker besides, appealing to a whole new set of teenage sensibilities right out of the gate. To tens of millions of ‘foreigners’, this folk rocker had virtually nothing to do with Americana, the very concept of which had not even come into existence yet. Their first notions of ‘what that Dylan guy is all about’ therefore deviated markedly from what his compatriots had trumped up about ‘their’ folk singer by that time.

The fact that many Americans have unfortunately never looked into this principal distinction and that they are therefore unable to imagine that a ‘foreign’ perspective might contribute meaningfully to the understanding of ‘their’ artist, can be attributed to their two-pronged exceptionalist misconception that a) the USA is the centre of the world, and b) that the core of Dylan’s art is ‘typically American’, and deserving of the Nobel Prize for that reason alone. But I maintain that the Americana in Dylan’s oeuvre is of minor importance to the appreciation thereof, a point that I will illustrate using several examples.

Dylan’s international breakthrough meant that his four folk albums also quickly became available outside the United States in the autumn of 1965. Then, too, ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ and ‘Times they are a-changin’’ were – however unjustly – embraced as the key numbers from this earlier work. Journalists who until then were just ‘doing their jobs’ were suddenly jolted awake and, free from their initial superficiality, promptly praised him as the ‘voice of a generation’.

But for Bob Dylan himself this epithet, bestowed upon him by spectral unknowns, came one-and-a-half years too late. In the autumn of 1963, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) had given him the Tom Paine Award, named after one of the founders of the United States, because he had repeatedly spoken out and taken action in favour of those civil liberties and against the lamentable fate of America’s black population (see Chapter 21). Although he accepted the award, how could we foreigners have known that the handover ceremony on 14 December of that year was the direct catalyst for his decision never to align himself with any social movements ever again? In an interview in the autumn of 1964, he had already said:

“I agree with everything that’s happening, but I’m not part of no movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the movement’. I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no movement would allow. It’s like politics, I just can’t make it with any organisation. I fell into a trap once – last December – when I agreed to accept the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.”

In short, he had already mentally rejected the notion long before that he would ever raise his voice on behalf of anyone, other than himself – for exactly how and why that came about, the reader is referred to the ‘biographical’ section at the end of this book. It was not because he had abandoned the social engagement that so characterised his earlier work, but because at the core of his engagement lay the notion that nobody should ever be made to surrender their soul to another.

His decision to ‘go electric’ was the logical outcome of his self-liberation, and ‘Subterranean homesick blues’ was his way of celebrating. It was a bull’s-eye. As such, ‘Don’t follow leaders’ can be interpreted as a politically-charged slogan, but one that is left up-in-the-air by the following rhyme: ‘Watch the parking meters’. One could admittedly – though strangely – argue that leaders should not be followed due to some mysterious consequence involving parking meters, but anyone capable of making sense of such an argument, though doubtless a gifted rhetorician, would most likely only open themselves up to ridicule. Clearly Dylan felt the need to include that one line, which in itself showed some engagement, though principally to fend off the idolatry that had risen up around him. He himself had been so idolatrous of his childhood hero, folk singer Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), that he had even become Woody’s epigone. After realising as much, he therefore knew what he was talking about and said the following to journalist Nat Hentoff in The New Yorker on 24 October 1964:

“Everybody has to find his own way to be free. There isn’t anybody who can help you in that sense. Nobody was able to help me. Like seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East. He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him – as much as he could talk – and the talking helped. But basically he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realised that. So Woody was my last idol.”

I cannot remember how long it took me to acquire Dylan’s first four LPs, but I do know that I did endless odd jobs in the summer of 1965 so that I could buy them as quickly as possible once they became available. I cannot have succeeded until the autumn of that year, however, since the new songs of course took precedence, and although their release was delayed in the Netherlands, it was still a sizeable outlay for a teenage budget: three singles and two LPs. But less than a year after I had first heard it, I can state with certainty that I had obtained ‘All I really want to do’ for my very own. The song that started everything for me opened Another side of Bob Dylan.

continued: Dylan and us: beyond America. 8: What you really want – Untold Dylan

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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

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