UberDylan

UberDylan: Greatest Song of all Time, Greatest Rock Artist of All Time by Roxanne McDonald

Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall” You thought they were all kiddin’ you You used to laugh about Everybody that was hangin’ out Now you don’t talk so loud Now you don’t seem so proud About having to be scrounging for your next meal.How does it feel How does it feel To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone? ~“Like a Rolling Stone;” Bob Dylan; Highway 61 Revisited

It has been said and agreed upon that all art is a response to something. At the same time, the best of our musical artists are considered for the significant cultural impact they have made and continue to make [that they are the something to which others respond). Come up with a list of just such genii, be they intentional protesters of the period or inadvertent arbiters for an era, whether they are more passive social commentators or more active servants for the cause--and one name will surely be at the top: Bob Dylan.

So it seems reductive to toss out some trivia when the man so many of us would take a bullet for has contributed so much. Let the following, then, serve as the smallest of tributes to the greatest, the absolute best of the best of expressionist and influential artists extraordinaire.

He was Robert Zimmerman at birth, was playing harmonica and guitar as a kid, studying art as a teen, and performing folk as a beginning musician. (In a biography I read in the seventies, he was doing poorly attended coffee shop and roadhouse gigs for sometimes as little as a buck a night.)

He took his earliest inspirations from Woody Guthrie (whom he would visit in the quintessential folk artist’s dying days) and Hank Williams as Dylan developed his folk style; took inspiration from blues artists such as Jesse Fuller to then begin infusing the genre into his nascent work; and made his recording debut on a platform of political protest songs—which, with the following album’s offerings introduced Dylan to the Greenwich Village and other artists who would be instantly compelled to cover, copy, imitate, and follow his work and style.

Dylan then evolved yet again, incorporating the influences of such poets as Rilke and such stylings as those of the R&B musicians he was listening to; and within a short period was taking on the British invasion persuasions of, particularly, The Animals, segued into folk slash rock.

So profoundly impacting were Dylan’s early lyrics they were the first to be considered “literature”, and so universally influential are they still that, as Rolling Stone maintains, such political figures as Jimmy Carter and Vaclav Havel have been heard citing Dylan. Likewise, so popular was his next range and style of art, rock (since I refuse to call it pop rock), that by the middle of the sixties, Bob Dylan was a national chart-topping musician being played on juke boxes across the land and being sought out for concerts and autographs that a few years earlier he would have unfamiliar with as part of his rapidly escalating reputation.

His relationship with Joan Baez had begun and ended in his folk period, and with wife Sara Lowndes now a constant, and the mother of his first child, he settled in to writing, performing, and growing family and music career…until a motorcycle accident saw Dylan a temporary recluse, and triggered yet another transformation…however subtle. Holing up in a rented place they called Big Pink, he and The Band played and recorded his new works, newly morphed material that was now as heavy on the country as it was on blues and folk genres.

Though his time away from the music scene and his subsequent return may have felt as if he had been in a coma [which according to some conflicting versions of Dylan’s accident and injuries, he was, sort of—with what some say a concussion, others say amnesia]: the later sixties had been producing the response of artists delivering electric, psychedelic, long-playing and unambiguously reactionary music that contrasted heavily nut that failed to intimidate the versatile Bob Dylan. After a select few hits, a poorly received eleventh album [Self-Portrait], an undefined performance with occasional co-writer George Harrison in Bangladesh, and an unremarkable release of a collection of writings, Dylan agreed with fellow performers to start touring.

The small gigs, the charity gigs, and the mass-appeal gigs brought mixed reviews and mixed results. For instance, the charity concert Dylan and company did in efforts to raise money in support of convicted murderer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter resulted in little more than a re-trial that still saw Carter convicted, the infamous song, “Hurricane”, and a lawsuit by the woman named in the song, Patty Valentine.

The next period for Dylan was one of farewells—including the final performance for him and The Band; having to take a $2-million loss on the docu-drama he funded, Renaldo and Clara; and divorce as requested by Sara, who won custody of the couple’s five kids, as well.

Re-invention came by way of Dylan’s definitively deciding he was a “born-again Christian,” so influenced was he then by the likes of Debby Boone, The Alpha Band, and McGuin. Like his comeback albums (such as New Morning and Blood on the Tracks), but somehow much better received, some, his next few albums would get mixed reviews, poor reviews, and stellar reception, alternately. That is, several did little to advance his musical career, while one, Slow Train Coming, went platinum and hit #3 on the charts (1979).

Through the eighties, Dylan’s work met with the same amorphic results—his collaborative albums doing less than his retrospective recordings for him—but by 1989, 1990, and 1991, thirty years after beginning his humble and poetic strumming, Dylan had become a steadfast, undeniably important fixture in the musical milieu…, and for that he was rewarded, respectively, with induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; with the highest of French cultural honors, Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; and with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.

One final decade [thus far, of course], with his triple-Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, his performances for everyone from MTV Unplugged to the Pope, and his continued collecting of such prestigious awards as the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s Polar Prize and a 2000 Oscar, reinforce for fans his stunning and stellar indelibility on the culture and consciousness of millions.

Even without the highest of marks and accolades, Dylan was, is, and will always be for many of us the twentieth century’s literary elite, poet laureate, lyric icon extraordinaire.

References from Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide, at MTV; Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll; et.al..

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