Bob Dylan and Me

"Me and you we've known each other
Ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say good-bye, Bobby Jean."
Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Jean

We were pals back in the early 60s, Bob and I, but then he went on without me. As Bruce says about his adolescent confidante Bobby Jean, "We liked the same music...we liked the same clothes," but then he plugged in that guitar and started singing about God knows what. I was left wearing my Bob Dylan uniform, strumming away on sanctimonious anthems of soaring ideals, secure in my pre-packaged condemnations of social injustice and certain that the times they were a-chanigin'-- just not too much. But he didn't need me anymore, and I had other friends anyway.

I'm reminded of this episode, of course, by the recent release of Martin Scorsese's brilliant film about Dylan's early career and first artistic metamorphosis No Direction Home. I'd watched the DVD and inhaled the soundtrack days before the PBS broadcast aired. It was absolutely riveting to see not only Dylan in that era but all the other important figures of my formative years--the teenage Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk ...

But I have been "assigned" to write about my own memories of the 1965-66 Dylan transition by a former student who always has had a great awareness of important music and a nose for a human story. I remember his asking ingenuously once or twice as a teenager for my take on the 60s as an important era of social turmoil. I always brushed him off, saying it wasn't that exciting to hear about. I did so not because the era wasn't pretty exciting or the music extraordinary, but because I didn't want to come off as stuck in the past when there was so much going on at the moment. But you asked, Jonathan, so here goes.

I got my first guitar for Christmas 1960. I hadn't even heard of Bob Dylan at the time, but I guess he'd gotten his first guitar a few years earlier because now we can hear his first recording--a low-fi tape made by a high school friend in 1959. He's moaning away on a solemn folk spiritual, "When I Got Troubles." Didn't we all.

I'd been working on my guitar chords for a year or so when I discovered the music I wanted to learn and duplicate. It came to me via an L.A. FM station, KRHM, and the d.j. was a very witty and knowledgeable host named Les Claypool. So it was folk music for an hour every weeknight at 9 p.m. and four hours on Saturdays, from 8 'til midnight. For the longest while, everything I knew about folk music was provided in recordings and commentary from Les Claypool. And as soon as Dylan's first album came out, it was on the air at KRHM.

It's hard to describe a first exposure to Bob Dylan. We folkies were used to musicians with the raw frankness of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly. Many of the traditional balladeers and bluesmen even had quite melodious singing voices--think of Cisco Houston, Brownie McGee, or Bill Broonzy--yet we didn't expect everyone singing this stuff to sound like Glenn Yarborough or Joan Baez, but Dylan was something else. That twang was an uneasy mix of the Minnesota prairie and Oklahoma plains transplanted to Greenwich Village. He seemed to be intentionally abrasive, so rough around the edges that you had to take him or leave him alone, but could never ignore him or lump him together with others of his sort.

But most of us--and we were a vast, youthful army of folk freaks--loved him, loved the craggy voice, attended every word of the early songs, adopted the sneer for ourselves because we felt the same way about racism, poverty, and pointless war. We were relieved of the need to discover the world's rottenness and corruption because we had only to sign on to this visionary's articulation of the problems we faced. Learn the chords, learn the words, copy the intonation, wear the blue work shirt...and voilà, you were a serious, sensitive person also.

That (and the inspiration of several others like the Native American song-writer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, and an array of hot-picking bluegrass bands) got me nearly though my sophomore year of college. That year, though, was when Dylan took the first steps toward re-defining his place in the music world. He clearly needed to say more than he had been, play differently that he had been, and rattle the complacency he had inadvertently created.

He "came out" as a decisively rock artist in the summer of '65 at, of all places, the serene and scholarly Newport Folk Festival, but his fans were already dealing with the electric shock of half the tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. I remember discussing the "Dylan's new sound" with one or two friends of the folk faith. We were more amused than dismayed. Dylan seemed to be trying so hard to put people off, which in a way had always been his gig, so we refused to be as shocked as we were supposed to be.

Most of our major folk heroes, remember, were men and women much older than ourselves--the generation that was recording in the fifties, forties, and even the thirties. People like Pete Seeger or Jack Elliot were still youthful liaisons to an older group of icons--Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the Rev. Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotton and others. Hell, some were even dead already. Dylan was one of us. Our age. He could change his groove any time he wanted, and we would just wait and see how it turned out. Nonetheless, I do remember doing an early form of Amazon mail order, sending a copy of Bringing It All Back Home to my brother for no reason or occasion other than to gross him out.

I was premature, though. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, soon to follow, were more outrageous and undeniably the work of genius. I wasn't aware at the time of the reaction he had gotten across England on his 1965 tour filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, but I don't think I would have been one of those creepy Dylan worshippers who shouted imprecations at him nightly as he tried to bring them something curious he'd just come up with, such as, say, "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man." I always liked the iconoclasts, the ass-kickers, the dare-devils of pop culture. Nothing kept me from going to clubs like the Ash Grove in Hollywood, the Ice House in Pasadena, or the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach just because Bob Dylan had stopped appearing at Gerde's Folk City in New York.

Dylan was at the height of his creative powers and naturally his music was controversial, not just because it was no longer folk or "protest" (whatever that is that something like "Desolation Row" isn't), but because he was breaking loose from literalism and sober metaphor into regions of wild subjectivity and free association. This, of course, is what painters and orchestral composers had been doing for over a half century, while "popular music" remained bound by the restraints of objective report. I wish I'd paid closer attention at the time, but a solo acoustic guitar player had fewer options if he lacked the amp, the Fender and a few mates to fill out a band--especially if he was working on something of importance that Dylan and other budding musicians, like the guy down the hall in my UCSB dorm, Robbie Krieger, weren't working on, a college degree.

So it wasn't until nearly a decade later--after I'd graduated, gotten married, and launched into a teaching career and Dylan had fully recovered from his motorcycle accident and regained interest in making new music--that we connected again. The album was Blood on the Tracks, and I was onboard again. It was not until this mid-seventies period that I would see him live for the first time, and then watch him wade through his born again phase. Now THAT was agonizing, especially when the music was so strong and the sentiment so sappy.

But we got through that together and moved on. Don't think twice, pal, it's all right.