The new, polka-dotted, shade-wearing, long, curly-haired, skinny-trousered, booted pop star, with a white strat hanging around his neck, cut a mean figure. Just like James Dean or Marlon Brando, he oozed charisma – confident, articulate and uncompromising. Rock music had a new rebel, and this time, he had a cause.
This wasn’t just a new sound; it was a new genre, a new style, a new vibe and a new culture. Bob Dylan was matchless. He put poetic lyrics to a novel kind of rock music and coupled that with style and attitude. The result was devastating. In the process, he blew both worlds apart, sent the music media into a spin and broke through into the world of serious academic consideration. The sober world of the adult mainstream media was beginning to take note. What had been considered a juvenile entertainment of no intrinsic worth was now being written about, reviewed and discussed in pillars of the establishment, such as The Times. Rock music had come of age. His poetry was analysed in universities. His views were taken seriously.
Where Robert Johnson was fabled to have stood at the crossroads at midnight, selling his soul to the devil in exchange for becoming the best blues musician on the planet, Bob Dylan chose to stand on a motorway intersection in the stark noon sun daring all the gods and devils in the universe to take him on. He required no divine intervention.
One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.
I was fortunate to be introduced to Bob Dylan’s music at the young age of thirteen, though I did not fully appreciate that at the time.
A good friend of mine by the name of Charlie Mutton had purchased Bob’s debut album shortly after it was released and he was smitten. That was peculiar. Up to that time we had been listening to chart material and old rock ‘n’ roll. Heaven knows where Mutt picked up on Dylan’s first album. I don’t remember it being either popular or available in my neck of the woods. We weren’t big on ‘folk’ music. However, my ears weren’t tuned in to the raw, nasally sound of Bob’s folk-blues and, although I listened all the way through and even appreciated a number of the tracks, I was not greatly impressed. Mutt was more clued up and assured me that Dylan was going to be huge and if he’d only release a single it would be a top ten hit. I remained quietly sceptical.
Mutt was incredibly prophetic. Subsequent albums and the ‘Times They Are A Changin’’ single did just as he had predicted. Bob Dylan went on to become one of the most important figures in the history of rock music. Not only did he change the face of rock music but he also had a profound effect on the direction of youth culture. Once I’d ‘got it’, and my ears became more accustomed, I too was utterly smitten.
As with Dylan I was caught up in the zeitgeist of the time. These were the days of great divisions in society, a rising rebellious youth, the threat of instant annihilation from nuclear war, great changes in attitudes. The traumas of the second world war were still fresh but the economy and world were opening up. Change was in the air. Our parents represented something we did not want to be. Bob was riding that wave of change.
The 1950s Beats may have cracked the façade of the rigid conformity and strict hypocritical morality of the prevailing post-war 1950s culture. Rock ‘n’ roll and r&b may have liberated youth into a temporary hedonistic frenzy, but it was the 1960s generation who blew the whole structure to smithereens. Peculiarly, Robert Zimmerman found himself, sometimes unwillingly, right at the forefront of those shifts in the tectonic plates of society. Who could have predicted that?
Who could have known that this young middle-class Jewish kid from a decaying nondescript town in the middle of nowhere would create a persona and develop the skills to take the whole world by storm?
That young Dylan was a chameleon, a sponge, a mirror, a driven force, who was searching for identity, acceptance and fame. He absorbed everything around him with an unquenchable thirst, then reflected it back a hundred times brighter. He took on his surroundings and magnified them.
For that young Dylan integrity was all that counted. Authenticity and cool were the only things that were important. Robert Zimmerman was an empty vessel into which he poured the ingredients that created Bob Dylan. That early incarnation was a wild vortex of possibility. He created a persona and mythology on which to hang the brilliance of his craft.
Everything about Bob Dylan was false, a construct, apart from his natural talent. His persona was nothing more than a vehicle to transport him to where he wanted to go.
Young Bob Dylan was ruthless. He drained everyone around him dry, wringing out their songs, their chords, their tunes, friendships and love. I’m not implying that this was intentional or in any way mean, merely necessary. In order to get to where he needed to be he had to grow, blossom and change. Nothing was more important. Bob was helplessly riding a tsunami that he himself created. At times, for the people involved – Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Martin Carthy and Dave Van Ronk, to name a few – it must have felt as if they were being used and abused.
That young Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman) was on a roller-coaster that kept changing tracks. Seemingly, he had no compunctions about leaving people and whole movements behind. Parents, lovers, friends and fellow musicians bit the dust. He moved on when the need arose, without scruples and ne’er a backward glance. The chameleon had to grow and move. That was his nature, all he knew.
The biographies are numerous, the details mauled over, magnified, twisted, sensationalised and made to fit the required template. Hard to disentangle reality from myth. There lived a legend largely generated by Bob himself in his quest to create credibility and breakthrough.
One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.
Bob Dylan is the magician who sprinkled poetic fairy dust on to the popular music of the early sixties and his songwriting sparked a revolution and changed rock music forever. The diminutive poet/singer claimed he was merely a ‘song and dance man’ but Dylan altered popular music from intellectually bereft teenage rebellion into a serious adult art form worthy of academic study. Dylan headed for the sixties as a Little Richard rock ‘n’ roller but soon turned acoustic folkie and after absorbing the music and words of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Brecht, he became a vagabond social troubadour. Basking in Rimbaud he transformed into a poetic symbolist before later immersing himself in lysergic beat surrealism. The chameleon of Dylan in the sixties was bewildering to his followers. His first album was a raw debut folk/blues. Then followed three acoustic poetic gems, three ground-breaking surreal ,electric wonders and four that were more mundane and country-tinged. But by the mid-sixties he was a strung-out polka-dotted rock star. He crashed (physically and mentally) before leaving the sixties as a clean-cut country crooner. Dylan had mutated more times than a trilobite. Dylan’s ground-breaking music changed the world and his amazing story is revealed by exploring the eleven albums that he released between 1962 and 1970.
Phil Ochs was the ‘The Prince of Protest’ in the sixties. The only real rival to Bob Dylan, he was the archetypal Greenwich Village topical songwriter. Whether protesting the Vietnam War or campaigning for civil rights, workers’ rights and social justice, Phil was always there. Phil was the man to take up causes, write songs, play at rallies and even risk his life. His clear voice and sense of melody, linked with his incisive lyrics, created songs of beauty and power. As his career progressed, with lyrics and music becoming more highly poetic and sophisticated, he still never lost sight of his cause. Towards the end of the sixties he joined with the YIPPIES in protest against the Vietnam War. But idealism became Phil’s downfall. He was an idealist who could see no point in continuing if he was unable to make the world a better place. Phil lost all hope and descended into depression, which, along with excessive alcohol consumption, led to his suicide in 1976. Shortly before he took his life, Phil asked his brother if he thought anyone would listen to his songs in the future. Well here we are; sixty years later, still listening. The songs of Phil Ochs are every bit as relevant as they ever were and they are making the world a better place!
Phil Ochs was the ‘The Prince of Protest’ in the sixties. The only real rival to Bob Dylan, he was the archetypal Greenwich Village topical songwriter. Whether protesting the Vietnam War or campaigning for civil rights, workers’ rights and social justice, Phil was always there. Phil was the man to take up causes, write songs, play at rallies and even risk his life. His clear voice and sense of melody, linked with his incisive lyrics, created songs of beauty and power. As his career progressed, with lyrics and music becoming more highly poetic and sophisticated, he still never lost sight of his cause. Towards the end of the sixties he joined with the YIPPIES in protest against the Vietnam War. But idealism became Phil’s downfall. He was an idealist who could see no point in continuing if he was unable to make the world a better place. Phil lost all hope and descended into depression, which, along with excessive alcohol consumption, led to his suicide in 1976. Shortly before he took his life, Phil asked his brother if he thought anyone would listen to his songs in the future. Well here we are; sixty years later, still listening. The songs of Phil Ochs are every bit as relevant as they ever were and they are making the world a better place!