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I've always been intrigued by that Dylan quote. But he mixes two different things. First he talks about "connoiseurs of Bob Dylan music". What's wrong with that? He basically offers products (records) and services (concerts) and should be glad he has so many consumers (fans). But then he changes the subject, when he talks about them "not having an inkling about who I am". How does he know they don't know? He is the single most important figure of the second half of the 20th century in popular music, how could he not be studied and analysed? I think he refers to people like A. J. Weberman (who, by the way, is the only person I know of that actually went through Dylan's garbage). From what I know, he basically dislikes people and avoids contact not only with fans, but also with promoters and members of his own band (those pictures of him playing cards with his band are all pretty much made up, he does not socialize with them). But if you are an artist that kind of attitude is bound to make people even more interested. If you hide from your fans you are bound to create a major interest. But that's Dylan's game.
Try to read David Dalton's book, "Who is that Man?", it basically explains why lunatics abound among Dylan fans. One of the strangest things about the Neverending Tour is that it remains a paradox: it offers Bob exposure without contact.
I think the records he started making in 1997 might in the end be regarded as his greatest.
A good interpretation of that quote, and I agree it having the confusion of pointing with finger towards two different kinds of 'Dylanologists'. Those who are taking his music (maybe too) seriously, that is, the stuff he does as an artist and as a public figure, But then those who are interested on him as a private person (or trying to understand his art/public doings from the base of his personal life). Even though Bob might have enough of both of them - his music is 'analyzised' more than any other pop musician's - I think he should not be too bothered by the former group, but take that 'over-interpretation' as an honor. Most probably any other artist in any field would do...
The other thing is the other group, and I wholeheartidly agree with him in criticizing them. Dylan is a very private person, and he has taken to extreme in protecting his privacy, be that game or not. I don't think that's game at all, but just his learned way of coping with the world (his fame, status, etc.). But being that a matter of his idiosyncratic nature, I think he has a point in there, too. A very important point, which I think makes him a better artist as well. Anything he has offer to world or other people is his art. There is nothing beyond or behind or under it, which makes any difference. Just the art - records, songs, performances - and that's he has to offer, he is good at, and we should be interested in.
But what I think makes this whole thing puzzling is that as an artist, as a public performer, he puts so much of his privacy in front. He puts there, if I may use cliches, his soul and heart, and to an extent that needs to be damn demanding. I can easily imagine him thinking 'what else do you want? I give anything I can'. Nietzsche once said that 'what is not written by blood, is not written at all', and I think Dylan if anyone ever in his field, has done his craft with that attitude. And that's also a reason why we easily confuse the public and private realms. Dylan reaches people - he talks to us by music that sounds so personal, coming from one soul to other, which I think it is a mark of great art. Dylan's 'dilemma' is that he is a bit too good in what he does, and he needs to deal with the consequences, especially working in a business that is driven by the expectations of what celebrities supposed to be and act like.
Actually I don't think Dylan is that different as far as private/public distinction goes than Jagger, who is also famous for protecting his privacy. But Dylan draws the line stronger between art and all the rest. More extrovert Mick sees the public realm much wider, and his 'Jagger act' is much more than his music and performances, including interviews, public showings, meeting fans, etc.. Introvert, even antisocial Dylan seem to protect his privacy even from his band mates. But I still would claim that as public performers and artists, Dylan is much more private than Jagger ever is. Everytime Dylan performs, probably having not much option, he reveals much more of himself, writes with blood, than Jagger does. Sometimes when watching Dylan on stage I feel like that that's the only moment he can be himself. to live and breathe. And that he must be a damn unhappy person, the loneliest person, or even nothing outside of that context. (Ouch, that judgemnt went too far...
)
- Doxa, a pseudo-dylanologist
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2014-05-23 10:09 by Doxa.
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Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
BroomWagon
()
Date: May 22, 2014 17:24
Bob Dylan is echoing much of what he wrote in that song 40+ years ago, "You ain't going nowhere" per all of those who hailed him way back when.
[www.bobdylan.com]
[www.bobdylan.com]
Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
DEmerson
()
Date: May 22, 2014 18:27
Bob's relationship (or lack thereof) with his fans is interesting. One would imagine he has had his share of total fanatics over the years. My quick Bob story. I'm the sort that will on occassion try and catch some of my favorite performers before of after a show, in hopes of getting an autograph, handshake, picture, whatever - but that's it. Would never cross a line.
I've seen Bob 20-some times over the years. So one time he played a hockey rink in Lowell, MA. I went in early, hung out near the stage door for 1/2 hour before what would be approx. arrival time for soundcheck - Sharpie, and copy of Blonde on Blonde in hand. Finally two tour buses pull up, accompanied by two cops on bicycles. This is 3:00 in the afternoon, and I am the ONLY one there. Two (big) guys get off the bus, come over to me, ask me what I'm doing. I tell them hoping maybe I can get an autograph. They say no, you need to leave. OK, I'll just go over here then. No, you need to leave the area entirely. I'm like, I can't just stand way over here and watch? No - and you can either leave the area totally, or deal with them (points to the two cops on bikes). Wow. (I wanted to start shouting I AM NOT A PSYCHO!, but thought better of it - LOL). The point being, I love the Stones, but just never have really put the (considerable) effort in to trying to get one of their autographs/handshakes - BUT, it does sound like under the right circumstances, if you're lucky, they will give a moment to the fans. Bob - not so much. Again, I bet they guy has probably had his share of crazies over the years, and just does not deal with it at all.
I just remembered one last thing - the one thing I DID see on one of the buses, (before the guys came out) - next to the driver's seat, a Box Set of Johnny Cash, Love God Murder.
I've seen Bob 20-some times over the years. So one time he played a hockey rink in Lowell, MA. I went in early, hung out near the stage door for 1/2 hour before what would be approx. arrival time for soundcheck - Sharpie, and copy of Blonde on Blonde in hand. Finally two tour buses pull up, accompanied by two cops on bicycles. This is 3:00 in the afternoon, and I am the ONLY one there. Two (big) guys get off the bus, come over to me, ask me what I'm doing. I tell them hoping maybe I can get an autograph. They say no, you need to leave. OK, I'll just go over here then. No, you need to leave the area entirely. I'm like, I can't just stand way over here and watch? No - and you can either leave the area totally, or deal with them (points to the two cops on bikes). Wow. (I wanted to start shouting I AM NOT A PSYCHO!, but thought better of it - LOL). The point being, I love the Stones, but just never have really put the (considerable) effort in to trying to get one of their autographs/handshakes - BUT, it does sound like under the right circumstances, if you're lucky, they will give a moment to the fans. Bob - not so much. Again, I bet they guy has probably had his share of crazies over the years, and just does not deal with it at all.
I just remembered one last thing - the one thing I DID see on one of the buses, (before the guys came out) - next to the driver's seat, a Box Set of Johnny Cash, Love God Murder.
Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
KeylockSanchezandCo
()
Date: May 22, 2014 18:29
Quote
TooTough
I just ran across a Bob Dylan quote about his hardest followers,
the so-called "Dylanologists", made in 2001:
In an interview conducted by Alan Jackson for The Times Magazine in 2001,
before the album [Love And Theft ]was released, Dylan said “these
so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music…I don’t feel they know a thing,
or have any inkling of who I am and what I’m about. I know they think
they do, and yet it’s ludicrous, it’s humorous, and sad. That such
people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get
a life, please. It’s not something any one person should do about another.
You’re not serving your own life well. You’re wasting your life.”
I know that every group has followers that go beyond some "point",
maybe even here. I would call myself a "hardcore Stonesfan", having seen
them XX times, paying thousands for their music and memorabilia.
So who does Dylan mean? The guy who bought the house next to his birthplace?
Or the 100+ concert goer? I think it´s a hard quote. But that´s Dylan.
I can´t imagine the Stones saying such things about, well, us. I´d be very pissed.
I've always been intrigued by that Dylan quote. But he mixes two different things. First he talks about "connoiseurs of Bob Dylan music". What's wrong with that? He basically offers products (records) and services (concerts) and should be glad he has so many consumers (fans). But then he changes the subject, when he talks about them "not having an inkling about who I am". How does he know they don't know? He is the single most important figure of the second half of the 20th century in popular music, how could he not be studied and analysed? I think he refers to people like A. J. Weberman (who, by the way, is the only person I know of that actually went through Dylan's garbage). From what I know, he basically dislikes people and avoids contact not only with fans, but also with promoters and members of his own band (those pictures of him playing cards with his band are all pretty much made up, he does not socialize with them). But if you are an artist that kind of attitude is bound to make people even more interested. If you hide from your fans you are bound to create a major interest. But that's Dylan's game.
Try to read David Dalton's book, "Who is that Man?", it basically explains why lunatics abound among Dylan fans. One of the strangest things about the Neverending Tour is that it remains a paradox: it offers Bob exposure without contact.
I think the records he started making in 1997 might in the end be regarded as his greatest.
Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
DEmerson
()
Date: May 22, 2014 18:37
I think the records he started making in 1997 might in the end be regarded as his greatest.[/quote]
Well said Kylock. I recently thought the only truly great album any of the greats (Bob, Paul, Bowie, Stones, Bruce, Neil, etc.) has made over the past 20 years or so (this is totally just one guy's opinion) - Time Out of Mind.
Well said Kylock. I recently thought the only truly great album any of the greats (Bob, Paul, Bowie, Stones, Bruce, Neil, etc.) has made over the past 20 years or so (this is totally just one guy's opinion) - Time Out of Mind.
Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
Aquamarine
()
Date: May 23, 2014 09:42
The critic Greil Marcus once told an interviewer that, among musicians, Bob Dylan had the stupidest fans. “I think it’s because something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe that there is a secret behind every song. And if you unlock that secret then you’ll understand the meaning of life,” he said. Dylan himself seems to agree. In 2001, forty years into his career, Dylan said, “These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I don’t feel they know a thing, or have any inkling of who I am and what I’m about. I know they think they do, and yet it’s ludicrous, it’s humorous, and sad.” A decade later, Dylan told an interviewer for Rolling Stone, “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy? What the @#$%& is the matter with them? … May the Lord have mercy on them. They are lost souls.”
David Kinney’s new book, “The Dylanologists,” is a journey among these so-called lost souls. Kinney is a newspaper journalist and a Dylan fan; his first book, “The Big One,” from 2009, was about a different set of obsessives: the anglers who compete in an annual fishing derby on Martha’s Vineyard. Here, he travels to a Dylan-themed diner in the singer’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, which catered to visiting fans. (It recently closed, after losing its liquor license; the executive chef explained to the local paper that “people from Hibbing don’t like Bob Dylan as much as people not from Hibbing like Bob Dylan.”) He stands in line in the cold among a group of Dylan’s late-career tour regulars in order to get a prime spot in the front row. And he introduces a cast of Dylan disciples: circumspect keepers of secret bootleg recordings, feuding editors of Dylan zines and Web sites, literary detectives sourcing allusions in his lyrics, and a guy who owns Dylan’s childhood high chair.
There are plenty of creeps. In the mid-sixties, perhaps unnerved by his influence over his fans, Dylan fled upstate to Woodstock, where hopeful acolytes showed up at his house. One guy sneaked into Dylan’s bedroom to watch him and his wife sleep. Later, Dylan recalled thinking, “Now wait, these people can’t be my fans. They just can’t be.” Devotion can turn strange, and sour. After Dylan moved back to New York City, in the late sixties, he was dogged by a man named A. J. Weberman, who created a peculiar translation system to “decode” Dylan’s lyrics—“in Dylan’s language Texas might mean ‘Europe’ ”—and even went through his trash. Years later, still preoccupied by bizarre theories about Dylan, Weberman tells Kinney, “I wasted my @#$%& life on this shit.” Another parser of Dylan’s songs became convinced that his album “Time Out of Mind,” from 1997, foretold the death of Princess Diana. As Kinney writes, “Any fool could find whatever he wanted inside the vast Dylan songbook: drugs, Jesus, Joan Baez.”
Yet, despite these unnerving examples, most of the fans that Kinney talks to aren’t fools or stalkers. They have simply developed an unusually strong affinity for an artist and his music. And though their ardor seems to make the artist himself uncomfortable, Kinney suggests that Dylan might be partially to blame for it—that his own aloofness and self-made mythologies have deepened his fans’ thralldom. “Dylan created personas and then demolished them, denied they had ever existed, and scorned the people who still clung to them,” Kinney writes. Political folkie, country farmer, travelling gypsy, born-again Christian, rustic dandy—Dylan has cycled through a series of musical characters as if playing all the parts in a one-man vaudeville act. It’s been thrilling and curious, and also—most of the time, at least—deeply persuasive. Can fans be blamed for coming under one of these spells—for believing that Dylan meant what he sang at the March on Washington, or wasn’t just messing around when he recorded “Self Portrait,” or for preferring one incarnation above the others and lamenting or resenting that version’s demolition by Dylan’s own revisionism? Kinney’s own fandom seems to have lapsed a bit into skepticism, yet he never mocks the continued devotion of those who still believe. By getting his subjects to talk about the moment, often years past, in which they were swayed by Dylan’s music, Kinney humanizes the archetype of the pop junkie.
It is risky to be an earnest Bob Dylan fan—the kind of person who is inclined to follow him around on his Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988 and hasn’t stopped, as Dylan plays on past his seventy-second birthday. Or someone like the music critic Lester Bangs, who found himself, in the seventies, using Dylan’s album “Blood on the Tracks” as “an instrument of self abuse”—something he put on after every heartbreak, a personal soundtrack of misery. Dylan might very well sneer at one of the hardcore fans whom Kinney talks to, who describes what he feels when he watches the singer onstage: “I just wanted him to know that I existed and that I loved what he did. But it goes deeper than that. I don’t know why, but if Bob is sad, or his music is sad, I feel sad, and I feel sad for him. When he’s singing and he’s hurting, it hurts me, too.” Another fan, who followed the tour as a young woman, told Kinney that she went out of her way not to meet Dylan on the road; she’d heard about his mercurial, often prickly personality, and couldn’t imagine how she could go on listening to his music if he were to shoot her an icy, dismissive stare.
Like a disappointed father—or an angry God—Dylan seems to lament the foibles of his followers. But Kinney argues that Dylan may have more in common with his obsessive fans than he might think. Like them, he is a collector of cultural ephemera, a hoarder of odd texts and phrases, and an avid, idiosyncratic student of the past.
In the summer of 2003, a schoolteacher from Minnesota was travelling in Japan and happened to pick up a book about the world of Japanese organized crime called “Confessions of a Yakuza.” On the book’s first page, he read a line, about a man sitting like a “feudal lord,” that stood out. He realized that it echoed a line from one of Dylan’s songs from the album “Love and Theft,” which was released in 2001. He brought the book home and found a handful of other, unmistakably reused phrases. Dylan had not credited his strange source, which seemed to have been selected almost at random. In the years since, with the help of Google Books, Scott Warmuth, a fan from New Mexico, has been delving deeper into Dylan’s recent writing and finding all kinds of odd, uncredited borrowings. Passages from Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), were taken from disparate sources: from H. G. Wells, Jack London, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald; from Tony Horowitz’s nonfiction book “Confederates in the Attic,” a travel guide about New Orleans, and an issue of Time, from 1961. Listeners of Dylan’s album “Modern Times” (from 2006) found lyrics that came from the work of an unremembered Civil War poet named Henry Timrod. Some have called these plain cases of plagiarism; others have suggested that they diminish or else entirely scuttle the idea of Dylan as an original American voice.
But Kinney takes a different view of these discoveries. Warmuth’s reading of Dylan’s memoir has revealed that Dylan’s “appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.” The thefts that Dylan made were part of the story—he had, as Kinney writes, “hidden another book between the lines.” Kinney remarks on an especially intriguing section of “Chronicles,” in which Dylan seems to be explaining the method behind his guitar playing. Dylan writes, mysteriously, “You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust the listeners to make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t.” If this sounds inscrutable as musical technique, that’s because it is lifted from a self-help book about gaining influence over others called “The 48 Laws of Power,” by Robert Greene. This, then, is a cunning bit of dark humor: Dylan purports to explain the magic behind his music, but he’s really just revealing how susceptible devoted fans are to this kind of florid nonsense.
This unpacking of Dylan’s memoir, and the increased scrutiny given to his recent albums, is a reminder that Dylan’s work has always been spurred on by his own fannish, idiosyncratic obsessions. Michael Gray, who has written extensively about Dylan’s songwriting, tells Kinney, “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else.” Dylan’s earliest songs borrowed chords and lyrics from traditional folk songs; he has lifted lines and licks from the blues; he has repurposed and reassembled the Bible, press clippings, English poetry, the American songbook, and a half century of cultural comings and goings to create a kind of ongoing, evolving musical collage. Dylan is an archivist and a librarian in addition to being an artist.
Before Robert Zimmerman was Bob Dylan, he was an eager music fan. As a young man, he couldn’t wait to blow out of Minnesota and meet his idol, Woody Guthrie. He was, Kinney writes, “earnest, embarrassingly so. He would talk and talk and talk about traveling east, meeting Woody, making it big.” Dylan, just nineteen years old, visited Guthrie at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, in New Jersey, where Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s disease, had been committed. Guthrie was debilitated by the illness—there wasn’t much he could teach Dylan. Perhaps Dylan learned that idols never live up to a fan’s expectations, and so it’s silly to expect otherwise. But Dylan had been a musical pilgrim long before he inspired others to make pilgrimages in his footsteps. Kinney tells another story, of the time when Dylan, years later, in 2009, showed up for a tour at John Lennon’s childhood home. Or the year before, in Winnipeg, when he was spotted at the house where Neil Young grew up. Another time, he was seen at Sun Studios, in Memphis, where Elvis had cut his first records. Someone stopped him and told Dylan what his music had meant to him. Dylan responded, “Well son, we all have our heroes.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/bob-dylan-fanboy.html
David Kinney’s new book, “The Dylanologists,” is a journey among these so-called lost souls. Kinney is a newspaper journalist and a Dylan fan; his first book, “The Big One,” from 2009, was about a different set of obsessives: the anglers who compete in an annual fishing derby on Martha’s Vineyard. Here, he travels to a Dylan-themed diner in the singer’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, which catered to visiting fans. (It recently closed, after losing its liquor license; the executive chef explained to the local paper that “people from Hibbing don’t like Bob Dylan as much as people not from Hibbing like Bob Dylan.”) He stands in line in the cold among a group of Dylan’s late-career tour regulars in order to get a prime spot in the front row. And he introduces a cast of Dylan disciples: circumspect keepers of secret bootleg recordings, feuding editors of Dylan zines and Web sites, literary detectives sourcing allusions in his lyrics, and a guy who owns Dylan’s childhood high chair.
There are plenty of creeps. In the mid-sixties, perhaps unnerved by his influence over his fans, Dylan fled upstate to Woodstock, where hopeful acolytes showed up at his house. One guy sneaked into Dylan’s bedroom to watch him and his wife sleep. Later, Dylan recalled thinking, “Now wait, these people can’t be my fans. They just can’t be.” Devotion can turn strange, and sour. After Dylan moved back to New York City, in the late sixties, he was dogged by a man named A. J. Weberman, who created a peculiar translation system to “decode” Dylan’s lyrics—“in Dylan’s language Texas might mean ‘Europe’ ”—and even went through his trash. Years later, still preoccupied by bizarre theories about Dylan, Weberman tells Kinney, “I wasted my @#$%& life on this shit.” Another parser of Dylan’s songs became convinced that his album “Time Out of Mind,” from 1997, foretold the death of Princess Diana. As Kinney writes, “Any fool could find whatever he wanted inside the vast Dylan songbook: drugs, Jesus, Joan Baez.”
Yet, despite these unnerving examples, most of the fans that Kinney talks to aren’t fools or stalkers. They have simply developed an unusually strong affinity for an artist and his music. And though their ardor seems to make the artist himself uncomfortable, Kinney suggests that Dylan might be partially to blame for it—that his own aloofness and self-made mythologies have deepened his fans’ thralldom. “Dylan created personas and then demolished them, denied they had ever existed, and scorned the people who still clung to them,” Kinney writes. Political folkie, country farmer, travelling gypsy, born-again Christian, rustic dandy—Dylan has cycled through a series of musical characters as if playing all the parts in a one-man vaudeville act. It’s been thrilling and curious, and also—most of the time, at least—deeply persuasive. Can fans be blamed for coming under one of these spells—for believing that Dylan meant what he sang at the March on Washington, or wasn’t just messing around when he recorded “Self Portrait,” or for preferring one incarnation above the others and lamenting or resenting that version’s demolition by Dylan’s own revisionism? Kinney’s own fandom seems to have lapsed a bit into skepticism, yet he never mocks the continued devotion of those who still believe. By getting his subjects to talk about the moment, often years past, in which they were swayed by Dylan’s music, Kinney humanizes the archetype of the pop junkie.
It is risky to be an earnest Bob Dylan fan—the kind of person who is inclined to follow him around on his Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988 and hasn’t stopped, as Dylan plays on past his seventy-second birthday. Or someone like the music critic Lester Bangs, who found himself, in the seventies, using Dylan’s album “Blood on the Tracks” as “an instrument of self abuse”—something he put on after every heartbreak, a personal soundtrack of misery. Dylan might very well sneer at one of the hardcore fans whom Kinney talks to, who describes what he feels when he watches the singer onstage: “I just wanted him to know that I existed and that I loved what he did. But it goes deeper than that. I don’t know why, but if Bob is sad, or his music is sad, I feel sad, and I feel sad for him. When he’s singing and he’s hurting, it hurts me, too.” Another fan, who followed the tour as a young woman, told Kinney that she went out of her way not to meet Dylan on the road; she’d heard about his mercurial, often prickly personality, and couldn’t imagine how she could go on listening to his music if he were to shoot her an icy, dismissive stare.
Like a disappointed father—or an angry God—Dylan seems to lament the foibles of his followers. But Kinney argues that Dylan may have more in common with his obsessive fans than he might think. Like them, he is a collector of cultural ephemera, a hoarder of odd texts and phrases, and an avid, idiosyncratic student of the past.
In the summer of 2003, a schoolteacher from Minnesota was travelling in Japan and happened to pick up a book about the world of Japanese organized crime called “Confessions of a Yakuza.” On the book’s first page, he read a line, about a man sitting like a “feudal lord,” that stood out. He realized that it echoed a line from one of Dylan’s songs from the album “Love and Theft,” which was released in 2001. He brought the book home and found a handful of other, unmistakably reused phrases. Dylan had not credited his strange source, which seemed to have been selected almost at random. In the years since, with the help of Google Books, Scott Warmuth, a fan from New Mexico, has been delving deeper into Dylan’s recent writing and finding all kinds of odd, uncredited borrowings. Passages from Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), were taken from disparate sources: from H. G. Wells, Jack London, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald; from Tony Horowitz’s nonfiction book “Confederates in the Attic,” a travel guide about New Orleans, and an issue of Time, from 1961. Listeners of Dylan’s album “Modern Times” (from 2006) found lyrics that came from the work of an unremembered Civil War poet named Henry Timrod. Some have called these plain cases of plagiarism; others have suggested that they diminish or else entirely scuttle the idea of Dylan as an original American voice.
But Kinney takes a different view of these discoveries. Warmuth’s reading of Dylan’s memoir has revealed that Dylan’s “appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.” The thefts that Dylan made were part of the story—he had, as Kinney writes, “hidden another book between the lines.” Kinney remarks on an especially intriguing section of “Chronicles,” in which Dylan seems to be explaining the method behind his guitar playing. Dylan writes, mysteriously, “You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust the listeners to make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t.” If this sounds inscrutable as musical technique, that’s because it is lifted from a self-help book about gaining influence over others called “The 48 Laws of Power,” by Robert Greene. This, then, is a cunning bit of dark humor: Dylan purports to explain the magic behind his music, but he’s really just revealing how susceptible devoted fans are to this kind of florid nonsense.
This unpacking of Dylan’s memoir, and the increased scrutiny given to his recent albums, is a reminder that Dylan’s work has always been spurred on by his own fannish, idiosyncratic obsessions. Michael Gray, who has written extensively about Dylan’s songwriting, tells Kinney, “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else.” Dylan’s earliest songs borrowed chords and lyrics from traditional folk songs; he has lifted lines and licks from the blues; he has repurposed and reassembled the Bible, press clippings, English poetry, the American songbook, and a half century of cultural comings and goings to create a kind of ongoing, evolving musical collage. Dylan is an archivist and a librarian in addition to being an artist.
Before Robert Zimmerman was Bob Dylan, he was an eager music fan. As a young man, he couldn’t wait to blow out of Minnesota and meet his idol, Woody Guthrie. He was, Kinney writes, “earnest, embarrassingly so. He would talk and talk and talk about traveling east, meeting Woody, making it big.” Dylan, just nineteen years old, visited Guthrie at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, in New Jersey, where Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s disease, had been committed. Guthrie was debilitated by the illness—there wasn’t much he could teach Dylan. Perhaps Dylan learned that idols never live up to a fan’s expectations, and so it’s silly to expect otherwise. But Dylan had been a musical pilgrim long before he inspired others to make pilgrimages in his footsteps. Kinney tells another story, of the time when Dylan, years later, in 2009, showed up for a tour at John Lennon’s childhood home. Or the year before, in Winnipeg, when he was spotted at the house where Neil Young grew up. Another time, he was seen at Sun Studios, in Memphis, where Elvis had cut his first records. Someone stopped him and told Dylan what his music had meant to him. Dylan responded, “Well son, we all have our heroes.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/bob-dylan-fanboy.html
Re: "Dylanologists" and "Stones hardcore fans"
Posted by:
Doxa
()
Date: May 23, 2014 09:59
Quote
KeylockSanchezandCoQuote
TooTough
I just ran across a Bob Dylan quote about his hardest followers,
the so-called "Dylanologists", made in 2001:
In an interview conducted by Alan Jackson for The Times Magazine in 2001,
before the album [Love And Theft ]was released, Dylan said “these
so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music…I don’t feel they know a thing,
or have any inkling of who I am and what I’m about. I know they think
they do, and yet it’s ludicrous, it’s humorous, and sad. That such
people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get
a life, please. It’s not something any one person should do about another.
You’re not serving your own life well. You’re wasting your life.”
I know that every group has followers that go beyond some "point",
maybe even here. I would call myself a "hardcore Stonesfan", having seen
them XX times, paying thousands for their music and memorabilia.
So who does Dylan mean? The guy who bought the house next to his birthplace?
Or the 100+ concert goer? I think it´s a hard quote. But that´s Dylan.
I can´t imagine the Stones saying such things about, well, us. I´d be very pissed.
I've always been intrigued by that Dylan quote. But he mixes two different things. First he talks about "connoiseurs of Bob Dylan music". What's wrong with that? He basically offers products (records) and services (concerts) and should be glad he has so many consumers (fans). But then he changes the subject, when he talks about them "not having an inkling about who I am". How does he know they don't know? He is the single most important figure of the second half of the 20th century in popular music, how could he not be studied and analysed? I think he refers to people like A. J. Weberman (who, by the way, is the only person I know of that actually went through Dylan's garbage). From what I know, he basically dislikes people and avoids contact not only with fans, but also with promoters and members of his own band (those pictures of him playing cards with his band are all pretty much made up, he does not socialize with them). But if you are an artist that kind of attitude is bound to make people even more interested. If you hide from your fans you are bound to create a major interest. But that's Dylan's game.
Try to read David Dalton's book, "Who is that Man?", it basically explains why lunatics abound among Dylan fans. One of the strangest things about the Neverending Tour is that it remains a paradox: it offers Bob exposure without contact.
I think the records he started making in 1997 might in the end be regarded as his greatest.
A good interpretation of that quote, and I agree it having the confusion of pointing with finger towards two different kinds of 'Dylanologists'. Those who are taking his music (maybe too) seriously, that is, the stuff he does as an artist and as a public figure, But then those who are interested on him as a private person (or trying to understand his art/public doings from the base of his personal life). Even though Bob might have enough of both of them - his music is 'analyzised' more than any other pop musician's - I think he should not be too bothered by the former group, but take that 'over-interpretation' as an honor. Most probably any other artist in any field would do...
The other thing is the other group, and I wholeheartidly agree with him in criticizing them. Dylan is a very private person, and he has taken to extreme in protecting his privacy, be that game or not. I don't think that's game at all, but just his learned way of coping with the world (his fame, status, etc.). But being that a matter of his idiosyncratic nature, I think he has a point in there, too. A very important point, which I think makes him a better artist as well. Anything he has offer to world or other people is his art. There is nothing beyond or behind or under it, which makes any difference. Just the art - records, songs, performances - and that's he has to offer, he is good at, and we should be interested in.
But what I think makes this whole thing puzzling is that as an artist, as a public performer, he puts so much of his privacy in front. He puts there, if I may use cliches, his soul and heart, and to an extent that needs to be damn demanding. I can easily imagine him thinking 'what else do you want? I give anything I can'. Nietzsche once said that 'what is not written by blood, is not written at all', and I think Dylan if anyone ever in his field, has done his craft with that attitude. And that's also a reason why we easily confuse the public and private realms. Dylan reaches people - he talks to us by music that sounds so personal, coming from one soul to other, which I think it is a mark of great art. Dylan's 'dilemma' is that he is a bit too good in what he does, and he needs to deal with the consequences, especially working in a business that is driven by the expectations of what celebrities supposed to be and act like.
Actually I don't think Dylan is that different as far as private/public distinction goes than Jagger, who is also famous for protecting his privacy. But Dylan draws the line stronger between art and all the rest. More extrovert Mick sees the public realm much wider, and his 'Jagger act' is much more than his music and performances, including interviews, public showings, meeting fans, etc.. Introvert, even antisocial Dylan seem to protect his privacy even from his band mates. But I still would claim that as public performers and artists, Dylan is much more private than Jagger ever is. Everytime Dylan performs, probably having not much option, he reveals much more of himself, writes with blood, than Jagger does. Sometimes when watching Dylan on stage I feel like that that's the only moment he can be himself. to live and breathe. And that he must be a damn unhappy person, the loneliest person, or even nothing outside of that context. (Ouch, that judgemnt went too far...
)- Doxa, a pseudo-dylanologist
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2014-05-23 10:09 by Doxa.
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