Dylan obsession
Charles Spencer
There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie adolescent at a boy’s boarding school who fancied himself as a poet.
But while I can appreciate that such albums as Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks are compelling and lyrically profound, it would be dishonest to pretend that I listen to them often. Looking at my shelves I’m astonished to discover that I own 16 of Dylan’s individual albums and no fewer than six best of/essential/greatest hits collections. Quite a few of these numerous discs, I fear, have never been played all the way through.
What is it about Dylan that prevents my admiration from turning into deep affection? There’s so much that’s palpably right about him: the manifest integrity, the artistic daring, the fact that he is still out there, performing more than 100 gigs a year, and releasing albums in his sixties that are regarded as among the best in his entire catalogue.
The main drawback is his singing. A nasal whine from even his earliest days, it seems to have grown ever more clotted and mannered with the years. David Bowie has described it as ‘a voice like sand and glue’. Another has compared it to a ‘catarrhal death rattle’. Call me old-fashioned but I like singers who can actually sing. I’d rather hear Dylan’s songs performed by almost anyone but Dylan, especially the Byrds, who always made him sound magical, Jerry Garcia, whose croak is somehow infinitely preferable to Dylan’s rasp, and Jimi Hendrix, whose performance of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is streets ahead of the original.
The other off-putting thing about Dylan is his fans. They don’t come more tiresomely obsessive. The literary critic Christopher Ricks is a particularly egregious example, with his grotesquely inflated claims for the singer–songwriter as a great poet who belongs in the pantheon with Keats. To his credit, Dylan himself appears to find his most devout worshippers an irritating embarrassment, too.
But in recent weeks, I have become a bit of a Dylan nut myself. Say what you will about Dylan’s music, one thing is in no doubt. He is a great DJ — perhaps the greatest ever.
His Theme Time Radio Hour, which goes out on the XM subscription station in America but which has been picked up here by the BBC for both Radio Two and the digital station 6 Music, is a total delight. I’ve always longed for a programme that would play every kind of popular music — soul, blues, jazz, reggae, r’n’b, country, gospel, rock, reggae, folk, western swing — and Dylan plays all that and more. Many of the songs are old and unfamiliar, some are acknowledged classics, and each show is devoted to a single theme. Of the shows I’ve caught recently, these have included New York, Flowers, Dreams and Women’s Names.
Unlike most vacuously prattling, selfobsessed DJs, Dylan gives you both the name of the artist and the title of song before and after playing the record, but he also gives you a great deal more — revealing nuggets about the performers’ lives — and often their deaths, too; quotes from poets such as Shakespeare, Rilke and Walt Whitman who may also have something to say on that week’s chosen theme; pithy and often wise comments of his own and some endearingly dreadful jokes. One moment you are hearing how the brilliant but alcoholic country singer George Jones was reduced to driving to the liquor store on his lawnmower because his wife, Tammy Wynette, had thrown the alcohol down the sink and hidden his car keys, the next he is dispensing helpful hints on how to deal with toddlers’ tantrums. With engaging modesty he never plays any of his own recordings and he often repeats lyrics he especially admires after the song has played to draw attention to their quality.
There’s an addictive night-time atmosphere to the show, and Dylan’s speaking voice, wry, leathery and stained with experience, has a beauty that for me his singing lacks. But what shines through most is Dylan’s enduring love for popular music in almost all its forms. ‘I never understood no border control when it comes to music,’ Dylan once said and he has movingly described how old songs are at the heart of his spiritual values. He apprehends his God through the songs of Hank Williams and the Carter Family.
Thanks to the BBC’s i-player you can listen to the programme whenever it suits you via your computer, and three double CD collections are available featuring some of the superbly varied music featured on the programme, the best being Theme Time Radio Hour on Ace Records (CDCH2 1202) since this contains recent recordings as well as those that are out of copyright. And should any readers have any CD bootlegs of the show available I would be extremely interested to hear from them. After all these years I’m turning into a Dylan obsessive myself.
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