Anglonautes > Arts > Music > Rock / Folk > 21st, 20th century > USA

And this "modern minstrel genius," as American poet Allen Ginsberg called him, this self-elected reject from the middle-class backwoods of Minnesota, becomes more of an enigma every day.

After six LPs and as much, if not more, exposure than the Beatles, Dylan has successfully sheltered his own poetic soul from the limelight in a one-sided game of chess with newspapermen and questioners.

Only a few phrases have been uttered from Dylan's lips outside his songs. And what he has said has been a mixture of send-up, humorous mockery and evasiveness, resulting, recently, in the same treatment from the Press.

During Dylan's concerts, too, there are no explanations, no introductions, and none of the usual political diatribes between the songs that are most common to protest singers. Despite this, or perhaps as a result of it, since it heightens the mystery, he is hypnotic on stage.

The atmosphere at his concerts is one of tense and silent rapture, with the crowd leaning forward to catch every cryptic syllable of the songs they quote daily, like a religious manifesto, on street corners.

Now there is something disturbing about Dylan: he is said to have disowned all the songs he ever wrote before he turned to "folk-rock". He is said to have become an introvert.

He was nearly booed off stage in Dublin recently when he came on with three tons of sound equipment and his new backing group - simply called the Group.

There were pleading shouts of "We want the real Dylan. Leave it to Mick Jagger" as he belted out the endless choruses of his hip-orientated rhythm and blues songs.

There is a growing uneasiness with Dylan among his fans. It is that he is changing without telling them why. They are in the dark, and they feel perplexed.

When the Dylan cult originally took hold, it grew directly out of the Dylan songs. They were poetic and expressive against the comparative banality of pop music. They incorporated everything from folk songs to protest to hip to abstract existentialist poetry and to Dylan's special brand of "the aesthetic of the ugly", gathered, it seemed, from the hard travelling along dusty roads, suffering hardships and heartaches.

He had opened the floodgates of a sudden new medium which was peculiar to young people, in which they could express themselves. They latched on, copying him and quoting him.

But Dylan never stopped to explain to his fascinated fans what he was doing or the changes he was going through. Unlike the Beatles, the only thing that was common property was his songs.

He expected them to be sufficient, and his complaint with newspapermen who asked him questions like "What exactly are you protesting about?" was that they never listened to his songs before asking him about them, and they were trying to find, in the present trendy fashion, a label for him.

And on his trip to Britain last year, in the face of some of the most controversial songs he had ever written, he said wearily: "I do not write about anything."

But as one of his friends said to me recently: "Dylan is just a poet, he lives like a poet with few friends around him. He finds the normal questions journalists ask him pretty irrelevant."

Dylan wants to please his audiences, or not to disappoint them, and obligingly says: "I just get the word from other people to turn up somewhere, and I am there."

If there is a change, it has come about between these two British tours. The old Dylan, at the Albert Hall in London last year, was the poetic Dylan with one guitar, a handful of harmonicas, and a few wry jokes.

This time the magic's still there, but he might throw a few fans off the track.

For one thing, the existentialist Dylan has married. For another, the man who took contemporary folk music out of its hermetic shell and has shaken it and enriched it has seemingly turned his back on it.

From The Guardian archive > The Manchester Evening News >
May 17 1966 > The minstrel who's just a big mystery,
G,
Republished 30.9. 2005,
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/sep/30/
bobdylan

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