Posted on 09/27/2004 5:38:26 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
It's not easy being a counterculture icon - just ask Bob Dylan.
The unwitting voice of the Make Love, Not War Generation has written a memoir chronicling the agonies of fame, which include a plague of peaceniks so intrusive that he kept guns in his house and "wanted to set fire to these people."
In an excerpt from "Chronicles, Volume I" published in the current Newsweek, Dylan bemoans the consequences of writing "songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities."
"I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of," Dylan writes.
In fact, Dylan says he had two pistols and a rifle in his upstate Woodstock home to protect his family from his rowdiest fans.
His home was once a quiet refuge, but after his success, "road maps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts."
"At first, it was merely the nomadic homeless making illegal entry - seemed harmless enough, but then rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive - unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry," he writes.
"Not only that, but creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. This was so unsettling. I wanted to set fire to these people."
All he ever wanted was "a nine-to-five existence" - not to be some "Big Bubba of Rebellion."
"In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best and that was all that mattered - the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing," he writes.
But his genius for penning songs that spoke to a generation torn apart by the Vietnam War apparently turned him into "a scapegoat - someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire."
For Dylan, 63, the soon-to-be-published book seems to mark the recovery from what he describes in Newsweek as a 25-year "downward spiral."
He spent three years writing this first installment, but says he didn't enjoy the process.
"I'm used to writing songs," he tells Newsweek, "and songs - I can fill 'em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth and it can't be misinterpreted."
Bob Dylan was a 2nd Amendment advocate and didn't know it - LOL.
That's excellent. You have kept the original meter of the lyrics perfectly. Blowed up the left real good too!
maybe he'll write a song about property rights for his next album
Any Buddy Miller fans out there?
Though, it is not the worst thing.
I'm just finishing Alistair Horne's "The Price of Glory," about the battle of Verdun, and there's a quote from some French writer: "War is less costly than servitude. The choice is always between Verdun and Dachau."
Lots and lots of drugs helped the understanding, back in the 60s. Been there, did that, got the t-shirt.
Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X ...
I smell a ghost writer in those clichés (and there are many more of them there.) Disappointing...
See tagline.
LOL
Did you catch a cat burglar, Meek? Or have the Mods been stalking you? ;-)
Suggest you check your olfactory. I read it all. I know Dylan. Dylan wrote it.
"And the one eyed undertaker, blows a funeral horn, come in she said Ill give ya, shelter from the storm.."
I don't think he is closet about it. Liberals have just turned his phrases to their own liking. I have been a fan a long time and in his interviews he always reflects my take on things. He has said for years he is not a the sheepish bleeding heart type. Compassionate yes, as all of us conservatives truly are, but not a liberal.
Yeah, me too.
LOL! And good lyrics post there, CG!My thanks to BulletBobCo for the concept of this
pic and to Conspiracy Guy for the captions!
You know what is sooo funny about your post, I just bought a re-cut cd of an album of Donovan's that I had in the mid sixties. Called a Gift From a Flower to a Garden. Hey, it is a nostalgia thing. lol I really loved that album, and really wanted to hear some of it again.
wow
That's even worse for Dylan if he wrote it. It's got more cliches than the first two pages of a Harry Potter book. And such hackneyed expressions in such number are typically a dead giveaway that a professional ghostwriter or editor had been involved and wrote it from interview tapes with the rambling subject, as most such things are concocted. You have no evidence that Dylan wrote it other than the statements in Newsweak magazine, which we here otherwise dismiss as lying MSM, and neither do I. Based on this excerpt, I say he didn't.
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