Gee, you'd almost think he was a closet Republican...
I bet a lot of aging hippies are getting deeply depressed even as we speak.Yeah, really. Who'd have ever thought the guy that wrote Mister Tambourine
Man would be like that??? .....
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."
Republican wannabe.
I think it's worth another look. Lots of symbolism and metaphors... Of course the problem with symbols and metaphors is they are not obviously concrete. They can be co-opted to mean just about anything anyone wants which of course is the problem with poetry... or sometimes even "Mission Accomplished" banners. To some the banner praised the hard work of air craft carrier personnel while to others the banner represented well, just about anything Kerry (or Michael Moore, or Dan Rather) happened to be thinking at the moment.
Dylan's answers were always "blowin' in the wind" and it took even him many years to try and understand what he really meant. That's fine, part of the territory with poetry. Likewise, it's part of the process of aging. He was "...much older then but he's younger than that now". As are we all.
Get me a cabin, in Utah.
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout.
Have a bunch of kids who call, me, 'pa'.
That must be what it's all about.
- Bob Dylan, "Time Passes Slowly," New Morning (1970)
She inherited a million bucks
and when she died, it came to me
I can't help it if I'm lucky..............
I love Dylan, but let's face it, he probably wants to avoid making comments about how other people look.
Dylan? Ain't he the moron helped to get Hurricane out of jail? Must be a huge dose of white liberal guilt there.
Gee, you'd almost think he was a closet Republican...
I bet a lot of aging hippies are getting deeply depressed even as we speak.Yeah, really. Who'd have ever thought the guy that wrote Mister Tambourine
Man would be like that??? .....
Yeah, I never got it either. It all sounded very pretentious to me.
It's funny that the press hailed Springsteen as the new Dylan, but it wasn't until Bruce shook off the Dylan influence that Bruce became listenable.
Maybe "Born in the U.S.A" is what Bob could have been if he threw off his own pretensions and wrote about what really mattered to him 8-)
The best Dylan song, "Idiot Wind". Check out the live version from the live album "Hard Rain", recorded in '76. My favorite Dylan album. Check out also, "Love and Theft" a recent release..
Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" is an all-time classic. That song reflects a lot fo the sentiment he shows here in this interview -- he wrote it as a "farewell" of sorts to the hippie culture in Manhattan's East Village after he lived near them for long enough to realize that they were the most useless people he had ever met.
You apparantly were correct. Mr. Dylan seems to have been in it for the money (good reason) and not for the philosophical BS that was so prevalent at the time. My friends were so into Dylan and Thoreau and every other type of anti-establishment type, Jerry Rubin, Mao's red book, etc.... I couldn't take it any more! and joined the MARINE CORPS!!!!!!!
White liberal guilt? Wasnt Hurricane innocent?
I used to have a room mate who thought "Blood on the Tracks" was Dylan's best album. I argued for "Desire," and it made for many good-natured debates.
He played "Idiot Wind" over and over. Great song. Great album.
Actually, that song is "Sign on the Window." .....on New Morning.
Bob is no closet Republican. He sang at Clinton's first inauguration, and he supported Al Gore's campaign, calling him his buddy.
But he is a gun owner. Like he said in his film Masked and Anonymous, "I gotta lot of respect for a gun."
Apparently, the pretensions were everyones Else's, not his....
Guilty as sin AND Dylan played pretty loose with the facts in his lyrics.
And don't forget "George Jacvkson"- 2 versions!
But, hey, it was the times and nobody's perfect.
A legend in his own time.
"Positively 4th Street" by Bob Dylan
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