| THE SUN’S NOT YELLOW, IT”S
CHICKEN
So Bob Dylan, always a modest record seller, has
recently had sales of his catalogue increase tenfold. It seems that
his past is coming back not to haunt him but to enhance him; no
doubt fuelled by the recent release of his episodic memoir Chronicles
1( now in paperback & every bit as dazzling & revelatory
as the critics have claimed ), Greil Marcus’ Like A Rolling
Stone ( as usual making mountains out of mountains ), the Martin
Scorcese documentary No Direction Home, (shown on SBS in November
or form a queue behind me waiting to borrow our esteemed editor’s
fresh from America DVD copy) & the just released CD soundtrack
featuring 24 previously unreleased live & alternate versions
of his career up until the triumvarite of the Bringing It All Back
Home, Highway 61 Revisited & Blonde On Blonde albums, which
account for 14 of tracks included. It’s been welded to my
CD player over the past week, but don’t expect any objective
review or opinion on it’s quality, these tracks have been
part of my musical DNA for the past forty years, I don’t have
to remember the words, they just come out my mouth as automatically
as my own name, I’m permanently programmed.
Back in the dreary Orstralian suburbs in the early
60s as a schoolboy I first heard of Bob via the writing credit for
The Byrds’ hit version of Mr Tambourine Man & then heard
Subterranean Homesick Blues on the radio( thanks Stan). I was hooked,
it was simply the most complex exciting funny & scary thing
I’d ever heard, like Chuck Berry with a blown but razor sharp
mind. The saving grace for a pocket money dependent teen back then
was the 7” EP, you got 4 tracks & a picture cover for
the price of 1 & a half singles, a bargain! Not that there was
a record shop in my town, just a corner of the local electrical
store with a few token racks, but somehow I came upon Dylan’s
Mr Tambourine Man EP & of course I had to have it! And I must
admit that I was initially taken aback, his version of the title
track lacked the ornate elegance of the 12 string guitar & soaring
harmonies of the Byrds’ hit version, instead it was a simple
nasal rambling folk song, as a matter of fact my mother who was
used to hearing the likes of The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks
& The Yardbirds blaring out of my bedroom came to the door with
a bemused look on her face & asked “What’s this
then, hillbilly music!?”
And in a way she was right. But the other tracks
on the EP, from the forthcoming Bringing It All Back Home album
were incredibly musically & lyrically dense blasts from absolutely
elsewhere, they were electric, a folk/rock hybrid never before heard.
It was a quantum leap from “she loves you” & “I
want to hold your hand”! Then came “Like A Rolling Stone”
on the radio, and over the next 18 months we had 3 albums, one a
double, that were to transform my world & music forever, the
reverberations personally & musically still being felt today.
Here was a voice, purse lipped like Lennon’s
but with an added curdled hipster subversive sneer that bespoke
rebellion alienation & disgust that was far more potent than
any juvenile delinquent bad boy rock n roll pose before or since,
you didn’t need to suspend your intellect to be a misfit or
drop it to be in love. It was a talk/singing vowel elongated wail,
spitting into the void.
Over the course of the 3 albums, Dylan always
more a lyricist than a melodicist evolved a hybrid folk/blues/country,
rock instrumental sound that drew upon blues shuffles & 12 bar
structures, often using the band like one big rhythm machine that
he could stretch & move his voice across like an action painter,
at other times Mike Bloomfield’s psych blues guitar &
his own harmonica blurt adding punctuation & force to the stripped
down or lush arrangements whenever & wherever appropriate.
Lyrically he walked a tightrope across a cusp of contradictions,
simultaneously depicting & critiquing, both visceral & intellectual,
playful & yet deadly serious, humourous & tragic, direct
& yet deliberately obtuse, subtle & kinetic, it was a tour
de force never before achieved or even thought possible. No lyric
sheets, his written stream of conciousness prose on the back covers
bearing no semblance to the words on the record itself, he demanded
active listening, his lyrical density & velocity stretching
the listener’s comprehension , exhilarating & exhausting
to keep up with. A magician transmuting the unknown into the actual.
He seemed to overrate his audience’s intelligence, although
he never talked down, he came straight at you.
I spent the best part of 2 school terms meticulously
carving his phrase “ Motorcycle Black Madonna Two Wheeled
Gypsy Queen “ into my Year 10 desk. It made perfect sense
even though I had no idea what it actually meant & prepared
me psychicly to seek out & comprehend the poetry of people like
Dylan Thomas, Byron, Allen Ginsberg, e.e.cummings & others,
it was as Dylan had somehow rewired the linguistic part of my mind.
A very powerful meme.
Not that the world woke up at the time, afterall
it’s taken nearly 40 years for each of these records to notch
up a million sales. Dylan remained a secret passed on from one acolyte
to another, like a surrepticous joint at a party, an invitation
into an invisible world. These newly available versions illuminate
& reinvigorate the familiar versions, Dylan showing us that
there are many paths on the mountain, all leading to the peak.
back to top
|
