Image by: Binary Ape, Flickr Creative Commons
In 1965, Bob Dylan, the young poet, folk singer and voice of a generation, walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival to make his third appearance in three years. The sun was shining and thousands of young revelers looked on with anticipation. Dylan plugged in his electric guitar, and, with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he started to play electric. Loud.
It’s hard to know what his visions for this moment was, but the outraged heckles and boos that arose during this career-defining performance still resonate today. Sure, there are disagreements about whether the crowd’s hostile reaction was because Dylan’s politically minded folk fans felt betrayed or if it was simply down to poor sound quality. Pete Seeger famously threatened to cut the power cables with an axe to kill the sound, but he still maintains it wasn’t because he had taken offense, but because he couldn’t hear the words. When it comes to Dylan, the words matter. However, the electric controversy did continue to stir up mixed reactions all through the singer’s tour in ’65 and 66’ to the point where people took to walking out mid-concert, after his acoustic set and before he and The Band plugged in. One man in Manchester, England, even stood up to yell “Judas” mid-show. There’s a bootleg of the concert on which this insult can be heard today. Whatever you believe about these events, one thing is certain. Dylan had changed things. Again. And what was the result? Three of the all-time greatest albums in any genre.
With his 35th studio album released on September 11, 2012, probably defying a few more conventions after a prolific, diverse and frequently controversial recording career (which is far from over, by the way; he has just announced another North American tour), this story is undoubtedly as relevant today as it was 45 years ago and shall be 45 years from now and 45 years again thereafter.
The release of Tempest will mark a recording career that has spanned 50 years and defined (and redefined and redefined again) genres and perceptions and music as a whole. Well, the industry at least. A career that as well as producing 35 studio albums has seen the successful release of 58 singles, 13 live albums, 14 compilation albums (most notably the official unofficial bootleg series) 6 collaboration albums and the input to 8 film soundtracks, including the entirety of one (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), as well as his songs being used in many others.
Deep Breath.
Officially there have been 15 album tributes dedicated to him and, according to the iTunes Music Store, there are 2,330 covers of his songs by 1,380 artists. There are even covers of covers of his songs and covers of them again. He has acted in and performed for many films as well as having two made about him. He has written eight books, and because I’m getting tired, I’m not going to count how many books there have been written about him. But it is a lot. A lot. And since 1988 he has been on the fondly named “Never Ending Tour.” He doesn’t subscribe to this name himself, but… I mean… It hasn’t ended yet.
So what made young Robert Allen Zimmerman from middle-of-nowhere Minnesota (my apologies, all Hibbing residents) who failed to get into military school arguably the biggest name in music history? What gave him the vision to change the voice of a generation and shape the way in which generations to follow would think? Eh, Disruption?
Image by: Capt’Gorgeous, Flickr Creative Commons
Instead of one great insight, this story began with a boy moving from a small coal town to New York City at the dawn of the ‘60s, with the sole intention of playing music and the sole belief that there was something bigger out there than could be found at home or within the conventional and mundane. He was concerned with boxcars, Woodie Guthrie and learning new chords on his old guitar. His graduation from coffee shops in Greenwich Village to recording his first studio album, the eponymous Bob Dylan, featuring more covers than originals, was an underwhelming one. But then something changed, something that shocked everybody around him and elevated him to the level of “voice of a generation” in an instant and living legend in a couple of years. Another name that he himself would not subscribe to. The theme of not subscribing to titles for Bob became a disruptive trend quite early on.
He was a folk singer at the time; this is not in doubt. And at that time the convention stated that folk singers played covers of folk songs. That is how it was done, simple as that. This is how it always would be, but this was never his vision.
The world was soon to learn that Bob Dylan was not a man who bowed to convention. The first hard hitting indication of this man’s great counter-conventional nature came in the form of his second single. The song was “Blowin’ in the Wind” and it began “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man.” We’ve all heard the line quoted a thousand times and for good reason. In a sense, the 21-year-old folk singer became the first of a generation of inspirational singer-songwriters, taking off from a tradition that had Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger on one side and the likes of Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison on the other. But he really did something new and made it its own. He reshaped a generation of musicians in the space of the two years that followed. Those two years are now commonly referred to as his Protest era. A high point of this was being invited to perform at the March on Washington in August of ’63.
It was because he was so prolific and influential in this time that when he decided to change things up again, so many people felt so betrayed. Often when a musician changes style there’s a low grumbling amongst his “core fans,” but it’s rarely talked about a couple of months later. Bob Dylan changing style in 1965 after a mere four-year recording history is still the center of heated discussion today. People still care.
And when he did this he released two platinum albums (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited) and one that went double platinum (Blonde on Blonde). With these he changed the shape of rock music, of pop music. He created folk rock, he reinvented the singer-songwriter and he became to many degrees a poet, the first popular musician to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for a number of years in a row now.
He has since then released five more platinum albums, three double platinums and eleven golds. He has been on a genius creative streak since 1997, releasing four of his greatest albums to date and at the same time winning an Academy Award for best song. Where he might take us with Tempest is anybody’s guess, but when asked if the album’s title was some sort of allusion to his retirement with Shakespeare’s last play having been titled The Tempest,
No arguments here. And remember: keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.
Written by: Conor Cawley
