Mr Tambourine Man

Bob Dylan and 1960’s Counter Culture


"I really was never any more than what I was - a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze… I wasn't a preacher performing miracles."

Bob Dylan's influence hangs over the 1960's like the shroud of some great omniscient prophet. So interwoven are the reality of Dylan and the myth of that decade of social unrest that the truth has for a long time been obscured. No more. In his new memoirs, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. One, he finally lays to waste some of those myths.

Revolution is a word of multiple meanings. To some it resonates of political upheaval, but a more subtle definition suggests a far-reaching change. These two meanings define the gulf between Dylan and the congregation of acolytes who adopted him as their poster boy. They were hell bent on massive uprising, their tactics resembling an out of control juggernaut. Dylan's genius and salvation was his ability to transcend this bombastic approach, to reach deep into the tender heart of the matter and tap the throbbing pulse.

"Dylan switched from the hard commitments of social realism to the more abstract 'realities' of neo-protest and disengagement. His style became one of eloquent despair and personal anarchism," wrote Hunter S. Thompson in 1968. Not renowned for his music writing, Thompson the self-confessed political animal and sceptic of the hippy movement recognised the truth in Dylan's voice.

This was a personal revolution as much as a public one. The changes Dylan went through mirrored the changing climate of the times, perhaps as a reaction, perhaps as some kind of premonition. Certainly he could never be accused of jumping on anybody else's train. His fabled adoption of electric instruments in 1965 may have disenfranchised him from the folk audience that had brought him up, but it was an incredibly prescient move.

"Judas" they called him, but Dylan was onto something bigger. Plugging into the zeitgeist he connected with a new, more vital audience, hungry for anthems to fuel their simmering fire. For a short period there was a symbiotic relationship between the hippies and Dylan, but he would be no one's figurehead.

"All I'd ever done was sing 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. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper."

Dylan's new realities presented greater challenges than many in the counter culture were prepared to face. Their brave new world was more utopian dream than honest attempt to change the status quo. Meanwhile Dylan tapped the mainline of American consciousness and spoke to the common people, including those not seduced by radical politics. His greatest songs spoke of their lives, of the times, of a fractured, confused society.

'Mr Tambourine Man', 'Like a Rolling Stone', 'Ballad of a Thin Man', 'Maggie's Farm', 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'. Each song spoke of a different new reality in Dylan's unique poetical manner. He'd learnt to codify his meaning in allegory from the pioneers of American folk song such as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly.

"Protest songs are difficult to write without having them come off as preachy and one-dimensional. You have to show people a side of themselves they don't even know is there. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular."

Dylan achieved this in no uncertain terms, developing his own dialect that communicated to those whose ears were tuned into the same frequency. Over the decades since his legend has grown inexorably, cementing his place as one of the great social commentators of the Twentieth Century. Chronicles Vol. One finally voices how Dylan himself felt about his deification.

“I had never intended to be on the road of heavy consequences and I didn't like it. I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation, and that notion needed to be pulled up by its roots.”

• Bob Dylan Chronicles Vol. One (Simon and Schuster).

Recommended:
Woody Guthrie - The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie (Vanguard)
Leadbelly - Best of Leadbelly (Cleopatra)
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue (Elektra)

Gavin Bertram.

Ghost Dancing

David Toop


Millions of steel Pachinko balls colliding in a Tokyo arcade. The disturbing hum of the human nervous system in the sound vacumm of an anechoic chamber. Field recordings of nature amplified into an unholy choir. Barking dogs edited into a perverse version of 'Jingle Bells'.

Attempting to listen to this galaxy of sound almost destroyed David Toop's desire to listen to anything. A difficult situation when your primary interests are writing about and playing music. Fortunately Toop overcame this inertia to write his fourth book, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory.

'When sound artists and improvisers focus on details that once would have seemed just a tiny part of a bigger whole, I believe they are entering the microscopic in order to counter a wider sense of fragmentation: too many signals making too much noise.'

"For a while it became a real problem for me. I wondered how I was going to carry on writing about music," says Toop from his home in London. "Now I'm much more ruthless, I don't listen to anything unless it's really good."

Haunted Weather is a different sort of travelogue, a strange journey through a subterranean world of sound that takes in the author's dreams, memories, and experiences. This dizzying array of ideas spanning the use of sound across the arts is initially a dense, impenetrable domain. But Toop's luminescent prose makes the trip worthwhile, drawing connections between movements separated by both geography and history.

That wide-angle lens approach to a vast, amorphous body of sound-related art is filtered through Toop's experiences performing at experimental music festivals in locations as diverse as Glasgow, Mexico City, and Tokyo. Immersion in this world puts the writer in a unique position to commentate on the ideas he encounters.

"I kind of have two careers which are interconnected," explains Toop. "There's a constant reciprocal feedback between one activity and the other. I'm constantly in contact with musicians so that feeds the writing, and thinking about and being exposed to so much music gives me new ideas for ways of making music."

Toop came to experimental music through the free improvisation movement of the early 1970s. Growing frustrated with the ever-changing line up of his band, he worked on two magazines, Musics and Collusion. The paucity of income from these endeavours spurred him to begin writing a book about the hip-hop phenomenon in 1983. At the time hip-hop was viewed by many as a fading phenomenon.

"People said to me, 'Why are you writing about a music that's kind of finished?' But by 1985 hip-hop had really taken off. I didn't know that was going to happen, I just thought it was a really good story of how something develops and evolves."

Rap Attack uncovered the hidden roots of hip-hop in earlier African American music styles such as soul and R&B. Toop's assiduous interviewing of all the main contributors rendered his book the last word on the subject, and with its success came offers of work.

A deep knowledge of hip-hop gave Toop an advantage in the fashion hungry but late coming English music press. After becoming music columnist for lifestyle bible The Face, he also began contributing to titles such as Elle and Vogue, and broadsheet newspapers including The Times.

But, Toop says, journalism took over his life. "I was getting very frustrated because I had this totally alien background in free improv experimental music. There was a lot of pressure on me to write in a more conservative way about more straightforward subjects. After a while I just got tired of it."

His second book in 1995, Ocean of Sound, provided a handy escape from the journalistic treadmill. Refining an impressionistic, nonlinear style of writing, Toop drew from conversation, the blurred spectre of memory, vivid travel diary entries, and his omniscient musicology. This raft of ideas defined the pulse behind the nebulous ambient music scene of the 1990s.

"The breakthrough for me was the idea of writing something as the thought came up," he explains. "I'd write a short passage about something, and if an idea came up related to that, I could drop it in, like samples into a piece of music. From that point I felt absolutely liberated. It became much looser and more poetic, more to do with making connections sideways."

Ocean of Sound plunged into a submerged world of music that was just breaching the surface of popular culture. Although bracketed with commercial club music, many contemporary ambient artists (such as Aphex Twin) were resolutely experimental, both in concept and method. Where avant-garde music had previously been stunted by technological limitations, this was no longer the case. And after the cultural scorched earth of the eighties, there was a renewed interest in things contemporary.

"Suddenly there was a more open, younger, bigger audience, and there were a lot of crossovers happening between certain sorts of music that had been marginal up till then. I found that very exciting. That was partly a selfish thing in the sense that I as a musician hadn't really had an audience for some years. It was a very difficult time during the eighties for anybody involved in experimental music."

Toop the dormant musician took advantage of the prevailing mood, and has released five solo albums and many collaborative efforts since Ocean of Sound was published. He has also compiled a double CD to accompany Haunted Weather, featuring acts such as Scanner, Autechre and Toop.

"This whole period has been really interesting," he admits. "There's been a huge explosion of interest and activity in music and soundwork, suddenly a validation of sound art. That has been really gratifying. It makes you realise how much more complex the development of art or culture is than the stories we read in the magazines, hear on the radio, and see on television."

But Toop is careful to point out that he's never wanted to evangelise to others about music, saying he hopes what interests him is of interest to others. "I try and be very clear that it's my subjective view, and I'm simply making a case for these ideas and this particular emphasis."

Now his fourteen-year old daughter Juliette is absorbing these ideas, as she reads Rap Attack to learn the history of the hip-hop she's listening to. "It's funny," laughs Toop. "Most parents go through this whole crisis about their kids listening to Eminem, and I'm one of the people who wrote about him."

Gavin Bertram.