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.