Dylan at 80

Gary Browning

Description

2021 marks Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none.The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate's masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors' who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster!

Sujets

• Popular culture

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 21 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788360715
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Dylan at 80
It Used to Go Like That, and Now It Goes Like This
Gary Browning
Constantine Sandis




Published in 2021 by
Imprint Academic
www.imprintacademic.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 Gary Browning & Constantine Sandis
The rights of Gary Browning & Constantine Sandis to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Imprint Academic or Andrews UK Limited.


Bob Dylan Mural by Eduard Kobra, Minneapolis 25 August 2017 (from a photograph by Sharon Mollerus, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license CC BY 2.0)


Bob Dylan performing at the Azkena Rock Festival, 26 June 2010 (photograph by Alberto Cabello, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license CC BY 2.0)



Dedication
This book is dedicated to Conal Browning.
Things come and go, but some things stay. My son, Conal, is with me most of the time, even if he died over 10 years ago. Paranoid schizophrenia came to possess him in his early teens, and life was a struggle for the next ten or so years until his death. Memories of Conal intersect with memories of Dylan. Life was hard for Conal, but he could tell the inauthentic from the truthful, and he was a good person to be alongside. A half-smile from Conal was worth a lot of the world’s laughter.
Conal liked to listen to all sorts of music, and he loved playing the guitar. Late one night when I was rewriting a book that refused to be written, I crept down to the basement kitchen to make another cup of coffee, and I heard Conal playing. The music was gentle and soulful. On another day I came home from work, and he was watching Dylan’s 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous. I had seen the film, and it didn’t seem to add up to much. Dylan’s music was powerful, but his acting and the script seemed wooden. Conal liked the film, and he spoke about it clearly, and with conviction. ‘It’s the truth’, he declared. ‘There is no way out. There’s no outside to political mind control. It’s a stacked deck.’ I murmured my objection to a political rock concert that takes place in the film, at which, the Dylan character, Jack Fate is enlisted to perform. ‘Surely,’ I mused, ‘the idea of a rock concert to provide funds for a cause is formulaic and unconvincing.’ Conal didn’t blink. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s the way things go. We can only speak in clichés, protest is as hackneyed as anything else. Nothing works.’
Conal liked Dylan. Above all, he was drawn to the early Dylan. His enthusiasm for the early acoustic Dylan reminded me how much energy and talent the early Dylan possessed. While people of my generation tend to favour Dylan’s explosive mid-60s period, where his electric sound and surreal lyrics turned everything around, Conal recognised the vitality of that early music. His favourite song was ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, Dylan’s elegiac evocation of a preceding convivial time with friends. Just as I found it hard to understand how Dylan could look back wistfully on his earlier years when he was still so young, I was taken aback over how Conal could look back so reverently at a young age. Of course, Dylan was hell bent on moving forward and cutting ties, so perhaps that’s what made his looking back so poignant in 1963. Likewise, Conal packed a lot of suffering into relatively few years, so his earlier life appeared dreamlike and special. His death was awful. His sister, Eleanor, is not a Dylan fan, yet she chose ‘Shelter from the Storm’ to be played at the funeral, and listening to the song made sense in the aftermath of the hard rain that had been falling earlier in the day.
Conal had to bear many things; sectioning, arid professionalism, nurses at their wits end, social workers bereft of sociability and parents who seemed to sit on the wrong side of the fence. But near the end he took some philosophy courses at Oxford Brookes University. He had left school early without qualifications, but now, towards the end, he excelled at philosophy and one of his teachers was Constantine, my fellow editor of this book. I did not know Constantine well at the time, but I am grateful that he taught Conal. He remembers Conal in this way:
Conal was in his early twenties when he joined my Introduction to Ethics class as an associate student. I remember the day I first met him well because he had emailed me beforehand to introduce himself and apologise for missing the enrolment deadline. This meant that I had to sign some forms which he brought to class. There was a calm intensity and natural sensitivity to him; a shyness that others might have easily mistaken for aloofness, and a silence for snobbery. Yet I felt I got him straight away. I subsequently got to know him a little bit and he reminded me of myself at his age, in an uncanny number of ways. Conal was much better than I’d been at philosophy, though. He didn’t speak often in class, but when he did he asked perceptive questions, with nothing to prove and no axe to grind. He seemed to enjoy the module and was particularly taken by moral particularity, while finding consequentialism to be inconsequential. The essays he wrote were thoughtful.
Conal was a bright and likeable kid, one of a handful of memorable students who were far more interested in specific problems and ideas than in how to achieve a particular grade. Sometimes, he’d arrive late to class, or skip a lecture altogether, but was always genuinely sorry to have missed out on whatever we were covering that day. He wanted to make his own way in life and being an associate student gave him the freedom to do it while holding on to some kind of routine and whatever stability might have come with it. In the end, freedom won out and I didn’t get to see him during the last months of his life.
Conal Browning is gone, but his spirit’s living on and on.
Gary Browning (with Constantine Sandis)
Oxford & London, April 2021


Conal Browning



Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Universal Music Publishing for permission to reprint from the lyrics to the following songs of Bob Dylan:
‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’; ‘Abandoned Love’; ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’; ‘Ain’t Talkin’; ‘All Along the Watchtower’; ‘Are You Ready’; ‘As I Went Out One Morning’; ‘Ballad in Plain D’; ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’; ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’; ‘Black Rider’; ‘Blind Willie McTell’; ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’; ‘Buckets of Rain’; ‘Can’t Escape from You’; ‘Can’t Wait’; ‘Changing of the Guards’; ‘Cross the Green Mountain’; ‘Crossing the Rubicon’; ‘Cry a While’; ‘Dark Eyes’; ‘Desolation Row’; ‘Dignity’; ‘Every Grain of Sand’; ‘False Prophet’; ‘Forgetful Heart’; ‘From a Buick 6’; ‘Gates of Eden’; ‘Gonna Change My Way of Thinking’; ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’; ‘Got My Mind Made Up’; ‘Highlands’; ‘Honest with Me’; ‘I Contain Multitudes’; ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’; ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding); ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’; ‘Joey’; ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate); ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’; ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’; ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps’; ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’; ‘Make You Feel My Love’; ‘Masters of War’; ‘Mississippi’; ‘Mother of Muses’; ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’; ‘Murder Most Foul’; ‘My Back Pages’; ‘My Own Version of You’; ‘Narrow Way’; ‘Nettie Moore’; ‘Never Say Goodbye’; ‘North Country Blues’; ‘Not Dark Yet’; ‘Odds and Ends’; ‘One Too Many Mornings’; ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’; ‘Pledging My Time’; ‘Positively 4th Street’; ‘Queen Jane Approximately’; ‘Red River Shore’; ‘Restless Farewell’; ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’; ‘Shelter from the Storm’; ‘Shooting Star’; ‘Song to Woody’; ‘Soon After Midnight’; ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’; ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’; ‘Sugar Baby’; ‘Summer Days’; ‘Tangled Up In Blue’; ‘Tempest’; ‘The Death of Emmett Till’; ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’; ‘This Dream of You’; ‘Tin Angel’; ‘To Ramona’; ‘Tombstone Blues’; ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’; ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’; ‘Unbelievable’; ‘Under Your Spell’; ‘Wedding Song’; ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’; ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’; ‘With God on Our Side’; ‘Working Man’s Blues #2’.
We would also like to thank a few people who helped make this project happen: Bob Dylan for keepin’ on. Jeff Rosen for his help and encouragement at the outset. Graham Horswell and Keith Sutherland at Imprint Academic have been terrific. Likewise, Marc Cimino and Joy Murphy at Universal Music Publishing. All of the contributors have been fantastic in getting their writing done, even with all the tired horses in the sun. Raia and Louise have given us terrific personal support. We just couldn’t make it by ourselves…



Notes on Contributors
James Adams is an independent researcher and writer living in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the world of Bob Dylan, his primary interests are Dylan fans, fanzines and fan culture.
Nicholas Birns teaches at New York University where he regularly teaches a course on Dylan. He is author most recently of The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Space (Lexington) and is co-editing th