OK, here are my two memories of Dylan.
It’s about 1964 and I’m visiting a family in Pennyburn, in Derry. Several of the family are around my age and we’re all still reeling from the burst of creativity and pop music revolution that’s come blasting out of Liverpool, with the Beatles the most eminent. So when I visit the family this evening and one of them holds up a record and says “Why don’t we play this instead of the Beatles?” it sounds to me like blasphemy.
“Honest. This guy is even better than the Beatles!” . Blasphemy heaped on blasphemy. And then I hear Bob Dylan’s nasal twang hitting “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I’m blown away. Totally original sound, just acoustic guitar and mouth-organ, and this weird, through-the-nose-half-talking way of singing. Amazing. And the fact that he’s received the blessing of John Lennon cements it.
Fast forward a couple of years to May 1966. I’m in Dublin and Dylan is playing in the Adelphi Cinema, in Abbey Street in Dublin. The place is packed.
Bob finally comes on-stage, a small, unimpressive figure, and without even waiting for the applause to die down, let alone bowing before he starts, Bob launches into …I can’t remember what it was. But it was great. For the first half of the show it was like being close to a saint if not a god. Making wonderful sounds as he moved through ‘Girl from the North Country’, ‘All I Really Want to Do’, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.
Then there was an interval. We didn’t have to go to the foyer to smoke – we smoked where we were sitting, using the built-in ashtrays on the back of the seat in front of us.
After the break Bob strode on-stage once more, this time backed by several electric guitars. WHAAAT? A section of the audience began to boo. Then a voice roared in a strong Dublin accent “Never moind them, Bab – never moind them!”
And we didn’t. I can still hear that wailing little voice above the thundering tunefulness of the electronic backing. He didn’t bow at the end , either. Just walked off. That was Bob. Deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? He should be given those handed out to some of the nonentities over the years. As John Lennon did say and Dylan might have said and with more justification: “If there’s such a thing as a genius, then I’m one”.
Well…what can I say , Jude?… Ps I’ve a great bootleg of that Dublin gig. I hear the whole 1966 tour is to be officially released later in the year..It’ll not dissappoint.
It is a little ironic that Dylan, who in his early days at least, was a poet and icon of peace, should receive an award initiated by,and named after, an arms manufacturer and merchant of death. And that he should thereby link arms with war criminals such as Kissinger and Peres. not to speak of more recent high profile recipients.
He might have invented dynamite, but he didn’t say it should ever be used…
Was it that Einstein never forgave himself for opening the doors to the invention of the atomic bomb…which is where his ideas eventually led. He was supposed to have said later in life that it would have been better had he become a plumber instead….In any case , Bob has not accepted the Nobel prize as yet…you’d never know…he might refuse it ,although going on past form , he’ll turn up and look quizzically at everyone and wonder why they’re all making such a fuss about a song and dance man such as himself…..
Is Bob Dylan entitled, Esteemed Blogmeister, to be called the Nobel Poet Lariat when dressed in his Stetson, as he was wont to do when recording Nashville Skyline?
Anyways/ biodh sin mar ata, the two songs of his which most resonate with one do so for different reasons: one for the lyrics, the other for the music. Both, in a peculiar class of a way, have an Irish resonance for one.
The first is ‘Maggie’s Farm’ which one always associates with a bald chap of an impish disposition brought up on a South Derry farm, contagious to the Heaney homestead. He used to include it (the song, not the homestead) in his Karaoke repertoire, every Wednesday night.
Curiously, he was as apolitical a chap as is possible to encounter in a day’s power jog and it was left to one particular put-upon and opportunist listener to invest the lyrics with an applied (gulp) Irish dimension.
It is common among the Hot Presstitution on Liffeyside to, erm, deconstruct the Dylan lyrics of this song as a withering go at the Military Industrial Complex sorta thingy.
-I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face and for kicks
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks
The National Guards stands at the door
Ah, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
-Mine’s a pint of Glennane craft ale, a chara, for to wash down one’s Ploughman’s lunch .
The other song is ‘To Ramona’ which Sinead Lohan made a memorable recording of, twenty years ago.
Bob Dylan is not the first Yanqui to borrow an elysian melody from the Mexican folk tradition . Aaron Copland was another gringo also of the Jewish persuasion, as it happens, who brilliantly drew upon the same for his celebrated ‘El Salon Mexico’.
Speaking of which El Donaldo, who father’s vaterland was Germany, might be reminded that the German influence on the exquisitely rambunctious music of Northern Mexico known as ‘Norteno’ is subterranean.
When Maxmillian 1 declared himself Emperor of Mexico in 1864 (na ceistigh / don’t ask) he brought many German-speaking opportunists in his wake. When in 1867 he faced a firing squad and lost, they hightailed it up North, stopping short of El Rio Grande and hard-scrabbled a living as farmers. Indeed, to this day there are still small pockets of German-speakers to be found in this area, not unlike those Welsh-speaking farmers in Patagonia.
After putting down their shovels, secateurs , hayforks, scythes, ploughs and hoes in the evening, they took up their button accordions and double basses to lament their lost Alpine homeland. This strain of loss and these instruments form a core part of the musical genre known as Norteno which is a captivating blend of polka, waltz, schottische, bolero, corrida and ranchero.
Its foremost contemporary exponents are ‘Los Tigres del Norte’ who correspond to what, say, the Dubliners were in the folk revival in Ireland of the 1960’s.
It is doubtful if Los Tigres or Bob Dylan for that matter will play at El Donaldo’s inaugural celebrations, which would be a pity but hardly a surprise.
Indeed, Mighty Perk, Bob constantly revisits the Mexicano in his soul. As recently as on 2009’s “Together Through Life” album, that old button -accordian again hoves into view, mixing with the jump blues as easily as ham and eggs