So I read Dylan's biography by Howard Sounes, and have been hesitant to start this little piece about Dylan's first LP, simply called Bob Dylan. I am not sure if both are related. From Sounes' biography I learned that Dylan is a not-always-nice and intriguing person. From listening to Dylan's first album I learned he was, at age 20-or-so, already an intriguing singer.
It is tempting to listen to this first recording in the light of his later biography. It is also tempting for me not wanting to do that; wanting to write a review as if I was living in 1962. Trying to relive the 'authentic experience' of 1962. Nót taking into account (my knowledge of) his later work.
But I am not going to strive for such an 'authentic' review, ignoring what I have learned from 1962 onwards (I was born in 1964, by the way). In the first place because that is, of course, impossible anyway. When I write, I write now. But also because the point of this blog is not to write 'authentic' reviews - if you want them authentic, search the web for reviews written in 1962 (but be aware that you will not be able to read them in 1962...). The point of this blog is to trace what listening to Dylan, here and now, brings me. The fact that I listen chronologically to Dylan's albums is not very meaningful - I could have chosen listening alphabetically (starting with his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan) or by color (starting with his 1988 Down in the Groove with a nearly all-black sleeve).
Listening is a 'reflexive' activity - while listening your complete biography (your listening biography, your wider musical biography, your even wider general biography) comes into play continuously. Listening to music is a constant - if often implicit - way of shaping and reshaping your life history. That might be the reason why it is so important to so many people. And that is why I feel free to write in any which way about me listening to Dylan's The Complete Album Collection; Vol. 1.
So there we go. I listened to Bob Dylan at home, in the car, on a camping; mostly at night, on headphones often. The album very much is a singer-songwriter album - more singer than songwriter, I would say, as most of the material is 'traditional' (aka 'author unknown') or written by other musicians. Dylan wrote only two songs himself: 'Talkin' New York' and 'Song to Woody'. 'Talkin' New York' describes his experience of coming to New York (and leaving again); it is more spoken than sung (hence the 'talkin'...' - it stands in a tradition of 'talkin'...'-songs), and contains the line "You sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here", spoken to Dylan by one of the folk revival's bigger shots, reminding me of the endless discussions about what is folk music and what is not in the Dutch (Frisian, to be precise) folk music scene of the late seventies and early eighties I was part of. Defining 'your' area; drawing the demarcation lines; picturing the musical 'others'; trying to find your place in a musical world inhabited by heroes (Nanne Kalma, Doede Veeman at that time) as well as enemies; music is not only the realm of the beautiful, it is full raging war sometimes and often, at least, a form of cold war.
The other song 'in his own write' (the title of a small amusing book written by John Lennon) is a tribute to Woody Guthrie, Dylan's hero of that time. Guthrie already was very ill by then; Dylan went to see him and claimed that he and Guthrie became kind of friends (the record sleeve talks of "a deep friendship between the two"), but Sounes makes it reasonably clear that this may be a bit of fabrication by Dylan - Guthrie at that time did not recognize even good friends like Pete Seeger anymore, so why would he recognize a young Dylan?
But 'Song to Woody' is a beautiful song. It borrows the melody of a Guthrie song ('1913 Massacre'), borrowing - as I learnt from Sounes - becoming one of the hallmarks of Dylan's work; he uses fragments of melodies, fragments of lyrics from others freely to write his own songs; which of course lead to allegations of plagiarism but I like Sounes' standpoint in that respect, viz. that Dylan's origin as a singer-songwriter in the domain of 'traditional' American songs explains this way of constantly reworking the tradition you stand in (a very 'biographical' form of songwriting, if you want) and that therefore any reproach of plagiarism (check my other weblog Everts World of Music for some older thoughts on it here and here) falls short and ignores the nature of how new music constantly trickles out of older music. (Plagiarism is by the way a concept that only works if you accept that the music world is a world defined by the laws of the market economy and by a strict definition of 'ownership' (intellectual or otherwise) - I guess Dylan is one-foot-in (in very firmly, I admit) and one-foot-out of this definition of reality.)
'Song to Woody' reminds me, of course, of Guthrie himself. It also reminds me of the Billy Bragg/Wilco-project in which they put, helped by Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie, existing lyrics from Guthrie's inheritance to new music. I got into it because I knew Billy Bragg and started listening to the great CD Mermaid Avenue (also featuring Natalie Merchant, former singer of 10.000 Maniacs and having made the great CD Tigerlily as well as a later intriguing project of children's songs and lullabies), which then led me to appreciate the Wilco part of the CD better than the Bragg-part and getting me hooked on the voice of Wilco's singer Jeff Tweedy (the Wilco concert I attended much later in Groningen is still one of the best concerts I ever heard; the best one being a concert by the Dave Rawlings Machine). And 'Song to Woody' also reminds me, because of the line ending with "...and peasants and princes and kings", of the work of singer-songwriter Danny Schmidt, whom I also heard in Groningen at the Take Root-festival and, a week later, again together with about 30 other listeners in a very small cafe in the very small village of Spijkerboor, where I again was very impressed with the lyrics of Danny's great song 'Stained Glass'.
It is telling that I start talking about Dylan's first album focusing on the songs he wrote himself rather than on his 're-songs' (a term I prefer over 'covers' - a cover points to much to the original, a 're-song', I hope, to the act of singing an (existing) song).
It is also telling that this first blog entry on Dylan's albums tends to get longer and longer as I write. So time to quit for now, and come back on the rest of Bob Dylan in a next blog entry.
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