There have been so many words spun about Dylan lately, inspired by the Scorsese film, that there’s no way a poor ol’ RWB could possibly keep up with refuting the various distortions that inevitably show up. However, there’s a piece I saw today that is just so rank it requires a response: “Why Bob Dylan was merely a rabbit caught in the headlights;” an article from the Belfast Telegraph (I can’t imagine Bob’s friend Van is at all pleased with what’s in the hometown paper).

The article is by one Gerry Anderson, who admits to having had a false view of who Bob Dylan really was – ever since he first started listening to his music back in the mid-’60s. Astoundingly, he admits that the cracks only really started to appear in his Dylan-illusion when he read Chronicles, just published last year. Previously, he had been annoyed back in 1965 when he heard Dylan acknowledge the influence of the Clancy Brothers, because “he was everything the Clancys were not; an antidote to the poison of shouted camaraderie and false sentiment.” He also didn’t like Dylan’s late-’60s country sound, saying it caused “an uncomfortable shuffling of feet all around” amongst himself and his like-minded friends. However, apparently he shrugged off these irritations and went back to believing that Dylan, in the end, was not whatever these signs would indicate, but was, instead, the kind of artist he could feel comfortable admiring.

(It always has been noteworthy how people can be greatly offended by something Dylan does one minute, and yet slip back painlessly into believing that he still really belongs to them after all. Whatever he did – Christianity, country music, etc. – was just some kind of idiosyncratic aberration that could be forgotten and forgiven.)

All that’s at an end now for Gerry, however, thanks to Chronicles and Scorsese’s No Direction Home. He has discovered that:

… instead of being the fiery revolutionary we wanted him to be, all HE ever really wanted was a conventional family and a small house with a picket fence.

And then, in the Arena documentary, No Direction Home, it became clear that the words of his songs didn’t mean anything to him either. He just liked the sound of them.

…

The walking wounded of Woodstock must now learn to accept that Bob Dylan was merely a rabbit caught in the headlights; caught in the middle of something he didn’t understand. None if it meant anything.

So, after 40 years of living with a spectacularly wrong notion of who his idol Bob Dylan really was, this guy concludes that it is Dylan who was “caught in the middle of something he didn’t understand.” The capacity of the human mind to embrace illogicality, when it is preferable to truth, is clearly limitless.

He likewise prefers to think that the words of Dylan’s songs “didn’t mean anything to him (i.e. to Dylan),” rather than allowing the possibility that those words have meanings that go far beyond the tight chains of thought with which he and his “band of Dylan lyric codebreakers” tried to burden them.

Somehow, it is Dylan who was trapped in falsehood and in a failure to understand. Not Gerry himself, or anyone else who might have heard, for instance, the song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and been unable to think of it as anything but some kind of criticism of an imperialist, nuclear-armed America.

And somehow the knowledge that Dylan always saw his songs as transcending the politics of the time makes Dylan into some kind of liar, instead of providing justified embarrassment to those who abused those songs by claiming narrow ownership of them.

It’s amazing, and it’s even more amazing that someone can fail to progress even one inch over the course of 40 years, and be so proud of the fact that they are willing to happily brag about it in the Belfast Telegraph.

…

P.S.: On the subject of transcendence, how ’bout this version of Hard Rain, from a 1994 performance in Japan, at an event called the “Great Music Experience:” mp3 sample here for a little while.

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