John Kerry denies owning a Chinese assault rifle … while Bob Dylan boasts of owning a “clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle.”

Alright. I wasn’t going to go to town on the Newsweek excerpt from Chronicles. I really wanted to wait until I could read the whole book. Only thing is, I didn’t count on what the rest of the world was going to do. How can Right Wing Bob keep silent when everyone else is hyperventilating over Dylan saying of his hippie tormentors, “I wanted to set fire to these people” … ?

First, I want to reiterate the prime directive, contained in my mission statement here. It is not my intention to try to maintain that Dylan agrees with me on all political questions, or that he can be labeled a “conservative.” He spurns all labels, and does not participate in partisan politics, and I respect that about him.

That said, now that this excerpt of his memoirs has been published, it is not his conservative-minded fans who are reacting with shock or horror.

The first thing that needs to be commented on is that as soon as you get one step away from Dylan’s actual words, the media are still engaging in their usual distortions.

Since we started talking about firearms, lets continue on that theme. Any number of stories, like this in the Herald Tribune, imply that Dylan armed himself in his home in Woodstock solely for the purpose of defending himself against marauding fans. Their stalking “led him to keep several guns in his house and stifled his creative process.” So, it equates Dylan with your typical celebrity who may abhor guns but is forced to carry one because of death threats and obsessive fans.

That ain’t what Dylan writes.

He says, without specifying a timeline, that “Peter LaFarge, a folksinger friend of mine, had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around ….” He says he had it around - not that he ran out and got it when the druggies started knocking on his door. And consider how he describes these pieces. He doesn’t just call them “guns,” like your average Hollywood liberal would. (”I had to get a gun - and I hate guns! It’s terrible!”). He characterizes them in a gorgeously colorful and almost tactile fashion. “Colt single-shot repeater pistols / clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle.” These terms may or may not be technically correct, but what’s clear is that Dylan had his own sense of what these firearms were - their lineage and their design. (Colt and Winchester are both classic American gun manufacturers, I might add - no Lugers for Bob!) He knew these pieces, and what they were mattered to him on some level. All of this matches perfectly with classic American notions of the place and purpose of firearms. In rural America in particular, a firearm is a tool and and a necessary possession, even for people who are not being stalked by Californian drop-outs. A farmer needs a rifle he can depend on, whether for ending the life of one of his farm animals or defending his stock from a predator. It’s not about wanting to kill people - as Dylan also says here: “… it was awful to think about what could be done with those things.” Even in urban America, millions of people today own guns, not because they look forward to spilling blood, but because they greatly value their independence and their ability to defend themselves if necessary. Dylan had said just a page earlier in this excerpt,

Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty.

As an aside, in a 1981 interview, Dylan was pressed on the subject of gun control (does Billy Joel have to answer these questions?). While acknowledging that America “always has been gun crazy,” he also says, “Guns have been a great part of America’s past,” and “I don’t think gun control is making any difference at all. Just makes it harder for people who need to be protected.” (Hey Wayne! It looks like we’ve found a successor for Chuck Heston.)

He is admirably consistent, as usual. Woodstock 1967, London 1981, and now, in Chronicles, in 2004. He’s the same guy - surprise surprise.

That notion of consistency brings up another issue. The world’s media is reacting like this is the story of the century, “Bob Dylan repudiates hippie fans,” “unwilling icon,” “fame triggered personal crisis.” To anyone who has been interested in Dylan’s career and read his interviews through the years, there is certainly nothing shocking in what he is saying in this excerpt. Those who consider themselves fans and find themselves shocked by this either have not been fans for very long or have selectively tuned out those things they preferred not to hear. Dylan has gone on the record many times describing his anguish at being held up as a spokesman, at having groups of people expecting something in particular from him. His confrontations with Weberman and his band of loons in the Village are well known. His deliberate attempt to put off these people and make them forget about him by releasing, for example, “Self Portrait,” has been common knowledge for decades. Indeed, it was pretty damned obvious at the time. So the degree to which surprise and shock is being expressed is a vivid illustration of just how distorted is the image of Bob Dylan that the media has been perpetuating, and just how many individuals have bought into it.

Which reminds me. Bob Dylan grants a major interview to the Sunday Telegraph about Chronicles. (Unavailable on their site but posted here.) This fortunate journalist is getting to speak to Bob directly, as well as refer to Dylan’s own words from his book. But he just can’t limit himself to the facts in front of him - he can’t restrain himself from making his own characterizations of things about which he clearly knows next to nothing. Specifically, where he says, “A year later, Dylan had written his great anti-war anthem, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind.’” Et tu, Mr. Sunday Telegraph? Dylan is on the record too many times to count saying he doesn’t write “anti-war” songs. At this stage of the game anyone who’s paying attention knows that “Blowing In The Wind” is a song that asks timeless questions, but doesn’t expect an answer - and least of all does it expect that war is going to end. And if you don’t expect that war is ever going to end on this earth, then why would you write an anti-war song? For more on an anti-war Dylan song that isn’t, see God On Our Side.

There’s more to say, but there’ll be more time to say it too, God willing. And the book isn’t even out yet.

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