#PSBPopCulture: Who is Bob Dylan? – February 10, 2016

By: Jonathan Hemingway @JLHemingwayPSB

Bob Dylan has played important part of my life. You have to understand that my father used to spin Dylan vinyl albums in our living room when I was a child. We would listen to Dylan albums on cassette tapes on the way to Wednesday night church. And of course there was always the Highway 61 Revisited album in the stereo when my dad and I would play table tennis in the basement. Recently, Jimmy Fallon impersonated Bob Dylan on the Tonight Show doing a rendition of Drake’s Hot Line Bling to the tune of Dylan’s Positively 4th Street.

For the millennials who may not know who Bob Dylan is, here are some quick hitters on what most people associate Dylan with:
-Bad singing
-Harmonica Playing
-Folk songs

While it was not actually Dylan singing on the Tonight Show, it was a pretty accurate impersonation of Dylan. So who is Bob Dylan and how did he become such an iconic figure within popular culture?

Here is My Answer…

Before the hippies turned America upside down in the Sixties, the beatniks were the counter-cultural influence in America in the Fifties. It is out of their embracement of folk music that Dylan emerged as a cultural leader. In fact one of his more popular songs from 1963, Blowin’ in the Wind, spoke to wide audience of people. Take the opening the lines of the song as an example:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

The first two lines could be interpreted as a questioning of America’s segregation system. The mentioning of doves and cannon balls could be alluding to the Cold War with the Soviet Union or the imminent war of containment in Asia. 1963 was an important year in American History. It was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” in Washington DC. It was also the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And the country was on the precipice of sending American men to Vietnam. It is impossible to quantify just how influential Dylan was with his music and anti-establishment message.

The pattern of Dylan’s career could be simplified to this: He refuses to be pigeon-holed. In 1965 he hooked up an amplifier to his guitar, went electric and turned his back on the folk music community. In one of the recordings of his early live electric shows you can hear Dylan yelling at his band to “Play f*&%king loud!” This was the ultimate snub to the beatnik/folk music community that was rejecting everything modern, including electrified rock music.

Dylan produced three Platinum albums during this period that would be anthems of counter-culture movement of the 60s. Songs such as Like A Rolling Stone, Highway 61 and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 would become anthems of the age.

By 1969 when the hippies converged on Woodstock, N.Y., for three days of “Peace and Music,” Dylan was absent. Again he had changed the course of his music creativity and produced a country album. My favorite song from his 1969 album, Nashville Skyline, is Girl from the North Country. He teamed up with Johnny Cash on this song and appeared to be able to sing and carry tune. My father told me of an interview where Dylan was asked why he was able to sing so well on this album. Dylan said, “I stopped smoking cigarettes for a few weeks.”

For my 16th birthday, my father bought me a couple of cds. He handed me Blood on the Tracks and just said “Here, you’re going to need this.” I had no idea what he meant, but I would soon understand. This would become the most important album in my 20s. Some background: Dylan recorded this album after his separation from his wife Sara in 1975. The entire album is about love, love lost and trying fit pieces that don’t fit together anymore. I played that cd hundreds of times during my separation and subsequent divorce of my ex-wife. My father was right, I would need it.

There are too many meaningful lines from this album to pick my favorite, but here is one from Shelter from the Storm:

Now there’s a wall between us, somethin’ there’s been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn
Come in, she said
I’ll give ya shelter from the storm

Dylan continued to puzzle and amaze fans and critics. In the early 80’s he became a born-again Christian and released three Christian albums. Less than two decades before this, Dylan was said to have been the man that introduced the Beatles to marijuana. Now he was legitimately a believer and spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ through his music. By 1983 he returned to secular music and released the album Infidels, which would go Gold.
In 1989 he teamed up with the Grateful Dead to release the album Dylan and the Dead. Then he helped form the Traveling Wilburys and released two albums. That group featured some of the best rock musicians of the 20th century, which included Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison. That collaboration stands as two of my favorite albums of all time.

In the mid-90s Dylan nearly died from a bacterial infection, but battled through and made a classic album called Time Out of Mind. This would be his first Platinum record in nearly two decades. One of the more popular songs from that album is called “To Make You Feel My Love.” This song was so influential, it was covered by Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and later by Adele. I also had this song on my wedding playlist when I married Nakita in 2013 (we played the Adele version…her voice is a bit more pleasing for a wedding crowd).

My favorite line from that song:
I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn’t do
Go to the ends of the earth for you
To make you feel my love
While his music through the 80s, 90s and into the 21st century would not be as popularly acclaimed as his work during the 60s, Dylan manages to stay relevant. For his fans, his music is always cutting edge. His message, although at times in code, speaks to an audience.

The questions that Dylan always seems to bring up in terms of music and pop culture, are:

“What does it mean to be successful in music?”
“Does the evolution of an artist necessarily mean he/she is selling out?”
“Should an artist cash in his/her 15 minutes of fame while sacrificing relevancy in the future?”
“Does an artist have to produce top 40 hits to be successful or popular?”
“What is more important: the art, the message or the money?”

A close study of Dylan’s life and career will show that he is a paradox. Maybe even a hypocrite. Here is a man that left the ‘60s culture to sell country records. But in the 21st century he has been on more than one commercial. Or maybe he has been playing us the whole time as the commercial below alludes to:

He was the voice of counter-culture who turned into an evangelical Christian. Was this a part of a master plan to sell more records? Or was he being true to his experience at the moment? Or is he a man that truly appreciates making art that he is satisfied with?

To me, there are no answers to any of these questions. He is just an interesting musician to follow. You never know what you are going to get from one album to the next. That is what keeps all of us Dylan fans coming back.

HEMI-HEAD-SHOTJonathan Hemingway is a Chicago sports fan who reps the Bears, Bulls and Cubs. He’s also a diehard NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber. Like Clay, Hemingway’s music taste are wide-ranged and depend on the day. He is also a major part of PeachStateBasketball.com wearing multiple hats with the title of Director of Domestic Scouting and owning CoachHemi.com.



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Posted February 10, 2016 by admin in category "#BCSPopCulture

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