Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Robert "Bob Dylan" Zimmerman

This video of US President Obama awarding Dylan the highest US civilian honor seemed a little strange to me: 
I got the same feeling while reading his recent interview in Rolling Stone and will share, below, with you a few quotations from that interview.
Sept. 27, 2012, issue

Some of the early Dylan songs, such as “All I Really Want to Do Is Just Be Friends with You,” appealed to me at the time, although not when I listen to them now, and some, such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” really repulsed me even then. “Like a Rolling Stone,” has on several occasions been voted in large polls as the “greatest song of all time,” but it has always seemed to me to be the kicking of a young, defenseless, devastated girl when she was down. It is interesting to read in the wiki on this “greatest song of all time” that even Dylan himself has publicly referred to the song, twice, as “vomit.”

The incident in London in which someone in the audience yelled “Judas!” at him was roughly the point at which I lost interest in his music. Many people have remembered and written about that incident, by the way, and you can see in the Rolling Stone interview that he hasn't forgotten it either. The fact that he can say so testily even now that it had something to do with whether his guitar was electric or not shows that he has still not dealt with it.


My first misgivings came from two of his concerts that I attended in the early 'seventies. It struck me at the time, particularly in the second, "Rolling Thunder," concert, that he seemed to have no rapport with the audience. It was if the audience wanted to believe in him, but couldn't connect with him and even felt sorry for him.
Joni Mitchell


Then there were Joni Mitchell's recent observations: 

Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I. 

And here is the entry in Andy Warhol's diary for Saturday, July 13, 1985:
Andy Warhol
 
Watched the Live Aid thing on TV. Bobby Zarem’s office had been calling, wanting me to go down there, but when you’re with that many big celebrities you never get any publicity. Later on that night Jack Nicholson introduced Bob Dylan and called him “transcendental.” But to me, Dylan was never really real—he was just mimicking real people and the amphetamine made it come out magic. With amphetamine he could copy the right words and make it all sound right. But that boy never felt a thing—(laughs) I just never bought it.

I met Carrie Fisher in Los Angeles a couple times when I was young and was struck by how lovely she was and by her straightforwardness, although I didn't know at the time “who she was,” that she was Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds' daughter, etc. This was before her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars. She writes in her recent book, Shockaholic, about the aura of unreality in which celebrities are seen by the public, and calls it the “shine.” There is a passage in her book about Michael Jackson, whom she knew well, and she offers this plausible explanation of how his celebrity and the shine may have resulted in his attraction to children:
Carrie Fisher
Michael's celebrity turned many people into eager, greedy stargazers who only wanted something above and beyond what a normal human is willing, or expected to give. They were there for the anecdote. It's what I call 'the shine.' People want to rub against it, and in so doing, their own value is increased. But I'd like to propose a reason why Michael preferred the company of children to what I've referred to as adults.


Kids of a certain age being too young to understand the peculiar phenomenon of fame, are potentially easier to trust and hang out with than a certain kind of adult who, as I said earlier, more often than not have a tendency to start acting completely disorganized around someone as outrageously famous as Michael. 

The other people who aren't rendered strange around famous people are generally...other famous people! In such instances, the issue of celebrity is neutralized, and they are free to move on to whatever they like or don't like in the normal human way.

I experienced fifteen minutes of celebrity myself and have known a few famous people well enough to have a feel for what Carrie Fisher calls “the shine.” I remember a student finding me in a supermarket and saying to me, “What are you doing here?” meaning, “Do you eat food?” I remember working at a department store in Hollywood one Christmas when Jayne Mansfield came to my counter to buy something. People just acted crazy, goofy, strange. Just imagine living in the “shine” for fifty years or more the way “Dylan” has.

Here are a couple quotes from the Rolling Stone interview:

Interviewer: “Are you saying that you can't really be known?”

Dylan: “Nobody knows nothing.”

Interviewer: “[There is] a long-stated perception of you as somebody with a lot of phases and identities.”
...

Dylan: “It's not like I have a great memory. I remember what I want to remember. And what I want to forget, I forget.”

Dylan: “What others think about me, or feel about me, that's so irrelevant.”

Dylan: “In my case, there's a whole world of scholars, professors and Dylanologists, and everything I do affects them in some way. And, you know, in some ways I've given them life. They'd be nowhere without me.”

Now, really, as Joan Rivers would say: “Can we talk?” Seriously. Can we talk?

Am I wrong in thinking that “Dylan”is a lost, inauthentic person pretending to be authentic, and that President Obama himself looks a little lost as he presents Dylan in that video with the Medal of Freedom?

When someone like Joni Mitchell or me thinks that everything about Dylan is phony, and he says that we are “evil motherfuckers who can rot in hell” for it, what does it say about this Christianity about which he is so touchy?

I know I have mentioned this in a previous post, but I come back again to Hawthorn's writing “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Finally, what goes through my mind most is that certain sensitive, perceptive, deep young people whom I know and love are coming into a world in which they see this, and I wonder what can be done to protect them from despair, from winding up in an asylum like Salinger's Holden Caulfield, or even suicide. The only thing I can think of doing is just to acknowledge and to tell them that what they are seeing is true, “to bear witness to the truth” as Christ put it. I think The Catcher in the Rye, for example, strengthens such a person because it enables him/her to see that he/she is not alone, not crazy; that there is at least one other person out there who sees it too; like Old Lear hoping that he and his daughter could be God's spies together.






No comments:

Post a Comment