“DYLAN’S ACCEPTANCE TRUE OF HISVAST MYTHIC STATUS”
In which Robert Zimmerman finally comes to terms with being Bob Dylan. ANDREW MALE grapples with the old shapeshifter’s career-defining late masterpiece.
SOUND MAN “IT’S THE OF A FINALLY EASE HIS AT IN CONSTRUCTED IDENTITY.”
1 BOB DYLAN ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS COLUMBIA
BACK IN 2012, Bob Dylan gave one of his strangest interviews. Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, the then 71-year-old sidestepped questions about politics to concentrate on an issue that had been bothering him: that of transfiguration. Pulling out a copy of the 1975 Harper paperback Hell’s Angel: The Life And Times Of Sonny Barger, he pointed the interviewer to a passage about a biker called Bobby Zimmerman, who died in a motorbike accident in 1964.
“You’re looking at somebody that’s been transfigured,” said Dylan. “I had a motorbike accident in 1966. So when you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist.”
It wasn’t clear, but Dylan appeared to be saying that the soul of Bobby Zimmerman had fused with his, resulting in his own motorcycle crash in 1966, and leading to subsequent physical and stylistic changes down the years. Well, if the previous 54 years have all been acts of constant shapeshifting and asking “Who is Bob Dylan?”, and in the wake of five years where he thought he might like to be Frank Sinatra, Rough And Rowdy Ways finally accepts the inevitable: “I am Bob Dylan, and no man knows my history.”
From its opening brace of tracks, I Contain Multitudes and False Prophet, Rough And Rowdy Ways can be read as Dylan’s true acceptance of his huge, mythic status. Both songs (which arguably contain more first-person singular nominative-case personal pronouns than any other Dylan compositions) depict him as both fabrication and legend, part-built from 20th century popular culture (“I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones”) and popular song (“I go where only the lonely go”), but also something unknowable and vast (“I go right to the edge, I go right to the end”). It’s the sound of a man finally at ease in his constructed identity. Possible glimpses of that could be seen on the 2019 instalment of his Never Ending Tour, where Bob performed hand on hip, “affecting a kind of slink,” as we wrote in MOJO 311, “smoothing an eyebrow and flashing a brief unnerving grin [like some] camp 78-year-old gunslinger.”
So while there is certainly temptation to read Rough And Rowdy Ways as Dylan’s Blackstar, a deathshadowed last will and testament, with the track Black Rider being the most explicit point of comparison, there is one key difference; rather than readying for death, Bob is preparing for deathlessness, whilst carrying “four pistols and two large knives”.
That Dylan knows he is putting down important stuff is evident in the sound of R&RW. Gone is the one-take vocal “spontaneity” we’ve come to expect from the singer, replaced by a meticulous attention to both the sound of the band and the clarity of his lyrics, lyrics that mostly concern themselves with the self. Even the two supposed love songs on the LP, My Own Version Of You and I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You, could just as easily be more Songs Of Myself, Robert Zimmerman embracing his alter ego and glimpsing the promise of immortality in the construct of ‘Bob Dylan’ – “I’ll be saved by the creature that I create” – on the road to Key West, “The place to be/If you’re looking for immortality.”
However, Key West is only one end point on R&RW. The other is that 16-minute fever dream of 20th century American history, Murder Most Foul. We don’t have the space here to go into all its possible meanings, but one thing stands out: in singing the song, Dylan becomes JFK (“I’m leaning to the left; got my head in her lap”), he becomes Oswald (“I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline/Never shot anyone from in front or behind.”). In the final act of transfiguration, Dylan becomes the 20th century. Or, as Walt Whitman wrote in Song Of Myself, “The past and present… I have fill’d them, emptied them/And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”