Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, say no speech for me . . .
Bob Dylan is too busy being himself to accept a Nobel Prize, and that’s just as it should be
Bob Dylan has always rejected the myth of Bob Dylan.
During a 1986 press conference in Australia, he got metaphysical when asked to reflect: “Bob Dylan doesn’t ever think about Bob Dylan.”
“Who is Bob Dylan?” he asked, sounding like a philosophy undergrad possessed by René Descartes and looking gaunt in his dangling earring and unbuttoned shirt. “I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be Bob Dylan. Most of the time I can just be myself.”
On Saturday, Dylan will just be himself, which is to say, he will not attend a lavish ceremony in Stockholm where the Bob Dylan is to be conferred with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. After becoming the first singer-songwriter to win the prestigious award, Dylan has mostly bewildered his Nobel overlords.
When it was announced in October, Dylan went radio silent. It’s like he was lost in space. Or if he did hear, it was as if this was no big deal, the equivalent of a $2 payoff on a scratch lottery ticket.
Dylan ghosted the Nobel committee. He didn’t take their calls. He didn’t issue a statement. In the PR rollout, he was MIA.
Two weeks later, one member conclud- ed Dylan was “impolite and arrogant.” “He is who he is,” Per Wastberg said. Yes. And he is never who we wanted him to be.
“I don’t break rules because I don’t see any rules to break,” Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton, exactly 50 years ago.
“As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any rules.”
This hostility toward convention, this instinct to do or say whatever he wants, has always animated the real Dylan. And it’s led to endless confusion about the mythical Dylan as “elusive,” “shy,” “rude” and “difficult.”
In 1963, with a chance to appear on a TV program that served as a launch pad for musical stardom, Dylan told The Ed Sullivan Show to buzz off after a CBS exec said the planned song — “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” — was too controversial.
Dylan refused to pick another song.
His disdain of rules is most pronounced when he’s forced to celebrate the mythical Bob Dylan. The same year he walked away from Ed Sullivan, Dylan won the Tom Paine Award and promptly insulted members of the governing Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.
By then, he was starting to chafe at the notion he was the “voice of his generation” or “the face of protest music.”
When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Dylan put less thought into his off-the-cuff remarks than most of us spend on grocery lists.
But at least he showed up, which is often not the case.
Dylan did not attend the 2000 Academy Awards, in which he won his only Oscar. Five years later, he declined an invite to attend his own induction ceremony at the UK Music Hall of Fame. As with the Nobel ceremony, he cited “other commitments” as the reason.
But as with so much of what the real Dylan says when forced to explain the mythical Dylan, this is likely 20 per cent half-truth and 80 per cent nonsense.
“You feel like an impostor when someone thinks you’re something and you’re not,” Dylan told 60 Minutes in 2004. “It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are.”
It’s a dichotomy that’s not easily reconciled, even at the age of 75.
The mythical Dylan, rightly lionized for a peerless body of work and unmatched influence on popular music, is seen as an artist who, in the words of the Nobel academy, “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
But the real Dylan, wrongly criticized for his muted response to the Nobel, was always clear: he was a “song and dance man.” Period. Those generational anthems, now forever associated with the counterculture, often took less than a day to pen.
“You feel like an impostor when someone thinks you’re something and you’re not.” BOB DYLAN SINGER-SONGWRITER
Dylan’s prolific output is marked by a remarkable indifference to its significance.
“I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write,” he told Time magazine, during a wildly combative interview in 1965. “I mean, I just write ’em. I don’t have to say anything about them. I don’t write them for any reason. There’s no great message.”
This is not what the Nobel people likely want to hear, which is why Dylan is right to skip the festivities. He may be a poet in retrospect. But in the present tense, before a podium, he can also be a lousy public speaker because he’s blind to his own impact.
This Nobel Prize should be awarded to the mythical Bob Dylan.
He’s since said winning left him “speechless.” So he will now send a speech to be read and singer-songwriter Patti Smith will sing, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Everyone will be pleased.
And somewhere else, far away, Bob Dylan will just be himself. vmenon@thestar.ca