The times they ain’t a changin’: Bob’s still rude
Amember of the Swedish Academy that awarded bob Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has attacked him for being ‘impolite and arrogant’ after he failed to return their phone calls.
To attack Dylan for being impolite is a bit like attacking Humpty Dumpty for being egg-shaped, or an octopus for being all hands, or Queen elizabeth II for being regal.
Impoliteness is the whole point of bob Dylan. His fans worship him for playing concerts with his back turned to them, and for just grunting between songs, which he then proceeds to mangle.
‘every night, he gets up on stage and murders masterpiece after masterpiece,’ is the way one of his biographers summed up his performance technique.
Those who have met him in the flesh are perversely delighted by his standoffishness. A fan once came up to him and said: ‘You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are.’ To which Dylan replied: ‘Let’s keep it that way’.
Just imagine the disappointment of a Dylan audience if their idol were to arrive on stage with a spring in his step and say how thrilled he was to be there before singing:
Some Academicians are now beginning to worry that Dylan will duck out of the prize-winners’ white-tie banquet in Stockholm on December 10, and that they will be reduced to putting his cheque for $930,000 (£760,000) in the post.
Should he be given the Nobel Prize for Literature at all? The announcement was greeted with raised eyebrows by even some of his most ardent fans. His best songs will be remembered after most contemporary literature is forgotten, but this does not make them literature, any more than it makes them chemistry, peace, medicine or economics.
In fact, his two attempts at what might recognisably be called literature have been decidedly patchy. His 1965 stream of consciousness ‘prose-poem’ Tarantula is close to gibberish, and reads like an explosion in a Scrabble factory. ‘behold the prophesying blind allegiance to law fox, monthly cupid & the intoxicating ghosts of dogma...’ is a typical snippet. It goes on like that for 149 pages.
His memoir Chronicles is clearly a cut above, and is full of interesting bits and pieces, but it is written in often clunky and cliched prose.
‘I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office, him signing me to Columbia records was so unbelievable,’ is the way he describes his big break. If it had been a school essay, it would have been marked: ‘Can do better.’
but if the members of the Swedish Academy were to re-read Dylan’s Chronicles, they would find the author’s capacity for disrespect provides some of its most arresting moments. They might further note that he is particularly disrespectful of his core supporters.
At one point, he recalls a battle with his more obsessive fans, who were camping out on his lawn. ‘I would tell them repeatedly that I was not a spokesman for anything . . . whatever the counterculture was I’d seen enough of it.’ To get rid of them, he eventually turned to the police, who informed him, much to his annoyance, that shooting hippies is illegal.
In 1971, a particularly irritating fan called Alan Weberman complained to the police that Dylan had punched him, slammed his head on the sidewalk, and ridden away on his bicycle.
To my mind, this was a fair response to gross provocation: Weberman kept sitting on Dylan’s doorstep, and sifting through his bins in search of secret codes. but it shows that Dylan has never been the sort of person to mind his Ps and Qs.
UNLeSS he was with his mother, of course. In her company, he was as good as gold. An obscure memoir by Walter Yetnikoff, the then head of CbS records, carries this description of Dylan and his mother, beatty Zimmerman, over dinner in a restaurant after his concert at madison Square Garden in the eighties:
‘Sitting next to bob and his mother, I was astonished by their dialogue.
‘You’re not eating, bobby,’ said mom as his girlfriend Carol was cutting up his food as though he were an infant.
‘Please, ma. You’re embarrassing me.’
‘I saw you ate nothing for lunch. You’re skin and bones.’ ‘I’m eating, ma, I’m eating.’ ‘And have you thanked mr Yetnikoff for this lovely dinner?’ ‘Thank you, Walter.’ ‘You’re mumbling, bobby. I don’t think mr Yetnikoff heard you.’
And so on and so forth. Sadly, mrs Zimmerman died in 2000. If she were alive today, I suspect those phone calls from the Swedish Academy would not have gone unanswered.
‘Have you thanked the Academy for their lovely award, bobby?’