The songs Bob Dylan wanted to fail miserably: “To me it was a joke”
It feels counterproductive to the very idea of being a star to be actively trying to make something people will hate. Music is a big business, and the aim of the game has always been to succeed. Month upon month, year upon year, decade upon decade, artists clamber for notoriety and fans. But for Bob Dylan, a man who made it to the dizzying heights of fame and renown, it then became his mission to shake it all off as ‘All The Tired Horse’ was made to try and fail.
It might seem strange for an artist to try and fail. Surely, for most musicians, success is so fleeting that to tempt the sonic fates is to end up in rags. But Dylan is different. He was the man who rejected folk as soon as he anointed their de facto King, a punk rock move before Johnny Rotten was hocking up his fattest loogie. Dylan has always let his heart run the show.
In 1970, Bob Dylan seemed sick of it all. He’d become the king of the folk world, shocked everyone by going electric, pioneered a new folk-rock sound and made himself one of the most famous and beloved musicians in the world in the process. But he’d also had several major personal reckonings.
In 1966, a motorcycle crash led to a major rethinking of his life and his mission. To the artist, the brush with death was something he was grateful for, feeling like fate had somehow stepped in to give him answers to his questions and force him to change how he was living and working. He told a biographer, “I had been in a motorcycle accident, and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”
From then on, Dylan became a recluse. He moved out into the country, began doing painting lessons, made no public appearances and didn’t tour again for eight years. He still worked and released albums, but they were different and done in a different way, aiming to serve no one but himself.
Self Portrait is the pinnacle of that. It’s not just that the tracklist is a confused jumble of covers of other people’s songs and instrumentals, but the whole thing has a sarcastic tone as if Dylan is laughing at his listeners. “To me, it was a joke,” the artist said of the album. Sick of his celebrity and the way the public swarmed around him, this was an attempt to finally sicken them off him as he explained, “And I said, “Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you know? They’ll go on to somebody else.”
It’s an incredibly bold move. 1970 is only eight years on from Dylan’s first emergence, and while he had certainly earned enough credibility and fame to be consistently considered one of the greats in that short time, to take a step toward actually losing fans was still an outrageous idea. But it is these ideas that set Dylan apart as a true artist. It is in his rejection of fame and resistance to success that we begin to see the real artist at the heart of his work.
Nowhere is that point clearer on the album than on ‘All The Tired Horses’ where Dylan is essentially saying, over and over, ‘leave me alone’.
“All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm” is sung on repeat, not even by Dylan but by a small choir. As the album’s opening track, it’s his clearest comment on the burnout and exhaustion he was feeling. It could be said that Dylan himself is both the tired horse, with his fans and the music business complaining about it, and the worried voice stressing about his lack of productivity. Swaying between those two points, it could be heard as a comment on Dylan’s conflicted desire to keep making art and stop altogether.
Or, it could just be an annoying, purposefully weak song that refuses fans any decent lyricism, any folkish twang or any of Dylan’s voice. It denies them anything and everything they’ve come to expect from the artist as a way to get them to leave him behind.
“I wasn’t going to be anybody’s puppet, and I figured this record would put an end to that,” Dylan told Cameron Crowe retrospectively, adding of the track and the album, “I was just so fed up with all that ‘who people thought I was’ nonsense.”
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