A man of myth: How Bob Dylan created Bob Dylan
When Sam Shepard was roped into the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, he was able to purvey the mastery and myth of Bob Dylan first-hand. “Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not to the head,” he eventually wrote when he made it to the other side of the tumultuous roving folk show. “It moves us into an area of mystery. Some myths are poisonous to believe in, but others have the capacity for changing something inside us, even if it’s only for a minute or two.”
That air of legend has always been there in the welter of the wavering ways that make up the original vagabond. “Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us,” Shepard continues. “The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us.” As Dylan said himself: “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.”
Thus, Dylan is forever searching out his niche in the world and he is amorphous enough to be whatever his muse chooses to be. Over the years, he has expressed this himself in his own poetic way. “All I can do is be me, whoever that is,” he says. And, for good measure, he explains, “I change during the course of a day. I wake up and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep, I know for certain I’m somebody else.”
This was apparent to Shepard even within the short space of the tour. “Dylan has invented himself,” he wrote. “He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own mind. The point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in? He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan.”
In his case, this wasn’t just a case of dropping his Zimmerman birth name and putting up a bit of rock ‘n’ roll affrontery—it was far more deep-seated than that. In fact, he had his eye on myth from the very get-go. Speaking in 1962, at the age of 20 after arriving in the bum utopia Greenwich Village with nothing to his name but obscurity, and things money can’t buy like poverty, he proclaimed, “I’m never going to become rich and famous.” Now, that might be a shockingly bad prognostication of the future but his view on his past was just as inaccurate.
“I was with the carnival off and on for just about six years,” Dylan told Folksingers Choice on WBAI FM after having a healthy serving of lie pie for breakfast. “Oh, I did just about everything. I was a clean-up boy. I used to be on the main line on the Ferris Wheel, just run rides. I skipped a bunch of things, and I didn’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this, and I skipped that. It all came out even though.”
That might have been a great big whopper, but weaving a world of mystery was the essence of the young folk troubadour. The carnival represented a sense of America’s wandering past, five years earlier a novel captured something similar. In 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road captured culture on the wing. On the jacket sleeve of modern copies, you will find the following testimony from Dylan himself: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” The book was about truly being present in the world that you capture, getting out there and getting your knees dirty wading through the people’s culture of the day.
Thus, the folk scene that it helped to spawn in New York City was one that held authenticity as the utmost tenet. However, in the timeless tales of authenticity that folk represents, what exactly does authenticity look like? Well, according to Dylan, it looks like the fabricated myth of a carnivalesque upbringing. And you’d have to say that he did a pretty great job of spinning that fitting yarn. In essence, when everyone was trading covers of authorless tracks from time immemorial, Dylan decided to weave his own original take on things into existence.
The issue was it was hard to make enough racket to get your myth heard because the bohemian New York suburb was literally swarming with fellow bohemians. There was a regional shortage of flannel, whisky and good fortune. Thus, you had a thousand artists playing the same songs in the same basement bars on the same nights, like some rolling Groundhog Day of whining “fat people”. Dylan, like many others, sensed he had to get out for a while. As Jackson C. Frank would harrowingly croon: “Take a boat to England baby… the blues are all the same.”
In the end, Dylan was actually invited across the Atlantic by the British TV executive Philip Saville. He had witnessed an early Dylan performance in one of the aforementioned dive bars and sought to bring him over to the growing London scene to perform on the drama, Madhouse on Castle Street. Therein, Dylan recalls: “I ran into some people in England who really knew those [traditional English] songs. Martin Carthy, another guy named [Bob] Davenport. Martin Carthy’s incredible. I learned a lot of stuff from Martin”
The anonymity that the Atlantic provided meant that Dylan could morph his new identity into something a little more solid. When he arrived, his manager Albert Grossman and one of Dylan’s early heroes, Odetta, were already acquainting themselves with the frosty London scene. Dylan checked into the Mayfair Hotel and later broke his performative duct in the Madhouse on Castle Street playing an early incarnation of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. Thereafter, he did what any good folk musician would do; he turned his collar to the cold and damp and went from bar to bar with his careworn guitar under the arm of his moth-eaten coat.
Between Bunjes Coffee House and The Establishment, he could go from one hard-luck story to the next. By the time he got to the Roundhouse, the future star with one hat and a thousand autobiographies had been three different people, all of them slowly melding into Bob Dylan and his Freewheelin’ ways. As the director, Ethan Coen, said of American folk: “The scene was defined largely by the worship for authenticity.” In a city where everyone was talented but largely the same, being original in the true sense of the word was vital. Being in London was like stepping back to that.
Pete Seeger had recommended the Troubadour on Cromwell Road to Dylan. He visited this joint on his wayfaring tour. His half-sister, Peggy Seeger, would later opine: “What might have puzzled Dylan was the non-nightclub atmosphere the folk clubs had. There were no lights, there were no microphones… there was no ritualised nightlife to it. It was a bunch of ordinary people coming to their pub.” In other words, if Greenwich Village was a manufactured facsimile of folk, with a thousand people searching for the real thing, then in London it was simply playing out. People would finish a hard day’s work, then head to the pub to unwind with some music and a beer and hear a tale they could relate to.
So, Bob Dylan became the voice of the people and, in turn, the voice of a generation. He was through with the past-obsessed ways of folk, so much so that he decided to re-write his own history book. As a symbol of this, he wasn’t even that bothered about getting his story too straight and let lore fill in the blanks of his patchy journey to the podium of pop culture. He’s been giving ample space for myth ever since and it is the reason why he proves so captivating beyond the music itself. As folk has always asserted, in pop culture, it isn’t virtuosity we love but the stories that come along with the art. Dylan is a master storyteller if nothing else. A true original, even if it all amounts to one fat lie.
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