by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
If Bob Dylan wouldn't have been a songwriter, he would have been a serial killer.
This is according to an associate of mine who believes the chameleonic Jewish kid from Minnesota's knack for imitation and a shrewdness for self-aggrandizement make him fit the profile of a sociopath.
Initially, I didn't understand what he meant, but it started to make a bit more sense after I spoke with Tony Masters, Dylan's personal attendant of 20 odd years. Masters said Dylan loves his audience and hates his fans, citing that he will perform even when severely sick but abhors being approached by admirers when off the stage. While his antisocial behavior may not quite equal that of John Wayne Gacy, Dylan certainly draws a stark contrast to the average attention-starved musician.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
As Dylan's new No. 1 selling album Modern Times just dropped, I've decided to focus on a retrospective of this enigmatic artist.
In his early years, he was considered one of the leaders of the American protest movement and a prophet of a diseased civilization. In his book Chronicles Vol. 1, he makes it clear that he has eschewed this view almost from the beginning of his career. Mass media have always tried to categorize and file away original and talented people, and Dylan's perception of this only fueled his mistrust of his interviewers. As a result, he has often been duplicitous and untruthful regarding his history.
He is particularly loathed by interviewers and fans who have tried to get into his head, but his rambling ways and mold-breaking decisions - like appearing in a Victoria's Secret commercial while sporting a sleazy pencil-thin mustache - have stopped him from remaining still enough to be classified and forgotten.
Dylan has also demonstrated that he is not above adopting old lyrics or music into his own material. On a rare bootleg of Cynthia Gooding's radio show in 1962, he plays a song whose chord progression is obviously lifted from the "House of the Rising Sun." Likewise, on Modern Times, his lyrics are heavily influenced by the uncredited Civil War-era poet Henry Timrod. In spite of these questionable practices, few doubt his status as the greatest of American songwriters. It's as if he is the high priest of Americana and as such has been appointed the task of gathering our cultural roots, rearranging them and then feeding them back to us via song.
My personal memories of his music stem from my toddler years when my mom would play records of his early, acoustic works. The warm tones and subtle imperfections of the vinyl highlighted his lonesome tenor and became interweaved with my mother's nurture. Later, I learned to play guitar by listening to his Merle Travis-style finger-picking patterns, taking note of the way the meaning of his words was affected by the melody in which they were sung. My history is marbled by his music.
There is little doubt in my mind that Dylan has difficulty in dealing with other people, but I don't think he could have been a serial killer. The only thing he has tried to kill has been his own mythical status. It has been the one task he has utterly failed to do.
