Update: that seems to be working now. Being essentially a blogger, as opposed to a programmer, all this is very confusing. Unfamiliar processes without manuals or training, that's the net. Trial and error in these matters takes a long stressful time.
Bob Dylan, Oliver Cromwell, Shakespeare, Mozart. What did they mean and did they mean it? What were they thinking? Is it just that they didn't give interviews, or just that when they did they were only ever asked stupid questions? Anniversaries, new discoveries, changed fashions; we make and remake them.
I found the spectacle of Dylan struggling with his status as 'wisest man in the world' truly moving. This was not a title he awarded himself, unlike the Rajneeshes and Hubbards and it evidently embarrassed him acutely. He had no systematic thought - he was only selling records. For money, yes, but also to amuse himself, to develop himself. No one who has career ambitions of their own in steel and glass buildings has any right to question why Dylan did what he did. He wanted to do it. It felt right. And I bet that the writing was the most exciting thing he ever did in his busy life. To sit with a typewriter or a pen and paper, to dream something into being, to make his own company. We lessers do our crosswords, our sudoku, our grids. He fitted the images and the meter, the rhymes and the repetitions into his. Maybe one a day. Just him and it. A maniplator's skill. Not unworthy. Compulsive. A world out of thin air.
Where did it take him? Much further than he ever thought, I'm sure. Careers like that are not planned. In 1961 being a folk singer was not a ticket to writing celebrity gardening columns. Almost single handed he himself made it into a career. He took the ear of the world and gave it to others. When he started out he was trading in a commodity that still had real value for its consumers. He created a market for that extraordinary blend of the surreal and the tradiional that he pulled off. Pages and pages of imagery so biblical-historical, so rural-natural, so personally adaptable. Like Shakespeare but truly in modern dress.
Einstein found his celebrity unbearable and was driven to appreciating the honest reaction of a baby that screamed at his beard. Dylan was goaded to distraction by hordes of journalists who asked the wisest man in the world questions so petty, shallow and unreflective that they diminished not only his status in the asking but for which no redemption would come in the answers. Pop muppets of the modern era have been asked what their favourite colour is on many occasions. "Why do you sing?" might well be asked of Geri Halliwell. But of Dylan? VS Naipaul summarily dismisses any journalist who interviews him the instant it becomes apparent that they have not read his work with sufficient attention, for him a bit like realising that your dentist is unaware of where your teeth are found. Dylan showed model forbearance on this front in this film: an exceptionally acute man imprisoned by the stupidities of stardom. Is it any wonder he retired, faced with the prospect of repeatedly sitting in a room surrounded with minds unfeasibly dulled by professional life, reduced to asking him to suck his glasses to make him look more instantly whimsical, more suitably, predictably reflective. And the darkness comprehended him not.
His restlessness speaks well of his creative spirit. I don't think that after about 1963 he actually cared much whether anyone bought his records any more. I think he did want them to sell and to be listened to, but there was not an ounce of defensive thinking, of strategic marketing, of demographic targeting in his output or the creative changes he plotted. How easily he could have been the leader of the world's conscience-stricken youth. Show up at a few marches, endorse some cause: easy, easy. Maybe our Stings and Bonos are well intentioned and passionate people but Dylan refused to see the work and the man as separate. He declined to take sides because he clearly understood the price of sideism. So he offended everybody by standing away from them all. And did it harm his muse? I suggest that it did not. He continued to absorb himself constructing an oeuvre and a lifestyle in which he remained beholden to no one, a decision that allows us, to this day, to entertain ourselves trying to work out what he meant. In his words, and in his person.
The film vividly highlighted how he started out as a solo performer, and the theme was there throughout. There have been no significant collaborations. He has never raided anyone else’s larder. Revealingly he resorted to unusual measures to play harmonica, allowing him to break into the voice-guitar dialogue himself rather than hire a tin sandwich sucker to do it for him. Here was a man with independence on his mind.
Even Baez couldn't offer him anything. "She needs a singing partner," Dylan recalled thinking when he first saw her perform, by which he meant himself. Shortly afterwards the film had her telling us how hurt she was when he wouldn't call her up on stage in London, especially as she had accorded him this honour in New York. Nice editing. As with the Kennedy quote about "Let the word go forth... the torch has passed to a new generation etc etc" which Alan Ginsberg duly echoed some time later.
Back to Bob. So was he important? His contemporaries both musical and political had no doubt. They didn't wait for history to anoint him, they got straight on with it. They neither knew nor cared that he had once passed himself off as Bobby Vee in a dark corner of small town America. They only saw him as the full formed troubadour in dusty wandering bootheels, the outsider, the poet visionary, travelling light with nothing but the power of words and imagination, Champion the Underdog. All parts of the project were in perfect harmony. He was so rough, so unpolished that deception was impossible; he had to be the real deal. Art concealing Art. Unlike Paul Simon, the only other notable, and contrasting, product of that background, who used Art to conceal Garfunkel.
At this point it has to be restated how unfair it is to blame Dylan for all the cavalcade of imitators deceived by the simplicity of the image, the uncomplicated music, the plain voice. Everyone can do a good Dylan impression. Dwell on that for a moment and marvel at how he became everyman, how he found a voice we all have. It was this that gave Jimi Hendrix a licence to sing, though unfortunately not a talent for lyric. Furthermore, he can’t be blamed for encouraging so many bad singers and lousy poets to combine the two weaknesses and put them on show.
Like Jagger and Geldof, I have no doubt that he would have brought himself to the attention of his peers one way or another. However I think he had a clearer idea than most of the perils of setting out to be liked. In one of many revealing comments in the film Bob himself remarked that the booing on his 1966 tour had not been too distressing. "After all, you can kill someone with kindness," he said. That was a view from 2000 but I have no doubt that he could have dismissed any adverse reaction that way at almost any point. Nevertheless I couldn't help noticing that in the footage of the 1966 tour he was consistently rocking as he sat and talked. But not in a good way. In a neurotic, zoo specimen way. He was evidently not comfortable with the situation on some level, or maybe in general. Home, control, the typewriter beckoned.
Several pieces of footage confirmed something I have long believed about Dylan. I have always thought he wrote the words first and now I'm sure that he did. This gave his work coherence and gravitas, qualities distinctly lacking in Tin Pan Alley rock ‘n’ roll, but more importantly it conferred longevity. As a further observation I note that his songs were fantastically successful in the hands of other people. I think this reflects some of his unwillingness to straitjacket himself. He built in enough meaning, enough breadth both musically and lyrically to accommodate the artistic minds of others. Like a great religion we can all read the message as we wish. Compare Abba and the Bee Gees, both of whom systematically wrote words last.
When melody precedes text in time, within the process, the notes mean more than the words. Words are then bolted on, whichever ones are lying around. The upside of this is that appeal widens in the short term, the term in which the writing is done: a self regulating mechanism. The end result seems somehow more relevant or current. In Hegelian terms this is no more than Spirit recognising Itself. The problem comes later with words written in one era in one idiom and heard in another. Dylan as a writer elevates himself out of fashion and into tradition. Thirties songs are peppered with topical allusions and slang that have taken on quaint and ridiculous airs. Heaven knows what today’s argot-heavy, street level pop will sound like in even ten years. Dylan, consciously or not, handed out licence to perform one's own agenda.
I'm sure he likes his money but I'll wager he values his privacy too. Where are the lines of authorised clothing? The children's books, the fitness video, the perfume and the jewellery? The vanity record label where he slays the dragon of A&R iniquity and gives something back? No, he's just kept quiet and paid his taxes. His vanity projects have been dabblings with film and prose writing, but chiefly his concerts, great rambling affairs where he can change whatever he wishes at a whim. I venture that the sterility of modern recording processes coupled with a drying of the flow of new songs has driven him out to where he can get that sense of motion, of changing scenery, of adequately controlled danger that he might remember from earlier times.
Check the Basement Tapes, for irregular meter that is. Joan Baez had that one right on the button. He's irritating if you're expecting consistency, she summarised. Note that he always counts in the numbers - studio OR stage. You try getting a drummer to accept that. Check the footage of Mr Tambourine Man, a ‘pop’ hit in someone else’s hands, as he wrestled to keep himself interested. To his credit he did put rather more effort into that rendering than I saw Mark Knopfler muster for a perfunctory Sultans Of Swing, Wembley 1985. But there again Dylan’s catalogue is so vast that it doesn’t fence him in. Imagine seeing Dire Straits and them not playing Sultans.
And what of the whole thing, the two nights spent in Zimmerland? Well, I don’t know much more, save that I’ve idled away half a morning writing this. Scorcese, they say, had limited input into the film but I, for one, never expected anyone to get shot. One question though: why did Steve Jobs get thanked in the credits? Anyway, I thought the whole thing was fascinating and in the end, as you might expect, the delphic brilliance of Bobby Zee shone through. He had all the best lines, and handed out at least five major clues to Dylanologists, out of his own mouth.
Get me a new Bob Dylan. Let’s see how long he lasts.
[I wanted to perform] the essence, no frills.
[Of performers he admired in New York] There was something in their eyes. They were saying "I know something you don’t know".
I got into a habit of not giving my stuff away.
I set out to write in broad, sweeping statements.
And a standalone gem:
If you needed my autograph I'd give it to you.
I didn't like him much as I grew up. Too complex lyrically yet too simple musically, plus strange voice. And all the pseuds I knew liked him. I was wrong, but he's still there for me.
It was chucking out time at school yesterday. The ice cream van which had hovered invitingly by the gates was pulling away, like a disappointed angler when the fish stop biting.
Jake was late appearing. He assessed the situation instantly and shot off down the pavement, a blur of sugar lust and waving arms. The van stopped and the man served him a cone.
Jake walked back triumphant.
"Mmmm," he purred. "They taste better when you've caught them yourself."
via Mel.
"You've won a free holiday," she said.
"...," I replied, looking at the phone in my hand. Funny how we look when we think we haven't heard correctly.
"A holiday for two, at a range of destinations in Europe, flights paid."
Free lunch at last, with breakfast and dinner too, I thought. Getting out my gift horse dentistry set I asked why.
"You answered a brief questionnaire about your shopping habits a few weeks ago and you're a lucky winner in our prize draw."
I remembered. There was a downtrodden woman who asked me some questions in a car park near Rochester a few weeks ago. I told her, in sum, that I shopped about once a month in Sainsbury's. Hundreds of pounds worth of holiday for that. Cool.
But I'm a busy man, and it didn't sound like a family trip. I have a telephone number to ring to claim my prize (0871, not a pillage line) and a security code. She assured me there was no catch. So anyone who fancies a break at a time of their choosing in the next eighteen months, just drop me a line.
Good luck is to pass on. Enjoy.
I have been listening to Radio 4's Book of the Week every morning for the last five days. It has been Persian Fire by Tom Holland, a modern retelling of the war between the Persian Empire of Darius and Xerxes and the classical Greece of Athens and Sparta, a war won by the Greeks at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea.
I know it's a modern retelling because the televisual details are there on every page. Generals are 'bleary' in the morning, sand is 'blood slaked', feet crunch on leaves, metal glints in the distance, spears are reduced to matchwood. I can see the TV series already, complete with horns going wooo and big foreign sounding drums going brruh da duh diddly bosh as the Persians march.
I have always thought that the moral of this epic story was what the Greeks themselves thought it was, what generations of whiggish English historians thought it was, namely that flexible free societies always beat rigid autocratic empires.
Perhaps the lesson is actually that large, multinational coalitions fighting rogue states on the periphery of their imperium always come unstuck when fighting small determined forces at a distance which are defending their homeland with a clear idea of how they wish their own affairs to be organised.
Please can I have my life back, mister? It disappeared over the wall some time around two months ago and has lain unrecovered in the garden of Test cricket. That lovely garden, that Eden from which competitive sport seemed to fall many years ago. That last bastion of decency under pressure, of skill and bravery, of hurling objects with intent but without malice. And sadly that beautiful spectacle now bought by our latterday global media serpent tempter.
I watched nervously through the weekend's sporadic play and fretted through the long delays for bad light. The gaps in the entertainment slowly brought Jake to the boiling point of his impatience, desperate to go to the park and play cricket himself. Never mind watching, doing was his only thought.
Ah youth! One of the comforts of middle age is to watch top quality competitive sport and know that it really is top quality. I watched the World Cup Final live on telly in 1966. It seemed quite normal to me. I enjoyed England's victory in much the same way as I enjoyed a Fruit Pastille, then I went out into the garden and kicked a football about aimlessly. It didn't occur to me for one moment that I would never see the like again, nor that I was sharing even the same sun as that England team, three hundred miles away and black and white as they were. Normal but distant.
Now, with a little more life under my belt - and a little more me under my belt too - I have the essential perspective. The series win secured at the Oval has not been wasted on me. I see and appreciate context, the bigger picture. That is a large part of what makes for great entertainment. It's not just the result or the fact that the end is unknown and hidden. I knew someone who knew someone who saw Edith Piaf sing shortly before she died. She was lousy of course, hoarse, feeble and unmistakeably close to death. But she sang, and the whole theatre cried. Low quality content can make for high drama, but we have had the highest quality content and all the drama a busload of queens could bring. Rare indeed.
Cricket on television for me is about the process, the action as it happens. You can keep your highlights, give me the uncertainties of real time, the languorousness of the tale unfolding. It’s premium quality, unscripted drama, more skilful than 'improv', which lays claim to risk but is all forgiveness. Better, too, than watching highly paid actors act. It is possible to enjoy Macbeth while all the time knowing that he will end up dead, but how much better if you don't.
It mattered to those teams whether they lost. In the theatre Macbeth gets paid either way, and he can't win. That's what I like about sport. Not tribalism, which I abhor, not even the result in isolation, but grace under pressure. Serious combat where nobody gets hurt. Cricket may well be having a mini golden age, while there's enough money in the game to attract talented players but not yet enough to make them cheat. And I hate the fact that Murdoch has bought it. We wouldn't allow him to buy the Fighting Temeraire and scrawl Spitfires on it, would we?
Anyway life is now themed differently in our house. The Ashes may be finally won and the tension dissipated but cricket has yet to relax its grip over the household. The children now sit at the Peckham Road End at lunch and the food is served, or delivered, from the Garden Shed End. I approached the fridge yesterday morning at breakfast with my arm aloft to pluck the box of choice from the cereal Manhattan above. "Wait there!" called Jake. My hand hovered between the Corn Flakes and the Weetos. "No!" he exclaimed, then "Yeeesss!" as my hand hovered over the chocolate option. I caught myself about to shout "Noice area, Warno!" as I poured in the milk.
We did eventually make it to the park late on Sunday afternoon with bat, stumps and a Poly Ball complete with realistic seam. The light was poor - we are only a mile and a bit from the Oval - but Jake seemed thrilled to be sharing the same gloom as Andrew Flintoff. A nice family asked if they could join in. They did. I now realise that thirteen year old girls can bowl at quite a pace. She got me out twice. Some time later two tough looking kids of about ten asked if they could join in too. All my inclusiveness came to the fore and I invited them graciously. Shortly afterwards I realised that one of them was a pest who used to spoil our football games last year. He insisted on bowling. He chucked. Blatantly. Then he wanted to play football. I declined on behalf of all. Going home suddenly seemed a good option.
"Five more minutes!" I called. "We’ve got to be back at seven, on the dot."
"Why?" asked the chucker, a little too aggressively for my white flannel tastes.
"Because that’s when our tea comes out of the oven," said I, improvising as fluently as any bebop pioneer. "It’s chicken," added I, looking for that killer detail, reaching to score.
But I was out of my ground and, quick as Adam Gilchrist, my bails were off.
"But we had chicken for lunch," piped up Jake, all shiny, new ball honesty. At that moment I regretted impressing on him how important factual correctness is in life. Cricket still has lessons for us all.
I am hoping shortly to return to cyber-reality with tales of canoes in France and votive offerings in Cumbria, but meanwhile I have several musical things to finish plus some other stuff that takes a lot of head space and mental energy to do. Like thinking of birthday presents for the boy.
Meanwhile here is a public service announcement.
For all the dozens of people who come here looking for the meaning of "Pass The Duchie/Dutchie/Duchy 'pon the left hand side", here it is.
The 'dutchie' in question is a dutch pot, a large cooking vessel for stews and the like, shortened in West Indian slang to dutchie or any other spelling you care to mention. It's an oral culture so it doesn't matter.
The reason it gets into the song is because the weeny members of Musical Youth, a Birmingham-based pre-boyband boy band, used to play a cover of "Pass The Kouchie", a song originally recorded by the Mighty Diamonds about passing a cannabis pipe or 'kouchie' (pronounced 'koochie'). This topic was deemed unsuitable by the band's manager and their producer. So after some reflection the word 'dutchie' was substituted for 'kouchie' and magically the song was transformed from being about drugs to being about food. (I know this to be true not because I am an expert in Rastafari but because the group's manager told me.)
Big hit followed but not much happiness. The various guardians of the under-aged stars fell out over the money which slowly evaporated into the hands of lawyers and a legacy of bitterness and trauma was all that was left.
A bit boring. Sorry. Why anyone would want to spend the keystrokes on this beats me but there really does seem to be some demand for this information, and I am nothing if not public spirited.
And all this because I once wrote a joke about biscuits. Ho hum.
Update: the producer of the track was Peter Collins, who worked closely with Peter Waterman at the time. They had a company called Loose Ends Productions, but Waterman never got label credits as producer. "Pass The Dutchie" came near the front of an amazing run of chart entries for the two Peters through 1983-4 which included hits by Tracey Ullman, The Belle Stars, Roman Holliday, Musical Youth, Nik Kershaw etc etc. Peter Collins held the record for most chart entries in 12 months for several years until overhauled by Stock Aitken Waterman who managed 40 in a year around 1987-8.
Hope that covers all your questions.