In January 1966, just a few months after making the jump to electric rock, a journalist asked Bob Dylan: “What has made him follow the path of rock and roll?” And he replied: «Indifference. I had just lost my real love. … I started drinking. The first thing I remember was that I was in a card game. Then in one of dice … I woke up in a pool room. Then, a huge Mexican lady took me out of the table and took me to Philadelphia. He left me alone in his house and the house burned. I left to Phoenix then. I got a job disguised as Chinese … ».
The 25 -year -old musician continued with that sly and surreal story and, after a long time, he concluded: «Everything was very good until a delivery man tried to stab me. As is easy to guess, I returned to the road. The first individual who appeared asked me if he wanted to be a star. What else could he answer? The editor, still with breath, insisted: “This was how he became a rock and roll singer?” And Dylan settled: “No, that’s how I took tuberculosis.”
He asked him, but he only gave him elucubrations. He was beginning to be tired of trying to analyze and unravel every step he took or verse he wrote. There began to form the mysterious and inscrutable halo that has accompanied Robert Zimmerman since he adopted the pseudonym of Bob Dylan. The last attempt is ‘A complete stranger’, the James Mangold movie starring Timothée Chalamet that tells the story of his meteoric promotion from when he was 19 years old until he reached the top of the success list.
The film again puts the focus on the “mystique”, according to Synopsis itself, as the main cause of Minnesota’s becoming a worldwide phenomenon and provoking an obsession with his work against which he has always fought … without much success. Proof of this is the huge bibliography that has generated his person, with more than one thousand titles between classical biographies, political comments to his work, poetic interpretations of his songs, essays on Jewish influence on his music, dictionaries, university thesis and encyclopedias, among other things.
The cinema
In the cinema other directors tried before. In 1967, Da Pennebaker made the documentary ‘Don’s Look Back’that followed his tour of England to penetrate his intimacy. In 2005, with ‘No direction home’Martin Scorsese focused on the musician’s life from his arrival in New York to his 1966 retire ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’which mixed fictional and real material. In 2007, the turn was for Todd Haynes with ‘i’m not there’, a somewhat surreal ‘biopic’ that played with the myth. He knew that, he would tell what he told, he would never decipher the gallimaties of his life.
“Despite everything written about Dylan, it is not known with certainty of him,” said Alex Ross in his chronicle about the composer, entitled ‘The Wanderer’ (1999), who also investigated about the myth created around the singer. The playwright and actor Sam Shepard, Pulitzer Award in 1979, had the same feeling when he accompanied him as a guest on his 1975 tour. «His identity is a mystery. We have it right here before us, but nobody can touch it, ”he concluded, despite the time he spent.
Zimmerman managed to remain airtight since the years he became one of the promises of the folk scene in the New York neighborhood Greenwich Village, in the early 60s. In that environment, the figure of Dylan arises as a kind of spokesman who sings about the problems of his time, despite being only 20 years old. That is the time that portrays ‘a perfect stranger’ and the one that Dylan referred to in ‘Chronicles’, the first volume of his autobiography: «I felt like a piece of flesh that would have thrown the dogs. ‘The New York Times’ published delusional interpretations of my songs. On the cover of the magazine ‘Esquire’ a four -headed monster formed by my face and those of Malcolm X, Kennedy and Castro appeared. What the hell meant that?
Generational leader
The author of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind ‘rejected that role that society had granted him as the leader of a generation that fought against war and racial segregation. Even today, in biographical semblances, he is remembered thus, as a man who “wrote political songs and contributed decisively to the introduction of the term ‘protest’ in the pop vocabulary”, despite the fact that Dylan denied by active and by passive that he dedicated himself to the protest action. He didn’t even accept that his letters had a political message. «The counterculture, whatever it was, had me fed up. I was sick how my letters subverted and extrapolated their meanings to interested conflicts, ”he insisted.
As Dylan himself has reproached on occasion, many critics and fans have occupied for decades to obsessively analyze their lyrics and find encrypted messages. The most famous case is AJ Weberman, an infamous activist who, in 1969, founded a curious field of study he called “Dylanology.” His work method was to establish correspondences between the words used by the musician and the hidden meanings that, according to him, hid. For example, he said that “rain” or “chicken” wanted to say “heroin.”
The worst thing is that it went further and ended up digging in Dylan’s garbage to collect objects and then sell them. The harassment ended when the singer -songwriter left his house and beat him on one of those nights he walked through his house and bothered his family. The case of Weberman, naive and jocular, only reflects that inexhaustible curiosity to explore the true thoughts of Robert Zimmerman, the same one that James Mangold wanted to dedicate his latest film.
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