Albert Kropf is a member of Sozialistische LinksPartei (ISA in Austria).
On the 80th Birthday of Robert Allen Zimmermann
With his skills and fame, a Bob Dylan at the forefront of the social protest movements would have had the power to help unhinge the world. Instead, the old Dylan preferred to fish for the big money and sold his musical life’s work to the entertainment industry.
It is not for nothing that there are few musicians who can match the fame and success of Bob Dylan. For 60 years, the figure of Bob Dylan has wandered through the entertainment industry with his many facets and twists, refusing to allow himself to be put in a box. And once he has found himself in one, he immediately sets about dismantling it personally, not always to the delight of his many fans.
It all began immediately after his arrival in New York in 1961, or to be more precise, in the then somewhat run-down artists’ district of Greenwich Village. Because of the low rents and good performance opportunities, a scene of different artists and coffeehouse literati developed there. It fell on politically as well as economically fertile ground and followed in the footsteps of the still jazz-laden beatniks of the 1950s.
The anti-Communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy era under President Eisenhower was coming to an end. The post-war economic upswing increasingly began to reach not only the middle class, but also parts of the working class because of the “Sputnik shock”, following the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite into space. There was a spirit of optimism, which until today is often wrongly attributed to the young President John F. Kennedy, who had just been elected.
Early socialist influences
Dylan was immersed in this melange. In addition to literary and general artistic interests, however, his hobby horse was folk music. The great icon of left-wing, union folk music, still living at that time, was Woody Guthrie.
In this style of music, the tradition of work songs that had been kept alive until the first third of the 20th century by the wandering migrant workers, the “hobos”, often poor and destitute farm families, is combined with elements of Irish folk music. Folk is in and of itself easy to play, does not require expensive instruments, and thus has always had a very low barrier to entry and therefore wide distribution in North America. In the early 1960s, folk became increasingly niche due to the more recent developments in popular music, with various jazz styles, the emerging blues, country and of course rock ‘n roll.
But in the early 1960s it experienced a new spring, especially among young intellectuals. Woody Guthrie had been suffering from a serious illness for years in a mental hospital near New York, so it was someone else who carried this new wave of folk and also shaped it, the almost 40-year-old Pete Seeger. However, with it had a more political, socialist and anti-racist claim.
Both had a great influence on the young Dylan. He visited the old Guthrie in hospital, performed and played together with the younger Seeger, and finally Seeger also supported him in his first record deal. He soon broke with both in different ways.
Passive protest to electric turn
With the onset of success came the gradual departure from left-wing folk. This was also the period of his relationship with the, at that time, much better-known Joan Baez, making them the new dream couple of folk. However, it did not last for long. The broader masses, to whom he had now become known, perceived him as a socio-critical musician. In reality, he had already adapted and started from a much more leftist sub-culture. Thus, he still publicly sympathized with protest movements, but unlike Pete Seeger and later partly Joan Baez, he was not an active part of them.
In the mid-1960s, Dylan then made a sharp turn, with a switch from acoustic to electric guitar. Although it is hard to imagine today, at the time this meant an outrageous break in style for the very traditional conscious folk community. They accused him of opportunism and betrayal. From today’s perspective, the Dylan afterwards is clearly less political and more at home in the mainstream. Whatever the reasons may have been, the “electric turn” massively facilitated his way into the mainstream and the break with traditional folk. Almost incidentally, Dylan also laid the foundation for a new genre — folk rock. Many young musicians, like The Byrds or his own backing band The Band, follow him on his new musical path and become famous themselves. Dylan was a trendsetter.
Back to Nashville
Dylan used a motorcycle accident for an almost two-year sabbatical. This was followed by a brief, two-album flirtation with the backward country music metropolis of Nashville. Dylan went there just as the “Outlaw” movement had resisted the dictates of flat, white country, left the city and pitched their new tents elsewhere. The Outlaw movement at that time already included such greats as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard. Nashville. Dylan might have fit in better with them, but he still went to Nashville.
The separation of American music styles into blues, country, and rock ‘n roll, etc., didn’t happen until the second half of the 1950s. At first, it all took place under the same roof. Johnny Cash was considered both a country and rock’n roll star and was on the same record label as the young Elvis. The later differentiation was less a musical product, but massively driven by the entertainment industry.
This meant that every niche could be carved out, served and occupied. For country music, this meant a backward Western image, with often racist and sexist approaches. Country and the folk of Dylan, were mutually exclusive. Country greats like Johnny Cash were also in Nashville, but because of their popularity, they were able to position themselves in a more multi-layered way. However, with the neoconservative turn in the 1970s, many of them, including Cash, fell into the dull country mould. Later, all outlaw country music became as commercialized as the music they were actually up against. Permanent oases cannot (unfortunately) be maintained in a thoroughly capitalist world.
Nevertheless, a broad “intersection” between folk and progressive country has survived to this day, drawing less from the Western cliché than from the realities of life and work of “normal” people.
Dylan had been present with his songs in the alternative and social movements since the 1960s. He helped to shape them, but never participated in their construction. On the contrary, he maintained a critical, intellectual and later increasingly cynical, arrogant distance from them throughout his life. Often, the impression arose that he had actively helped to create them at the beginning, perhaps even kicked them off, only to push them brusquely aside in the end and then watch impassively as they failed, decayed, or sank into insignificance. This does not apply to the Outlaws; he did not take up their political thrust; Dylan stabbed them in the back with his Nashville trip.
Hurricane
After further retreats into private life, Dylan finally succeeded in a brilliant live comeback with the “Rolling Thunder Revue” in the mid-1970s and including the albums released before. It was a comeback, although he had actually not really gone away. With Hurricane, Dylan also took the genre of protest and political songs to a new level.
With the song he started a movement for the release of the black boxer Ruben Carter, who had been wrongly sentenced to three life sentences due to a racist verdict in the US. All the world began talking about Hurricane, but Dylan let go of the issue, and simply dropped it. Ruben Carter’s sentence was not overturned until 1985, on the initiative and thanks to the campaign of others. It almost seems as if Dylan was not ready to bear the consequences of his music. All those who thought Hurricane was Dylan’s return to his political roots had rejoiced too soon.
Turn to mythology
“His Bobness,” as loyal fans call him, turned to Christian mythology shortly thereafter, was baptized, and made life difficult for many of his fans with three missionary albums that scratched hard at what was bearable. Unsurprisingly, sales figures plummeted, and the Messiah of the Rock Generation – the title of the biography published in 1978 – became a risk factor for his record company.
What he had not done earlier with the black civil rights, anti-war and student movements, he started doing now: he wanted to openly win people over to one cause with his music, Christianity. And this at a time when the arch-conservative, regressive and reactionary Christianity of the US was swimming to the top with Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Here, where a demarcation line separating him from Christian fundamentalism should have been drawn, Dylan was silent. There followed not only a musical decline, but also his decline as a “moral” authority for many fans.
After the album Infidels (1983), he now announced he would become a real pop star. For the already long-suffering Dylan fans, hard times continued. Albums with what were in and of themselves good song structures were significantly overproduced by Dylan and made inappropriately “poppy.” Instead of a somersault to become a pop star, he made a dreadful belly-flop. The critics wrote of “disco Dylan”. Surely it could hardly get any lower than that”.
But then came Dylan’s performance in 1985 at the Live-Aid concert organised to raise funds to fight the famine in Ethiopia. Broadcast live on television to all corners of the world and documented to this day, Dylan was heralded by US movie star Jack Nicholson as “the American voice of freedom.” He was supported by the two Rolling Stones legends, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. A terrific setting, but quite obviously the three of them had helped themselves too much to the intoxicating weed and the liquor bar backstage. The performance turned into a disaster and symbolized Dylan’s crisis.
Not yet dead
It was the left-wing hippie veterans of The Grateful Dead around Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir who were now catching Dylan. For many fans, what has always belonged together is finally coming together – twenty years late. But there isn’t really a spark, the love seems to be over quickly with Dylan. The mainly political development of the last 20 years is too contradictory. At the concerts Dylan seems apathetic, absent and, what was also nothing new for Dylan fans, listless. He is the total opposite to the “ramp pigs” of Grateful Dead, who make every concert an experience for the fans. The resulting album has the meaningful title Dylan and the Dead. But Dylan is far from dead, a new hook and Dylan docks with the supergroup “The Traveling Wilburys”. Besides him, the music legends George Harrison (The Beatles, The Plastic Ono Band), Jeff Lynne (Electric Light Orchestra), Roy Orbison (Pretty Woman) and Tom Petty (Tom Petty & the Heartbreaks) are active in the band. Although Dylan fits in well, he doesn’t really belong in this, in the end, very commercial enterprise – he is not a pop, rock or country star, but Dylan.
There’s life in the old dog yet again, and so he relaunched in 1989 with the surprisingly strong, secular and more political but somewhat darker album Oh Mercy. Like a seismograph records tremors of the earth, Dylan reacts to social changes: the protest movement in the 1960s, rock music, the first commercial and then neoconservative turn of the 1970s, the resurgence of white Christianity in US, the pop of the 80s, the supergroups, and so on. And now in 1989 in the year of the great upheaval with the collapse of the Stalinist states, Dylan does not join the chorus of the victory of unrestrained capitalism.
After 15 years he again releases a socially critical album. This surprises many who have already written him off. The follow-up album to Oh Mercy was another brief relapse, but with Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, he followed up with two acoustic blues and folk-laden albums in the early 1990s, and there he was again. Bob Dylan had reinvented himself, as he had done so many times before.
A new Modern Times
With Modern Times in 2006 he presents himself as a political, critical, even if sometimes cynical cue. The whole album is full of quotes, some of them of himself. It is produced by Jack Frost. How fitting that the album released in a time of increasing social coldness is produced by Jack Frost. Of course, it is no coincidence, and behind the name hides Dylan himself. The cover and title are also a successful allusion to Charlie Chaplin’s great satire of capitalist assembly line work in the age of the silent film of the 1930s. Dylan thus brings the theme of labour and industrial production into the 21st century, emptied of postmodern arbitrariness. A new high point is reached.
After that, Dylan was initially darker, even more cynical and once again he increasingly lost his political claim. Fittingly, after Shadows In The Night in 2015 he turned musically more and more to the US light music, the Frank Sinatra time. Again, this was a hard-to-digest turn for many Dylan fans. He has been on tour for 30 years with the Never Ending Tour to this day. He has visited many cities several times since then, always different and yet always the same: bad-tempered, grumpy, taciturn, somewhat listless and without an encore. It is actually impressive that someone who shows so little passion and joy on stage still fills the big concert halls without any problems.
And commercialisation
Dylan remains true to himself in the 21st century: after the musical resurrection comes a new “stress test.” Dylan turns to advertising, an absolute “no go” of decades past. As recently as the second half of the 1970s, Dylan jokingly responded to advertising requests by saying that he was only available as a model for women’s underwear. What remained a joke for just under a quarter of a century became a bitter reality in 2004. Not only was Dylan’s Love Sick featured in a sexist ad for sexy lingerie, but he also immediately mimed the silent observer in the background.
That’s not all: in the years that followed, he became a “repeat offender,” appearing in patriotically inclined commercials for the US automobile industry. For him, not even the argument that he needed the money applies. Dylan lives a secluded life, is not a “show-off” and, unlike many other musicians, owns the rights to all his songs and works. It can’t be a lack of money, there must be plenty of it.
Appropriately, in 2016, he shipped his extensive private archive to the University of Tulsa for an estimated $20 million. At least it is now in the same place as the archive of Woody Guthrie, whom the young Dylan so admired. All the more surprising was the turn from the Sinatra sound of the last three albums back to folk and blues in the spring of 2020 with Rough and Rowdy Ways. In general, Dylan is more political again, criticizing the rampant corruption, racism and finally the decline of the United States and the American dream. And what comes next? At the end of 2020, he sells all his song rights for almost $400 million to the entertainment company Universal, as if to really damage his image permanently.
Who is this Bob Dylan?
It is not even fixed whether this Bob Dylan, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, even exists. Bob Dylan is actually an artificial figure created around 1959 by Robert Allen Zimmermann.
This one was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota into a middle-class Jewish family. He even continues to spread partly contradictory rumours about the origin of his name. Dylan is for him, at least during the first years, more than just a stage name – it is rather an art figure. Again and again Dylan speaks about Dylan in interviews not in the first person, but in the third person. In keeping with another role model, the French poet and bon vivant Jean Arthur Rimbaud, “I is another.” Dylan plays with this until today and thus also with us. Yet Dylan is only one of many names he will use for a wide variety of things over the decades. As we have already seen, on some albums he is represented by several at once.
One name, however, he almost never uses: his real one, Robert Allen Zimmermann. So to what extent the real person merged with the artificial one at some point is impossible for us to estimate.
Probably not even he himself knows that. Maybe it is the other way around and there is only Bob Dylan and no Robert Zimmermann anymore. In his autobiography Chronicles, published in 2004, he writes, appropriately enough, that Bobby Zimmermann died in a motorcycle race in 1964: “Now there is no more Bobby Zimmermann. That was the end of him.” His motorcycle accident was in 1966 and not in a race. Biography and fiction merge. He consistently refers to his various life partners throughout his book only as “his wife”, as if there had been only one partner. Overall, it is less an autobiography and more a novel about the life of a certain Bob Dylan. It is Dylan’s “Bob Dylan” from the year 2004.
Question marks run like a thread throughout the history of “Bob Dylan.” For the most part, he put them there himself. Over and over again, there is a small hidden hint here, one there. Is that really what happened?
Sometimes the suspicion creeps in that Dylan could be a purely artificial figure. Bob Zimmermann then amuses himself by watching us give meaning to everything in Bob Dylan’s life, where perhaps there is none. Is Bob Dylan perhaps really just an art figure, as Borat is for Sacha Baron Cohen? No, he certainly isn’t. His falling, his suffering, his tragedy is too great and too real for that. And he takes himself far too seriously for that!
There is simply no uniform Bob Dylan, but only the one of the moment. Actually, we can’t even answer the question whether Bob Dylan really turned 80 in 2021, or whether it wasn’t “just” Robert Allen Zimmermann’s birthday. At the end of the day, however, it doesn’t matter. What remains is a life of failure in the demands he placed on himself, which in turn makes Dylan – whether an art figure or not – deeply human. But the story of Bob Dylan is also the story of thousands of people who, since the early 1960s, have begun to see the prevailing conditions more critically through his music, with some of them ultimately becoming political activists. A step that he himself was not only never ready to take himself, but as an increasingly arrogant old man openly rejected.
From a left-wing point of view, however, it is also a life of unused opportunities. With his skills and fame, a Bob Dylan at the forefront of the social protest movements would have had the power to help unhinge the world. Instead, the old Dylan preferred to fish for the big money and sold his musical life’s work to the entertainment industry. It is not enough to write good, political songs to change the world in the long term. This requires political and social movements of the people affected and not representatives in politics, trade unions or even the music industry, to which Bob Dylan belongs today.
