The Virtual Rambler

Number eighteen: 8^th November 2011

Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens

In the 1950s , a few old folk songs were smoothly rendered on Capitol records by what I assumed to be college kids with crew-cuts and guitars. Some even made it into the hit parade. Meanwhile a contemporary explosion of genuine folk music came out of the Sun studio in Memphis. In Minnesota during that decade the young Robert Zimmerman had tuned into radio stations playing country and blues music , as well as deve;loping a teenage fascination with Little Richard and Elvis. By 1960 he was at the State University in Minneapolis , where he joined the folk music crowd and started introducing himself as Bob Dylan. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself”, he said later. “This is the land of the free.” Not long afterwards , a denim-clad Dylan arrived on the Greenwich Village scene in Manhattan. Here was that timeless figure of the provincial making his way in the metropolis. He was initially perceived as a Woody Guthrie tribute act , with a line in outlandish fabrications of an earlier life roaming and rambling throughout the West. Before too long he was ransacking old folk melodies and providing them with new lyrics. Taken up thereafter by the patriarchs of The Movement for a year or two , he would inevitably come to dissent from Folk music’s dissenting ethos (Civil Rights , Union struggles , Finger-pointing in general) in favour of putting his free association lyrics to a rock beat.

The chutzpah of self-reinvention and a ruthless singleness of purpose were traits Dylan shared with Charles Dickens. Both men made their own luck , wrote their own story and lost no opportunity to dress up and appear on stage before a rapt audience. Dickens wore a variety of brightly-coloured waistcoats , Bob donned every conceivable style of hat. A century apart , they each appeared at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall (built on the site of the Peterloo Massacre) in performances that became legendary.They were both in their early twenties when they found the fame they aspired to. Their audience would have preferred them to keep on repeating the original formula - The Pickwick Papers (1836), The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) - for ever more. For all their embrace of ‘modernity’ (whether 1860s or 1960s) they were nostalgians at heart. In fact Dickens remained fond of the picaresque novels of Smollett and Fielding he had read as a child , while Dylan’s abiding love of earlier American music derived from his younger days at home listening to those distant radio stations. In different ways , both succeeded in becoming international institutions whilst exposing misdeeds and hypocrisy. The vagueness of their discontent is the mark of its permanence , as they exhibited the affinity between imagination and inconsistency.

They both felt a manifest unease about the circumstance of their pre-fame lives. Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) wished to obscure his small-town , bourgeois jewish origins ; the Englishman repressed his feelings about a brief spell of youthful menial work when his feckless father had been imprisoned as an insolvent debtor. Having promoted themselves as candidates for public admiration , both men pursued elaborate policies to guard their privacy. Neither could acknowledge the price of fame in a media age , whereby every professional or private act of a celebrity’s life becomes a natural subject for public curiosity and discussion. Their work suffered from embarrassing lapses on a regular basis. Dickens dissolved into lukewarm treacle whenever those angelic heroines and dying children entered his creaking plots. Bob’s ventures into film became close cousins to Elvis vehicles , albeit fewer in number. Nor was he immune to cringe-inducing songs like Forever Young and entire albums of total tosh (Christmas in the Heart , to name but one). We are accustomed to hear pundits speak of a ‘classic Dickens’ novel and by sheer longevity , Dylan’s achieved that venerable status on which medals and honours are conferred. Accepting or refusing awards has come to occupy a significant amount of his time. Just as Dickens fell into the clammy grip of “heritage”, so Bob has become a walking antique.

Their respective nations followed an oddly parallel trajectory as these two men aged. An explosion of early Victorian Industry was the leitmotiv of Dickens youth , as post-war booms in American production and consumption were the theme of Dylan’s earlier years. In either case , spectacular production gradually waned and gave way to manipulations of wealth and credit as Finance and Services became industries in themselves , no longer the adjuncts to manufacture.

Wig

⁽¹⁾ These were Elvis’s earliest recordings with Scotty Moore and Bill Black , under the supervision of studio boss Sam Phillips. They were a blend of white country and black blues styles that came to be known in later years as Rockabilly , a combination of Hank Williams and Arthur Crudup.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014