The Virtual Rambler

Number eighteen: 8th 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, 9th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3rd October 2011