Peg Noonan and Bob Dylan

WSJ/ June 20-21-2020

Peggy Noonan:  Bob Dylan, A Genius Among Us

A commentary by

R.E. Prindle

 

Reference: http://idynamo.blog/2010/01/22/exhuming-bob-23a...

Today Peg celebrates the release of Bob Dylan’s new effort titled Rough and Rowdy Ways.  The one that contains Bob’s ridiculous seventeen minute opus:  I Am Multitudes. The title commemorates the Bobber’s Hillbilly background.  Bob’s title is taken from the great Hillbilly singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers’ wonderful song My Rough And Rowdy Ways.

One might say that Jimmie wrote Bob’s life or, at least, Bob patterned his life after the song.

 

For years and years I’ve rambled

Drank my wines and gambled

But one day I thought I’d settle down.

I got a perfect lady…

But somehow I can’t forget my good old rambling ways,

I may be rough, I may be wild,

I may be tough and countryfied

But I can’t give up my rough and rowdy ways.

 

A tip of the hat to Sara, that perfect lady, and that is the story of Bob’s life.  The truth of the matter is that Bob has always been a Hillbilly singer and songwriter.  He transmogrified  the Hillbilly from ‘weird old America’ as Greil Marcus would have it, into a contemporary form.

Dylan’s pre-NYC days are grounded purely in Hillbilly or what has been sanitized into Country and Western.  When Hillary Clinton speaks of ‘deplorables’ these are the people she means, good ole Southern country boys.

Dylan has always been a con artist.  He needed a way in and he found it in Woody Guthrie Hillbilly garb.  He wrote some hokey protest songs to make it in the New York folk scene.  He was quite the hero to Pete Seeger, the uncrowned king of folk.  But, as Bob has said:  That whole folk scene was just a shuck.  You have to find your way in where the opening is available.

Once in Bob soon found his way out:  The Paul Butterfield Blues Band playing electric Blues.  Bob went electric and destroyed all Seeger’s illusions.  As the great Andy Warhol so astutely realized Bob went from political protest to personal protest disguised as pseudo-philosophical ruminations.  This was epitomized in his LP Another Side of Bob Dylan.  This was the crossover LP to Bringing It All Back Home.  That is Bob’s unhappy childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota out there on the edge of the universe as we know it.

The Bobber was a fraud.  Beginning with Bringing It All Back Home he wrote of his personal experience from Hibbing to NYC into enigmatic lyrics that sounded deep and meaningful.  This style may be epitomized by his song Like A Rolling Stone. The song is simply about his attempt to seduce Edie Sedgwick.

During this period he was in a battle with Andy Warhol to be king of Greenwich Village.  Both he and Warhol were contesting for the hand of a nothing kind of girl named Edie Sedgwick.  Like A Rolling Stone’s meaning is about this contest.  I have written extensively about this period and refer the interested reader to the link at the head of this article.  There is also a 23b.

Now, all these songs from this period terminating in the double LP concern Andy and Edie.  Nothing more and they are written in perfectly transmogrified Hillbilly with touch of Negro country blues which in fact is a variation of Hillbilly country blues.  So, Bob here has brought it all back home talking about himself.  He has dissociated himself from the shuck and jive of NYC folk.

Bob met his perfect lady, Sara Lowndes, he took her from husband, married her, fathered a brood and attempted to settle down.  Even took to looking like a middle class Jewish boy.  But, he couldn’t forget his rough and rowdy ways, went back to the road and has been the itinerant rambling troubadour ever since.

Peg Noonan calls him a genius.  I would say his transmogrification  of Hillbilly music is indeed a feat of sheer genius.  His genius stops there and ended with his dissociation from the Warhol period of his life.  Bob was a full participant in the drug life of NYC which during the early sixties sunk into an amphetamine haze.  That scene burned out beginning in 1966 when Bob  and Sara united and left the city for Woodstock.

Andy was nearly assassinated in 1968 which caused the downfall of the epoch.  Andy was actually dead for ninety seconds but was resuscitated and lived for several years although  it was Andy 2.0 and not the real thing.  Nothing goes on forever.

Dylan rambled through the Wasteland for a few decades after resuming his rough and rowdy ways.  He too had died, figuratively, at the same time Andy did.  The Bobber has never been the same.  His chief subsequent contribution has ben the recording of ‘old weird’ Hillbilly music.  His three record set trying to fill Frank Sinatra’s shoes was risible.

I follow Bob’s career because I’m fascinated by his ability to keep an able but mediocre career alive while becoming recognizable to succeeding generations while remaining an idol to Peg and others.   I bless the child who has his own and the Bobber certainly has his.