Doing a post about Dylan brought on an interesting discussion with Sandy about him. She has trouble dissociating his personal life, particularly his treatment of the women in his life, from his music. Being both male and a Gemini, such feats of schizophrenia come easier to me. I had a hunch that I probably would not really want to hang around him much, but I liked the music anyway.
One songwriter that we do really agree on is Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He and Jerry Garcia, who wrote their music, collaborated on most of the original songs of the Dead. The early ones have a very pleasant psychedelic flavor, like China Cat Sunflower, below. The later ones, starting about Workingman's Dead, have a more complicated, more folkloric lyric line. He had a real knack for mining American folklore about rambling gamblers, lost loves, and the West. His songs probably resonated even longer with me than Dylan's.
Plus there is the performance aspect. I have seen Dylan twice and like him better on record, frankly. But while I was in California, 1969-1973, I pretty much turned into a casual deadhead for a while. I probably went to 20 shows over the four years. There was something about both the music and ambience of their shows that I really liked. I also learned to NOT eat popcorn passed around at a Dead concert, particularly if you were the designated driver, which I usually was.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Robert Hunter
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2 comments:
It might be a pretty bland world if we discarded the works of our extremely creative whenever we didn't approve of their personal lives. Creativity must go with life on the edge to judge by much of what we see around us. I agree that I probably wouldn't want to hang out with Dylan or other popular singers known to use drugs and such. However, was John Belushi any less funny for having died of an overdose? Was Hendrix' rendition of All Along the Watchtower any less awesome because he died early due to lifestyle choices?
Once I heard John Mellencamp brag about how he was unable to pass an English class. That bugs me much more than the fact that he has three ex-wives.
In principle I agree with you (an artist's art and life aren't necessarily relevant to each other). But I would argue that Dylan is a bit of a special case.
I like many of his songs very much. At the time (when they came out) I liked the apocryphal ones like _When The Ship Comes In_ and _The Times They Are a-Changin'_, and the socially-conscious ones like _Pity the Poor Immigrant_ and _Chimes of Freedom_ (even though, looking back, the poetry in that one pretty much jumps the shark). I like the religious ones like _Death Is Not the End_ (there is a great recording of it by Brit folkie Peter Bellamy, who [ironically] took his own life later) and _I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine_ (even though neither St. Augustine of Hippo nor St. Augustine of Canterbury was martyred, but who cares if a good song gets history right or not. Maybe this is some random St. Augustine known only to Dylan).
But these aren't the songs that made the pop charts. So maybe my beef is with the listening public that creates the charts, I don't know. But when I was a mid-teenager and _Like a Rolling Stone_ and _Positively Fourth Street_ were constantly on the radio for what seemed like years at a time, all I could figure was that Dylan had some kind of huge chip on his shoulder vis-à-vis his old girlfriends. And I suspected, from these songs, that if some wayfarin' type ever was to order me to lay across his big brass bed, not much time would be passing before he'd be telling me to pawn my diamond ring (babe!) because his boot heels needed to be wanderin'. Of course King Kong and little elves would be dancing on the rooftop, and the wayfarin' dude would be telling me that I had no direction home and that it was a drag to see me. Not a positive picture. (Joan Baez's _Diamonds and Rust_ tells the story from the other side.)
Doesn't mean the guy isn't/wasn't a genius.
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