Dylan In The Name Of

On Tuesday May 24, the Fleadh Cowboys will perform at Dublin’s Button Factory. They played a show ten years ago on the same date. It was the last time they shared the stage as a band. So what’s the big deal about May 24? To understand the singular importance of that particular date we’ll need to travel back in time 70 years, when the Zimmerman family from Duluth, Minnesota welcomed their little son Robert Allen into the world.

Since then he has gone through a ton of names: Elston Gunnn when he was backing up Bobby Vee on piano and handclaps; Bob Landy – again in a piano-playing role on the 1964 album The Blues Project; Blind Boy Grunt on the recordings he made for Broadside Magazine around the same time; Tedham Porterhouse when he played harmonica on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s 1964 album Jack Elliott; the almost transparent Robert Milkwood Thomas when he contributed harmony vocals and piano to Steve Goodman’s 1972 album Somebody Else’s Troubles; Sergei Petrov as the co-writer of the film Masked and Anonymous; Shabtai Zizel ben Avraham, which is not a pseudonym as such, but the Hebrew version of his name, and of course the one by which the world knows him – Bob Dylan.
The name-changing is symptomatic of a mercurial personality repelled by the notion that anyone could define him in a straightforward, limiting way.
Musically, he has followed the same ever-shifting path, from his schoolboy rock ‘n’ roll excursions in Hibbing, Minnesota through the obsession with Woody Guthrie that led to him abandoning college and decamping to New York where his musical hero was hospitalised with worsening Huntingdon’s disease. He said of Guthrie: “The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them ... [he] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.” Thus, Dylan took to the folk clubs and coffee houses of downtown Manhattan, playing live and cropping up on records by other singers on the same Greenwich Village scene. It was while playing harmonica on one of these albums that John Hammond spotted him and signed him to Columbia, where he was soon the butt of the kind of mixed feelings that he would attract throughout his career. After the mediocre sale of his first album, he became known at the label as ‘Hammond’s Folly’ and would have been dropped if Hammond hadn’t fought his corner. As his writing developed though, it became clear that his producer’s loyalty had been justified and he made a number of albums in quick succession that would yield a slew of career-defining classic songs like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’.
Like his hero, Woody Guthrie, he was as politically engaged as he was musically and it made him the toast of the folk circuit, with performances at the Newport Folk Festivals in 1963 and 1964 and a first trip to England where his records were being devoured as voraciously as at home.
He was an uneasy idol though, and knew if he was to develop, he couldn’t let himself be held in stasis by the worshipful respect of his admirers. Having made a career out of adapting old folk songs and modelling his performance on a template from the past, he cast it all out by letting his lyrics run wild and performing with electric instrumentation. It was a moment of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion that led to accusations of betrayal and saw him booed at the 1965 Newport Festival. In fact it was his only way out.
There are still those who argue that Dylan never again achieved the vigour and intensity of those early performances and recordings, and as anyone who has seen him live can testify, his mercurial quest never to give the same performance twice can come across as shambolic. His records too can often seem merely slapdash when he attempts to quickly and succinctly record the mood and feel of a particular moment in time. In the early part of his career, it was often others who recorded successful versions of his songs. Sonny and Cher; The Byrds; Peter, Paul and Mary, even Jimi Hendrix recorded more definite takes of Dylan songs.
As he searched for another approach, he recorded in Nashville (not altogether successfully) in the late ‘60s, before entering what would be an extended fallow period in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when critical successes like Blood On The Tracks seemed to happen almost accidentally. Even that record, now hailed as one of his best, was panned at the time as a shoddily recorded throwaway. Commercial success eluded him too, and some of his attempts to broaden his oeuvre met almost embarrassingly disastrous results. His 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, an improvised sprawl coming in at over four hours, died a death and was hacked back to a more manageable two hours, mainly drawn from concert footage, to get a widespread theatrical release. An equally reviled and ill-judged live album recorded at the Budokan in Tokyo seems to have been largely motivated by the need to recoup some of the film’s costs.
His restlessness however knows no bounds and he has continued to make music, to paint and latterly to present The Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on XM Satellite Radio where he draws out spindly narratives from his encyclopedic knowledge of recorded music.
So where to now, Bob Dylan? His ‘Never Ending Tour’ seems set to continue never-endingly and his songs continue to resonate with audiences and performers, attracting more and more cover versions each year. Who knows what lies ahead in terms of his recorded output. 2009’s incongruous Christmas In The Heart left one thing crystal clear though; he still has a few surprises left up his sleeve. Happy Birthday, Bob.

Salute Him When His Birthday Comes show takes place at the Button Factory, Dublin on May 24