The darker side of Bob Dylan
How the songwriter’s duplicitous behaviour and his visionary music were bound together
On 22 May 1966, the day after a fractious show in Newcastle, Bob Dylan flew into Paris for a concert at the Olympia Music Hall on his 25th birthday, two days later. At Le Bourget airport, he was accosted by some young Parisians. Dylan could be playful, even skittish with his fans, but when he was asked whether he thought he’d find it hard to transcend the language barrier, Dylan snapped, “What do I care? We don’t play English music or French music or Russian music. We play American music.”
This ill temper continued at the official press conference the next afternoon, held in the basement of the George V hotel. Dylan had brought his own double – a ventriloquist’s puppet found in a Parisian flea market. The photographer Barry Feinstein was on hand to watch the circus: “Every time one of the journalists asked him a question, he put his ear to the puppet’s mouth and pretended to listen to the answer. Then he would tell the press. It drove them nuts.”
By 1966, Bob Dylan had become a mass media event. He insisted on accuracy and engagement in his interactions with the press, but many of the reporters present were either news journalists or writers still stuck in the protest period that he had long left behind. Irritated beyond measure, Dylan turned to his interpreter in Paris and said, “I don’t mind them asking questions about anything, but I mind them asking questions about my music, because they don’t know anything about my music.”
The problem for Dylan was that, as far as the media and many fans were concerned, it wasn’t just about the songs. As he told an Irish journalist earlier that month: “It’s weird, this saviour business… the evangelist stardom.” He wasn’t just a singer and a successful musician – a pop star – he was the “Voice of a Generation”, the leader of a new youth culture that, since it was incomprehensible to many adults, needed explanation and elucidation, neither of which Dylan was prepared to offer.
Boosted by amphetamines, Dylan was moving faster than almost anyone in the culture during this period, and as he reached warp speed, he became more confounding, more obtuse, more splenetic. Confronted by a writer in Paris who admitted he wasn’t familiar with his albums, Dylan delivered a full-on truth attack: “You’re one writer, I’ve never seen anything you’ve written. You don’t know how to write. You can’t write.”
This might be expected in the canon of entitled pop star behaviour today – partly because Dylan helped to set the template – but in 1966 it was shocking. At the same time, Dylan offered moments of extreme clarity, as in his response to the Parisian press: “I don’t belong to any movement. I’ve only got some ideas in my head and I tell them.” Or, as he told another reporter: “I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer, man… I find myself in this accidental position. I’m fortunate because I make a lot of money and it’s all I really wanna do. No hobbies, no outside interests.”
The Olympia show in Paris was the third from last in a gruelling transcontinental tour. Visiting him that day, the sublime singer Françoise Hardy had “this bad feeling about him. He was so thin. He was very frail. He really seemed to be sick. He wasn’t well in himself. I honestly thought he was at death’s door.” But Dylan didn’t die. Indeed, it was his Rimbaldian escape from terminal teenage velocity that laid the foundation for the subsequent 55 years of his life, work and public engagement.
Spanning the years 1941 to 1966, The Double Life of Bob Dylan weighs in at 500 pages and is obviously intended as the definitive account of that period. It is but one entrant in the publishing bonanza triggered by Dylan’s 80th birthday on 24 May this year: others include revisions of existing biographies by Howard Sounes and Robert Shelton, new books by Paul Morley, Chris Gregory and Michael Gray, and a volume of academic essays edited by Sean Latham.
Dylan’s relevance today is based on a continual reinvention that has gathered pace since the late 1990s. Musical elements include the Bootleg Series albums – a thorough examination of his back catalogue now running to more than 15 volumes – and a sequence of new albums culminating in 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, an engrossing record that went to number one in the UK.
Dylan has also received major institutional honours: a Presidential Medal of Freedom given by Barack Obama in 2012, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. He has pursued creative work in other fields: there have been exhibitions of his paintings in the Gagosian Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Denmark. In 2013, the Halcyon Gallery in London exhibited “Mood Swings”, which featured seven wrought iron gates welded by Dylan – a direct harking back to his roots in America’s “iron ore country”.
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