Bob Dylan's music has earned him critical and popular acclaim to rival Shakespeare, writes Craig McGregor.
When Bob Dylan tours Australia this month it may be the last time Australian audiences get to hear in person the artist Christopher Ricks, a former professor of English at Cambridge University, likens to William Shakespeare.
It's a big claim but Dylan has created such a voluminous oeuvre, and has covered such an amazing breadth of styles and genres in his six decades of songwriting, that only artists such as Picasso, poets such as Milton and playwrights such as Shakespeare spring to mind as possible comparisons.
Dylan revolutionised the popular song. He broke out of the stale Tin Pan Alley tradition of thinking a pop song had to be a love song, typically 32 bars long, with a jaunty or lachrymose melody and lyrics to match. It was music lite.
In more than 400 songs and 50 albums, Dylan destroyed that: he sang about war, injustice, God, kids, politics, protest, drugs and just about everything else (including love) in blazing imagery borrowed from the Bible, the Beats, the blues, Baudelaire. After Dylan, the pop song could be about anything.
Dylan's album Modern Times zoomed to the top of the American charts. In a sense he's turned himself into a showbiz shaman, a magician, like the midwest touring troupes of old, a popular entertainer who can synthesise the tumultuous world of song.
He openly borrows lines from old songs and incorporates them in his own. He seems to regard the entire corpus of American music - folk songs, gospel, ragtime, blues, vaudeville, jazz, classical and pop - as an inexhaustible resource to be reshaped. In that sense Dylan is continuing the vernacular tradition of using anything from anywhere as long as it works.
Dylan has his critics. His voice has obviously become rougher and more tired, and there are those who always said he couldn't sing. Others think his last albums don't rival earlier albums such as Blood on the Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. A series of Bootleg albums and covers of songs by other songwriters is evidence, they say, of flagging inspiration.
But his Bootleg series, up to No. 9 with the recent release of his earliest Witmark demo songs, contains some of his most brilliant work. Blind Willie McTell, a fusion of blues with a bitter evocation of the slavery south featuring Dylan on piano and Mark Knopfler on guitar, is a masterpiece. In just five verses Dylan moves from ''this land is condemned/from New Orleans to Jerusalem'' to the Civil War, chain gangs, Rebel yells, bootleg whiskey, God-forsaken savagery and greed, all held together by his haunting tribute to the blues singer Blind Willie McTell, with a final acknowledgement of St James Infirmary Blues, on which the song is based.
A recent book by the American cultural historian Sean Willens devotes a chapter to analysing the song's sources and context.
Up To Me rivals Tangled Up in Blue as a masterful autobiography-in-song such as very few songwriters have attempted; in its cadences and extraordinary imagery it hints at how much Robert Zimmerman, songwriter, may owe to Dylan Thomas, poet.
When he was younger Dylan was being hailed as a poet and his work was included in several poetry anthologies. There is no doubt most of his lyrics can stand by themselves but the music intensifies and defines the words.
As for his latest albums, songs such as Nettie Moore, Highlands and the moving Not Dark Yet are the work of a mature, more reflective artist.
Dylan's singing is right for his songs: sometimes harsh, sometimes mellifluous. He has often tended to declaim his songs, especially in his live concerts. But that only adds to the power and the passion. The test is that Dylan's versions of his songs almost invariably sound better than the covers by other singers - except perhaps Jimi Hendrix's incendiary version of All Along the Watchtower.
In recent years Dylan has expanded from songwriting. He has hosted a radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. He has taken part in the film director Martin Scorsese's filmic biography No Direction Home. He has made films, notably Renaldo and Clara, and written volume one of his series of books, Chronicles, which was praised by critics from The New York Review of Books to on-the-street music mags.
This month two newish books on Dylan are scheduled to be published. One is The Mammoth Book of Bob Dylan, edited by the British music writer Sean Egan; the other is an updated version of Robert Shelton's No Direction Home. Shelton was the music critic for The New York Times when Dylan was a virtually unknown songwriter, and it was his review of a Dylan concert in 1961 at Gerde's Folk City that launched Dylan on his career. Shelton wrote: ''Mr Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.''
Remarkably, a younger generation is discovering Dylan's music. He's always had an influence on other songwriters, from Elvis Costello to Paul Kelly, both of whom are appearing at the Byron Blues Festival, but now he seems to appeal not only to an older generation but to a significant number of generations X, Y and Z as well.
Why? Possibly because he's the last, and greatest, of the singer-songwriters who is able to straddle today's fractured and ever-expanding genres of pop music. That's why we may never see his ilk again. He is an artist who tells powerful, contemporary stories-in-music about love, hate and redemption.
He draws on his own imagination and a thousand other sources to create parables of our time … even though, years ago, he denied he was any kind of prophet.
Dylan's great insight was to realise the song, not poetry, was the key to reaching a mass audience.
Dylan turned pop serious.
He is a contemporary Bard who has used the mass media to achieve something of the same critical and popular acclaim as the Bard himself, and in the process has transmogrified the popular song into one of the most important art forms we know.
Craig McGregor is the author of Bob Dylan: A Retrospective and is writing another book on Dylan's songs. Dylan plays at the Byron Bay Blues Festival on April 25-26 and at the Sydney Entertainment Centre on April 27-28.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/showbiz-shaman-who-makes-pop-songs-serious-20110415-1dhmt.html#ixzz1JvaQAPJC
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