Wherever I am, I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic. . . . You name it. I can’t shake it. Stepping out of the woods, people see me coming. I knew what they were thinking. I have to take things for what they were worth.
—Dylan, Chronicles, 2004
Bob Dylan is illusory. More than any artist in history, he is both of the people and ethereal. Countless millions have heard his voice, seen his image, attended concerts where someone named “Bob Dylan” stood up on stage and performed; yet we know so little about him, at least beyond the songs. Even then, however, much of Dylan’s catalog resides in ambiguity, misdirection, and uncertainty. Still, though we cannot pin him down to a specific thing or identity, audiences possess an image or impression of Dylan. Say the name to almost anyone anywhere in the world and some picture or sound comes to mind, probably both.
Outside of American presidents, this kind of universality is unheard of in contemporary culture. How does one become so utterly ubiquitous in American history and simultaneously remain an enigma wrapped in a riddle encased in fog?
This is the myth of Dylan. He is shrouded in a lifetime of illusion, eluding the most basic questions that seem commonplace in our confessional, celebrity-obsessed society. But at the same time, Dylan has provided via music, film, and words enough content to fill many lifetimes. A small library could be filled with books on Dylan and magazines and newspaper articles about him. How can a man who has said so much for so long stay a mirage?
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Over the course of his long career, scholar Ray B. Browne examined popular culture and folklore, showing that these topics were significant in understanding life in the United States and had vital consequences, not only for how people lived their lives, but also in the ways they viewed themselves as citizens. He called folk studies, for example, “society’s way of life, the timeless and world-wide comparative attitudes toward the problems of life and those people’s ways of adjusting to and coping with those problems.” He felt that understanding culture might lead to people developing solutions “for the benefit of all society.”1 This lofty goal remained central to Browne’s work. As several generations of scholars following in Browne’s footsteps have proven, this study has only grown in importance as technology drives popular culture deeper into the nation’s awareness.
What this concise biography underscores in its thematic perspective, in the Browne tradition of popular culture studies, is that an artist like Dylan can have a transformative influence on people’s lives by serving as a tool for them to better comprehend themselves, the society around them, and their possible futures. Rather than dismiss Browne’s ideology as Pollyannaish, as some critics might do, I concur with his rationale for the humanities (and broad critical thinking) when he states:
The humanities are those aspects of life that make us understand ourselves and our society. They are a philosophical attitude and an approach to thinking and behaving which interpret life in a human context. In other words, the humanities humanize life and living, make it more understandable and bearable and human.2
I think that Dylan, though notably cranky about scholarly interpretations of his work and life, might actually appreciate the idea that both he and his music help people “humanize” life and make it more bearable.
One could argue that music is at the heart of the human in humanities, and via Dylan’s influence, popular music transformed into something akin to collective storytelling. The singer himself, as he continues touring and performing, seems to have taken on a role as the nation’s troubadour, a traveling bard delivering a country’s story to it.
Interestingly, Dylan himself plays a kind of dual role in the contemporary American society: he is simultaneously a creator of culture and a folklore figure within that same culture. As a result, for example, he can both create and star in films, such as Masked and Anonymous (2003), as well as serve as the subject of movies, including the critically acclaimed I’m Not There (2007) and Martin Scorsese’s award-winning documentary No Direction Home (2005). Likewise, he can write loosely autobiographical songs or perform covers of other musicians’ work, each holding meaning for audiences.
Dylan the iconic figure, then, is always lurking about, perhaps casting a shadow over whatever he does next. This must make for a maddening situation. When one exists in the history books for actions shouldered as a young man, how does the older, wiser person deal with whatever residual notions are left in the wake? For some people, Dylan might forever be that fresh-faced boy belting out “The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ” while for others he is the 70-something they just watched last night performing at the State Fairgrounds or the local outdoor amphitheater.
It is fair to conclude that many people have created their worldviews, at least in part, by listening to and assessing Dylan and his music. One could certainly argue that for a generation that came of age in the early 1960s, Dylan taught them about equality and compassion in his anthems that took center place among those protesting racial inequality, the war in Vietnam, and other social issues. Scholar Richard M. Dorson explains:
A tale is not a dictated text with interlinear translation, but a living recitation delivered to a responsive audience for such cultural purposes as reinforcement of custom and taboo, release of aggressions through fantasy, pedagogical explanations of the natural world, and applications of pressures for conventional behavior.3
Dylan as a musician and part of folklore, therefore, plays an important role in how people have created their worldviews. He exists on many levels in this interpretation and these notions of him have changed based on how the world around him and his audiences shifted.
A foundational aspect of human life is the need to create meaning. People engage in this activity from birth, investigating and examining the world in relation to other people and things around them. This type of exploration is called semiotics and basically centers on asking what something means in relation to ourselves and others. Via signs, according to scholar Marcel Danesi, people create meaning and develop a personal worldview. “Semiotics,” Danesi explains, “allows us to filter the signs that swarm and flow through us every day, immunizing us against becoming passive victims of a situation. By understanding the signs, the situation is changed, and we become active interpreters of that situation.”4
Essentially what Danes illustrates is that people create the world around them through language. Words stand in for the meaning of some item that the community basically agrees to adopt. Scholar Norman K. Denzin clarifies this point, saying, “The world of lived experience is shaped by cultural understandings and cultural texts.”5 Thus, humans represent the world via signs and symbols and then proceed to interpret their environments through constant interaction with one another and the signs they then constantly assess. For sociologist John P. Hewitt, “A sign is something that stands for something else—that is, an event or thing that takes the place of or signifies some other event or thing.”6
In this light, the idea Bob Dylan takes on various collective meanings among the broader public, while simultaneously meaning something different to particular individuals or subsets of the larger whole. People use symbols, then, to adapt to a complex world that contains an enormous amount of abstraction. As a result, Hewitt says, people are symbol-using creatures “free to range in fact and imagination across wide expanses of space and time . . . to gain considerable freedom from determination by the surrounding world.”7
As a sign and creator of signs for legions of fans across his long career, one views Dylan constantly in battle with these parts of his iconic status, situating and being situated at the same time. For example, in the early 1970s, Dylan faced a period of uneasiness in his personal life as he coped with the decline of his marriage to his wife Sara. Looking back on the period later, he spoke about the many sides of himself that existed and kind of threw him off-kilter. Dylan explains, “I was constantly being intermingled with myself, and all the different selves that were in there, until this one left, then that one left, and I finally got down to the one that I was familiar with.”8 This statement infers that Dylan could not find a center due to the pulls on him from all the innumerable audiences that needed something from him. He got caught in a trap of demands placed on him by his fans and others who existed in the star’s orbit.
One might wonder how a megastar of Dylan’s stature could ever get back to his true self under this kind of glare. In the singer’s case, he accomplished the feat with the help of Norman Raeben, a former boxer turned painter who taught art classes in New York City. Under Raeben’s tutelage, according to biographer Clinton Heylin, Dylan found a new vision that enlarged his creative range. On his next album, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Dylan created songs that Heylin calls “audio painting,” a kind of storytelling that relies on the listener to reimagine time itself. For example, in discussing the lead track “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan says, “I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting.”9
In this period, while Dylan coped with personal issues regarding his marriage and its demise and the welfare of his children, he created an album that sounds intensely personal and autobiographical. Yet, above he tells us that he wrote the songs in an attempt to find a new narrative. Listening to the songs, though, many critics and audiences questioned how the lyrics could not have been personal. These queries forced the public Dylan to lash out at interviewers who assumed too much in reading his personal life bleeding into his songs. In a 1985 interview, the singer looked back on Blood on the Tracks and exclaimed: “I don’t write confessional songs.”10
Although Dylan said that he did not write songs derived from his life and that the album did not pertain to him, when one hears “If You See Her, Say Hello,” it does not seem possible for it to be anything other than autobiographical. Interestingly, if one compares the lyrics for the song on the official Bob Dylan website with what is listed in the official Dylan book of lyrics and then listens to the song on the album, each version is varied and each variation changes the way one might interpret the song.
In “If You See Her, Say Hello,” the narrator laments the breakup of his relationship and hints that he still loves her, despite her great distance from him. It is as if he longs for her to be closer, but still rebukes himself for holding onto the tie. The website lyrics and album version both follow this idea. For example, the final line in the song portrays the narrator telling some listener that she “can look me up if she’s got the time.” However, when the published lyrics appeared in 2004, the final line is changed to make it less personal: “Tell her she can look me up. I’ll either be here or I won’t.”11 As the years pass, Dylan obviously made significant changes to the song to downplay his initial, personal connection to the story presented in the song. Other stanzas are eliminated completely from the printed and electronic sources versus the song that exists as music.
Yet another thought-provoking twist comes into play if one turns from the published lyrics to the ways Dylan again transformed the song in live performances. According to biographer Heylin, touring in 1976, the performer changed “If You See Her, Say Hello” completely. He played an acoustic version that reveals the narrator “is haunted by the lady, but he hates her power over him. . . . His tone starts as dismissive, he becomes threatening to her new lover,” Shelton explains. Later, he asks the Lord to grant him the power to keep him from allowing her back into his life.12
Viewing Dylan as a sign and symbol creator, however, stands in stark contrast to what he claims and others have perceived about him. For example, scholars Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender explain, “Dylan is a great rejector—he rejects his own role-playing . . . his own audience . . . and his own songs. He dislikes anything programmatic, mistrusts the wrong kind of relevance or specificity. . . .” They call his evasiveness “a deep temperamental trait.”13 The singer’s reluctance at being pinned down leads to a general state of ambiguity in his work, which lets his fans and listeners engage in interpretation, which actually heightens their feeling of ownership or kinship with the singer and his songs. Kermode and Spender conclude, “His peculiar relationship with his audience—they must teach themselves to do the work of performance and interpretation—has its dangers, which is why he often tells them that it is not his business to solve their problems but simply to get on with his own work.”14 Rather than reject this ambiguity and dismissal, the fans seem to relish in the chaotic nature of being a Dylan fan.
In the end, Dylan wears so many guises that it is impossible to categorize him, which is a bonus for many people who view him as a symbol. He can alternatively exist as a singer, writer, musician, revolutionary, poet, degenerate, or any of the other labels that might be thrust at him. On the bobdylan.com website, for example, the history section “Bob Dylan 101” points visitors to explore “the beginnings of a character named Bob Dylan.”15 Obviously, the artist himself is used to dealing in symbols. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that he enjoys messing with the dominant narrative of his life.
Dylan can reject them outright or question the desires of others to place this anchor around his neck, yet whatever people have pinned on him has taken on its own kind of universality. “We depend on one another to learn what we must know in order to adapt to the world and solve the problems it throws at us,” explains Hewitt.16 The answers may be blowin’ in the wind or down on Maggie’s Farm or somewhere out there as we are tryin’ to get to Heaven, but for many fans and others Dylan is the manifestation of some portion of reality. For our iconic figures, this burden might seem too much to bear, but it is manifest in the culture that deifies celebrities.
Bob Dylan is a musician, songwriter, poet, and cultural icon.
(Library of Congress)
Obviously, while Dylan is ultimately human—waking each day, eating, daydreaming, bathing—performing the tasks that make up one’s daily life, there is another aspect of his being that defies simple definition. Dylan, a member of an elite category of iconic figures, exists outside his physical form, essentially manifesting numerous meanings that provide other people with a tool to interpret the world around them. As a result, the artist is not only a member of society, but also a set of interpretations and symbols that help others generate meaning.
Many listeners who grew up in the 1960s, for example, may hold Dylan up as the living embodiment of that era. This is no doubt the most symbolic representation of Dylan for most people. Others, though, may view him as a musician first, recognizing his place within the nation’s musical heritage. Regardless, there are relatively few individuals who have risen to a position that supersedes even outlandish celebrity to become truly iconic.
When one examines Dylan’s trajectory, sociology helps in comprehending how a musician could undergo this change. Sociologists are interested in studying how organized life and society operate. As far back as anyone can speculate, human beings have used music and storytelling as a method for interpreting their societies. In creating worlds for listeners via music, Dylan in some respects is acting as a sociologist, presenting visions of the world for others to unravel. Each three- to six-minute song becomes its own little world, ready for examination by people yearning for tools to help them understand their existences.
Dylan or any other artist might respond to these statements by explaining that they simply are crafting music, paintings, sculptures, literature, or any other form of artistry as a means of expressing themselves, not attempting to interpret life’s larger questions. Dylan himself has shunned the notion that he should be viewed as a 1960s’ icon or that he had anything like that in mind. Yet, in assessing how the arts and creativity fit in the modern world, we cannot merely wave off the power of a Dylan-esque figure when he or she emerges. As such, I contend that utilizing some aspects of sociology will prove fruitful in tackling Dylan’s life and meaning.
The approach used here is symbolic interactionism, a theory that grew out of the late 19th- and early 20th-century thinking of William James, John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, and George H. Mead. Scholar Norman K. Denzin explains that interactionist thinkers are “cultural romantics . . . [who] believe in the contingency of self and society and conceive of social reality from the vantage point of change and transformations.”17 Growing out of pragmatism, symbolic interactionism explores how people create meaning for themselves and the broader society through a system of constant negotiation, modification, and re-assemblage as they interact with others. In other words, people actively create meanings of themselves and society through dealings with others.
Examining the way Dylan transformed from folk singer to icon in the 1960s and how he continues to traverse his legend now all these decades later, one can see how he not only acts as a character within a symbolic interactionist world, but is also a symbol for others as they do the same. According to eminent sociologist and thinker C. Wright Mills:
The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in a second-hand world. The consciousness of men does not determine their existence; nor does their existence determine their consciousness. Between the human consciousness and material existence stand communications and designs, patterns and values which influence decisively such consciousness as they have.18
This exchange, therefore, between Dylan as symbol and Dylan as person enables individuals to traverse an ever-changing terrain that makes up their lives. Reality, in other words, is constantly evolving. As individuals living in a larger society, we yearn for symbols that help us cope with its complexities.
It is via language and words themselves that people create meanings. Scholar Joel M. Charon explains that the symbol is “the central concept of the whole perspective.”19 Furthermore, he says, “Words are symbols. They stand for something; they are meaningful; they are intentionally used by actors to represent physical objects, feelings, ideas, values. They are used for communication. Their meaning is social.”20 As a result, everything that one sees or thinks is derived from words, which gives things meaning. Our only meaning—what we think, observe, and imagine—is garnered from the words we use to describe those impulses.
Dylan operates on multiple levels here. First, he is a musician who utilizes lyrics and sound to communicate a particular worldview to listeners. Then, others use these symbols as a tool for refining and creating a particular worldview. As a result, Dylan’s 1960s’ anthems may have not been forged as such, but he cannot deny their use in helping people around the globe weigh issues such as race relations, warfare, equality, and the human condition.
As it has across humankind’s existence, music is a tool for not only entertainment, but also for interpretation. According to Denzin, it is symbolic interactionism applied to cultural studies that enables content or words to “connect and join people.”21 Dylan’s powerful storytelling abilities—essentially exploring pivotal topics within the confines of a single song—demonstrate the synergies at the heart of words, culture, and artistry.
A Dylan style then emerged that intensified and extended his reach as his fame grew as a musician. His songwriting, heralded by critics and music consumers, became a central facet in understanding Dylan as a performer and craftsman. Operating within a celebrity culture, the singer/songwriter grew into a commodity as well. Both he and his songs became a way for companies to sell records, magazines, and concert tickets. Gradually, one can no longer separate Dylan’s personal identity as a person from the broader meaning of Dylan in culture. He transforms into a commodity, literally and figuratively being bought, sold, and ingested by consumers, while being continually replenished by the companies mass producing him for additional consumption. Entertainers are constantly asked to assess and reexamine themselves in this regard via the demands of interviews, press conferences, and other means of making themselves public.
For Dylan, the understanding that he was being commoditized may have fueled the quest for a different path, whether this meant going into seclusion at the peak of his mid-1960s’ fame or the stories of his traveling under numerous disguises and fake names to create a sense of autonomy for him and his family.
Ironically, Dylan might deny whatever label those around him foist on him as an iconic figure, but the products that inspired those classifications lived on despite him, as does his own place within all of this. In the late 1980s, for example, Dylan admits losing the ability to interpret or play his old songs, saying that they “were too cryptic, too darkly driven, and I was no longer capable of doing anything radically creative with them. It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat. I couldn’t understand where they came from.”22 As mentioned earlier, artists are living within an interactionist world as they apply its tenets to their own lives, while at the same time carrying the added weight of doing the same for audiences and consumers. They become guides. As Charon concludes, “The symbolic interactionists . . . conceptualize society in the dynamic sense: as individuals in interaction with one another, defining and altering the direction of one another’s acts.”23 In this sense, an artist as a facet of mass media disseminates symbols that others use as stimuli for creating their own worldviews. Above, we see Dylan struggling between these two positions, unable to view his work as others did, even to the point of near-paralysis in playing them.
Symbolic interactionism helps one understand an iconic figure like Dylan because it enables us to see him within society and as a tool that others might employ to better fathom themselves and the broader culture. Or, as biographer Robert Shelton explains, “Ultimately, I’ve learned so much from Dylan that I can’t complain. He never short-changed me and he won’t short-change you. He’s given fair warning about not following leaders and about trusting yourself . . . let him have his flaws and blind spots.”24
For a figure as transcendent as Dylan, his work remains critical and significant as successive generations engage with his ideas and meanings (both what he himself believed and how he has been interpreted, correctly or not). As a result, I contend that we must take Dylan at his word when he claims to shun the iconic label. Yet, we cannot dispute that people have championed him as such, more or less forcing him into this vaunted position.
Dylan’s early years in New York City and his rise to international superstardom came at a time when the United States asserted itself as the world’s economic, cultural, and military powerhouse. The post–World War II years, fueled by a vibrant economy and glut of consumer goods, sparked the cooperation between corporations and advertising, public relations, and marketing to sell goods and services to willing consumers, coincidentally with greater spending power in a thriving marketplace. This period also solidified advertising and marketing at the heart of consumer capitalism by equating success with the accumulation of specific goods, brands, and products. Fulfillment of the American Dream necessitated one engage with this notion as advertisers, marketers, and public relations professionals combined to create a branded world.
The American Dream in this age floated along on an endless sea of consumer goods piped into the nation’s living rooms via television. Advertising historian Stuart Ewen calls this push “ideological consumerization,” symbolized by the post–World War II era, “in which mass consumption erupted, for increasing numbers, into a full-blown style of life.”25 The corporations, government, media, and other societal institutions helped one another by getting more money into the pipeline. Television enabled marketers to create a space for constant advertising and selling, ironically, directly in the living rooms of eager shoppers.
Advertisers and marketers are paid to create material that performs an incredibly difficult task: getting consumers to reach into their wallets and purchase the goods and services being sold. Thus, as nonsensical as it might sound, advertisers in the 1960s used hippie imagery and activist symbols to sell products made by multinational corporations. Similarly, record companies (actually large corporations) searched for artists that could sell a sound or a vibe to turn profit that enabled these organizations to stay in business and make money.
Given the economic materiality of this kind of system, an iconic musician like Dylan has almost no power as he is co-opted into its inner workings. As a result, the era witnessed more viable pop acts turn his songs into hit records, not only in the United States, but globally too. Later, as Dylan established himself, suddenly there were Dylan imitators or mini-Dylans appearing on the scene. Most often—think of British singer Donovan in this instance—it was not the musician who set out to sell this image. Instead, some manager or record executive picked the performer because he thought he could make money off a sound or image. Yet Dylan, more or less, is completely powerless to do anything about these kinds of blatant rip-offs. Dylan himself joked at one time to folk queen Joan Baez that he wrote protest songs because he thought he could make money from them.
The capitalist system, even in the free-spirit music industry, necessitates the product viability and the creative co-optation of themes, images, and other cultural norms. The artist, however, is stuck in an odd place during this process, somewhere between image and reality in which he or she may be completely unable to do anything to change what is happening. So, can we blame Dylan for the jingly, jangly Coca-Cola songs of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Regardless of the authenticity of Coke’s calls for harmony and peace, these kinds of pleas would probably not have attempted to play on the peace movement without “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The peace and love theme of these kinds of jingles captures one portion of the era, yet completely overlooked the ravages of the Vietnam War raging in Southeast Asia. These choices were deliberate and conducted by advertising agencies that did research to identify what messages would stick with consumers the best.
Advertising solidified and extended its centrality in American culture in the mid-20th century. In the early years of the century, advertisers grew adept at delivering messages and creating culture around them that people soon numbed to the selling proposition. The idea that consumers looked to advertising for entertainment in the period demonstrates how sneakily the industry infiltrated the national consciousness. What advertising provided viewers, readers, and listeners in mid-century was a means of exploring and defining themselves based on the national creed of consumption. Advertising served as a mirror for people to view themselves as they wanted to be perceived.
The idea of advertising, corporations, and growing consumerism fostering a golden age of marketing in the United States probably would have happened with or without Dylan. Yet, it is in his role as the voice of a generation (whether he accepted or rejected that moniker) that the imagery flourished. His influence is all over the era and subsequent decades, particularly when one thinks about the nostalgic views of the peace and love generation and the way his music later changed radio formatting. “Like a Rolling Stone,” for example, upended what could be considered storytelling or narrative, which eventually crept into advertising campaigns and visual imagery.
Even when one cannot directly identify Dylan’s influence on a campaign or style, from a broader perspective, his music and persona inspired those who were creating these campaigns. For example, the prolific Mary Wells used the emotions and ideas of the era to create campaigns that appealed to consumers. According to writer Mark Tungate, Wells saw television advertising as “a form of theater.” He explains, “Arguably, she was the first advertising executive to unlock the potential of TV advertising as spectacle.”26 Bill Bernbach, one of the modern advertising founding fathers at one point called her a “dream merchant.”27
Wells understood the link between advertising, products, and the dreams and aspirations of modern consumers. Her creative team used artistry and creativity to link the goods and services provided by their clients to notions of what it meant to live at the upper reaches of the American Dream. For Wells, the connection boiled down to storytelling. “Advertising, in any form, is about telling stories that captivate readers or viewers and persuade them to buy products,” she explained. “You can tell stories in many ways, with or without words. But knowledge is the fuel that ignites your talents in the advertising business.”28
As someone trafficking in dreams, Wells understood the idyllic version of the free-love era and employed it in vivid Technicolor. In a campaign selling lemon-scented cosmetics, for example, Wells convinced the company to call the line “Love Cosmetics” and created a print ad featuring Ali MacGraw, then an unknown actress. For the TV commercials, the spots were played over a pop song by Dylan–wannabee Donovan. As such, one does not need to have the real Dylan in an ad to create a link between him (or a symbolic Dylan) and consumers.
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No one—not even the Beatles, Elvis, or the Rolling Stones—remained private like Dylan. Whereas every nook and cranny of Elvis’s or Mick Jagger’s lives seem open to public inspection, few people (and perhaps no one outside his immediate family) could even say with any certainty whether or not Dylan is married, where he lives, or how many children he has, let alone grandchildren.
Yet, more than any of the rock and roll royalty mentioned above, Dylan remains in the public eye via constant, seemingly relentless touring. The CDs, the new releases, the bootleg series, the books, and articles on the Web keep coming, but we still have not figured Dylan out. Even to his most diehard fans and self-professed Dylanologists, the man is mythic, as mythical as Paul Bunyan, but as real as the faces carved into Mount Rushmore. Dylan is our one last great legend.