Bob Dylan’s Lost Years
The turning point was back in Woodstock,” Bob Dylan once said of a time in 1966. “A little after the accident. Sitting around one night under a full moon. [I] looked into the bleak woods and I said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’ “
Everything Dylan had done up to then had been accorded the power of influence and myth. His early-l960s folk-derived songs – in particular “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” – had given voice to frustration and anger over delayed civil rights and advancing warfare. His electric music – which came roaring alive in 1965, with “Like a Rolling Stone” – carried a sense of wrath and of new possibilities. As critic Greil Marcus would note, “The world used to follow him around.”
The music that Dylan made after 1966 was far different. Some of that work –the legendary Basement Tapes, and John Wesley Harding, both recorded in 1967 – has long been considered some of his best, and most resourceful. But the album he released in June 1970 – Self Portrait, a sprawling collection of folk songs and country music, with a few haphazard live tracks – was the most surprising and controversial he’d yet made. It was seen as a betrayal of his effect and potential, and of the following that had trusted him. It was Greil Marcus who also wrote, at the outset of Rolling Stone’s most famous review, “What is this shit?”
“Would Self Portrait make you want to meet Dylan?” the review continued later. “No? Perhaps it’s there to keep you away?” Dylan himself would later say as much –that he’d made the album to discourage those who saw him as a prophet, who invaded his life and demanded he return to his public and political obligations.
Now, 43 years later, a new collection, Another Self Portrait (1969–1971): The BootlegSeries Vol. 10, offers a different way of hearing that music. Dylan was singing about a constantly risky search for new identity and new voice – for a different way of being. He seemed to be renouncing the ideals of tumult and rebellion in favor of other verities: home–based idyll and folk tradition. But through it all, there was another tumult going on: Dylan’s battle with the world over the nature of his calling and responsibilities. “I used to think,” he said in 1968, “that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that any more. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
Dylan’s Self Portrait years would be the most misunderstood passage of his life and work. “We’ll never entirely forgive him,” one biographer would later say. Yet much of what Dylan would do that was great in the years after flowed from this antecedent of failure. That is, maybe it wasn’t a failure after all. Maybe it was better than anybody, including Dylan, knew at the time.
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