The Mercurial Ghost

He's been called so many things: Poet, spokesman, prophet, phony, sell-out, and perhaps most famously, Judas.  Yet through all the changing winds of status and stature he's only had one name: Bob Dylan.  The name itself is a fabrication, a manufactured pseudonym that remains as elusive as the man that it identifies.  Regardless of how the name came to be, since it was introduced to the world in the early sixties, it's a fully charged name, one that crackles with strange electricity whenever it is brought up in the right circles.  Bob Dylan means a lot of different things to a lot of different people but the common thread that connects them all is the passion with which his ever morphing music brings out in people at various stages of their lives.  Dylan seems to live within everyone in some form or another.  In his 50 year career it's as if he's lived behind everyone's eyes, seeing all and experiencing all in order to dispel the stories and situations of everyday life spanning this continent and the world beyond.  At his core, Dylan is an actor who feels most comfortable in other people's skin.  Since Bob Dylan doesn't really exist, Bob Dylan can be anyone.  In many ways he represents us all and his music seems to speak to all our hopes, fears, insecurities and jealousies, triumphs and despairs as well as our great cruelty and compassion, both personally and collectively.  He encompasses an entire universe of human behavior.  Because of this I see him as the ghost who lingers in the back of our consciousness, smiling, laughing, crying, berating...  Within his music lies a vast, dark ocean of sensation and feeling beyond the waves of thought we battle with day after day.  When Dylan's masterpiece Blonde on Blonde was released in 1966, giving rock it's first double album, he described the record as having the "thin, wild, mercury sound," he'd always heard in his head.  That beautifully cryptic phrase suits Dylan's personality to a tee: the mercurial star of electricity shifting to fit the contours of his wild vision, wherever it may take him.  Those who listen to him are lucky enough to have been along for the ride.  Like anything worthwhile, it hasn't always been the smoothest, most comfortable ride and at many times people have felt the desire to get off.   When he first showed signs of abandoning the seemingly pure paradise of folk music in favor of more personal, introspective songs ripped from his soul as well as writing more absurdly humorous songs with no specific target, gripes that he was selling out to commercial interest began to be heard.  Plugging in his electric guitar and fronting a rock band was seen as rubbing salt in the wounds of folkie purists who already felt betrayed.  Overnight, Dylan had gone from obscure Greenwich village urchin to the rugged king of the folk revival as well as a reluctant prophet-poet for an outspoken generation with a common dream of changing the world.  When Dylan turned away from this almost deified position, one which never sat right with him in the first place, it was seen as the ultimate slap in the face. What all those suddenly jaded folkies failed to see was that rather than abandoning the movement completely, Dylan was instead widening his gaze to encompass a whole universe of previously overlooked derelicts and outcasts swept aside by our often savage and unmerciful society.  His songs were throwing a light on the narrow corners of our world and exposing the tangled web of complex situations and circumstances at work behind everyday life.  Songs like "Chimes of Freedom," "Like A Rolling Stone," "Tombstone Blues," and "Desolation Row," with their parade of downtrodden and warped circus renegades, hold up a fun house mirror to society in an attempt to show how bizarre this "normal" life usually is and just how truly complicated it can get.  In order to effectively showcase all of this lunacy it becomes necessary for Dylan to be more than one person.  The true genius of Dylan's work lies in its adaptability; by writing about general, universal themes and concepts with a razor sharp wit and satirical eye, his best songs continue to be applied to a myriad of situations whether political or social, personal or collective.  As Dylan himself so wisely observed in 1965, everyone has their own personal ideas and images about even the most universal of concepts and therefore it's useless to write songs with specific messages.  Instead, his most timeless songs remain stubbornly elusive and beautifully enigmatic.  Their essential meaninglessness allows them to be continuously re-adapted to fit the shape of current circumstances.  Like water, they contour to almost any situation.  In Dylan's world, it is meaninglessness which is holy, meaninglessness which represents a rare kind of freedom:  the freedom to be anything and anyone, do almost anything and to simply keep on keeping on.  It is meaninglessness and selflessness that allows this man named "Dylan" to be anyone he chooses.  He is all encompassing, he is everyone and he is no one.  His music, to me, represents the perpetual surge of creation and existence present behind all things at every moment.  One can listen to his songs and see the full span of life replete with all the  mysterious misfits who inhabit and pass through this realm and the infinite array of experiences, most beyond comprehension, that one can encounter in their life. In this way Dylan's music -- which will have people discussing, arguing, contemplating, cursing, laughing and crying over until the end of time-- fulfills the basic characteristic of folk music, which is the ability to be re-adapted time and again to help shed much needed light on the world's increasingly desperate situations and provide some perspective from places just beyond the fringe of our consciousness.