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Friday 29 August 2008

Dylan obsession

Charles Spencer on turning into a Bob Dylan obsessive

There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie adolescent at a boy’s boarding school who fancied himself as a poet.

But while I can appreciate that such albums as Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks are compelling and lyrically profound, it would be dishonest to pretend that I listen to them often. Looking at my shelves I’m astonished to discover that I own 16 of Dylan’s individual albums and no fewer than six best of/essential/greatest hits collections. Quite a few of these numerous discs, I fear, have never been played all the way through.

What is it about Dylan that prevents my admiration from turning into deep affection? There’s so much that’s palpably right about him: the manifest integrity, the artistic daring, the fact that he is still out there, performing more than 100 gigs a year, and releasing albums in his sixties that are regarded as among the best in his entire catalogue.

The main drawback is his singing. A nasal whine from even his earliest days, it seems to have grown ever more clotted and mannered with the years. David Bowie has described it as ‘a voice like sand and glue’. Another has compared it to a ‘catarrhal death rattle’. Call me old-fashioned but I like singers who can actually sing. I’d rather hear Dylan’s songs performed by almost anyone but Dylan, especially the Byrds, who always made him sound magical, Jerry Garcia, whose croak is somehow infinitely preferable to Dylan’s rasp, and Jimi Hendrix, whose performance of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is streets ahead of the original.

The other off-putting thing about Dylan is his fans. They don’t come more tiresomely obsessive. The literary critic Christopher Ricks is a particularly egregious example, with his grotesquely inflated claims for the singer–songwriter as a great poet who belongs in the pantheon with Keats. To his credit, Dylan himself appears to find his most devout worshippers an irritating embarrassment, too.

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