The Bob Dylan Mask (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

There are those artists who never have an unuttered thought. They feel compelled to reveal their most intimate feelings, their nastiest habits, and the messiest clutter of their personal lives. The caution light in their brain has gone out.

And then there's Bob Dylan. He hid behind an adopted name and contradictory, phony biographies until some of his real past was discovered. His brilliant songs seem simultaneously confessional and mysteries beyond our reach, meaning they fail to let us see him. His interviews are notorious jousts with journalists as he reveals, hints at, hides, lies, and attacks. Here he is, having just turned sixty-nine, and we know all about him except that part that is significant and revelatory.

When he was very young discovering what it meant to be a songwriter and singer and charting his future, Bob Dylan created a persona, a character, someone unlettered and untutored with a reflexive, natural grasp of language and a jukebox for a mind. He developed a singing voice that growled. He play-acted at being Woody Guthrie. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, well-off middle class Jewish kid from, of all places, Hibbing, Minnesota. No, he was Bob Dylan, a man of the people who sprang spontaneously from nowhere, a traveling troubadour for the downtrodden.

The persona was very useful to him in many ways as he began his career. He could in his new identity feel part of the folk. Bob Dylan was a hobo, a rambler and a gambler, someone who knew hard times. Of course, Robert Zimmerman had no experience with such a life. But Bob Dylan, well he was different.

The Dylan who couldn't put two grammatically correct sentences together, who seemed on unfriendly terms with proper English, fooled some people who thought he was a simple rustic. That perception gave him an advantage over those who misjudged him.

His Bob Dylan mask allowed him to gauge people according to how they reacted to him as someone (seemingly) poor and uneducated. Later he could use the mask in anger to assert that people didn't understand him. The mask was a useful device to keep people at a distance.

The folk audiences he originally played for desperately sought authenticity. They wanted a young Woody Guthrie, an heir to Pete Seeger. And here was this young rebel whose vague origins and odd behavior and ever-present song allowed them to fill him in as they wished. They pictured the person they wanted behind the mask without ever being allowed to look at who was really there.

Dylan's persona let him keep the most precious part of himself private, behind the front of a kid on the run, abandoned by parents and society, someone who blew in with the wind. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, college dropout. He was Bob Dylan, master folksinger, the man who knew, like Woody, that guitars don't lie, who knew words placed just right could lead people over pain, who burned with a fiery drive to sing truth to power.

Dylan's keeping part of himself permanently private has, to understate, worked for him. It's hard to imagine that he will change. Of course, his ongoing march toward an ever-closer eternity may cause some re-thinking. Does he want to be understood or does he want to go out a mystery?

For now, the Bob Dylan mask remains firmly in place.

Comments

[Lee Marc Stein]

A similar question about Dylan's insistance on remaining a "man of mystery" came up in the first session of my Dylan Workshop this morning. Maybe these lines from "Maggie's Farm" say it best: "Well, I try my best/To be just like I am/But everybody wants you/To be just like them."

He wants the focus on his music, not on his personality. He is the opposite of, say, a Norman Mailer.

I think there was a transformation, though, after the Ed Bradley 60 Minutes interview. In Scorsese's No Direction Home (2005), he seemed to pull off his mask for most of the time.

By the way, I held up your excellent book during the workshop and quoted you particularly on the interpretation of "Like A Rolling Stone."

[F E Mattimoe]

What "Scorcese film"?

I don´t know whether Scorcese directed Raging Bull or not, but he certainly had next to nothing to do with NDH. Dylan recorded the interviews before he hired Scorcese to cut together old footage from DLB etc.

Issues like this show the lack of honour of big name directors.

Shameful. Shaming, too.

[Larry Epstein]

Lee--thanks for your comments, and for discussing my book!

To F.E. Mattimoe: You're right that Scorcese didn't direct the film in the normal sense and that the interviews were there already, but he was important in the sense that he took an enormous amount of material and structured it into a coherent and interesting film. He was an editor, but in the very editing he was, in a loose sense, directing the story.

[Bob Levitt]

Dylan's notorious jousts with journalists??
There were some famous ones in the mid 60s but that's, ahem,45 years ago. Since then I have collected every interview I could find and put into a binder. It's the size of the NYC phone directory. In my collection there are maybe a couple of so-called jousts. Mostly he is open and candid and he loves to talk about music with an intelligent and informed journalist. I stopped reading your blog after "jousts" because it's obvious you are stuck inside of a cliche ridden view of the man.