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Story By: by Ellen Willis

Dylan

Nearly two years ago, Bob Dylan had a motorcycle accident. Reports of his condition were vague, and he dropped out of sight. Publication of his book, Tarantula, was postponed indefinitely. New records appeared, but they were from his last album, Blonde on Blonde. Gruesome rumors circulated: Dylan was dead; he was badly disfigured; he was paralyzed; he was insane. The cataclysm his audience was always expecting seemed to have arrived. Phil Ochs had predicted that Dylan might someday be assassinated by a fan. Pete Seeger believed Dylan could become the country’s greatest troubadour, if he didn’t explode. Alan Lomax had once remarked that Dylan might develop into a great poet of the times, unless he killed himself first. Now, images of James Dean filled the news vacuum. As months passed, reflex apprehension turned to suspense, then irritation: had we been put on again? We had. Friends began to admit, with smiles, that they’d seen Bobby; he was rewriting his book; he was about to sign a contract with MGM Records. The new rumor was that the accident had been a cover for retreat. After Blonde on Blonde, his intensive foray into the pop demimonde, Dylan needed time to replenish his imagination. According to a less romantic version, he was keeping quiet till his contracts expired.

The confusion was typical. Not since Rimbaud said “I is another” has an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity. His masks hidden by other masks, Dylan is the celebrity stalker’s ultimate antagonist. The original disparity between his public pose as rootless wanderer with southwestern drawl and the private facts of home and middle-class Jewish family and high school diploma in Hibbing, Minnesota, was a commonplace subterfuge, the kind that pays reporters’ salaries. It hardly showed his talent for elusiveness; what it probably showed was naivete. But his attitude toward himself as a public personality was always clear. On an early recording he used the eloquent pseudonym “Blind Boy Grunt.” “Dylan” is itself a pseudonym, possibly inspired by Dylan Thomas (a story Dylan now denies), possibly by a real or imaginary uncle named Dillon, who might or might not be the “Las Vegas dealer” Dylan once claimed was his only living relative.

In six years Dylan’s stance has evolved from proletarian assertiveness to anarchist angst to pop detachment. At each stage he has made himself harder to follow, provoked howls of execration from those left behind, and attracted an ever-larger, more demanding audience. He has reacted with growing hostility to the possessiveness of this audience and its shock troops, the journalists, the professional categorizers. His baroque press conference inventions are extensions of his work, full of imaginative truth and virtually devoid of information. The classic Dylan interview appeared in Playboy, where Nat Hentoff, like a housewife dusting her furniture while a tornado wrecks the house, pursued the homely fact through exchanges like: “Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?” “Well, I guess I’ve always wanted to be Anthony Quinn in La Strada. . . . I guess I’ve always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot, too; but I don’t really want to think about that too much.”

Dylan’s refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As his songs have become more introspective, the introspections have become more impersonal, the confidences of a no-man without past or future. Bob Dylan as identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what he wants. This terrifies his audiences. They could accept a consistent image — roving minstrel, poet of alienation, spokesman for youth — in lieu of the “real” Bob Dylan. But his progressive self-annihilation cannot be contained in a game of let’s pretend, and it conjures up nightmares of madness, mutilation, death.

The nightmares are chimerical; there is a continuing self, the Bobby Dylan friends describe as shy and defensive, hyped up, careless of his health, a bit scared by fame, unmaterialistic but shrewd about money, a professional absorbed in his craft. Dylan’s songs bear the stigmata of an authentic middle-class adolescence; his eye for detail, sense of humor, and skill at evoking the archetypal sexual skirmishes show that some part of him is of as well as in the world. As further evidence, he has a wife, son, and house in Woodstock, New York. Instead of an image, Dylan has created a magic theater in which the public gets lost willy-nilly. Yet he is more — or less — than the sum of his illusions.

Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled. Illusion is fine, if quarantined and diagnosed as mild; otherwise it is potentially humiliating (Is he laughing at me? Conning me out of my money?). Some still discount Dylan as merely a popular culture hero (How can a teenage idol be a serious artist? At most, perhaps, a serious demagogue). But the most tempting answer — forget his public presence, listen to his songs — won’t do. For Dylan has exploited his image as a vehicle for artistic statement. The same is true of Andy Warhol and, to a lesser degree, of the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg. (In contrast, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were creatures, not masters, of their images.) The tenacity of the modern publicity apparatus often makes artists’ personalities more familiar than their work, while its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who can’t or won’t be personalities. If there is an audience for images, artists will inevitably use the image as a medium — and some images are more original, more compelling, more relevant than others. Dylan has self-consciously explored the possibilities of mass communication just as the pop artists explored the possibilities of mass production. In the same sense that pop art is about commodities, Dylan’s art is about celebrity.

This is not to deny the intrinsic value of Dylan’s songs. Everyone interested in folk and popular music agrees on their importance, if not their merit. As composer, interpreter, most of all as lyricist, Dylan has made a revolution. He expanded folk idiom into a rich, figurative language, grafted literary and philosophical subtleties onto the protest song, revitalized folk vision by rejecting proletarian and ethnic sentimentality, then all but destroyed pure folk as a contemporary form by merging it with pop. Since then rock-and-roll, which was already in the midst of a creative flowering dominated by British rock and Motown, has been transformed. Songwriters have raided folk music as never before for new sounds, new images, new subject matter. Dylan’s innovative lyrics have been enthusiastically imitated. The folk music lovers who managed to evolve with him, the connoisseurs of pop, the bohemian fringe of the literary community, hippies, and teenagers consider him a genius, a prophet. Folk purists and political radicals, who were inspired by his earlier material, cry betrayal with a vehemence that acknowledges his gifts.

Yet many of Dylan’s fans — especially ex-fans — miss the point. Dylan is no apostle of the electronic age. Rather, he is a fifth-columnist from the past, shaped by personal and political nonconformity, by blues and modern poetry. He has imposed his commitment to individual freedom (and its obverse, isolation) on the hip passivity of pop culture, his literacy on an illiterate music. He has used the publicity machine to demonstrate his belief in privacy. His songs and public role are guides to survival in the world of the image, the cool, and the high. And in coming to terms with that world, he has forced it to come to terms with him.

Excerpted from Dylan, printed in 1967 in Cheetah magazine. From the collection, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Copyright 2011 by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press.

Originally Published On: www.npr.org – Original Article Here

(CNN) — Brad Paisley is a busy guy. He’s on the road about 100 days a year entertaining his millions of fans. And with his new album, "This is Country Music," in stores now, Paisley isn’t showing signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Currently out on tour, Paisley let CNN hop on his tour bus and shared some of his secrets of how to survive life on the road. He says his most essential tool is coffee.

"We like coffee. There’s something about being out here on the road that the hours aren’t anything like what you’re used to when you’re at home."

But caffeine is not the only fuel Paisley relies on. He is a very big advocate of staying healthy by staying in shape. And he and his guys come prepared for that. He led us into a room full of what he calls "the emergency stuff — dumbbells, adjustable weights and kettle bells.

"I’m telling you that’s important out here because they feed you really well, and then I have to get up in front of thousands of people and pretend I haven’t eaten, you know, a 16-ounce steak," Paisley says.

But he does take time to relax and says he really enjoys getting to catch up with his favorite TV shows on the road, thanks to having TiVo on his bus. He says that getting to see what happened on "The Office" whenever he wants is a great way to pass the time while traveling by bus.

Paisley also thinks that for anyone who travels all of the time for work, it is important to stop and smell the roses, so to speak.

"If you’re somebody that gets a chance to go somewhere … that has to work somewhere or go to another city, then do your best to see it. Because I just think that’s the best way to have an interesting life," he says.

"It’s hard to be judgmental once you’ve been around the world … it’s pretty hard to be anything but understanding, and I think it’s good for everybody to get out and see someplace other than where you grew up."

Paisley also speaks candidly about how the road has taught him to not take his family and loved ones for granted, but rather the time away makes the time at home all the more special.

But if there is any question as to why Paisley chooses this semi-nomadic life — it’s for the fans.

"I look out at so many of the same faces every year as we do these tours that I’m reminded how really, really lucky I am to be in this type of music. It’s crazy how loyal country fans are. I can’t say enough how much that means to me."

Originally Published On: www.cnn.com – Original Article Here