Kapitan Niemand is living in the present moment
“It was the third of September. That day I’ll always remember…”
- Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone (#168)
In September 1961, John Hammond hears a 20-year old Jewish boy called Robert Allen Zimmerman playing the harmonica and the very next month signs him to Columbia Records, much to the chagrin of the label’s management. A year later, the boy officially changes his name and releases the album Bob Dylan. In a New Jersey field in 1963, a young teenager, Greil Marcus, hears a scruffy Dylan play a “bit part in a Joan Baez concert”. He becomes one of his first fans and Dylan soon releases a second album.
While touring France in January 1964, George Harrison discovers an LP of Dylan’s second album. He walks into The Beatles’ hotel room with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and plays it as the four of them listen to it start with “Blowin’ in the Wind” (#14). Harrison would later recall how they “spent a month listening to this album of his and it blew us away really.” Next year, in New York, they are introduced to Dylan by Al Aronowitz and Dylan in turn introduces the Fab Four to marijuana. In 1965, he writes “Mr. Tambourine Man” (#106), with which the Byrds debut (#79) – introducing the world to David Crosby and Gene Clark’s harmonies and Roger McGuinn’s trademark Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, inspired by the otherwise quiet Beatle’s “A Hard Day’s Night” (#153). In October, the folk duo Simon and Garfunkel cover Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” (#59) on their debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
The same year, Dylan writes a song at his home in Woodstock, NY and gives birth to rock as we know it. The fans are not impressed by the new avatar. At a live performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall, Dylan readies a change from his folk music and acoustic guitar to a Stratocaster and an irate British student, Keith Butler, echoes the sentiments of many fans, and yells accusatively above the ensuing silence “Judas”. The master lyricist responds by quoting his own song quite unequivocally, “I don’t believe you” and adds, “You’re a liar.” Then he closes the show with a song of which Jimi Hendrix would later say, “It made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who’d ever felt so low…”. Hendrix gave his own famous rendition of the same song at the Montrey Pop Festival in 1967, just before he set his Stratocaster on fire covering The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” (#257).
In July 1966, Dylan allegedly hits an oil slick and crashes his Triumph 500, putting him out of the tour circuit for another eight years. Rolling Stone magazine is founded the year after and Greil Marcus becomes its first reviews Editor. An increasingly disillusioned Dylan continues to stay on the sidelines. He becomes the only one of organiser Michael Lang’s rock ‘n’ roll heroes who does not sign on for the Woodstock festival, though his backup group, The Band, make a historical performance, closing with The Weight (#41). Dylan moves out of Woodstock after the festival, feeling stifled, and releases Self Portrait in 1970, returning Paul Simon’s favour by including on it the biographical song “The Boxer” (#105). He is not the only one who is disillusioned. Greil Marcus opens his memorable Rolling Stones review of the album with the infamous, “What is this shit?” adding “I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing hard. But I’d never said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing softly.”
In 1971, Dylan makes his only live stage performance from 1969 to 1974 on the behest of George Harrison at The Concert for Bangladesh. Harrison himself is appearing live for the first time since the Beatles broke-up. His close friend, Eric Clapton, enthralls the audience with the first live performance of Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (#135) on a hollowbody Gibson Super 400. He would later agree that he would have preferred a solid-body, like the Les Paul he gifted to Harrison after recording The White Album, or perhaps like his more famous gift – the Fender Lead II that started the Hard Rock collection in 1979.
Dylan writes “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (#190) with the repeated pattern G-D-Am7-Am7 and G-D-C-C in 1972, which becomes one of the most covered songs of all time, including famous renditions by Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead and Roger Waters. A band called Guns N’ Roses starts covering the song in live performances in 1987, which once spurs Harrison to quip “There’s only three chords in it, but they managed to get one of them wrong.”
A year later, in 1988, Dylan is inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by another musician John Hammond discovered, whose first album Lester Bangs critiqued dismissively with the words ”...he wrote like Bob Dylan.”. Bangs was not a Dylan fan, but the musician was. In his induction speech, he said “The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind”. Critic Peter Knobler wrote of him singing “with a freshness and urgency I haven’t heard since I was rocked by Like a Rollin’ Stone.” Known to many simply as The Boss, the musician sold 15 million copies of his ‘84 hit Born in the USA (#85).
The same year, at Dylan’s home studio, he teams up with Harrison and other greats to form The Travelling Wilburys and record together till 1990. Introduced by the words “We waited twenty-five years to hear this – Ladies and gentleman, Mr. Bob Dylan”, he performs at the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock in 1994, along with ’69 performers The Band and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
The man who didn’t like to be called a poet would be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven years running from 1997-2002. He would never receive it.
In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine releases a special collector’s issue titled “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. The song Bob Dylan closed the 1965 ‘Judas’ performance with on his Stratocaster is named the Greatest Song of All Time at #1. His erstwhile fan and critic, Griel Marcus releases a book the next year which is a tribute to and biography of the song, which he claims drew a line after which “the world was not quite the same”. It is 2005. And I have begun a journey that would culminate three years later. On the 3rd of September.
