This is very long, but I feel it needs to be passed on. Andrew Brown in The Guardian's Wrap:
The Wrap: A worm's eye view
03 October 2005
Andrew Brown on the lessons one ageing guitarist can learn from another
Last week was a pretty low point for British democracy: an 82-year-old man who had fled Hitler as a child was expelled from the Labour party conference for shouting "liar" at Jack Straw. When another delegate objected to this treatment, he was himself threatened with terrorism charges. You can blame this kind of behaviour on all sorts of nasty and authoritarian tendencies in Blair's government, but I think a fair part of the blame rests with Bob Dylan.
In the same week, the BBC showed Martin Scorsese's film about the singer, which culminates in footage of his famous British tour in 1965, when he was repeatedly booed for playing with electric instruments, and on one occasion taunted with a cry of "Judas". The story has been known to anyone literate in the last 20 years, because rock criticism seeps into the consciousness of anyone under the age of about 50 much as pesticides seep into the groundwater, and the story of Dylan and his electric instruments is one of its founding narratives. Here is the misunderstood genius making some of the greatest music of the 20th century, and being booed for it by a retarded English audience.
Obviously, this is how Mr Blair thinks of his own performances in front of the Labour party: these snivelling loser folkies with their horrible traditions just can't understand the excitement and power of his new songs. It's quite likely that in his Oxford days he even owned a bootleg of the concert. It's something that anyone who pretended to a serious interest in the subject had to do. Admittedly, the sound quality was pretty awful, but that hardly mattered: if you read Rolling Stone, or NME, you knew what to think and feel when you heard it.
The first crack in this story came towards the end of the 20th century, when the recordings of the tour were finally released officially, and on high quality CDs. One disc was acoustic, and the other - the famous one - was electric. You only had to hear them once to realise the folkies had been entirely right. The acoustic stuff was infinitely better. Although the electric songs would later be recorded beautifully in the studio, and the backing musicians would themselves go on to make some wonderful records, what they played on stage in Britain was mostly just raucous and soulless. No one then knew how to make electric instruments sound good outside the studio, as Dylan himself says in the Scorsese documentary. In the general atmosphere of grovelling reverence, no one points out that this means they did not in fact sound good.
However, you can hear, very clearly, Dylan's response when someone shouts out "Judas!" from the crowd. "I don't believe you," he says, and then, as if he'd hit on something really clever, "You're a liar!". Finally, he turns to the band and mutters something only audible on the official recording: "Play [gerund omitted] loud!"
Those three words hold the seeds of a radical inequality. No wonder idealistic folkies hated them. Once the man on stage has an amplifier, he cannot be shouted down. Even within the audience, the voices of the audience cannot be heard. It's quite impossible to attend a concert at normal, acceptable levels of amplification without some shield for the ears, usually made from drink and drugs.
But when you can't be heard three feet away, even wanting to heckle comes to seem a breach of the natural order. The audience's wordless belonging, crushed together beneath an avalanche of noise, can actually be a very great pleasure. But it's nothing like a reasoned or even democratic dialogue. No wonder politicians want to be the men on stage.
This isn't the only link between the decadence of our democracies and the flowering of Dylan's songs. I love Blonde on Blonde, and I love Highway 61. But it would take a very great fool (or a professor of English literature) to pretend that their lyrics are poetry, or even that they make much sense. What gives them their undeniable power is the impression of naked sincerity. They seem to be part of a conversation conducted in bed.
The voice that says "Up on Housing Project Hill, it's either fortune or fame/ you must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim," carries such urgency that it takes years, even decades, before you notice that it's talking nonsense. Yet take away all the verbs, and these lyrics might come from any speech to any party conference.
Dylan is even responsible for the original of all the apologies supplied by modern politicians - what Tony Blair might say to the hecklers, and even the Iraqis: "I didn't mean to treat you so bad/ You shouldn't take it so personal/ I didn't mean, to make you so sad/ You just happened to be there, that's all."
It just doesn't sound so sincere without the arrangement.
- Andrew Brown maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog (http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog).
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