Why Dylan’s always in tune with the times

THE night before he came, the acrid smell of burning and conflict were in the air. A riot broke out, prompting the call for reinforcements from Dublin. Baton-wielding cops charged the crowd. Mindless violence kicked out in all directions as the booze took hold.

When it was all over you couldn’t walk through the main street without kicking broken glass. Bricks, rocks, beer crates, and all manner of spent missiles were littered about. There were three upturned vehicles lying along the street, smoke rising from their exposed bellies. A hard rain had fallen on Slane village.

It was the morning of July 8, 1984, and a song-and-dance man was coming to town.

The Bob Dylan concert at Slane Castle that day was notable for a few things, apart from the violence: it was the first time Dylan had played in the country for 18 years; his tour was marking his emergence from a flirt with Christianity; and onstage he met another strange young man, in whom he found an unlikely kindred spirit.

Bono came on for an encore of Blowin’ In The Wind. It soon became obvious that the 23-year-old U2 frontman was departing from a sacred text. Halfway down the field, I turned to my friend. “Bono doesn’t know the words,” I said. “He doesn’t know the words of Blowin’ In The Wind. The fella is up there representing the country and he’s embarrassing us in front of Bob Dylan.”

A few months later, in a rare radio interview in a New York hotel room, Dylan was asked whether he could relate to anybody in music these days, whether there was anybody who was carrying the flame that he had ignited more than two decades previously.

“Naw,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything.” Then, he paused. “Apart from one guy. This guy Bow-no, of U2. He came on with us in Dublin. He was something else. He’s the only one that’s got anything substantial coming from his heart. The rest of them (are) just putting on an act.”

And so one shaman recognised another, out there on the road. Bono went on to weave his magic in spheres other than music, but Dylan was, is, and always will be, just a song-and-dance man. But a song-and-dance man like no other.

Dylan turns 70 next Tuesday. Instead of cocoa and slippers, he is celebrating by continuing to bring his music to the world. A few months ago, he played in China for the first time. The occasion was marred by controversy over the censorship of songs that might be interpreted as political anthems, songs like A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Masters Of War.

These songs were written nearly 50 years ago, at the height of the nuclear age. That Communist leaders feared Dylan had the power to reach down through half a century, into the hearts and minds of disaffected youth in China, speaks volumes for his status as a cultural icon.

Of course, he was never part of any political movement. The anti-war people latched onto his songs in the 1960s because he sang of the fears of the time, but, as always, Dylan was speaking for nobody but himself.

As always, he was plugging into the human condition, giving voice to the emotions of Everyman.

So it went from the off.

The likes of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie opened doors for him, but, once he skipped through, he put his own stamp on the work. His nasal twang, the sound of sand and glue, would never have made it but for the songs he wrote, songs that fused poetry and music.

Dylan saw early on that the power of art was not confined to standard notions of beauty. One of the things that blew him away about the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem in the early 1960s was the expression on their faces as they brought ballads to life.

The folk movement claimed him because he had used that medium in his earliest incarnation. But his art owed more to the blues than folk, and the palaver over his switch to electric in 1965 was all about the folkies own issues.

Dylan was assigned the role of spokesman for the counter-culture. He never asked for it, and when it became a drag he used a mysterious motorcycle crash to check out and retreat to upstate New York to raise a family.

The 1970s saw his family idyll crumble. His 1975 album, Blood On The Tracks, bristles with emotional turmoil. When he received a compliment on the quality of songs, he said: “How can you enjoy so much pain?”

On the album’s sleeve notes, Irish-American author Pete Hamill elevated the singer to another plateau.

“And his poetry, his troubadour’s travelling art, seems to me to be more meaningful than ever,” Hamill wrote. “I thought, listening to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.”

Through the 1980s he continued to beat his own drum. At LiveAid, much to the chagrin of Bob Geldof, Dylan suggested that some of the money gathered should go to American farmers to pay off huge mortgages. His words begat Farm Aid.

Three albums saw him through Christianity, but he came out the other end with a jaundiced view. The opening song on his album, Infidels, was addressed to the Jokerman, Jesus Christ. “You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds, manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister.”

A few years after that Slane concert, with a 50th birthday looming, Dylan kicked off the never-ending tour. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but from that time on he has spent most of every year touring, chasing the scattered ghosts of those bluesmen for whom the road was a reassuring constant, as the seasons turned from summer to autumn, facing into winter.

Through it all, he has retained the mark of the original. Where others, such as The Rolling Stones, revert to pumping out decades-old greatest hits, Dylan keeps writing the songs that reflect him and his time. In 2005, a year shy of his 65th birthday, Modern Times was released to a tumultuous reception.

He still had it, after all those years. As with four decades previously, Dylan sung about where he was at, where his country was at, mortality weighing on his mind, the sun sinking on the American century. “Well, the place I love best is a sweet memory, it’s a new path that we trod, they say low wages are a reality, if we want to compete abroad.”

And there’s life in the old dog yet.

The sand and glue has coarsened into gravel and grit, but the song remains the same. He’s back this summer, playing the Marquee in Cork, as he keeps on keepin’ on, warding off the night with his shaman’s wand. Happy birthday, Mr Zimmerman.