By: James Hall, rock critic / The Daily Telegraph
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com
The great troublemaker is back up to his old tricks. According to what actor Edward Norton says in the upcoming biopic, A Completely Unknown (which will premiere on January 17), Bob Dylan has "slipped into a completely incorrect scene". Norton, who plays folk singer and activist Pete Seeger in the film, told the magazine Rolling Stone that the 83-year-old Dylan takes "great pleasure in obfuscation and distortion", adding that he is "a great tinkerer".
To the “confusionist” you can add the mythmaker, the enigma, the dubious narrator, the fabulist, the clever distorter, and the joker. Even his name is an enigma – Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman before legally changing his name in 1962. During his sixty-year career, Dylan has distracted and confused fans at almost every turn. “Nobody knows anything about me,” he told critic Robert Shelton in 1966.
This mystique has always been intentional, in part because of Dylan's refusal to be glorified as the voice of his generation (at one time, this was the headline in an American newspaper: "Spokesman Denies He's a Spokesman," which irritated him beyond measure. measure Dylan). His friend, Marianne Faithfull, wrote that Dylan "was so enigmatic that everything seemed to take on at least one other meaning ... He was nothing but a slippery subject." Dylan has gone so far as to suggest that deception is a creative necessity. "When someone wears a mask, he will tell the truth. When he's not wearing a mask, he's very suspicious," he told Martin Scorsese in his film Rolling Thunder Review, for the 1975 tour.
However, there have been cases when the incitement of provocations, on his part, has turned into pretending, sometimes even intolerably. WHEREAS A Completely Unknown – starring Timothée Chalamet – is approaching its UK premiere next Friday, here's a list of the musical genius's most convoluted and annoying antics.
1. A false origin story
When Dylan first signed with [record label] Columbia Records in 1961, he sat down with the company's serious head of press, Billy James, who was eager to gather some facts on the artist. "He seemed like he'd never done drugs in his life, never been in trouble," recalled Dylan, who immediately became a carjacker. The musician told James that he was from Illinois, that he had worked in construction in Detroit, that he had a job as a bakery truck driver, and that he had traveled by freight train to get to New York. "A pure lie," Dylan - who was born in Minnesota - later described the information he had given to poor, hapless James.
2. Playing dominoes with tiles
Dylan is known for introducing the Beatles to marijuana – during the Fantastic Four’s US tour in the summer of 1964. The drug sent all four members of the band, plus manager Brian Epstein, into a “high”. When British journalist Chris Hutchins entered the band’s suite in a New York hotel that night, he found the Brits sitting in a row of five chairs. “Every now and then, a man standing at the end of the row would push the nearest Beatle out of his chair, and, like a domino effect, each would knock the other down, ending with Brian falling to the floor laughing uncontrollably and causing the others to laugh as well,” Hutchins recalled in Craig Brown’s book, One Two Three Four. "It was a surreal scene, made all the more strange by the fact that the man pushing them was Bob Dylan."
3. Middle finger for fans
Any artist with a long career will release average albums. It is inevitable. But to purposely put out a terrible album just to turn people away from you is an insult to the fans. Well, that's exactly what Dylan did with Self Portrait in 1970. The 24-track double album was a messy mix of covers of other people's songs, concert recordings, instrumentals, and original songs. The critic of Rolling Stone-it, Greil Marcus, began his critique with the words: "What the f... is this"? A book from 1991, The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time, ranked it as the third worst rock album in history. In a 1984 interview, Dylan called the album a "trash" filled "joke" while admitting he had done it to get fans to forget about it. "I wanted to do something that they couldn't like, that they couldn't relate to," he said of his reason. But the idea "failed", he admitted, as it simply made the fans "more feverish". It's no wonder.
4. Monsignor Finiani
Getting straight answers from a rock star as a journalist is hard work even at the best of times. But Dylan took it to a whole new level in May 1966, during a press conference at the George V Hotel in Paris. The singer had earlier bought a ventriloquist doll at a flea market. He decided to call him Finian. Whenever a reporter asked Dylan a question, he would put his ear to Finian's mouth and "hear" the answer from the puppet, before repeating it to the assembled reporters. Some of the questions and answers were:
journalist: What did you think of your first night in Paris?
Dylan: It was very boring.
journalist: Why is the doll here?
Dylan: He followed me.
journalist: Is it a mascot?
Dylan: No, it's a religious symbol.
journalist: What religion?
Dylan: It is a symbol of the religion of tears.
"It drove them crazy," said photographer Barry Feinstein, who documented the tour. Joke or annoyance? While for Dylan the event was special, for Ashiqar journalists it was not. This was his last press conference for the next 12 years.
5. Romance with Stone?
In the aforementioned Scorsese documentary, Rolling Thunder Review – which premiered in 2019 – actress Sharon Stone claimed to have known Dylan in the mid-70s. She said that one night, backstage, he played her the song Just Like A Woman, while telling him that he had written it for him. It was Dylan's guitarist, T Bone Burnett, who told Stone that, in fact, the song had been written 10 years earlier. The problem is that this whole scenario was probably a hoax. There is no evidence to suggest that this scene took place. In the same documentary, a filmmaker named Stefan van Dorp recalls (nowadays) filming the concerts of Rolling Thunder in 1975-'76. Van Dorp is actually performance artist Martin von Haselberg, also known as Bette Midler's husband. That's clever, because Midler appears briefly in the film with Dylan in a murky 60s scene shot at Gerde's Folk City club in Manhattan. Was she? (Yes.)
6. The master of disorientation
For most of his career, Dylan had grown weary of being labeled a generational icon and the attention that inevitably came with it. “I wasn’t the leader of any generation, and that idea had to be uprooted,” he said. So, in the mid-to-late 60s, he launched a campaign of disinformation to reduce public interest in him. He started a rumor with his record company that he was planning to quit music to enroll at the Rhode Island School of Design. The news spread to the press. “Some people said, ‘It won’t last a month.’ The reporters started asking questions in the papers, ‘What happened to the old version of him?’ Let them go to hell,” Dylan wrote in his book Chronicles. He also went to Jerusalem, where he was deliberately photographed near the Western Wall, wearing the small Jewish hat. "All the magazines turned me into a Zionist overnight. That helped a bit," he wrote.
7. Other names
“Dylan” isn’t the only name Robert Zimmerman has used. After graduating from high school, he performed as Elston Gunn. He also performed as Tedham Porterhouse, Blind Boy Grunt, and Robert Milkwood Thomas. When he was part of the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys in the late 80s, he became Boo Wilbury. Then, in 2003, Dylan co-wrote the screenplay for Larry Charles’ film, Masked and Anonymous. His name for this project? Sergei Petrov. A trace of Dylan's love of different names can be found in one of his favorite poetic lines (and the title of his 2020 song): The Contain Multitudes, from Walt Whitman's 1855 epic poem, Song of Myself. It is worth remembering the lines Whitman wrote before this: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I'm big, I have many names). This explains a lot.
8. A happy accident
On July 29, 1966, Dylan was separated from his Triumph T100 motorcycle while riding in upstate New York. Rumors circulated that he had been badly disfigured or suffered life-changing injuries. However, the extent of the accident was never determined. No hospital records related to the incident have been released, and no ambulance is believed to have been called. After the accident, Dylan retired; he would not tour again for nearly eight years. In just two sentences in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan admitted that the accident provided him – at least in part – a shield behind which he could retreat. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and was injured, but I recovered. The truth was, I wanted to quit my job,” Dylan wrote.
9. The silent treatment
Many journalists have experienced Dylan's mysterious silences. When the presenter, author and co-founder of the magazine Q, David Hepworth, secured an interview with Dylan for the magazine's first issue in 1986, things did not go as planned. "It was my worst nightmare. He didn't talk to me. And when Bob Dylan doesn't talk to you, oh ... there's something to tell the grandkids," Hepworth said in Paul Gorman's history of the music press. In Their Own Write. “I was sitting in Dylan's dressing room in Madison Square while he played his guitar and purposely ignored me. And there were only me and him in the room." Being a master of indirection didn't help Dylan. The headline of the article, when it was published, was "Q… n…, how rude is this"? - said Hepworth. This became the precursor to a regular magazine column Q, for reject artists with the title "Who the hell do they think they are?" [Who The Hell Do They Think They Are?].
10. Donovan and the Masked Singer
The lonely Donovan, the hippie musician with only one name who was billed as "the English Dylan", was the victim of a Dylan prank in London in 1965. Donovan and his friends visited the singer in his hotel room. But Dylan told his men to put on masks just before Donovan arrived – "to put the fear into him, man," according to an account in Marianne Faithfull's autobiography. But things got worse. After Donovan arrived, Dylan asked him to play a song on his guitar, Faithfull wrote. The song Donovan chose was mr. Tambourine Dylan's Man, with the words changed – a song that had been circulating on the festival circuit and was not known to have been written by Dylan. According to Faithfull, Dylan cut Donovan off saying, “You don't need to sing it anymore. I have heard this song". Ouch! /Telegraph/
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