Dylan Goes Hard

Evolution is an act of defiance. A defiance of order that’s necessary to create change and progress—this is true whether art or biology. (Whether the change is good is another matter; it’s also completely inevitable.) The birthing of evolutions, like biological birth, can produce profound labor pains.

Regarding the particular evolution of Bob Dylan, he was evolution squared: He evolved “folk music” while blithely battering it as it had been known—yet always doing it with a kind of ham-fisted love. Clearly, he was a fanboy of folk and traditional American musicks—even calling himself an acolyte of Woody Guthrie. But he could never bring himself to simply pay it homage. His evolution of the art he loved, birthed something far more radiant and radioactive. Especially when he took it electric. As we know, the loyalists were vociferously appalled. In recent interviews, Robbie Robertson addresses this issue explaining how the initial audiences were beyond disappointed—expressing shock and sometimes rage. But booing wasn't enough—people charged the stage and threw objects. One audience member famously screamed “Judas!” Dylan responds by calling them a liar.

According to Robertson, Dylan was never discouraged. The resistance only made him more defiant and utterly resolved that he was on the right path. Eventually, the audiences relented.

His songs became the gold standards of generations. The only evolution he couldn't surmount was age. So when the time came, the aged troubadour was bestowed with the Nobel Prize and the career at last set in marble and parchment for evermore: Dylan canonized as an institution.

And the traveling companion to this difficult evolution was his voice: a chameleonic instrument he’d change like a mask. With his very first album, as heard on Gospel Plow, he offers himself in a conventional gospel growl and sounds uncharacteristically tuneful. By 1966 that was all gone as evident in Like a Rolling Stone (below). At this stage, he replaces the tuneful with atonal insolence, aggressive in ways even Johnny Rotten wouldn’t match. Its defiance rendered in agonized beauty. And the songs: bouquets that often offer surprising melodic secrets when you hear other people sing them.

Dylan was more punk than Elvis ever was.

The Rolling Thunder Revue of Maggie’s Farm is Olympic and yet again, his voice is more conventionally dynamic. It’s some of the hardest music of his career. It also sounds as if he’s aware of the punk that was happening at the time. Even Dylan™ seems to realize how significant the cultural moment of punk would be—though not nearly as commercially significant as his own moment beginning 15 years before.









On A Hard Rain Is A-Gonna Fall, Dylan paints the moment as “Where black is the color/where none is the number...” And then in Like a Rolling Stone and much of the rest of Blonde on Blonde, he locks that moment into his voice: