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:

Early Punk and The Rages of "Boredom," Buh Dum Buh Dum

Full disclosure: I'm a grayhead.

So old, in fact, I remember the '80s – firsthand. I remember the hoary early days of Punk that preceded it. I remember how it felt: a growling soundtrack to a revolution about to happen. The truth is, as powerful as the music was – some of it, anyway – the music was almost ancillary: Its real power came from its anarchy. Bands were releasing their own records, printing their own 'zines, cobbling together their own fashion, and foregoing the institutions. Unlike the  Surrealists and the Dadaists before, this was not a intellectual or elitist movement. It wasn't even a populist one – it was tribal and marginal by design. It was anti-cultural, anti-institutional, anti-establishment, and antisocial to a degree. It was like a rare earth element, destined to exist only for a moment in time.

Soon, the riffraff came – those with a pathological attraction to Punk's impudence and implied violence – and took things in another direction. Sid Vicious was the icon and the original genius of the movement was lost.

But, Punk's initial rages were rendered so authentically by the vanguard bands it was inevitable to quickly morph into a kind of institutional mediocrity as the sub-culture swelled. And now, a generation later, those first couple of years still remain a comet-sized fiery spitball that blew up Pop Culture.

My romance with Punk was a brief one: it died with the end of the Sex Pistols. Over the long haul, youthful rage deserved much more nuance than Punk was able to provide and to that purpose Post-punk seemed to be the answer: The Fall, Joy Division, Wire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc. Some of them, for better or worse, are still with us.

Still, Punk was the fuel and momentum and its echoes still resound even now (see Perfect Pussy).

In this post- Green Day and Rock the Casbah era of mega-platinum "pop-punk," the rawer output of the first wave of bands may sound quaint by comparison. Despite their limited market exposure – MTV's 120 Minutes was still at least eight years away – their cultural influence was considerable. Beyond its tonsorial and sartorial statements, it was its rage for shaming the megastar dinosaur bands of the time where punk really made its mark. Punk seemed to quicken their slog into the tar pits of irrelevance. (Much of what would end up on Coda was Led Zeppelin's attempt to draw their swords against the attack.)

For those of you too young to remember, among those seminal late '70s punk bands was the original Buzzcocks. Before the assembly line of hits, their first release was a four song EP called Spiral Scratch and was essentially a très British rendering of the first Ramones album (which only preceded Spiral Scratch by less than a year). At this juncture, Pete Shelley was relegated to guitar and vocal back-ups and Howard Devoto was the vocalizer and lyricist. Soon after the recording, Devoto would depart and form the great post-punk Magazine.

Above, hear the classic iteration of the Buzzcocks run through Boredom live; Below, Magazine's decidedly more buttoned-up and padded shoulder take.

If you're interested, hear the entire Spiral Scratch EP here: