The Song That Changed My World

Apart from Sunday hymn-singing live music of any description was unheard in the small village of my childhood. The radio was our musical source as well as much else. As an adolescent I was as attached to it as Walkman-carrying teens are today and I was riveted to the soaring lamentations of Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney pumping two-minute epistles of obsession’s tension and release. I aspired to the latter’s adenoidal falsetto and clean cut look with mixed success. And then there was Dylan. What antithesis! While the aforementioned alluded to rebelliousness, Dylan embodied it.

There’d been a positive music review of, Another Side of Bob Dylan in the recently launched Australian newspaper. I’d been perusing its literature pages since its inception to supplement those of the Age. Enquiring at the local record shop I was told it wasn’t in stock. But his most recent release was. I forked out two pounds two shillings and ran home bearing the vinyl, adding my first LP to a small pile of 45s. Unbelievable! Thrice I moved the cumbersome record player’s arm to the rim of the disc flipping it as it moaned to anchorage.

Here was an irreducible ‘I’ rendering other voices as cliché: one with narrative wordplay glorying in itself rather than pandering to mass legibility. Here was fearlessness. All other Bobbies, Lind, Vinton, Vee, Darin, and Goldsboro, were discarded in Pop’s dustbin. I hovered above the turntable that summer Saturday morning entranced as Highway 61 Revisited spun its web. The healthy hate and blasphemies of the title song and Tombstone Blues were alien to mainstream consciousness, questioning received history and the institutions supporting it.

Breathless short and middle-length songs with explosive, electrified arrangements were sandwiched between the seemingly endless Ballad of a Thin Man, Queen Jane, Like A Rolling Stone, and Desolation Row. No one in my circle had an inkling of the civil unrest inspiring Dylan’s protest songs, or awareness of the suffering feeding the Blues. Nor did I. Australia’s experience of war, Depression and pioneer tribulations were expressed through anodyne Country and Western twang. Dylan didn’t really cut it with my friends who were divided down the Rolling Stones and Beatles axis.

I wore his songs into myself through mimicry, carried them wherever, unapologetically unleashing them on friends. Mimesis emboldened me, giving permission to be who I wanted to be, a rebel with cause to break family shackles. No single song was more resonant than Desolation Row whose melancholic flood of despair spoke truths about which I was hitherto inarticulate. The dirge cited browned postcards depicting hangings. I was aware White Supremacist racists, the Ku Klux Klan were opposing The Civil Rights Movement. I thought The Klan was a Southern phenomenon and hadn’t operated in Dylan’s Minnesota. That they’d lynched Negros in the 1920s and had those hangings depicted for mass circulation on cards was news. As a cast of jongleurs and misfits paraded their anguish, actual identities rubbed against mythical ones. A debate between modernist poets Pound and Elliot incited the mirth of calypso singers. Einstein disguised as Robin Hood bummed cigarettes. Cinderella adopted the pose of actor Bette Davis. In the final stanza the narrator adopted a pitiless tone to distance himself from this procession and farewell his former identity. My pubescent brain was in overdrive as Dylan’s cinematic vision unwound. Adopting his stance I positioned myself with the dispossessed, the losers and outcasts.

I entered Art School at Caulfield Technical College in1966 and dropped Pitney’s clean-cut look for jeans, work shirts, and Cuban-heeled boots allowing Dylan’s unkempt hair to be my model. In mid-April he arrived to play at Festival Hall with an unknown backing group of Canadians.

My sweetheart, Kerry was more into Donovan and The Stones. I’d tagged along with her to St Kilda’s Palais Theatre the previous summer to hear her Rolling Stones and the incomparable Orbison whose stony stance belied his vocal flights. Though reluctant, she rugged up for Festival Hall and whatever revelations Bob might deliver. He was smaller and paler than anticipated pursing his lips at the microphone with intimate intent. His enunciation made a ghost of his studio-recorded voice. His guitar and harmonica were sharper. I was entranced as he crouched at the piano for the last of his acoustic set unwinding Desolation Row’s improbable scenarios.

After intermission the Canadians wandered onstage one after the other to pound us with the electrified second half. It was a blitzkrieg of unprecedented intensity. Lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, later fronting The Band, darted between verses with whip- cracking glee. He and Dylan stood either side of the mike gyrating in sync like lovers. Bearded keyboard genius Garth Hudson sat in semi-darkness extending the chords with whimsical accord. Like a Rolling Stone, Just Like A Woman, and Ballad of a Thin Man hovered in the air between stage and the enthralled, entranced crowd. I had been immersed in a timeless dream. Was it All Over Now Baby Blue? Far from it. Kerry was a fresh convert.

My Dylan was electric Dylan not the guy who’d recently betrayed legions of acoustic guitar-carrying folkies with their investment in authenticity. After the show I dug into his early albums. But they and his avowed references, Lead Belly, Brownie McGee, Big Joe Williams, and Robert Johnson failed to register. So what if he filched from other sources. His bricolage transcended them.

Friends and neighbours sharing school and club football were galvanising as a group. Though I’d graduated I was closer to them than those of my year. All were on deck to stage Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood. Thomas reportedly wrote the play as a riposte to the atomic devastation of Hiroshima. I attended rehearsals and performances, enchanted by my mates acting and the language. Discovering the Dylans initiated me in the wonder and power of words to steer lives. Their metaphors and music vivified my world.