Visions Of Johanna - The Portrait of an Artist by Peter Leyland
I began writing this blog the day after the Eurovision Song Contest had been shown on the BBC to great acclaim. It was a contest that had been held in my favourite city, Liverpool, and you can see above a picture of Bob Dylan singing Visions of Johanna in the same city in1966. This was a key work from his album Blonde on Blonde and with any luck you will be able to get the song too, although you don’t have to listen to it all. A couple of verses will give you the flavour.
Anyway, it is a longstanding favourite of mine, and on the day of the Eurovision Song Contest I somehow came across this live recording of it from the 1966 Dylan concert at the Odeon Theatre in the city. (On the same day Everton happened to be playing Sheffield Wednesday in the FA cup, which they won.) I still have the programme that I bought on the day of the Dylan concert because, as we time travellers have a habit of saying, "I was there."
The Programme: inside was a space for writing the titles of the songs
Bob Dylan began as a folk singing troubadour, following his mentor Woody Guthrie’s example and singing about the working people of America. He would follow Guthrie’s pioneering style as he travelled the country. On his second album, Freewheelin',he would tackle anti-racist and anti-war related themes, and he ended it with the apocalyptic A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall, based on the English folk ballad Lord Randall, where a young man is answering his mother’s questions about how his lover has poisoned him. In Dylan’s hands this folk ballad became a very different song, speaking of themes which now have much in common with cataclysmic climate change we experience today. On his third album, The Times They Are a Changin', he began including ballads of his own about working people. North Country Blues concerns a mining town in Minnesota, situated near where he lived in Hibbing.
Troubadour or poet? I was reading a book recently by Simon Armitage, current UK poet laureate, who in Walking Home (2013), describes how he travelled the 256 mile long Pennine way from north to south without any money, and paying his way by giving poetry readings at village halls, churches, pubs clubs and even living rooms. In nineteen days, he made £3,086. The costs he incurred for maps, compasses, waterproofs, compasses, accommodation, where not provided, and blister plasters, were ££1,174. In comparison, troubadour Bob Dylan in his early days made very little money at all. He first sang in Greenwich Village, 'blowing my lungs out for a dollar a day', but by the time of that Liverpool concert he was earning a great deal more.
His singing life wasn’t without its problems though, and three days after the Liverpool performance there was the infamous concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, where he was booed and called ‘Judas’, because the second half of the performance was not the fans’ beloved folk ballads but his 'new music' with a backing group led by Canadian, Robbie Robertson. The song Like a Rolling Stone is a good example. Dylan survived this, however, and continued the tour, playing at a number of other venues in Britain. The backing group with some changes of personnel would go on to form The Band and with their eponymous album of 1969 become one of the greatest, with a sound that wouldn’t fit into any category. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is a personal favourite.
But to return to Dylan and his changes of style. This tour would not be the first nor the last of those changes. After the 1966 tour and a life-changing motor cycle accident, followed by a period of recuperation, the album John Wesley Harding appeared. I remember buying this on my return from a trip to a college in Sheffield where I was seeking a teacher-training post. Nashville Skyline came next, which was again completely different, and this prompts me to ask the question - what is an artist and what is his or her art? For some it is subjective, for others it lies outside the self and can be categorised by awards or exhibitions, or simple longevity. In literature we have The Nobel Prize which can serve as a marker, and Dylan was awarded this in 2016 for his contribution to lyricism, "for having contributed new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. This was controversial for some, and Dylan didn’t attend the ceremony himself, leaving poet, painter and author, Patti Smith, to receive and make the award speech for him.
Bob Dylan, like Picasso and Emily Dickinson before him, challenged and crossed boundaries in various ways. The artist cannot compromise with his material. Dylan has gone from folk poems and surrealist expressionism in his early years, to the existential despair of songs like Shelter from the Storm in his middle years, to a contemporary gospel style during his Christian phase, and much later to traditional American standards, including those of Frank Sinatra. His latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) would seem to invoke the Never Ending Tour upon which he continuously travels and which began in June 1988.
As I was writing this, Bob Dylan reached the age of 82. When he came to Liverpool in 1966 there were a number of photographs taken of him in some of the wasteland areas of the city surrounding the venue at which he was later to play. In one he was posed on a set of steps with a group with a group of children. I will leave you with that and, if you got to the end of the song from Liverpool too, well done. It was definitely better than the Eurovision Song Contest.
Comments
Your mention of Simon Armitage's Pennine Way made me smile because he must have done the same thing a little later in the west country. It is a running joke in a lovely memoir called The Salt Path, in which an impoverished couple who have decided to walk the entire south-west coastal path keep finding they are mistaken for the poet (and partner) and are too desperate for the hospitality offered to come clean. I'd love to know what Simon Armitage made of their shenanigans.
And would you believe that Dylan himself was releasing some new recordings of his songs from a Shadow Kingdom performance in 2021. On June 2nd too. Why didn't he tell me about it?