Caught in the Carousel

Dylan: He's Just Like Us!

By Kaya Oakes

Bob Dylan

By all accounts, Bob Dylan is having what most people would consider a very good year. His new album, Together Through Life, went straight to #1 (even if it sounds like a jam session by the world's most expensive bar band); his "Never-ending Tour" continues to sell out venues worldwide and will never actually end. He may be recording with Paul McCartney (admittedly, the "good" of that possibility is subjective), and according to the burst of rumors and biographies that accompanies the release of every one of his albums, he's been secretly married more than five times, has more than thirty illegitimate children, is obsessed with remodeling his Malibu compound into an architectural fantasia complete with a car hanging from a copper domed ceiling, and currently lives alone in a trailer with two large German Shepherds.

Dylan turned sixty eight a few weeks ago, which means he's firmly crossed over into the AARP demographic along with a whole army of his Boomer fans, but he's still hip with the kids and still relevant to a contemporary audience, which helps him to keep selling albums and filling houses on tour. When they were discussing Dylan's memoir Chronicles, one of my UC Berkeley students cheerfully announced that he'd attended Dylan's grandson's Bar Mitzvah. "What's Dylan like?" I asked. "Somebody's grandpa," said the kid. And, snickering, "Grandpa in a leather jacket."

Bob Dylan

And yet, in spite of the Vincent Price moustache and the thousand-yard stare, Dylan's still got sex appeal. What else would explain the steady trickle of gossip about him, the endless stream of books, the fact that teenage girls look at a photo of the young Dylan and say, "I want him to do me." Dylan—beneath the intellectual posturing, the barbed insults hurled at journalists, and the grouchy persona—has always been about sex. Listen to the lyrics. That ain't poetry, it's a come on (arguably, poetry itself is a come on, but that's fodder for a different essay). After all, Heath Ledger played a spookily accurate version of Dylan in very, very tight jeans.

But a big part of that sex appeal has to do with mystery, and mystery's grist for the gossip mill. We learned a few years back that Dylan did in fact secretly marry his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in the '80s, and fathered an actual child with her (as opposed to his hypothetical marriages to other backup singers, along with his phantom children). But Dennis has repeatedly stated that they kept the marriage secret for a reason: to give their daughter a "normal childhood." And the problem with that? Could be thinly veiled racism: Dennis is African American, and, according to Howard Sounes in the not very reliable UK Daily Mail, Dylan "has a thing for black women." In the same article, Sounes says that, "when you look at his art, there are a lot of studies of naked voluptuous black women in various hotel rooms." Oh well, that explains it all! Expect him to be touring with Jill Scott any day now, and don't invite him to the White House lest he make a play for Michelle.

Bob Dylan

Dylan's most iconic exes, Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez, have freely talked about what a dick he turned out to be, a bad boyfriend who cheated on both of them and skittered away from marriage like the wandering protagonist of one of his songs. He left Rotolo for Baez, then made a play for Baez's sister Mini Fariña while he was still with Baez, then left Baez for his first wife, Sara Lownds, who he impregnated while he was still with Baez. If you've seen Don't Look Back, you've seen the cinematic evidence of how much of an asshole he was to poor Joanie. To her credit, however, Baez seems to have gained a sense of humor about the absurdity of their relationship over the years; you can see her cursing like a sailor and doing a wicked Dylan impersonation in Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home. Every biography of Dylan blames this hobo lothario pattern on something; his peripatetic lifestyle, his parents, the sexual revolution, drugs. Mostly, there's a thinly veiled air of sexism about the whole conversation, like the women themselves are to blame just for wanting to date a nice guy, goddamn their selfish ways.

But I think the reason we're still culturally fascinated with Dylan after fifty years of his music is because we will never know who he is. There's a reason the man wrote a song called "I'm Not There." With celebrities blabbing about their poop habits on Twitter and everyone showing their boobs on MySpace and the mind-boggling number of memoirs by famous people and nobodies that continue to be published every week, we now know everything there is to know about everyone. Could it possibly be that not knowing about someone is more interesting than knowing about them? Duh. The recluse is a rarity in today's society, and if Dylan fits the classic pattern for introversion (fantastic performer but incredibly antisocial; creative but cranky about sharing it), his love 'em and leave 'em tendencies may simply be part of who he is.

Bob Dylan

Or maybe it's just none of our business. As a member of the generation that grew up with Dylan on my parents' stereo, I've always liked him for what he is to me: a genius songwriter who had a really good streak for many years, got weird in the seventies (like a lot of my parents' friends), got cheesy in the eighties (ditto), and finally settled into what looks like a pretty comfortable kind of late middle age. He rarely does interviews, and when he does, his personal life is almost always off the table. In fact, the interview segments in the Scorsese film were actually conducted by Dylan's manager, with whom he seems to be a lot more honest and comfortable, so the revelations about his teen crush on a girl and his breakups with Rotolo and Baez, along with the personal revelations in Chronicles, seem to all be of a piece. After building some pretty thick and high walls around himself and his music for many years, Dylan finally kicked out a brick.

Does that mean he has to kick out another one in order for us to "know" him? I'd prefer that he didn't. I like my icons enigmatic, and as a fellow introvert, I like to be left alone as much as I imagine Dylan does. However much time he has left on the earth, let's let him live it the way he always has: making up selves, imagining lives and creating and re-creating his own set of rules.

Bob Dylan

Kaya Oakes is the author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution Of Indie Culture
You can write to her at: kaya@oakestown.org.