Never say goodbye

Michael Henderson considers the perennial appeal of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan turns 70 next week, and from Duluth to Derby they will blow out the candles. The Minnesotan troubadour, who rolled into New York the year Kennedy became president, will pay no attention. As he wrote in one of his better songs, ‘Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint.’ Like Ken Dodd, a different kind of minstrel, he will stop performing only when they put him in a box.

It would not be unkind to say he has been crooning like a 70-year-old for some while. His voice, which was never an instrument of beauty, lost whatever shape it may have had at least a decade ago. At one concert in Brixton, Andy Kershaw, the BBC radio presenter and Dylan fan, lost patience with all the mumbling and muttering, and shouted, ‘What song is this, Bob?’

Yet still the followers linger, waiting for a sign. And what followers they are! Across ocean and desert they pursue their quarry, hoping to hear him get it right one more time. No popular singer has attracted such devoted admirers, or so many batty ones. One of the most persistent, Michael Gray, who wrote a biography called Song and Dance Man, once confessed he was spell-bound by the way his hero shakes his leg, so we are not obliged to accept every claim made on his behalf. Dylanophiles do not make hard-nosed reviewers.

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The more enthusiastic followers, like that (usually) superb critic Christopher Ricks, would have us believe that he is not a popular entertainer at all, but a poet, a true artist. They make much of his literary pretensions; yet pretensions they are. Reading Balzac may be the pastime of a civilised man (Dylan was very keen to sprinkle names throughout his overrated autobiography, Chronicles), but furnishing a room with books doesn’t make a man an artist.