Kids: don't follow leaders

Shakespeare is living among us, goes the blurb on the Bootleg Series Vol 7, written in a kind of adolescent prose poem by Andrew Loog Oldham, who should know better, but perhaps doesn't. Anyway, I think that's about right, comparing Dylan with Shakespeare; not matching him iambic pentameter for iambic pentameter, but easily matching his cultural impact. I know which I prefer. Not only is he a beautiful man, but he possessed the most beautiful voice. I've got no time for anyone who doesn't get that. He could snarl and sneer and twang, but he could also record tracks like She Belongs To Me, Lay Down Your Weary Tune, and just soothe you with a gorgeous resonance, courtesy of Neumann microphones Gmbh.

The opening track of the 2nd disk, She Belongs To Me take 2 is sublimely beautiful, with just acoustic guitar, bass, and electric guitar. As James pointed out, it sounds a bit like the Velvet Underground 3rd album. Lesson number one: drums aren't required. I've always known it to be so, and I should have more faith in my own convictions when recording my own stuff. I'm going to free myself from the tyranny of drums as of now.

Track 2 of disk 2 is The Moment, the performance of Maggie's Farm at the Newport Folk Festival. Although I've been a Dylan fan all my life, I've never indulged in bootlegs. This is down to canniness. I would never pay someone for something he ripped off. It's receiving stolen goods, but more to the point, the bootleggers should be robbed blind themselves. So, no, I wasn't ever going to pay £19 for a badly done CD of questionable sound quality. So I've never heard any of the Newport stuff before. This version of the Maggie's Farm comes straight from the mixing desk.

It's fantastic.

In all my reading over the years, I'd been under the impression that Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues band were ill-rehearsed, shambolic, noisy, and sounded pretty awful, even if you weren't some anal folkie having apoplexy at the very thought of electric guitars.

Dylan, naturally, would not have seen the problem. Because to him, "folk music" would be anything he damn well wanted to call folk music, and not some, narrow, sanitised, Victorian mentalist idea of "authentic", respectful, acoustic, fol-de-rol folk with a finger stuck in your ear.

I always liked his attitude. It stems from having a both/and view of the world and not an either/or attitude. Either/or is for pedants and politicians to get themselves jammed up with. Both/and admits that life is inherently contradictory and that folk music is whatever you want it to be.

Someone is on the stage, relishing his moment, introducing Dylan. He's like a local celebrity at a village fête. Instead of just saying something that might make him sound like a pretty cool guy 40 years later, he thinks he's a headmaster at a public school. "Please don't play, Gentlement, for just a second..." he says to the guitarist who dares a strum. And instead of, "Ladies and Gentlemen.... Bob Dylan." We get "The person who is coming up is a person..." and an interminable and incoherent speech about his importance to folk music.

Which makes the whole Maggie's Farm thing, even funnier, of course. These people just played into Dylan's hands.

The audience dismay at Newport, taken together with the cry of "Judas!" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall prefacing Like a Rolling Stone (the final track), and the boos that greeted Dylan and the Band on that 1966 tour (so much so that Levon Helm opted out, not wishing to subject himself to the abuse), provide a further lesson.

Lesson number two: The hindsight of history is harsh on the short-sighted. Or, as Ibsen put it: the majority is always wrong.