Originally published in Outlaw Blues, Chapter 3, August 1967

As I write this—August 1967—Bob Dylan has been silent for more than a year. It’s been a curious calm. Between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde was a gap of some ten months—but a gap broken up with the release of several 45’s of exciting new material, a winter concert tour, a fascinating interview in Playboy, and finally the cheerful, triumphant “Rainy Day Women”—“Everybody must get stoned.”

1967 has offered no such relief. Dylan suffered severe damage—three broken vertebrae—in a motorcycle accident in August 1966, and retired from public view. All concerts were canceled—first till January, then March, then—perhaps—forever. Tarantula, Dylan’s much-promoted first book, never appeared. TV specials scheduled for ABC-TV and the BBC in Britain were canceled amid bad will and lawsuits. MGM announced it had signed Dylan, discovered it hadn’t, and prudently shut up; and meanwhile Columbia issued a greatest hits LP, just to be on the safe side. And still no sign of a new recording.

And why should we be so concerned? It has been Dylan’s unwilling, unfortunate fate to be somehow responsible to the world for every move he makes. A year is not a long time in an artist’s life—some writers have been silent for twenty—and surely a man deserves as much time to do his work in private, and as much time to simply relax, as he can possibly obtain. This is the least any of us might ask; and yet if Dylan retreats he is considered not hardworking but somehow cowardly, unwilling to show the world his rough drafts, unwilling to work and create in a fishbowl, mounted on a pedestal in Times Square. Dylan is our most-loved living poet, and the public that has embraced him now believe they possess him—he must behave according to their will.

They hold him responsible for the passage of time; sometimes he must think that. At Newport, Forest Hills, 1965, his fans dictated what he could and could not play, and with what instrument! The “folk music boom”—actually an early stage of modern pop music and not deserving of the name folk at all—progressed properly into a freer, more complex form of creative music; and Sing Out and the mad dogs of the “folk boom” led a witch hunt against the man most prominently identified with the changes music was undergoing. Bob Dylan and his electric guitar were held responsible for the plight of every ambitious “folk” singer who found himself out of fashion. “Dylan did it!” they screamed. “You got a lot of nerve…” answered Bob, but he was deeply hurt. He’d been concerned with his music, his poems—he’d never tried to carry the world on his shoulders.

But the world wants to be on his shoulders. We expect our artists to take care of us. Or so it has been; but maybe, just perhaps, this last year of silence has been a time of learning, not just for Dylan but for his fans. Deprived of a new LP, we return to what he’s done before…at some point Highway 61 or Another Side of or The Times They are A-Changin’ has crept back on the phonograph, and the songs have been heard a new way. “It ain’t me babe…no, no, no, it ain’t me babe; it ain’t me you’re lookin’ for.” Does the girl who first heard that at nineteen, a champion of Peace, defender of the Negro, and veteran of her first traumatic freshman affair, now discover the song at twenty-two? It doesn’t seem as sad, perhaps; she’s come and gone and discovered that sometimes it just ain’t him, or it just ain’t you, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it; she suspects that maybe the words mean a little less than she thought they did, but maybe they evoke a little more… And the young glue-sniffer who so proudly uncovered “Tambourine Man” as a song about a dealer now hears it again, and the thought strikes him that if he thought the word “dealer” was supposed to have risqué connotations, or if he thought the song incomprehensible without its “secret meaning,” then he was a silly child and as wrong as night is dark. For now he listens to Dylan’s song and hears the singing joy, feels it all on the surface with no need of a secret decoder, realizes that whether Mr. Tambourine Man is a connection or a Cub Scout den mother, or just a close close friend, what counts is the feeling, the surrender and the joy, the sense of wonder and discovery, and the bright jingle-jangle morning all around you.

Dylan has been silent. But songs are never silent—they speak, long after they’ve been spoken. Dylan’s songs do not decay in time; rather, time flows over them, enriches them, filling in the little cracks we did not understand. “My Back Pages”, “Baby Blue”, “One Too Many Mornings”—these songs have meaning now, and always will. Dylan owes us nothing. We owe him already more than we can give.

Watch: “Mr. Tambourine Man“ [at youtube.com]

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