13 - Blonde on Blonde (1966)

Summary

In all the micro-documented history of rock & roll it's hard to imagine a more incisive description of the paradox of rock-star fame - the kind of fame that later hastened the deaths of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain - than these lines from “Visions of Johanna”: “Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously / He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously.” To see these lines as self-descriptive is and isn't, as we'll see, to take them out of context. Blonde on Blonde - let's acknowledge it as BOB - represents the first of Dylan's many attempts at a self-portrait, but it undertakes self-portraiture in a defiantly anti-exegetical way. Tired of being saddled with the heavy interpretations of fans, critics, journalists, and scholars, Dylan amplified and exposed the songwriting strategies that informed his earlier albums. The self-consciously surrealist textures of BOB at once invite and ridicule attempts to divine their meaning. Like the French poets from whose books he lifted more than a few pages, Dylan immerses his listeners in the twinned processes of weaving and unweaving myth - which is why the songs of BOB seem so often self-interfering and contradictory. The least didactic of the albums of Dylan's second period, the album where, as Ellen Willis has written, Dylan proves “no longer rebel but seismograph,” BOB compels listeners to take responsibility for their own interpretations (Willis 235). It offers the specious promise “anybody can be just like me, obviously”: the promise is specious because the obvious isn't obvious - the obvious is offered up as bait and quickly yanked away. The story of how the author of “Blowin' in the Wind” or “Masters of War” got to this point has been often told, and his movement away from the folk scene where he first established his career is now itself the stuff of legend. Less often considered is where the astonishing success of what had at first seemed a career-killing move had left him.