No One’s There

In anticipation for I’m Not There and, more importantly, with the season of autumn having reached full swing in my little corner of Massachusetts, I’ve been on a huge Bob Dylan kick. It’s gotten to the point where I’ll play “Positively 4th Street” even when I’m not angry at anyone, I’ll play “If You See Her, Say Hello” even though I’m long over that chick, and the enjoyment of “Mr. Tambourine Man” has become a nightly occurrence. For a guy who actually once considered selling back his newly bought copy of Highway 61 Revisited because the singer could barely sing and because the lyrics didn’t make a lick of sense and because all the songs seemed to go on forever without changing it up in the slightest, this is a pretty big deal for me. I used to resent Dylanophiles (or whatever they’re called) for their unflinching admiration and total worship of the man; now it seems I’m being sucked into it. Must be getting old (or, as Dylan put it in “My Back Pages”, getting young maybe?).

So, of course, I eventually stumbled onto Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary, No Direction Home and found myself immersed in a part of Bobby’s career that I never cared to delve too far into before because I always figured it wasn’t as worth it as his crazy psychedelic poetry stuff about one eyed midgets and rows of desolation where all sorts of fictional characters hang out: pre-electric political Dylan. The guy who did “Blowin’ in the Wind”, told us the times were a-changin’, swore to stand over the graves of war mongers, and wondered aloud whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side. That side of Bob.

Though the man’s music in that period is viewed with a bit of skepticism nowadays (was Mr. Dylan sincere or not? Did he really fancy himself a protestor for a while or was it just something he fell into? Books have been written…), I can certainly see the appeal. Here was a small guy who just got on stage armed with a guitar and a mouth harp and just belted out those songs with a phlegm-tattered voice, a certain way with words, and what sounded like utter conviction/passion. It’s easy to get seduced.

Getting a small piece of young Dylan’s sheer magnetism got me to thinking about how little my rabble had been roused in my relatively short time here on the planet. Sure, I’ve gone to forums and demonstrations, some passionate and convincing, others passionate and silly, and still others where it seems like the fate of the world is about as interesting as reading the ingredients off the side of a cereal box (please note that Rice Krispies contain malt flavoring. Mind blown?). But clearly this kid was something special and all I’ve seen in my adventures were failed attempts at being special or topical or what have you.

Around Boston, you get a lot of such “we’re taking a STAND, man” style moments, usually in a half empty bar on a Monday or Tuesday night, wasted on a bunch of college kids who are really just there to socialize and play a relatively cheap game of pool. Such moments are countless, but here are my top three, in chronological order:

1. Saw a ska/punk band around 2004 or 2005. Normal lookin’ bunch of guys, the kind you’d probably play hours of table tennis with (if you can play table tennis for hours, that is). The bass player was a guy with a mohawk who looked like he took the band a lot more seriously than the other guys did. Maybe he wanted to be in Crass or Agnostic Front or Simple Plan instead (whatever young angry fellas listen to nowadays). The singer, a goofy-looking type who learned the majority of his vocal mannerisms from Dookie and all its bastard sons, leans into the microphone and says “This song is about the war in Iraq. It’s called �Bomb Yourself’”. A messy explosion of noise and an incomprehensible bit of grunting later and I guess a statement of some kind was made.

And so that happened.

2. Saw a fairly generic college rock band back in 2005 or 2006. Lightly distorted guitars a la Guided By Voices, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t someone in the band who, as a child, held Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary as close to him as Linus (everyone’s favorite Peanut) held tight to his blanket. They were definitely going for that sort of thing. After a pretty dull thirty minute set where all the songs sounded about as interchangeable as the individual members of an ant colony (I hope insect enthusiasts don’t peg me as a bigot, I’m just trying to say all the songs sounded pretty much the same, that’s all), the singer, a dewey-eyed fellow with a shaved head that made him seem like a softer, more sensitive Ian Mackaye, leans into the microphone and says “This song is about how church and state should always be kept separately.” A bunch of up-tempo “emotional” rock chords and a whole lot of incomprehensible high notes being hit later and I suppose I got some education along with my rock and roll.

And so that happened too.

3. Saw a kid with just an acoustic guitar earlier this year or late last year. Full beard, well-trimmed and never approaching crazy hobo man status. Liked to close his eyes when he sang, his voice technically good, but heavily immersed in that post-emo, college kid, sensitive boy whine that seems to have possessed the singer-songwriter genre these days. Chances are you know exactly the one I speak of. In the midst of his set, he leans into the microphone and says “I write this song about Hurricane Katrina.” A swell G-D-C-Am combination and a load of melodramatic, movie-of-the-week lyrics later, belted out by a screech that could feasible duel (though not defeat) Chris Carrabba, and I suppose I was moved.

So what’s happening here?

A whole lot of nothing basically, except me not having any fun. There was a lot of that. There’s also a certain sense of futility and perhaps a bit of posturing involved. I dare propagate that more artists/musicians/whatever seem concerned with people thinking their saying something important than actually saying something important, this being a by-product of a perhaps unconscious fear of actually saying anything (hence hiding whatever statement you might be making behind high notes, mumbles, and loud guitars) or simply a fact of having nothing really to say.

The whole Bob Dylan thing looks simple. Clearly it isn’t. Otherwise, people would have good reasons to look up from their pool games.

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