Basically, Bob Dylan sounds like an 80-year-old on his first album.
When the boy Robert Zimmerman set off for New York in 1961 from his hometown, the shabby mining town of Hibbing in the north of the USA, he sings the old ballads about murderers and workers from the time of the Depression in Greenwich Village with his characteristic croak.
A precocious boy with an Old Testament Grant in his voice.
He has become one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.
A fixed star, a legend.
And on Monday, his 80th birthday, Dylan will finally have managed to live as old as he sounded back then.
It is quite funny that on the occasion of his jubilee party he will again be referred to as the “voice of a generation”.
Where his organ so unmistakably belongs only to himself.
This voice.
It is a challenge even for the early listeners.
"As if it had blown over the walls of a tuberculosis sanatorium," etched one critic.
"Bobby Dylan sounds like a dog caught in the barbed wire - but it doesn't matter because he writes the songs," Rodney Dillard explains to the laughing audience in 1964, before the bluegrass band The Dillards did a splendid version of "Walkin 'down." the Line ”.
The voice sounds like a challenge
To this day, many believe that Dylan songs are tolerable only when they are sung by others.
As a defiant reaction, Columbia Records advertised its artist in the sixties: "Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan." This sentence can be agreed on by both his fans and his opponents, because it can also be understood as a threat.
At his first Dylan concert in the nineties, the author of these lines only realized after five minutes of the master's free-floating vocal performance that it was the song “Mr.
Tambourine Man “acts.
The fact that Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 doesn't make it any better, even if he received it for "new poetic forms of expression in the American song tradition," according to the official explanation.
Because the price is about words and not how you express them.
But Dylan himself has a fundamental problem with this: In his acceptance speech, which was postponed a year later, he rejects the assessment that his lyrics are literature.
He emphasizes the primacy of sound.
The meaning of lyrics is often not important to him as long as they sound good, he flirted.
“Songs are unlike literature.
They're meant to be sung, not read. "(" Songs are different from literature. They are meant to be sung, not read. ")
Every song could be the last
By himself, one might add.
Because if you listen carefully, you will notice: Dylan is a master of phrasing, he charges language electrically when he stretches syllables, spits out consonants and simply doesn't want to lock his tirades into the meter.
And over and over again - because he was never interested in singing the "ultimate version" of a song.
New for the birthday
On the occasion of Dylan's special day, Bayern 2 is dedicating Whit Monday from 11:05 a.m. to the birthday child.
At the end of this Dylan focus day, only Dylan's music will be played from 11:05 p.m.
There are also three new publications: "Forever Young: Our Story with Bob Dylan" (Hoffman and Campe); "Look out kid. Bob Dylan's songs, our stories ”(Ullstein) and“ Bob Dylan: I'm just myself, whoever that is. Conversations from 60 years ”(Kampa). cp
Dylan once said of Frank Sinatra that he had "the truth about things in his voice." Accordingly, one could say: Dylan questions the truth, the essence of things, incessantly. Especially at his concerts, which are never alike: the groaning, panting, growling, slurping is an expression of a search in which the risk of failure is always around the corner. Is he cheerful or grumpy, aggressive or relaxed today? You can hear it immediately at every concert, it's a blessing and a curse of his performances. At best, his singing gives the well-known songs a new dimension. He doesn't really care about the audience - but only those who can't stand him chalk it up.
Dylan's career as a “recording artist” can also be broken down by his voice: the ancient debutant, the bright folk voice of “The Times, they are a-changin '”, the cutting sarcasm of his rock songs, especially “Like a Rolling” Stone ”, the stoner coolness of“ Blonde on Blonde ”, the country touch of“ Nashville Skyline ”, the preaching of the gospel phase in the late seventies, the nagging of“ Oh Mercy ”and“ Time out of Mind ”. In recent times Dylan almost only whispers due to age, for example in the song "I contain Multitudes" on the latest LP. "I sleep with life and death in the same bed," it says in the awareness of mortality.
Maybe you have to see Dylan's way of singing against this background.
Constant movement is better than standing still, and every song could be the last one to sing against the tombstone blues and outsmart death.
In the song “Tombstone Blues” in 1965, the young Dylan explained to a “lady”: “I wish I could write you a Melody so plain, that could ease you and cool you and cease the pain.” No, he cannot with a simple melody serve, you have to endure the pain.
Because as long as you can feel it, you are still alive.