Free Bob Dylan by Andy Gill

remained in relatively close contact for a few more years, before too long they both realized they were too different to be together: to Bob, Joan was just too much of a clean-cut, straight-arrow goody-goody; and she, for her part, couldn’t bear the nasty, spiteful tone that began to creep into his songs through 1964 and 1965. “Unlike other people, about whom I think I have some kind of sense,” Joan explained three decades later, “I never understood him at all. Not a tweak.”
    Joan, however, wasn’t the only one mistaken in her view of Dylan. The “spokesman of a generation” began to realize that this new position, foisted upon him by one magazine article after another, was actually more of an imposition, as assorted political groups attempted to make claims on his time. In July, his friend Theodore Bikel had persuaded him to fly down to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter-registration drive organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “Snick”) to increase the black vote in the state. Dylan was pleased to help out a cause he believed in, and he got on well enough with the local farm workers, but not for the first time, he found himself surrounded by activists who seemed to want to lecture him about his responsibilities to the civil rights movement—as if he hadn’t shown his commitment by going down there in the first place! And after Joan Baez’s concert at Forest Hills, New York, he had been buttonholed at the post-gig party by Clark Foreman, head of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), who had made him listen to a recording of some screenwriter’s speech about the social responsibility of writers! Who needed that?
    What he wanted to do most in the world—write and sing songs—was increasingly being viewed as something in which other people felt they had a say. Plus, Dylan had started to be regarded as some kind of oracle, as if he had all the answers—which was flattering, certainly, but also worrying. Besides which, he was beginning to hate being typecast as just a “protest singer.” “Man, I don’t write protest songs,” he claimed. “I just react. I got all these thoughts inside me and I gotta say ‘em.” And not all of these thoughts were exclusively about injustice. Some of them were about himself. “Because Dickens and Dostoevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could,” he told one newspaper, “I decided to stick to my own mind.”
    His mind could be a lonely place, however, particularly for one with such a natural aversion to crowds. Even at Newport, Dylan had seemed scared by his growing fame, telling friends, “The attention is too much commotion for my body and head.” He had long since realized the value of autobiographical fictions in protecting his real self from unwelcome attention, spreading all kinds of misinformation about himself ever since his earliest days in New York. None of his friends was unduly bothered by this, but they saw a streak of paranoia developing in Dylan around this time, possibly inculcated by Grossman, who assiduously stoked the notion of the “Dylan mystique” and encouraged Bob to think of himself as someone special, apart from the general run of performers. As if heneeded any evidence that this was the case, there was an edge of adulatory hysteria about Dylan’s triumphant Carnegie Hall solo concert on October 12, which concluded with him having to be whisked away from a crowd of screaming teenagers who thronged the stage door. By the end of the year, he would write, in a poetic letter to Broadside magazine explaining the pressures of his life: “I am now famous by the rules of public famiousity… it snuck up on me an’ pulverized me… I never knew what was happenin’.”
    Things all came to a ghastly head in December, when Dylan was