1 post tagged “opportunism”
Speaking of having conversations, I finished an interesting article in the September 4, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, "Bob on Bob," a review of a book that compiles excerpts of good interviews of Bob Dylan over the decades. But, as Bob is a notoriously difficult interviewee, the article largely analyzes several of these interviews Bob Dylan has given over the decades.
Bob Dylan has been known to reduce many an erstwhile quote-grabbing interviewer to utter confusion partly because they are "looking" for someone who apparently isn't there. Here's a great excerpt from the New Yorker article:
If you were serious [in that musical age when rock and roll was moribund] you played folk songs. And to become a folksie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe anyway; it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin' Jack Eliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin' Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flabush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival--its where Joan Baez got her start in the coffee houses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) ...Artifice was the price of authenticity.
It seems that many folks see Dylan as less a philosophical visionary and more of a cultural opportunist with great musical talent. For Dylan, it was never about the "movement" but about the "song."
So, "finding" Dylan has been difficult. Here's something to think about: if someone were to look for you, really look for you, who would they find?
