The Gift of Bob Dylan

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest…

-Bob Dylan

While the whole world fights over names (names of people, names of streets, names of cities), and Shakespeare wrote one of his best plays about it, Dylan didn’t give a hoot. To him, names mean nothing. He changed his at a young age. He never denied being born as a Jew. It just didn’t matter to him that much, I guess.

From Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare: (scroll down)

Juliet:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Romeo:

[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

Juliet:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Romeo:

I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

Dylan remarked, “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”

He grew up in two nondescript towns in the Midwest, Duluth and Hibbing. He never denied that either.

The most famous guy around before Dylan was a fictional character, Paul Bunyan. His statue from the 1930s still looms tall. But it ain’t nothing compared to the shadow that Dylan has left on rock music and culture.

Hibbing

Kirby Ferguson claimed, in his TED talk, that Dylan had ‘borrowed’ the words and lyrics to most of the early songs that made him famous. I’m not sure that Dylan denied that either.

Kirby Ferguson at TED

So if you ask me what made Dylan so great, I would have to answer, his remarkable ability to throw off his past, his name, his culture, his heritage, ignore his relationships, what others think of him, and to concentrate on his music and recreating his persona whenever he felt like it.

Whether it’s commendable, permissible, likable, enviable, probably none of these appear to bother Dylan in the least.

To my mind, that’s what made Dylan Dylan. If you speak Hebrew, then you might enjoy or resent this talk I give a few years back.