I try my best, to be just like I am

Revisiting a throwaway moment to celebrate Bob Dylan's birthday.

There are many Bob Dylans to love - enough to know that the ones I love might not be the ones that others love. 

For most of my life the one I loved most was the motorcycle-black-madonna Bob Dylan, the stuck-inside-of-desolation-row Bob Dylan, with his shades and his amphetamines and his 11-minute songs, with his stream-of-consciousness sleeve notes and his torrent of words, with his endless alternate versions and one-take recordings and his winging-it culture-making, and his pressers, too - perhaps his best mode of chaotic spectacle, his greatest improv performance of the idea of Bob Dylan, which he left behind pretty sharpish as he retreated to the stage, to his songs. 

For lots of my life I’ve also loved the doomed romantic sage Bob Dylan, the peripheral-but-on-the-way-back-in Bob Dylan of Time Out Of Mind, the not-dark-yet Dylan in his late 50s, the one undergoing a renaissance at the end of twentieth century, a rebirth that will last 25 more years, entering a territory that will feel new to anyone who grew up on Desolation Row, since no first-wave rock star had ever really been that old and as relevant, but you suspect for the Bob Dylan underneath it all it was no big deal, he was just being him, a blues guy, just singing and playing and touring and quietly collecting his flowers. 

More recently I’ve loved the just-divorced Bob Dylan, the Bob Dylan of strange songs on sloppy and marvellous albums like Street Legal, Slow Train Coming, and Saved, the Bob Dylan peeking out from a doorway with the tan line visible from his absent wedding ring, the born-again Christian whose songs are disproportionately represented in the Girl From The North Country musical, a kind of theatrical Grapes Of Mice And Men, a Long Day’s Journey East Of Eden, with characters as spiritual and lost and utilitarianly dressed as the man who wrote their songs. 

I love all these Bob Dylans, but the one I’m thinking of today, as he turns 83, as I write this, is the Bob Dylan of 1969. The Amish-beard, country-music Bob Dylan, dressed in shades of brown, the Bob Dylan who sings from his clenched throat rather than through his nose, his voice curdled into a cream of sand and glue. He smiles. He seems… content? He plays country songs. He’s trad, again, only not in the way all those cross northerners wanted him to be when he came here and offended them all with his noise and sneer - that prostitute for rocknroll. 

This is the Bob Dylan that appears, albeit briefly and quite probably without speaking - I can’t quite remember - in the Johnny Cash documentary I saw on TV recently.

It was late. It was a Friday night. It was made in 1969 by Granada TV, of all people, and Cash is presented as someone not yet known as The Man In Black, but nevertheless simply and definitely as the man. (The film’s title was, in that decidedly literal way that’s either very British or very 60s or both, Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music.) Cash is followed around by the film crew, is seen with family and on tour, in the studio and on the ranch. It’s the source for a lot of the home-movie style footage that turned up decades later in the Hurt promo - the one that made us all cry when he died. He looks impeccable, a walking ad for Brylcreem and good jackets, shoulders twice as wide as his hips, fabulous boots, waistcoats. He’d have looked incredible as a touring musician or gambler in Deadwood. (Not a prospector, you feel, he’s too content with his lot for that.) In the film he plays San Quentin, where he sings A Boy Named Sue (for, astonishingly, the first time ever, and the live recording of this moment becomes the single), and where he also sings Long Black Veil - a dark, twisted beyond-the-grave lament that The Band (who played with Dylan in England and then again on the Basement Tapes, taking Dylan back into that “weird, old America” of folk music and hard work and endless land that also gave us Johnny Cash) had just done on their debut album. In concert, rivulets of sweat pour down Cash’s face like raindrops on glass. He violently swishes his head at the end of every line - that sort of tic, proto-punk snarl he had. He wins big at the Country Music Awards, with his Live At Folsom Prison album. His name is announced and glides from table to stage with grace and danger, a coyote with great hair and somewhere else to be. At the mic he thanks Luther Perkins, his guitarist, then gets the fuck off the stage before he says too much. Few men ever looked better. 

Into this vivid 1969 and into Johnny Cash’s timeline comes the quiet-ish, content-ish, country music version of Bob Dylan. They duet on Cash’s TV show. They sing a new version of Girl From The North Country for Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. Cash writes the record’s sleevenotes - a generous and beautiful poem dedicated to and about Dylan which is notably more coherent than Dylan had ever managed while channelling speed through his typewriter. 

The Cash film shows us the two of them together.  I love how they stand side-by-side, leaning forward like men propping up at the bar, men who’ve done a hard week’s work and have quietly suggested - perhaps only with their eyes - that the bartender leave the bottle and then leave them alone. 

If they seem pensive it’s because they’re listening. They’ve just sung One Too Many Mornings and now they’re listening back. 

Dylan barely moves. Cash laughs and you feel the tension breaking. I couldn’t resist taking a bunch of quick photos from my sofa - a reel of two guys just relaxed, working, playing. 

The photos make me wonder what it might be like listening to yourself play and sing like that. What it must be like listening to yourself play and sing with someone like that. A hero of yours. Or someone you’ve written a poem about. I can’t get over that Bob Dylan is standing next to Johnny Cash and Johnny Cash is standing next to Bob Dylan, and wondering how much might feel at stake in a moment like that. What’s on the line here? I can barely look someone in the eye when they tell me they’ve read my writing. How could you stand this? Full exposure, your vague notion that something you’ve just tried might work, and now you’re hearing whether it did or not, wondering what people might think, wondering - perhaps, as I would - about your talent, about your taste, about your ability to match up. The act of trying something only to let the consequences float in the air, for everyone - for him - to hear. A film crew there to catch it. 

Some duets put two voices together that blend like whiskey. They create a third distinct entity the world didn’t even realise it needed, but now can’t do without. The duets that Cash and Dylan sung are not like that. We should say that their voices back then made for a polite but royal mess. Their intonation inhabits different worlds. There is shared DNA, clearly - Girl From The North Country takes its melody from an old folk song, one you imagine Cash’s sharecropper family may well have known and sung, and certainly his new in-laws, the Carter Family, would have - but as a singing performance nothing about it works. You feel like you’re listening to two versions of the song at once. They blend like vinegar poured into olive oil. Their words follow different lines, which bump into each other now and then like stunt drivers asked to nudge each other around the racetrack. They trade ad libs awkwardly at the end as the song limps rather than soars to its close. 

It’s safe to say this is not my favourite Bob Dylan, but I love it anyway, and there’s something about the Bob Dylan in these photos that I hold on to. He was 27. Cash was 36, a musical generation older - musical royalty, in fact, part of the Million Dollar Quartet at Sun Records, the man - and the Bob Dylan in these photos has earned that man’s respect, his love even, the right to sing alongside him. Dylan turns up with an old song and a new voice and listens back smirking into his arm like a caught teenager. I imagine him thinking that whatever the outcome of this little experiment, it’s nothing compared to the strength and power of the tradition they’re each stepping into. He knows there’s no single performance or single song that is going to define the journey either of them is on. This Bob Dylan knows that he is both bigger and smaller than any inhibition or caution or fear or any other feeling we have that sometimes stops us from creating. He knows his work is only play, and is as transient as it is serious. It means both everything and nothing. That’s why Cash can laugh. That’s why Dylan can release the song, if he wants, by putting it first on his new record - an album he knows will confuse and confound the people who thought they knew who he was. I like the idea that Dylan’s ongoing work is both always the same and always different, so it can take whatever shape it ends up taking, because his job is to simply give in to the process and see what happens. The last thing you should take seriously is yourself. 

Later in the Cash documentary, Merle Haggard says something beautiful about “the things we believe in but can’t see.” He’s talking about dreams, and about songs - and about souls, like the one he says belongs to Johnny Cash. I like to think he’d agree that Bob Dylan had such a soul too, indeed that Cash and Dylan were connected on some molecular or quantum level, if not a vocal one. When all we can see of Bob Dylan are the many different Bob Dylans there are to love, perhaps the existence of an authentic, foundational Bob Dylan is, like Haggard says, something we need to take on trust, or at least feel on some unspoken or invisible level. But I also like to think that we might see just such a soul or essence peeking out through Amish-beard Bob Dylan’s eyes in these photos, smirking into his arm as he stands next to Johnny Cash, listening to himself singing and playing next to Johnny Cash. This essential Bob Dylan knows that just as dreams and songs and souls exist even if we can’t see them, so the things we think we see, those thoughts that masquerade as obstacles, like ridicule and judgement and creative anxiety, are really an invention; merely provisional - they dissipate the moment we question them.

This essential Bob Dylan questions these inventions without blinking. He knows to show up as someone unaffected by these obstacles, who simply doesn’t see them, and to become that person for as long as he needs to be him. This Bob Dylan, like all the Bob Dylans any of us might love, continues to produce regardless; to always be the same yet always different; to always ask, who do I need to be today?

Happy Birthday to you, Bob, whoever that may be.