Follow Suit: Bob Dylan
From workshirts and Wayfarers to striped trousers and bolo ties, Bob Dylan has reinvented his image as often as his musical direction. For 65 years it has helped him stay relevant and revered — and kept us on the outside looking in.
The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown did many things well, not least the casting of Timothée Chalamet, but one of the best was its title. The phrase comes from Dylan’s 1965 song Like a Rolling Stone, but it’s also the best available description of its writer. Whatever your degree of devotion, Dylan remains unknowable — frustratingly and tantalisingly but, ultimately, gloriously so. As he sang in 2020, he contains multitudes, and that is, against stiff competition, the greatest thing about him. However much water you draw, he is a well that never runs dry.
Whatever your degree of devotion, Dylan is unknowable — frustratingly, tantalisingly and gloriously so.
That quality — mystique — is one of the three essential ingredients of popular music, and he has preserved it for 65 years and counting. The other ingredients are talent and showmanship, both of which he has in abundance. His talent is to write lyrics that resonate with the wisdom, wit and dexterity of the greatest wordsmiths up to Shakespeare, and to set them to tunes that sound like they have been around for generations. His showmanship is less celebrated but equally vital: not just the ability to perform but his delivery. His is the most intimate voice in rock: he talks directly to you, like a confidant, whether the subject is politics, love, God, death, the last person who annoyed him, an apocalyptic vision, a shaggy dog story, or last night’s dream.
Dylan is certainly the most influential figure of the rock era, but he’s also the coolest. From the start, image was important to him, the film star James Dean as much a role model as the folk singer Woody Guthrie. Just as his songwriting genius was based on a capacity to combine seemingly disparate sources and make something altogether new, so his image (or images) took other styles and made them his own. With the natural gifts of room- silencing charisma and otherworldly levels of self-belief, he made himself the rock star against which all must be judged.
Another thing A Complete Unknown gets right is to show us Peak Dylan. He arrived in New York from Minnesota in 1961 as a revival of folk music was thriving, and quickly showed himself to be not just the best mimic of the era’s heroes but something more: an original. In five years he had created a new form that blended folk’s lyricism, activism and worldliness with rock ’n’ roll, raising the game of everyone from The Beatles down. He also evolved at a prodigious rate. After three acoustic albums he leant into the blues, embraced electric guitars, and produced three more records that turned it all over again. Rather than the earnest, lecturing activist of Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin’, Dylan revealed himself to be infinitely more nuanced: a commentator, comedian, provocateur, lyrical lover, social satirist, storyteller, mystical poet, and ruthless follower of his muse and self- interest. In short, an artist. Only Lennon and McCartney rivalled him for influence, with everyone from cabaret singers to soul stars covering his songs, and his hordes of disciples creating entire genres by following his latest exploration.
Just as pervasive was his image. In the early sixties he adopted the rural folkie outfit of short hair, workshirts and suede jackets, and gave it a city-boy spin that still resonates today, the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan inspiring a 2020s mode dubbed ‘Bob Dylan core’. By 1965, though, he had transformed himself, taking The Beatles’ Carnaby Street chic and amping it up into the definitive rock-star look. As seen in the fly-on-the-wall documentary Don’t Look Back (the next stop for the Dylan-curious after A Complete Unknown), it was the exact point between mod and bohemian: Chelsea boots, pipe-cleaner trousers, tailored leather jackets, an unkempt tower of curly hair, a flash of colour from a polkadot shirt or striped T-shirt, and black Wayfarer sunglasses worn around the clock. With the addition of amphetamine-driven twitchiness, chainsmoking and an expression of amused surliness, it set the template for any rock musician who understood that clever could be cool, from Lou Reed and Jim Morrison to Nick Cave, the Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys.
