Jonathan Cott on Dylan :
In Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Masculin-Feminin, the young protagonist played by Jean-Pierre Leaud picks up a French newspaper and reads a headline out loud: Qui Etes-Vous Bob Dylan? It was, and is, a good question. As the folk singer Eric von Schmidt commented in 1961, "At this time Bob had the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time he was [in London] he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day he'd look like a little gnome, and one day he'd be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he'd look like a thirteen-year-old child. It was really strange. . . . You'd never know what he was going to look like."
You'd also never know what his voice was going to sound like. One of the other fascinating, if obvious, things about Bob Dylan's mercurial personality was the way the timbre of his voice would change from one record or period of his life to another - as if his voice, too, couldn't stand having just one, unvarying sound. When he first arrived in New York City, he was singing like a hillbilly, sounding "like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire," as someone remarked at the time. And as years went by, Dylan's voice would veer from, in his words, "that thin . . . wild mercury sound . . . metallic and bright gold" of Blonde on Blonde (1966) to the relaxed country sound, which some attributed to his having stopped smoking cigarettes, of Nashville Skyline (1969) to the openheartedness, gentleness and anger of Blood on the Tracks (1975).
Like the Greek sea deity Proteus, who in order to elude his pursuers continually changed shape, from dragon to lion to fire to flood - uttering prophecies along the way - Dylan has unequivocally remained true to his vision of an unlimiting, unpossessive love that, whatever its form, comes straight from the heart, from which springs a wisdom worthy of the greatest poets and teachers.
As always, Dylan has kept on keepin' on - like his hero Hank Williams' alter ego, Luke the Drifter, traveling and performing in one "joint" after another, night after night, literally around the world. And on his journey he never wavers from revealing and confronting the masks that all of us are wearing and that distract us from our path.
Without even the "murmur of a prayer," as he sings on "Not Dark Yet," the soul turns "into steel" and the inner light is extinguished. On his sixtieth turn around the sun - still keeping the lights burning and reminding us to be a light unto ourselves ("Everythin' I'm sayin'/You can say it just as good" - "One Too Many Mornings") - Bob Dylan has remained true to the words of Emily Dickinson's little prayer: "Lad of Athens faithful be/To Thyself/And Mystery/All the rest is Perjury."
Jonathan Cott, a contributing editor, first interviewed Bob Dylan for "Rolling Stone" in 1975.
