Not many pop stars attain the status of icon, not in their lifetimes anyway, and not in the deepest sense of the word, which carries connotations of the holy and stirs the faithful beyond appreciation to a concentrated awe.
If there is an iconic figure still roaming the landscape of American pop, it's Bob Dylan - maybe only Dylan, whose mystique in recent years has grown, deepened, and broadened, even as his creative output has dimmed.The proof was on display here last week at the Museum of Television and Radio, where hundreds gathered to hear a panel discussion on two old-new Dylan releases - a double CD of his famous May 17, 1966, concert in Manchester, England, and an hourlong film of that concert, called "Eat the Document," that has not been seen anywhere for 26 years. (The museum, at 25 W. 52d St., is showing it through Nov. 20.)
The Manchester concert - long available on pirate LPs but released commercially by Columbia Tuesday, as "Live 1966: The `Royal Albert Hall' Concert" - was the penultimate date on Dylan's first tour with an electric band. The tour with the group, called the Hawks (later known as the Band), caused a historic uproar.
The panelists waxed philosophic on the implications of this band, this concert, the songs Dylan was writing and singing, the transitions he was wrenching himself through, and the transitions he was reflecting - and amplifying, so to speak - in society.
Greil Marcus, the rock critic-historian and author of "Invisible Republic," which links Dylan's work from this era to an underground tradition of American folk music dating back a century, laid out the context of the times.
"There was an unprecedented, self-conscious revolution in all the arts," he reminded the audience at the museum. "People were saying, `I can do what's never been done before, win what's never been won before' " - a Dylan lyric - "and going out and proving it. There was Jean-Luc Godard's `Weekend,' Roth's `Portnoy's Complaint.' People were saying, `Can you believe he's doing that?' And most people were responding, `No, I can't. Give me more.' "
Ron Rosenbaum, the lit-sleuth who has plumbed the depths of texts from Shakespeare to Pynchon to Hitler, went further, seeing the mid-'60s Dylan as foraging the dark corners of the post-Holocaust subconscious.
"People often say he stopped doing protest songs at this time, but I think he was shifting to a more radical protest," Rosenbaum proclaimed. "He's not protesting political injustice - that's taken for granted. He's protesting the very order of the universe, or lack of it. It's a protest against the laws of gravity - against the lack of gravity, in the sense of seriousness and meaningfulness. I think he's angry that the universe is absurd." Many of his songs are about being abandoned by a woman, but this is metaphor. "He's feeling that he's living in a universe that's been abandoned by God."
All this started to seem a bit over the edge. But then another panelist, D.A. Pennebaker - who directed an earlier Dylan documentary, the classic "Don't Look Back," and served as cameraman on "Eat the Document" - supplied the coup de theatre.
"Samuel Beckett, before he died, asked me for a script of `Don't Look Back,' " Pennebaker revealed. "Beckett never referred to Dylan by name. He always called him `The Poet.' He'd say, `Could you bring me the script of The Poet?' "
If Beckett, the 20th century's bleakest black-humor playwright, saw a soul mate in Dylan, maybe Rosenbaum was on to something.
Rosenbaum himself added a capper. He interviewed Dylan at great length in the late 1970s for Playboy. "At one point," he recalled, "Dylan kept harping on about how all the troubles of our world can be traced back to that Time magazine cover in the '60s that read, `Is God Dead?' Dylan told me, `What if you were God? What if you saw that cover? You'd be pissed off!' "
In "Invisible Republic," Marcus wrote that Dylan was shifting to a more elemental, individual, genuinely traditional concept of folk music than the social-protest songs of the early '60s - a folk music, as Dylan once described it, "based on myth and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that, which are nothing but mystery." It was a concept not incompatible with electric thunder.
The film and CD confirm the longstanding reports that much of the audience hated this new sound. The previous summer, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan had famously plugged in an electric guitar and unleashed howls of rage. (Pete Seeger tried to cut Dylan's power cords with an ax backstage.) Dylan himself was shaken by the catcalls and came back for a reprise strumming his acoustic guitar.
But by the time of the Manchester show, Marcus noted, the hoots and hollers had become "a game for Dylan." Pennebaker agreed: "His idea of putting on a show that stunned people - that's what made him happy." At an earlier concert in France, Dylan came onstage against the backdrop of a huge American flag - during the height of French anti-Americanism.
"Dylan was celebrating insolence, as something that artists at the top of their game sometimes radiate," Rosenbaum reflected. "He knew he was doing something absolutely extraordinary and he didn't care what people thought of it."
The degree of anger heard from the audience, on the second disc of the concert (on the first, he plays solo acoustic to reverential applause), is Munich-beer-hall frightening. At one point, Dylan tries to start a song but he's drowned out and disoriented by the angry masses, stomping their feet off the beat. People yell "Sellout!" and worse at every break.
Marcus posited an eyebrow-raising thesis. Dylan's music, he noted, came as no surprise to this audience. They had heard about Newport. "They knew exactly what they were going to be getting, and they were ready to fight it," he said.
"There were British folk-music clubs all over the UK," he went on, "and they were run by the Communist Party." Even more than in the States, where folkies tended to be sentimental leftists but not hardball communists, this faction of the audience saw Dylan as a traitor to the cause.