Bob Dylan and the ageing of the West

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006 by Michael Karwowski

THE West is getting older fast, the result of fewer babies and longer life. Today, life expectancy throughout the Western world is around 80 years, compared to less than 50 at the beginning of the last century.

In the UK, the percentage of the population of pensionable age increased from 13 per cent in 1971 to 16 per cent, or almost one-in-six, in 2005, roughly equivalent to the rise throughout the European Union as a whole. Aptly named the Old World, the proportion of the EU's population aged over 65 will accelerate to almost one-in-three by 2050.

In the US, the proportion of the population aged over 65 rose from 9 per cent in 1967 to 12.3 per cent, or almost one-in-eight, in 2006. The number of over-65-year-old Americans is projected to rise further to one-in-five by 2030.

Far from fading away gently, however, many of today's old could hardly be characterised in terms of that patronising cliche of 'pipe and slippers'. Most of them don't smoke, for a start, and, as for slippers, walking boots might be more appropriate, since travelling around the world or exploring new experiences seems to be their favourite occupation.

Nowhere is this new interpretation of the old truer than with the 1960s rock aristocracy, those who have survived a life of excess, that is. They might have been the original pathfinders in establishing the 'cult of youth' in their own youth, but now, as they reach their sixties, they are proving that age is no bar to creativity. Pete Townshend, for instance, songwriter and lead guitarist of The Who, who penned the line 'Hope I die before I get old' in that quintessential '60s pop song, My Generation, recently wrote and recorded the band's first new album in 25 years, which includes a 10-song mini-rock-opera!

As for Bob Dylan, so-called leader of the alternative youth culture of the 1960s, who celebrated his 65th birthday this year, it would not be stretching the facts to say that he is enjoying a truly amazing creative--and popular--renaissance that seemed unlikely throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

A million-selling triple-Grammy-award-winning album, Time Out of Mind, in 1997 was followed by an Oscar-winning song, Things Have Changed, in 2000 and then another album, Love and Theft, released on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, which announced a completely new musical direction from this master of metamorphosis.

As if all this wasn't enough, Dylan then published the critically-acclaimed first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, in 2004, while the iconic film director Martin Scorsese, with Dylan's participation, made a biographical documentary, No Direction Home, which became the first-ever simultaneous broadcast, in September 2005, between two major public broadcasters, the BBC and PBS in America, which co-funded the film. Dylan then followed this up in 2006 with Modern Times, which promptly became his first US No1 album in thirty years--lots of firsts there for an old man who not long ago was seen as being on his last legs!

In such circumstances, Dylan's comment in the song Floater (Too Much To Ask) on Love and Theft comes as something of an understatement:

    The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
    On bad terms with the younger men
    But old, young, age don't carry weight
    It doesn't matter in the end.

Indeed, just as the '60s generation thought they were the first to create the 'generation gap' with their elders, so are they now in a perfect position to bridge that gap with the young of today as, once young, they are now old, even if still young at heart. More importantly, however, infinitely more importantly, they--and Bob Dylan in particular--are proving that genius, or the receipt of divine inspiration, bears no relationship to age. As Dylan writes, with studied irony, to his muse in Spirit on the Water on Modern Times:

    You think I'm over the hill
    You think I'm past my prime
    Let me see what you got
    We can have a whopping good time

Again, on the same album, in Ain't Talkin', we have:

    The fire gone out but the light is never dying
    Who says I can't get heavenly aid

--a profoundly inspiring notion that echoes English singer-songwriter David Gray's aptly-named Silver Lining on 1998's White Ladder album with its great line:

    Know that the light don't sleep.

But, and here's the beauty of pensioner power, whereas Dylan's first great period of creativity in the 1960s occurred in the midst of an insane rock celebrity turmoil that almost destroyed him when he was still only in his twenties, a lifetime's experience has now given him the relaxed perspective of distance in which he retains control while the truth he expounds in his songs is more considered and clear.

His three outstanding albums of the 1960s, after all, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde were all written and released in little over a year. The three most recent albums, on the other hand, were produced at a more leisurely pace over almost ten years.