DYLAN one more shot at glory

Gavin Martin witnesses Bob reborn on his recent American tour

Twenty years ago when Bob Dylan appeared on Live Aid – sweaty and in puffy disarray - he seemed to be heading the way of Elvis, a rock’n’roll king bound for an early grave.

But in 2005, the year of his 64th birthday, Dylan’s profile and reputation is riding higher than at any time since the 1960s.

True – even through the years of no albums, writer’s block and drunken drugged-up dissolution Dylan always kept on keeping on, like a bird that flew. He was out on the road like Kerouac, following the Lost Highway of Hank Williams, plotting the course of the eternal troubadour.

But in the autumn of his years something else is at work. From the merchandise on sale in the foyer of his shows, to his ever active website, the Dylan industry is rampant. And the man at its centre now seems keen to keep himself and his art in the public eye.

With the movie Masked And Anonymous he showed his facility as a scriptwriter, musing over the place of an artist in today’s media circus. It made Neil Young’s Greendale, which attempted to tackle similar preoccupations, look risible and showed that as a film maker Dylan had outgrown the much derided 1978 opus Renaldo And Clara.

The first instalment in his proposed three-part memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, was …

by Gavin Martin
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