"You’re Gonna Have To Serve Somebody"
by Addison Wiggin
“Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk,
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk,
Might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread,
May be sleeping on the floor, or sleepin' in a king-size bed...”
-Bob Dylan
“Who’s Bob Dylan?” my 17-year old daughter’s friends asked. The day after Thanksgiving her friends were having a party, but she wouldn’t be there. She was attending Dylan’s performance at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Who is Bob Dylan? “Just some ‘oldhead’,” another friend answered.
Lizzie knew who Robert Zimmerman was/is because she’d just taken a class on 1960s literature. We’re aware Dylan is better described to their generation as the “Taylor Swift for Boomers” than the free-wheelin’ polemic who wrote “Knockin’ on Heavens Door,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or “All Along the Watchtower”.
We suppose every generation needs a minstrel, a bard. We could leave a blank space here, you could write the name. Dylan at the symphony is a fair distance from the Newport Folk Festival, where he first plugged in his electric guitar in 1965. We had to lock up our phones in a pouch so the show wouldn’t be recorded. On this “Rough and Rowdy” tour, Dylan returned to his roots. Deep and soulful grooves, tight band… more rhythm and roots than jazz, rock or pop. And he sang, we think. He made noises with his mouth that sounded like the resigned moan of Americana.
My mother scoffs when she hears Dylan’s name. More than just his voice, she just doesn’t like the guy. He’s rumored to be cranky with his roadies, rude to hotel employees. No one can really figure out his politics. During the show, my middle son was lulled to sleep in the nosebleed seats where we sat.
Like his personality Bob Dylan’s music is divisive, often subversive. You either like it or you don’t. But it’s hard to ignore he’s been on the road in one way or another since before JFK was assassinated. He was and is still, somehow, a pioneer in the sound copied - and parodied - by a couple generations of distinctly American song-writers. The last time we saw him was at a stadium show he headlined with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York over a 4th of July weekend in the mid-1980s.
For all that time, Dylan was loosely associated with the 1960s counter-culture. “Mention the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s,” our friend Charles Hugh Smith wrote last month, “and the memory stored in popular culture is of drug-dazed, half-naked hippies dancing to rock music. There was a slice of that, to be sure, but there was much more that's largely been forgotten.” He continues: "The Counterculture was primarily a response to the meaningless debt-dependent consumerism that had already taken hold of our society and economy. The core values of the Counterculture Everyone Forgot were: 1. Learning how to make and repair things oneself; 2. Frugality; 3. Rejection of debt.”
Dylan’s lyrics carry more of the latter sentiment. For his lyrics, Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the only singer-songwriter to have done so. In iconic form he didn’t show up to receive the award in person, and refused to give the acceptance speech. And it was rumored he turned down the loot that goes along with the prize. A little bit of research proves all of those details to be false. He accepted the prize and the money, privately. He recorded a speech for posterity, but didn’t give it publicly.
On Friday in Baltimore, Dylan played mostly new songs from his 29th studio album, his latest. The band was tight. Then without any fanfare, Dylan began to moan the lyrics of “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” the only classic “hit” he performed that night. Some people say “you gotta serve” is pessimistic; a defeatist statement about the inevitability of servitude. John Lennon famously criticized the song, writing a parody titled “Serve Yourself”. “It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord,” Dylan reminds everyone. “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody!”
Ah well, we’ll get into the markets and politics this week, no worry… Just thought you’d get a kick out of one of America’s more enigmatic artists to get the week started. More to come…Dylan’s refrain rings. Can’t you hear it? You gotta serve somebody..."
P.S. Dylan is 82 years old - a year older than my wife’s mother. They have the same shuffling gait when they walk. During the show he mostly sat and crooned from a grand piano bench. But when he stood to give directions to the band, you’d think the earth itself had moved; the mostly sedate audience clapped and cheered more than during any of his songs. He began the Rough And Rowdy Ways Tour in 2021 at the tail end of pandemic hysteria. Regardless of what you think of him, his endurance and grit are a small evidence there remains gems, wisdom, in the lives of our elders.
Bob Dylan, "Gotta Serve Somebody"
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