Culture Vultures: Like a Complete Unknown

...Some evidence of the different standards that apply in this area can be gauged by the reaction of the BBC's American rock commentator, Paul Gambaccini, to the death of the original rock'n'roller, Bill Haley, in 1981...

...By then, things were going so swimmingly that Bill's son wound up marrying Mandy's mother...

...the news must have been sobering...

...To his credit, Dylan never fell for the burgeoning cottage industry of Dylanology...

...He came of age with the rise of rock criticism and the invention of the gatefold sleeve for long-playing albums: if you couldn't make out the words from the record, you could always read them in print and study them in college...

...Dylan has quietly gotten rich from cover versions by Manfred Mann and Olivia Newton-John...

...A while back, another Stone, Bill Wyman, began dating a youthful London nightclub habituee called Mandy Smith, then 13, and eventually married her...

...I n Britain recently, there has been a theory that stand-up comedy is "the new rock 'n' roll"—i.e., for young people, it has the cachet rock once had...

...If you're wondering "How exactly is histoplasmosis spread...

...Despite the cunning generational repositioning of having his son become his father-in-law, Bill's marriage to Mandy seemed only to accelerate the aging process: she became anorexic, and every pound she lost seemed to add another deep crevice to the road-map of his face...

...42 July 1997 • The American Spectator rights, should have the same youthful glow as John Major...

...But no disavowals could turn the tide, even though, far from his cry that the times they are a-changin', he seems to yearn for places where the times aremain the same...

...He's older than that now...

...While Sinatra had inherited Bogart's role as leader of the Rat Pack, Dylan seemed to have inherited the Walter Huston role in Treasure of the Sierra Madre — a crazy, ravaged old geezer in rags, gibbering incomprehensibly...

...I once rode in an elevator with Keith Richards and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, and it was terrifying...

...Dylan, at a loose end one afternoon, decided to take him up on it and got a taxi-driver to take him to Crouch End Hill...

...Twenty minutes later, Dave—the plumber, not the rock star — returned and asked the missus whether there were any messages...

...As he himself put it: Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand...

...college courses because you certainly can't hear any of 'em when you see him in concert...

...In that time, the "voice of disaffected youth," the "spokesman for his generation," has been accused of treachery on several44 So David Crosby looks like Bing Crosby's grandfather, and Jerry Garcia like Methuselah's brother...

...In 1969, the subject came up in Rolling Stone: 0: There's a cat named Allen Weberman who writes in the East Village Other...

...If you're old enough to remember when Bob Dylan wasn't, it's a jolt...

...In other words: the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

...There are worse ways to end up than a quiet life in the suburbs, dispensing adviceover the fence to the next-door neighbor on how to keep your lawn free of grass clippings ("The answer, my friend, is mowing in the wind...

...Inc., recorded by Columbia, and licensed for Canadian bank commercials...

...It doesn't help that rock cameramen like to film from below, so they can get close-ups of the stars' fingers grinding their axes: in Dylan's case, it just made him look like a stringy, leathery, Soo-year-old rooster tottering about in some abandoned Appalachian barnyard...

...But Dylan relieved him and the rest of New York's pop-culture intelligentsia from a tiresome trip south of the Mason-Dixon line to find out...

...As Dylan sang, the octogenarian Sinatra sat stunned, as if he'd suddenly had a vision of how he himself might look in another six decades, if he didn't ease up on the late nights...

...We have become used to the casual betrayals of rock idealism: "Money doesn't talk, it swears," wrote Dylan...

...It's the perfect protest song, even if you're never entirely clear what it's actually protesting against...

...In an otherwise youth-obsessed society, sixties rock stars are the only old-timers left...

...Today, his rude beauty is intact, no matter that he lives in Malibu, where field hands are thin on the ground, and that his are the first "folk songs" to be published by Warner Bros...

...Tambourine Man, play some taps for me...

...Many of us were still reeling from his appearance eighteen months ago on ABC's 8oth birthday tribute to Sinatra...

...As his presence on that Sinatra tribute showed, he's more relaxed about the contradictions of celebrity than his acolytes are...

...In America a few years ago, Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics, said to Dylan that the next time he was in London he should drop by his recording studio in Crouch End...

...Yet Dylan, unless he's been smoking those bat droppings, isn't OD'ing on excess...

...His fellow fiftysomething, David Bowie, has just refinanced his career by going to Wall Street and issuing bonds in himself and his back catalog...

...So David Crosby looks like Bing Crosby's grandfather, and Jerry Garcia like Methuselah's older brother...

...According to Dr...

...You know him...

...but, unlike corporate lawyers or shipping magnates, they rarely benefit from any rejuvenating properties...

...We shouldn't be sad, said Paul, because Bill had had a good life and he'd died peacefully of old age...

...And the possibilities were endless: You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat Ain't it hard when you discover that He really wasn't where it's at...

...Peter Cohn, chief of cardiology for University Hospital at Stony Brook, that's a fungal infection which in rare cases can lead to potentially fatal swelling in the pericardial sac...

...0 The American Spectator • July 1997 43 Dylan knocked at the front door and asked the woman who answered if Dave was in...

...Like many rich, powerful, older men, rock stars date young chicks...

...The handful of rock icons who made it through the sixties without choking to death on their own vomit in foreign hotel rooms have found in the nineties their earlier excesses catching up with them...

...MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic ofthe Spectator of London...

...As it happened, her husband was called Dave, so she said, "No, he's out on a call at the moment...

...His hero Woody Guthrie, an authentic penniless Okie, despised such repulsive capitalist concepts as copyright and so disdained royalties...

...Pop stars seem to have some unique genetic resistance to the plastic surgeon's knife, and those foolish enough to defy this rule only wind up proving it: I mean, would you hire Michael Jackson's cosmeticist...

...Actually, Ziggy Stardust looks pretty good at the moment...

...At ground level, they were okay—like Strom Thurmonds in Ann Miller's wigs—but they seemed to age a decade every floor until by the end you'd have needed a paleontologist to date them with any reliability...

...Well, I don't like to criticize what I can't understand, but how ironic that rock 'n' roll, which almost single-handedly created the ludicrous generational snobbery that disfigures American culture, should now be the oldest game in town...

...it's caused by fungal spores which invade the lungs through airborne bird and bat droppings...

...I hadn't heard this "anthem of a generation" in years but, amazingly, I knew every word, despite not fully understanding how they fit together: You said you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realize He's not selling any alibis...

...Thirty years later, he was appearing in London at something called the Mastercard Monsters of Music Festival...

...he's merely the victim of a fluke infection...

...fronts, but his histoplasmosis may be the most profound of all...

...So, for the grizzled old hippies, folkies, peaceniks, and Dylanologists who'd spent the sixties bellowing along with "How does it FEEEEEEL...

...A: Is this the guy that tears up all my songs...

...No," she said, "but Bob Dylan's in the front room having a cup of tea...

...Indeed, President Clinton, apparently concemed about "heroin chic," need only propose a law that every ad featuring an emaciated teenage wraith be followed by a close-up of David Crosby or Jerry Garcia: substance abuse unchic in a nutshell...

...Oh, very droll," he said...

...It's a sweet image, compounded by the rumor a couple of years later that Dylan had been seen with local estate agents looking for a house in the area —I'm not sure what the precise American equivalent of Crouch End is, but think Scarsdale or any cul-de-sac in Westchester County and it's close enough...

...I don't mean "date" in the romantic sense, of course...

...So too is Bob Dylan, who, by Hey, Mr...

...To Robert Shelton of the New York Times, Dylan bore "the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch...

...Indeed, they're older than any old people ever seen before...

...With the bewildering array of various permutations of Crouch, End, and Hill, the cabbie accidentally dropped him off at the right number but in an adjoining road...

...Maybe, as he contemplates a long and uncertain health treatment, it has even more appeal...

...When my accountant suggested I might try putting my money in a CD, I was so square I thought he meant a bank account...

...But somehow Dylan has managed to retain his purity in the same way he's retained his meticulously unkempt garb...

...As he wrote in one of his most famous couplets, "Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now...

...The guy was 56...

...Shelton had no very clear idea of whether the average Southern field hand actually had a rude beauty or, come to that, a porch...

...Bob said he'd wait...

...Heavy, man...

...I mean, a fellow like that would be much better off writing about Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky...

...I don't know about that, but on my own unscientific survey I'd say that, for young people, rock 'n' roll is the new golf: it's something their parents do at weekends in embarrassing leisure wear...

...are Dylan's doctors, treating him in New York for histoplasmosis...

...I bet he really does a good job if he could find something to do, but it's too bad it's just my songs, 'cause I don't really know if there's enough material in my songs to sustain someone who is really out to do a big job...

...He calls himself the world's leading Dylanologist...

...These days, the voice is pretty much shot—he can't seem to carry a tune, even his own, and it's a good thing you can study his lyrics in Eng...

...At the end of May, Bob Dylan's publicist announced the cancellation of the singer/songwriter's European tour on health grounds: these days, it seems the only people demanding to know "How does it FEEEEEEL...

...In that sense, like so many of his career moves, it's quintessentially Dylanesque: from Robert Allan Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, from acoustic to electric, from Jew to Christian—and now from the voice of the new folk boom to the voice of •, the old folks' home, from the gloomy prognosis of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" to the certain knowledge that a heart pain's a-gonna call...