The title of Heathcote Williams’s memoir, Of Dylan Thomas and his Deaths, reflects the author’s belief that the great Welsh poet died not once but twice. He writes, “It can be said that he was to suffer no less than two deaths at American hands.” The first death, contrary to the accepted claim that he died of a drinking bout, refers to his “mistreatment with morphine by an incompetent and flamboyant doctor” in New York, who misdiagnosed his condition and “brought on the coma from which he would never recover.” The second death came in the form of cultural theft when a famous imposter — namely Bob Dylan — stole his identity by exploiting his name, then denied it, and lied about it. “Less than a decade after his death,” Williams writes, the poet’s identity “was eerily pilfered so that the Dylan Thomas that everyone had come to know, and love pre-1953 would be eclipsed by his name being borrowed or, more properly, stolen.”
Heathcote Williams
Williams is thoroughly familiar with the ways of show business, having been both a film actor and screenwriter. “[O]bviously anyone in the world of entertainment is at liberty to call themselves whatever they wish,” he writes. “Penny Rimbaud of Crass and the Shakespeares Sister, for example, have hardly dented the significance of either the French poet or of the English bard. But Bob Dylan’s case is perhaps different, if only because helping himself to Dylan’s name and to something of his cachet has clearly sat so uneasily with the thief himself over the subsequent decades.”
There are plenty of meaty reasons for Williams’s contempt for the world-famous performer. He quotes Joni Mitchell, who put it this way: “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” Folksinger Tom Hardin was even more succinct. Williams writes that “Bob Dylan’s unrestrained kleptomania” would prompt Hardin to say: “He’s a cold motherfucker, man.”
Williams also cites Paul Simon’s satirical jibe in the song “A Simple Desultory Phillippic …”: “I knew a man, his brain so small / He couldn’t think of nothing at all / He’s not the same as you and me / He doesn’t dig poetry. He’s so unhip that / When you say Dylan, he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas / Whoever he was / The man ain’t got no culture / But it’s alright, ma / Everybody must get stoned.”
But the meatiest reason involves a larger issue than the “elements of Bob Dylan’s character that would make Dylan Thomas, were he alive, squirm with righteous revulsion.” It is precisely this: “Unlike Dylan Thomas who never once sold out — who never ‘shilled’ for anyone — his deadly Doppelganger would prove as keen as mustard to have his voice serve any and every American corporation.”
Williams writes that when Bob Dylan “happily does what Dylan Thomas never did, and that is to sell out to any and every commercial outfit and does so on an industrial scale, it is perhaps tempting to recall Norman Mailer’s harsh verdict on him: ‘If [Bob] Dylan’s a poet, I’m a basketball player.” Williams adds:
Dylan Thomas once said wistfully but cheerfully that he’d never earned enough from poetry “to feed a goldfinch,” and he hadn’t. He left just under a hundred pounds upon his death. The fake Dylan has been voraciously, all-consumingly commercial.
Bob Dylan would sing “I Want You” for a commercial for Chobani yogurt; he would sing “Love Sick” for a lingerie company, Victoria’s Secret; he’d appear in an ad for the Cadillac Escalade and he’d be shown driving Cadillac’s gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle as he strums, and he’d sing what had been, once upon a time, his generational protest song, “Times They Are A’Changin’” whilst the advertising company that had hired him projected seductive images designed to convey the virtues of the Bank of Montreal.
In a “Super Bowl Sunday” TV ad seen by more than 100 million American viewers Bob Dylan rattled an extraordinary concoction of jingoistic rhetoric to promote Chrysler, a company noted for building the M1 Abrams tanks that were used during the Vietnam War. “So let Germany brew your beer,” he tells the world. “Let Switzerland make your watch. Let Asia assemble your phone. We will build your car.” With stunningly meaningless gravitas, he concludes: “Is there anything more American than America?”
Or more shameless than His Bobness?
It’s nice to finally see someone writing in some detail about Bob Dylan’s inauthenticity – all that fake good ol’ boy singing and postured existential loneliness and protest that created his net worth of $180 million dollars. His work also illustrates how capitalism appropriates, markets, and ultimately disempowers protest. Culture is by nature inherently local. It inevitably becomes inauthentic when redesigned and repackaged as a mass media product.
Another interesting example is Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, one of America’s most famous country-western singers, who was in reality a Jewish guy from Brooklyn named Elliot Adnopoz. Ramblin’ Jack mastered the songs and guitar style of Woody Guthrie and had a large influence on Bob Dylan. Ramblin’ Jack in turn covered a lot of Dylan songs. He sometimes even referred to Dylan as his “son.”
All that said, there’s something about the permeability of ethnic walls in America that I really like. What is more American than a Jewish fellow from Brooklyn becoming a country-western singer? I also think of another Jewish musician from Brooklyn, Aaron Copland, who wrote the definitive works of classical music’s Americana like “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo,” and “Appalachian Spring.” Since we do not know who we are, or do not want to know, we settle for highly idealized visions of our identity that are essentially fantasies.
Woody Guthrie grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, but his family wasn’t particularly rural – at least in the sense that they weren’t farmers. His father was a politician, businessman, and according to Woody, a member of the Klan. He even participated in a lynching. Woody took up the guitar and learned authentic American folk songs, but by the late 30s, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial “hillbilly” music – yet again a bowdlerization of American folk music.
Through these market forces, the ethos of the Dust Bowl and the New Deal eventually became an artifice embodied in TV shows like the “Beverly Hill Billies.” Woody’s 1937 song, “Dust Bowl Blues” sounds almost like a precursor to the show’s theme song. In a subtle way, rural people are put down by songs like these. Eventually rural Americans accepted these demeaning images of themselves as stupid, poor, uneducated hicks. Listen to Woody’s song here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2z5F11ZLi0
In American popular culture, inauthenticity has mirrored itself so many times that the original sources are all but forgotten. Fakery is so deeply embedded in our image of ourselves that one has to be a faker to be authentically American. Since we no longer have any idea of who we are, we make a Grand Ole Opry of it with the hope that we can at least pretend to be something.
Looks like I put up the wrong URL for Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Blues” It should be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkAxuqrVNBM
The other URL is of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, which is also worth a listen.
Nonsense! Is there any educated human being anywhere who doesn’t know the difference between the two Dylans, who can’t instantly distinguish their works? I remember seeing Williams’ “AC/DC” many years ago at BAM. It was electrifying theater, but bogus cultural history.
The point of the essay seems to be that they are so easily distinguishable: “Unlike Dylan Thomas who never once sold out — who never ‘shilled’ for anyone — his deadly Doppelganger would prove as keen as mustard to have his voice serve any and every American corporation.”
This long list of famous pop songs used for commercials pretty much shows that being a well-known pop star and part of the corporatocracy are the same thing:
http://www.songfacts.com/category-songs_used_in_commercials.php