Bob Dylan: The (Anti)-Social Revolutionary

From unwitting civil rights figurehead to evangelical outcast, Robert Allen Zimmerman and his divergent ideologies have had a profound effect on contemporary popular culture. With a sound planted firmly between the folk music of late 1940s America and the birth of 50s rock-‘n’-roll, Bob Dylan (as Zimmerman would come to be known) embedded himself into the psyche of 1960s America…

Dylan was born in Duluth and later raised in Hibbing, both small and bitterly cold Minnesotan cities near the western shoreline of Lake Superior, largest of the 5 ‘great lakes’ of North America and largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. Notoriously vast and full of toxic rubbish, much like other more animated inhabitants of the US, the lakes were a huge factor in local industry. Dylan had a healthy Jewish upbringing, hinged upon the family values and solid moral base of the area’s tight-knit Jewish community. He was addicted to the radio and developed a healthy obsession with a number of bands that would mould his ambitions. He began writing poetry at the early age of 8, later learning to play the piano and the other instruments that would become a part of his legend: the guitar and harmonica. 

Zimmerman first started introducing himself as ‘Bob Dylan’ during his study at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He performed on the local folk-dominated ‘Dinkytown’ music circuit, honing his abilities as a performer and discovering an affinity with folk music rooted in the truth of its subject matter. Ever the poet, Dylan preferred this to the superficiality of rock ‘n’ roll, terming its repetitive catch-phrases and rhythms as un-’serious’. Despite this early preference, he would later go on to marry the two and redefine the parameters of popular music with the help of bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Dylan dropped out of college, through disinterest in academia as much as musical ambition, moving to New York to perform in its folk clubs and meet his folk-musician hero Woody Guthrie. The nature of his relationship with Guthrie seems to mark a turning point in Dylan’s attitude toward music, his childhood hero being terminally ill with Huntington’s disease at the time. This first real encounter with death, in particular associated with someone who’s life was reflective of his own ambition, stirred a sense of morality that would dominate the records that he produced in the early-60s. Another important contributive factor to his political awareness was girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, a high-minded activist whose parents had been political radicals even during the McCarthy era, which is a bit like being a racist footballer by today’s terms, only in this analogy the FA is replaced by a psychopathic xenophobe. Sepp Blatter, replace the FA with Sepp Blatter and you will understand the analogy.

In 1963, Dylan moved from reproducing classic blues and folk songs to creating original compositions. With a natural flare for lyricism, the vocal dimensions of a wasp humping sandpaper and a political relevance inspired by his hero Guthrie, Dylan became a prominent figure in the emerging civil rights movement. With his friend, contemporary and later lover, Joan Baez, he performed at many rallies and was involved in the 1963 ‘March on Washington’, an unprecedented rally into the capital involving over 200,000 protesters. This march set the scene for Martin Luther King’s famous speech: “I have a dream…”, and was a turning point in the protest for civil rights reform. By the end of 1963, however, Dylan felt caricatured by the movement and claimed a lack of interest, perhaps even disillusionment, with the politics that surrounded such civil unrest. The song ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ exemplifies this disillusionment, a thinly disguised rejection of the reputation and power that was conferred on him by being the voice of a generation.  His music began to take a different direction, enjoying a short-lived and mutually influential relationship with The Beatles and subsequently starting to write rock ‘n’ roll that would solidify his popularity in musical terms and rapidly shift the trend of pop music at the time. This set a standard of diversity and erratic ideology that his music would repeatedly reflect, his own dream having been confused and warped by the slavish attention the USA was paying to King’s.

The March on Washington, 1963

Throughout the late 60s and early 70s Dylan was a prolific yet unpredictable songwriter. After a profound reaction to a motorcycle crash and an exhaustive succession of shows on the back of commercial hits ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, Dylan stopped touring for 8 years. Curtailing his reported addiction to amphetamines and brief but vivid encounters with heroin, Dylan had 4 children with his secret wife Sara Lownds. It is understood that Dylan did not take well to the pressure of worldwide fame, particularly disliking the deep division between the members of his fan-base. Those who appreciated the folky, politically aware Dylan and those who enjoyed his popular rock ‘n’ roll were famously at odds and his concerts represented this division (one hour unplugged followed by an hour of intense electric guitar). Dylan didn’t think there was an issue with appreciating both sides of his musical vocabulary, the poetic and personal content of his lyricism remaining present on all his records, however it seems this led to a confused period in Dylan’s life and ambitions.

The most dramatic change in Dylan’s personal ideology, and as such the most dramatic change in the topic of his songwriting, was a late-70s phase of born-again Christianity. Apportioning himself redemption from an early adulthood in which he stood as an iconoclastic spearhead of civil revolution, Dylan’s rejection of this Christ-like role seemed to turn full circle. Releasing two albums of gospel music that alienated a massive proportion of his fanbase, Dylan finally wanted to preach to the world at the exact moment they decided to stop listening. Never fully renouncing his faith in Jesus, but quickly returning to secular songwriting, Dylan’s confusing patterns of thought are typical of the unwitting hero: someone who is thrust into great circumstances, does great things and yet doesn’t fully appreciate or understand his own motives. 

His songs, and the influence they had in questioning the social elite and dogmatic injustices of 20^th century America, far outweigh the sum of their parts. Perhaps his own well-publicised attempts to interpret a personal morality are reflective of what a society must do so as not to blindly follow a political regime or caricature, constantly reassess its moral values. In that sense, his rejection of such adulation thrust upon him by the civil rights movement neatly represents his suspicion of authority. Only someone possessed by the revolutionary spark of youth could be so subconsciously wise, his music condensed fragments of a particularly interesting slice of history. Still alive today and consistently reinventing his musical style, Dylan recently released the album ‘Tempest’ to critical acclaim, influencing another generation with his wit and invention. 

Lord Byron: The First Global Superstar

The archetypal contentious celebrity, Lord Byron can be seen as the birth of cultural iconicism. Renowned for his sexual, political and literary exploits throughout early 19th century Europe, Byron cultivated a type of notoriety that can be compared to the decadence of modern anti-heroes...

However, more than just a short-tempered alcoholic with bad hair and a natural gift, Byron participated in societal revolution at every level. A man full of clashing ideals and passions, the trajectory of his mood swings were chronicled from a young age. This manic depression was characterised by his diet, emaciating himself for weeks on end and then immediately returning to gluttony. His physical embodiment of the arrogant dandy created within his own poetry defined romanticism, dousing the intellectual institutions of the time with a vitality and passion reminiscent of the pop celebrity-fueled narcotic revolution of the 1960s. Rest assured, if the 19th century possessed a tabloid media as self-righteous and morbidly curious as the modern day, Byron would have been its poster boy.

Born to parents of class, yet parents who shared and perhaps seeded his later disregard for matrimony, George Byron’s upbringing was extremely privileged and rife with formative experiences. The spoilt yet precocious young man attained his peerage at the ripe old age of 10, inheriting it due to the death of his notoriously psychopathic great-uncle, ‘Wicked Lord’ Byron. His mother raised him alone, Byron’s father - John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron - visiting infrequently and solely to gain money to satisfy his enormous debts. Amusingly, it seems that nicknames were something of a Byronic tradition, his grandfather John “Foulweather Jack” Byron presumably a victim of ‘Crowded-House Syndrome’, the melancholy condition of always bringing the weather with you. 

This inconsistent parenting, a tempestuous relationship with his mother and early advances made on him by a scotch nanny, combined to create a man of extreme passion bridled by confused sexuality. Despite this, Byron’s formal education was first-class. Attending a grammar school in Aberdeen for the first 10 years of his tutelage, Byron was suspicious of its deeply entrenched religion. Having been born with a ‘club foot’, a malformed appendage that gave him a limp, and violent mood changes bordering on the psychotic, Byron considered himself a social outcast perhaps damned by the Devil himself. This oddity, present from an extremely young age, instilled him with a sense of unconformity that perhaps contributed to his later misdemeanors and celebrity. 

Enrolled subsequently at the renowned all-boys Harrow school in north-west London, Byron made great use of the opportunity to develop relationships, some extremely intimate, with the abundance of young men present during his board. These relationships differed to the extreme fixations that had bloomed with young women from a notoriously young age. Byron did not discriminate his affection on gender, and by most modern accounts he would be considered bisexual. (Though this is still a matter of much discussion.) A Victorian account would not be so generously defined or forgiving. Infact such acts of ‘indecency’ were punished in the extreme, with some offenders being publicly hanged.

A statue of Lord Byron in Athens, Greece

In virtue of this potential castigation, Byron’s life was a poem of persistent escapism. Inspired, and in some ways forced, by his hero Napoleon and the traditional ‘grand tour’, Byron jaunted through the relatively peaceful area of southern Europe. Making his way through the mediterranean, a region that generally had a liberal attitude to homosexuality at the time, Byron found himself deeply attracted to its culture and language, particularly the Armenians and their heritage.

After his two year euro-trip, Byron returned to England and found a publisher. Extracting the satire from some of his poetry to achieve a wider audience, he found himself famous overnight. Much like the modern rockstar whose celebrity is not confined to his field, or the modern actress whose private life is a matter of worldwide interest, Byron’s enigmatic persona and affairs with aristocratic women dominated his celebrity. One such affair, with Elizabeth, the countess of Oxford, ignited a comically short-lived passion for politics. Utilising his peerage, Byron made 3 witty, poignant yet ineffective speeches in the House of Lords. The first, and arguably the most memorable, was a speech defending constituents of his local nottinghamshire, known as Luddites, who destroyed machines that had replaced them in local fabric-working factories. 

Subsequent to the end of an ill-advised marriage and the birth of his (disputably) one and only child, Byron, now extremely famous worldwide, left England for a self-imposed exile that lasted until his death. In this final period of his tragically short life, Byron mainly inhabited Switzerland, Italy and his beloved Greece. Befriending several poets and visionaries that would become his counterparts in the romantic movement, including Mary Shelley (who famously conceived of Frankenstein at Byron’s estate by Lake Geneva), Byron also went on to have even more affairs with several nubile women of high repute. These adventures solidified and perpetuated his legend, contributing to his global celebrity. (Arguably the first of its kind.)

Byron, always one for brevity, reignited his political career for the role of revolutionary hero in the year preceding his death. Greece at the time was a part of the Ottoman empire, dominated by a turkish ruling class and possessed by a mutual class loathing. Having been a patron of Greek hospitality for a great length of time either side of returning to England, Byron believed in their right to independence and brought a great deal of publicity to their cause. He went on to fund the renovation of the Greek naval fleet, donating a fortune that by today’s terms would be the sort of fiscal stimulus needed to save the greek ship. Sadly, Byron’s tenure as the figurehead of Greek resistance came to a tragically early end, developing sepsis from excessive bloodletting after a particularly bad cold. It seems only fitting that Byron’s end was met due to excess, the impact of his notoriety and early death being a precursor to the byronic condition. Such is the morbid and capricious nature of human interest, a dignified end cannot be reserved for those who seek the attention and approval of all.

Nikola Tesla: The Ultimate Visionary

A man who registered over 250 patents across a tremendous breadth of fields, Nikola Tesla was of the inventive breed, so mentally attuned with nature that its infinite number of uses seemed to come to him one-by-one, as if broadcasted wirelessly by extra-terrestrial beings. Or so he would have you believe…

Nikola Tesla was born in a rural Croatian village named Smiljan, which in the 19^th century was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the sort of empire that was passed down through monarchic generations like a particularly bad batch of genetic defects, a bad tempered eastern contingent the equivalent of a gammy leg or male pattern baldness. Aside from the fact his birthplace sounds like a brand of eastern European cottage cheese, Tesla had a fairly healthy upbringing; he had a Serbian-orthodox Priest as a father and an illiterate mother, who despite her limitations could recite all manner of epic poems, the scale of which would make the average British schoolchild squeal in confused acronyms. (“LOL, WTF?”)1

A diet of brain exercises from his father and a healthy dose of maternal nurture meant the prodigious Tesla flourished from the very beginning of his existence. Sadly, the tragic death of his brother at a very young age would, perhaps more than any of his other formative experiences, go on to have a huge impact on his ambitions. Indeed in his autobiography, Tesla admits that he considered his talents to be inferior to those of his sibling, feeling himself to be a constant disappointment to his parents and a reminder to them of their loss. Their grief would perhaps be the world’s gain, as this sense of loss and self-deprecation seemed to motivate the young Tesla into becoming one of the greatest thinkers the world has ever seen.

The guy was a savant; he could conceive vastly complicated concepts within his mind that even the most advanced thinkers of his time could not make sense of on paper. He also possessed a name so fundamentally badass that it has become synonymous with the fields of study he engaged in. His list of inventions and early designs included the X-Ray, the radio, wireless communication, revolutionary electrical engines, the laser beam and the Tesla coil. (Still used extensively by modern cinema and weaponised by the Soviet Union to comedic effect.) Tesla even designed a speculative death-ray that was said to be able to ‘make 10,000 enemy airplanes drop from the sky within a range of 200 miles’.2 While this might seem meagre by the standard of today’s phallic missiles of nuclear doom, it was considered monstrous at the time. 

Above all, Tesla considered himself to be a thinker, spending most of his time considering these postulations in his head rather than drawing them out. Subsequently, the death ray and its specifications have never materialised, Tesla himself admitting that the blueprints existed only in his mind. Similarly, Tesla’s disagreement with the theory of relativity led him to work on his own theory of space and time that, despite apparently being ‘fully realised’, had never been written down. Tesla also believed that he had received messages from supernatural beings through his early experiments with wireless communication, which many of his peers at the time would politely term ‘poppycock’.3

Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory

It is this mythology that dominates the legend of Tesla, his links to the supernatural tending to encroach on descriptions of his genius. This is a complete injustice. Tesla was a man so in touch with the actual physical composition of the universe that his inventions, despite seeming other-worldly, are essentially elegant manifestations of his ability to harness the earth’s raw potential. It’s just a shame that he didn’t invest in some quality stationary. If he had done, perhaps we might be a few generations further on in our attempts to modernise energy generation and develop our theories of space and time. It’s hard to begrudge the man though. For all we know his ideas may have been tragically awful; a death ray that did nothing but turn human hair a dark shade of auburn; a space-time theory at the epicentre of which is the doctrine that gravity is actually just the quantitative measure of how serious a situation is, and that if we were a little less serious about our problems then they would just float away; or perhaps just a mis-understood recipe for pistachio ice cream.

In all likelihood, though, the ideas that never surfaced were probably as brilliant and epoch-defining as the inventions that he did bother to write down. One such example of his ineffable genius is the invention that brought him the most commercial success and peer acclaim, the alternating current electrical generator. AC, as it is commonly known, is a more efficient and powerful method of transporting and providing electricity in a domestic setting than the predominant DC (direct current) of the time, discovered and provided (expensively) by Thomas Edison. Tesla originally conceived of the rotating magnetic field, essential to his AC inductor engine, in the city park of Budapest, drawing his design in nearby sand with a stick after a missing fragment of his theory rose to the surface of his consciousness. Such moments of crisp revelation are recurrent in Tesla’s inventive life and it neatly portrays his method: that as long as all the principles are there and you have an understanding of the basic laws and permutations of nature, more complicated and useful compositions of these principles will occur to you. 

So rarely do you find a man like Tesla, who was so gifted in a particular field yet had so many more intriguing facets to his personality. Ironically, the man who many considered to be so future-orientated was terrible with his money. Suffering from a gambling addiction during his time at university that left him and his family bankrupt, he later went on to waste vast amounts of investor money on spurious projects and bad financial planning. He died penniless, despite the sale of his most valuable patents. Many conspiracy theorists have also been obsessed with the scale and origin of Tesla’s genius. One such author and ‘retired military intelligence operative’, ‘Commander X’, claimed that Tesla was sent to Earth on a shuttle from Venus. No explanation follows as to why Tesla was humanoid and only vague references to time-travel and immortality follow. What more can you expect from an author with a pseudonym like that? He sounds like a Scooby-Do villain.4

All things considered, Tesla was such that he will never be recreated, a unique phenomenon in his own right. It is with great irony that devices such as the television, facilitated by inventions he himself created, are now the curse of young minds that could potentially be as devoted and expansive as Tesla’s. If he were still alive today, upon observing all this over-stimulation, the barrage of useless information that people ingest on a ritual basis, I think he would both be horrified and fascinated by our abuse of the great opportunities that these inventions give us. With that in mind, I consider Tesla to be the most appropriate person I could hope to biograph as I begin this periodical tribute to interesting people, his life being a myriad of supreme intellect and complete calamity. I hope his story, and every other I will go on to provide, inspires you to become as interesting as you can possibly be.

1: Nikola Tesla, My Inventions 2: ‘Death Ray’ for Planes, New York Times 22 Sept. 1940 

3: http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm 4: Commander X, Nikola Tesla: Free Energy and the White Dove