Like a complete unknown

Oh. My. God. I'm so excited. The new biography of the Bard of Hibbing begins tonight, so everybody who's anybody will be watching. I mean it's on PBS, so you know it will be slightly off-center, not-for-everybody, just-a-little-bit-superior television. And it's made by legend-in-his-own-time Martin Scorsese, so it's not just TV, it's, it's, it's - ART.

Excuse me while I puke. Then repeat after me: the revolution will not be televised. While I try to keep an open mind, I would not expect great things from the same brains at PBS that deem Lyndon Johnson's fair-haired boy, Bill Moyers, to be too left-of-center for the impressionable minds of public television viewers. I'll listen to the songs, thank you very much.

Why am I (over)reacting this way to a legitimate documentary film about one of the more important songwriters of his generation? What particular buttons is it pushing in me? Enough about this Dylan guy, let's talk about ME.

Did anybody happen to see the article in the New York Times travel section a couple of weeks ago, a kind of travelogue down Highway 61 in Minnesota? It was cute. Written by an avowed fan who took great pains to explain that he is not a fanatical stalker-type who goes through his trash to be closer to his idol, it was pure NYT travel section in attitude. A Scorsese biopic can be expected to be pure Scorsese. I sound like I'm denouncing all secondary sources. Maybe I'm just skeptical of them.

By the way, did I ever tell you about my brush with fame? I was hitching through Indiana - or was it Kentucky - and I got a ride from an Army officer, a lifer - nice guy, very upright and proper - who claimed that his mother lived next-door to Mrs. Zimmerman in Hibbing. No shit. It was a special moment, you know? Only three degrees of separation, and I could have been sitting there talking to the legendary folk hero/poet himself! Dude!

Back in the heyday of the 33 1/3 RPM long-playing (LP) phonograph record, aka "album," better known in later history books as the Vinyl Age (let's see, Paleolithic, Neolithic, Iron, Papyrus, Greco-Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Reason, Industrial, Vinyl, etc.), there was a widespread attitude that real art couldn't be derivative and had to be original. A corrollary to this rule was that any schmuck who put out a greatest hits album was disqualified from being admired as a real artist, since only commercial music whores put out greatest hits albums to sell more records filled with their previously released material. How dare they stoop so low?

Then, of course, Dylan did it, then he did it again, so we had to revise our rules, because he set the standard of what originality in songwriting was all about, "the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond, straight into my heart," as Joan put it. My friends and I listened to those two double-albums hundreds of times, which led us to the albums they came from, where we listened to the lesser-known songs. So methinks I doth protest too much, for I was (and am) part of that mass audience that made Columbia, or whatever label it was, richer.

It reminds me of the time I saw Zappa in Marquette, Michigan. (This is turning into the Grumpy Old Man, "In my day we didn't have no iPod, we had a comb and piece of paper and we made our own music!") This was post-Mothers, I guess, so Frank was touring in a lot of smaller places where the crowds were tickled just to see the great Frank Zappa and any old band. The thing is, this was not any old band. A guy named Napoleon Murphy sang, played sax, and pretty much shared the stage with Zappa, to my amazement. When I enthused about this afterward, my iconoclastic friend Dazey said, "Sven, there are talented people all over the place."

But, but, but...Frank Zappa! Is more talented than most, sure. Which is no reason to construct a simulacrum of Zappa's work, or Dylan's, and treat the simulacrum as his work, then build an image of the simulacrum of the work, then build a simulacrum of the image...ad nauseum, which is, if you'll excused me, where I puke. Are you ready for the Bob Dylan Pavilion at DisneyWorld? Have you collected the complete set of Dylan action figures yet, soon you can get them free with any Happy Meal! How about the posthumous edition of Zappa's dark-roast favorites, available exclusively at Starbucks? Would you deprive your children of the cultural awareness that comes with participation in Dylan-mania?

There's a funny, uncomfortable scene in "Don't Look Back," an earlier film about Dylan, in which he is famously uncooperative with an interviewer from TIME magazine who asks him all the usual questions, the answers to which the readers of TIME want to read in the customary way that TIME delivers what it considers to be new and important every week. Long story short, Bob wasn't playing along.

Maybe he's friends with Scorsese, so he cooperated in this project due to a certain level of mutual understanding. Maybe their relationship made it possible to reveal things about Dylan's music that can be known only by watching this documentary. Maybe everything I've heard and interpreted about Dylan's life and work are misguided and just wrong. Maybe my life will be empty if I miss it.