As the children of the Sixties tried to crown Bob Dylan their poet laureate, he refused. “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know,” he said in 1965. Dylan was the rare celebrity who downplayed the worshipful titles offered him — poet, visionary, and especially spokesman for a generation. After his early 20s, he carried no banners, he led no movements, and he scoffed at all attempts to exaggerate his importance. He didn’t even play Woodstock, although he lived there. Dylan barely took notice of the upheaval around him, much of which was choreographed to a soundtrack he created, like a stone-faced silent-film star who strolls through mayhem with his nose in a book.
Dylan today turns 80, the most notable of the great rockers to do so (though John Lennon was born seven months earlier). Looking back, it’s amusing how completely he has defeated all efforts to define him, and it’s hilarious that, based on only a handful of songs in his huge catalog, Dylan accidentally created the template for the socially engaged progressive celebrity. Today a hack comic like Jimmy Kimmel offers more grandstanding about politics in a single week than Dylan did in his entire career. (But then, Dylan has talent.) While America was engulfed in civil rights, Dylan was immersed in the Civil War. When hippies surrounded his house in upstate New York begging for guidance, he booted them off, then moved to Malibu so he could be alone, abandoning his would-be flock.
