On The Front Lines
New to OldSpeak & Gadfly: Cultural Historian & Bob Dylan Biographer David Dalton Sheds Light on the Music Icon, His Impact on the Sixties & America
“America is a polyglot: a patchwork, a hodgepodge, a crazy quilt pieced together by our imagination. A work of fiction.”—David Dalton
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — New to OldSpeak, an online publication of The Rutherford Institute, and Gadfly Online is an insightful discussion with David Dalton, a cultural historian, screenwriter, novelist, and a founding editor of Rolling Stone, about his new book, Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. In this engaging interview conducted by John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, Dalton shares his insight into the real meaning behind Dylan’s music and image, what it meant for the social movements of the Sixties, and what it means for Americans today.
The interview, “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan: An Interview with David Dalton,” is available here and at www.gadflyonline.com.
In Who Is That Man? David Dalton paints a revealing portrait of Bob Dylan, ingeniously exposing Dylan’s chameleon-like persona. A primary catalyst in rock’s shifting sensibilities, Dylan is one of the most celebrated musical artists in American history; and few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined as he is. Yet Dylan remains something of an enigma. From Dylan’s emergence in the folk music scene through his religious conversion and to his present day performances, Dalton points out that Dylan is pretty much impossible to pin down, in the same way that the idea of America as a whole is impossible to pin down. “Dylan basically functioned as someone who lived between the fictions he created and the actual situations of his life. The problem with many Dylan biographies is you can’t just treat him like he did this and he did that. Dylan is a collective entity. The reason that Dylan is so confusing now is that Dylan is partly him, partly his creation and partly what we have made of him,” says Dalton. Dalton goes on to explain the way in which Americans view Bob Dylan is in many ways the same way Americans view themselves: a mixture of truth, legend, and wishful thinking. “America is a country that we basically invented. It is very different from Europe. We are always pretending to be something we are not. We have never really grown up. We are these teenagers who are perpetually acting out a fantasy. In fact, that fantasy and charlatanism is the basis of American culture. It is the basis of the music. Writing songs is totally make-believe charlatanism. Every time you get on stage, you are pretending to be someone. However, that is the brilliance of American culture and its profound belief in its own charlatanism.”
OldSpeak, the online journal of The Rutherford Institute, is dedicated to publishing interviews, articles and commentary on subjects often overlooked by the mainstream media in the areas of politics, art, culture, law and religion. Gadfly is an online magazine that strives to provide its readers with thoughtful coverage through current features on fresh faces, new sounds and trends-in-the-making, as well as retrospectives on the kingpins of pop culture, whether mainstream or underground. The Rutherford Institute is an international, nonprofit civil liberties organization committed to defending constitutional and human rights.
