“All I Really Want To Do”
Bob Dylan
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
1964, Columbia Records
This Exit: ”People get too famous too fast these days and it destroys them,” said Bob Dylan to Cameron Crowe in the exhaustive and generous liner note interview accompanying the release of the songwriting icon’s 1985 Biograph boxed-set. ”Some guys got it down—Leonard Cohen, Paul Brady, Lou Reed, secret heroes—John Prine, David Allen Coe, Tom Waits, I listen more to that kind of stuff than whatever is popular at the moment. It’s embarrassing to reveal that it took myself sixteen years to become exposed to Bob Dylan and his music. Of course, I’d heard his name, and it was as familiar and historically important as Abraham Lincoln’s, but I couldn’t say I knew any of his songs, and I hadn’t heard his music. It’s not the kind of thing my parents were listening to around the house, and it was the furthest thing from anything in which my peers were interested. But, like the story of millions of other self-discovering post-Kerouac youths since his emergence in the early 60’s, finding his music and persona represented the end of one part of my life and the development of the beginning of another—two sides of a white-picket fence in the suburbs.
The first one of Dylan’s songs that made me tilt my head toward the speakers like the RCA Victor dog was 1964’s “All I Really Want To Do.” Raised on American Pop Standards, Billy Joel, and the rest of the commercial FM radio hit-making machine, this song was simply the oddest, funniest, saddest, worst, and most brilliant composition I’d heard in my life up to that point. Because of the way my parents reacted to the acceptance speech Dylan delivered at the 1991 Grammy Awards after Jack Nicholson presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, I was curious to purchase (for five-dollars in a bargain bin at Nobody Beats The Wiz in Carle Place, Long Island) a Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits cassette. ”He’s drunk!” my parents howled disapprovingly at the television. ”Andrew,” they conceded, “you can’t understand how sad it is, a man who was so smart! Look at what drinking and drugs and the 60’s did to him!” I was enthralled, loved every word, and especially the long pauses. It was the first time I’d seen him in action, heard him speak, or heard him do anything, for that matter, and from my perspective there couldn’t have been a more perfect introduction. He was strange, pulsing at the podium with something I never yet witnessed from a person, and there began the study. Shortly after reading the liner notes of his Biograph boxed-set, which I owned just a few weeks later, I began rummaging through the bargain bins for Leonard Cohen, John Prine, David Allen Coe, Lou Reed, and Tom Waits cassettes, too—all of the “secret heroes.”
