Imagine your fans hate you.

Then imagine that as well as fans you also have fanatics. The fanatics think the fans are heretics and think you can do no wrong. Only the fanatics get it. Only they understand.

The fanatics know you’re special. More special than perhaps even you realise. And so they expect the world from you. Which you deliver, right up until the time that you don’t. You do something they don’t like.

Then they hate you.

Apart, that is, from the select few who get it. They totally understand that this was who you always were.

And so it begins again.

This is what it’s like to be Bob Dylan. A whirlpool of expectation and disappointment.

That’s what it was like when he went electric. When he went country. When he wore eyeliner. When he was born again. When he lost it. When he got it back. When he didn’t speak at the gig. When he did a Christmas album. When he covered Sinatra.

Basically, every two or three years, for more than half a century, that’s what it’s like to be Bob Dylan. Some people disappointed by you changing all the time, others convincing themselves they know the ‘real’ you.

Dylan couldn’t win and so he gave up trying.

The weight of opinion around him is overwhelming. Worse is the deification; ‘Dylanology’ self-servingly elevated to the academic — the idea that it all has to mean something. The bootlegs, the books, the reminiscences.

God, the importance, the unimpeachable significance of it all.

It’s tempting, mostly because of the baby boom smugs from whom we inherit this received wisdom, to dismiss the whole parade. To label it all bullshit. After all, he did, He saw through it all. Ridiculed it. Saw its absurdity and ran a mile. Every two or three years.

And have you seen No Direction Home? There’s a press conference scene that shows you exactly why.

It’s late 65. The man who wrote Masters Of War and The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll is long gone. In his place is a detached 24 year old. Alternately shy, smirking, bemused, evasive, and contrary. But always stoned. It’s no longer institutions he uses his songs to accuse, but a second person ‘you’ — both vaguer and more specific than anything from the protest years. Positively 4th Street and Like A Rolling Stone each drip with bitterness, but their unnamed targets feel small compared to the scale of the skewering they receive.

A press conference with Bob Dylan should offer up a lot to talk about. Instead, a very earnest man wants to know the significance (God, that word again) of the Triumph motorcycle. The icon in question appears on Dylan’s T-shirt, on the cover of the new album. It’s not even about the songs. Dylan draws a distracting pack of cigarettes from his pocket to see whether it will help him remember what’s on this cover.

Er, i dunno, i never really thought about it, he says.

The pack of cigarettes doesn’t work. It doesn’t put our earnest friend off either. He has his hero’s attention and wants to make it clear that he gets Dylan very, very much.

It’s scary. Here’s what he says, and what he looks like when he says it:

See those eyes? That obsession? That sense of expectancy?

That’s what Dylan’s been facing down his whole career.

I don’t pretend to ‘get’ Dylan. I don’t claim to know what it all means. I’ve not sure I’ve ever really wanted to. What I love is the words themselves. The idiosyncratic imagery, and the allusions I don’t need to understand. The way he puts them together and they way they pour themselves around the rhythm. The cadence, the rhyme, his flow — as good as Rakim.

Everyone has their favourite Dylan. The one I love most is the one I encountered first. The Dylan facing down that crazy-eyed beatnik, the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited. The cuban-heeled poet on speed. The stoned-and-sunglasses pied-piper of words, his stories a riotous crash of history and myth. A playful and impressionistic Dylan, who let literature, advertising, poetry, and cinema ricochet around a world of his own making, a world that straddled high and low culture, the traditional and the modern. Forget the overwhelming seriousness of the Dylanologists, this was a Bob Dylan that was having fun.

If Dylan’s music went electric in 1965, so too did his words.

Tombstone Blues was the one that grabbed me. I started out wondering what it all meant, this maelstrom of crashing blues adorned with strange combinations of people doing strange things. Why is Momma in the factory without shoes? Why is Daddy in the alley looking for food? Why is Dylan in the kitchen (or in trouble, depending on which chorus you grab on to)? And what are the tombstone blues anyway? And what does all this have to do with the absurd cast of characters popping up in every other line?

I imagined some kind of lawless wild west. An mythical edgeland where America’s famous and infamous go to live out their days. Some sort of surreal banishment to the frontier, perhaps.

But at some point I realised — I don’t know, and I don’t care. It just sounds magnificent. Even though —or perhaps because — nothing feels remotely significant. It simply revels in its own absurdity. Like Maggie’s Farm and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream and Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat, the words are an end in themselves. The world is more joyous simply for them having been put together. It’s about the meter, not the meaning.

A surreal series of vignettes connects a random roll call of fallen angels and weirdos: the historical bride, Jezebel the nun, Jack The Ripper, the medicine man, Paul Revere, Belle Star, the King of the Philistines, Gyspy Davy and his faithful slave Pedro, Galileo, Cecil B DeMille. Dylan jump-cuts from one bizarre scene to the next. Your head spins in a barrage of surreal imagery.

John the Baptist after torturing a thief,
looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief

Ma rainey And Beethoven once unwrapped a bed roll

The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Put jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle.

The lines sound like results of a game of Exquisite Corpse, the writing method invented by the Surrealists where players take turns to invent randomised prose — essentially an intellectualised version of Consequences. On Tombstone Blues the juxtapositions tumble out incessantly, hilariously. But the clauses never jar. The cadence bumps along irresistibly.

And then there’s the rhymes, always bringing it back home — each line resolved deliberately.

The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone,
Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown,
At Delilah, who is sitting worthlessly alone…

The ghost of Belle Star she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits…

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers are trying to endorse
the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse…

The rhymes go A/A/A/B C/C/C/B. You’re praying for that second B to come around. Each one is a doozy. Absurdly tortuous, profoundly satisfying.

My advice is not let the boys in
[ ]
You will not die, it’s not poison

Is there a hole for me to get sick in
[ ]
The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken

And sends them out to the jungle
[ ]
To win friends and influence his uncle

It’s ridiculous. And bewitching. The thing never lets up. Six minutes of entirely pointless wordplay. A pleasingly contorted thread revealing, I suspect, freshly wired neural pathways. Drug-induced, no doubt, but what’s infectious is the palpable high of dots being joined. The idea that he didn’t start out to say anything — shit just emerged.

You get a sense in Tombstone Blues of Dylan as a writer always on receive mode. You only arrive at this sort of stuff by tuning in to anything and everything. Words — their sound, their timbre, their potential — reaching out to him wherever he goes, the whole world a source of inspiration. The building blocks of expression, there to be played with. A creativity of combination and cut-ups.

There’s another moment in No Direction Home. He’s standing outside a pet store somewhere in Britain. The sign is full of mundane language. He starts saying some of it out loud. Before long he’s remixing. As he throws stuff together he becomes more energised, more playful.

It’s 67 seconds of dot-joining. And it’s infectious.

As the combinations get more ridiculous, more removed from their source context, the more like Dylan lyrics they begin to sound. Street improv becomes notes becomes material becomes songs.

I like to imagine Tombstone Blues springing into life the same serendipitous way, only instead of a shop sign the inspiration is history books, myths, folk heroes, stereotypes. The world gets jumbled up, just because it can. Because it’s interesting to notice what happens. Because it’s fun.

Or maybe because it creates some use for all this needless stimulus. Maybe it helps make sense of the world by stripping it of all sense whatsoever. Here’s the last verse:

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Tombstone Blues never gets talked about. Look up Highway 61 Revisited and it’ll be Like A Rolling Stone, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Desolation Row. The heavy stuff, the significant stuff.

But I like to think John Lennon was listening.

Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite came about because of Lennon doing exactly what you’ve just watched Dylan do.

Here’s the sign.

And listen again to any number of Lennon songs to hear a jumbled jive nonsense inspired by the spirit of Tombstone Blues. I Am The Walrus, Come Together, Cry Baby Cry. It’s Edward Lear crossed with The Goons crossed with Dylan — my favourite version at least.

I don’t know whether Lennon was aping Dylan’s style. I don’t care either. I just love the idea that two inspirational messiah figures, these two revolutionaries taken overly seriously by fanatics and co-opted by the we-were-there brigade, unlocked creativity the same basic way all of us do.

By playing. By messing about.

As DH Lawrence said in A Sane Revolution:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

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