Dylan Smoking
Dublin Core
Title
Description
The point of the image is unambigious: F you. I don't care. Cool. The canonical line from Marlon Brando in The Wild One. What are you rebelling against? "Watchya got?"
This one is slighlty different yet the same:
What sticks out for me is the context. I know where the image comes from: 1965 San Francisco press conference notable for the way Dylan answered questions:
“Your songs are supposed to have a subtle message,” a woman in the audience asks. Dylan: Where did you hear that? Woman: In a movie magazine.Dylan is known for not answering questions directly. The question is asked by Michelle Basil, one of "Four junior year students from Redwood High School in Larkspur in Marin County."
I was in high school in the 1980s. I had an F you personality. Outside of my parents' house near the top of the moutnain in Hendersonville, NC, I smoked cigarettes. We believed Bob Dylan's parents lived at the food of the mountain in a house where we saw the sign Zimmerman. Rumours were that, one summer, Dylan's wife took a job at the local grocery out of boredom. Dylan, we'd hear, often summered at the house. I'd fantasize of taking my guitar down there, still smoking, and play a song. Be a song and dance man. Years later, we learned that the family who lived there was not the Zimmermans. They were merely people by the same name, who hunted deer, and who left the animals to hang outside and drain blood. What should have been unambiguous (who lives there) was ambiguous (who is it that lives there).
I have not smoked a cigarette in over 20 years. Blood on the Tracks was the album I wanted my parents to bring home when I was a kid. "Can we get you something at the store," they asked. With my teenage attitude, I might have answered, "Whatchya got?" But I said, Blood on the Tracks. They brought home Blonde on Blonde instead. We didn't understand each other (ambiguity).
Images from the Blonde on Blonde session show Dylan smoking. The cover doesn't. But it has a smokey blurry feel to it. As if someone nearby is somoking and clouding the photograph. The image is not clear; it's ambiguous.
