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Rating: The city was New York. It was January. Just like now. Not the year, though. It was 1965, fifty years ago. With a rock band, a singer-songwriter records Subterranean Homesick Blues. It was very cold at 799 Seventh Avenue, but in the Columbia recording studio, Bob Dylan's folk catches fire. It becomes rock and heats up. Not everyone, at first, was happy with this change of pace. Purists of overseas music thought that a character like their American minstrel shouldn't dabble in rock 'n' roll: a style considered superficial and suitable just for winning over a girl, perhaps between a beer and a laugh. But how? Dylan had been at the Newport festival; here he had made public a piece that is not a song but the bible of young people, first American, then of all the young people in the world, that Blowin’ in the Wind now included even in many textbooks, and its author turns to rock 'n' roll? That's what some critics thought and said. It’s 1962 when all of America sings the manifesto song of a new protesting world: Blowin’ in the Wind. John Hammond had a good eye, and above all a good ear, when he spotted that frail boy expressing his views accompanying himself with a simple acoustic guitar and a stand without a parrot, but with a harmonica waiting for someone to blow into it. But Bob isn't self-referential. He realizes that something new is blowing in the musical wind of America and the world: the style of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Therefore, the transition that Dylan embarked on towards the new artistic language was entirely logical. Folk, as he had learned it, was tied to schematics that needed a shake. Never mind if even the managerial organization of the time doesn't support him: Bob Dylan goes his own way. And the path turns out to be the right one. In the end, it was the others who had gotten bogged down in that boy who sang the epic of the green American prairies, the adventures of the founding fathers, the wagon trains of farmers and preachers seeking bluegrass to tend and Indians to save. He, Robert Zimmermann, now Bob Dylan – a tribute to Dylan Thomas, poet by profession - had understood that America was too young to have a classical epic. The States could not afford it for purely chronological reasons: the only way to have it, to forge it, was to relate to Europe and its movements. And today, in this January 2015, the States – if they are not yet Homeric and Shakespearean – nonetheless dictate the rules in Culture and Economy. Bob was right, but just to be consistent, now protests against the excess of Americanization, which he had also hoped for, operating in the world. The electric Bob Dylan probably had more influence than the acoustic one. Just think, on an international level, of Mark Knopfler – practically Dire Straits - , or, just to stay within national limits, our De Gregori (it was he who 'introduced' Dylan to De André who didn’t know the songwriter; getting so entangled that for a while Fabrizio imitated his voice); even Mimmo Parisi or Luciano Ligabue are indebted to the electric Dylan. Shadows in the Nights, this is the title of the new album that Mister Zimmerman promised for February 3rd, 2015: it will still be the Dylan that fuels the pages of living History.
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