Killing your idols

There was a time when I thought about Bob Dylan every day, all the time. It was like he was my father or my best friend, or my right hand. I used to walk around saying things like, "And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin', and the windows are rattlin' and breakin', and the roof tops a-shakin', and yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin', and yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm," with a straight face.\nThen I read "Positively 4th Street" by David Hadju and found out that Dylan was a liar. He had walked around tellin' people he had been Elvis Presley's piano player and that he had written a song when in actuality it was a 16th-century Scottish folk ballad. Then I watched D.A. Pennebaker's film "Don't Look Back" and found out that Bob was a paltry jerk, treating everyone around him like garbage.\nDon't get me wrong, I still think Dylan is great and I love his work, but that is it. I don't know the man. In fact, by putting up the altar as I had, I was betraying his directive: "don't follow leaders."\nIt's hard to say now what I even thought I had in common with Dylan during my formative years. In the early '60s, when he was singing protest songs, his themes held no social alliance to me, nor did I even have a social agenda. In the mid-'60s his songs were about speed as much as anything else, which was not a drug I knew about at that time. In the late '60s and early '70s he sung about comfort and dilettante when I was a nervous mess. In the mid-'70s, when his songs were about the inability of husband and wife to communicate, I wasn't communicating with any girls. In the late '70s he wrote about God; just then religion's holes were revealing themselves to me.\nThis past summer I was talking with my friend Rob over Budweisers late one night when I said to him, "I'm really tired of being seen as the eccentric one."\n"It's just a comparison people make to themselves," he said. "It's hard for people to categorize you when they only know how to listen to you."\n"Is it because I want things to be perfect? I don't think it's that big of a deal. When I take a girl out, I like to have Scott Walker's Scott 2 playing in the car and a copy of Dubliners carelessly placed in the passenger's seat."\n"Well, I imagine she'll be impressed by that."\nIt's enough to make me wonder what I even see in a number of things. Idolatry, like a great many other encumbrances, can be status conscience. I suppose I loved Dylan for meter, melody and aesthetic as much as I ever said his songs meant something to me.\nDylan himself was given to bouts of finding the wrong leaders. As a young man, he worshiped Woody Guthrie. Bob reproduced the Guthrie act, and it broke him into fame. Only later did he realize that protest music meant nothing to him, and he 'fessed up that he had been faking it a bit. \nHe wrote in his notes to the always-appropriately-title album The Times They Are A-Changin', "Woody Guthrie was my last idol, he was my last idol because he was the first idol I'd ever met." After his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, people started vehemently calling him Judas. Two years later he would break off all comparisons by writing, "i would not want to be bach. mozart. tolstoy. joe hill. gertrude stein. or james dean / they are all dead."\nSo here I am, Bob, glaring back at you with tears in my eyes like a forsaken paramour. I'm calling it quits, not you, and you mean nothing to me now. When the tears pour down like molasses, empty fodder, it's all you and your head buried in the sand like pirate's treasure. You are no longer the Episcopate to me, and you've never written a song as pretty as "Moon River"