One of Dylan’s qualities is his chameleon-like ability to change personae. Within a single song he shifts from an authentic-sounding, confessional first-person narrator to someone completely invented.
Take the opening lines of Idiot Wind:
Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out but when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
The first couple lines could easily have been the words of Robert Zimmerman in the mid-1970s. After that the story turns darkly comic.
The song’s opening calls to mind the opening sentence of Kafka’s The Trial, here translated by David Wyllie:
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.
More on this theme anon.
A more recent example is the COVID-released Goodbye Jimmy Reed:
You won’t amount to much the people all said
‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head
Never pandered never acted proud
Never took off my shoes and threw them into the crowd
Here again you get a tone of defiance that seems to fit an unmasked young Bob Dylan. But Dylan was already an idol by the time Jimi Hendrix became famous for his virtuosity on the guitar.
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