Millions of young men once wanted to be Bob Dylan. God forgive me, I was one of them. Many of them are dead now, and almost none of them, least of all me, have the wild hair, let alone the slim waist, of our Dylan-worshipping days.
I tell you this because the era of Dylan will soon be over, and those who come after will find it impossible to understand it.
It is best expressed on the cover of what we then called an LP: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which I think I first saw when I was 14, at Christmas 1965.
In this photo, the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature walks down a dirty New York City street in the mud.
It's clearly freezing. He's quite unattractive and looks like he got his wardrobe out of a dumpster. But he has the girl.
That girl, the enchanting Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo, holds his left arm tightly with both hands as she smiles (he doesn't smile).
They say if you've never been hugged in this specific way by a woman, you haven't really lived, and I think this is true.
So that's the key to everything. Pseudo-intellectual, skinny, radical, so-called poets can get the girl. You don't have to be a sports hero, or classically handsome or well-dressed. You don't even have to have a car.
The cover of the LP The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, on which the singer walks through a New York street in the freezing cold with his girlfriend, the American artist Suze (pronounced Suzy) Rotolo
Some of Dylan's best songs were about his long, disastrous affair with Suze. Despite his unattractive moaning voice, you can still feel the passion and loss in them.
But there is something else too, or at least there was.
I first heard him sing on the small ivory Ferranti transistor radio I shared with my brother, which at the time was permanently tuned to Wonderful Radio London, 266 on medium wave. This was one of the pirate stations that mesmerized an entire British generation and, in my opinion, changed the world for the worse.
But like the children listening to the Pied Piper, and as Robert Browning put it 'stumbling and skipping, running gaily after the beautiful music, with shouts and laughter', we were in ecstasy as we rushed towards our moral and political ruin .
In those days you tended to hear about the new music stars before you read about them, and I remember initially assuming the man's name was “Bob Dillon.” Not that it mattered, because his real name was Robert Zimmerman.
Much of the action of the smart and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, is set in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.
It cleverly evokes the bohemian, slightly dirty, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan became famous as the singer of 'protest anthems' such as the gruesome, clichéd and silly The Times They Are A-Changin' and the weak, sentimental Blowin' in the Wind (Dylan himself got tired of singing it, and who can blame him?).
But the film misses the real importance of folk superstar Pete Seeger and Suze Rotolo, although it spends a lot of time on how they helped the young Dylan rise to fame.
Timothee Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, set in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him
Seeger, later famous for his liberal “peace songs,” had once been part of the small, ultra-Stalinist American Communist Party.
He was not very keen on peace at that time. When most sensible people were strongly in favor of fighting the Nazis, Seeger had been something of a pacifist from 1939 to early 1941.
Worse still, he and his folk group 'The Almanac Singers' made a record of songs opposing US intervention in the war against Hitler. Oops!
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.
They took the record out of the stores and went to those who had bought it (fortunately not that many people) asking them to return it. In 1942, they banged their drums and honked their banjos for war.
The seductive Suze had a similar background. She was a communist in the cradle, whose Italian-American parents were both committed members of the American Communist Party. This involved much more than paying contributions. Her mother even worked as a courier for the communist-backed International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.
It was after he met Suze that Dylan started singing – a lot – about the threat of nuclear war and racial segregation, and the other left-wing causes he seemed to have aligned himself with.
And then he left them and switched from politics and protests to a completely different kind of music.
It was after Dylan met Suze that he started singing about the threat of nuclear war, racial segregation and other left-wing causes he seemed to have aligned himself with
The film portrays this as just an argument in the music world over whether folk singers should use electric instruments. But I always thought it was about politics.
Millions of Dylan's political fans, then and later, considered him a lost leader, even a traitor, and the great cloud of myth that has surrounded him ever since has something to do with that.
What is Dylan and what was he? The respected professor Sir Christopher Ricks, a great expert on literature, has argued that some of his work is actually serious poetry.
I'm inclined to agree, although I suspect I misunderstood many of the biggest lines, such as “the ghost of 'electricity cries in the bones of her face.'
Not being an expert on poetry, I can't figure out if it means something profound, or if it means nothing at all but is just beautifully expressed.
It was certainly all a lot better than 'I want to hold your hand', 'painted black', 'turn and scream!', 'I hope I die before I get old', or the rest of the things we had to do endured, which in fact should not have lasted at all.
Yet I'm pretty sure Dylan (now 83) is making fun of us all, and has been for decades, showing up at concerts and gleefully mangling his best-known songs so that devoted fans have trouble recognizing them.
His best joke of all was when he accepted the Nobel Prize and then didn't show up to receive it, making the prize committee look absurd.
They had decided to worship superstardom, probably hoping it would rub off on them. And the superstar pocketed their praise and strolled away without looking back.
But somewhere in this enigmatic figure lurks a real person, the actual Robert Zimmerman who grew up amid the bleak iron ridges of Minnesota, where the winds struck heavily on the frontier line, and who occasionally wrote about his homeland.
For me, his greatest, truest song will always be the North Country Blues, about the death of an iron ore town whose people are told their mine must close because iron is 'much cheaper in the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing. '.
It contains in a few short verses a complete tragedy, fully understood by the heroine, left alone with three children, surrounded by thousands of bleak square miles of icy forest and lakes, with nowhere else to go and winter approaching. If the rest is forgotten, I think it can survive.
