No direction home

Rock & roll will forever be a walking, or rather strutting, contradiction.

Is it art or commerce, raw passion or introspection in faded jeans, poetry in pelvic motion or a great swindle, as the Sex Pistols put it when they weren't busy spitting at their audiences?

Are Elvis, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones a small, non-descript valley in the panoramic history of western music? Or do they stand on a majestic snow-peaked mountain eyeballing Bach, Mozart and Beethoven standing on the one behind them?

What is this thing called rock & roll anyway, this musical bastard conceived somewhere deep in the Mississippi delta by the most unlikely of parents?

Elvis was its pioneer, The Beatles its geniuses and the Stones its energy. Seeing Dylan live last weekend drove a simple point home. All these attributes are elusively wrapped in the musical soul and being of this one man. Now you see one, now you see the other. But never for long enough to allow you to pin him down.

Dylan's songs sound simultaneously ancient and modern. His words are mesmerising without ever giving a clue why they are. 

You close your eyes and his growling voice could be that of a drunken pirate stumbling back to ship after a night at the harbour whore house. 

But it could also be the young voice of an 'alternative' singer-songwriter strumming his guitar in a New York loft today. All of a sudden he realises that he's just stumbled on a magical new galaxy in rock & roll's aging universe. Just like a certain Robert Zimmerman did four decades earlier.

Bob Dylan was and will always be alternative. Because he's always been an alternative to himself.

"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone"

Pure rock & roll.