HT Mockingbird: Jonah Leher on creative impasse ... and Highway 61 Revisited

http://www.mbird.com/2012/04/jonah-lehrer-on-creative-impasse-the-insight-experience-and-highway-61-revisited/

Since this involves the story of how Bob Dylan got to the point of writing his album Highway 61 Revisited I can't help linking to this.  It was Pinkfloyd's Dark Side of the Moon that inspired me to take up the guitar but it was Bob Dylan's landmark album that constituted what I would call a personal psychedelic experience.  I had never heard anything like this stuff before and it blew me away.  Hearing Pinkfloyd spurred me to take up the guitar but hearing Dylan spurred me to think of a way I wanted to approach creating music as a whole.  At the time I thought only in terms of rock and pop and yet Dylan's music seemed to come from places that didn't just involve rock and pop, which was new for me.  I began to read and read about Dylan and how he approached things.  Dylan often said to never just stop at his stuff, to go back further, to go back to things he found inspiration in and to just keep following back. 

That's what I did.  I followed Dylan's music back to his influences and then followed the thread further back.  Around the time I got all the way back to William Byrd, Leonin and Perotin, and hit bach and Haydn and Ellington and Monk and pre-WWII blues along the way I realized that while Dylan inspired me to learn rock songs this journey he urged people to take was one that had led me almost completely away from rock or pop or even folk.  How do you justify listening to Edgar Varese or Messiaen or Koshkin as "folk"? You don't.  Even Dylan's sometimes villified Christian phase was part of the lesson for me, that if you're seriously attempting to express where you're at this will not necessitate conforming to just any old person's idea of what "rock" should imply.   

That Dylan could be this sort of inspiration and still not be a great, nice guy has not exactly shaken my world.  Remember the axiom that power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely?  The other part that gets less frequently quoted is the supplemental observation that great men are almost always bad men. This applies even when we are discussing mere influence and not formal authority. But I suppose that observation becomes an entirely separate idea, doesn't it?