Scene of the Crime (1) Even as Dylan walked off the Newport stage in 1965, he was reaching the first pinnacle of his forty-year career and had already transformed American popular culture. So many roads led to him and so many emerged from him that his main rivals as transformative agents in popular American music may be Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Elvis--and like all of them, he drew recurrent abuse or boredom from fans who saw him as betraying his talent, abandoning the purity of his early days. But for Dylan, purity is a pointless abstraction; like St. Paul, he believes virtue is manifest only in being tested. "To live outside the law," warns one of his most famous ruthless lines, "you must be honest." posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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