Peter Hitchens: Like millions of people, I once wanted to be Bob Dylan. But the truth is that he was in the thrall of the communists – and we were dazed as we hurtled toward moral ruin.

Once upon a time, millions of young people wanted to be Bob Dylan. God, please forgive me, I was one of them. Many of them are dead now, and very few of them, especially not me, don’t have the crazy hair or small waists of the Dylan-adoring days.

I say this because it seems like Dylan’s era is coming to an end and those who come after him won’t understand.

The most beautiful expression of this is the cover of “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” which was then called an LP, and I think I saw it for the first time on Christmas 1965 when I was 14 years old. .

In this photo, the future Nobel Prize in Literature winner walks down a dingy New York City street in the mud.

It’s clearly freezing cold. He’s pretty unattractive and looks like he got his wardrobe out of the skip. But he got the girl.

The girl, the seductive Suze (pronounced Susie) Rotolo, is smiling (he’s not laughing) and gripping his left arm tightly with both arms.

They say that if you’ve never been hugged like this by a woman, you haven’t truly lived, and I think that’s true.

That’s the key to everything. Any pseudo-intellectual, skinny, radical wannabe poet can get this girl. She doesn’t have to be a sports fan, classically handsome, or well-dressed. You don’t even need to have a car.

Some of Dylan’s best songs were about his long and disastrous relationship with Suze. Despite his unattractive moans, you can feel the passion and loss in them.

But there is something else, or at least there was.

I first heard him on the little ivory Ferranti transistor radio I shared with my brother, always tuned to Wonderful Radio London, number 266, on medium wave. This is one of those pirate stations that hypnotized an entire generation of British people and, in my opinion, changed the world for the worse.

But like the children who listened to the Pied Piper, and as Robert Browning described it, “stumbled and skipped, and chased merrily after the great music, shouting and laughing.” , we were mesmerized as we raced toward moral and political ruin.

Back then, you tended to hear the name of a new music star before you read about them, and I remember initially thinking the guy’s name was “Bob Dillon.” It didn’t matter. Because his real name was actually Robert Zimmerman.

Much of the action in Complete Unknown, a smart and entertaining new film about Dylan starring Timothée Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had heard of Dylan.

The song deftly evokes a bohemian, subtly sleazy, deeply political and bombastic world, from which Dylan launches into the horrifyingly corny and ill-advised “The Times They Are A-Changin'” He rose to fame as the singer of “protest” anthems such as “Blowin” and the languid, sentimental “Blowin.” ‘ in the Wind (Dylan himself was tired of singing this song. Who could blame him?).

But the film misses the true importance of folk superstars Pete Seeger and Suze Rotolo, spending a lot of time on how they brought young Dylan to fame.

Seeger, who later became famous for his liberal “peace” songs, was once a member of the small, ultra-Stalinist Communist Party of the United States.

At that time he was not so keen on peace. From 1939 to early 1941, when most reasonable people were very much in favor of fighting the Nazis, Seeger was something of a pacifist.

To make matters worse, he and his folk group, The Almanac Singers, produced a record of songs opposing American involvement in the war against Hitler. Oops!

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of that year, Saeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.

They pulled the record out of the store and went around to the people who had bought it (fortunately there weren’t that many) and asked them to return it. By 1942, they were beating drums and playing banjos for the war effort.

The charming Suze had a similar background. She was a cradle communist, and both of her Italian-American parents were ardent members of the Communist Party of the United States. This involved more than paying dues. Her mother also worked as a courier for the communist-backed International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

It was after meeting Suze that Dylan began to sing a lot about the threat of nuclear war, racism, and other left-wing movements that he appeared to be a part of.

So he left them, turned away from politics and protests, and turned to a completely different kind of music.

The film depicts this as simply a controversy 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 since, considered him a lost leader and even a traitor, and the great cloud of myth that has surrounded him ever since has something to do with this.

What is Dylan and what was he? Professor Sir Christopher Rix, a leading expert on literature and respected, claimed that some of his works were actually serious poetry.

I’d agree with that, but I think I misheard a lot of the great lines, like “Lectric’s ghost howls in the bones of her face.”

I’m not an expert on poetry, so I don’t know if it has some deep meaning or if it’s just beautifully expressed without any meaning at all.

Sure, “I want to hold your hand,” “I painted it black,” “Twist and scream!,” “I wish I died before I get old,” or any other thing we have to do. It was much better than what I had. Bear with me, it really shouldn’t have lasted at all.

Still, there’s no doubt that Dylan, now 83, is making fun of us all, and for decades he’s shown up at concerts and hilariously ruined his most famous songs, making his devoted fans laugh. You definitely have a hard time recognizing that.

His biggest joke was that he accepted the Nobel Prize but never came to collect it, making the prize committee look ridiculous.

They decided to worship superstar status, perhaps in the hopes that it would rub off on them as well. The superstar then pocketed their praise and staggered away without looking back.

However, somewhere inside this mysterious figure is a real person. Robert Zimmerman grew up in the rugged, iron hills of Minnesota, where the winds whipped across the border, and who occasionally wrote about his hometown.

To me, his greatest and truest song is the North Country Blues about the death of an iron ore town. People in iron ore towns are told they must close their mines because ‘iron is much cheaper in South American towns and the miners work for almost nothing’.

The story follows the heroine, who is left alone with her three children as winter sets in, surrounded by thousands of square miles of frigid forests and lakes, with nowhere else to go. The complete tragedy of what happened is contained in a short poem. I think it can survive when all the rest is forgotten.