Reinventing himself from a middling Midwest boy into a national folk myth, Bob Dylan, by all means, had no intentions of being ‘mediocre.’ The rocker either sang about peace or advocated fully against it or became a creative saint whose fans declared him to be the most hated man in history.
It was all these elements, the contradictions, that created the modern haze of Dylan, an enigma in itself many tried to expose or map out. Joni Mitchell was one of those people, as she didn’t buy into the narrative about Bob’s authenticity, claiming the rocker had nothing original about him and he’d stolen his entire image from others.
Although the pair had collaborated in Dylan’s The Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, Mitchell didn’t hold back from criticizing her old ‘friend,’ eventually making it clear that, maybe, they weren’t friends at all. However, she wasn’t the only one who had worked with Bob on the famous tour and decided he might be faking things as well, as another longtime friend of the rocker, Sam Shepard, once exposed.
You might say how Dylan hasn’t much luck when it comes to friends, but Shepard’s remarks weren’t as snidey as Joni’s. The playwright just wanted to show a different sight of Bob than what the public perceived while writing to his tour log in 1975, revealing a hidden truth that showed how Bob had reinvented himself, leaving no clues from the Midwestern boy he once was, and created a made-up persona.
Shepard argued:
“Dylan has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own mind. The point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in? He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan.”
It seemed that the two people, Joni and Sam, who had spent a fair amount of time with Bob, thought that he’d remastered not only his entire personality but those around him. He’d left his past as a Midwestern boy with Jewish ancestry to become a much more Anglicized rock icon, leaving the people closest to him suspecting the singer was nothing but a shadow of what he once was.
