I WAS in a bar in Donegal town enjoying a music session, one whose detail is now lost in the hodge-podge of memories of similar nights of drinking and tapping my feet and enjoying the craic.
In the toilet I shared a few comments with a man beside me who complained that one of the singers was hard to play along with.
He tended to sing a song a little differently every time, finding new ways of interpreting the rhythm and making life difficult for his accompanists on the piano accordion, the guitar and the bodhrán.
I said, “They say that about Bob Dylan too.”
And his reply surprised me. He said, “Dillon? Big fella from out by Drumnahoul?”
“No, not him.”
I couldn’t conceive of anybody never having heard of the one and only Bob Dylan.
Dylan isn’t the only one to flex his songs and sing them differently.
In Conor McPherson’s musical, Girl From the North Country, the sneering tone of his song Like A Rolling Stone is changed from snarling derision – “How does it feel?” - into a compassionate query. “How does it feel to be on your own… .. ?”
The work is malleable and Dylan himself respects that.
McPherson’s musical is a world’s wonder. But there doesn’t seem to be a strong Irish influence over McPherson’s interpretations. There is more blues, gospel and Cajun.
The film of Dylan’s early days A Complete Unknown tells of a transition from folk to rock that is more than the story of his life.
The first music I danced to as a teenager in the parish hall and the Ard Scoil was the céilí band of Eddie Fegan.
This was more sedate than the Dubliners, of course. It was approved by the Christian Brothers. They organised the dances, perhaps in the hopes of getting us all paired off with nice Catholic girls before we went out into the world to have our options widened.
There was another folk scene in Belfast at the time which I thought of as more esoteric. It was centred on Pat’s Bar in the Belfast docks area.
Here was a different attitude to music. The reels and jigs of Eddie Fegan were to be danced to. The ballads and shanties in Pat’s were to be appreciated, talked about, located in tradition, authenticated and then perhaps enjoyed.
My friend Peter was into that scene and once, talking about folk music I asked him what he thought of Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man.
He had only contempt for the idea that anyone pitching for a slot on Tops of the Pops was to be taken seriously.
In that film there is a scene in which Dylan leaves a party, at which he is painfully the centre of attention, and heads off to an Irish pub to watch a session.
There’s a suggestion that he is losing his sense of being true to his inspiration.
McAnn’s, the Irish bar, is heaving. The folk music there is a lot more raucous and upbeat than Dylan’s usual output. The band is singing The Irish Rover.
“We had five million hogs, six million dogs, seven million barrels of porter,
We had eight million sides of old blind horses hides in the hold of the Irish Rover.”
So he is intrigued and takes a seat.
We begin to wonder if he is moved by this brash thundering tempo to reconsider his slower, more reflective, modern, urban songs.
The folk music lovers who first took to him are already beginning to worry about him being too individualistic. They think, maybe he isn’t a real folky at heart at all.
But someone in the bar recognises Dylan. She angrily points him out, and in his attempt to leave quickly there is a scuffle and he gets thumped.
I wonder what the film was trying to say. Was it that if that night in the bar had gone better, he might have drawn a new line of influence from Ireland?
In which case the man in the Donegal bar toilets might not have confused him with ‘a big fella from out by Drumnahoul’.
But Dylan’s actual Irish influences are well recorded.
He was friendly with Liam Clancy, one of the Clancy Brothers. But when Liam recorded a rebel song by Dominic Behan, to a traditional tune, Dylan parodied it.
Dylan’s With God On Our Side has the same tune and even a similar opening verse to The Patriot Game, a song which celebrates the IRA of the 1950s.
This isn’t plagiarism, it is pure mockery.
The sarcastic pacifism of Dylan’s song is an obvious riposte to the militaristic chauvinism of Clancy and Behan.
So, perhaps if Dylan was actually accosted in an Irish bar, his subversion of The Patriot Game was the motive for it.
And you have to wonder if Dylan and Clancy were as close after that.
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