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Dylan's deepest dream: a nine-to-five
Fatherhood
Fatherhood had changed everything. Outside his family, nothing held real interest for him, and he saw even the shootings of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X as fathers whose families had been left wounded. He spent his days at little league games, birthday parties, school drop-offs, camping trips, and boating and fishing outings.
The generation label
Meanwhile the press kept promoting him as the mouthpiece, the spokesman, even the conscience of a generation. He thought he had very little in common with that generation and called himself more of a cowboy than a pied piper. He took his family out on a sailboat around the Caribbean to isolate himself from the world.
Privacy and Melville
He learned that privacy is something you can sell but can't buy back. Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby Dick, critics recommended burning it, and Melville was largely forgotten by the time he died. Dylan assumed that if critics dismissed his work, the public would forget him too, and he was fine with that. He was living on record royalties and did not know if he would ever again write songs as original and influential as his earlier ones, and he did not care.
Why did Dylan step back from public life?
In July 1966, Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York. He canceled a planned tour and spent the following months recovering and keeping out of the public eye. He stayed largely off the road for years and did not tour widely again until 1974, when he went out with The Band. The album Blood on the Tracks followed in 1975.
Why was Moby-Dick overlooked at first?
Moby-Dick appeared in 1851 to mixed reviews, and Melville's next books sold even worse. He worked for years as a customs inspector in New York to make a living. By the time he died in 1891, his reputation had faded so far that obituaries were short. Scholars and critics revived his work in the 1920s, and Moby-Dick is now widely regarded as a classic of American literature.
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