Imagine it’s 1966, and you’re Bob Dylan. You’re 25, and you’ve already been called the voice of your generation. The record you released the previous year, Highway 61 Revisited, hit number three on the US chart, and your brand new work, the double album Blonde on Blonde, was already spoken of in terms usually reserved for religion: the album, wrote one influential critic, was “a cache of emotion, a well handled package of excellent music and better poetry, blended and meshed and ready to become part of your reality.” You go on a massive world tour, but only to discover that your fans, at least a significant portion of them, have turned on you for daring to go electric. People booed in Newport, and in Manchester someone screamed that you were Judas. This was too much for some to take, and your drummer, unable to take it anymore, quit the band and went to work on an oilrig on the Gulf of Mexico. You finally return home, exhausted and dispirited, only to learn that your manager, ever eager to maximize profits, booked you for another 63-gig stretch. Desperate for some relief, you take your motorcycle for a spin. And you crash.
That story has been told many times. It’s become a part of rock n’ roll cliché, the battered myth about the misunderstood artist burning too bright until he burnt out. But it’s not true. As the Basement Tapes—released this month in their entirety, 47 years after they were originally recorded—prove, Dylan did the most heroic thing imaginable to overcome his stress and his fatigue: he went home, invited his friends over, and checked out.
Dylan being Dylan, the truth, of course, is more complicated than that. His friends happened to be some of the greatest musicians ever to walk into a studio, more commonly known as The Band. And what they did in what became known as the basement but was actually a garage, for five-to-seven days a week over the course of seven months, was record more than a hundred of some of the greatest songs Dylan ever wrote, and then decide not to release them.
It’s easy to write the whole thing off to some calculated decision on Dylan’s part, a marketing ploy meant to drum up interest in his stuff. Fans, after all, love nothing more than a bootleg, a secret and unreleased bit of work they value far more than the official and readily available body of work. And Dylan, many believed, was just the cynical prankster who’d pull a stunt like that off, staying relevant by teasing his fans with one treasure trove of music they’ll never get to hear. But as far as the available records teach us, that was never the purpose behind Dylan’s retreat. The idea was more profound and far more personal: To stay true to himself, to stay relevant, to reignite the passion that made him pursue music in the first place, Dylan had to retreat.
And so, he did. The music he played in the basement with The Band is incredible, in large part, because it was never meant to be heard. After years of working at full capacity, releasing hit after hit and rarely escaping the media’s constant glare, Dylan was finally free to relax. He played original tunes and covered some classics, joked around, started and stopped the music whenever he felt like it. And when he emerged back into the world, he was a man reborn.
You can take a less charitable view of his career. You can argue that he never succeeded in replicating the magic—or the popularity—of these early records. But that would be beside the point: any artist—or entrepreneur, or leader, or lover, or anything else—who wishes to stay in the game for nearly half a century is necessarily going to experience shifts and twists here and there. The point is to master these changes lest they master you. And Dylan couldn’t have done it without first retreating.
How To Handle Success
In many non-trivial ways, today’s startup culture is a lot like those early days when rock n’ roll was busy being born. It’s a young person’s game, one that respects no boundaries between work and life and friends and family and necessity and desire. In a scene like this, it’s easy to have talent, but it’s even easier to get completely lost, scarred by one late night too many at the computer, one setback too far, one more relationship sunk by not enough time and too much to do. If you feel it, that creeping gray dread that you can call burnout or anxiety or whatever else you like, stop. Put on the Basement Tapes, and remember Bob Dylan’s bravery: if he could put it all on hold and just go hang out with friends, if he could take the time and the space to make something beautiful just for himself and not for sale, if he could breathe deeply until he rediscovered the sense of purpose that led him to his art in the first place, so, dear reader, can you.