Bob Dylan

Well, I'm a day late and a dollar short.  (Make that many dollars.)  Yesterday was Bob Dylan's birthday, and he is now 73 years old.  As many my age are prone to say these days, "How the hell did THAT happen?"

I guess I was too sheltered to have known about Dylan in his folkie days, because my recollection of first becoming aware of him and his music was around 1967 with the album Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.  Already a "greatest hits" album before I'd even become aware of him?  My friend Judith, who lived around the corner from me, was clearly ahead of her time.  I'm pretty sure she was the one who introduced me to Peter, Paul & Mary, too.  And so it was in 1967, the end of our junior year in high school, that she alerted me to this amazing songwriter.  Granted, it took a little while to adjust to his voice, but there was no question that he had something to say, and the timing was spot on.  I can still listen to the songs on this greatest hits album and they are my favorites.  Forever.

Nashville Skyline blew my mind two years later.  That crazy voice had been tamed, credited, I recall, to his having stopped smoking.  Again, I can listen to these songs and I am back in 1969, an amazing year by all accounts.  Lay, Lady, Lay can still stop me in my tracks.

In 1974, Bob Dylan toured with The Band.  At the end of January of that year, I got to see them at both Nassau Coliseum and Madison Square Garden.  I swear, I thought I was in the same house with God.  I'm not kidding.  Those concerts still go down in memory as the most important that I've ever attended.  (And I've attended a lot.)

By the time the Rolling Thunder tour was underway, near the end of 1975, I was no longer as enthralled with the god Dylan.  But it was still a good show.  Subsequent times I've seen him have been somewhat disappointing, but what the hey, he's Bob Dylan, and he can do whatever the hell he wants.  It is rather sad that his audience these days wants the "old" Dylan and are quite intolerant of anything else that he wants to do.  I say back off.  He has earned the right to do whatever he pleases.  Just be grateful that you can be in the same space as he is.  That should mean something.

So today (and it should have been yesterday), I am in love with this poet who rocked the world.  He rocked my world.  He still does.  I cannot imagine what my world would have been like without him.  So, yeah, I am still in love with what he has to say.