With today being Bob Dylan's 70th birthday, just about everyone has celebrated with major magazine features, blog tributes and Facebook video sharing. I'm no exception, except that I took a negative tack.
Sure I was influenced by Dylan growing up. Twelve years older, he was one of my biggest influences in high school, for the usual reasons. Alienated, against the war, supporting Civil Rights and doing drugs, Dylan covered all these bases and more for a troubled teen who appropriated the battle cry in "The Times They Are A-Changin'," directed at "mothers and fathers throughout the land" with a warning not to criticize "what you don't understand," whose "old road [was] rapidly agin'": "Please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand…."
But after the the trilogy of great electric albums of 1965 and 1966--Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde--I gradually lost interest. There were high points on the succeeding John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait and New Morning, to be sure--even his Born Again albums and beyond--but to me he'd lost his edge and lyrical relevance.
Then again, I, too, had moved on musically. Come 1970--my senior year in high school--I had begun moving away from the Top 40 and the progressive rock genre that the '60s had spawned and immersing myself in country music, via the radio, and the roots American music genres, via the public library. And this is where I, personally, still owe the most to Bob Dylan.
Those first acoustic and definitely folk Dylan albums were a product of Dylan's study of folk music, heavy on Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, famously, and the Sing Out! and Broadside magazines and Vanguard and Folkways labels types who made up the early '60s Greenwich Village scene that Dylan gravitated to from Minnesota--names like Joan Baez, Richard & Mimi Farina, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, to name a few. But those first recordings also descended from the folk and country blues greats like Jesse Fuller, Bukka White and Blind Lemon Jefferson--all of whom were directly covered on his 1962 debut album Bob Dylan.
As I was only 10 in 1962, I had to go back and hear these albums after discovering him, probably around 1965 when he went electric and hit big on the pop singles chart with "Like A Rolling Stone," and I became aware that Peter, Paul and Mary's "Blowin' In The Wind," The Byrds' "Mr. Tamborine Man" and The Turtles' "It Ain't Me, Babe" were Dylan covers. From there it was hours and hours at the library listening to that early source material and then expanding upon it, such that the Newport Folk Festival albums on Vanguard, for instance, not only led me to blues but bluegrass, old-timey, gospel, Cajun, Sacred Harp, Georgia Sea Island and other music genres that I never knew existed; looking back, I can understand why that purist folkie 1965 Newport audience booed him when he came out with a rock band.
For sure, it wasn't any rock band that Dylan introduced his electric rock sound with, but Paul Butterfield's blues band (minus Butterfield, and with keyboard players Al Kooper and Barry Goldberg). And it was the blues that I focused on, harmonica blues, especially, thanks to Dylan's harmonica playing. I even bought a 10-hole Marine Band harp in every key and taught myself how to get a single note and bend the low draw notes--but that was about as far as I got. But to this day I know a good harp player when I hear one, and have long been friends with some of the top ones--all because of the Minnesota kid with the harmonica rack around his neck whom this Wisconsin boy admired.
I'm sure I'm not alone in any of the above, not by a long shot. But I did face criticism from a Facebook friend for a piece I wrote last week at examiner.com that reviewed the controversy over Dylan's recent trip to China: Some observers, most notably The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, slammed Dylan for not performing his 1960s protest classics "Blowin' In The Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'." I suggested, as have others, that Dylan long ago left that part of his career behind, and has pretty much dismissed it in his interviews and memoir.
Which brings me to what I've long felt about Dylan, that there's no there, there, other than what you and I project upon him from our own tastes, reactions, interpretations--as with any other artist, I know, though magnified in the context of this true cultural giant, whose work has prompted such intense reaction and interpretation for 50 years. We take from him what we bring to him, and much of what I bring to Bob Dylan, now, is what I originally got from him.
The flip side of projection, though, is expectation, and when those expectations aren't met they lead to disappointment followed inevitably by divorce. In the case of me and Dylan, I'd say the divorce is no-fault: I wanted something, unrealistically perhaps, that he would or could no longer deliver, that is, if he really did in the first place. My Facebook friend--who hasn't unfriended me yet, though maybe he will now!--felt after all he has done, Dylan is entitled to a "victory lap," meaning, presumably, his Never Ending Tour. Well, I've seen parts of that tour the last two summers, and I say parts because for me they were such boring, one-note, indecipherable affairs that I left pretty quickly.
But, hey! That's just me. I definitely do not deny Bob Dylan's huge impact on me, and while his own music hasn't retained its staying power in my life, everything else it brought me still has, and to an immeasurable degree, helped make me who I am.
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