The soundtrack of my life sounds both heavy and corny, but I barely remember life before Dylan. I first became aware of rock and roll when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I was in second grade. Shortly after, I was flipping through some entertainment, or women's magazines, that my mom had stashed for when she was bored at the dry cleaning drop off she ran on Main St. The writer described taking her teen aged daughter to performances by bands and singers her kid liked. The line that struck me was about some guy whose last name looked to me like it would be pronounced 'die lann'. She said while her daughter may have wanted to bring Mick Jagger home, she (mom) wanted to take this guy to a hospital.
Soon, Like a Rolling Stone was as familiar as Satisfaction. But, growing up, in grade school, I knew there were other songs too, like Blowing in the Wind. The nuns would try to get us to sing the words to the church song they had ripped off from popular music. Blowing in the Wind became Living in All Men... for guitar mass. I hated that.
But my lifelong connection, for lack of a better word, to Bob Dylan came the day I first heard Positively 4th Street on the radio. I looked around to see if anyone else was listening. This should be a secret. People didn't talk like that. People didn't think like that! Well, they did, but you didn't say it out loud. Now people say any fool thing they want, live their supposed lives on reality TV shows and there are no taboos. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls. But, life was different in the mid 1960s. The world was still in black and white. I couldn't get over that song. The attitude. The exposure of hypocrisy. The pissitude! Fuck off, in a song. Fuck everyone, really. One of the first albums I ever bought was Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. Positively 4th Street is on it. Maybe it was being an only child, but that song, stiff arm and middle finger introduced me to an attitude I could never shake.
I remember my fascination when I discovered my friend Paul Bamman's brother Steve had left his record collection, in their attic, when he went off to college. That was the first time I ever saw the album Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan looked like the coolest person in the world, sitting there on the album cover. I was mesmerized by the liner notes. "I accept chaos. I do not know if it accepts me."
I soon bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 2 and played both albums relentlessly from 7th grade through college. The quote never made into a high school year book, but if I had a lifelong theme, it was the last verse to Maggie's Farm:
"I try my best, to be just like I am
but everybody wants you
to be just like them.
They say, 'sing while you slave',
and I just get bored."
I started collecting all his albums, or trying, including Highway 61. One Christmas morning, Eddie and Rosalie knocked on our back door and brought me a copy of Dylan's self titled first album and invited me to "go for a ride in the car". I'm still trying to teach myself some of those old blues songs on that album.
A couple carloads of us drove to St. Louis, on a school night, Feb 4th, 1974 to see Dylan and the Band. In what later became so common place it became a pop culture joke, the crowd held up lit matches while calling for an encore. Later, over the years, concert goers would hold up cigarettes and lighters and today, they use cell phones. But, the practice began a couple of shows before St. Louis, on that tour.
Everybody has music for life events, be they joyous or heart rending. Dylan provides for any occasion. Fierce permanence in Planet Wave's Wedding Song. World weary sorrow, loss and the winsome discovery that life goes on, on Blood on the Tracks. Anger, sweet memory and pleasure in Desire, giving way to the final hopeless hope of the last two lines of the album, "don't ever leave me; don't ever go."
Dylan played the SIU arena, on Halloween 1978. I, and 500 of my best friends, slept on the sidewalk outside the ticket window the night before they went on sale. After, 25,000 partied on Illinois Ave. I've seen him four more times since, at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in 1989 (an unknown, to me, Steve Earle opened), again at the SIU Arena in 1990, in 2005 at the Pageant in St. Louis and in 2007 at the Fabulous Fox. Different times: high school, college, early 30s/beginning parenthood and a career, middle age/travel/political activism/twilight of a career. Soundtrack.
I stopped buying his albums when a lot of others did. The song writing lagged. But then he'd come out with Oh Mercy. And then a killer song, Things Have Changed. And then, in rapid succesion, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. Jerry Garcia died and Dylan inherited many of his nomadic concert followers to add to his own. His shows were packed again. I was buying his albums. But, I never thought he was someone you'd want to hang out with. I assumed he would rapidly turn that scorn he held interviewers with on anyone. Then becomes a DJ. Theme Time Radio Hour. The former religious convert, who sounded pissed off for 20 years, sounded absolutely jovial. Turns out that he just needs to be turned loose on a subject he likes. And he loves American popular music. Here was a guy I would have hung out with.
Speaking of which, if you judge one by their friends, Dylan is the coolest. He seemed to return to certain collaborators: George Harrison, Van Morrison, Patti Smith. As Chrissie Hynde would say, he's "the last of the independents."
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