From the time when I was only a young boy who found refuge from the difficult changes of life in his music, right to my youngest enjoying songs Dylan has written past the age where most retire, he has been a great blessing to us all.
Bob Dylan's list of accomplishments post the age of 62 is staggering. At an age where most have retire, Dylan has had a New York Times Best Selling book, has had successful art exhibits, released 3 new studio albums, performed live around the world in hundreds of concerts, played for the President of the United States, hosted his own hit radio show, and released the best selling Christmas album of the year, with 100% of the profits going to Feed the Hungry programs.
He has inspired many showing how an entire career can be made after the age of 65!
I first heard Dylan as a young boy and was immediately hooked. "Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol 2" was a double album, which meant that this paperboy had to pull together quite a few .25 tips in order to get the double album for $5.99 (plus tax) rather than the usual $3.99 of single albums. Between that and a new whiffle ball (.49 plus tax meant .54) I just had to have that album and played it raw, on a scratchy phonograph player I bought for $5 at a yard sale. I learned of the Dylan of the 70's, not so much the 60's. That wouldn't come until later.
If you'll allow me (and Heather) the indulgence of touting one of our favorite albums, give a listen to "Modern Times" as an example of how Dylan has only gotten better with age. We put up his song, "Working Man Blues #2" as one of the most beautiful examples of human emotion recorded.
"Blood on the Tapes" (also "New York Sessions") is the original "Blood on the Tracks" from 1974 which captured the pain of divorce on a recording, perhaps more than anything ever done, before or after. There is even a web site where you can download it for free and hear for yourself the "unsanitized" version of Blood on the Tracks. "Tangled up in Blue" is not the happy romp you may think it is: wait until you hear how it was originally recorded; stark, deep, painfully cutting to the quick. "Idiot Wind" goes back and forth between the pain of defeat and rage. We hope you'll give a listen and weigh in.
Perhaps the best Dylan website is one of the longest web sites on the world wide web: www.expectingrain.com
It has all things Dylan, including recordings from concerts going back more than 40 years!
Time, Rolling Stone, USA Today, and so many others are celebrating his birthday. Here are a few to check:
http://www1.rollingstone.com/dylan/
Here is a Dylan quiz.
I scored 24 out of 30. What is your score?
http://www1.rollingstone.com/topics/dylan-quiz
Dylan as artist:
The Incident
As seen on exhibit at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark
The Hyatts will mourn when Dylan retires. There are some who's voices seem to get better with age; such as Johnny Cash, while others retire early as their vocals give out, or they were caught in too much of a trend in order to remain popular. Dylan seemed timeless and constantly changed his music, always evolving. He once said, 'if you don't change, you don't grow' and said he wouldn't '"mainline nostalgia" as he considered it like a drug that people use, rather than pressing on to new challenges.
Even now, at age 70, his fans are eagerly awaiting the next new Dylan album; not of old material, but of newly written songs, of love, theft, loss, and modern times. He remains as relevant as he was in 1966, or 1975, 1988, or in 2008.
Poet, author, disc jockey, musician, singer, artist, father and grandfather, his son Jakob said that people would not believe what his life was like growing up; more like Ozzie and Harriet than a rock star life.
Dylan showed up at his grandchildren's kindergarten class, pulled out a guitar and played "This old man, he played three, he played knee-knack on my knee...", and left.
Recently, in New Jersey (2009?) he was stopped by police as they mistook him for a homeless man and wanted to know what he was doing walking in the area. (he likes walks in the rain).
He is said to be a good chess player, and continues to study the Bible and play many Christian songs and hymns.
Championed as a voice of a generation, including the civil rights movement, he avoided titles and the spotlight and wondered why "people carry signs and walk in circles" and when 1968 was exploding in protest, he disappeared to a farm in upstate New York, quietly being a husband and father, and enjoying his seclusion.
Reports have only recently come out where we have learned that he has supported food programs and literacy programs for many years, throughout the country, yet insisting on remaining anonymous, saying he was not a voice, only a "craftsman practicing his craft" in performing for others.
I once saw him in New York's Jones Beach with my children, who were spellbound by his gravelly voice and his ability to turn a lyric. They wondered why he never spoke to the audience, but grasped that he was about the music, and did not seek to be front and center any more than necessary. Without the words, they knew he was "just a craftsman practicing his craft" on guitar and harmonica.
During the difficult teen years, I could put on headphones (they were so big back then!) and find solace, especially during difficult times where I felt I had no one to speak to. Such were the silent days, where I feared those who had authority over me, yet like my classmates, feared disclosure to trusting parents far more than the brutes we faced.
As I got older, I noticed that Dylan seemed to always stay a few decades ahead of me. In 1979, he released "Slow Train Coming" which puzzled me, to no end, causing me to dig deep in Scripture for answers. "You eat too much candy, you're gonna get sick" he told a radio interviewer. It would be many years until I understood how freely he paraphrased Solomon's proverbs, and how he was able to cause them to fit so well, into my life.
Henry Timrod, poet from the South in the 1860's, became a well understood poet because of Dylan's liberal 'borrowing' of his material, and I became familiar with Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, and others, as Dylan used their inspirations to create his own.
Dylan enjoyed country blues from the depression, Barry Manilow, Bing Crosby, and beautifully arranged orchestrations from Japan. He has read voraciously (as a hobby and a source of inspiration) and when he wrote "Chronicles Part 1", I, like many others, was stunned at the talent of his writing.
What does the future hold for Bob Dylan?
I don't know, but for us, we will continue to be blessed by his gifts to this world, and hope that he has many happy returns, knowing that he appears happiest when most productive.
Thank you, Bob Dylan, for all you've given to us.
Here's an article you might enjoy:
Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan,” said an anonymous voice. The curtains parted, and a man with frizzy hair and a black jacket walked to the front of the stage, mic in hand. This was the Grammys, in February, and Dylan was there to sing his classic “Maggie’s Farm” with musicians from two relatively young bands, Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers, strumming guitars and picking banjos behind him.
How easy it would have been for him to go through the motions and accept his applause. That’s what people of his stature tend to do, on nights like these. But as he sang the 46-year-old song in his craggy 69-year-old voice, he seemed more alive, more in-the-moment than all the young sensations who had preceded him onstage that night.
Dylan turns 70 on Tuesday. With this milestone looming, it’s a good time to celebrate his artistic achievements, and many people are planning to do just that. But it’s also a good time to marvel at the amount of his artistic youth he has managed to maintain.
“He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan sang in 1964, in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” And he has spent his life living up to that.
At an age when most of his contemporaries have more or less given up on songwriting, he churns out first-rate albums and still, sometimes, makes some shocking choices. In 2009, he released an unapologetically corny collection of Christmas songs.
Not only does he stay on the road, delivering one-night-stand concerts all over the globe, for a good portion of every year, but he refuses to deliver the kind of greatest-hits setlists that would appeal to his oldest fans, or even sing songs the way people expect him to. He constantly alters the rhythms, the melodies, the phrasing of his material. It’s like every song, at every show, is an opportunity for rebirth.
YOUNG AT HEART
On May 13, Dylan posted a message on his website, bobdylan.com, primarily to refute claims that he had been censored while performing in China in April. Eight sentences in, though, he got sidetracked by something else that bothered him: a report in Mojo magazine that claimed, among other things, that the audience had been mostly “ex-pats.”
“If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came. Very few ex-pats if any,” wrote Dylan.
A few sentences later, he wrote that audience members responded enthusiastically to songs from his last four or five albums. “They were young, and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”
That’s pure Dylan — aligning himself with the young, the unjaded, those open to the new and not merely interested in reliving the past.
Youth and aging is a topic you can’t get away from in the songs of Bob Dylan. There are other important recurring themes, of course. But this is a biggie, and one that sometimes get overlooked.
CHANGING TIMES
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
— from “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” (1963)
AP Photo
Bob Dylan in 1963.
The protest-era Dylan — the first of Dylan’s personas to make an international impact — had no use for the status quo (politically or musically), and for many, his songs led the way in a countercultural revolution.
With his baby face and his sometimes goofy sense of humor, he might have seemed too young, to some, to be taken seriously. But the sheer power of his words — and the fact that they were striking a chord with young people — made him impossible to dismiss.
In another one of his protest masterpieces, “Masters of War” (1963), he acknowledged his youth itself, while lashing out at warmongers with withering disdain:
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.
In these early songs, Dylan bring up the subject of aging as a young-vs.-old, us-vs.-them thing. Soon, though, the subject became more complex for him.
In “My Back Pages” (1964), youthfulness is a state of mind: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” he sings. (The Byrds perfectly summed up the sentiment with “Younger Than Yesterday,” the title of the 1967 album on which they covered “My Back Pages”).
The “He not busy being born is busy dying” line, from “It’s Alright, Ma,” might have been, primarily, a jab at stodgy squares, but also offered an idea that was remarkably positive: Personal renewal as a force so potent it could stave off death itself.
NOT DARK YET
One of Dylan’s simplest and most heartfelt songs is “Forever Young” (1974). “May you stay forever young,” he sings repeatedly, as if praying. He was in his mid-30s — not a kid anymore, but with kids of his own — when he wrote it. Surely, like many of his contemporaries, he was starting to think about getting old.
Dylan has mused on mortality in songs such as “Death Is Not the End” (1988), “Not Dark Yet” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” (both 1997). Yet he is still capable of singing — and writing — with a youthful spirit.
“Old, young — age don’t carry weight/It doesn’t matter in the end,” he sang in 2001, in “Floater (Too Much to Ask). In “Summer Days,” also from 2001, he reached back, past the folk-rock of the ’60s, to the souped-up rockabilly of his teenage years in the ’50s, and played an old man (“The girls all say, ‘You’re a worn-out star’ ”) still eager to live fast and wild.
“I know a place where there’s still somethin’ going on,” he sings. Age has become irrelevant.
She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand
She says, “You can’t repeat the past.”
I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”
Dylan has performed “Summer Days” frequently in concert over the last decade. The song showed up, in fact, April 30 in Auckland, New Zealand, during the last show he presented before his 70th birthday. (He’ll be back on the road this summer, starting June 16 in Cork, Ireland; no New Jersey shows are currently scheduled.)
Dylan looks old. His ravaged voice certainly sounds old.
But somewhere deep inside, he has done it: He has found a way to stay forever young.
Jay Lustig: (973) 392-5850 or jlustig@starledger.com
SINGING DYLAN'S SONGS
The following Dylan tribute concerts are planned in celebration of his 70th birthday, which is Tuesday.
• Pat Guadagno and Tired Horses present their annual BobFest concerts at Two River Theater Co., 21 Bridge Ave., Red Bank, tomorrow and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. $35; call (732) 345-1400 or visit trtc.org.
• Professor Louie & the Crowmatix, Garland Jeffreys and Soulfarm will perform at a “Bob Dylan 70th Birthday Bash” at Mexicali Live, 1409 Queen Anne Road, Teaneck, Tuesday at 8 p.m. $25; call (201) 833-0011 or visit mexicalilive.com.
• Dylan cover band Highway 61 Revisited will present birthday tributes with former Dylan band members Scarlet Rivera (violin), Winston Watson (drums) and John Jackson (guitar) at the Historic Blairstown Theatre, 30 Main St., Blairstown, Saturday at 8 p.m., and the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill, 237 W. 42nd St., New York, May 30 at 8 p.m. $20 for Blairstown; call (908) 362-1399 or visit thehbt.com. $25 for New York; call (212) 997-4144 or visit bbkingblues.com.
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