Nod To Bob

Deep into a windy canyon in the Village I strode with Bill Klein. Old newspapers were flapping in the gutters, and an occasional drunk nestled against a steaming grate. This place was without possibility of direct sunlight. Back-lit by neon, day and night were almost indistinguishable. Gaudy and garish, gritty and gray. Birds hung by their necks in windows above neat rows of dead pigs, and the sweet smell of seared pork clung to the stairwells that led to basement restaurants. There were windows, too, along the place where the buildings met the sidewalks. Through them I could see people enjoying dim sum. We ducked in an alleyway, looking for a new friend. The birthplace of Dylan.

The first time I saw him he was thirty feet from my table, sitting atop a stool on a small wooden stage -- dimly lit, face half-hidden behind a mic -- mouth organ strapped to his neck. He played a few tunes, croaking out the lyrics, forging long word-chains. He was skin, bones, and hair. He could somehow synchronize his hands over the guitar with the harmonica in his mouth, and all his songs were new. Soon everyone else would be singing them, from Joan Baez to Peter, Paul, and Mary. The others wrote songs which lasted three minutes, maybe four. His ran to eight, ten, sometimes fifteen.

With "Subterranean Homesick Blues" he invented rap (and probably the first music video), twenty years before the boyz in the 'hood. What else could he do with that voice? Well suited to the brick walls and smoky coffee houses. But slowly, as he constructed his colossus of Roads, I began to hear beyond the rasp. I understood that, like an artist who paints abstracts as well as photo-quality portraits, he had the ability to do both. His timing was perfection -- and it was completely askew. Phrases that no one else could ever create, let alone juxtapose. Images that wrap you in a warm blanket of familiarity, or leave you feeling like you just got plunked in the middle of nowhere. He strapped on personas like a third instrument.

This was no Madonna or Michael Jackson, fitfully reinventing in search of the dwindling crowd. Here was a latter-day phoenix, arising anew each time because he had no other choice. Fly or die. Once I watched him perform an entire concert with his back to the audience, turning away only slightly from his fellows to bleat weakly into the solitary microphone. He morphed constantly because to do otherwise was to commit artistic suicide. He stirred the minds of more teenage boys when he went electric than Playboy did when they went pink. To follow him was to remain ever off-balance. The feeling mirrored reality. There is something essentially genuine about a man who seldom smiles, about a singer who squints at the spotlight, hand held in front of his face. He was both performer and audience of one. He wrote the songs, and then stood onstage as an afterthought. One of the most influential musicians of the last century, this understood by everyone except himself.

So.

They soared together, if to separate aeries. If JT's voice is a clarion, Dylan's is a foghorn. Taylor's songs are achingly beautiful -- a "hunger in the center of the chest" -- chord progressions and harmonies without peer, evoking brilliant October skies and country roads. Dylan's tunes are often sullen as the smudge of a Minnesota mid-winter drizzle. The locus of his muse was the one-four-five blues progression of Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie, the poetry of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Henry Timrod, and the Bible. His tunes lack complexity even as his lyrics meander through a thousand degrees of separation.

He eschews celebrity and pigeon-holing. One hundred years from now people will still be wondering who Alicia Keys was. But if labels are missing, not so layers. He has more than an onion. Dylan is to writing songs what Ray Kroc was to selling hamburgers. The James Joyce of song. No library, no theater, no music shop, no jukebox, no school -- essentially no home -- is lacking one of his works in one incarnation or another. At age 72 he is still working, his latest album creating the oldest living musician to top Billboard's chart in seven different countries. He continues to perform live an average of twice a week year round, a pace established decades ago. His public indifference is offset by the intensity of his personal relationships. Even so, he remains the most accessible musician I have ever heard, because his songs speak of my own life, both musically and lyrically.

Most of the others are gone now, even as he continues to tarry at the edges of our collective consciousness. The mathematicians and the carpenter's wives -- they are silent in their graves or behind anonymous windows and doors, aging in place, their work here done. Some of us have gone as well, one by one. Still he re-fashions himself anew, ever different, yet now so familiar.

Or so it would appear. His music is the soundtrack of our lives. Forever young.

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My Back Pages

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
"Rip down all hate," I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Girls' faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Bob Dylan
Copyright © 1964