We didn't have Mozart. We've got Bob Dylan. His voice is gravelly, and he's blunt, like John Wayne, Ike and the rest of our heroes. You can take him on the road in an old 442, bare foot on the throttle, headed out Route 66 to that painted moonscape. Tchaikovsky wouldn't fare too well on that trip.
He's turning 70 today--Tuesday, May 24. We're living in an amazing time--OUR Mozart is in our midst. I saw him once, at the Warehouse in New Orleans--how appropriate--in 1976. If a star's career is said to "arc" then he was at his apex: 'Blood On The Tracks'; 'Desire'. I was enthralled, but I wasn't a 'Dylanologist' even as a hobby. I just loved his raw, unvarnished epics:
"...My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, Should I put them by your gate? Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait ?"
So I never spent any time brooding over the deeper meanings. That made it all the more like stepping on a lucky silver dollar when it all came clear to me years later. Only through my own progression into real adulthood--family and a child of my own--did I begin to percieve what REALLY got under Dylan's skin. He was, in his prime, a committed family man who loved his wife and his children with a burning passion. Not what you thought? And not quite the stuff of 'torch-song' legend, huh?
The central vein of his creative wellspring at that interval of his career--again, acknowledged to be his finest hour--was that old tried-and-true staple of the artist: personal angst. He spent the early years of the 1970's ruining that which meant the most to him--and he knew it. In 1975's 'Sara' he was finally ready to profess his hopeless devotion to his love, sans ambiguity, and to his life's greatest reward--his family--given to him by her:
"I laid on a dune I looked at the sky, When the children were babies and played on the beach.
You came up behind me, I saw you go by. You were always so close and still within reach."
"Sleeping in the woods by a fire in the night; drinking white rum in a Portugal bar. Them playing leapfrog and hearing about Snow White; you in the marketplace in Savanna-la-Mar."
Hear Bob Dylan's plaintive bid as he pleads his hopes of gaining the "second chance" he probably already knows he won't get, and acknowledges he doesn't really deserve:
"You must forgive me my unworthiness."
His keen observational skills in concert with matchless phrasemaking wrought us anthems that throngs of my generation literally latched onto. Bob Dylan rejected their cultish devotion, abdicated the throne they wanted to perch him on, and even ridiculed their follower mentality. It's also ironic that the messiah of the 1960s counter-culture was an admirer of trail-blazer-on-the-right Barry Goldwater, who begot Reagan.
And in case you don't know, it was no mere happenstance that 'Forrest Gump' ran across America, then stopped, turned and huffed, "I'm kinda tired, I think I'll stop running now." His followers seemed lost as they asked "What are we supposed to do now?" This satirical look at cultishness was a Dylan metaphor of the highest order.
Enjoy the clip. Then the next time you hear his modern-day nasally gag-rasp, in what a recent blogger aptly dubbed his period of "graceful decline," take a minute to marvel at how such a giant of our culture has now spent these past several decades bearing the burden of his self-inflicted wound, and at how his status couldn't insulate him from it. I admire that he never showed up on Oprah or Dr. Phil to cry about it. "Graceful decline" indeed.
