Practically all my life, I’ve had to justify my love for Bob Dylan to many people. I’ve defended his nozzle voice, his folksy rhythms, and his cheesy old-hippie persona time and time again, trying to explain… it’s all about the lyrics, people. Bob Dylan is our greatest modern day minstrel, and his erring command over lyrical song-writing allows me to overlook the acoustical guitars and a gratuitous use of an organ.
I have listened to Bob Dylan since I was 13; I randomly got a cassette tape of his Greatest Hits after joining Columbia House Music Club under several names to repeatedly “Get 12 for the Price of One” (which you can do online now! here). The juxtaposition of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” followed by “Blowing in the Wind” blew my immature mind; who the eff was this guy?
Soon, I got book of his lyrics at the local library. It was the most subversive book I ever checked out from the Audubon library, except for maybe the Freudian Interpretation of Dreams. The stark beauty of the written word helped me overcome his dated musical styling. This guy was hip.
As I evolved from classic rock aficionado into teenaged punk, when I dared mention Bob Dylan to a friend, they would stare at me as if my green hair had suddenly turned brown and sneer “Hippie.”
The only close friend whose shared my love for Bob Dylan was AB, a tiny half-Iranian hippie girl from New Jersey who was my constant companion for two years in college. The first night we hung out, the details of which are too sketchy, she got all emotional at five in the morning and blasted “Hurricane” as she did this strange hippie dance in her tiny dorm room. Yet despite her erratic behavior, AB and I clicked.
Since I much preferred Bob Dylan over her other great musical love (the Grateful effing Dead), we listened to a lot of Dylan. We listened to “Mama You’ve Been on my Mind” so often that I almost picked up on her habit of calling every female “mama.” One night we almost started sobbing over “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” As the maudlin voices chanted about death and and Dylan crooned about his decommissioned boots and pistols, AB looked at me, tears welling. “Mama, I’m bummed,” she said.
Our circle of friend expanded to include two rabid Dylan fans, Josh and Adam. Both would stay up all hours of the night, drinking Boone’s, smoking Marlboros and absorbing Bob Dylan. They unofficially majored in Bob Dylan. Both eventually failed out of school with GPAs below 1.0. But before they both left, I developed a deeper appreciation for Bob Dylan than I care to admit.
I’m writing about Bob Dylan because this morning I spent a good hour reading his song lyrics at BobDylan.com. For every folk-shit stinker like “Now There’s a man you’ll hear about/ Most anywhere you go,/ And his holdings are in Texas/ And his name is Diamond Joe” there’s gems like: “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone/ Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown/ At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone /But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter” and”The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face/ Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place” and”The vagabond who’s rapping at your door / Is standing in the clothes that you once wore./ Strike another match, go start anew/ And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”
Thanks for indulging this lil’ bit of Bob love. I know the previous paragraph was painful.
