March 30, 2021

Bald eagle, eastern phoebe, song sparrow. Bob Dylan.

I didn’t grow up in a classic rock household. No Beatles, no Stones, no Who, no Kinks, no Zeppelin. On this side of the Atlantic, maybe a little more: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby Stills & Nash (Neil Young’s Harvest but none of the others). And my father loathed Bob Dylan. Still does. It’s a running joke of mine to tell him I’ve got some Bob Dylan music to share with him. I don’t exactly know what the aversion is. Likely it’s the voice. But Dylan has had so many different voices, and the one song he seems to tolerate is “Lay Lady Lay.” Could be attitudinal, the cockiness of Dylan during the period my dad was coming of age in the ‘60s.

All that’s fine. This is just to say I didn’t grow up with an awareness of Bob Dylan as this pivotal, foundational figure in music history. My earliest memory of Bob Dylan is from visiting my dad’s best high school friend sometime in the early or mid-80s. At the time I think he was living in a trailer in the woods in a Massachusetts town even more rural than what imagined mine to be. I remember the cassette rack affixed to the wall, with the chunky red Columbia records font repeating down two whole columns: Bob Dylan Bob Dylan Bob Dylan. I think I was mostly impressed by how many different tapes there were. Maybe the name Bob also made me think of Bob from Sesame Street. I think my dad told me he was a folk singer. Since that term had no meaning for me, I think I associated it with living in the woods. Folk music was made by people living close to the land somehow.

It wasn’t until high school, when I started sporadically collecting used records and cassettes gleaned from yard sales and flea markets that I started to immerse myself with the music so many similarly music-obsessed kids grew up with. The treasure trove was the 2-LP Greatest Hits Vol. !! collectively, from which “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)” and especially “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” became favorites, in addition to the previously unreleased “Tomorrow is a Long Time” and “Watching the River Flow.” The triumphant return of Dylan to gushing critical acclaim with 1997’s Time Out of Mind might also have had spurred my curiosity. I bought it on CD and Freewheelin’ on cassette.

There are still gaping holes in my Dylan discovery, though I’ve bought several volumes of the Official Bootleg series over the years, as well as Biograph, etc. But right now I seem to be in a pretty deep Dylan phase, rewatching Scorcese’s No Direction Home for the umpteenth time, and playing a game with a best friend who is also a consummate Dylan expert, whereby every time a Dylan song comes up on shuffle for me, I text him and we both give it a rating on a 10.0 scale. We’re over 60 at this point, but at this rate we should be done with the discography in 20 years.