Here are two things I think I know about Bob Dylan, as he calls himself now, who was born on May 24th, seventy years ago. (But maybe I’m just projecting. This transference stuff can get to you.) One, I think it probably creeps Bob out when people he doesn’t know congratulate him on his birthday. On my sixty-fifth, a surprising number of office cronies greeted me cheerfully throughout the day. How did they know? I decided to remove the date of birth from my Facebook page. Second, I bet Bob doesn’t like it when people think it’s cute to quote his songs in contexts that he never imagined, so I’ll try to steer clear of that.
And before I go on, a note to those of you who have never got Dylan. Please don’t try. One of the reasons I listened to “Freewheelin’ ” over and over in my sophomore year at North Texas State University, in Denton, Texas, was to assure myself that I was different from you. I was annoyed, a few years later, when “Like a Rolling Stone” began being played on the radio and stupid people heard it and praised it—so annoyed that I dropped out of college. If Bob didn’t stay in school, why should I? (I also remember thinking, What’s that organ doing in there?) Even today, I hate it at Dylan shows when a song whose special beauty I believe that I alone have recognized for years (“Ramona,” say) gets wild applause as soon, or as late, as the audience recognizes a few familiar words. I liked Dylan better when it was just me and Bob.
Or me and Bob and my girlfriend, until she announced, in September of 1965, after we saw Bob in Austin, at his very first show with the musicians who became The Band, that she thought the Beatles were better. And until, years later, when we broke up, she took my copy of “Highway 61 Revisited”—an early mispressing that had a faster, wilder version of “From a Buick 6.” Just took it.
So how many journalists are enthusing about Bob’s birthday? Too many to count, but if you want to try you should visit Expecting Rain, the authoritative aggregator for Bob references in the press and on the Web. (“On Dylan’s 70th, Albany man plays tribute”—Gazette Times). The Brits are all over it: the Telegraph (“How Dylan Looks Back to Go Forward”), the Observer (“Bob Dylan is 70: What to Give Him for a Birthday Present”), the Independent (“70 Reasons why Bob Dylan is the most important figure in pop-culture history”). Reason No. 23:
I still go to Expecting Rain every day, but, truthfully, it’s not as much fun as it once was, because it used to point to strange, offhand allusions; they have now been crowded out by all the big wonky-wonk think pieces.
All you big thinkers, please don’t try. As bards go, Bob’s a vatic. He just mumbles gibberish—at times quite tuneful gibberish—that somehow works its way into your bones, and into legal decisions. If you try to come up with a unified field theory about it, you sound like a dumbass. Biographies, on the other hand, are O.K., or used to be, when a new one would come out every five years or so, and you could skip to the later chapters. Now, though, they come out so quickly that it’s work to keep up with them, and they blur together, as all books eventually must. The only books I remember reading are the ones I read in the twentieth century.
Until fairly recently, when the oppressors clamped down, you could download almost any live Dylan performance the next morning. I say “almost” because apparently nobody bothered to sneak a tape recorder into a terrific show I saw a few years ago, where Steve Earle, Levon Helm, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings all played sets before Bob’s bus pulled in, and maybe Bob felt extra inspired by Levon. (Saratoga 8/17/08 anyone? Anyone?)
There are lots of sites, of course, where you can still celebrate Bob’s birthday illegally, but as the hireling of an institution that is somewhat touchy about “intellectual property,” whatever that is, I can’t properly tell you how to find them. Here’s something, though. If you often take the Times Square shuttle from Grand Central, you’ve probably stopped for a few minutes to listen to an African-American jug-style string band called the Ebony Hillbillies, and wished you didn’t have to go to work. Now you can watch them playing “Buckets of Rain” behind Garland Jeffries. You can even do that legally, I think.
This one, I’m not so sure about. It’s a live 1964 kinescope of Bob singing “Girl from the North Country” on Canadian TV, with helpful Italian subtitles. A YouTube critic appends a Miltonic outcry (“Areopagitica” Milton, not “Paradise Lost” Milton):
To show how special I am, I need to pick out an underrated Bob song that only the few have properly appreciated. That would be “Black Crow Blues”—“usually considered a minor work in Dylan’s oeuvre,” according to the current Wikipedia entry. But I don’t think Bob’s ever done it live, and Wiki says so flat out, FWIW. (Wiki doesn’t know that you can’t prove a negative.) Few artists have covered “Black Crow Blues,” though The Great Society did a 1966 version that is said to have been popular in Germany. (“Warum das so ist?” a commenter wondered.)
Instead, I’ll go for “North Country Blues” (but really a ballad), from a 1963 Newport appearance. No Sibylline utterances here, to be sure, but it’s a lovely tight pure folk protest gem all the same, and with no hint of bombast. “Anthology of American Folk Music” cultists take note: the old guy looking on with the banjo is Clarence Ashley. It took me a lifetime to discover who he was. If you don’t know, please don’t look him up.
