They say that if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there. Well, maybe. But if there’s one quintessential icon of my youth, it has to be Bob Dylan. Or at least, his music. Again and again, in his songs Dylan defined the turmoil of the 60s.
And today Bob Dylan turns 70. It’s hard to believe; in fact, it somehow doesn’t seem right. He was all about us against them, youth against age, ideals against corruption. There can’t be anything more scathing than “Masters of War” or “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”. Despair, disenfranchisement, disillusionment—he caught those elements and hammered them home.
Dylan broke the mold—he wrote popular songs about issues of the day, a major break from things like “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”. Yes, there were other topical songwriters (Tom Lehrer, say); but Dylan broke out to the wider audience. Maybe it’s because he was visceral where Lehrer was intellectual.
If there’s anything that encapsulates the 60s, it has to be “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.
“Come senators, congressmen
“Please heed the call
“Don’t stand in the doorway
“Don’t block up the hall
“For he that gets hurt
“Will be he who has stalled
“There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
“It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
“For the times they are a-changin’.”
(Sadly, senators and congressmorons are deafer than ever; the only calls they heed are from corporate donors and lobbyists.)
Or “Mr. Tambourine Man”. “In that jingle-jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.”
In a way, it seems so wrong that I’m finding a collection of celebrity tributes to Dylan in, of all places, AARP, although he is, after all, 70. The Telegraph has reviewed several books on him. & Rolling Stone has done him proud.
Speaking of which, it was Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that gave both the publication & the band their name.
I have a lot of the songs on different playlists, so I’m frequently reminded of his talent for saying the most with the fewest words. Things like “My Back Pages” still resonate. Is there anything truer than the refrain, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
And “I Shall Be Released” saw me through the past three years, especially the way Nina sings it.
Well, hell—there are scores I could go on about. But I’ll just mention two more:
The very anthem of the era has to be “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Three verses, four chords on the guitar, yet so powerful, so universal & so timely. Even now, nearly 50 years later. I’ll give you two versions—one by The Boss and one by Peter, Paul & Mary. They can’t have done a concert that didn’t end with it in all the years they were together.
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