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Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!
Bob Dylan would have been on tour for much of this past year if it weren’t for a global pandemic. The man turns 80 today.
Twenty years ago, Dylan was about a dozen or so years into his “Never Ending Tour” and on the verge of at least his fourth music industry “comeback.” Following up his return to releasing original material under the production of Daniel Lanois on Time Out of Mind (1997) after a pair of solo acoustic albums full of traditional American folk tunes, with the powerfully self-produced Love and Theft, it was as if he dove back down into the deep tradition of American music for the inspiration to recharge his creativity:
Songs like “Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain” or “I Saw the Light” — that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
My own gateway into Dylan’s art was Blood on the Tracks, smack dab in the middle of the 70s. This was a decade after the Newport Folk Festival crowd tried booing him and a few members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band off the stage and a little over a decade before Dylan’s Never Ending Tour and I was profoundly disappointed when the Rolling Thunder Review failed to come through Chicago. I finally got the chance to see Dylan live in 1978…