Happy 70th birthday, Bob Dylan.
From those dim, smoke-filled rooms in Greenwich Village to today, you have provided millions of people with the words they needed to make sense of senseless times. You have provided a voice to those who had their voice taken from them. You even had some fun along the way. You were the butt of jokes over your voice, dismissed as over-the-hill on the even of some of your greatest successes, played with the best musicians, taught John, Paul, George, and Ringo how to smoke dope and use it, sat in your pink house in Woodstock, NY with Rick Danko and had some fun and started another revolution even as your body healed from a motorcycle accident. You played with Christian themes, played at being a bourgeois parent, and in July of 1985 made an offhand suggestion at LiveAid that started FarmAid even as you stood and played with Neil Young and Keith Richards, surely a moment that needs to be remembered.
And who knows who you, the former Robert Zimmerman from Duluth, MN, really are? I guess that's OK, too, because it's really about the music you made, and your apathy toward the truth of your life is a sign, to me, that you would much rather make it all about the music.
I wonder how many of the folks who follow would name you as an influence?
Take the Time - Dream Theater
Like Rock & Roll Radio - Ray LaMontagne & the Pariah Dogs
Lady of the Island - Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Svete Tikhii, No. 4 of Vespers - Sergei Rachmaninov
Aquaboogie - Parliament
All Lovers Are Deranged - David Gilmour
Neurotica - Rush
Blues for Allah - The Grateful Dead
No Returning - The Explorer's Club
Phoenix - The Cult
Co-written by Gilmour and Pete Townshend, from one of my favorite albums of all time, Gilmour's About Face, this is "All Lover's Are Deranged". True dat. . .
