Today's daily New Yorker cartoon features an elderly couple, with the woman telling the man, "Dylan turns eighty today -- don't you think it's finally time you forgave him for going electric?"
I'm too young to remember Robert Zimmerman's "Judas!" moment or his audacity to expand beyond the folk movement to the point of inspiring Pete Seeger to take an axe to the band's power lines in Newport. I found Dylan when I was in high school, after I discovered the Beatles when I was in junior high.
For me over the decades, the greatest appeal of Bob Dylan has been "discovering" him -- the different modes of him throughout his career. For decades now, the 1966 release "Blonde on Blonde" has remained in my Top 5 albums of all time, while others have come and gone. (Haunted to this day by "Visions of Johanna," I still mutter to myself a play on those lyrics, during a senior moment, "Jeez, I can't my my keys."
I had to forage my way toward "Blonde on Blonde." Early, rudimentary memories, though, evoke snippets of sonic recollections: of being in my parents' black Buick Electra 225 and thinking how "Lay Lady Lay" stood out from anything else I'd ever heard on the radio; in Jerry Woods' basement circa 1978 hearing "Positively 4th Street" and thinking it was Dire Straits, who were the hot new hipsters, not realizing Mark Knopfler was simply Dylanesque and that the real thing was so much more expansive; with a driver's license of my own, tooling down 26th Street in my forest-green '74 Chevy Nova, hearing "Buckets of Rain," being blown away, and thinking, "OK, now which iteration of Dylan is that one from?"
It was from "Blood on the Tracks," of course, and -- aha! -- a copy of that record was in my brother's collection. Maybe Dylan's second best release. That album actually led me backward, to start to fill in the back catalog, those legendary recordings from the '60s at the height of his creativity. As I was starting to delve into Dylan, though, it was by now the late '70s, and he had fallen out of fashion during the punk and disco era. Imagine my shock when I bought the new release "Live at Budokan" (1979) and couldn't believe how horrifically he'd butchered his own songs. ("Is that a goddamn flute?! What the ....?")
That was right before "Slow Train Coming," which reaffirmed his popularity but put off a lot of fans who were worried by the launch of that multi-album Christian phase -- which was a concern but which also produced some of his greatest individual album tracks. He would emerge from that phase in 1983 with "Infidels" -- Knopfler, by now producing; Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare the dynamic rhythm section; Dylan's songs again epic in nature. I started going to see him live, maybe four times in the '80s, once with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backing him, often with the Grateful Dead either preceding him or following him into town but either way cluttering the parking lot each time.
It was hit and miss for the rest of the '80s -- I had finally caught up with Dylan's recordings in real time -- until his next masterpiece, 1989's "Oh Mercy," recorded with Daniel Lanois. I can't imagine anyone else creating the perfect song "Most of the Time." (Check out Bettye LaVette's version on the wonderful compilation album "Chimes of Freedom." For another fine collection of Dylan covers, go to the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' film "I'm Not There.")
I stuck with him in the '90s when he stopped recording his own material and instead put out albums of traditional folks songs, each album powerful in its own right. He picked up his pen again in 1997 and reunited with Lanois for what is probably his third-best release, "Time Out of Mind," just a haunting howl from a spurned lover now in his 50s and realizing the depth of musical history that came before him. That album was released on September 30, 1997, and it was just a few days later that I found myself in Sacramento for my good friend's wedding, and I was prepared with my Discman and mini earphones, so that after I went down to Tower Records (the original store?), I could go back to the hotel and play the CD right away. Try putting on headphones, closing your eyes, and launching the opening track -- the plaintive, spine-tingling opening notes of "Love Sick," altered here from the original:
That was my heyday (in a lot of ways), and it's been a slow slide toward estrangement for Dylan and me. The last release of his I bought was "Love and Theft." During this review of the documentary about Tower Records, I told the story of tracking down "Love and Theft" on its date of release -- September 11, 2001 -- despite the inconvenience of a terrorist attack that sunny day. That album was half disappointing, and it was then that I realized that Dylan is at his best when he has the right producer and at his worst -- like in the past two decades -- when his alter-ego Jack Frost is at the controls. Some writers need a good editor; some rock stars need a good producer. I've sampled his recent releases -- giving him the benefit of the doubt, even the horrific Sinatra stuff -- and have concluded that the man's lyrical muse has mostly abandoned him and that he has simply given up on writing melodies. He has essentially retired but keeps going.
I haven't seen him live since the '90s, the last time at a fairly intimate club in Chicago as he was launching that roadhouse version of his band, the sound he essentially still tours with, 25 years on. I've heard horror stories from fans who have gone to see the croaking-frog version of the elderly Dylan, sometimes genuinely baffled at which song he is singing, that's how recognizable the renderings can be. I've delved into his finely curated Bootleg series -- Rolling Thunder is simply the best live tour I have ever heard recorded, and I regret that I'm just young enough to have been too young to have caught that version of his band. It's a shame the recent movie about it is such a disappointment. If I had to pick one recording to leave you with, on Bob Dylan's 80th birthday, that I could take with me to that proverbial desert island, it would be, from "Bootleg: Vol. 5," the live version of "Isis."
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