On My Relationship with Bob Dylan

As I read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles (Vol. One) in the waiting room of the dental office, it struck me that there was no other reading material available.

Waiting rooms were once great places to read where people who rarely read or never read has the opportunity to read newspapers, books, magazines and religious pamphlets.

The smartphone, of course, murdered this custom, as it has murdered countless other healthy American cultural customs (such as fist pumping at a rock concerts and love notes passed in elementary classrooms). What is left for the phone to murder? That would be a fantastic subject for a book.

Dylan began driving through me like an ancient jalopy on a dirt road. His words took sharp, bumpy and winding turns. I love this book; it is not a rock memoir. Cracking it is like taking a manual can opener to a treasure chest containing one of the unique and inscrutable minds in American history.

I thought about my long and never-ending relationship to Dylan and made a bullet list with a quill pen constructed from an eagle feather.

  • I didn’t listen to Dylan until my early 20s and didn’t truly connect to his music then. It was more history than music. I’d read more about him than listened to him.
  • I bought the three-record set Biograph when it came out and that changed everything. I gave that box set away to someone special years ago, for a birthday, a new Dylan fan who was hungry for the obscure tracks. I don’t regret that gift but I sometimes I could play those records again. The liner notes were the length of a novella.
  • Thirty years ago I was gifted a poster of Dylan and it hung in every classroom until I gave it away to the wrong person and the person I should have given it to never forgave me. Forgive me.
  • I played the same Bob Dylan song at several classroom open mics: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. It is, in fact, the only Dylan song I know. I once held a Bob Dylan-only open mic in my classroom.
  • I saw Dylan backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Civic Stadium in Portland. It was one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen and Dylan admits this in Chronicles.
  • I saw Dylan on the Time out of Mind tour in 1999 and he still had it. I love that album. I also love that song from the Wonder Boys, “Things Have Changed.” He won an Oscar for that.
  • I commenced a new relationship with Dylan two years ago when I ended up the ultimate pariah in American life. Dylan wrote countless songs about pariahs. He was one, at one time. My dusty Dylan cassette tapes brought me to new old Dylan songs and I found better lines than the classic lines.
  • It often surprises me when a line from Dylan magically materializes when I write. I always manage to: (choose one below)

    merge

filter

mince

whisk

layer

carom

graft

saute

his words into my words. It is not plagiarism or paraphrasing. It is Dylaning..something Dylan did with the ancient and venerable and obscure and discarded masters of poetry and film and vaudeville and music and sports and journalism and history and murder and agriculture and alchemy and painting and theater and technical manuals. He brought all of this into his songs. Dylan taught me how he taught himself. Borrow. Merge. Change. Forget attribution. Fake attribution. Disguise. Document.

At 54 years old, I finally learned his lesson. How does it feel? Loose, free, true.