We did not wish Bob Dylan a happy birthday last Friday, because we were all caught up celebrating John Wayne’s birthday.
So happy belated birthday, Bob! (This is a two-minute song he sang on the Johnny Cash Show in 1969. He looks so clean-cut.)
Today in 1962 Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut album was released by Columbia Records.
That was 51 years ago.
US sales totaled about 2500 copies. Bob Dylan remains Dylan’s only release not to chart at all in the US, though it eventually reached #13 in the UK charts in 1965. Despite the album’s poor performance, financially it was not disastrous because the album was very cheap to record.
Since then he has released something like 35 albums. He has won many awards throughout his career including 11 Grammy Awards, one Academy Award and one Golden Globe Award. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. Last year he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And still he is the same old Bob Dylan driving reporters crazy, refusing to tow the line and give them the answers they want to hear.
Your fans know you and love you, Bob. We know that the Holy Spirit did not tap you on the shoulder. He kicked you in the ass. And you have been praising the Lord ever since.
* Song to Woody
If you read a variety of blogs, you have certainly come across more than one of those posts where the writer asks the question: Who would you choose if you could have lunch with anyone? Usually they go on to tell you how they would love to get together with Audrey Hepburn, Princess Diana, Thomas Jefferson, Mother Theresa, Steven Spielberg and so on. Blah, blah, blah, boring celebrities. And, yes, I include Thomas Jefferson in that company. He would probably choose to have lunch with Marilyn Monroe.
Not that I’m judging anyone for their choices. Everyone is free to choose whom they want to choose. This is America after all! Come on.
Anyway, I’m sure you can guess who I would choose. Just in the last few days I’ve talked about Bob Dylan and Hilary Mantel and Marty Stuart–all would be charming companions at a meal. And you know how I feel about Frederick Buechner and Raymond Chandler. A conversation with them–to die for! As for movie stars, we’d need a big table to accommodate all my favorites.
But if we’re really talking about conversation, let’s invite:
Thomas Cranmer. He wrote the book.
General Sherman. He had Grant’s back.
U.S. Grant. He epitomized humility and courage. He had Lincoln’s back. And he was a really good writer.
Dorothy Rabinowitz. She tells it like it is in the WSJ.
T.E. Lawrence. He would be awesome, but we’d need someone to come along with us who could make him feel comfortable and draw him out of his shell–like Mrs. George Bernard Shaw.
Mary Prowers Hough, my great-great grandmother and the classiest lady to ever set foot in Colorado. I’d have a million questions for her.
J.D. Salinger. We could talk about Jesus over a glass of ginger ale in the kitchen.
Eudora Welty. We’d talk about stories and the art of writing them. I think I would like to invite
Shirley Jackson to come along too. The three of us would get along famously.
Saint Timothy. He received letters from Saint Paul containing personal advice which I take very personally: God did not give you a spirit of timidity!
Well, I’m sure I’ve left out some obvious choices. Who would you want to share a meal with? Alexander? Sargon the Great? Thomas Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell? Johnny Depp?
How wonderful to be able to give a big shout out to Hilary Mantel for winning her second Man Booker Prize! She previously won the award in 2009 for Wolf Hall. Now she has won the 2012 award for the sequel Bring Up the Bodies. She is the first woman to win twice. I couldn’t be more excited for her, and if you have not yet read either of these two wonderful books–run (don’t walk) to your nearest book store/library to acquire the books and do so!
Meanwhile the wonderful fall weather continues here in our flyover state.
The leaves on the ancient mulberry tree in our yard are bright yellow.
…and at the same time the rhododendron bush continues to bloom
along with several spring annuals!
And I have been trying to find something to read. I have started several books that were recommended by friends and abandoned them all. Bleh. Now I have gone back to an old favorite and am reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One. Not surprisingly, Bob has a wonderful way of expressing things and amazing powers of recall.
Having moved to New York City after one semester of college, he drifts around playing music, staying with people he meets, reading their books, and listening to music. His brain is like the proverbial sponge as he sets about educating himself:
I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Kan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.
Don’t you just love that?
I wonder if Bob has read Hilary Mantel’s books. I think he would really like them and old Thomas Cromwell especially.
From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog:
Bob Dylan, who just released a new album titled “The Tempest,” is taking aim at critics who think he is taking too much artistic liberty by incorporating the work of others into his own. Reportedly, some of the lines on Dylan’s 2006 album “Modern Times” bore a resemblance to lines written by Henry Timrod, who was considered the poet laureate of the Confederacy and died in 1867. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the 71-year-old Dylan declared, “…in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and p#$sies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherf*&kers can rot in hell.” 71-years-old and going strong!
By God, I do love him. And for the record, I totally agree: All those evil motherf*&kers can rot in hell. Oh that felt good.
Our mother died twenty-four years ago today. She was 62 years old. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and that I don’t miss her.
She was, indeed, a pilgrim and a stranger in this world, but I like to think of her in heaven, dancing “beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands…” My mother was no fan of Bob Dylan. She feared the change he heralded, but she did like “Mr. Tambourine Man” a lot and that line in particular. I always thought it described her alter-ego perfectly.
Here is a poem that I found in one of her notebooks. It seems appropriate today.
Life
I made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But time did becken to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away
And wither’d in my hand.My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Times gentle admonition:
Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey
Making my minde to smell my fatall day;
Yet sugring the suspicion.Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye liv’d, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my sent be good, I care not, if
It be as short as yours.–George Herbert
According to The Wall Street Journal, Tomas Tranströmer beat out Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Check out the Speakeasy story.
I am so bummed.
dual personalities 