It’s the day before Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. I was reading a new Dylan biography outside, and everything smelled like flowers, even though it’s cloudy and there aren’t many flowers out yet in Iowa. Then I got to thinking of ten years ago, when Jim Dragoni and I organized a "Dylan's 70th Birthday" concert at my church in Philadelphia. This time around, it seems worth writing down what Bob Dylan has meant to me over to the years.
My life changed one day in my sophomore year of high school, when I came home from basketball practice, turned on the local rock radio station, and flopped onto the couch. It was around November 1992. As I was lying there, “Like a Rolling Stone” came on. At some point I got up and just stood next to the stereo to hear what it was. I’d never heard anything like it. All these years later, I still can't say exactly why I love that song so much, and it still blows me away. That Christmas, I got a cassette tape of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. We were visiting my grandparents in Florida at the time, and I listened to that cassette as much as I could on my Walkman. I can still smell the salty air of Florida in the winter when I hear that album.
I’d just started playing guitar the previous summer. Once I heard Dylan, I had something new to practice. I bought my first harmonica the next summer at a mall near Seattle when we were there for a baseball tournament. Soon I had a harmonica rack and a songbook containing every Dylan song from 1966 to 1975. I borrowed Greatest Hits, Volume 2 and the Traveling Wilburys from a friend and started getting to know the older Dylan albums. I came to love a vinyl copy of Another Side of Bob Dylan that I picked up during a school trip to Olympia. I bought a $5 copy of Planet Waves on cassette at a gas station in the desert east of Los Angeles during another baseball trip. Probably for just the sheer volume of songs they contained, the first Dylan CDs I bought were the double albums Before the Flood—a 1974 live album with The Band—and the 1975 release of the Basement Tapes (also featuring The Band). My first car was an old pickup truck that still had an 8-track player in it, so I got to know more Dylan through 8-tracks of the The Band and The Byrds that I picked up at a thrift shop.
In addition to being what I now recognize as unusual behavior for a dude on a baseball team, I see that this was a strange way to get to know Bob Dylan’s music. But it worked. I loved the early 60s stuff like “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” which expanded my awareness of important struggles for human rights that we still need to address today. At the same time, I enjoyed the trippier stuff like “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35," “My Back Pages,” and "You Ain't Going Nowhere." To me, the mix of surrealism and social engagement belonged together and wasn't an either/or. Folk, protest, acoustic, electric... the labels don't matter. Anything that opens your eyes, ears, heart, and imagination and connects you with our shared weird humanity is already revolutionary.
My eclectic introduction to Dylan’s work also meant that I got to know him in relation to other musicians like Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Byrds, The Band, and Tom Petty. He is a very short bridge between Woody Guthrie and Jimi Hendrix. This helped me see that there’s something about music that breaks down walls and opens doors into varieties of human expression and experience, if you bother to tune into it. While I think it’s mostly impossible to know Dylan’s personal intentions as an artist, messing with categories, labels, and rules has definitely been something he’s good at.
Sometimes people will ask, “Who’s the person you’d most like to have a conversation with?” I would say it's Bob Dylan, except that I have a feeling it wouldn’t be a good time. I’ve seen and read enough Dylan interviews to know that he gets cagey and obfuscates. A lot of his work seems to feature—if not revolve around—intentional misdirection. While that can be frustrating as a fan, it’s also taught me to see the importance of just letting someone be. I don’t need to know the inner thoughts of the artist to enjoy the songs. There’s something liberating about that, for both artists and audiences.
Getting used to the reality that some things will just stay mysterious has helped me in my career as a Lutheran pastor and historian. It’s okay for parts of the Bible to be bizarre and resist interpretation. There’s something exceedingly holy about that. Jesus can be the bringer of peace and a bringer of trouble. Martin Luther can be a mess of contradictions about grace and judgment. Life, people, institutions, and ideals can be disappointing and hurtful. Things don’t always resolve, line up nicely, or make sense. But a song in the face of the void can be a powerful thing, which inspires me to try things like creativity, compassion, and courage all over again.
Humor and sincerity, fiction and truth, imitation and originality, intimacy and distance: Bob Dylan has been a part of how I think about these mixed-up things. And in my own writing and songwriting, it’s nice to have songs like "I Believe in You" and "Every Grain of Sand" from his so-called “Christian phase” as a benchmark for how to engage the challenging work of writing about faith. How can you be direct without being preachy? Vulnerable without being cheesy? Sometimes you just have to try and see, and fail, and try again. And then maybe a nice song or an honest turn-of-phrase eventually shows up, and you know it when you hear it.
I’m thankful I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” that day after school in 1992. It and hundreds of other Dylan songs have added some awesomely funky words, music, and ideas to my life. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed talking about Dylan with friends, learning more about American music through his work, and—most of all—hearing, playing, and singing some really fantastic tunes. “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free…”
My life changed one day in my sophomore year of high school, when I came home from basketball practice, turned on the local rock radio station, and flopped onto the couch. It was around November 1992. As I was lying there, “Like a Rolling Stone” came on. At some point I got up and just stood next to the stereo to hear what it was. I’d never heard anything like it. All these years later, I still can't say exactly why I love that song so much, and it still blows me away. That Christmas, I got a cassette tape of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. We were visiting my grandparents in Florida at the time, and I listened to that cassette as much as I could on my Walkman. I can still smell the salty air of Florida in the winter when I hear that album.
I’d just started playing guitar the previous summer. Once I heard Dylan, I had something new to practice. I bought my first harmonica the next summer at a mall near Seattle when we were there for a baseball tournament. Soon I had a harmonica rack and a songbook containing every Dylan song from 1966 to 1975. I borrowed Greatest Hits, Volume 2 and the Traveling Wilburys from a friend and started getting to know the older Dylan albums. I came to love a vinyl copy of Another Side of Bob Dylan that I picked up during a school trip to Olympia. I bought a $5 copy of Planet Waves on cassette at a gas station in the desert east of Los Angeles during another baseball trip. Probably for just the sheer volume of songs they contained, the first Dylan CDs I bought were the double albums Before the Flood—a 1974 live album with The Band—and the 1975 release of the Basement Tapes (also featuring The Band). My first car was an old pickup truck that still had an 8-track player in it, so I got to know more Dylan through 8-tracks of the The Band and The Byrds that I picked up at a thrift shop.
In addition to being what I now recognize as unusual behavior for a dude on a baseball team, I see that this was a strange way to get to know Bob Dylan’s music. But it worked. I loved the early 60s stuff like “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” which expanded my awareness of important struggles for human rights that we still need to address today. At the same time, I enjoyed the trippier stuff like “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35," “My Back Pages,” and "You Ain't Going Nowhere." To me, the mix of surrealism and social engagement belonged together and wasn't an either/or. Folk, protest, acoustic, electric... the labels don't matter. Anything that opens your eyes, ears, heart, and imagination and connects you with our shared weird humanity is already revolutionary.
My eclectic introduction to Dylan’s work also meant that I got to know him in relation to other musicians like Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Byrds, The Band, and Tom Petty. He is a very short bridge between Woody Guthrie and Jimi Hendrix. This helped me see that there’s something about music that breaks down walls and opens doors into varieties of human expression and experience, if you bother to tune into it. While I think it’s mostly impossible to know Dylan’s personal intentions as an artist, messing with categories, labels, and rules has definitely been something he’s good at.
Sometimes people will ask, “Who’s the person you’d most like to have a conversation with?” I would say it's Bob Dylan, except that I have a feeling it wouldn’t be a good time. I’ve seen and read enough Dylan interviews to know that he gets cagey and obfuscates. A lot of his work seems to feature—if not revolve around—intentional misdirection. While that can be frustrating as a fan, it’s also taught me to see the importance of just letting someone be. I don’t need to know the inner thoughts of the artist to enjoy the songs. There’s something liberating about that, for both artists and audiences.
Getting used to the reality that some things will just stay mysterious has helped me in my career as a Lutheran pastor and historian. It’s okay for parts of the Bible to be bizarre and resist interpretation. There’s something exceedingly holy about that. Jesus can be the bringer of peace and a bringer of trouble. Martin Luther can be a mess of contradictions about grace and judgment. Life, people, institutions, and ideals can be disappointing and hurtful. Things don’t always resolve, line up nicely, or make sense. But a song in the face of the void can be a powerful thing, which inspires me to try things like creativity, compassion, and courage all over again.
Humor and sincerity, fiction and truth, imitation and originality, intimacy and distance: Bob Dylan has been a part of how I think about these mixed-up things. And in my own writing and songwriting, it’s nice to have songs like "I Believe in You" and "Every Grain of Sand" from his so-called “Christian phase” as a benchmark for how to engage the challenging work of writing about faith. How can you be direct without being preachy? Vulnerable without being cheesy? Sometimes you just have to try and see, and fail, and try again. And then maybe a nice song or an honest turn-of-phrase eventually shows up, and you know it when you hear it.
I’m thankful I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” that day after school in 1992. It and hundreds of other Dylan songs have added some awesomely funky words, music, and ideas to my life. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed talking about Dylan with friends, learning more about American music through his work, and—most of all—hearing, playing, and singing some really fantastic tunes. “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free…”