Robert Allen Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) came into the world on May 24th, 1941, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota.  The looking glass separating newborns from their adoring fans may well have been formed by Lewis Carroll.  Some two decades later, between 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan would give us four album sides that shone so brightly that even the sun shaded it’s eyes from their glare.  The bread for this sandwich would feature 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan on one side, and 1967’s John Wesley Harding on the other.  The cold cuts would be 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, and Highway 61 Revisited; followed in 1966 with rock’s first double album, Blonde On Blonde. The two records that acted as bookends were as fine as the pinnacle of nearly any rock act to come before or since, and many fine artists would have celebrated careers without one album of this high calibre.  The fact that they are not mentioned alongside this mother lode-creative outburst that they border hints that they are popular music’s answer to man touching the moon with a pen.  No one has approached such an output before or since, and even the Fab Four were listening in awe.

   

Dylan has been written off by jealous critics more times than Woody Guthrie has hopped a train.  When Dylan “went electric”, the acoustic folk crowd went apoplectic.  Dylan lit up the Nashville Skyline going country before it was cool, when contemporaries sought to match his muse with psychedelics (it is interesting to note, Dylan’s music never hyped drugs as a solution).  Dylan became the property of Jesus, and released Slow Train Coming in 1979. He said, “I like to keep my values scripturally straight”.  People had demanded an ultimate answer from him, and when he went crying in the wilderness some reacted with venom when he told them their answer.  When Dylan was largely written off and derided by critics without ears to hear, Dylan rebounded with 1997’s Time Out of Mind.  His output since has produced a second half as strong as Gone With the Wind after the intermission.

Bob Dylan has toured with a pace that would make the Road Warriors weary, and Willie Nelson looking out at the tour bus traveling alongside his own.  Dylan just released his 36th studio album, called Shadows in the Night.  He will be starting a new leg of touring in Germany, sprinkling shows all over Europe like a troubadour salt shaker.  A ticket to one of the shows is akin to seeing Tempest performed with Shakespeare seated in the theatre.

       In 1986, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that, “That day’s gonna come when there aren’t gonna be any more records, and then people won’t be able to say, “Well, this one’s not as good as his last one. They’re gonna have to look at it all.  And I don’t know what the picture will be, what people’s judgment will be at that time.  I can’t help you in that area.”  Dylan left vitriolic critics mute with his resurgence after that period, although Dylan’s demise had been greatly exaggerated in piled-on bias.  It is with assurance that L4LM can state that when the overall judgment requires verdict, it will drop words such as genius and masterpiece with regularity.  L4LM wishes rock’s poet laureate a happy 74th birthday, and we hope that the slow train pulls into many more stations before that lonesome whistle blows.

Words by Bob Wilson

Drawings by Claude-Angele Boni  ~author of: Stuck Inside of Mobile (with a rhapsody for Bob Dylan).

http://www.bobdylan.com/us/upcoming-dates