I don't even know where to start with Dylan. Bob Dylan IS my youth. I worshipped the man. We all did. I always thought he should be poet laureate of this great mucked-up indescribably non-linear acid-trip of a country of ours. I guess that makes me an idealist.
Is it possible we were all idealists? Back in the fabulous day? Quite. We were, after all, teenagers caught between the formless fears of our nuclear childhood and the certain horror of the Vietnam War.
But a truth spun out from our funky little 45 RPM RCA record changers—in grade school, really—all the way back in the fifties. The truth was about love and the truth was about fun and the truth was about what it meant to be young, and we called it, in the beginning, rock n roll. But by the end of the Eisenhower years our youth truth got all mixed up with the harder truth of oppression and the truth of circumstance and the truth of voices too small and powerless to be heard, and—probably most important—the truth of the mystical American collective poetic heart, as it beat, this time around, within the scrawny breast of this middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, of all places. The son of an appliance salesman, from the deep-freeze interior of our times.
We didn't have a name for this, which is, I guess, the way all revolutions start when you think about it, but we knew we couldn't get enough of this newest, greatest truth who called himself Bob Dylan. And that wasn't even his real name.
Sure I made love to Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Of course I sang Love Minus Zero/No Limit to my future wife pretty close to the first night we met, playing bad quitar and not even beginning to syncopate the way Dylan did. But for me anyway, it was about a lot more than that. It was about how Dylan could say what you were thinking when you didn't even know you were thinking it, in exactly the same way your lover could.
Like youth and love itself, Dylan was an alchemist of the highest order. He turned teen angst and the zeitgeist—the time-ghost—into gold and we loved him for it.
I had an odd collection of what you might call geek/nerd-type behaviors when I was a kid. I played both piano and violin. I sang soprano in the children's choir in church. I liked school and wasn't particularly good at most sports. But when I was ten years old I discovered Elvis Presley, whose records were promptly banned from my house. Of course I bought them anyway. Stashed them away from prying eyes. I tried to comb my hair like The King too. Learned to play a little guitar. It felt good to have a secret vice that made me feel so good (some things are constants in life, aren't they?), and it's really a very very small step from Elvis to Dylan, with one important consideration—with Dylan, it wasn't so much about entertainment. Dylan made us feel like whatever it was we were looking for was worth the time it took to find it. You didn't lay back and groove on Dylan on any album he made before Nashville Skyline. His songs demanded your attention. It took work to listen to Dylan. He didn't even publish lyrics because he knew that sometimes what you heard was more important than what he said.
And the kids who listened to Bob Dylan's songs demanded society's attention as no generation of children has before or since.
Bob Dylan scored the political ascendency of the 60's generation. He was the fullest flowering of the Second Renaissance, the one that sang the body electric and wrapped itself in denim and dreams. We'll never see his like again.