Happy birthday, Bob

Today is Bob’s birthday and he is 70.  That is something to celebrate.  Here are a few things I did today in his honour:

I thought a lot about the summer of 1964 when I would hitchhike to Toronto with my friend Cal on Friday afternoon and crash at an SCM summer project in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Trinity Square.  As a young undergraduate from Halifax, it was my first opportunity to meet Trots, Leninists, and Marxists (the project was called a Peace Camp) and hang out with them on our weekends in the big city.  It was also the first time I heard Dylan sing, down in the rectory basement with the SCM radicals.  Cal was disdainful of Bob’s voice and did some pretty funny imitations, and I have to admit that I didn’t really get what everyone was blown away by.

And I thought about when I joined the Columbia Record Club in the fall of ’66 after moving to Vancouver and had my own apartment and a record player from a second hand store on Fourth.  My first order included Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it all Back Home, and Blonde on Blonde along with nine other albums, all for one cent, and it was then that I began to understand what people who talked about Bob were talking about.

I remembered how Desire was for us the landmark musical event of the 1970’s and how our five year old daughter loved to sit in the front seat of our van and sing the first verse of Highway 61 Revisited at the top of her lungs as we drove across Canada in the summer of 1984.

Lol and I both listened to Rick Terfry this afternoon on Drive as he played old Dylan and Dylan covers and clips of people talking about working with Bob.

This evening we also both went to a reading by Andy Wainwright of a fiction piece he had recently completed called “The Old Master”.  It was about a 16^th century Dutch painter, but the story of this painter’s artistic life and creative processes was clearly and subtly connected to the story of Bob’s life and work and artistic development and processes.  It was interesting to listen to the ways that Andy alluded to Bob through the painter’s imagery and actions and to follow the interplay between the two “old masters”, the painter and Bob, that Andy was exploring.

I made two notes during the reading, “discography” and “hagiography”.  Discography is pretty obvious, since so much of Andy’s story and of what we presume to know or understand of Bob is measured out by what we hear in his albums, the works he has made throughout the various stages of his life.  And hagiography is also obvious, since the age of threescore and ten suggests that a time has been reached for reflection and assessment and summing up.  Bob’s no saint and has steadfastly resisted sainthood; however, all of the hagiographers still struggle to come to terms with what he is,  though Bob himself will never easily be summed up; say what you will about him, you’ll usually find out that “he’s not there”, so to speak.

I particularly liked Lorraine’s comment/question after the reading as she asked Andy to reread the ending of the story where there were images of two women and then wondered aloud about the fact that though Bob grew up through the 60’s and the changes brought about in the status of women there seemed to be so little written about him by women.  Andy responded that he thought Bob was not a misogynist and mentioned the book that Suzy Retolo wrote recently about her relationship with Bob, but neither comment really touched on the fact that when it comes to writing about Bob and his work, he really is, as Lorraine put it, “a guy’s guy”.

Here is a fact Andy mentioned that is worth noting:  Bob has been quoted in more court decisions than any other artist.  I might have guessed Shakespeare for that achievement, which just goes to show how profoundly Bob’s words have shaped our age.

Here and here are a couple of commentaries, both by guys, about today that are worth noting.

And here’s a wish: Happy birthday, Bob, and may you be forever young.