They've been saying "The 60's are over" for years. And now, for Mr. Bob Dylan, they finally are.
Ol' Bob turns 70 today.
Pic: Not a recent photograph
There's a decent little article on him here, and lots of birthday links here.
Bob Dylan can agitate people — much like the way he used to when he was in his 20s and being branded as “Judas” for daring to play loud rock music to folk-loving audiences.
I'll say. Most people I knew would have been happy to put a knife through his eye for dragging an electric guitar onto the stage. In the world of folk music, there can be no greater blasphemy.
On the flip side, if it hadn't been for electrics, we never would have been blessed with 'Blood On The Tracks', my personal fave Dylan LP*.
*For those of you under 50, 'LP' stands for 'Long Playing', as in "record album", as in "vinyl", as in "precursor to the frisbee", as in "the worst form of storage media ever used in the history of the universe after aluminum foil canisters." However, simply because they were so fragile, we treated them like gold, thus imparting a certain feeling of 'personal protection' over our music stars; a feeling you certainly don't get in the throwaway world of CDs and memory sticks.
The way I see it, the reason Dylan successfully pulled off the switch to electrics is twofold. The main thing was that, even with electric guitars and drum sets banging away in the background, they still sounded like Dylan songs. Credit his squeaky voice and simplistic chord structure if you will, but it was actually a little deeper than that. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that, despite the guitars and drums, his songs were still Dylanesque. That 'intangible something' was still there. And that, in the final analysis, was all that mattered.
But another reason is, while he used electric instruments, he never 'went electric' like the way so many bands did, bringing in moog synthesizers and fuzz guitar and electronic sitars and all the rest. He was still, in that final analysis, the quintessential Dylan we had known and loved for years.
Squeaky voice, simplistic chord structure, and all.
Happy birthday, Bob. And many more.
