In Praise of Bob

He’s played more shows than Springsteen, the Stones and U2 combined.  He’s written some of the most wonderful, bizarre, memorable and poetic music of our times – from albums like Freewheeling Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde…to Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.  His great songs are too many to name here, and his voice too distinctive to be successfully imitated.

I am here to sing the praises of Bob Dylan who, as today’s Wall Street Journal points out, has performed more than 2,500 performances since 1990.  To underscore the enormity of this accomplishment, Dylan sings more than 120 different songs a year in concert without a teleprompter and nearly half of those songs are not his own.  He is 72. 

I can’t remember my grocery list!

My husband and I have seen Dylan in concert twice:  Once in 1999 when he toured with Paul Simon (not an intuitive coupling, but it worked somehow) and then 5 years later when he played the Patriot Center at George Mason University.   Because the first tour was a showcase for Simon, too, it was hard in some ways to appreciate how energetic Dylan’s sound remained as he aged.  The concert at George Mason, on the other hand, was a revelation:  Backed up by a talented, three-man Texas-swing-style band that was not stuck in that or any other genre, Dylan played with the passion, athleticism and stamina of someone half his age.  He dipped deeply into his catalogue, playing Masters of War, Tangled Up in Blue, Love Sick, Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower and more.  Jack White’s sideline band, The Raconteurs, opened up the evening with an earsplitting set– but the kids (and their parents!) wanted Dylan, who delivered with the power of the younger Jack White but also so very much more.  The kids in the audience raised their fists and swayed to the music and Dylan, looking gnomish in his cowboy hat and dandified western shirt, growled with pleasure like a very happy cat.

From time to time when I’m bored with what passes as serious pop, rock or blues music today (which is often), I turn on Dylan and the Beatles to bring me back to that golden age of my youth when the music was freeing and the lyrics seared your soul.  I sing and tap my foot and move my upper body, nodding my head to the rhythm, lost in the sound.

“I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go…”

Thanks, Bob and congratulations on your truly "never-ending tour."  You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go, so don't, okay?