06_SEP_2006
I lost a lot of time last week listening to Bob Dylan. He recently qualified for Social Security and has a new album out - his 39th studio effort, according to the blogs. So much has already been written about "Modern Times" (mostly effusive, as I would be) that it would be redundant reviewing its contents.
Suffice it to say that, as I too advance toward them Golden Years, lil Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, remains one of my few true heroes. It isn't because of his exemplary life. He has famously, or infamously, dabbled deep into drugs, hooking himself on heroin for a time - and during middle age, when he ought to have known better. He divorced and dropped at least $15 million in the process - a sum that might have been better spent on marriage counseling and his and Sara's favorite charity than lawyers and accountants. And he has left me and thousands of other fans deeply disappointed at times when he didn't feel like delivering anything beyond a garble of his lyrics and a lot of noise on stage when he should have just called in sick. But those venalities aside, Dylan has remained the one true artist of my generation, and this latest album is further proof. My fellow Zimmy zealots agree that it is his finest and most disturbing effort since "Blood on the Tracks" 30 years ago. I promised no explication, cites or other critical crap, so just take my word for it and get the album. I leave the poetry to Bob.
My point here is more about the medium than the message. I bought my first Dylan album when I was still in high school, before the Beatles, before the Rolling Stones, before any of our enduring rock idols made a ripple on the radio. My favorite Dylan tune then, and now, was "Don't Think Twice," a simple, bittersweet love song that has as much resonance for me today as it did when I first sang it at the age of 15, straining to match Dylan's whine while plucking my way through the melody on my old Gibson B-12 Natural. Back then, in the early 60s, we got our music via Top 40, still broadcast over AM because FM was still in the process of being refined and added to our growing number of media choices. If the song was so searing that we had to possess it, we bought it at a record store, usually first on a 45 rpm which resembled a flat black saucer with a hole in its center. If the 45 satisfied, we'd buy the album - again, flat, black vinyl, but about thrice as big as the 45 and with a much smaller hole in the center, and played at the slower speed of 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. These long-playing or LP albums became the musical life blood of the Baby Boom generation.
And doesn't all of this sound so quaint now? As I write this, I'm reminded of my father, telling me the tale of how he made his first crystal radio receiver back in the late 1920s, when radio was in its infancy and, as an inquisitive youngster, he was discovering the music of his generation through this new and remarkable medium. Needless to say, when he first told me how he hooked up this primitive device to catch Big Band airwaves at a time when the notion of broadcasting was some sort of miraculous novelty - I was less than impressed. I had no idea what a crystal set was, just as I was oblivious to his companion miracle: the pinhole camera that, again, my father made himself, decades before George Eastman put his first Kodak Brownie on the market. The profound nature of my father's tales didn't really hit me until years later, when I saw my own youthful touchstones become passe and, ultimately, museum pieces.
There are still LPs out there in the world - even a few specialty stores here and there that sell them. There are also radios that have only the AM band. They're not quite as scarce at this juncture as a Depression Era crystal set. But you've got to look pretty damn hard to find them. In my lifetime (and Dylan's for that matter), I've heard the inevitable vinyl scratches of my LP collection give way to CDs and, now, to ITunes. AM is an anachronism and even FM is on the leading edge of losing its audience increasingly to satellite radio. That's why Dylan remains so vital and visionary through all of this. His music and his poetry has been as modulated over a half century as any radio wave, hitting LP highs with "Blonde on Blonde" or "Blood on the Tracks" followed by lows like "Self Portrait" or "Knocked Out Loaded".
But even now, as he kvetches over the decline in the quality of music that seems ironically to have accompanied the technical superiority of contemporary recording studios, Dylan has been one of the first to embrace satellite radio, delivering a weekly themed program like an old-time Top 40 deejay. He growls his observations between eclectic tunes on a host of subjects - baseball one week, Greenwich Village the next. Like "Modern Times", it's old and new at the same time. This is no geezer harping on them good ol' days. Once again, Dylan has found a new and unique way to meld the past with the future and deliver his message without once coming off like a preacher man. Take him or leave him. But if you take him, I guarantee you won't leave disappointed. As media have changed, twisted, rarified, and left their vinyl skeletons in the dust like so many ancient crystal sets, Dylan has always been up there just a mite ahead of the pack.
I may sign up on XM radio just to hear his inevitable theme program on Alicia Keyes.
