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It's Dylan's 60th, and he's everywhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime.
In my (not so humble) opinion, he is the single most significant pop culture figure of my lifetime.
I was too young for his beginnings, and too old for his comebacks, but he was always lurking somewhere on the edges of my interests. I remember trying to make a drawing in jr. high school, illustrating all the characters from Desolation Row, even as I lapped up prog-rock with my generation. In college, when the punk/new wave moment was all that mattered, I spent one of my favorite springs making minimalist sculptures while listening endlessly to Bringing It All Back Home. The late-coming accolades he's been receiving for his neo-folk act serve as confirmation of my own notions of what Traditionalism might be.
Much can be summed up in the story of All Along the Watchtower. It appeared on John Wesley Harding, the acoustic album released after the motorcycle accident, which seemed, in some ways, a step backwards. The so-called Movement, which Dylan had once fronted, had passed him by (or he had stepped aside) and the music had spawned plenty of new stars, and was splintering in many directions. The crash was coming, and Dylan, standing on the ominous yet ambiguous Watchtower, saw it on the horizon. A lot of other people didn't. One who did was Jimi Hendrix, Dylan's greatest disciple. Hendrix electrified the song, whipping its subtleties into a roar of anguish and foreboding. The Hendrix rendition became the "official" version, especially as performed for years by the Grateful Dead. Through its history, the song encapsulates the folk roots of rock, both black and white, and the transformation of that material into something more than mere entertainment. Hendrix was the ultimate product of that transformation, and his version, a testament of faith in the wounded prophet, closed the racial feedback loop of pop culture. The Dead survived the crash, and carried the achievement forward, a revelation, and a warning, to a new generation.
And it's not even one of my favorites.
Give me Mr. Tambourine Man any day.
The first psychedelic song, though similarly, it was the Byrds' version that got the message across. It's notable that they relied on something sonic, excising the lyrical culmination, which remains one of the great evocations of inspiration, from whatever source:
And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're
Seein' that he's chasing.
Happy Birthday, Bob.