So he played “Lay, Lady, Lay” in Brooklyn. If you read “Set-List This: Bob Are You There?” Then you know this was the starred song on my list of songs I wanted him to play. Not that I, for a second, am overestimating my self-importance here, because it was perhaps likely happenstance that he chose to play that song – or perhaps not. Perhaps he even read the list and thought, Why not.

Whatever the matter, it becomes irrelevant because he did it and that makes me happy because the request wasn’t even for me so much as it was for a friend and that particular song makes me both of us incredibly happy for reasons that remain personal, but obviously, duh, relate to the lyrics. I remember first hearing that song when I was younger and finding it absolutely terrifying: here was something sexually threatening to me. Then my friend one day asks me about this and starts repeating the lyrics; Whatever colors you have in your mind / I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine. Ah, I finally got it. So that’s what the song is about… It still made me nervous, but again, I was young and timid and a deer in headlights. Then I grew up somewhat (I said “somewhat”) and I understood about the colors and it all began to make sense. For what it’s worth, if BD ever sees this, know that you made one girl very, very happy because you helped play a role in a coming of age, as you have done for so many of us, male and female.

For my part, where I’m at now, I want to hear “Spirit On The Water” this Friday in CT at the MGM Grand. Combine that with “Lay, Lady, Lay” (or any of the other songs on my set-list) and I’m a happy girl. But then, I’m a pretty happy girl in the first place, so there is very little that would make me truly unhappy, unless Bob himself is unhappy, which would naturally be reflected in his music and hey, I want him to be happy as a person.

So you wonder, does it make a difference that there are some – not all – but some people who are in that audience, or will be, because they truly love him, and they truly love some little piece of music and know it by heart and even play it on their own harmonica (to no great success, I admit, but one tries), not out of some form of idol worship, not at all, but because Dylan has made a profound difference in our lives by speaking out and being That One. I’ve said it before and I won’t say it again… Suffice to say he was and remains part of our evolution. Our growing up.

We grow up with Bobby Dylan and he with us. He is part of our culture and references it and our culture, as my friend Phil says, references him. There’s that loop again. It’s a self-perpetuating mechanism and a good one and one that I find very interesting. I doubt I’m alone in that.

As Dylan has changed, changes still, and evolves, so do we. Few musicians have managed to touch so many generations. Dylan is not and was not the voice of just “one generation” but of many. He is the voice of a whole new generation with “Modern Times” as one writer for my site points out. And then there are those who were there in the summer of ’65 when he really “hit” with “Like A Rolling Stone” and others, like my friend Phil Gounis again (who I shall be running an interview with soon) who remembers when “Subterranean Homesick Blues” hit the a.m. radio. And then there is my cousin who stood in the freezing rain for hours to watch “Eat The Document” and it became part of who he is today, and like a book, or a moment in life, the experience was deeply affecting. Haven’t you read books like this? I certainly have – Nabokov comes to mind. Kundera also. Henry Miller. Any number of authors I can point to as really having an impact on my own writing and helping me make sense of my own experience.

Maybe my own writing has done that for some people: I’ve been told that it has. That it is, and this to me is the ultimate compliment, “identifiable”. Someone relates to what I wrote – something they themselves could not find the words for. I know that my poems are used in wedding ceremonies (which I consider a great honor) as well as funeral services (to sum up a life), which I also consider a great honor. I don’t mind at all that marrying couples pillage my poetry or the grief stricken find some comfort in that work. I don’t make any money from it, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that it is affecting – or some of it is. You can’t expect to always “hit”, but if you hit one out of a hundred times, then as a poet, as a writer, you’ve done your job. You can’t hit the high-mark every time. Nobody can. Not even Dylan.

Such experiences shape us. I can tell you a period in my life when I was listening to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Positively 4th Street” (granted, not a good time in my life), but it shaped me and Dylan’s songs gave voice to feelings/thoughts/emotions that I just (even as a poet) could not find the words for. If I couldn’t snarl out the pissy and pithy “Positively 4th Street” then I’m glad Dylan was there to do it for me, because I think we’ve all been there. I identify with “Ballad Of A Thin Man” in the same way… I love the way he snarls it out (in the live version of 66 from ETD). I understand that kind of pissed-offness at ignorance, and I don’t think I’m alone in that either, otherwise the song wouldn’t be such a hit. Yes, it resonates with me. But then, so does “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” so it’s not all anger here. It really runs the gamut from rage to lovesick to wist to you name it – all the great human emotions, right? To put it succinctly, Dylan has been and is there for both the good and the bad.

I have been reading the reviews of the Brooklyn show and so far, I’ve read some very good things, but I’ve read some interesting things that speak to Dylan’s “voice” and how it wasn’t good or what they had “expected”, and how it wasn’t “limber” etc etc and I think to myself, okay, fair enough. We are critics, so we go to a show and we write what we see or hear and feel and that’s all that any of us can do. So I can’t say it’s wrong simply because I disagree, but what I can say is this: What did you expect? Did you expect to go and hear Dylan of 1966? And if you had, would you have liked that then?

You have to put it into context. Even Dylan then, in the 1960s, had a voice that many considered grating and it was by no means the “norm”. I did not find it grating. I think and thought he was a genius with the way he used his voice as a separate instrument more so than so many vocalists. He really “used” it and the intonations and emphasis was excellent. He wasn’t exactly like other bands of the day and didn’t have the softer tones of the Turtles or Herman’s’ Hermits, who may be good in their own right, but they’re not Dylan and to wit, never had the staying power. Doesn’t that say something?

I’ve read and listened to people who’ve told me that Dylan’s voice is just “noise” (as Mr. Greenleaf says about jazz in the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley”…”Oh Jazz… it’s just noise, insolent noise….”). People who say that about Dylan’s voice remind me of Mr. Greenleaf. There’s just something they’re not connecting with in Dylan’s voice and that’s fine, of course, but that doesn’t mean he sucks. It may mean you’re not connecting with it, and we could even take it to radical extremes and give it a bad write up and be the target of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” which is all about people who know something is happening, but they don’t know what it is. Are those people like “Mr. Jones”?

What I do not get at all is this: I mean to each his or her own, bien sur, but why go to a Dylan show if you know what you’re going to hear (and by now, most of the reviews I read pretty much knew Dylan’s voice right now, etc), so why go and then slam the guy? I just don’t get that. Did they expect some sudden overturn or change or what they would consider “improvement” (personally, I LIKE his voice now… just as I liked his Nashville Skyline voice and etc… Dylan’s nothing if not changeable). Like I said, I happen to like his voice right now, just as I have liked every other incarnation of his voice from his early Woody Guthrie put-on to his 60s pure Dylan to Nashville Skyline to the overemphasized words in the 66 bootleg (especially apparent in “Mr. Tambourine Man” in which he overemphasizes the words “to” and “you” and others, but those two come to mind). I like that he is so changeable. It works for me, perhaps because I too am so mercurial that I can keep up or he keeps up with me, who knows… either way, there’s a great synchronicity there. I like the whole “Blood In My Eyes” period, and I like “Modern Times” as well. In short, I like all of it and I like every rebirth or incarnation of Dylan. Yes, some more than others. I won’t lie. I can get into the fact that Dylan now wants to dress how he wants to dress (tell me Bob, what was the sixties about? Did you always want to be that cowboy and were just following fashion then, or did taste change? I’m curious).

I see him now dressed up as a glittering cowboy and I kinda like it a lot (in some way, it’s sort of sexy, though I don’t know why and on any one else it would be absurd, but like so many things, Dylan pulls it off.) That said, I still miss the Dylan of 66 with his pegleg pants and his pointy boots: the Dylan of “Eat The Document” with his checker suit that he wore in concert, with his velvet jacket, his polka-dot shirt, his mop of curls (which I adore).

I remember watching “Eat The Document” for the first time and seeing him in a hotel with some French girl and he says he needs to be entertained before lunch and has a moustache drawn on his face. They joke by the window. She is gummy and has short hair. She’s neither here nor there, pretty enough, I suppose, but was that even the point? I don’t know who she is or was; maybe she’s someone really important, but she’s certainly not treated that way. She seems, as he says, “entertainment” and not particularly entertaining at that.

Then the scene cuts. So who knows what happens after, right? Maybe she stayed, maybe she left. I don’t know. All I remember thinking about it was I can almost bet that if they were together, she didn’t try to count his curls in the afterward, and that is where she missed and that is where I would have hit. What a waste, I thought. Forget that he’s Bob Dylan (because let’s say he’s a carpenter or a chicken farmer, okay?), he was a beautiful boy and an immensely talented boy and to be able to spend that kind of time with him is amazing and I would not have wasted a minute of it. But I am a poet, likewise, so for me to want to sit there, or lie-back and count the curls on Dylan’s head (which would take a lifetime, which is exactly the point), is hardly surprising. I’d just want to lie back and talk about life. That, and as I said, count his curls. Yes, yes… I know…

Maybe as one poet to another he’d understand that and try to count my freckles and we’d make a game of it: Asa Nisi Masa. I don’t know. All I do know is that there seem to me so many wasted moments and I wish I could gather them like so many scraps of cloth (like bits of silk fallen from a night sky) and weave them back together just to have a few hours with Dylan to sit and talk and hey… take it from there. Really, I want to sit and talk about whatever is on his mind. I’m not out to crucify Dylan like so many critics. I just want to be the friend at the end of the day that he can come back to and shoot the shit with. The one to whom he can tell his troubles and know that all will be okay.

Part of that is being a journalist and being nonjudgmental and just recording what you hear and not analyzing it too too much, but just listening (read: not over-analyzing or reading something into it that is not there). Yes, some analysis is inevitable: we all put things through a filter of sorts. It’s impossible not to, and one could even argue that it’s stupid not to because in the final account, analysis is what makes our work interesting – analysis and introspection.

I don’t try to “read” Dylan – I try to read me through Dylan, and that’s a different thing entirely. To my mind, it’s impossible to read Dylan with any degree of certainty unless he himself gives you his official seal of approval and even then, you’re still a filter. Nothing is authentic unless it comes directly from him, which is why “Chronicles” is such a compelling book. It’s Dylan as told by Dylan, and while we know we cannot always trust the subject him or herself, especially in biography, it’s important to have his or her point of view for the record. We want, and I write this as a biographer, our subject to leave us with as much raw material as possible and in safe places so that we can shout “Hurrah” because that material is original source material and is vital if we are to have any true understanding of our subject.

Hey, if Dylan wants to sit down with me and talk to me, that’s a different matter entirely. Let me know and I’m on the next plane (seriously). I’m prepared to leave at the drop of a hat and that’s no problem: I can be anywhere in the world with a day’s notice and I’d do it. It’s my job. I take that seriously. To sit with him, to discuss, then it is unfiltered. But for now, in the here and now, I can only go on what my own experiences are, those of people close to him who have been kind enough to grant me interviews, but I realize that even with those people, each has a story that is told from their perspective and thus shaded. It is THEIR story, NOT Dylan’s story, and that’s an important difference. I have no desire to be another “filter” for Dylan – another Christopher Ricks or Greil Marcus – it’s been done a hundred times over and I’m bored.

Yes, yes, impress us with some broad array of facts and that’s great. I respect that as a researcher and shit, I do it for my other writing so I know it’s not easy, but it’s not writing from the gut either and I see very little introspection: I see a lot of PROJECTION and even some valid interpretation, but that is a different thing entirely. Project what you want onto Dylan or into his songs and interpret them how you will but at least be decent enough to say that this is OPINION and this is, as I write on Tant Mieux, “Cultural commentary.” We write opinion, but we never have the gumption to say this or that songs means definitively this. I like some of those books, I really do and I own and have read them all and some of the authors I know well enough. But “Dylan’s Visions of Sin”? It seems to go to far to me. How tf does anybody know (besides Dylan) what his vision or idea of sin is or what each song in turn is truly about?

Yes, art is there for our emotional response and I believe any and every emotional response is “valid” (unlike some who feel that no interpretation is valid at all and that we shouldn’t even try, which to me sounds like “don’t be moved by art” or how can you be, because you don’t know wtf it is about… right? You have to have some visceral reaction to respond and that means you have to have some understanding of the work (whether right or wrong, it’s your understanding and hence, it resonates). I don’t see how that is “invalid” or why it upsets some people so much that you should bring a piece of yourself to any piece of music or artwork. It seems to me IMPOSSIBLE not to …. Part of art is the synchronicity between the piece and the viewer. What we give, what we get back, etc. and that combines to create something greater than both artist and viewer/listener. That is art that truly moves us – and I include music in there.

All I’m getting at here, after this long-winded rambling piece, is that I think all responses are “vaild”, only that some may be more or less insightful. Ultimately though, I think Dylan is part of my life as a sort of soundtrack. When I hear him happy, I’m happy. I read no more into it than that. When it sounds to me that he’s down or pissed off, I can relate and that hurts: it hurts that he’s in that state (so it sounds), and it speaks to me when I’m in that state. But to stay that Dylan’s voice is “feeble” or “shot” or any of the other things I recently read about the Brooklyn show makes me wonder – why go? Why listen? Listen, if you want Jim Morrison, then go for it. You can have both, of course, but if you prefer one over the other (and I certainly do have a preference: I don’t think “The End” is a particularly profound song… to me it sounds sophomoric, but again, that’s all interpretation and to others it’s an intensely profound song). It’s all good, but let’s not shoot someone out of the water for just being who they are. The minute we do that, we pass a judgment, and I have to tell you, I’m not a big fan of judgments. I don’t like it when it happens to me, and I don’t like it in general. I wonder who any of us are to throw stones…Criticism is important, but don’t go into something knowing what you’re gonna get then come out and complain about it. I hate blue cheese. I’ll always hate it. I could, I suppose, go and eat it and then write that up, but tell me, what’s the point?

For you, I hope you enjoy any show you attend, and yes, I hope Bob’s in a good mood that night, because that, I think, does make a difference. When he’s “on” he’s “on” – we’ve all experienced that, I think. But this is the most we can ask, and that seems fair to me.

Thanks for listening,

S.R.P.