Slow Train Coming

Why are we still enamored with Bob Dylan even today, as he turns seventy years old?

Dylan isn't a traditional rock and roller like Elvis Presley was or Rod Stewart is. He's not someone who struts onstage or plays flamboyant arrangements. His music is menacing, but in a more subtle and sly way. He pretty much lets his voice - commonly compared to the sound of a cow with a limb caught in a barbed-wire fence - deliver the edge to the many poetic stories his songs represent.

And what songs they are! Originally a folk singer in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Dylan adopted and adapted the ideas of the musical heroes of his teenage years, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, and added a rock and roll sound with electric instruments that sounded spare and basic but could still pull a scab off an uncomfortable wound. Many of Dylan's tunes, whether acoustically or electrically arranged, probe such sore spots. His way with words and rhymes created a world dominated by strong women, Biblical characters, wanderers seeking truth, and a motley crew of jokers and thieves. Only in a Dylan song like "Desolation Row" could Romeo and Cinderella meet through mistaken identity. Only in a Dylan song like "Sweetheart Like You" could we be introduced to "the most beautiful woman who ever crawled across cut glass to make it deal."

Dylan's songs, open to personal interpretation and universal in themes of love and betrayal, are not confined to any particular time and place, making them open to all sorts of musical re-arranging and interpretation by the many recording artists who found their own meaning and their own voice in Dylan's words.

That's why we still care about Dylan today.

Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited with their humorous parables of American culture, are considered the masterpieces in the Dylan catalog, but I recommend John Wesley Harding from 1968 as an example of Dylan's low-key side. Its on that album where, after a devastating motorcycle accident, he quietly delved into the meanings of freedom, relief, and love . . . and found himself renewed.