Where to begin…
Let’s start with my brother and Bob Dylan. No idea, really, which Bob Dylan song I first heard on the radio as a girl. Maybe “Blowing in the Wind?” That’s only a guess. But I do know that my brother was a Bob Dylan fan and was the first person whose knowledge, appreciation, and discussion of Dylan helped me admire his work on new levels.
My friend Riley LOVED Bob Dylan, and we had many conversations about him. I can think of specific songs Riley wrote that were Dylan-influenced. I have a favorite story (real) of when Riley interacted with Bob Dylan in person. A recurring character in Riley’s personal zeitgeist, initials “MVP”–a facet of Riley himself–was Dylanesque.
In college, my friend Kathy and I would listen to our favorite Bob Dylan albums and songs on repeat and have long discussions about them. As a matter, of fact, Kathy and I recently had a text interchange about those favorite Dylan songs. It was a little bit like going home, the way going home mostly is during the pandemic.
Dylan has never bored me. He has shifted gears, reinvented himself, reshaped his music, returned to his music and altered it so many times–and had so many interesting musical relationships through the years–that frankly, I don’t know how any of us can keep up with him. It was so much fun to be able to celebrate a whole new Bob Dylan with Tom through our mutual love for the Traveling Wilburys, founded in 1988, the year Tom and I married.
Bob Dylan is a force. There’ll be no argument from me that he deserved to be the first songwriter to receive a Nobel Price for Literature (in 2016), for, as the Nobel committee said, “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Before there was an Internet where anybody’s full set of lyrics are at our fingertips all the time, trying to accurately remember an artist’s songs was a challenge. I was working at a bookstore where we often used the dry erase board in the break room to write a favorite lyric, and one day, someone wrote a line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and PRAISE TO ALL BOOKSELLER GODS, my struggle to recall the rest of the lyrics was alleviated because the little beauty pictured above was on our shelves for me to purchase and still treasure.
<
Recently, I wrote a song (more accurately, one of my characters, a musician, wrote a song). But though I can be a lyricist (good or bad, not important right now), I can’t write music. To write these lyrics, I listened to a Dylan favorite, “Sara,” and wrote as if that were the music that would accompany my songwriter’s lyrics. It helped me with cadence, rhythm, and mood. (And as that character says in one of my novels, “They always want Dylan.” Must also hat tip Lynne here for “All Along the Watchtower.”)
On June 6, I lost a friend of 46 years. (He died because of cancer.) I haven’t written about this loss because it’s too raw. Even today, talking to Tom, I started crying. I know how deeply his absence is felt by everyone who loved him in his family and community, and two people dear to me in particular, his sister Carreme and mutual friend to us all, Debbie.
Because of the Internet, I was able to watch his funeral mass even though I couldn’t be there. That meant so much to me, and the eulogies given for him resonated because they spoke of his character and of how special he was to those who knew him best. His younger brother specifically mentioned Joe’s love for Bob Dylan’s music, and he referenced in particular the song “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a dialogue between two people experiencing a separation that is…forever.
From Joe’s obituary: “He spent his life fighting for anyone who needed to be fought for. So many of us needed him to fill some void, be it father, lawyer, justice and he filled those gaps in our lives, our society, for as long as he could. The best service we could do in [his] memory… is to live our lives in pursuit of faith, justice, and equality and try to fill the gaps as best we can.”
Joe, thank you for every interaction of those forty-six years. For every shared correspondence. For everything you taught me and we learned together and apart on this journey. You were an extraordinary friend, son, brother, uncle, husband, godfather, father, grandfather, and human being. You are woven into a tapestry with all the threads that connect us and Bob Dylan.
The same thing I would want today,
I would want again tomorrow…
Well that made me cry
=(