Today is the Great One's birthday. No, not Wayne Gretzky of LA Kings and (future 06 Stanley Cup winners) Edmonton hollers fame - the other great one, Dylan.Truly one of the most influential and luminary songwriters, thinkers, intellectuals, filmmakers, and artists of the 20th century. So {My Canadian Tuxedo} chooses to reflect a little bit on how best Dylan can transition into a comfortable (and profitable) golden era of his life
Should he a) continue writing more ditties while sitting on his porch
b) sit down with his drink of choice at some point today, and admire the truly laudable achievements he's made to modern pop music, American culture, and of course to the life of one wayward Canadian who's prone to wearing scarves the way Dylan does.
Here for a moment is some truly useless trivia about Dylan I managed to dig up on Wiki and various news-sites:
(1) Nee Robert Allen Zimmerman, Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota on May 24, 1941 - but grew up in nearby Hibbing. which is notable only for being the birthplace of the Greyhound bus company (!). Went on to attend - without any great success - the University of Minnesota in 1959.
(2) Revealing in his 2005 autobiography Chronicles (Vol I) his original choice for a stage name was Robert Allen, because it sounded like a "noble Scottish king", but upon hearing that there was already a US saxophone player named David Allyn, he decided to nod his cap to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and decided on "Bob" as a first name since there were already too many Bobbys in the current music scene (Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vinton et al).
(2) Since 1962, has written around 450 songs, included on such remarkable albums as Blood on the Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Time Out of Mind (note: my personal favourite is American Masters Vol. I or the live album Hard Rain) .
(3) In 1965, made one of the first ever promo films, for Subterranean Homesick Blues, which included a cameo by American wordsmith Allen Ginsberg.
(4) In 1966, Dylan suffered a near-fatal motorcycle crash when he careened off the side of the road while cruising near his home in Woodstock, NY
(5) At the 2000 Academy Awards, accepted an Oscar for the song Things Have Changed, from the Wonder Boys soundtrack (a great movie incidentally, co-starring a pre-Cruise Katie Holmes). His performance at the awards show was lauded more for him showing up, then for the performance, nearly incomprehensible by Dylan standards.
(6) His (to quote Derek Zoolander 'extremely good-looking') son Jakob is also in the music biz, fronting the Wallflowers, whose entire disc catalogue (2 studio albums, 1 live) roughly equals the musical output of eight months in the life of his pops. But oh that Jakob Dylan is a tasty morsel...
(7) He has been married twice, reputed to have sired (at least) five children, and carried on torrid love affairs with the likes of singer Joan Baez and performance artist Suze Rotolo. One of my all-time tunes, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, is reportedly an eff you to Rotolo when she decided to continue living in Italy indefinitely in the early 60s and broke things off.
If you are interested in more trivia about the Bobber, feel free to check out PBS' American Masters website for all things Dylan-related [source].
Highly recommend are the following films:
- the Dylan-directed 2001 effort Masked and Anonymous, and
- the 2005 Scorsese flick No Direction Home, a chronicle of Dylan's life from 1961-1966.
Rock on, my soul brother. You are saluted you here at My Canadian Tuxedo, and in your honour I will be putting all of my favourite Dylan albums on repeat tonight, including my personal fave,
A Hard Rain 
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (lyrics reprinted via bobdylan.com)
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony,
I met a white man who walked a black dog,
I met a young woman whose body was burning,
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,
I met one man who was wounded in love,
I met another man who was wounded with hatred,
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
(Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music)
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