My first Bob exposure that I recall happened when I was 9 or 10 when my brother came home from college and played Blowin' in the Wind on an acoustic guitar. I'd have a strong reaction every time I'd hear him on the radio, not necessarily because he had a pretty voice, although I didn't mind it. It was more like the power of the word.
When I first heard Tangled Up in Blue, I just froze in my tracks. It got to the point for a few years that I'd check out a new Dylan album the way some people consult the I Ching. Sometimes I gauge how I'm doing in terms of Dylan albums (right now I'm somewhere between Oh Mercy and Love and Theft).
Sometimes I wonder whether he consciously wrote some of those lyrics or was just a channel of the Muses. In any case, I think Arlo Guthrie was right when he said that "Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope to catch something. And I don't think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything."
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1 comment:
Yeah, he affected me the same way. My buddy's big brother had all the early Dylan albums so we were afflicted at an early age...
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