“He sounds like the cry of a constipated ape,” we said.
His first listeners cried, “Get your adenoids fixed!”
Everyone found him mumbly and rude. When he sang “You’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend,” no one disagreed.
Bob Dylan turns 80 today. He came of age when “don’t trust anyone over 30” was wisdom, Then at 31 he wrote the sublime “I Shall Be Released.” He heard the answers blowin’ in the wind.
I remember roaring “The Times They Are A-Changin’” outside the White House at an anti-war march. And singing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (Black lives matter). I still cry at “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
He hasn’t mellowed at all. When he won the Nobel Prize, he didn’t even answer the mail. He’s not what you’d call a beautiful human being.
So if I ever wound up in an elevator with him – and I said his songs have touched my heart – he might be as surly as ever and tell me “I don’t give a shit.”
I’d feel so honored.
