Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the cover of  a book that has graced my coffee table for decades.

When was it when a Dylan song first mattered to me? I can’t be sure, yet I can’t remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue.

Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than I to measure the success of a Dylan song. (Not pioneer of Dylan studies, Michael Gray, mind you, who writes that it is “one of Dylan’s most important and cohesive albums . . . of astonishing complexity and confidence delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices.”) Granted, he points out that it was badly produced, but that doesn’t matter to me.  What matters to me and anyone else who has ever missed someone – or something – is “Where Are You Tonight?” It remains a staple in the soundtrack of my life. We all have one.

But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

“Hey, hey, HEY, hey.”

Where are you tonight? 

Picturing the picture on the cover of the Street Legal album, it occurs to me that this was the first time I considered Bob Dylan in color. Until then my idea of him was monochromatic, an iteration of the Dylan we know from the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video – forever flippant, flipping over his cue cards, dropping them in the alley. Deadpan.

Laid Off. Bad Cough. Paid Off. And, finally – naturally – What?? 

What??

Always on the road, heading for another joint.

That’s what. That’s why. 

During one of my first summers in the United States, one of my American cousins took me to Buffalo to see The Grateful Dead open for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.  In color. Previously, I had seen Dylan perform at Slane Castle in Ireland in the summer of 1984 –  a mighty performance with Santana and  Van Morrison. But this was different. This was as American as the idea could be. Deadheads. Tie-dye. Weed. The Wave. This was the Fourth of July.  “It doesn’t rain on the Fourth of July!” Bob Weir told the crowd, and like poetry,  the heavens opened. This was Positively 4th Street (What??) and I loved it.

As a going away present, my cousin later gave me the coffee table book. Published in 1967, it is a collection of photographs by Daniel Kramer. Black and white, these indelible images taken over a period of two years, reveal the young man Kramer characterizes as someone “who set his own marks and did not allow himself to be manipulated.”

Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes

For Kramer, Dylan was “someone worth photographing,” someone worth seeing from different perspectives. For me, Dylan is someone who forces you – without telling you – to shift a little in order to see better.  Thus we find him perched on a branch in a tree or in an alleyway in London or Stuck Inside of Mobile. Or in the falling shadows.

Photography is just light, of course, and the good photographer will always find the right light. It is writing with light. As Amyn Nasser describes there is a kind of magic in this

. . . ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. [The photographer] respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.

Yes, the ability to stir the soul, to see things right in front of us and into the empty spaces between them. Also a welder, the self proclaimed song and dance man makes gates out of vintage iron and scrap metal items such as spanners, chains, and car parts and axes. Some include reminders that he is also a musician – a treble clef or a guitar. Born and raised in iron ore country in Hibbling, Minnesota, Dylan writes in Chronicles, that he has always worked with iron in one way or another. Paul Green, the president of the Halcyon Gallery in London – which first showcased Dylan’s iron works explains, “He’s drawing from an industrial past, a working man’s past . . . It’s partly about looking back but it’s also about resurrecting these items and the physical act of putting these objects together.”

Why do gates hold such appeal to Dylan? He says it’s “because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”

What??

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Something is happening here, and Bob Dylan doesn’t have the answers either. We won’t see him on tour for a while. On the road almost continuously since 1988, he has canceled the summer leg of the “Never Ending Tour,” his representatives saying it will resume once they are confident that it is safe for both fans and concert staff to do so. The coronavirus may have altered his touring plans, but Dylan has been busy. Over the course of a month, he has dropped three original new songs, the most recent with an announcement that he is releasing a new album on June 19, Rough and Rowdy Ways. This flurry of activity began on March 27 when a new song, a 17 minute rumination on the assassination of President Kennedy and America and music,  “Murder Most Foul,” arrived unexpectedly at midnight  with a Tweet from Dylan:

Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”

And, back to black and white . . .

Of course we found it interesting, the timing of its release in the middle of a pandemic that continues to upend national and cultural life with the Covid-19 death toll this Memorial Day weekend hovering close to 100,000.  We may not yet know the full social, cultural or political legacy of the coronavirus, but we know that part of it will be the incalculable loss spread out before us on the front page of the New York Times today. In black and white, the names of a thousand people who were known and who leave behind the people who miss them terribly, and who in the middle of their grief, had to pluck just the right detail from a whole life to include in an obituary that might just help the rest of us ‘know’ their loved one as more than just a number. In black and white before us a list of deaths that could fill ninety-nine more pages today.

I find myself recalling a hot monsoonal night in the summer of 1988, when I saw Dylan play at the amphitheater in Mesa, Arizona. Lightning struck during his performance “Mr Tambourine Man.” Of course it did. At the time, a recent immigrant to the United States, those were days of wonder for me, days before we worried about what waited around the corner – before we were observant, before we knew better.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

On your birthday – and every day, Bob Dylan – may you stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.

 

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