Backwoods Blog

BOB DYLAN TURNS 80

The Isolation Blues;

reflections during covid-19

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
– Bob Dylan

Excerpt from an interview with Douglas Brinkley that appeared in The New York Times June 12th, 2020 coinciding with the release of Dylan’s latest album “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”

Are you hopeful about what lies ahead? Always. Because the view we get of the country is not accurate. We get artifice of it, the conflict of it. I’m not naive. I don’t think that true divisions and animosities and bigotry and prejudice don’t exist. We see that every day. But fundamentally, we are a resilient and strong and resourceful nation that has oftentimes overcome our worst tendencies – “overcome” is probably too strong a word. But our biggest problem as humans is ignorance, not malevolence. Ignorance is an entirely curable disease.

How? Information and work. You need to talk to people. Ignorance is often cured by experience, by spending time withwhat you don’t understand. But I honestly don’t know. Well, you know what? I do know: in the same waythat (a current politician’s name) recklessness is born out of experience, so is my optimism, because good people outweigh (expletive) people. By a long shot.

Do you think of this pandemic in almost biblical terms? A plague that has swept the land? I think it’s a forerunner of something else to come. It’s an invasion for sure, and it’s widespread, but biblical? Extreme arrogance can have some disastrous penalties. Maybe we are on the eve of destruction. There are numerous ways you can think about this virus. I think you just have to let it run its course.

How is your health holding up? You seem fit as a fiddle. How do you keep mind and body workingtogether in unison? Oh, that’s a big question, isn’t it? How does anyone do it? Your mind and body go hand in hand. There has to besome agreement. I like to think of the mind as spirit and the body as substance. How you integrate those two things, I have no idea. I just try to go on a straight line and stay on it, stay on the level.

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Bob Dylan turned 80 last week. How does that make you feel? If you can remember when “Highway 61” came out then that means your younger days are almost as far back as Bob’s. Dylan has reinvented himself five times since then (over the course of almost sixty years) and he is showing no signs of calling it quits as of yet. When “Nashville Skyline” came out in 1969 he confessed he had a hard time listening to any of his material before “Blonde on Blonde” (1966). An artist is never content with their work; there is always something new to try. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 he elevated song lyrics to the level of art that could stand on their own with or without the music. I figure any time you’re analyzing song lyrics in an English class (which happens all the time with Dylan) then it’s literature. Dylan has become a wise bard of the times (I guess he’s always been), but now he has the craggy face and worn-out blues singer’s voice to go along with it. There are certain people alive in the world that I’m always interested in getting their opinion on things, be it in an interview or recent release of their work. Or better yet, to sit down in a cafe somewhere, have a cup of coffee with them and just find out what they’re thinking. Bob Dylan is one of those people. These are curious times indeed and it’s nice to know Bob is still around just to put in his dime. Back in the sixties a popular saying was “you can’t trust anyone over 30.” People weren’t sure what to do with that when freewheelin’ Bob Dylan turned 30. Well, now he’s 80. 

Happy Birthday, Bob! 

“Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now…”

In the woods,

 
Dave

June 2, 2021