WILKES-BARRE — In the words of Bob Dylan, the times they were a-changin.’
Growing up in the 1960s and being a direct beneficiary of all that great music and also witness to and participant in the counter-culture happening across the universe, the music and words of Bob Dylan were there, but kids like me failed to fully appreciate the genius among us.
Sure, we turned the radio up as loud as it could go and we yowled to “Like a Rolling Stone,” because, after all, we were all complete unknowns back then.
Despite knowing all the words, we managed to under-appreciate what they all meant and we failed to heed the not-so-subtle message each Dylan song was delivering.
So after seeing the movie — “A Complete Unknown” — I have spent much of my free time watching interviews of Dylan and reading those that were in print.
I find all of them fascinating and I now have an insatiable appetite to learn all I can about a guy who I under-appreciated. Dylan deserves better.
I also totally forgive him for not appearing at Woodstock in 1969, despite the fact that he and his family lived in the town of Woodstock, N.Y. — the original planned site for the concert. Dylan has said he chose not to play at Woodstock because one of his children was sick. Good enough for me.
As I learn more and more about Dylan, I want to keep going. I want to listen to every lyric of every song and learn them well enough to sing along without stumbling. I want to digest all that Dylan has espoused during his multi-decade career that, by the way, continues today at age 83.
I will not spoil any of the movie moments here — just know that it is not an Oscar-caliber movie, but it will provide all you need to know about the early years of Dylan’s music and that should energize you enough to keep going.
There should be no doubt that Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, is a genius. He should be remembered as a true messenger for humanity. At a very early age, Dylan saw things that were staring all of us in the face — and he acted. He wrote the lyrics and put them to music and he stood on stages of all sizes with crowds also of all sizes and he let it all out.
In a “60 Minutes” interview with the late Ed Bradley in 2004, Dylan was asked if he really wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 10 minutes.
“Probably,” was Dylan’s response.
An incredulous Bradley asked wide-eyed, “How?”
Dylan said it came from “this wellspring of creativity” that he drew from back then — something he acknowledged he no longer can do.
“All those early songs were magically written,” Dylan said. “I can’t do that now,”
Bradley showed a clip of Dylan singing “It’s Alright Ma,” which he wrote in 1964. The lyrics come out like a Gatling gun.
Dylan said, “Try to sit down and write something like that.”
But Dylan did just that over and over and over again. It’s all there in his songs.
Magical? Maybe. I say it’s the work of a genius who was light years ahead of everybody else.
The songs elevated Dylan to a pedestal he never sought. Bradley pointed out that he was revered by his fans, considered almost God-like. Dylan scoffed at that.
Dylan said he was just a kid who knew something greater was out there for him — far away from Hibbing, Minnesota. So he packed his bag and headed for Greenwich Village and the rest, as they say, is legend.
Bradley joked that the way Dylan was seen by the world was, actually, the polar opposite of how he saw himself.
“Ain’t that somethin’? Dylan says.
Dylan calls it “destiny,” which he defined as: “When you know something about yourself that nobody else does.”
I plan to see the movie again. I’ll probably watch it many times.
I’ve done a 180-degree turn on Dylan. To me, he no longer is a complete unknown.
“Like a Rolling Stone” was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as the No. 1 song of all time.
Now I know why.
In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. On the back of the gold medal presented to him, it reads:
“And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery.”
Exactly.
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