On Bob.

I was reliving my youth again tonight, listening to old Bob Dylan tracks on YouTube.

Dylan and I go back a long way, back to those nights when I would start my school homework, only to play an album of his and the homework could wait. Sometimes I finished it at two o’clock in the morning. School work was just system work after all. He once said:

Woody Guthrie was my only idol because he was my first idol.

Well, maybe I could say the same about Bob, although ‘idol’ would be too strong a term. I’ve never idolised anybody – except Jesus maybe, and even that relationship cooled at about age twelve. I think it would be true to say, though, that Bob Dylan was probably the only commercially successful musician who ever influenced my thinking.  He was an early teacher, and he taught me that there is reality outside the tram lines. I took the lesson in my own way a bit further down the line. And of all the words he wrote and sang, the ones that most impressed me were:

It’s all right, ma,

It’s life and life only

So maybe he wasn’t so important after all.