I didn’t always like the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice, but I always loved his songs. When I was thirteen, beginning to write poetry, ponder rebellion and discover my parents’ music, I stumbled on a miracle. My dad pulled out a Judy Collins album of songs from the early sixties-—about half of which were Dylan covers—and stuck it on the dusty record player with the glee anyone feels at finding a much-beloved album. He didn’t know that by doing so he was sowing the seeds of my Dylan mania.
The third track was a recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man” sung with Collins’ crystal-clear voice. I can remember the way my heart started beating as I realized what I was hearing. “My weariness amazes me,” she sang. “I’m branded on my feet/ I have no one to meet, and the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming.”
While those lyrics may mean many things to many people—conventional understanding is that they are about the need for drugs—to me, they described middle school. I felt weary—weary of hiding my hunger for poetry, and my need to express myself in unconventional ways. I felt branded by the pressure to fit in, to keep my mouth shut, to conform. And as I looked around me, I thought those ancient empty streets might as well be my streets, the limiting world of early adolescence.
And Dylan’s words told me what to do to break free: “Dance beneath a diamond-sky, with one hand racing free/silhouetted by the sea.” As the song played, I used to close my eyes and picture myself running down to the beach and waving one hand in the air, just like Dylan said I should. And really, who wouldn’t want to do that? It still seems like the most wonderful idea in the entire world.
But when I played Dylan’s version of the song I had a harder time reaching such epiphanies. His voice was so whiny, so difficult to take, and the song’s beauty and rapture were lost on me. So I bought the Judy Collins CD and listened to her version over and over and over.
I often bring my obsession over to my friend Mollie’s house. We’d discovered the Sixties at the same time. She had started listening to the Beatles at my urging, and then had turned to music that was more “hard core” to us: Janis Joplin, The Velvet Underground and Dylan. Although she too had found Dylan through a female crooner (hers was Joan Baez), she wouldn’t accept my rejection of Bob’s voice. “After a while,” she said, “it feels like an old friend.” She made me a tape and I listened harder.
To aid me in my burgoening music taste, my aunt and uncle from California sent me Blonde and Blonde, a more sophisticated Dylan album, for my fifteenth birthday, along with a Janis Joplin CD. I took to Janis more at first; after all she was better for holding my hairbrush like a microphone and screaming along. But the Dylan crept up on me, with quirky lines like “Mona Lisa must’ve had the Highway Blues, you can tell by the way she smiled,” which struck me as incredibly witty—and true. When he sang “I want you, I want you, I want you soooo bad,” it was as though he’d channeled the intensity—and absurdity—of my teenage desires.
I held him in increasing reverence, and began to not mind that voice. I began to even like the idea that such beautiful songs could come from such an ugly voice. And then I began to think the voice wasn’t so ugly to begin with.
My friends appreciated my love for Bob, but my new passion was tougher on my family. I insisted on playing Dylan in the car, and although they liked a few songs, it was the voice that led my brother to shout “turn that shit off,” and my dad to craft a dead-on Dylan impression that sent us all into hysterics—but worried me by its implied disrespect to Bob.
The summer I was sixteen, I went on a hiking trip in Washington state, and bonded with my trip-leader over “Blood on the Tracks” — Dylan’s heart-wrenching 1975 post-divorce album. I only knew a few of the songs, but my leader—bearded, wild and anti-intellectual—kept urging me to buy it. He borrowed my walkman to listen to “tangled up in blue” on Mollie’s mix tape over and over, smacking his hands on the dashboard in time to the music. And at the end of the trip we made memory sheets for each other: “I love Sarah for her love of Dylan,” he wrote. I was smitten, inspired, amazed by the way Dylan lovers find each other. The minute I got home, I bought Blood on the Tracks, and it became my favorite album, ever.
As my adulation increased, so did the albums in my collection and my knowledge of Dylan trivia. I printed out lyrics and hung them up on the wall, and put a poster of Dylan with a harmonica right above my bed. I saw him in concert with Paul Simon and was the only one of my friends who could identify most of his songs. Play “Like a Rolling Stone!” one friend kept yelling in exasperation, and then “Bring out Paul Simon!” But I was far more excited about a radically reworked version of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (Dylan is known for playing unrecognizable versions of his classics) than I was for Paul Simon’s rocking version of “You Can Call Me Al.” And what I always remember about that night will be the moment I realized that I was in the same very ampitheater as Bob Dylan, and better yet, he was playing a song that appeared to be “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It was too good to be true.
I even wrote a poem to Bob and published it in my high school literary magazine. The title of the poem was “Muse”—because Bob was my muse, and I mused over Bob. I thought I was quite clever.
My first year at Harvard, I hung a new, life-size poster of Bob above my computer in Matthews hall, and surrounded it with tapestries. Its sheer size scared my roommates. My friend Sadie, whose dad was a Dylan fanatic, had always shied away from her heritage. But at my urging, she realized just how awesome her dad’s obsession was. I saw Dylan two more times in concert—each one less spirited than the previous, each one disappointing to my friends but still fine with me. “Who cares if he’s bad?” I wanted to say. “He’s Bob!” Sadie and I once asked each other if it was a coincidence that “Bob” and “God” were both three-letter words with “o” in the middle.
Even when I studied abroad in Ireland, Dyan followed me. My poetry teacher noticed that I had a Dylan quote as my email signature, and he immediately engaged the class in a discussion about whether Dylan lyrics were actually poetry. After class a group of us went to the “artsy” pub in town and kept talking. Once again, Bob had opened a door to new friendships.
The juxtaposition of ugly and beautiful, I’ve decided, is the essence of why Dylan lovers love Dylan and have stuck with him through his many, many idiosyncrasies and disappointing choices. He’s defiantly himself, and never panders to expectations. When we hear perfect songs coming from his nasal twang, we think that we too can make something beautiful. Bob Dylan does whatever he wants, and he still manages to hold fast to the hearts of fans like us, so much that we spend 25 bucks to see what may well be a mediocre performance—even those of us who have seen him three times already.
I don’t care. When I walk through the doors of Dylan’s Harvard concert on Sunday, I’m going to forget about all my midterms, and the coldness of impending winter. Instead, I’m going to dance beneath a diamond sky of music with one hand waving free, and thank Bob for letting me.
