Dan on Bob

Visiting my cousin Donna Harrison and her husband Don in Reno this weekend, and Donna just happened to ask me how and when Bob Dylan became so important in my life. Little did I know that as I was answering her, Bob was winning an election in Stockholm that nobody was paying any attention to, and this morning I awoke to the glorious news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I am overwhelmed in a rush of emotions about this for many reasons, not the least of which is that as a writer I came to Bob for his literary genius first and his musical genius (astonishingly still underrated) second. The Nob has featured numerous of my takes on Bob over nearly 600 posts (here, here, here and elsewhere) and at the risk of repeating some of them, I just want to tee off Cousin Donna’s question and play some of my greatest Bob hits rather than try to fashion something new out of the swirl of thoughts and emotions I have about this today.
I recall as vividly as if it happened yesterday seeing a very small ad in one of our Springfield papers that Dylan would soon be playing there. He was billed as “the man who wrote Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was a big Peter, Paul and Mary hit at the time. When I asked my high school buddies if anyone wanted to go see “the man who wrote Blowin’ in the Wind”, one of them, another cousin, Junior Nosal, replied, “Did you ever hear him sing? He’s awful.” So we didn’t go, and for many years thereafter Junior would struggle to regain status as one of my favorite cousins.
Then college and the world opened up, pal Alan Osborn and I would escape the dullness of I soon planted the seeds of my own Dylan collection and fell asleep most every night with my big clunker of a record player beside my bed playing Bob low so as not to wake the house.(Ramona, come closer/shut softly your watery eyes/the pangs of your sadness will pass/as your senses will rise… my lullaby).
And then John Robinson entered my life. John and his girlfriend Nancy had defied the "Dylan can't sing" canard and gone to that concert I missed in Springfield and not only that but they got there early enough to catch Dylan in rehearsal where, as John tells it, Bob sang a song directly to Nancy. Don’t know if it was She Belongs to Me, but it could’ve been: She’s got everything she needs/She’s an artist, she don’t look back/She’s got everything she needs/She’s an artist, she don’t look back. I won’t pull punches here…with the saintlike indulgence of Nancy and Lorna we became total Dylan obsessives. Entire evenings would be spent sitting around a turntable in the dark listening to that voice, which had now become as fundamental to my being as my dear old dad’s (in fact Dad said to me one day, in a flash of self-pity, “I wish you’d listen to me like you listen to him").  John and I got to the point where we could talk mostly in Bob speak…quoting lines to each other like a couple of master linguists speaking in an exotic foreign tongue. Our most manic expression of Bob-love was when John heard that someone was selling the long-rumored, highly mysterious Dylan bootleg up near the green pastures of Harvard University. We immediately gassed up my VW bug and made a mad dash two hours up from Hartford to Boston. We found a wild haired guy in a trench coat standing beside a stack of blank, white covered albums smack in the middle of Cambridge Square. We gave him $5 each, got back in the car and drove all the way home for a turntable which would reveal whether we had been scammed. That was the earliest version of the legendary Basement Tapes and remains among my most precious possessions.  
Just a few years later, I was teaching an advanced course of my own design in Dylan as Literature at Lebanon High School in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Imagine Dead Poet’s Society without the dead part. On the jukebox in the student lounge Lay Lady Lay, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and the Hendrix version of All Along the Watchtower were among the most popular plays…at least when I had monitor duty. I’m guessing there weren't many other high schools in America where that would be so. To this day, I hear from many former students…not dead yet on Facebook…who tell me with great gratitude how that course introduced them to Dylan. That has probably brought me my greatest satisfaction as a…as a what? The word fan really doesn’t come close to covering it.
Dylan has been a guide…a comfort…an inspiration…an intellectual sparring partner…my wicked messenger…a joker and a thief…even, as he sometimes insists, an entertaining song and dance man. I cannot imagine having lived this life of mine without him in it and consider it one of the true blessings of my life that I didn’t have to.  


Bob autograph, secured for me by Sister-in-Law Hayden Riley,
 who boldly approached the man himself at an airport one day.