Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.
The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.
I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness. In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.
Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.
If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.
The children understand agape.
Public domain photo, Bob Dylan 1963
- Susan Weber's blog
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I love the way you started -
I love the way you started - the idea that stories take us places - they quite literally take you places, as you travel to share them, and your young listeners want to go places physically, too!
I think that is one of the most wonderful things we can derive from art - Dylan's, or anyone else's: inspiration to travel, to see new places - physically and otherwise! Maybe those places are different points of view - or maybe they're across the world. But that is a big part of what art does for me.
(If you are a lyrics aficionado, you probably already know the work of Elvis Costello - but just in case, I thought I'd put in a plug for his works. One of my favorites is "King Horse.")
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'Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.'
Neil Gaiman, Sandman
Younger Than That Now
I'm not sure what it is that Bob Dylan touches in us, but you have come very close to describing what I felt the first time I heard his sound in the summer of 1965, when I was seventeen.
At the time and for some years, I thought the epiphany I felt had to do with my youth and way of looking at the world and how I fit into it , but as time wore on, I realized that it had nothing to do with either, as they were left far behind, or at least in their proper perspective.
"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." (Bob Dylan, My Back Pages, 1964).
Part of what I like about Bob Dylan today is that he does not present a "greatest hits" or "oldies" show, but keeps writing and presenting more songs and experience. He has not bought into a Hollywood lifestyle. His show is not glitzy or gimmicky, no hubris. It does leave you feeling squeaky clean.
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Water Color Visions
>words
My favorite part of this (Aside from knowing and having seen the responses of Susan's tender and powerful audience) is her comment about a "lyrics lover who didn't understand a single word of the show" and Walt's "I'm not sure what it is that Bob Dylan touches in us."
There is an indescribable essence to what makes his music and lyrics so effective. I think it's that way with all fine things, and sometimes trying to put a finger on it only makes it scoot away the more. Bob may have, as usual, said it best:
At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
with no attempts to shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.
At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true.
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.