Happy birthday Mr. Zimmerman …….. listening to Bob Dylan for the first time …… and that radio programme

Now, with all the hype on the radio this week I had assumed that today was Bob Dylan’s birthday, but no that is a week away.

The Times They Are A- Changin', 1964

Still it didn’t stop the Today programme this morning broadcasting some of his songs which were accompanied by reflections from a collection of celebrities on what those songs meant to them.

All of which will be followed up this afternoon by “It Ain’t Me Your Looking For: Bob Dylan at 80”.*

There are five episodes in the series and the first  is “Learn Your Song Well (1941-1964)”.

And it is the one that will most resonant for me, because it was in June 1964 that I bought two of his LPs.

These were “The Freewheelin Bob Dyan” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, and while a year separated their release, I know I got them together.

They sit along side four other LPs bought between 1964 and 1966, and another which came out three years later.

I was 15, fired by the injustices I saw around me, and in particular the news stories from the USA of Dr. King, the Freedom Riders and the campaigns for voter registration.

And the songs off those two LPs spoke directly to me, focusing as they did in part on the discrimination, poverty and the power of the Establishment to seemingly do what they wanted.  

There are lighter and more personal songs which also chimed in with an adolescent, but it was the political ones that took me over.

Of these it was, and perhaps still is, “A Hard Rains -A-Gonna Fall", about the unthinkable landscape of a post nuclear war, which was “written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when those who allowed themselves to think of the possible results were chilled by the imminence of oblivion. ‘Every line in it’ says Dylan ‘is actually the start of a whole song.  But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put it all I could into this one’”.**

From Dylan I went on to some of his contemporaries like Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, and from there via Peter Seeger Joan Baez, and Buffy St Marie onto English folk music.

I also weathered the electric conversion, muttered darkly at his move away from the early stuff but kept buying the LPs because electric or not they were great music and powerful songs.

Unlike a colleague of mine who at concert in Manchester in 1966, shouted out “Judas” during one of Dylan’s electric songs.  I have to confess I only half believed him, until I came across a newspaper story which confirmed the account.***

All of which I guess is pretty much as close as I will ever come to Bob Dylan, other than the seven LPs and eight CDs I have of his work.

So, I shall be listening to the Radio 4 programme, later today at 13.45, and maybe thinking about him next Monday on his birthday.

Pictures, the LP  covers, “The Times They Are A-Changin'”,1964, “The Freewheelin Bob Dyan”, 1963, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

“It Ain’t Me Your Looking For: Bob Dylan at 80”, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w4ny

**Nat Hentoff, sleave notes, “The Freewheelin Bob Dyan”, 1963

***Bob Dylan: How I found the man who shouted 'Judas', Andy Kershaw, The Independent, July 17th, 2013, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/bob-dylan-how-i-found-man-who-shouted-judas-314340.html