Plan B Forum

After All These Years, We're Still Living in Dylan's America
And I'm thankful for that.

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BY CHARLES P. PIERCE | MAY 24, 2016

Seventy-five years ago today, the Zimmermans of Hibbing, Minnesota, had themselves a baby boy. It hasn't been a great year for musicians; it started with Lemmy and it most recently cost us Prince. (The In Memoriam section of next year's Grammy awards is going to take a month.) So, on the occasion of The Master's Diamond Birthday, it's a good day in a tough year to be grateful for the continued grace of his presence and for what the Irish journalist Joseph O'Connor calls his "extraordinary single imagination." From The Irish Times:

• You took the music of immigrant America, the ballads, the blues, the rambles of Woody Guthrie and The Clancy Brothers and Dominic Behan, the cadences of gospel, the imagery of William Blake and Bessie Smith, the amphetamine-fuelled poetry of bebop Greenwich Village and the windblown mournfulness of the lonesome prairie, and fired them in the kiln of the most extraordinary single imagination ever to work in popular music.

For myself, he opened the possibilities of the language like very few others did, and he opened up the possibilities of America the way nobody else did. He solved all the conundrums of the country and invented new ones. He learned all the country's spells and cast a few of his own. The America he invented is a glorious place and the real one that he improved is better for his having been born. And him? He's still on the road, heading for another joint. Thank god there are still joints. Thank god he's still here to head to them.