Upon the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan
He turns 80 today, the Master does. By my count, he has had at least seven different careers, something that Todd Haynes captured brilliantly in his movie, I’m Not There. (And on his latest album, he cops a little somethin’-somethin’ from Walt Whitman, a direct literary ancestor, and titles a song, “I Contain Multitudes.” He’s not kidding.) For so many years, he captured the moment and bottled it in words, and now he seems to be writing from some timeless place of myth and story. He’s the Norse skald, telling the stories of forgotten kings. He’s the Irish seanchai, singing around the fire of the deeds of Cuchulainn. He’s Virgil. He’s Homer. He turns 80 years old today. His soul is infinitely older.
America prides itself on being a land of constant reinvention but, very often, that’s a sleepy old-wine-in-new-bottles exercise. Dylan is someone who’s been calling that bluff since he rolled into Greenwich Village from the rusted hills of Minnesota’s Iron Range. For example, imagine if that motorcycle had rolled a few more times over him in 1966, if he ended up underneath it the way Duane Allman did. We would have lost them all—John Wesley Harding, the joker and the thief, Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts—all of the characters that came later, including everyone he name-checks in “Murder Most Foul,” even the killers of JFK. The extraordinary richness of his catalogue is a direct result of the fact that he was never content with one persona telling one kind of story. He contains multitudes and he shares them with all of us.
-- Charles P. Pierce, today, upon the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a36517062/bob-dylan-80th-birthday/
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