Legend’s lyrics, music influence central Ohio musicians’ works
Bob Dylan rarely agrees to interviews — including a recent Dispatch request — but the famed folk-rock musician has enough admirers to fill his silence.
Azita Raji, the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, gave a speech on his behalf at last year’s Nobel Prize ceremony — Dylan won in the Literature category — and a number of local musicians expressed their admiration of Dylan in advance of his Sunday performance at the Palace Theatre.
At age 76, he has been active long enough to have influenced several generations of artists, including James Wooster, 35, a local musician who organizes an annual tribute to the Band, which often toured with
Dylan.
“I think we’ve all been really blessed to get to see where Bob wants to take us,” Wooster said.
One of my early, formative memories was (when) I was in Pittsburgh with my dad. I was probably in second or third grade and … we were in this big parking lot and we heard this music. There seemed to be a pop-up amphitheater, and Bob Dylan was playing. We got tickets and I remember standing up on a chair so I could see and him playing “Mr. Tambourine Man," which was the only tune I could recognize at the time.
“World Gone Wrong,” this collection of old country folk and blues numbers. It’s just him, stripped down and basic. I have it on cassette. … Every time I’d go on a road trip with my mom, we’d take a rental car. My mom would take five CDs she liked and I’d take a few of mine. I’d always take that tape in my backpack because it never failed (that) the car we got didn’t have a CD player. It would just be me and that Bob Dylan tape in the dark on miles and miles of freeway. I must have listened to that a hundred times.
If they don’t like Bob Dylan, it’s just that he’s not a good singer and never has been, and his harmonica playing is horrendous, too. His guitar playing is nothing to write home about. A big percentage of his songs are three- or four-chord songs, and he’s strumming and there’s nothing crazy about it. But I think if people genuinely don’t like Bob Dylan, they must not really care about lyrics. … You want to listen to him sing because the words are amazing.
I remember listening to “Blonde on Blonde” (with) just this sense of wonder. It was almost like the world turned 3-D. The words just jumped off the page. It was
the words; it was the music that was blended with it. It was the way he could not necessarily be tied to one genre on one CD. As you listen to it, it shape-shifts. It’s almost like being granted
permission to do things your own way. He’s notorious for that. He’s notorious for never bowing to the critics and never paying much heed to what people said.
More so than just people who play guitar well, I’m more interested in people who are on a journey of self-realization through their art. With him … it’s more about going through all these phases of internal struggle. That was more his motivation than making his music or art for anyone else. It seems like he has this internal search or struggle that’s never-ending. That’s what I
“Great Wave” was. A few others present the scenarios of dreams. The
like about him — he’s always trying to figure himself out.
I’m an English teacher, and I hung Bob proudly on my wall before he won the Nobel Prize. My students would always fask me, “You’re a literature teacher; how come you have a musician on your wall and not an author?” And I would say, “He is an author, 100 percent.” … To me, he has always been an author. He’s an artist. He’s a poet. He has established the song as a legitimate piece of literature.
— Julia Oller joller@dispatch.com @juliaoller