WILKES-BARRE — I never thought I would ever be a Bob Dylan fan, but I am.
The reason I wasn’t a fan before was based largely on misinformation.
Thankfully, it’s all straightened out.
Dylan, in case you haven’t heard, is a genius. And a quirky one at that.
Sunday night at Farm Aid 40, Dylan did it again. He sat at a piano and played and sang and utilized his ever-reliable harmonica to the delight of all those in attendance and watching at home.
Dylan is 84 years old. Willie Nelson is 92. Neil Young is 79. John Mellencamp is 73.
All of them performed at Farm Aid 40.
Their music is timeless.
Sitting there watching these icons play as flawlessly and as compassionately as ever was amazing, to say the least.
To truly get it, however, you had to “be there” when their music hit the airwaves for the first time.
Now that really was amazing.
Just about anybody who was a teenager in the 1960s will tell you that the music was the best there ever was.
And they are 100% correct.
Just listen, for example, to The Byrds greatest hits. It’s all there. The Byrds took meaningful lyrics, added electric guitars and literally changed music forever.
And you thought I was going to say it was The Beatles.
I still long for the day when I can hold a yellow Rickenbacker guitar just like Roger McGuinn’s and plug in and start playing.
But, as The Byrds sang, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
As kids like me were rapidly passing through puberty and all that accompanies that process, it was the music that got us through to the other side, man.
The 60s man, well let’s just say it was far more than anyone ever could have ever imagined.
The music of the 60s changed the world. We had really never heard anything like that before. We were still lost in a world of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and movies like “Beach Blanket Bingo.”
Fashion also changed in the 60s, along with attitudes. We were embarking on finishing a decade that was already marred by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Vietnam would escalate and protests, sometimes fatal, would arise on college campuses and in southern cities.
Authority was being challenged. Drugs, such as marijuana and LSD, would surface, and the decade would be culminated by the world’s largest rock concert — the August 1969 Woodstock Festival in Bethel, N.Y.
Kids like me took guitar lessons and drum lessons. We played at places such as local dances as we tried to emulate the music, but it was more about being cool, man.
We wanted the girls — a species whose existence before all of this we rarely would even acknowledge — to like us. To come and watch us play.
Actually, we stunk, and they knew it, but we still participated — both species, boys and girls.
If you weren’t around in the 60s, I recommend you watch the documentary film “Echo in the Canyon” — it “celebrates the popular music that came out of L.A.’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood in the mid-1960s as folk went electric and the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas cemented the California Sound.”
As the film clearly shows, many bands landed in Los Angeles with the same plan my pals and I had in Plymouth — but what happened was far more than anyone could have expected as Laurel Canyon became a musical hotbed of creativity and collaboration that has transcended every generation since.
Hosted by Jakob Dylan — son of Bob — “the film explores the Laurel Canyon scene via never-before-heard personal details behind the bands and their songs and how that music continues to inspire today.”
And Sunday night, I was transfixed — again. Back to a time when, in the words of Bob Dylan, the times they were a-changin.’
I can remember turning the radio up as loud as it could go and yowling to “Like a Rolling Stone,” because, after all, we all were complete unknowns back then.
Despite knowing all the words, we managed to under-appreciate what they all meant and we failed to heed the not-so-subtle message each Dylan song was delivering.
There should be no doubt that Robert Zimmerman, a/k/a Bob Dylan, is a genius. He should be remembered as a true messenger for humanity.
So since I never got to see Dylan live in concert, watching him perform at Farm Aid 40 was time well spent. And it was also good to see Willie, Neil and Mellencamp bringing it as well.
Dylan sang, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Genius, man.