The first time I heard Buckets of Rain, I cried. While I often use music as a crank handle for my emotions, I wasn’t sad before listening to it or even during. It was just so beautiful that it overcame me.
Since then, I have gotten choked up if not outright weepy several times listening to Bob Dylan, seeing Bob Dylan, reading Bob Dylan, spending the better- and I do mean better- part of the last year and a half Bob Dylaning. I am Frank Reynolds unzipped and flailing on the couch.
I discovered Bob Dylan through A Complete Unknown. Before then, I only knew him as a blurb. I could have named some of his songs but probably would have listed a Dire Straits or Tom Petty one by mistake. He was inconsequential to my life, and I have no idea what led me to venture out in the pitch-dark of a 4:30 Boston December afternoon to a movie theater, where I only go once every other year.
I don’t know why my parents agreed to come, having grown up during the 60s, very openly not Dylan fans then, now, or any time in between. “I’m a Beatles guy”, my father explained, as if choosing were the only choice. “I just think he’s kind of weird,” my mother said more than once, each time with her Tom Waits CD playing in the background.
After the movie, I started learning more about Bob Dylan and his music. I do this after any documentary or based on a true story, curious to discover more, trying to separate which part of the story is true from the part that is based on. This generally lasts until the next podcast or documentary, but this one was different. This one has not stopped 18+ months later, 7 concerts across 4 states and 2 countries later, endless hours listening, reading, watching, and discussing later. I continue to learn more and more about Bob Dylan’s music as I have grown to understand almost nothing about who he is as a person.
The second time Bob Dylan made me cry was in my car on the way to his concert- my very first one. After 3 hours listening to him the entire way, To Make You Feel My Love came on, and I almost had to pull over. I don’t cry much (honestly), and that song didn’t mean anything to me at the time. Why, suddenly, halfway to Ohio, did it hit me? (And why did I think Youngstown was a biggish city? Can I blame Springsteen here?)
I had the best seat I’d ever had and spent the most I’d ever spent and I was an anxious, uncomfortable, somewhat high mess before it (just like our beloved Bobby) and completely enthralled throughout it, choking up several times, mostly during Mother of Muses when he got to, “I’ve already outlived my life so far” and “I’m traveling light and I’m a-slow coming home.”
He had completely broken my heart open.
We use the word heartbreak to talk about something painful and sad, but a heart can break open in lots of ways- bursting from joy, exploding with anger- and once it’s open, it can let so much in and push so much else out. Discovering Bob Dylan has done both for me and keeps on doing it, over and over again.
When I saw the movie, I don’t know that I was depressed, but I was 47 and the world had gotten a little gray. Since then, it has felt like opening the door to Munchkinland. The discovery and excitement over something new- something so exquisitely genius and extraordinary-keeps revealing colors I have never seen before.
Dylan once said,
“The highest purpose of art is to inspire.”
Bob and his art have inspired me. I’m not just writing this experience because of Bob Dylan. I’m writing period because of Bob Dylan.
After decades of stashing my writing in manila folders and then in Microsoft ones, I was finally able to post my first piece online. I would not and could not (likely should not) have done this before, but the hypocrisy (irony?) of writing about Bob Dylan and being too worried about what other people might think proved too much for me.
Most people ignored it, some were kind, and a few were Redditors. After a while, my stomach stopped roller coastering and the world played on.
Now I’m writing again. Some days, writing is all I think about, and some days I feel like a writer, and that breaks my heart open in a way I have been waiting for nearly my entire life.
For the first time in a long time, I have started exploring new music, figuring that if Bob had been hiding in plain sight all these years, someone else must be waiting for me too. I found one of those greatest albums lists and started each morning with a different one. Five hundred albums later, I have been reintroduced to former favorites (Outkast, Weezer), dug deeper into artists I had only known previously on the surface (The Velvet Underground, Sam Cooke), and discovered music that I have completely fallen in love with (Modern Lovers, Lucinda Williams)- a totally cliched musical awakening. An awakening.
Bob has also broken my heart open by sharing stories that expose the injustice and ugliness that pervades the world sometimes in the lives of real people like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and George Jackson, sometimes in societal indictments like The Ballad of Hollis Brown and North Country Blues, and sometimes in scathing accusations of those in power like in Masters of War and With God on Our Side. Bob never sugarcoats or discriminates, and he never capitulates. Everyone gets a verse. He makes sure you notice, that you never get cold to it, and that it continues to break your heart open over and over again. He writes about this part of the world in a way that dares you to look it straight in that eye and spit in it.
When he breaks my heart open in this way, it can be heavy, and it reminds me of days that were hard before my house landed on the wicked witch. There are Dylan songs that I will listen to on repeat well into the double digits (I’ve never once been able to listen to High Water less than 4 times in a row.) There are other songs that I need to be in the right mood for. I can’t listen to Buckets of Rain every day and certainly not on repeat. It’s just too much. So is Red River Shore (Version 2 please) or his Unplugged version of I Want You. Pretty much all of the Times They Are A-Changin’ album.
The songs themselves are beautiful and heartbreaking, and I think a part of my heart breaks for the version of him that is singing them.
Earlier this summer, someone posted this photo from the Phoenix show. Bob doesn’t play much guitar anymore and barely at all on this Long Hot Summer Tour. Here he is in the tour’s trademark hoodie, 85-years old, hiding, hidden, and dimly lit, strumming a few chords to a crowd that will be in awe of him and will walk out on him just like they have been doing for the past 65 years.
I don’t know if there is any joy in performance for Bob Dylan anymore or if he is able to glean any sense of fulfillment from it. My guess is that he is honoring a sense of duty to his call and that he maintains reverence for the work. Also, that he is still searching for something that he hasn’t been able to find, like in When I Paint My Masterpiece, a song he has been playing so brilliantly on this tour (and always), a song whose tone I can never quite put my finger on- hope? irony? masochism?
I want to see something beautiful in this photo, but it just feels too sad.
A snapshot of a man who maybe wants to let go but doesn’t feel like he can or simply doesn’t know how. Or a man whose time is running out and who will leave a hole too big to even think about. A man who broke open his own heart to let the world come in and has spent a lifetime suffering for it and needing it.
Remembering that celebrities are just people who have bad days and bad habits and bad goes of it can be comforting and relatable. It’s a good reminder that they are human and that we all make mistakes and lots of other platitudes that make me feel better when I’m not feeling so great.
At the same time, there’s something discouraging about that, like if they have every resource and opportunity and still can’t figure it out, what hope do I have? What’s the point?
Maybe there isn’t one.
In his reflection on what he learned after turning 80, Dylan wrote,
“You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.”
This was his response about the best part about turning 80.
But maybe he’s right. Maybe the best thing about getting older is learning that taking it all so seriously doesn’t spare us or save us. That seeing the fear for the paper tiger that it is opens us up to whatever it is that our broken hearts now have room for.
Although a lot of his work and his demeanor is heavy, Bob has also shared his love of this world with this world, showing how much beauty and goodness there is within it. He fell in love with this world, with his God through his God in his Christian trilogy. He prayed for his children in Forever Young and Lord, Protect My Child. He fell in love with a woman and with the ideal of women, or his muse- it’s often hard to tell- in songs of complete surrender and faith- in I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You, Nobody ‘Cept You, and When the Deal Goes Down. All of it about and through the music- his beautiful, moving, challenging, and confounding music.
In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan asks rhetorically (I think),
“What is it about lapsing into narration in a song that makes you think the singer is suddenly revealing the truth?”
It is this narration, this performance, this truth that separates him from every other artist I have ever seen. No one sings Dylan like Dylan, and no one sings other people’s songs quite like Dylan either. He has a distinguishing way of making songs his own, even those that are other people’s through the way he incorporates and adapts them and then channels them. It can and should break your heart open over and over again. Bob writes about this world and then performs it, inhabits it in a way that dares you to look it straight in that eye, and if you can bear it, let it overcome you.
!["I see Creation just about everywhere," Dylan once said in an interview.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5ukp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9f315928-4ed7-4fb7-a24f-875a1be11aba_4488x2958.jpeg ""I see Creation just about everywhere," Dylan once said in an interview.")
A lot of people watched A Complete Unknown and returned to Kansas unmoved and unchanged. I’ve seen dozens of biopics that did not impact me in any significant way. I’m not sure how any of this works.
This has all been unexpected and overwhelming and hard to understand and frankly a little bit batshit (just like our beloved Bobby.) No matter how much I try to make sense of it, and how many different ways I ask, “Why does Bob Dylan __________?”, it doesn’t matter. I can’t find the answer. I can’t find an answer. I can barely venture an educated guess.
Bob has broken open my heart and my mind and challenged me to think in ways that are uncomfortable. He asks me to consider what is wrong with not understanding, a concept that, frankly, I struggle to understand. He tells me that sometimes I can feel something so much that understanding isn’t necessary.
And maybe that’s the lesson I’m supposed to be learning.
Maybe I’m supposed to keep letting my heart break open to whatever might be trying to get in or get out. Maybe the feeling, the experience is whatever it is and doesn’t require five pages to say that it is whatever it is. I’m not sure how to start to not understand my way into understanding (or understand my way into not understanding) when I’m someone who feels a need to understand everything.
But it’s been nice to see the world in color again.
