Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate

It was unexpected. I was scrolling through the Washington Post, saw another Nobel Prize winner announced.

Bob Dylan? For literature?

We’re so conditioned to think of “literature” as being “books” that my first thought was, “I didn’t realize he wrote a book.” But this is the Nobel Prize, not a Pulitzer – the award is for his body of work, not for an individual piece of work.

Bob Dylan was honored for being, Bob Dylan.

When I used to teach, I would always ask a “Question of the Week” just to get my students engaged. One regular question was, “Who’s your ‘Bob’?” ‘Bob’ is a common name, I figure everyone has somebody that they just think of as ‘Bob,’ whether celebrity or friend or family member (“Bob’s yer uncle”). As a liberal arts student in college, “Let’s listen to some Bob” referred to Bob Marley, whose Legend is a staple of every music collection for liberal arts grads around my age. Even by the time I graduated from college, though, if I was going to “listen to some Bob,” it was almost certainly going to be Dylan.

Another question that I would ask annually would be, “What’s your theme song?” – the song that just makes sense of your life. I have a lot of songs I like, but for me, my “theme song” has always been “Tangled Up in Blue” – without hesitation. The restless, rambling lifestyle and mind-state, the difficulty in making meaningful lasting connections, the notion that the past can feel like illusion, the concept that we all see our shared experiences from “a different point of view” spoke to my personal condition, if not the human condition.

A close second choice for most of my life would be the essential “Like a Rolling Stone,” as I know very well how it feels to be on my own, with no direction home – and often wondering what “home” would feel like.

Bob Dylan has given his voice to countless social justice movements over the last 50+ years, penning “The Times They Are A-Changing,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and popularizing a blazing rendition of “Maggie’s Farm.” While the Denzel Washington movie brought attention to the injustice done to Rubin Carter after his release, it was no doubt Bob Dylan’s epic “Hurricane” that kept the case in the public consciousness long after his conviction. Based on the heavy use of his music in protests around the world, I would have been less surprised to see Dylan awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – and would have found him more deserving than some.

Of course, he’s much more than a protest singer. For me, his music is some of my earliest memories. My parents’ record collection when I was growing up would probably fit on a 4gb flash drive, but I remember Blood on the Tracks as one of my favorites, from the previously mentioned “Tangled Up in Blue,” to “Idiot Wind,” and the rollicking “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” which is just a lot of fun even before you’re mature enough to realize that Dylan is making a point that Big Jim owns the town’s only diamond mine, and the “hanging judge” being a drunkard. Nashville Skyline didn’t resonate with me the same way, and I didn’t understand why my dad liked “Lay Lady Lay” – but the side of Dylan that I would reject when I was in the stage of my life when I was doing a lot of rejecting makes a whole lot more sense now: “Lay Lady Lay” is one of the most complex love songs I know, trying to be masculine and demanding, while at its heart being vulnerable – “stay with your man a while,” he pleads, in a voice that betrays his fear of spending another night alone. And when I’ve gone through breakdowns in relationships and the break-ups, I’ve turned so many (too many) times to “Don’t Think Twice (It’s All Right)” as my ultimate “F- you” break-up song: “I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind/You could have done better but I don’t mind/You just kinda wasted my precious time/But don’t think twice it’s all right.”

When I got my first acoustic guitar after 4 years of playing bass, the first sheet music book I bought was a Bob Dylan collection, and the first song I learned (at age 17) was “Tangled Up in Blue.” Like Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, I wanted to be Bob Dylan. Part of what touched me so much when I read the news about the Nobel Prize was simply the acknowledgement that . . . it matters. Rock music can be an entertainment, it can be a diversion, but it also expresses the human spirit, and the human condition. Bob Dylan now stands alongside Hemingway and Steinbeck, the stories we can tell with popular song can be every bit as meaningful as what you’ll find in the dusty poetry primer you’ve ignored since your freshman English course, and infinitely more accessible.

Bob Dylan has challenged the powerful, championed the causes of the oppressed, told the tales of the common man, and given us visions of a better way to live together. While it took me a few minutes to wrap my mind around the idea of Bob Dylan being a Nobel laureate, the committee got it absolutely right.

Congratulations, Mr. Dylan.

And for the rest of us – the bar just was set a little higher. Let’s prepare to leap.

 

 

Adieu, Maestro

Contrary to popular belief, classical music is far from dying, even if it finds itself confined to the public radio waves in most places.  The music is kept alive by the interpretations of conductors who view scores as more than dusty pages, but as plays with sound waiting for the right performers – and direction.

The music is kept alive by the efforts of great conductors, and Sir Neville Marriner was among the greatest of his generation.  Marriner passed away yesterday at 92.

Sir Neville will be forever associated with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, an ensemble he founded in his living room with friends.  Even in the 1950’s, who starts a classical music jam band?  Yet from this beginning, the Academy went on to record hundreds of albums, with Sir Neville credited as conductor on over 200 (I say “credited,” because the Academy is supposed to be a “conductorless” orchestra).

The Academy achieved rare popular acclaim for its soundtrack to the 1984 film Amadeus, which won Academy awards (and Golden Globes) for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham, though Tom Hulce was also nominated).  Yet through the superb performances by actors and director and film editors, the music really shines.

I was growing up in a part of the Midwest with friends who were into Quiet Riot, Ratt, Def Leppard, Motley Crue – and the best concerts were at the State Fair.  None of this moved me as much as the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor at the end of the Amadeus soundtrack; my parents were happy to indulge me by picking up bargain bin Mozart cassettes, which was a welcome respite for them from hearing “Message In a Bottle” for the 200th time.  I’ll admit, listening to Wolfgang Amadeus made me feel intellectually superior to my peers (as if I needed anything to add to that), and I suppose I adopted a classical punk stance akin to Alex in A Clockwork Orange (the book, and later the film).  What I didn’t realize is that listening to Mozart would connect me to a tradition spanning both continents and centuries.

And Sir Neville Marriner was my gateway pusher.

From Mozart, it was an easy leap to Beethoven, though I rejected Haydn and Handel, and was slow to warm to Bach.  Classical Punk turned to Classical Goth in college, and I became obsessed with my “Dead Russians”: Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov – especially Rachmaninov, and I found the dark tones “sounded like death”; of course, every liberal arts college kid of my time has a copy of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” in his collection, even if we rarely get past “O Fortuna.”  I moved east from my dark Russians to the lighter strains of the Scandinavians, Grieg and Sibelius, and as I seek a greater calm in my own life in my middle years, I find myself drawn to Vaughan Williams and the English countryside so easily heard in his compositions.

Sir Neville also made me pay attention to conductors as well as composers, and I next sampled some Karajan, always was aware of Bernstein (but not immediately aware of his significance, as I tended to dismiss, in my youth, the Americans as inherently inferior to European conductors), moved through Solti, Previn, Maatzel, Szell, Furtwangler, Abbado; and today will pick up Slatkin, either Jarvi (Neeme, or son Paavo).  I may have looked forward to releases in Gardiner’s Brahms symphony cycle the way most of the industry waited for the new Taylor Swift or Beyonce albums.  Osmo Vanska is my favorite, as his Beethoven cycle opened my ears to music I thought I knew by heart (and has replaced Karajan as my favorite symphony cycle), and made me a believer in Sibelius.

So often when classical music is thrust into the spotlight, the style is forced to overwhelm the substance.  Even after the immense popularity of the Amadeus soundtrack, Sir Neville and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields never compromised on the quality of their art.  As Sir Neville and the Academy were my introduction to Mozart, I still look to their recordings as the definitive interpretation of most of Mozart’s works.

The Maestro has laid down his baton.  For his contributions throughout a life dedicated to his craft, he has well-earned a standing ovation.  Rest well, Sir Neville.