Happy birthday, Bob Dylan
With forever thanks
Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walking the hills of old Duluth...
It was a funny thing growing up knowing the Lakes were all around us, longer and wider than the ground beneath our feet. Nobody said much about them, but I think they shaped us in unseen ways. In family histories, remembered vacations, and longer histories of tribes and settlement.
Anyway, this is one of my favorite Great Lakes references and a song about love and history too ("something that's crossed over from another century").
From Bob's side of the Lakes, in Minnesota.
For somebody who's spent a fair amount of time reading/writing the history of nostalgia, I love Dylan's regular declarations that he is not nostalgic.
"Nostalgia is death," he once told an interviewer. Offered a souvenir song list of his early performances, he was heard to refuse it, saying if it were a list of the concerts to come, he'd take it gladly. This doesn't mean there is no nostalgia in his songs. Look at 'Sara'. Or this one, 'Bob Dylan's Dream,' an early lament for youthful friends and places.
But nostalgia is not a regular element, and Dylan never stays there long. What's more, his restless need for change and forward movement is well documented. Joan Baez once remarked that it was terrifying to be on stage with him because you never knew what he was going to do with a song. There was no settling into a 'pat' performance. And there was no settling into 'folk'. It may seem like nothing now, but the guy braved death threats for going electric.
Anyway, I think he 'gets' what I might call the 'good nostalgia' - a working through of the past for the present. A productive engagement with the past. A few years back, Dylan released a bunch of Sinatra covers. Here's what he had to say at the time:
“It’s not taking a trip down memory lane or longing and yearning for the good old days or fond memories of what’s no more...a wall of time separates the old from the new and a lot can get lost in this kind of time. Musical influences too — they get swallowed up, get absorbed into newer things or they fall by the wayside. I don’t think you need to feel bummed out though, or that it’s out of your clutches — you can still find what you’re looking for if you follow the trail back. It could be right there where you left it — anything is possible. Trouble is, you can’t bring it back with you... I think that is what nostalgia is all about.”
With hungry hearts through the heat and cold / We never much thought we could get very old / We thought we could sit forever in fun /And our chances really was a million to one