OutTakes: On Bob Dylan's Birthday
Commentary by Edd Merritt,
June 2, 2011, page 12.....

Tell me how does it feel?

So Bob turned 70 last week – my fellow Minnesotan, Zimmerman aka Dylan, that is.
Thinking little about it at the time, I unknowingly followed him around in my post-college days – a summer in Dinky Town, Minneapolis, on to the lower east side of Manhattan. I even stretched matters to make it seem as though I had something to do with Bob’s growing up on Minnesota’s iron range, because that’s where my family was from. And, of course, I was petrifyingly jealous of his relationship with Joan Baez who, in New Hampshire legend, was so cool she rode her motorcycle barefoot in winter.
Well, to compound my 1960s’ nostalgia, I walked into my own living room this morning to find son and his wife, my 4-year old grand kids and my own wife Beth ( Grammy) doing a superb imitation of the Waltons. The twins were whipping up pancakes under Grammy’s instructions; my daughter-in-law Nik was on her computer on the couch; and my son Chris was stretched at the dining room table reading the newspaper. Each and every one of them was doing his or her own thing, with nobody paying the slightest attention to the other. Behind it all was They Might Be Giants singing, “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the brand new place. Davy, Davy Crockett, traveling through outer space.”
Their dog, Lola, must have been the equivalent of John Boy, scoping out and mentally recording the scene.
Ah, the snows of yesteryear. In a current world where the thunderclouds of the present tip us on our noses, it is rather satisfying to reflect on a period when we, the young and vicious, also thought that our world was in destruction mode.

“Momma’s in the basement mixin’ up the medicine; I’m on the pavement thinkin’ about the government.” “Look out kid, it’s somethin’ you did. God knows when but you’re doin’ it again.”

Subterranean homesick blues? You bet they were. Maddening, scary, but we survived.
In a May 24 New York Times commentary, David Hajdu asks us to break out the “guitar-shaped cake pans” because it’s not only Bob but an entire bunch of folks his age who used music to question the sanity of human kind and its fixer called war. John Lennon, Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson – Carole King came down from up on the roof to catch Lou walking on the wild side beside Brian asking whether surfer girl loves him and, if so, John, is it good as Norwegian wood?
Elvis wasn’t very old then either. I first tasted him in Nancy Hill’s basement on the radio all the way from Memphis. “Don’t be cruel,” and he wasn’t. The girls sighed and the guys wiped back imaginary ducktails. We were one up on our classmates.
My grandsons are four. Their present world is as adrift as mine was in the late fifties and sixties. Their minds now focus on immediacies – food, what brother has that I don’t. They also focus, as did I growing up, on how far they can push the envelope before time out becomes time in. If they are at all like father or grandfather, there will come a time, however, when tunes will help define those limits.
Where around the globe and how far into the galaxy will these tunes travel? Even Robert Zimmerman doesn’t know.

But deep inside my heart,
I know I can’t escape.
Oh mama, can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
-Bob Dylan – “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”