birthday :: Blog
Happy 70th Birthday to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Bob Dylan
Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday! It’s hard to believe that rock’s poet laureate has been making music for a half-century! To celebrate his birthday, Rolling Stone magazine put together a panel of 13 music writers and musicians to select Dylan’s 70 greatest songs. I was extremely honored to have been a part of that panel. Each panelist had to submit a list of their top 25 Bob Dylan songs. My list featured “Like a Rolling Stone” at number one. I guess the other panelists agreed, as that song was number one in the final rankings. The song was really revolutionary. Even though it clocked in at more than six minutes, it became a hit, reaching Number Two on the charts. The musicianship, as Bono wrote in his Rolling Stone essay about the song, “is so alive and immediate that it’s like you’re getting to see the paint splash the canvas.” But most important are the lyrics, as Dylan attacks the “all the pretty people,” the ones “thinkin’ they got it made.”
The rest of my top ten was as follows: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Subterranean Homesick ...
Happy Birthday, Roy
Every weekend I try to pull out some music to take in the car. (Full disclosure -- I do not have my collection on an iPod nor do I own one. I don’t object to them, I just haven’t done it yet.) Anyway, I try to pick out things I haven’t heard in a while. Sometimes I close my eyes, drag my fingers along the spines of the CDs and stop randomly. Last weekend I ended up on a copy of The Essential Roy Orbison, the outstanding double CD collection from 2006. As much as I love to discover new music that moves me, I keep going back to the first generation of rock and roll artists. That group of artists will never fail you musically. Roy, in particular, is worth periodic reexamination. His voice, the songwriting, the arrangements and the records themselves are all without parallel. The arc of his career is completely unique. He starts as a West Texas rocker, like his contemporary Buddy Holly and, along the way, becomes a skilled songwriter. As a performer and recording artist, Roy hit an amazing stride in the early Sixties. The songs from his Monument Records era may ...
