Bobby Dylan Turns 85

Happy birthday to a prophet of the generations!

“Of every earthly plan that is known to man, He is unconcerned.

He’s got plans of His own to set up His throne when He returns.”

So sang Bob Dylan during what many have called his Christian or Gospel period in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Dylan, who turns 85 today, has long been a David of this era and many others, a musician and writer with a voice that pleases the Lord.

And that is because Dylan, like the shepherd boy who became king, is filled with love.

Last night, Carol, my wife, as well as other family members, and I attended a hootenanny at The Fret House, a guitar store in Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles.

The Fret House opened in late 1969, a few months after Woodstock.

For a number of years, it has participated in a series of performances with musicians, who highlight a musical genre, a period of music, or, in this case, an iconic figure.

Saturday night’s gig, a tribute to Dylan, the birthday boy, took place in the basement of the store, below the first floor, where guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukuleles and other string instruments hang from the ceiling.

It is the kind of place, where you can take music lessons, get your instrument repaired, or have your amp tested.

After a sound check, a sold-out crowd of 60 or so filed downstairs to the basement and heard several hours of stories, spoken word, as well as some call-and-response that allowed audience members to participate, by singing along, sometimes reminding a few stage performers of verse to old Dylan tunes, by shaking maracas, and by blowing into kazoos.

One of the songs played last night was “When He Returns,” the source of the quote that opens this piece.

Bobby Dylan is and always has been a prophet. And like all prophets, he is channeling God, as the lyrics at the top of this piece suggest.

In exploring the mystery of the Bobster, who is very much “a complete unknown” to most of us, many speakers pointed out last night that Dylan and his songs at core are indeed fueled by love.

As I often point out in my articles, I recognize that not everyone believes in God.

For those of us, who do believe in the Lord, it is clear to us that God is love, a point often made in the Bible.

As a prophet, Dylan transmits that love through the beauty of his music, his idiosyncratic voice that seems to change, however subtly on every album, his phrasing, his melodies, and his lyrics, all of which create art that is unique.

He has an otherness, a strangeness, a weirdness to his work, as all great language artists do.

Harold Bloom, the late literary critic, used to cite such factors when he assessed the merits of a writer, as I pointed out in a tribute to Toni Morrison, “Listening to Toni Morrison as well as Prozac,” a Thrive Global piece that I wrote on August 8, 2019, not long after Morrison passed away.

Bloom believed that the best writers, like Shakespeare and Milton, as well as Morrison and Dylan, exceed others at a cognitive, imaginative and aesthetic level.

It is no surprise that the best writers are invariably harmed by the jealousy of others, by Salieris and their ilk, mediocrities who far too often seek to diminish geniuses and sometimes try to steal from prophets.

God, of course, sees through all of this.

And God reveals the evil of hacks, the kind of people, who did not want to believe that Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as one of the speakers at The Fret House noted last night.

Then there are those people who cannot fathom that Dylan wrote that song in perhaps 10 minutes.

If memory serves, Dylan, when asked if he wrote the fabled anthem with such dispatch, said, “probably.”

He might have been exaggerating slightly, just as Harold Bloom might have been exaggerating slightly when he said that he could read a 500-page or perhaps a 1,000-page novel in an hour and retain whatever it was that he wished.

But no one should doubt the brilliance or the originality of either man.

Bloom, like Dylan, was a prophet.

I have written quite a bit about Dylan and Bloom over the years, including pieces for the Huffington Post, “A ‘Heavy’ Side of Bob Dylan at 75,” from May 2016, and “The Daemon Knows that Harold Bloom Is a Genius,” from July 2015, when Bloom himself turned 85.

I also alluded to Dylan in a tribute to Professor Bloom in a column for Thrive Global in October 2019, “Remembering Harold Bloom, Literary God.”

As I noted in that remembrance, when I met with my former professor at his New Haven home in September 2014, I said to Bloom that Dylan “is what you would call the ‘vernacular sublime.’”

Harold Bloom nodded at me and smiled from his chair in his kitchen, while he and I, joined by Jeanne, his wife, drank tea and listened to jazz music.

While I reflect on the 85^th birthday of Dylan, as well as the life of Harold Bloom, who passed away at the age of 89 in October 2019, I feel grateful to be here on this planet, the only planet on which we know for sure that we can enjoy the blessings of art of the most exquisite beauty.

Carol and I are going to see the Bobster in concert next month. Dylan remains a marvel. He has been traveling from joint to joint on his Never-Ending Tour for years now, and for some time he has been focusing on his Rough and Rowdy Ways album, which includes songs such as “I Contain Multitudes” and “False Prophet.”

As Dylan sings on the latter song, “I ain’t no false prophet. I just know what I know. I go where only the lonely can go.”

I might add that great artists can often hear what others can’t hear and can imagine what others can’t imagine.

Sometimes, we, homo sapiens, can achieve things that no humans have ever done before, by climbing Mount Everest, or by writing 37 plays and numerous sonnets of the highest literary quality, as did Shakespeare, arguably the greatest playwright and poet of all time, or by composing the Psalms, unifying a kingdom and conceiving of a temple to God, as King David did.

We are at our best on this planet, when we create music and poetry and prose that can elevate our species and all others with beauty, with originality and with love.

Again, I know that not everyone believes in God.

But I do.

And I have no doubt that God knows all. He is all-powerful. And He is omnipresent.

I might add that God is within all of us, male, female, gay, straight, bisexual, transgendered.

He is within every creature great and small.

And He blesses all of us with elements of the Holy Spirit, with different gifts.

While I will always be an optimist, in spite of the evil that we now face, it is also true that God does not like it when people lie, cheat and steal, when they commit hideous crimes, when they gang up on others, on mortals and angels, and on prophets.

We can all try to forgive those who have committed evil.

Indeed, we might all heed the words of Prince, one of Dylan’s fellow Minnesotans, who passed away 10 years ago, when the late artist wrote, “I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand. I’ll never beat you. I’ll never lie. And if you’re evil, I’ll forgive you, by and by…”

Yes, we can try to forgive evildoers, but it may not be up to us.

I do not intend to sermonize or to sound too preachy, but there is a point when God makes clear how He feels when people try to crush those who persevere and exude the Holy Spirit, when people try to diminish those who read, write and create art that is unsurpassed, art that channels the Lord.

Not everyone knows that God gets all the glory.

But I do.

Remember: God is the author and finisher of our faith.

As Bobby Dylan sings in another song from his Christian period, a song that was played last night at The Fret House:

“I believe in You, even if I’d be outnumbered.”