Scott Spencer on Dylan :
There was nothing in your demeanor that would have suggested that you'd be among the last ones standing. You seemed unaware that at least one green vegetable and one yellow one should accompany every meal. You abused your nervous system; you drove a motorcycle. You burned your bridges, leaving managers, girlfriends, journalists and hard-core fans shaking their fists at you from the other side. You seemed fragile, vulnerable - you seemed like that terrible, exhausting cliche: the vagabond poet fated to an early demise. I doubt that anyone who loved you imagined you'd still be making music in the twenty-first century.
Forty years ago, in 1961, you were twenty and making your first record. This is what the world was like: The East Germans were constructing the Berlin Wall, and Cuban exiles and U.S. operatives were launching the Bay of Pigs invasion. Now bricks from the wall are sold as post-Communist memorabilia, and Bay of Pigs veterans are invited to symposia and reunions back in Havana. The world you came from has all but disappeared, and most of the people who were in the business when you were starting out have come and gone. The year of your first record, people were listening to Bobby Vee singing "Rubber Ball" and Neil Sedaka trying his luck on "Calendar Girl." In the music business, careers and reputations rise and fall, fortunes are won and lost, fates rule with a heavy hand - why intrude upon the birthday cheer with a long list of fallen rock & rollers? Yet you, who once seemed so marked, so mercurial, continue to command our attention. And right now what we need to celebrate, even more than your survival as a creator of songs, an illuminator of the reality behind reality, is your simple human here-ness. Not only have you somehow continued to exist, prancing like Pan through a forest of drugs and Jesus, highway wrecks and heart infections, but you're still hip, you're still mysterious and enigmatic, you're still writing lines like "I've been to Sugar Town/I shook the sugar down/Now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door." The Bob Dylan Story, when they make the movie of your life, won't follow the genre conventions of watching the suffering artist on his forced march from early genius to madness and on to suicide or overdose. We'll leave that to Vincent van Gogh - and Basquiat, Elvis, Lenny Bruce, Charlie Parker and all the other careening supernovae of the tragic-artist biopic. Your birthday marks another milestone in your longest, most surprising and ironic song, the song that is your life: Talking Survival of the Fittest Blues.
Scott Spencer is the author of "The Rich Man's Table" and "Endless Love."
