Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

Tomorrow is Bob Dylan's birthday. I saw the man in concert once (Elvis Costello shared the bill and did an amazing solo acoustic show, Dylan did a full band, but I found EC's portion of the concert better), and he looks every bit of his seventy-two years. He didn't live the rock-and-roll lifestyle so much as embrace the role of "voice of a generation" and all that entails, from the early Sixties onwards.

The dude has been an icon since he was twenty-two. In case you ever want to feel bad about your lack of forward momentum in life, look up the stats: a folk-singing icon at twenty-two, a rock rebel at twenty-four and twenty-five, and reclusive balladeer from twenty-five to pretty much now, albeit more in the public eye since his return to performing in the Seventies. The man has been at the forefront of so much that I think you can safely assume he has fans not just for himself, but for each version of Bob Dylan that's been floating around since the Woody Guthrie days of 1962-1963.

Me personally, it's all about the electric period, that first burst of rock energy that came alive with Bringing It All Back Home and this song in particular, "Subterranean Homesick Blues." In a prototype of the music video, Dylan drops cards bearing lines from the song at a rapid pace, an iconic technique that would be borrowed for everything from other artists' videos to ads for cars (no, really, I saw a local ad with a weatherman doing much the same thing, dropping cards that built on the promise of really good deals on cars. I'm guessing the homage was not intentional). Bob Dylan was punk before there was even a thing such as punk, because he defied what his audience expected of him at the time.

From 1965 to 1967, he toured with the Hawks, who, when he suffered a mysterious motorcycle accident, would start jamming with Bob in Woodstock, New York. Eventually to become The Band, they went on to achieve their own success with the trio of voices now sadly all gone: Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm. The pressure on Dylan was intense, and hatred over his "new direction" so fierce that he could very well have been another victim of the wave of assassinations that swept the world in the Sixties.

What amazes me is that he not only survived that intact physically but also mentally (though I'm sure the drugs he took and probably still takes helped a lot). In an era where people can become famous for just being famous, Bob Dylan actually stands out as someone who, except on rare occasions, never really settles for being "Bob Dylan." He's not willing to sit still and let others define him, even if (like me) they like the older version of him, from back in whatever particular era his music spoke to them. For me, it's hard to top his mid-Sixties period (culminating in Blonde on Blonde) and honestly, if I had to live with only the three albums he put out from 1965 to 1966, I'd be good.