Bob Dylan

When I was a kid and my parents were married my whole family would go on road trips up to our house in Charlevoix, Michigan. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and including rest stops for two kids and a dog, it took about 10 hours to get up there. Though my brother and I have been best friends since we were little, we did fight like siblings obviously on occasion, and when you’re in a Subaru sadan for 10 hours with a big smelly dog between you, things can get a little restless. Whenever we would start to act out, whine, or prove unable to entertain ourselves, instead of the classic “I will turn this car around” or “don’t make me come back there!” that I’ve seen on sitcoms, my father would just start singing Bob Dylan in his best impression. Not only do all Bob Dylan impressions sound like little more than a low whine when anyone does them, but my father is certifiably tone deaf. Like, he cannot distinguish between two tones.

            Through operational conditioning, I learned to associate Bob Dylan with punishment, as soon as my father would start to sing “Memphis Blues” whatever actions my brother and I were doing would immediately cease before he even finished saying “Oh, Mama.” Last summer, however, I was on the megabus and my ipod had died, so I resorted to using spotify on my phone, and this was before I had premium, so all that was available to me were the radio stations. I settled on the Counting Crows station as I thought that best encompassed my music taste (what can I say? 90s alternative folk rock is my passion), and after flipping through a couple Matchbox Twenty and R.E.M. tracks, “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan came on. This is Bob Dylan?! I thought, in absolute disbelief. This is great! The artist I had so actively avoided was blowing my mind on that dingy megabus. I added the song to a playlist and listened to it regularly, and a few weeks later I ventured cautiously into more of Bob Dylan’s repetoire, but it wasn’t until I found “Hurricane” that I realized what I had been missing my whole life. “Hurricane” is one of those songs that you check how much time is left and pray that it’s at least 6 more minutes (which is great because the song is 8 minutes long), that you wish you’d lost your virginity to, that you can’t listen to enough. I know consider myself an avid fan of Bob Dylan and now have even learned to associate the memories of my dad singing “Memphis Blues” with happy times with my full family.

What a babe