The First Time I listened to Bob Dylan

A flurry of articles like cherry blossoms falling celebrated Bob Dylan’s 80^th birthday in May. Enthusiasts poured over lists of the best songs, and the best albums, considering what should have been included or excluded. I was reminded of the first time I listened to Bob Dylan. Forget about when Kennedy was shot or 9-11, where were you when you first listened to Bob Dylan?

How to know if what I remember is true? You won’t. For sure, I was late to the Bob Dylan party. I came to “Blowing in the Wind” via Girl Guides and Peter, Paul and Mary and “Mr. Tambourine Man” via the Byrds radio hit cover version.

Top 40’s music poured out of my bedside teal-green plastic AM radio, tuned to CHUM 1050 Toronto. “In Toronto, it’s number one!” the catchy jingle rang out. Dylan’s 1969 hit was Lay Lady Lay and the thirteen-year-old me thought it was a pretty ballad with creepy lyrics. “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean…” Did I know it was a Bob Dylan composition? I’m not sure.

In the summer of 1971, my brother and I and talked our dad into buying my sister a record player for her fourteenth birthday. It had a turntable and two detachable speakers with long spindly wires for better sound separation. Stereo sound was a new feature on LP’s. (long-playing records). I think the record player cost forty dollars, well over our budget. We didn’t bother asking my sister if she wanted a record player for her birthday. We needed a way to play our music at the cottage. What albums were we listening to that summer? Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman; Janis Joplin, Pearl; The Band, The Band. We poured over the cover art and liner notes to find every detail we could find about the artists. The lyrics were rarely printed, we learned them or mislearned them (a mondegreen), by listening to the same track over and over and over.

My sister loved the Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed and the concept album, Tommy by the Who. We all listened to the Beatles’ Abbey Road and I wished that I owned Blue by Joni Mitchell. And when the cottage floor shook from our leaping up and down during “Jumping Jack Flash” or “Honky Tonk Woman” from The Stones, Through the Past Darkly vol II, we kept the stylus tracking on the vinyl by taping pennies to the top of the tonearm.

But that was usually weekend stuff. For most of that summer, mid-week, my sister and I were on our own in the wooden cottage with plywood walls and worn linoleum floors. The cottage had all the modern conveniences, running water, flush toilets and electricity but was on a large island in a lake in the Kawarthas in Ontario. The store and the payphone were a mile away on the mainland. We would gently paddle the canoe or roar across the water in “The Tin Can,” our aluminum boat with a 9.6 HP motor. Why 9.6 and not 10 HP? I never knew. Our parents were newly divorced–Dad, in town an hour away by car and Mom, in another country.

One the day I listened to Bob Dylan, my sister and I had crossed the water to go to the store to get maple walnut ice cream cones. We were wearing our summer uniform–T-shirts and cut-offs over our bikinis and calloused bare feet. It was my summer of Sun-In hair lightener. Blonds had more fun.

We met these two guys at the government dock. They were friendly and clad in the expected uniform of tight Levis 501 jeans, flapping plaid flannel shirts over tight T-shirts and steel-toed work boots. Their hair was long and shaggy. They were older, maybe even out of high school. Tall and skinny. Did they have names? Sure–single-syllable English names like Ken, Al, or Jeff or maybe even Bob–something like that.

“Do you like Bob Dylan?” one of them asked holding up the album he was carrying. And I knew I was supposed to, so I said yes but I would have been guessing if he asked me to name one of his songs. Which Dylan album was it? I can’t say for sure. But we invited them back to the cottage to play it. We clambered into The Tin Can and buzzed back across the lake to the cottage. It must have been a sunny day with calm water. It was a long crossing when the weather was bad.

One of them put Bob’s record on the turntable of my sister’s stereo system with the fake green leather covering and those separated speakers. They may have smoked a joint before they met us. They talked in slow, low tones. They sat together on one couch and my sister and I sat on the other one. We listened in silence to that rasping voice and those mournful harmonica sounds. I pretended to understand the lyrics.

And after fifteen minutes or so, one of them got up and turned the album over to the B-side. I don’t know that for sure. Maybe he played the B-side first? Not everyone is a purist. I’m not sure I recognized even one of the tracks. But I knew from how they nodded and listened that this music was important. It was like listening to a hymn in church. And that’s all we did. We listened.

Did we offer chips or pop or even beer? No. We wouldn’t have any beer until the weekend when my brother or father would arrive. Did they offer us a toke? I expect so. Did we take one? Maybe. And they stayed for the time it took to play the album. We didn’t dare suggest that they listen to our music. And then we ferried them back to the mainland and said goodbye. The whole event was just listening to music on my sister’s record player.

Since then, I’ve tried to figure which one of Dylan’s albums it might have been. By 1971, he’d released eleven studio albums and one compilation album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, the only Bob Dylan album I ever bought. He composed a lifetime’s work of enduring pieces in under ten years. And at least five of those years were spent recovering from a serious motorcycle accident. Maybe the album that day was Nashville Skyline with “Lay Lady Lay”? But surely, I would have remembered that song with the creepy lyrics and been awestruck by his duet with Johnny Cash in “The Girl from the North Country,” with its old British ballad, Scarborough Fair sound and shared lyrics.

And a few years later, Dylan played with The Band in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. At age seventeen, concerts in hockey arenas seemed like a good idea. I was a fan of both Dylan and The Band’s musical confluence of folk, country, blues, and rock. I’d found Music from Big Pink. “The Weight” and “I Shall be Released” are hymns to me.

Musicologists from the 2010 Rolling Stone Magazine list of 500 greatest songs credit “Like a Rolling Stone” from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited as the number one greatest rock song of all time. (beating number 2, also from 1965, The Stones, “Satisfaction”). Dylan has fifteen songs on this list. And yes, this list was likely created by ageing white males who speak only English. What makes a greatest song? According to the hip-hop artist Jay-Z, “it just is”.

It’s fifty years later. Patti Smith has sung “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” in Sweden at the Nobel prize ceremony in 2016. Bob and I both have grey hair. He’s sold his back catalogue and I’m mortgage-free. Does he fight of old age by pedalling a Peléton as he tours? And fifty years later, I’m still only familiar with those early years of his work and my favourite piece remains “The Girl from the North Country.”

Do you have a Bob Dylan story?

The Girl from the North Country

So, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair

Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

Remember me to one who lives there

She once was a true love of mine