A Note on Bob Dylan's Birthday

Bob Dylan's brother, David Zimmerman, taught the children in my neighborhood how to sing! He was the music teacher at Sunny Hollow Elementary in New Hope, Minnesota. It is well known now that David Zimmerman contributed to the re-recording of Blood on the Tracks in Minneapolis (Christmas of 74).

Bob apparently spent some time with his brother at the grade school. After David Zimmerman worked with Bob on the album he decided to leave teaching. With Bob in tow, Mr Zimmerman visited all his students, all of the classes. During a question & answer session, my brother Rob (age 7) asked this unknown visitor if he knew of the poet Billy L (my middle name is James). Bob said no but that he would have to check this "poet" out. I did not know about this conversation until later (my brother, after all, was 7 & really had no idea how famous Bob was; I was 17). When I heard the story a few weeks later, I was thrilled.

At 19, I studied for a semester in Rome, Italy on the University of Dallas campus. There was a copy of Blood on the Tracks where I stayed. I listened to that album every day, over & over again. What an education: The Confessions of Saint Augustine, The Sistine Chapel, Agamemnon's tomb in Greece, the Louvre in Paris (Leonardo, Botticelli, Giotto), Sophocles & Bob Dylan.

Happy birthday Bob!

For Bob Dylan

He sang a tune or two in a one man band
then hopped a train to a distant and nameless land.
And in a boxcar he heard someone say,
'You can't take back what you never gave away'.

There are rumors of war; there are holes in the sky.
The dead line the roads but no one hears them cry.
The living are throwing stones into an empty well.
Their houses are bare; they have nothing left to sell.

I hum along to a song that I know and understand
as I trudge toward that distant and nameless land.
And in the darkness I hear someone say,
'You can't take back what you never gave away'.