Wonderful article from Charles P. Pierce Esquire Magazine May 25
Let's get the whole gang together: Davey Moore, Hattie Carroll, Hollis Brown, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven, John the Baptist, the Commander In Chief, Louis The King, Napoleon in rags, Lucille, Johanna, Sweet Marie, John Wesley Harding, St. Augustine, the joker, the thief, Big Jim, Lily, Rosemary, and most of all, the Jack of Hearts, Rubin Carter, Isis, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Blackjack Davey, Charlie Patton. All of them. Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack, because if you want to remember, you better write down the names.
Bob Dylan turned 83 on Friday. All of him did. All of them did. All the personae, the entire kaleidoscope of masks, the false fronts and head fakes, and, finally, the last, and in many ways, best of them all. The travelling storyteller, the seanchai as the people in the old country would call him. Out on the endless tour, up the endless highway. I think of him and I think of Turlough O'Carolan, the legendary blind Irish harper who would travel the countryside, composing his songs on the spot for whomever would give him food and drink. Go back further. Go back to Homer. Sing to him, O muse. When Dylan dropped "Murder Most Foul," virtually out of a clear blue sky, blessing us with it as consolation for the years when America had gone so terribly wrong, it was Homer of whom I thought, poet and historian both, protector of the shadowland between myth and reality, chronicler of what Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America," a phrase I wish I'd written.
He'll be around all summer, travelling with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp and a whole clutch of other artists in something called the Outlaw Music Festival Tour. It's a high-priced extravaganza but, in a very real way, he's just on the road, heading for another joint. Move along, brother Bob. The highway, as you taught us, is for gamblers, and we take what we have gathered from coincidence.
Here’s a collection of comments and reflections from Dylan's artistic partners and others just sharing the same spaces with Bob. Interviews I’ve done over the years to be added to when Dylan turns 85.
