What I said five years ago I can’t say better now.

Which sort of sounds like a Bob Dylan line to me at the moment, so I’ll happily stick with that.

Happy improbable 80th Birthday to a timeless, forever young legend of the pen, mind, words, voice, music. At this point in time, all of what Bob brought with his precocious, mercurial magic, wisdom and wit and contradictory impulses and confounding disguises, is ultimately beyond his sole posession of ownership.

It’s become something strangely, willfully universal that belongs to all of us who bought a ticket to ride. Here, then, let’s ponder the totality of singer and song: A 60-year epic poem in endless verse; a shape-shifting, transmuting, enveloping chronicle of humanity itself.

Grace, failure, striving, resignation, truth, lies, desperation, cruelty, farce, folly, and untold other things, perpetually spiraling at twisted angles through time, space, and song. We are forever challenged, and forever intrigued. And so shall we forever be. Mystery and truth. That’s the enigmatic essence of Bob Dylan.

Read more of my riffing on His Bobness here (last night’s attempt to re-publish this piece somehow wound up invisible or out there in the ether): https://rpmlifeinanalog.com/2016/05/25/forever-young-bob-dylan-turns-75-approximately/