It's Sunday in the Mad city, and everyone is sending me email, telling me that it's Bob Dylan's birthday tomorrow. The 80th, I think.
But I don't believe Bob cares about birthdays. He doesn't need to be saluted when his birthday comes any more than he needs to be bowed down to on Sunday, like whoever the artist is that he sang about in "She Belongs to Me."
I happen to think birthdays are more of a children's thing, and I tend to think Bob agrees with me, because in his memoir "Chronicles: Volume One," as he's writing about avoiding what was at the time "the long-awaited ballyhooed reunion tour," he says:
As long as my own form of certainty stayed intact, I owed nobody nothing. I wasn’t going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. I was already living in the darkness. My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in-between. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it. For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best and that was all that mattered—the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing….
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It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only 80)
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