'When Ruthie says come see her in her honky tonk...'

Bob Dylan turned 70 yesterday. No other recording artist, besides the great Joan Baez, more deeply affected me in my dysfunctional adolescence than Bob Dylan. I was 16 years old, land locked on an island, frustrated by conservative Catholic parents, disinterested in 80% of my high school education run by an incompetent order of French nuns and anti-social. My parents pressured me to join religious groups (OMG). I flunked Home Ec. and was sent to summer school every year to get a leg up on Math. The road between home, school and church was polluted with my jail break dreams. I started pilfering my father's liquor cabinet and taking whiskey to school. Smoking in the basement of my house became a routine. My only self discovery was I liked girls. That way. At the end of a stressful summer, circa 1962 (?) my parents sent me to visit an aunt in SF who carted me down to the Monterrey Fair grounds to hear Joan Baez. A fog settled in over the evening sky. Under-dressed, and shivering, I was mesmerized by the the folk ballads. At the end of the evening Joan Baez called out to a friend in the wings to join her. A skinny white boy, curly black hair, a harmonica slung around his neck walked on stage. It was Bob Dylan. Together, the only song they sang that night was, 'Blowing in the Wind.' The doors of my world blew open. I was a confused child on the flight over, and now on the return flight home, I was a confused adolescent with an agenda. When I got to college, I had friends who loved the same things that I did. The hall ways of the dorm echoed with songs from the iconic, 'Freewheelin Bob Dylan,' 'Bringing it all back Home,' and 'Highway 61 Revisited.' Somewhere compressed in all that music, Dylan went electric on us. I cared for a split nano second. Then rolled along with it. Years later, sitting with friends in a dyke bar, Dylan's 'Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again' lurched from the juke box. The place was smoky and crowded, but we all stopped what we were doing and sang along with Dylan 'neath his Pananmanian moon. Thanks and Happy Birthday, Bob.