Dylan 0: Rationale

I can't remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan. He must have been on the radio since I was a baby - he started recording in 1961 at the age of 20. I was born in 1964.

I must have learned to play simple Dylan songs (which don't exist, really) when I was learning the guitar at age 12 or 13. I remember my guitar teacher not only taught me classical guitar (Emilio Pujol, Matteo Carcassi) but also liked to teach me playing chords. I remember one of the first songs I learned was the Stones' "My Sweet Lady Jane", but I guess "Blowing in the Wind" was part of the package too. I should look it up in the old guitar lessons notebooks I may still have in a box somewhere. I remember the teacher often used a red pencil to write with.

I am quite sure some of Dylan's songs were part and parcel of the alternative youth 'gang' I was part of at secondary school, from age 15 to 18. At the same time I was playing in the folk music scene, and Dylan's songs were played (as covers, sometimes in translation) often. I have heard many of his songs at that time without realizing they were written by him, actually.

Then there is a lengthy period of which I don't remember hearing too much of or about Dylan. At some point - but maybe that was earlier - he was converted to Christianity. I remember looking at it with wonder and a slight feeling of disgust. At those times, Christianity for me and many in my my circles was the equivalent of bourgeois, something you were because the neighbors were it too - because you ought to be a Christian, not because you really wanted it; unless what you really wanted was being just like the neighbors, of course. It didn't cross my mind, at that time (although I read everything Dutch author Gerard Reve, a converted Catholic, wrote, so I might have known better), that it might be possible to become a Christian in spite of all the bourgeois humbug and organized slickness around it, because a specific deep inner question can only - and therefore must - be answered in a religious way.

About two years ago I bought, for a reason I can't remember anymore, a double CD called "The Essential Bob Dylan". I became totally hooked, without knowing why.

Recently I turned 50 and some people gave me money. Enough to buy "Bob Dylan, The Complete Album Collection; Volume 1". And I decided to listen to it chronologically, and write a blog entry after listening to each of the 45 albums. I am not doing that because I am a huge fan of Dylan - fan in the sense that I want to know everything about him, that I want to visit all his concerts (but if the chance is there I will visit one), that I want to talk about him for hours, that I want to understand precisely all his lyrics, that I want to know everything about his biography... No fan.

I want to write this blog because I am fascinated by music, and researching it professionally. My research is basically about the question why people do with music what they do with music - whatever it is they do. To find that out I interview lots of people about their musical lives, and am continuously observing. I try to understand what makes them tick, musically.

But that feels sort of out-of-balance, and unfair in a way. I want to understand others, but I do that on the basis of my personal fascination for music. So I feel I owe it to the people I talk with, look at and write about in public to do something in return: not only to write about them, but also about myself. Not only about what makes other people's lives musical, but also about what makes my life musical.

So that is what this blog is about: about what I encounter when I listen to Bob Dylan's records. How do I listen to it? How do I react? How do I connect it, in my mind - often sub- or half-consciously - to my own musical past, my musical present, my musical future - to my own musical biography? And will that, in the end, shed some light on the question why I like "The Essential Bob Dylan" so much? And why I like the Beatles, Beethoven, Indian music, fado, the kora and the 'ud; and how and why I have been drawn into American music those past five years?

This blog will be an exercise in writing about my own musical life, with listening to Dylan's records as a catalyst (an excuse, if you want). It will also be an exercise in writing about myself - in "auto-ethnography" or "auto-ethnomusicology" if you like, something I do not like too much in others but something I feel compelled to do myself now, given the direction my life as a researching ethnomusicologist is taking at present.

To finish: this blog is not a review of the 45 records in the Dylan-collection. I am not going to be posing as a specialist. I will read a biography of Dylan, and I will read some of his own literary work, but just because I would do that anyway (I come to like biographies more and more, the past few years, I notice). The blog will (after this entry) contain at least 45 entries, maybe more because I guess I will at times feel the need to write a short 'intermission'.

I hope some of you will like some of this blog. I do, already now; I am looking forward to find out about my musical self in a quasi-organized way, this next two years or so.