In a landmark press conference in San Francisco in 1965, Bob Dylan was asked by an older journalist what he thought his role was. Then a sprightly 24-year-old, Dylan shot back with his trademark somewhat sardonic smile, “Just to stay here as long as I can.”
Well, Dylan, who is turning 80 years old on Monday, made good on his promise. It is hard to think of anyone in the history of rock & roll who has been so trailblazing, creative, prolific and adulated. Across a now-60-year career, the then-scruffy-looking Jewish lad named Robert Zimmerman has constantly reinvented himself, begging, borrowing and stealing from everyone and everything he could get his hands on, and keeping the folk and rock world agape with his ability to constantly come up with the goods.
According to local Dylan devotee, US-born Shmuel Berger, any musician who has played with Dylan talks of his incredible inventiveness.
“[Guitarist-vocalist] Charlie Sexton, who has been in Dylan’s backing band for over 20 years, once said that the most amazing thing about Dylan is that never stops creating, and inventing new stuff,” says Berger who says he has “probably the largest collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs and other memorabilia in the Middle East.”
Although the existence of Dylan and the 1960s folk revival was not widely known in the isolated Israel of the early 1960s, things started a-changin’ here following the Six Day War when Israel, and particularly kibbutzim, became something of a Mecca for hippies and other young people from all over the world making the trek here for extended sojourns.
Yehuda Eder was one of the beneficiaries of the overseas cultural influx. Now one of the doyens of the Israeli rock scene, the 69-year-old guitarist-vocalist says he got in on the Dylan act earlier than most.
“I grew up on Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi, which was founded by people from Britain,” he recalls. “So we got all these volunteers coming over from abroad, and they brought sex, drugs and rock & roll over with them,” he laughs.
That exciting multi-sensorial mix took in material by the then emerging superstar of the folk music revival.
“A volunteer gave me a cassette by [Dylan’s mid-Sixties back-up group] The Band and I’d listen to it all night,” Eder says. “That was one of the most formative things that happened to me in my life. No one told me it was good music. I just felt it.” Eder was well and truly hooked. “I used to put his LPs on, like Freewheelin’, and [1975 release] Blood on the Tracks and play them all night, and then learn how to play them on the guitar.”
THAT EARLY impact began to filter through into Eder’s evolving musicianship and, eventually into the output of mid-Seventies seminal Israeli rock band Tammuz, with the likes of Ariel Zilber and preeminent rocker Shalom Hanoch in the lineup.
Hanoch, and many of his contemporaries, says veteran rock and pop radio show presenter and walking-talking encyclopedia of Israeli commercial music history Yoav Kutner ,were heavily influenced by Dylan.
“Shalom Hanoch had an amazing record called White Wedding,” he says referencing Hanoch’s critically acclaimed 1981 offering. “You listen to that and you just know that Hanoch must have gotten into Blood on the Tracks, and songs like “Sara” [from Dylan’s 1976 album Desire].”
Kutner believes it wasn’t just the sound or even the poetic lyrical content that left their imprint on cutting-edge Israeli artists. “[Late poet-troubadour] Meir Ariel was in the United States in the late-Sixties to early-Seventies, and he heard Dylan there. That was when he realized he could write songs that were five or six minutes long, and he didn’t have to make do with songs of two, two-and-a-half minutes.”
Years later Zilber put out a cover version, in Hebrew and English, of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which Dylan wrote for the soundtrack of 1973 western Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, in which he also appeared, and which featured on his eponymous record. And there are plenty more Israeli artists who have helped to bring Dylan into the local cultural fold, including the likes of now 77-year-old blues-leaning rocker Danny Litani, 56-year-old vocalist Hemi Rodner and 48-year-old former enfant terrible Aviv Geffen. The latter’s feted writer dad, Yehonatan, translated various Dylan numbers into Hebrew.
Members of the younger crowd have also ingested Dylan’s heady lyrical and melodic sensibilities, with internationally renowned indie pop duo Lola Marsh member Gil Landau, and folk-country band Jane Bordeaux vocalist Doron Talmon, fusing their oeuvre with Dylanesque content.
“Dylan opened up possibilities for singer-songwriters here,” Kutner suggests, in more senses than one. “He sometimes declaimed the words, rather than singing them. That eventually influenced people here, around five, 10 years later. I love Dylan’s voice but I think artists here realized they didn’t have to sound like Sinatra, and they could fashion their own vocal style.”
Indeed, no one could “accuse” the iconic American songsmith-singer of operatic renditions but, like fellow poet-singer the late Leonard Cohen, Dylan has a unique musicality and delivery.
And the man just keeps on giving. Last year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways album, produced during a coronavirus-induced lull in Dylan’s normally packed gigging schedule, is testament to the octogenarian’s staying power and seemingly bottomless well of creativity.
Happy birthday Bob.