I don't have many heroes. Just a few. Amongst them is Robert Zimmerman or Bob Dylan as he likes to be known.
It was in 1963 when I first heard one of his albums in a council house on Trinity Close in the East Yorkshire village where I was born and raised. A friend's older sibling had brought it home. It was "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" and it contained some of his most famous songs- including "Blowin' In the Wind", "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright". I was blown away.
Much later, I twice saw Dylan live in concert. I visited his childhood home in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1977 and in 2005 stood outside his Malibu home in California. I don't profess to be a nerdy expert on the life and music of Bob Dylan but I know a lot about him and I own or have owned a dozen of his albums. His lyrics have often grabbed me by the heart.
This is not the first time that I have blogged about Dylan and matters that surround him. In 2020 I blogged about his younger brother - David and ten years earlier , I blogged about his first significant girlfriend back in Hibbing - Echo Helstrom.
Checking out this blog's background statistics, I notice that those two blogposts are still viewed regularly. When other posts get buried by the passage of days and years and finally disappear from view, "Echo" and "David" keep going. Of course this will all be to do with other Dylan aficionados searching through Google for more knowledge about someone who is a living legend.
Dylan is 83 years old now. He was born on May 24th - the same as my mother and my son-in-law and Queen VIctoria too. On the day that he dies, the world will become a poorer place and maybe this planet will stop spinning for a while. But at the moment he is still working, still creating and fortunately the end is not imminently nigh.
Link to my 2019 post: "Echo"
Link to my August 2020 post: "David"
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/Usdph1Z