Welcome to Gardener is Gone, devoted to the art of Bob Dylan. Although I provide links to useful resources, you’ll find little in the way of news here, nothing in the way of gossip, and when I’m not looking at a recording or performance straight in the face, I’m never more than one or two degrees of separation from that. I live in New York, and you can find here information about Dylan events and meetups where we can share opinions and violent disagreements in person, often fueled by pitchers of beer, which can only sharpen the wits and deepen the mutual affection of everyone involved.
When I started this blog about a year ago, I had a dim and meager dream of seeing my thoughts and feelings regarding Bob Dylan’s work arrayed in a professional-looking typeface, highlighted with apt little illustrations. Dimly I hoped like-minded people–people who also find an endlessly renewing abundance of pleasure and a perpetual quest for meaning in Dylan’s songs–would find my own bloviations, in their neat typeface, and we could become friends, of a sort. My dim and meager dream is now in full swing: I’m happy with this font, it’s much easier than I thought to insert little pictures, and I’ve met a few very excellent people through this indulgence.
I’ve had the great good fortune to indulge my interest in Dylan in other slightly more public ways, which you can read about here, and as these activities and bloviations accumulate, I want to amend my dim and meager dream into something grandiose and unrealizable. More dream and less pastime.
I’ve come to feel that the invisible reader –the invisible Dylan listener–I’m addressing here is not necessarily of my time and place, although all serious comments from those of you in the here and now are precious as carbuncles, and keep them coming.
Well, who are you? You could be 20 or 43 or 16 or 38, and you could be in a Starbucks in Menlo Park right this minute, 1:23 PM EST on October 7, 2009. Or you could be floating around a space station parked outside Neptune on October 8, 5409. You’ve just heard Desolation Row, or Highlands, or all of Blood on the Tracks, or three songs from John Wesley Harding, or Not Dark Yet, and you’re wondering what exactly you just heard and why you didn’t know this existed before. Or someone had an extra ticket to see Bob Dylan play one town over and you thought, what the hell, and expected a wizened has-been, but left the venue wishing the show had gone on for another hour. In the weeks that follow, you find more of this music, and discover that most of it sounds impossibly different from the rest of it, and in fact, this man’s music is nearly more different from itself than it is from other music.
And the story that’s told about Bob Dylan’s music is hard for you to find yourself in. You may wish for the excitement of political righteousness and action that you’re told The Times They Are A-Changin’ was the soundtrack to, but realistically this is a fantasy, and the song still grips you and makes sense to you. Unfortunately, you play New Morning often and with great delight, although you understand this is only a minor album created in the quiet smoke following the supernova of Bob Dylan’s genius. You also understand that the peculiar language and method of the songs he wrote from about 1989 on is problematic and apparently a condition of failing inspiration.
Well, I would like to offer you an alternative to that story. My grandiose crusade is based on a commitment to the ongoing vitality and richness of Dylan’s work–there is remarkable invention and expressiveness and thought throughout the span of his music, waiting to provoke a lifelong conversation with new listeners. For those of you in 5409, I can tell you that Bob Dylan is all over the place here in 2009—he can make front page news by straying onto someone’s yard in New Jersey, or singing corny Christmas songs. This is a strange time of hyper-visibility in his career, and for people like me, it’s an opportunity to speak up and start introducing new stories about what makes art great, enduring, intimate, original, profound, beautiful.
Or, we could just meet up after a show and boozily argue about Larry Campbell.
YOU MAY NEED TO SCROLL WAY DOWN TO FIND THE LISTS OF POSTS AND LINKS IN THE RIGHT HAND MARGIN.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Eruke (you are welcome to email me directly at gardenerisgone@gmail.com)
