Dylan on being 80.

Bob Dylan, Robert De Niro, Dionne Warwick, Gloria Steinem, Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel were asked to share their thoughts on the pros and cons of turning 80 … and offer advice to Donald Trump.

Emails began circulating from my Bobhead friends, always grateful for Bob news. Not that there’s a shortage of Dylan related material. He’s currently touring, changing guitarists and setlists … he recently performed an obscure song from The Basement Tapes, ‘Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby’ for the first time since recording the original in 1967! In the devoted, deep world of Dylan there’s always something new to look at, read or discuss. In Bob we trust.

This latest offering to the New York Times was the source of spirited discussion. ‘Quintessentially Dylan’ … ‘classic cryptic Bob’ … ‘beat poetry prose’ … and so on. A few jokers wondering if he’d lifted it from somewhere else … a Civil war poet, the Japanese author Junichi Saga. He certainly has form, although maybe using ‘SparkNotes’, an online student study guide, when discussing Moby Dick for his Nobel Prize acceptance speech was a playful joke? Cheeky Bob. I don’t care! The breadth, history, power and continuing relevance of his work speaks for itself.

Anyway, I’d been meaning to read the article properly but got distracted and didn’t read it until Saturday night, at a dinner party. A dinner party! A great, loose and loud dinner party. ‘Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too’. Refreshments flowing, a playlist veering madly from The Third Man Theme to Jimmy Cliff, Emma Donovan, Stevie Wonder. There were singalongs, anecdotes and gossip. We nearly danced!

Around midnight, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ follows ‘The Only Living Boy In New York’ on the random playlist and after a few spirited renditions of ‘how does it feel’, I sense a move towards the front door and the feeling the night is winding down. No! Not yet! Wanting to somehow extend the evening I ask, ‘what unites Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel and Trump?’, confident that somebody would have read the article or heard about it. Blank faces all round, so I reach for my laptop to find a few quotes. My wife says, ‘why don’t you read what Bob said’, quickly adding, ‘in your voice’. Someone suggests I imitate Dylan, but I know that’s dangerous, so I read it straight. Well, pretty straight. Some drawn out phrases, some pauses.

These dear friends in their 60s and 70s all fall quiet and maybe a little vulnerable and Dylan’s words ring out, simple and full of acceptance. A touch of mystery, but honest, human. My voice cracked a little at the end and tears almost fell. Once again I’m amazed and grateful to be living in the time of Bob.

Lucky us!

Dylan’s remarks … ‘The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program.

You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.”

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.’

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