The Score Magazine - Archive April 2009 issue! | Page 16

Pix: Sony Music
P
Forever
Y oung
Daniel Thimmayya
ull up a search on the points of interest, in music,
listed against the year 1959 and you will find your
screen filled with quite a bit of chronologically listed
information. For a year far removed from the times
we now inhabit, quite a few familiar names will catch the
average person’s attention. The ever trusty Wikipedia will
alert you to the emergence of Ritchie Valens’ cult latino-roll
anthem ‘La Bamba’ and his tragic demise in an air crash, as
it has listed the opening of ‘The Sound Of Music’ on Broad-
way. It was also the year that saw the birth of Bryan Adams.
What it fails to tell you is that in a remote high school in
Minnesota, a lithe young guitar player had the microphone
cut off for being too loud. Perhaps, as obscure a beginning
as befitting one of the greatest visionaries that the previ-
ous two generations beheld, and this one is discovering with
reverent awe. And that is where the public first beheld Rob-
ert Allen Zimmermann, or as millions across the world have
come to know him, Bob Dylan.
Attempting to profile Dylan would fail miserably, both due
to a voluminous career and intrinsic space constraints of the
print medium. What one could actually do is celebrate the
life and continuing legacy of perhaps, music’s most revered,
influential, underrated yet powerful personalities ever to
strum a tune on stage.
It has been fifty years since and one may be compelled to
ask what it is that has kept the stone rolling through the
years. After all not many can actually attribute it to his vocal
quality, critics having lambasted it through the decades. This
then leaves us with his songwriting and his curiously erratic
career path. Looking at the former, Dylan has been hailed
as a powerful poet; a formidable distinction for someone
based out of Greenwich Village, strewn with artists, musi-