[Published originally in 2016. Denton High School seen above.]

My first Bob Dylan concert was bought for a $5 add-on ticket at the small Carowinds open-air arena in 1989 when Steve Earle opened for him with “Copperhead Road” and a few other loud songs. It might have been my first real concert, period. My dad and I edged down the aisle to get closer to the stage, and when Dylan took the stage and performed my whole consciousness was electrified. I don’t remember all the songs he played that day. I just knew that he was now my idol. I’’ve seen him perform a dozen other times over the past 25+ years, collected literally all of his albums, and will see him again November 5 in Durham, NC.

So you can guess my excitement when I heard the news that Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, the first American writer to do so since Toni Morrison in 1993. What this moment means to a fan is one thing, but also pretty monumental to an English teacher. The Swedish Academy compared Dylan to Homer and Sappho since their poems were also meant to be performed, just as Dylan’s lyrics have been heard by millions upon millions of listeners and readers. Some high-brow types think giving the Nobel to a common musician lowers the importance or impact of the award. I’ll take “common” any day. Dylan’s songs have literally changed the course of history, from lending “Blowing in the Wind” to the Civil Rights Movement, “A Hard Rain’s….”” to anti-war and nuclear protests, writing “Hurricane” to free a wrongfully convicted boxer, to penning “Like a Rolling Stone” and strapping on an electric guitar to invent a new musical genre (it’s not the #1 song of all time for nothing). For sheer impact upon society, no other writer in modern-day history can boast as much influence.

I’ve followed Bob Dylan for my entire life and I’ve seen some of his many “faces.” I’m too young to have been there for some, so I’ve discovered them third-hand (but it’s the best I can do). I’m not going to argue for Dylan’s greatness as a musician here, because if someone doesn’t recognize that, then they’re probably not a music lover. I’m also not going to argue for his greatness as a writer, for now it’s been recognized by the most prestigious body in the world. I just want to walk through some anecdotes from my Dylan journey and hope you’ll let me take you there. The faces of Dylan have been there for me at some critical times in my life, and I’m just a single fan among countless others.

First stop, a classroom in the now-demolished Denton High School building funded in 1929 is where you’ll see the varnished hardwood floors and concentric circle lights hanging from twelve-foot ceilings, thankful students in rows getting a breeze from the raised, eight-foot arched windows on an early day in May. “How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?” are the words from “Blowin’ in the Wind” coming from a school-box GE record player. Images of students being fire-hosed and attacked by Dobermans probably shocked the eyes of his small-town students, but my dad Wayne Plaster knew what he was doing. So, during his Civil Rights movement unit, we listened to Dylan, along with the words of the “I Have a Dream” speech and video of John F. Kennedy. That was as close as I got to the 1960's growing up, but it left an indelible mark on my mind. Who could hear those words, even years after they were written, and not be impacted? Meanwhile, my mother Sue was using Dylan lyrics in her English classes for sentence diagramming and poetry analysis, inspiring young poetic minds.

This image of Dylan as the protest song singer was the only view I had of him until that August 13, 1989 concert at Carowinds that day. My dad and I literally and figuratively left my mother behind in her seat that day when we ventured down the aisle to see the plugged-in Dylan with his electric sidemen. Looking back at the songs he played at Setlist.fm, it’s no wonder I was amazed. While my dad remembered “Barbara Allen,” I was transfixed by “Masters of War” and transformed by “It’s Alright Ma…” “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,” were lines about Ronald Reagan that I didn’t understand at the time, but his laughing audience and much of the world knew Dylan was remarking on the Iran-Contra affair, the Savings and Loan crisis, a slew of other scandals, and even his slow response to the AIDS epidemic. When the song was written, I’m sure it was (partly) about Lyndon Johnson.

This juncture in Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” was at least a month before his release of Oh Mercy, an album I’ve since discovered, and he didn’t preview a single song from it that night under the cloudy skies at Carowinds. Maybe Dylan didn’t want his bootleggers to get a hold of his apocalyptic “Man in the Long Black Coat,” the catchy “Everything is Broken,” or my favorite, “Most of the Time.” But I hadn’t discovered that album yet because I was years from catching up, literally.

I must have wanted to start at the beginning, with the 20-something-year old Dylan of Freewheelin’ and Another Side. My roommate my freshman year at Appalachian State University and I used to fall asleep to one of my limited album choices. If it wasn’t U2’s The Joshua Tree it was a Bob Dylan album. I don’t know why, but Buddy’s favorite was “I Shall Be Free,” and even to hear it now I think it ranks as one of the funniest songs I’ve heard. Even behind the comedy of “Well, I took me a woman late last night/ I's three-fourths drunk she looked all right,” lies the social conscience of lines like, “I's out there paintin' on the old wood shed / When a can a black paint it fell on my head / I went down to scrub and rub / But I had to sit in back of the tub / (Cost a quarter, Half price).”

My transition to college was not an easy time for me, but Dylan helped get me make it through. Just about everything I lived, I could see through his music. So when he came to ASU’s Varsity Gym on October 30, 1990, of course I had to see him. One of my acquaintances worked for App Stage Shows, which planned events for campus, and she told me Dylan’s back-stage pre-show request was hot tea with honey and lemon and a bottle of Jack Daniels. You’re not going to find any proof of this anywhere, but that night Dylan was so drunk that he shuffled precariously up the microphone and murmured incoherent syllables to an audience of mainly college students who were equally intoxicated on various substances (after all, it was Boone). Let’s just say Dylan sang some very weird songs that night; I don’t remember much of it, to be honest. Even if we barely understood a word, true Dylan fans probably didn’t care. With his issues at the time, it’s no wonder that his Under the Red Sky album of that period is one of his worst.

When I saw him a year later at the LJVM Coliseum on May 4, 1991, Dylan was still in this dark period. Little did I know at the time that the older songs on his setlist that night were to be treasured. The tracklist plays like a greatest hits album, with songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Lay Lady Lay,” and “Gates of Eden.” By this time, Dylan had abandoned his guitar and adopted a piano on stage. It was an unusual night with Dylan intermittently hopping from that little piano to a microphone at the center of the stage. Seated on a little stool, Dylan pounded at times on the keys, his band doing its best to piece together a coherent sound from his call-and-response mumblings. The vision Dylan had at that moment of totally restructured arrangements would not come to a harmonic fruition until years later; he probably knew what he wanted then, but not quite how to obtain it. Like a low point in anyone’s life, Dylan’s would rebound from these struggles in the early ‘90s with his return to traditional music in Good As I Been To You.

I was in graduate school at ASU when I heard his version of “Black Jack Davy.” It wasn’t long before I was hot on the trail of aging Watauga County folksters like Frank Proffitt, Jr. as a part of my own new ballad revival. I collected over 100 variants of that folk song from out-of-print books, scrapbooks, and microfilm, but it all began with Bob Dylan. His return to traditional songs was not something I completely understood at the time, but this album and World Gone Wrong are handsome tributes to the songs that helped shape America’s early years. I probably wasn’t the only one who discovered some of these songs for the first time through Dylan.

I saw Dylan every chance I got during these years. We should call it the era of the amphitheatre when Charlotte and Raleigh both built open-air arenas large enough to attract hot, new music acts and aging legends. I even saw Dylan, at least once, during his ballpark tours. He co-headlined with Willie Nelson for one of those and I remember making a long trek to Sevierville, TN to a minor league stadium with the stage situated in center field. I also saw Dylan twice with Chicago and once with Santana at the NC amphitheatres. It was on one of those nights in Raleigh that I was there for a historic, magical moment. I know it was the September 19, 1993 show because I remember the exact song that changed his career. I’ve since lost the interview when he talks about this curious, pivotal moment. As we know, Dylan had seemingly lost himself, in alcohol, maybe, but definitely lost in direction, having come out with no great music of his own in years. In his own words from Chronicles I, “There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him … I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn't dump the stuff. Wherever I am, I'm a 60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.”

That night in Raleigh, I was with my mother that night in the dark on a blanket, and she was definitely not enjoying the show. Where was the Dylan she knew and loved? She wasn’t used to Dylan’s new style and it was hard to recognize the songs. Then is when it happened. The first few strums of “Desolation Row” floated over the crowd, which any real Dylan fan recognized at once, but then, something else. After the first eight songs of mumbling, incoherent rambling, Dylan broke into….well, song. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging. They’re painting the passports brown,” are the words he sung with perfect clarity, even clear in a large arena under the stars. The crowd was instantly breathless. This wasn’t the Dylan we had grown used to, but the one who enunciated, punctuated, even growled, exact nuances of emotion into every syllable. I don’t know exactly what or how it happened, and maybe Dylan himself doesn’t know, either. Somewhere around that time is when Dylan recovered his career. In maybe the most honest interview Dylan ever offered, his Chronicles book deal led to an interview with Ed Bradley. It is a must see for anyone who’s ever heard of Dylan. Right around the 1:25 - 1:35 time stamp, Dylan explains how those early songs came from “that wellspring of creativity” and the painful realization that he once could tap into it, but can’t any longer.

So, as Dylan had done several times before, when he reached a creative end, he simply re-invented himself. As he forged new frontiers into every genre from folk, folk-rock, country, Americana, and roots music, he sometimes dwelled only long enough to move on to something new when others tried to catch up to him. Sometimes his music seems out-of-place and out of time. One great example of an album way ahead of its day is Infidels, which I only listened to in earnest recently. Way back in 1983, Dylan forecast the demise of American manufacturing in “Union Sundown,” even as Walmart was still expanding across the nation. In his words, “Well, it's sundown on the union / And what's made in the USA / Sure was a good idea / 'Til greed got in the way.” Now, more than 30 years later, a prominent political ad shows a candidate being called on the carpet for marketing a clothing line made in numerous countries overseas (as he says about the foreign workers, “They’ve gotta work, too.”). Similarly Rhiannon Giddens (also of the Carolina Chocolate Drops) casts her version of the Irish ballad, “Factory Girl,” in the context of a Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over 1,000 people. Dylan’s songs from the Infidels album speak to saving the environment (“License to Kill”), the good/bad guy in the war against terror (“Neighborhood Bully”), and even leaving out the splendid “Blind Willie McTell” as an outtake—all while employing reggae musicians and Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler. The song “Jokerman,” sometimes called a throwaway or meaningless, may be some of Dylan’s best. The Infidels album was Dylan’s return to secular music from gospel, of all things, and a fine return it was.

At just this type of juncture in the mid-’90s, where was Dylan to go and what would we hear from him next? He had conquered nearly every genre imaginable. So it probably came as a shock to many people, Dylan fans or not, when he became a blues musician. The chronology is sketchy to me and still a bit of a blur, but Dylan released “Things Have Changed” and it was used in the Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys, winning Dylan an Academic Award and Golden Globe for best original song. I know this song so well because it’s the first song I learned to play and sing on guitar. I lived alone in a 100-year old house, but other than this beautiful abode and a tiny cat, my life was changing (like Dylan’s). Shortly after this period in my life, I moved back to NC and began my teaching career.

Dylan had also created his first original album of music in seven years with Time Out of Mind, and I was lucky enough to see him at the Orange Peel in Asheville (a tiny venue that held only a little more than 1,000 people) on April 9, 2004. We all stood on the gym-like floor, swaying and mesmerized. I felt like he was speaking directly to me when he sang songs from that album and Love and Theft. ”Cold Irons Bound” that he sang that night won one of his three Grammys from Time for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, along with Album of the Year. “Not Dark Yet” stands against even his legendary songs of the 1960’s as one of his best. Dylan had truly reinvented himself. When he played these songs for producer Daniel Lanois (from the Oh Mercy album) in a hotel room one day, Lanois knew there was something special about them. Dylan claims that the album’s recording was “haunted” by Buddy Holly and explains Holly’s influence on him from an early age. Somewhere in that same time period, I saw him again at the Civic Center in Asheville, and his show was just as powerful.

Regardless of the inspiration, Dylan was on a roll. “Love Sick” from Time had been used for a Victoria’s Secret commercial, and so when his Modern Times album came out, what more natural fit for an iPod and iTunes commercial, but his “Someday Baby”? I find it remarkable that someone the age of Bob Dylan at the time, already in his 60’s, could be such a master of marketing. His website was one of the first I knew to have all the lyrics to his songs, for example. His promotion of his new material is extraordinary, so strong in fact that Modern Times opened at Number One on the Billboard 200, selling almost 200,000 copies the first week (mostly due to pre-sales). Dylan fans like me ordered early enough to get the album on double thick two-disc vinyl and it still streams from the cloud to all of our modern, digital devices. Once a folk troubadour, Dylan was now belting out blues standards make popular by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters.

In the true tradition of folk and blues music, much was made of Dylan’s use and re-purposing of lyrics from Civil War poet Henry Timrod and even the Roman poet Ovid. If ever there was a better modern day example of Shakespearean use and re-invention of popular sources, I don’t know of one. Dylan continued to produce strong, viable, original music with Together Through Life and Tempest (with the first peaking at number one in Britain, and the later peaked at number three in the US). When critics conjectured that Tempest would be Dylan’s last album, as The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play, Dylan responded and explained, Tempest and The Tempest are not the same; they’re two different titles. Just when the world, and even the most die-hard Dylan fan like myself, was probably thinking, there’s really nothing left to do, we were shocked to see what Dylan had in store.

Shadows in the Night probably surprised us all. Don’t catch yourself calling them Frank Sinatra “covers,” even though all ten of the songs were made by famous by Sinatra. Dylan and his touring band even recorded the songs in the same Capital Studios, studio B, without any visible microphones other than the one for Dylan’s voice. Hailed by critics, this UK number one album was 51 years after his first UK number one with Freewheelin Bob Dylan in 1963 (a record number of years apart). Dylan’s vocals are sincere, honest, heartfelt, and are powerful interpretations of these old standards. As I get older, with aching feet from traversing tiled schoolhouse floors, or hurting joints from coaching softball, sometimes I just want to relax, and Dylan’s voice on these albums helps pave the way. As soon as the Shadows album was released, there were confirmed rumours that another collection was on the way, and now we also have Fallen Angels, which I enjoy even more. “On a Little Street in Singapore” is fascinating, and Dylan’s version of “That Ol’ Black Magic” makes the song sound like it was written yesterday. I think that’s what is so startling about Dylan’s latest two contributions; he takes songs that have been around for generations and makes them sound new again. Probably just as valuable as creating original music like he did for years, is Dylan’s ability to preserve almost-forgotten, sometimes nearly ancient tunes and bring them to life for an entirely new generation. That’s why I can’t wait to see him next month in Durham at the DPAC.

The Nobel committee definitely did not miss the mark in its choice when it chose maybe the most well known poet in the world. Anyone who thinks that poetry cannot transcend the printed page is foolish, with the same type of backward thinking that kept artists like Van Gogh and Monet out of the accepted mainstream. Dylan’s work is so deep and diverse that I’m only just now uncovering its power and secrets. Before my time, I’m learning more and more about his seminal trilogy—Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—a powerhouse of electric blues rock that contain some of the best rock vocals and lyrics ever produced. The track listings of each of these reads like a greatest hits album. I sometimes used to think the same about some Beatles records, until I learned that’s what they actually were (hit singles later put onto an LP record). Contained squarely within a single decade, the Beatles were incredible, but they came and went and are now gone. Dylan continued into the 1970’s, ‘80s, ‘90s, has turned the millennium, and continues to make brilliant music into the next two decades. His impact upon society probably can’t be measured in any real terms. Who knows how many lives he’s influenced? If you count the other musicians (and other writers) he’s had an effect upon, then his contribution pyramids into fathomless quantums.

For me personally, my debt to Dylan is manifold. His music has inspired me, motivated me, sustained me in times of darkness, rejoiced with me in times of happiness, and guided me like a beacon light for nearly my entire life. Dylan is a master, and obviously a “real” writer and poet, and likely the best of the past century. If you take the time to listen, it’s easy to see his genius. When we change, Dylan changes with us. When Dylan changes, he changes us. They say that great literature is timeless; what could be more timeless than the music of Bob Dylan?