Dylan and the Fall

If you grew up in a certain era, his name isn’t just a performer on a poster. It’s a weather system. A shift in air pressure. A bulletin from the fault line where art, politics, faith, doubt, youth, age, and trouble all collided.

And at the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you about one night—one Bob Dylan concert—that coincided with the most frightening turn my own life had taken up to that point, and how, in a way, it nudged me toward paying attention to people many others don’t see.

But let’s start with the man himself.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Hibbing was not Greenwich Village, not California, not London. It was wind, work, winters, and radio.

Inside that small-town house, though, the signals of the wider world were pouring in: country music, blues, early rock ’n’ roll, gospel, and crooners—all collapsing into one restless imagination. He listened hard. He absorbed. And he did what born artists do: he tried things on.

Transcript

Celebrate Creativity – My name is George Bartley, and this is Celebrate Creativity - episode 507 - Dylan and the Fall

Guthrie showed him that music just didn't only our deck decorate life it could talk about unfairness poverty dignity and hope with a straight face     
Today I want to spend some time with an artist who has never made it easy, never made it simple, and never once apologized for confusing people who try to nail him down.

Bob Dylan.

If you grew up in a certain era, his name isn’t just a performer on a poster. It’s a weather system. A shift in air pressure. A bulletin from the fault line where art, politics, faith, doubt, youth, age, and trouble all collided.

And at the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you about one night—one Bob Dylan concert—that coincided with the most frightening turn my own life had taken up to that point, and how, in a way, it nudged me toward paying attention to people many others don’t see.

But let’s start with the man himself.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Hibbing was not Greenwich Village, not California, not London. It was wind, work, winters, and radio.

Inside that small-town house, though, the signals of the wider world were pouring in: country music, blues, early rock ’n’ roll, gospel, and crooners—all collapsing into one restless imagination. He listened hard. He absorbed. And he did what born artists do: he tried things on.

At Hibbing High School, he played in rock ’n’ roll bands that wanted to be Little Richard." Boisterous, loud, piano-pounding energy. That’s an important detail: the “voice of a generation” began as a kid trying to sound like a wild man of early rock. Then he discovered Woody Guthrie and the deep river of American folk song.

Here was a different template: songs as bulletins from the road, songs as empathy reports, songs as union meetings and prayer meetings and protest marches set to three chords. Guthrie showed him that music didn’t just decorate life; it could talk about unfairness, poverty, dignity, and hope with a straight face.

Then, in 1961, the not-yet-famous Robert Zimmerman arrived in New York City, renamed himself Bob Dylan, and made a beeline for two places: the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, and the hospital room where a very sick Woody Guthrie lay. Dylan wanted, quite literally, to stand next to the source.

He played in tiny rooms, doing other people’s songs, watching, learning, refining a stage character: the drawl, the harmonica rack, the guitar slung just so. But very quickly, he started bringing in his own material, and that changed the temperature of the room.

These early songs were called “protest songs,” and some of them certainly were—sharp, topical, pointed at segregation, nuclear fear, injustice. But even in those first records, there was something unusual going on.

He wasn’t just making rhyming editorials.
He was mixing the Bible, the blues, the newspaper, folk tales, and absurdist humor.
He was willing to sound ancient and brand-new in the same verse.

His label signed him; his peers felt the ground tilt. People older and smoother than he was started covering his songs because, suddenly, their own material felt a little small.

However, in an era of polished pop and crooning charm, Dylan’s voice arrived like a busted screen door in a cathedral.

Critics and relatives said:
“He can’t sing.”
“He sounds nasal.”
“He’s ruining his own songs.”

But the “wrongness” was intentional. This was a voice that refused the lie that serious topics require a silky tone.

Dylan delivered lines like someone who had seen too much and was slightly amused you were only now catching up. That tone gave permission for popular music to be:

Angrier,
Stranger,
More literary,
More honest about confusion.

His choruses sounded simple enough to be sung at rallies, but they also contained questions that you never fully resolve. You could sing along at 17 and then, at 47, realize you’d been carrying a riddle around in your head for thirty years.

That is no small creative achievement.

By the mid-1960s, Dylan had been crowned—without his consent—the finger-pointing poet of conscience. The pure folk hero. The boy who would save us.   So of course he destroyed that image.

In 1965, he walked onstage with an electric band, turned the volume up, and detonated people’s expectations.

Some fans booed, some cheered, some were just bewildered. He played anyway.

The songs poured out: dense, surreal, bitter, hilarious, ecstatic. He collided Beat poetry, Biblical thunder, roadside Americana, and private heartbreak into rock songs that sounded like nothing before them. Suddenly, rock music had room for complicated grown-up language.

This is a recurring Dylan theme. Just when you think you know what he “stands for,” he mutates.

He did it again with country-inflected records.
Again with spiritual and gospel-driven projects.
Again with late-career meditations, and reinterpretations of standards.
Again when the Swedish Academy handed him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” 

Dylan helped make it normal—expected, even—for a serious artist to:

Write their own material.
Treat albums as coherent statements, not just singles warehouses.
Use pop songs to ask spiritual, political, and philosophical questions.
Let characters speak who were outcasts, sinners, fools, prophets, and victims of systems most songs ignored.

Many people covered his songs and made them prettier.
Very few have made them deeper.

Love him or argue with him, Dylan permanently widened the job description of the songwriter. He proved that popular music could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the novel, the play, the poem—not by pretending to be them, but by being unapologetically itself.

And then there’s the live show.

A Bob Dylan concert, especially in his strongest years, rarely behaved itself.  He wasn’t a jukebox. He wasn’t going to reenact your favorite memory on command. He was going to stand there, on his own terms, and if you wanted a comfortable legend, you might have chosen the wrong evening.

But if you were willing to sit in that uncertainty…
You might walk out different.

Which brings me to one particular night,
one particular hall,
one particular kid.

I want to take you back to a specific memory.

I am in seventh grade.

My family took me to see Bob Dylan in Washington, D.C., in late 1965, one of those legendary nights where he played the first half alone with an acoustic guitar and the second half with a full electric band.

Now, at that age, I wasn’t arriving with a scholar’s grasp of Dylan’s discography. I wasn’t cross-referencing set lists or parsing metaphors. I was simply there—old enough to feel excitement, young enough to be overwhelmed.

I remember the anticipation, the murmuring in the hall, the way a room changes right before the lights go down. You can feel hundreds of private lives briefly breathing in sync.

And then Dylan comes out.

Not as a polite master of ceremonies, not as a smiling cruise-ship entertainer, but as someone who seems to have walked in from a different universe and is only half-interested in whether we keep up.

The sound is rougher than the radio.
The phrasing wanders.
The band doesn’t play it safe.

People lean forward.

There is, in the hall, that peculiar Dylan feeling:
You can like it, hate it, wrestle with it—but you are not in charge of it.

For a seventh-grade boy, that is a big experience.

Some mix of words, chords, defiance, and mystery lodged itself in me that night. I wouldn’t have said it so clearly then. I can say it now: I walked out with the sense that art could be disruptive and still be true.

But the most disruptive moment was waiting for me somewhere else.

The hallway

The next morning, I am back in school in Staunton, Virginia.

The setting could not be more ordinary.
Fluorescent lights. Lockers. Footsteps. Voices. The familiar little world of schedules and bells.

I am walking down the hallway.

At some point, my memory stops.

I don’t remember falling.
I don’t remember the looks on my classmates’ faces.
I don’t remember the sound my body made when it hit the floor.

What I know is what I was told later:
I had my first epileptic seizure.
I was on the ground, shaking.
I was foaming at the mouth.
I was biting my tongue.

Quite an image for a seventh grader who’d just been at a Dylan concert.

Within hours, I was in the University of Virginia Hospital.
I would be there for about two weeks.

Two weeks is a long time when you’re young.
Tests, questions, wires, white coats, worried faces.
There’s the quiet, creeping understanding that your brain has done something dramatic without asking your permission.

Eventually, there was a diagnosis.
There was a prescription.
A medication I began then and, to this day, have continued.

And since that time, I have not had another seizure.

That’s the factual outline.

But of course, families don’t just live on outlines.

“Bob Dylan caused your seizure”

At some point, in the swirl of fear and relief, my mother—trying to make sense of it all—said, quite calmly, that Bob Dylan had caused my seizure.

You can hear the mixture in that sentence:
half joke,
half superstition,
half desperate need to attach this terrifying event to something concrete.

And I want to be very clear: this was not malice toward Dylan. This was a mother’s love trying to find answers.

Because if you can say:
“It was the concert. It was the noise. It was all that strange music,”
then maybe the universe feels a tiny bit less random.

And who am I, all these years later, to argue with that love?

I don’t, in any literal medical sense, believe that Bob Dylan short-circuited my brain.

But I do believe that night, and that seizure, and that season of my life, opened up something that never closed again.

When you’ve been the kid on the floor,
the one who frightened everyone,
the body temporarily out of your own control,
you cannot un-know what that feels like.

You become  aware—viscerally aware—of people whose lives don’t fit the “normal” frame.

People with epilepsy.
People in psychiatric wards.
People whose hearing, sight, or mobility works differently.
People whose thoughts come out sideways.
People who are feared, pitied, or simply ignored.

In the years that followed, I didn’t just resume a neat, straight path.

I found myself drawn toward people with severe problems.
Toward hospital corridors.
Toward counseling settings.
Toward communities where communication was fragile and precious.

I became an interpreter for the deaf—often in mental health contexts.
Rooms where someone was battling both internal storms and external misunderstanding.
Rooms where, without a patient interpreter, a person’s terror or hope or confusion might never be properly heard.

Standing in those rooms, hands moving, voice bridging, I often thought:
“I know something about what it feels like to have your body betray expectations.
To scare people.
To need someone patient enough to listen past the surface.”

Would I have gone into that work without that seventh-grade collapse?
Without those two weeks in the hospital?
Without that night at Constitution Hall rattling the cage a little?

I can’t run the experiment again.
I only get the one life.

But I find the line very suggestive.

Because Dylan’s songs are crammed with outsiders:
Jokers, thieves, wanderers, prophets in rags, people on the margins of power and comfort.
They are full of warnings that justice is not evenly administered, that suffering does not politely organize itself somewhere out of sight.

Dylan made paying attention to the overlooked feel necessary.

My seizure made being overlooked impossible.

The two together pulled me, gently but firmly, in a particular direction:
toward the people on the edge of the room.

Did Dylan “do” it?

So, did Bob Dylan cause my seizure?

Medically, no.

But did that night contribute to the pattern of how I would understand my life?

I think so.

He showed me an artist who refused to smooth out the rough edges,
who insisted on singing about hard truths,
who invited listeners to sit with discomfort instead of running from it.

Then my own nervous system staged its own small rebellion,
reminding me I would never be entirely in the “safe, average, nothing-to-see-here” category.

Those two experiences—Dylan’s art and my body’s crisis—became entangled.

They left me more attuned to people who live with diagnoses, labels, and struggles that make others avert their eyes.

Not out of sainthood.
Out of recognition.

So when I say my mother believed Bob Dylan caused my seizure, I hear, underneath it: “Something powerful happened to my child, and I am trying to name it.”

And when I look back over all the years since—
the interpreting, the mental health work, the creative life, the attention to people who suffer—
I find myself smiling a little at the question.

Did Dylan cause it?
Did he change me?
Did that concert plant a seed?

Well…how do you prove something like that?

As a certain very famous Dylan song gently suggests,
some answers do not arrive as signed affidavits.
They arrive as possibilities that move through your life, your choices, your memories.

So when I try to trace the path:
from a seventh-grade boy at Constitution Hall,
to a teenager on a hospital bed in Charlottesville,
to a man standing beside people in crisis so they can be heard,

I have to admit:
the answer to what role Bob Dylan played in all that…is blowing in the wind.

And for me,
on this podcast,
in this life,
that is exactly the kind of answer I can live with.