As the acutely age-aware sixties generation grows old, it seems that there will be a great many celebrations of a great many milestones. In May 2011, the man who refused the title of “spokesman of his generation,” Bob Dylan, had his seventieth birthday. Reading all the tributes to the illustrious poet/musician/performer, I remembered a great essay I’d read about 25 years ago by the famous art historian, the late Sir Kenneth Clark, entitled The Artist Grows Old and wondered if it would help me gather insights for reflecting on Dylan’s progression as an artist. Clark had his own moment in sixties popular culture as host of a series for television called Civilization, which essentially brought high culture and a sophisticated explanation of it to the living rooms of ordinary people around the world. Truth be told, I’ve read Clark extensively, and I’m as great a fan of his as I am of Dylan’s.

Credit: Wikipedia

Clark warns against comparing aging painters to aging poets and musicians (but does so anyway), and he summarizes the characteristics of the old-age style of sculptures and artists as “a sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct. And in a few rare instances the old-age myth of classical antiquity—the feeling that the crimes and follies of mankind must be accepted with resignation.” Oddly enough, Bob Dylan began in the 1960s with these characteristics, except that while presenting the ridiculousness and terribleness of the crimes of mankind, his anger was channeled into changing it. Perhaps the greatest success of the expansion of a moral and social consciousness in the sixties was the number of gains made for the civil rights movement, which Dylan wrote beautifully and powerfully about. And one of the generation’s great failures was the inability to stop the tide of war and the production of weapons that proliferated around the globe. One cannot doubt the power of Dylan’s song “Masters of War,” his youthful attack on the armament industrialists, with its vicious final chorus that begins with the lines “And I hope that you die/And your death’ll come soon.” Perhaps the “Masters of War” point today to Dylan is to say back: “I hope you grow old/And your words will be irrelevant.”

Rolling Stone magazine recently published a list, with descriptions and some blurbs written by celebrities, of the 70 greatest Bob Dylan songs. Almost all of them are from the sixties and seventies. There are a few people in popular culture who have added a lexicon of expressions to world lingo comparable to Shakespeare (but really, not quite) and the greatest would have to be Dylan. Nearly all of those pearls come from those first two decades of his work. One could say that he changed the way popular music is written, and his unique voice changed the field of what popular music could sound like. Listening to Dylan in the sixties opened minds to new horizons and while The Beatles were singing about holding hands and giving advice on puppy love, Dylan was tackling great social issues and writing poetic lyrics that have yet to be deciphered.

The artist is growing old. Today Bob Dylan hosts a radio show where he tries to expand the tastes of his listeners by playing music not normally heard on the airwaves. I’ve never heard the show, since you have to be a Sirius XM subscriber to gain access. Dylan’s most well-received recent artistic statement probably came in Time Out of Mind (1997), much of which centers around simple chord progressions and pretty good reflective lyrics. One of my own problems with Dylan has been the lack of attention to production, which, with simple songs, can lead to monotony. Dylan himself loves the cover version of “All Along the Watchtower,” which Jimi Hendrix recorded. Hendrix’s interpretation has a masterful production quality and one would bet he put a great deal of time into capturing Dylan’s downright chilling tale. Eric Clapton once left a Dylan recording session in complete puzzlement—he noted that it moved quickly and that when Bob’s coat buttons knocked against the guitar, there was no retake. When Dylan does pay attention to experimenting with sounds, the results are great, with songs such as “Everything Is Broken” and “Most of the Time” from the Oh Mercy album. Of course, he had studio master Daniel Lanois behind the production board for that collection.

So much has been said and so much has been speculated and downright mythologized about Bob Dylan. I often wonder what he thinks about all of this attention, about being the first celebrity to have his actual garbage rummaged through by a reporter looking for leads. When I read Dylan’s autobiography, I heard the voice of the man I’d always imagined him to be. A friend of mine who is a much bigger fan that I am was disappointed in the book, and couldn’t hear the voice of his generation, the voice of a man who changed the world. There’s an old press conference with Dylan from the sixties where he stops everything and jokes, “Hey, I’m just a song and dance man.” That’s both spot-on and way far-off at the same time.