Yesterday I looked at how Bob Dylan shaped my musical tastes for decades. Today I’m paying tribute to the other important formative band of my adolescence — The Beatles.
I got into The Beatles a year or two after I discovered Dylan, when I was around 17. I spent a ridiculous amount of time that summer typing out the lyrics to all of the band’s songs on an electric typewriter (the sort of story I can tell my kids to explain how unplugged we were “back in the day”).
Arriving at an artist like Bob Dylan during this musical genome project, I find the script has flipped.
It suddenly doesn’t make much sense to talk about my appreciation for Dylan’s music in terms of how he fits into my five categories. Rather, it becomes pretty clear that Bob Dylan’s music is likely the reason I’m drawn to those categories in the first place.
Bob Dylan is without question the most important musical influence of my life. I discovered him in my mid-teens, when the reptilian centers of my brain were still evolving, when I was quickly becoming the person I would forever be.
I’m approaching all of the artists in this musical genome series from the perspective of the categories I’ve defined, so in those terms it’s pretty clear that I’m a huge Fiona Apple fan because she’s a) a ‘Piano (Wo)man’ and b) ‘Melancholy.’
But if you were to ask me why I love Apple’s work apart from the context of this project, I wouldn’t mention either of those things. I would say I’m a Fiona Apple fan because of her voice, and because of the passion she pours into every lyric and melody she writes, every word and note she performs.
Here’s a song from one of the five or six albums in my CD collection that belong exclusively to my wife. I have never heard this song or this album before, and I listened to only about half of it just now before posting it.
R&B is definitely not in my musical genome. I have zero patience for this sort of music. I would crawl across broken glass to get within ten feet of Beyoncé, but I find only a few of her songs listenable. And Mary J. Blige? Not even on my radar.
I had just listened to several songs from Tempest, Bob Dylan’s newest album (review to come), when I clicked the ‘shuffle’ button to choose my next Random Weekend selection.
And there was Bob again, 36 years earlier, performing a song that didn’t make it onto any of his 35 studio albums.
According to the Bootleg Series liner notes, Dylan performed ‘Seven Days’ only five times, during his celebrated Rolling Thunder tour. One of those is captured here in stirring fashion.
