While looking to see what were the latest Bob Dylan-related videos uploaded to YouTube, I found the clip below. It’s of a student singing Gotta Serve Somebody at a school prayer service, accompanying herself on piano. I think it’s a really good take on the song, actually; it’s worth a listen all the way through.

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And below is a clip of Bob Dylan performing the same tune in Copenhagen last March.

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J.D. Salinger passed on last week. I’m not one who has any deep thoughts to share on Salinger and his legacy. I read The Catcher in the Rye as a kid but it didn’t affect me the way it seems to have affected some. All the talk in the air about Holden Caulfield reminds me that my own idea of the perfect expression of teenage rebellion and turmoil would be (perhaps not so surprisingly) Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home. I’m not saying that Bob Dylan himself envisioned it as an expression of those kinds of feelings, since he was far from being a teenager when he wrote and recorded it, but it connects with themes of that nature in a startlingly effective way, even now.

I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only.

That’s about what you’d see if you examined a cross-section of the average 16 year-old brain, really, isn’t it? Of-course, from Dylan’s point of view, a lot of this was coming out of the way in which his exploding creativity was meeting resistance from those who wanted to keep his talent tied within certain bounds. I think of that clip (below) of Dylan performing Mr. Tambourine Man at the “Topical Song Workshop” in Newport in 1964, with a somewhat pained Pete Seeger captured sitting behind him (on the right of the screen).

Just as topical today as it was then!

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To bring this all back home to Gotta Serve Somebody: A listener may be drawn into Dylan’s work as a teenager, relating to those themes of rebellion, resistance and intellectual liberty, but once becoming so taken with this artist, there’s no way to evade the desire to hear all of his songs; there’s no way one wouldn’t want to explore and follow the crazy thread of his career, trying to figure out where he was going and where he could be ending up. So, even someone who might not otherwise be inclined to listen to gospel music is likely to listen to Dylan’s version of it, once having become deeply engrossed in his art generally. And many other musical and lyrical vistas besides are bound to open up to the curious and open mind that chases where the spark of Dylan’s talent has gone, down through all these last five decades.

To be drawn into Dylan’s work is to discover, I think, something that is both highly individual and very outward looking; his work is always pointing back to foundational sources while also leaving room for the listener’s spirit to find its own space. And there’s always someone discovering his work for the first time and beginning to follow that spark. And that’s a nice thing.

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