This is a new one on me: an astrologer provides horoscopes for each sign of the zodiac, using quotes from Bob Dylan as the jumping off point for each. The justification is that we are currently in Gemini, which is Dylan’s sign. It’s gobbledygook, naturally, but indicative of something, I suppose; another example of how Dylan’s words have gotten under peoples’ skin. I’m disappointed that under Leo, which happens to be my sign, she uses this quote, without identifying the irony therein: “I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.” Yes, Dylan actually did say something like that, but not in 1965 when he was being tattooed with that label, but in the summer of 2001, at a group interview in Rome in advance of the release of “Love and Theft”. There doesn’t seem to be a single authoritative transcription of this interview on the web at the moment (probably because extracts from it were originally published in a variety of outlets in various countries and different languages), and I don’t have one myself although I’ve heard the audio, but for the purpose of this post here is one transcription, and here’s the relevant part:

Q: Once you wrote ‘For me the future is a thing of the past.’

Dylan: I said it for everybody. Aren’t I the spokesman for a generation?
I speak for all of us.

So, that clearly comes across rather differently from the way it appears as quoted by the astrologer. She probably obtained the line, however, from one of those web-based famous-quote-aggregators, like the one at this link. How’s that for irony? Dylan spends his life running away from the label of “spokesman for a generation,” then uses it off-handedly and facetiously in a press conference, and now it’s out there for all time as if he actually seriously declared himself to be this thing. Amazing.

What’s that other famous quote, from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”? “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• You that Hide Behind Walls
• Bob, Barry, etc.
• Too Much Of Nothing from the Christian Science Monitor
• Correction now made to the Christian Science Monitor online as well