Be like Bob.
“If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”
I went to a movie theater for the first time in years to watch Timothée Chalamet embody the young Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s beautiful film “A Complete Unknown.” The music biopic chronicles Dylan’s arrival and rise to fame in Greenwich Village from 1961 to that divisive moment when he “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan has always held a unique resonance for me—not just because his music shaped a generation, but also because we have the same birthday. :) Eight years ago, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, I shared some thoughts about his artistic courage in a piece called “Be Like Bob.”
Today, as we face our own period of social upheaval—the times they are a-changin’—those reflections feel particularly relevant. I offer them again as we enter 2025, hoping they inspire you to discover your inner voice and let it guide you.
Bob Dylan has become the first musician to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And he has no idea how it happened.
Because it was unknowable.
Here’s why.
Dylan didn’t write his songs.
His songs wrote themselves.
They emerged from his inner self.
His wellspring of creativity.
And it never would’ve happened if he knew what he was doing.
If Bob stuck to his story.
Unwilling to let go of his identity.
His manufactured self.
His trappings of success.
Consider Sunday night, July 25, 1965.
That’s when Bob went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
He made a spontaneous decision to perform with a fully amplified band.
Because he felt like doing it.
And the folk music establishment was not impressed.
In fact, they were downright angry.
They viewed Dylan’s metamorphosis as a put-down, a betrayal.
How dare he play an electric guitar?
Who does he think he is to challenge the Festival?!
Make no mistake.
The establishment is not interested in your inner voice.
And they couldn’t care less about inspired creation.
The establishment wants you to advance the agenda of the establishment.
The business of the establishment is to keep people muddled in the establishment’s mysterious knot of beliefs and traditions.
Which blows my mind that Bob won the most venerable of establishment awards.
So embrace the paradox of his achievement and follow Bob’s lead.
Don’t be a static part of the establishment.
Be a dynamic force of life.
Your life!
Do something different and daring.
Will you disappoint people?
Sure, initially.
Dylan was said to have “electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other.”
William Blake wrote, “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
So is yours.
Let go of your need to please and your desire to fit in.
Do something unimaginable.
Rise above the herd and be like Bob.
Stay passionate!
Tom ... missed this one and found it still in my inbox. Good one that has me thinking. Thanks and hope this year is good in spite of the craziness.
It's so sad that every American didn't have the opportunity to be here for the 60's. Without a doubt, one of the greatest periods of change and consciousness in American history. I wasn't a Dylan fan and I know nothing of his music, but artists like Marvin Gaye, and Otis Redding and Freda Payne and so many others, similarly spoke from their consciousness and captured the essence of the socio-political issues of the day. I am still in awe of that era and even that time in mine and my families life growing up in Mississippi, the heart of racial prejudice. I'm thankful for great artists like the aforementioned because they became the voice of a society screaming out for change. Now my plan is to watch the movie to try and catch the essence of Dylan that I wasn't even aware of during that time.