(AFP Photo/Eric Wishart)

by Eric Wishart


My journey with Dylan began in the late 1960s, when I first heard this unique, haunting voice on the radio singing an equally unique, haunting song, 'Mr. Tambourine Man.'
Living in Glasgow I was a keen golfer and, aged 15, won a junior competition at my golf club. I received a two pound gift voucher, and the idea was that you bought your own prize and then had it presented back to you at the annual club dinner.
Everybody else had purchased putters or golf balls or golf umbrellas at the professional's shop. But when it was my turn to receive my prize, there were a lot of disapproving looks when I received the one I had chosen.....Bob Dylan's 'Greatest Hits', not what you were expected to do at the club.
I became obsessed with Dylan - the voice, the writing, the visions of American and of relationships, the iconic album covers, his capacity to change, the mystique. Few artists have redefined themselves so many times. The transition from the biting social comment of 'Who killed Davey Moore,' a stinging indictment of boxing, to the surreal, dark poetry of 'Visions of Johanna' in barely four years.
“Who killed Davey Moore, why and what's the reason for?” had become “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” and he was still only 24.
There was the disappearance after a mysterious motor cycle accident, and the low-key rebirth with 'John Wesley Harding', and then his first artistic decline with the unloved 'Self Portrait' and the return to form in the mid-70s with 'Blood on the Tracks'.
(AFP Photo/Marina Helli)

During these early years I discovered a world of unreleased recordings, which I would buy behind the counter as bootlegs at Virgin Records when it was still an alternative shop. And then I delved even further into the world of the undiscovered Dylan, via collectors who would send me reel-to-reel tapes of obscure recordings from parties at his friends’ houses, early radio appearances, his first peformances at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, and the mysterious Basement Tapes, a journey into the old, weird America, as Greil Marcus called it.
In these days Dylan wasn't touring, and it was not until 1974, eight years after a disgruntled fan had shouted 'Judas' at him during a concert in England, that he finally returned to the road.
As the tour criss-crossed the United States, the only way of hearing the concerts was from the reel-to-reel tapes my friends sent me.
I bought tapes and an unpublished book from AJ Weberman, who notoriously used to go through Dylan's garbage at his house in MacDougal Street in New York to find clues about him. I built up a collection of books, kept all my old copies of 'Rolling Stone’, which has chronicled Dylan from the early days, and I still have a pile of yellowed clippings from the 'Melody Maker' and 'New Musical Express.'
I finally saw Dylan – four nights in a row – in 1978 at Earl's Court in London, and I’ve probably seen him 30 times since then.
Perhaps the best concert I attended was a run of three shows at the Grand Rex in Paris in 1990. Silhouetted by the spotlight, he sang 'Visions of Johanna', and for a few moments he recaptured the Bob Dylan of 1966, when he changed popular music forever.
(AFP Photo/Ollivia Harris)

Through Dylan I discovered Rimbaud, William Blake, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Woody Guthrie, the old lost field recordings in Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’, and some basic lessons in life, of not being afraid to change and of doing what you believe to be right regardless of what other people may be saying or doing.  
In the 1970s I wrote a music column for my newspaper in Scotland, and met many of those who knew him or had met him – Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, his former manager Albert Grossman, Johnny Cash, Carlos Santana, Donovan, the musicians from Kokomo who had played on the 'Desire' sessions, the photographer Elliot Landy who shot the 'Nashville Skyline' cover, and one Sunday afternoon in Glasgow, Allen Ginsberg after he gave a poetry recital at Glasgow University. They had recorded Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' together and I asked Ginsberg if they were going to release the recordings.
“Bob said no,” Ginsberg told me. “Keep them for your friends, make them happy.”
They seemed to genuinely like him, said he was funny, could stand up in front of 20,000 people quite happily but couldn’t handle being thrown into a room full of people all eager to have their Bob Dylan moment.
The closest I came to him was in 2000 when I was invited to the presentation of the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, and he walked past within a few feet. I didn't snap a photo or shout out “thanks for everything Bob.” 
Best to let my Bob Dylan moment just come and go.
I suppose my appreciation of him has evolved over the years. Back then it was the voice and the poetry and the music and yes, the mystique. In the early 1970s, few people really talked about Bob Dylan, my friends were more interested in Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
In the old days a Dylan concert was a rare commodity, but he has been touring almost non-stop for more than two decades, and has attracted an army of followers who trek from concert to concert, rushing to the front of the stage as the lights go out and blocking the view for everybody behind. If you read the reviews of the concerts they post on fan sites, you would get the feeling that they think they have almost developed a relationship with the man on the stage. A book industry has sprung up around Dylan too, with corny titles that draw from his works - 'Wicked messenger', 'Revolution in the air', 'A Simple Twist of Fate', 'Like a Complete Unknown' – reverential volumes about the least reverential of artists.
(AFP Photo/Frederic Brown)

My appreciation of Dylan has matured too over the years. Now I just wonder at where his innate perception of the human condition comes from.
His songs often articulate your own feelings in an uncanny way, a gift that few other writers possess.
In one of his later songs, 'Trying To Get to Heaven,' he sings: “When you think you've lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more,” which always makes me think about getting older, and the tragedies that can befall you when you least expect them.
I took it for granted back then, but how did a 21 year old write “you just kinda wasted my precious time, but don't think twice it's alright.”
One day, just before I was packing up my belongings in France for a move to Hong Kong, I took all of my Dylan collection out and arranged it on a tall bookcase.
It formed a pyramid – along the bottom the vinyl LPS, above them the reel-to-reel tapes, then the VHS concert tapes and the cassette tapes, then the CDs and DVDs, and then, on top of them all, an iPod.
I stood back, and looked, and thought: that's my life. 
Or as Dylan once said, “My life in a stolen moment.”