Bob Dylan has legions of fans in every generation now, all over the globe, just by virtue of his timeless Americana melodies, the way his poetry demands a freer way of life, a truer kind of love. Here’s how I know. My non-hippie parents nevertheless introduced me early to the man by referring to him as an icon who “kinda sings funny” but ‘writes songs like an angel.” My two school-age children know most of the words to songs like “Masters of War,” asking for albums like Blood on the Tracks by name during long car trips. My oldest son, a photographer and writer for the Navy now, plays Dylan songs on his ukelele for his shipmates during deployments singing songs about love and loss, truth and unnecessary lies, as he journeys to country after country bringing songs that promise still that the times, they are a-changin’.
However, the 73-year-old Dylan also knows how to touch the most devoted of his fan base. He reaches out to members of the American Association of Retired Persons.
After three years of declining interviews, Dylan just reemerged to grant an interview to former Rolling Stone editor Robert Love, writing now for AARP The Magazine. Love traveled to San Francisco to ask the legend, “Um, why AARP?”
Dylan said he came up with an idea to give free copies of his forthcoming 36th studio album, Shadows of the Night, to 50,000 random subscribers to the magazine. The album, featuring Dylan’s take on Great American Songbook classics from the ’20s to the ’60s, will be mailed out next week with the magazine’s February/March edition.
Who better than AARP’s subscribers, aged 50 and older, to recognize these songs? Since the organization has 35.2 million members, that’s just pure marketing brilliance. Dylan told Love:
“A lot of those readers are going to like this record. If it was up to me, I’d give you the records for nothing and you give them to every [reader of your] magazine.”
Of course, producers don’t like plans like that. Chances are, the album, available for sale on Feb. 3, will delight listeners of all ages once again. It features often re-recorded songs once made famous by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gertrude Niesen, Irving Berlin, and Ray Charles.
These are songs that Dylan adores. Before falling under the sway of folkies like Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, he was a fan of show tunes and lounge balladeers.
“These songs are songs of great virtue. That’s what they are. People’s lives today are?filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don’t survive. We don’t see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it ? everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life. These songs are anything but that.”
Tim O’Brien, who created a portrait and illustration of Dylan for the interview, told Billboard that Dylan has inspired so many people with his attitude of universal change, and it hasn’t just been singers and poets who’ve been moved. He said:
“When I was in art school working late nights, I started to listen to Bob Dylan. Hearing what art could come out of a young man in his 20s was inspiring and might have even pushed me to strive more in my work. … I have loved Dylan my whole life. Now that I’m 50, he’s still ambitious and striving and it’s remarkable that he still pushes me to want to be a better artist. I also admire his desire to be out there working, almost like Woody Allen. It’s as if working is life. I loved painting his portrait.”
Long after Dylan’s gone, that spirit of inspiration will clearly carry on. Our children will make sure of that.
