My dad is famous for his hair. A bushy, bristly thatch of black and gray, it’s immediately recognizable in a crowd and can make him appear up to three inches taller, depending on when he’s last had a haircut. My friends were fascinated by his hair, and by him, this grinning, wiry man of eccentric appearance and intense, almost incandescent energy. They assumed he had secrets — a druggy past, perhaps; some kind of wild history — and were disappointed and incredulous when I assured him them he had nothing of the kind. “Maybe he just hasn’t told you about it,” they said. “But man, you know your dad was wild! I mean, come on, dude. The hair!” The boys especially were drawn to him. Valiantly, they tried to befriend him. Failing, the bolder ones would dress as him for Halloween, streaking a frizzy black fright wig with gray in a bewildered homage to the man they couldn’t crack. As a child, I made drawings of my family, never bothering to sign them; nobody else’s crayoned father had that thick, waxy nest perched atop his smiling head like a black curl of smoke.
Except, of course, for the man who made the records my dad loved enough to keep tucked carefully away in big cupboards in the dining room, away from sticky fingers clumsy with the turntable needle — a man named Bob Dylan.
It was years before I realized the Jew-fro was not unusual for men of my tribe. In Nebraska, compared with the fair, lank locks of other fathers, the descendents of German farmers and Slavic meatpackers, it seemed hopelessly exotic. I was sure Bob Dylan must be related to us.
“Maybe somewhere down the line,” my mother said, with a snort. “Same shtetl.”
“Bob Dylan and my dad are cousins!” I exclaimed proudly, to anyone who would listen.
“Who is Bob Dylan?” my classmates would ask.
“Duh! He’s only like the greatest songwriter the world has ever known!”
“Oh. Gross! Anna’s got milk coming out of her nose!”
They had other things in common too, my dad and Dylan, both small-town Midwestern boys, although Omaha, where my dad grew up, was practically cosmopolitan compared to tiny Hibbing, Minnesota. But they were Jewish, marking them instant misfits among their gentile neighbors, who generally regarded the Semites among them with bemused disdain that occasionally erupted into outright violence. My father was regularly taunted and beaten by neighborhood thugs on his way from his junior high school to his parent’s butcher shop, where he would grind hamburger meat late into the night, doing his homework in the walk-in freezer.
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As someone who has found multiple artists who seem to articulate the profoundest yearnings of deepest self, only to be supplanted a few months later by a fresh crop of idols, I find my dad’s commitment to Dylan touching.
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He was an achiever, National Honor Society, champion debater, president of the Latin club; a frighteningly smart kid, smart enough to know that academic achievement and an Ivy League degree were sure tickets out of the meat market and into a world where people talked about big things — politics, literature, morality; anything besides the wholesale price of kosher fryers or what constitutes a nice brisket.
For Dylan, music was the way out of a stifling town nearly as small and frozen as my father’s meat locker. He spent every spare moment listening to the radio and made scratchy records in the recording booth in the town department store. He formed bands in high school, played and sung in talent shows, and spent a desultory year at the University of Minnesota before reinventing himself as a Dust Bowl hobo and setting off to seek his fortune. And quite a fortune it was. No mention was made of his bank statements in No Direction Home (the recent Dylan documentary made by Martin Scorsese), but I’m sure they’re impressive.
He did say something in that film that stuck with me; how he still remembers the first time he heard Woody Guthrie. Suddenly, there it was, the music that, without even knowing it, he’d been searching for all his young life. Music that made perfect sense to him. Music that said what he couldn’t say yet, but had in his soul. Dylan never wavered from his instantly formed allegiance with the mind and heart of Woody Guthrie, tracking him down, befriending him, and even caring for the older man on his deathbed. As someone who has found multiple artists who seem to articulate the profoundest yearnings of deepest self, only to be supplanted a few months later by a fresh crop of idols (further evidence for the ever-expanding case that, among other things, I have no idea who the fuck I am), I found this kind of commitment touching. It also sounded like something I’d heard before.
“I remember my teacher sneaking Dylan records into junior-year high-school English to play for us,” says my dad. “You weren’t supposed to do that, of course — too modern and too political. It was my first major exposure to any kind of music outside of a few classical pieces, musicals, Allen Sherman, whatever we had hanging around the house. I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ for the first time in college, with one of his persistent musical patterns that I’ve always liked, with the organ and the words — it was a revelation.”
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