Well, yeah. ;-) There was something that grabbed me about the whole folk music movement, and that was that it was different from the other music of the time. It was different for one thing because it harkened back to so much past history, and the songs were often about serious stuff....whereas the other popular music was very seldom about any kind of serious stuff at all.

Dylan moved it up several notches. After Dylan, you could write a song about anything you could write a book about. No subject could not be broached seriously in a song. This was a wonderful thing. I think Bob did a great deal in broadening the boundaries of songwriting in people's minds.

The biggest influences on the people who were a few years older than me had been people like Elvis, Buddy Holly, the various rockers. Now those songs were pretty well all love songs...or they were sort of "partying" songs, I guess you could call them. Great music, but pretty light subject matter.

Then before that there was jazz and Big Band and Sinatra...jazz and Big Band was primarily instrumental music, seems to me, and Sinatra did love songs mostly, and songs about what a cool guy he was?

It was only in folk music that I could find songs about history, society, politics, unions, many past cultures and times, miners, sailors, philosophy, spirituality, PLUS of course the love songs and the other kind of stuff you found typically in pop music.

Folk music touched far more themes and it did it far more intelligently. It had more respect for and awareness of the past. It carried centuries of human development into the present and proposed new and radical possiblities for human development.

Now Bob took all that in, and he then shaped it in new and surprisingly modern forms. He bridged the ancient to the ultra-modern and with powerful effect. That was pretty breathtaking, and it transformed the whole songwriting scene.

The solid foundation Bob built on was laid down by a vast number of other great players who came before him, and his respect for what all of them did has always been plainly obvious. I like that. He didn't act like he had just suddenly sprung into the world out of nowhere, which is what I think I see a lot of younger artists doing now. (They're "cool" just because of their look or their "attitude" or something...what the heck is that? It's just posturing. It's not based on anything except the desire to be "cool".)

He honored the past. I see a lot of contempt for the past in people now....such as in the phrase: "You're history!" or "That's soooo old!"

This is sad. Things become history because they have lasting meaning...that's why they ARE history, whereas other things are forgotten. To be "history" is to have mattered enough that people remember you.

I respect Bob, because he respects where he came from and the people who were there before him. I wish I could see more of that in the contemporary urban youth culture. It seems to be based on ephemeral things that rise up like bubbles on the water and then vanish just as quickly.

I see so little respect for the past now in people that it really troubles me. People who cannot appreciate where they came from and where their ancestors came from are people who probably don't know where they are going either.

I think the transition of people's attention from books to television has had a great deal to do with this shift in consciousness. TV is ephemeral. It puts stuff in front of you for a moment...then it's gone...then something else is in front of you...then it's gone. Poof! No continuity. It's even worse now with 150 friggin' channels to flip between constantly. And it's all shot through with commercial advertising. It's sad what that does to people after awhile, how much it reduces their attention span. Books aren't like that. A book is something you move through steadily, without commercial interruptions...you take your time...you absorb the entire thing...you comprehend...and then you can go back and read it again. That stays with you. That encourages thought and reflection. It encourages understanding.

The kind of songs Bob wrote...well, I think they were like the last heroic echos of an age that has been quietly slipping away from us all since about the end of WWII maybe...an age where people actually thought about things in a measured way, and focused on one thought steadily until they had worked it through before going to the next thought.

TV doesn't encourage coherent thought. It fragments. It trivializes. It encourages momentary distraction and all forms of consumption. It plays on every human weakness...just to sell you something. We are meant to be something nobler than mere "consumers", aren't we? I sure hope so!