Giac has a good point. Rick's rendering of Dylan's music was a special moment in the show Monday night. Rick's version brought back memories but it also seemed richer than my recollections of the music. The old record players didn't do the music justice and with Dylan singing, it was easy to miss the finer points of the music that Rick pointed out.

Yes, I can still remember. I was a young kid. We were visiting relatives in New Jersey when Hank, who was married to my distant cousin, Cathy, decided to share his love of Dylan with me.

Hank seemed a little odd even for me. I believe he got out of the draft for health reasons. He was working in a factory assembling missile parts and he liked to steal parts made from expensive metals, drill holes in them, nail them to boards and make primitive happy faces. In the days before home computers, he had two printing presses in his house, which he used to print cards that said things like 'Santa Claus picks his nose.' He wrote to the editors of Time Magazine every week and had a coffee table in his living room that he made out of a coffin. Hank disliked kids enough that he spent hours painting signs like 'Danger 50,000 volts, Keep Out', so the relative were more than a little bemused when Hank accepted me as a friend.

Hank proudly lays one of his Columbia LPs on the turntable and I hear the guy whining through his nose words like Oxford town, Oxford town, gotta go around to Oxford town. And I say to myself, 'You gotta be kidding. What a piece of shit!' I'd probably heard good singers like Leroy Van Dyke by then.

A couple years later, I'm in grade 11 at Riverview Rural High in Cape Breton. I get the mumps or measles (I can't remember which.) The doctor tells me I'm well enough to go back to school so I go fishing in the freezing rain and get pneumonia. I think I was near death and delirious. For a few weeks my mind resembled Little Hawk's. Fortunately, my sister had had the presence of mind to join the Columbia record club. Just when I thought there was no hope, Columbia sends out Highway 61 as the pick of the month. I put it on an old vinyl covered record player with a 5-inch speaker. Almost immediately, I realized that Dylan was singing to my delirium. "There's something happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"