How Can You Hate His Voice When The Man Has Dozens Of Them?

Every man has his breaking point, I guess. This morning I reached mine. What I thought was an out of the blue gift to warm my soul on this (another) drearily cold day--someone put on Bob Dylan's Desire album at work--turned into just another cold slap in the face, one that I've endured for 30+ years now. But today's slap turned out to be the one that broke this man's long silence. Not silence about the merits of Bob Dylan; that silence, as regular readers know, is no silence. But the silence--shaking head, mutterings to myself about the rubes who surround me, internal lamentations about how alone we all are in this world--I've maintained when confronted, yet again, with somebody who doesn't like Bob Dylan because "I can't stand his voice." Well, the floodgates have been pried open; here comes the torrent.

I admit, upon probably my first exposure to Bob Dylan, as a pre-pubescent lad separating the wheat (Nashville Skyline) from the chaff (Chicago Umpteenth) in a carton of discarded cassettes from an older cousin, I called him Bob Dye-lan. I was eventually corrected. See, we all can learn and grow in our Bob knowledge/appreciation, if we are willing. I've always been willing. I should have heeded that good piece of wisdom this morning when my co-worker, an otherwise super-friendly, diligent, and most pleasant person, uttered the old standard, "I can't stand his voice" complaint. Instead, liked a wired Bob trying to figure out who threw the effing glass, I went kind of ballistic. In short, I told my co-worker I would no longer be speaking to her and that if she needed to communicate with me she should put her thoughts in proper Gregg Shorthand on a neutral color post-it and mail them to me General Delivery. I then hummed the first lines of "Positively Fourth Street" ("You've got a lotta nerve, to say you are my friend") anytime she came within ten feet of me all day long. I take it to be a sign of her desperate need to apologize and atone that she took to humming the resounding chorus of Handel's "Hallelujah" back at me. Thus, in a more civilized attempt at detente, I offer this primer on the many voices of Bob Dylan.

The many voices (not the voice of Voice of a Generation, but voice of, like, how it sounds) of Bob Dylan. Because he has sung/does sing with a multitude of them. You see, saying you don't like Bob's voice is like saying you don't like weather or food. Fine, you don't like sub-zero temperatures or mushrooms--who does?-- but what about sixty-eight degree mildly overcast and breezy days while chomping on some pistachios, hunh? See? Maybe the gruff growl of Bob's recent concert tours tries your patience a bit. Fine, but you can't then condemn him outright when the honey-sweet next-farm-over voice of "One More Night" or the wizened, wry, winking Groucho Marx crossed with Bob Newhart voice of "Talking World War III Blues" is just a click away on your i-Pod. Not in the mood for the careening, trapeze artist voice of the Rolling Thunder Revue tours? Fine, shuffle over to the tender heartbreak of the wounded puppy offering pillow talk in an empty bed of "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" or the mature, rueful, bittersweet croons of the soon-to-be ex of "You're A Big Girl Now" or the quiet howls of the rusty lusty fly (pants, not insect) of "Blood In My Eyes." And on and on and on. And then become an obsessive like I am and track down all the other versions of these and all the others and discover the different voices Bob sings them all with through time. Of course, in a freer, less technologically daunting America, I could provide you with audio samples of all of this, but that would be too easy. Easy like the voice of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" when true Bob appreciation is a little more challenging, like the caterwauling battering ram of "From A Buick 6."

You want a voice that's attractive and infectious like a bloody lip? Try Highway 61 Revisited. A voice like ceiling climbing smoke from a wine-sodden mouth? Blonde on Blonde. A voice still warm from the last good night's sleep, weeks ago? Blood On The Tracks. Playful like a sugared-up lab rat in an Escher maze? Another Side of Bob Dylan. Wisecracking and avuncular? Under The Red Sky. Mixed-up damning and whimsical like the offspring of Jonathan Edwards and W.C. Fields? "Love and Theft." And that's just scratching the surface, not only of the man's many albums, but the many different voices on each of the albums.

Look, I could get all Marcusishly Significant on you and deconstruct Don McLean's apt phrase in "American Pie" that the voice does indeed "come from you and me," with all sorts of Emersonian/Whitmanesque uber-yawp gobbledygook tossed about, but the fact is you have to listen, not read. As Bob himself said about certain kinds of music, with his own you have to "lean forward" a bit. If you do, trust me, you'll soon get past the received notion of the "unpretty" voice and discover dozens of amazing voices, not one of which, thankfully, sounds anything like Peter Cetera.