The InterWebs are loaded this morning on Bob Dylan birthday stories, and this humble post will way-most-likely fall between the cracks in the pile on, but like anyone with any kind of musical appreciation over a long spell will have a Dylan narrative — can’t be helped:

Happy birthday Bob! In honor of his 80th, one of my favorite RS covers photographed by Morgan Renard next to the urinal in the men's room backstage at MSG. pic.twitter.com/Nzp21gewyI

— Alison Weinflash (@alisonweinflash) May 24, 2021

Coverage of this auspicious event ranged from CNN, to The Hollywood Reporter, to the BBC, the Guardian, and even The Jerusalem Post. However, one of the originals in the bunch is from Jason Zinoman at The New York Times, who claims (in the headline), Dylan is ‘Our Most Underappreciation Comic‘ — some snips:

His early performances had comic bits. Using long guitar strings, he quipped that the instrument needed a haircut.
The first genre of song that got attention was the talking blues, a comic form dating to the 1920s with standard chord progressions backing up jokey lines and topical references — not that different from a stand-up set. Some of those songs made it onto albums, others only became available later.
One of the earliest wasn’t released until 2010. “Talking John Birch Society Blues” spoofed the paranoia of the anti-communist organization, with a narrator finding suspicious activity in the glove compartment, the TV set, even on the American flag. (“Discovered there was red stripes!)
It ends with him all alone investigating himself.
…
Along with talking blues and surreal scenes, Dylan flashed borscht belt punch lines in songs like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” a rambling yarn that begins with him singing, stopping, cracking up and asking for a second take. Keeping this mistake sets the loose tone for the song, which includes a visit to a bank that ends with this quip: “They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants.”
…
By the next decade, Dylan had become one of the biggest stars in the world, while his songs became darker and more personal, digging into heartbreak. But even his harshest songs often carried a light wit.
In the opening of “Idiot Wind” (1975), he sings that he shot a man and took his wife, who inherited a million dollars; when she died he got the money.
After a pause, he adds with deep feeling at odds with the smirking sentiment: “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

And concludes:

Speaking in a gravelly deadpan that increasingly resembles the voice of the stand-up Steven Wright, Dylan sounds like he scorns canned laughs, a betrayal of one of the last things you could trust.
“You can fake an orgasm,” he croaked. “But you can’t fake laughter.”

Go read the whole piece, interesting stuff — it’s behind a paywall, though, but for some reason it’s not always up. I have a subscription now, but I used to occassionally slide.

My personal affiliation with Dylan, at least as far back as my decaying memory can recall, is with the song, “Like A Rolling Stone,” released in July 1965. In between my 10th-and-11th grades, I had my first real job that summer, washing/cleaning rental-autos for Avis-Rent-A Car, which required driving between the wash rack and the commercial terminal (located on Eglin AFB in the Florida panhandle), allowing a lot of car-radio listening time.
After the first weeks of a shitload of great songs — maybe “Mr. Tambourine Man” (The Byrds), “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (the Rolling Stones), “I Can’t Help Myself [Sugar Pie Honey Bunch]” (The Four Tops), or maybe “For Your Love” (the Yardbirds), to name a few — came Dylan’s opus into the mix, and it blew my naive, tiny mind.
Although most radio stations then (FM was still aways away) wouldn’t play the whole song — six-plus minutes — a station in Panama City would, and I’d hear “Like A Rolling Stone” sometimes two/three times a shift.
And for a daydreaming 16-year-old, a refrain for youthful angst without really comprehending:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

The following summer, I purchased my first of only two Dylan albums I owned, “Blonde On Blonde,” and played the living shit out of it.
Beyond the popular radio-played “Rainy Day Woman No, 12 & 35,” I most-listened to “I Want You,” “Just Like A Woman,” among others, but my most-favorite (I listened to it incessantly), and maybe because one of the cities in the title was known and nearby, or maybe because of it’s wonderful, rambling-storytelling music:

Just weeks after the release of the album, Dylan was in a horrific motorcycle accident in upstate New York, and he disappeared for a long while afterwards, supposedly re-directing himself:

The accident gave Dylan a chance to hit reset and revive himself.

By 1966, Dylan had gone from an up-and-coming folkie to the voice of the ’60s generation, and he was uncomfortable with it. Woodstock had become a “nightmare,” with moochers at his door and goons breaking in.
“Everything was wrong, the world was absurd,” he wrote in his memoir.

Some Dylan historians have suggested the motorcycle wreck may have saved his life.
He was exhausted from constant touring and, according to some accounts, had been taking large amounts of amphetamines while on the road in 1966.

Although he didn’t tour for years, and did release some follow-up albums, I didn’t re-enter the Dylan picture until the mid-1970s when I purchased, “Blood On The Tracks,” which I think is a masterpiece. Once again, I loved the whole album, from “Shelter From The Storm,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” and onward, but once again, too, my most-favorite is “Tangled Up In Blue” (played and played and played until maybe the vinyl warped), just such a wonderful piece of storytelling with flow-along music:

Paul Campos at LGM this morning also had a Dylan-birthday post, which included writing about his purchase of “Blood On The Tracks” as a teen-ager who didn’t yet know the Dylan appeal:

I was fifteen when Blood on the Tracks was released. I have no recollection of why I bought it — at that point in my life Bob Dylan was just some old guy from a long time ago (the Sixties, which might as well have been the 1860s if you were 15 in 1975) — but I must have listened to that thing 2000 times that year.
Obviously I’m biased by this autobiographical detail but I still think it may be his best record.

As I agree, even now near-46 years later..

Over the years, Dylan also has been in countless productions, from movies, TV shows, musical documentaries, what-not (his IMDB page is enormous), but this is one of his first which allowed him some acting room — “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” (1973) — and produced a kind-of big hit, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (Slim Pickens slowly dies a bloody death next to a creek with a couple verses playing along, pretty potent).
Dylan in this action sequence:

I’d way-forgotten the knife throw….

(Illustration: Bob Dylan, September 1961 in New York City [Michael Ochs Archives/Getty], found here).