Bob dylan: The bloodless revolution

[RonPrice]

When Bob Zimmerman, alias Bob Dylan, came out of obscurity in the late 1950s and made his debut in New York on 4 November 1961, a folk music revival had been launched. This revival was celebrated at the Newport Folk Festival founded in 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith. Folk music and the political Left had a symbiotic relationship that became the paradigm for folk singers between April 1962 and 1965. But Bob Dylan was a poet and not a spokesperson or, as America’s beat poet laureate Allen Ginsberg described him, “a column of air, a single breath, a shaman.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1SBS TV, “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Episodes 1 and 2,” November 2005 and repeated October 2008.

As Ron Price, alias Bahá’í pioneer, came out of obscurity in the late 1950s and made his debut as a member of the Baha’i Faith circa 12 October 1959 and then as a pioneer in the Canadian Bahá’í community circa 20 August 1962, he continued to play baseball, hockey and football, focus his energies on his schoolwork and control his embryonic erotic enthusiasms by means of this sport and study as well as the socializing influences of the secular and religious ethos of his cultural milieux. The Baha’i community’s Ten Year Crusade had been launched in 1953 and then celebrated at a series of events Ron took part in as an adolescent and young adult from 1959 to 1963. For a short period Ron toyed with the Left while studying history and philosophy at university in Canada but, by 1965 he was, like Dylan, fully apolitical, poetically inclined and had begun his life “on his own like a rolling stone,” with “no direction” toward his “home.” –Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 26 October 2008.

Yes, as Ginsberg had said, it was
the first bloodless revolution, well,
partly, Allen, partly, as the tragedy
of the human condition exposed in
an unprecedented and tempestuous
slough of despond, with forecasts of
doom and battles with phantoms of
a wrongly informed imagination as
Dylan had poeticized so brilliantly.

His days, my days, those days, back
then passed so swiftly, as the twinkle
of a star. But, you made your mark,
Bob, at this crucial turning point in
history, a juncture the like of which
shall never return and which we can
scarcely appreciate, fully understand,
even now, beyond our reach perhaps
for several generations, as a unique
victory was won, a victory still not
known by the human race, eh Bob?

Ron Price
26 October 2008