Dylan and the Fall

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If you grew up in a certain era, his name isn’t just a performer on a poster. It’s a weather system. A shift in air pressure. A bulletin from the fault line where art, politics, faith, doubt, youth, age, and trouble all collided.

And at the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you about one night—one Bob Dylan concert—that coincided with the most frightening turn my own life had taken up to that point, and how, in a way, it nudged me toward paying attention to people many others don’t see.

But let’s start with the man himself.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Hibbing was not Greenwich Village, not California, not London. It was wind, work, winters, and radio.

Inside that small-town house, though, the signals of the wider world were pouring in: country music, blues, early rock ’n’ roll, gospel, and crooners—all collapsing into one restless imagination. He listened hard. He absorbed. And he did what born artists do: he tried things on.

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