It always seemed to me — and I could be wrong but this is my memory — that in the 1960s, boys sat around, stoned or not, like rabbis doing talmudic interpretations of Dylan lyrics. Not girls. My intro to him came in 1966 in 10th grade “AP” (advanced placement) English, where this kind of hidden-bohemian woman teacher (this was a time in my totally and still de jure segregated public HS when the boys where still being kicked out for a day and sent home, if they wore sandals to school with no socks, or if their sideburns got too long, or their hair past their ears, and girls still had to do the spaghetti-strap bend-over test for the old lady assistant principal, to see if their breasts were even slightly visible and if so also remove to home and change). So this bohemian teacher, Ann Sherill, played us The Times They are A’Changing. I remember it was a hot day and the big fan was on, and we girls were stuck on the backs of our thighs (we had to wear dresses then) to our desk seats. I remember being absolutely electrified, probably not just by the title song but also by Hattie Carroll.
I bought the first two albums with my coffee-cart-girl-at-the-cafeteria money. This was spring 1966, when (I later learned) he was electric, but for us it was still 1961 or 1962 and all we knew of him was the acoustic and his covers of other people’s folkie work. I discovered Woody Guthrie from him and learned to play and sing a lot of Guthrie songs. (I now have a very old chapbook of poetry, all in Yiddish, written by Guthrie’s mother-in-law, who was from Coney Island.) I bought a Stella guitar for $15.95 at a pawnshop in downtown Houston (the owner, an acquaintance of my grandfather, called my grandfather to rat on me for being in a pawnshop and asked if “Debbie is in trouble?”). I never really followed Dylan after he went electric. His earlier work was revolutionary enough for people, certainly including girls, in certain 60s US places. I later listened to his newer stuff and the only one I remember with love is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which I played at 6 a.m. while finishing a night on mescaline, at age 18 in Chicago, feeling that it completely captured my moment of coming down. So…I can’t really despise or mock the guy. I just kind of ignored most of his later stuff. Its misogyny seems so little different from the Stones and so, so much else of the period. I can’t believe his face today. He looks exactly like that Jewish altekaker from the pawn shop who phoned my grandfather.