Expecting Rain

2002/3 .. i was heavily into hip hop at the time..loved all the good stuff...esp good storytellers..nas,tribe called quest,blackstarr etc..i remember vividly sitting in my friends place listening to a nas's illmatic and discussing which is still one of my favourite verses in a song
my pen taps the paper then my brain's blank
I see dark streets, hustling brothers who keep the same rank
Pumping for something, some uprise, plus some fail
Judges hanging niggas, uncorrect bails, for direct sales
My intellect prevails from a hanging cross with nails
I reinforce the frail, with lyrics that's real
Word to Christ, a disciple of streets, trifle on beats
I decipher prophecies through a mic and say peace.
I hung around the older crews while they sling smack to dingbats
They spoke of Fat Cat, that nigga's name made bell rings, black
Some fiends scream, about Supreme Team, a Jamaica Queens thing
Uptown was Alpo, son, heard he was kingpin, yo
x "rap is real", watch the herbs stand still
Never talking to snakes 'cause the words of man kill
True in the game, as long as blood is blue in my veins
I pour my Heineken brew to my deceased crew on memory lane
we had had a smoke or two and were drinking tea/chatting when all of a sudden he got all excited and told me if i liked nas i would love this..so he pops off into his mom's room and fetches a cd and puts it on..'lily rosmary and the jack of hearts' ..mind blowing stuff..i had no idea how anyone could combine words and music to that degree..it was as if the whole song was being drawn in pictures for me the whole thing was so visceral..i was hooked right away so he made me a copy of blood on the tracks and ive never looked back.
first gig was dublin november 2003 and bob had to cancel the following night in cork due to a throat infection..i could hardly understand a word he was saying..still rocked though..galway 2004 was a whole different ballgame though..roll on limerick

Around '90-'91. When I was first getting into music Led Zeppelin was big for me. There's a great song on Physical Grafitti called 'In My Time of Dyin' Well I had the vynl and amongst the liner notes were the songwriting credits. The credit said Trad. Arr. Bob Dylan. Well I knew OF Dylan and knew the stuff that was played on the radio. LARS and occasionally Tangled.
Anyway I wanted to hear another version of this great song not realizing it would be TOTALLY different from Zep's version which is a total rock jam!! So I went to the local record store and discovered the song on the first('course at the time I had no idea it was his debut) album. I also discovered that Mr. Dylan was/is quite prolific as there were many titles. So I decided to pick up one more picking Blood on the Tracks( I guess because I knew Tangled from the radio).
And the rest is, as they say, history.

So I guess I owe it all to Jimmy Page.

Thanks Jimmy

It was 1970 or 1971-around the time the Beatles broke up, because that is when I began to get interested in listening to FM radio and expanding my musical listening beyond my parent's collection (as broad and eclectic as their collection was!). I was 10 or 11. I had the all day job of cleaning out our huge basement and the radio was playing a long, multi-hour audio documentary on either the Beatles, or the history of rock music (may have been two different radio documentaries I am conflating in my mind). In any case, there was a segment on Bob and LARS and an extended analysis of his impact on rock music. I was enthralled (I had heard his name of course, and some of the songs on the radio before, but somehow it really hit this time). You heard his music a lot on the radio back then. I bought Greatest Hits I, than II which must have been out or came out shortly after, and then began collecting. Went to see the Rolling Thunder Review in Augusta, Maine in 1975. I stopped paying much attention in 80s (still remember cringing watching his train wreck performance for Live Aid). But I always listened to his 60s and 70s stuff. It was seeing him on the Oscars for "Things have Changed" that reawakened my interest in his post 70s and current stuff.

My sister gave me 'Freewheelin' for Christmas (i THINK it was '64, maybe it was 63? anyhow i was like 13 so i now been a fan for 47 years! holy moly!) i didn't know anything about Bob previously, it was a gift from outta the blue...I was a introspective super-shy kid living in a blank void, sitting around daydreaming and flunking school.

mysterious wonder and love at first listen....

i became a fan because the music/sound/voice really reached me; touched me.... it was unlike any other music i'd ever heard plus i just liked it a whole lot...it sounded like a real person singing direct to my ear, not like the unimaginable and unknowable glamorous superhumans on tv called 'stars'....'corinna' was the first song to really grab me...i'd listen to it over and over and over...

this is like trying to explain why a flower smells nice--it just DOES!

I was a big Johnny Cash fan when I was 12 and I heard the duet 'Girl From The North Country' and got bit by the Dylan bug ever since. I'm 18 now.

I had the same thing happen to me.. in my case a pot smoking cousin dragged me to some friends of hers place..and they were playing Freewheelin'. I was very young. I know i wasnt a lot of fun for her as she was supposed to take me swimming and i ended up getting very sick instead... now thinking back, i must have gotten very stoned that day...i was about six..
Later on, early 70s i heard Lay Lady Lay and then a couple years later Blonde on Blonde was played for me and that began the collection of every album.. which i still have. Encased in a vacuum sealed vault .. ok ok.. i have them in totes.. but you get the idea.

Yes, yes, yes.... well stated..... I am still as interested and fascinated as ever..... It surprises me too.... I think because it makes you find so many other subjects that you might not have been aware except that something in a song or book leads you to it. And then of course he keeps adding to collection of both music and info all the time.

I thought I was gonna be in the minority of the poll being someone that came in after the year 2000.... but I guess not.... in Chronicles he says that he was gonna start touring and then returning to the same venues in order to build a new group of fans..... well, Bobkins, I think you can put a check mark on that one.... well done....

obviously there has been some kind of a generational change… The answers to the thread "how many shows have you been to" seem to indicate the same.
The fact that there seems to be a new generation might also explain why some questions that (from the perspective of somebody who discovered Dylan some two decades ago) have been discussed too many times before and discussed again (first show, best vs. worst show/album/song).
I wonder whether the older folks are still here (and less active then before) or whether they disappeared… (are we a minority by now?)

Summer of '68 ... around the time Bobby Kennedy was killed, I heard "Positively 4th Street" and soon after got the Greatest Hits album. I had been vaguely aware of Dylan, but was more of a Beatles/Stones fan before this.

I was first aware of Bob when i bought a concert tour program at an Eric Clapton concert in 2004. In the photographs there were a couple of pictures of Eric and Bob (30th anniversery show and 1999 Crossroads Benefit). So i knew the name and then saw him for the first time on the dvd for Crossroads. I had heard of his legacy/reputation at this point and I was only eleven at the time and the first thing i thought was "this is the legend? this is the great Bob Dylan? His voice is terrible!" For the next few years i kind of rolled my eyes whenever anyone mentioned his name. I saw something else of him on a PBS documentary so my understanding of Bob extended to him being that "terrible singing legend who wears a harmonica in a brace and can't decide if he wants to sing, strum or blow."

Then in spring 2009 after my mother had bought a couple of greatest hits CD's something struck me one night when i was in a reflective mood and without thinking about it much i just threw in disc two of "The Essential Bob Dylan" listened to all that stuff thought it was really good and my feelings towards him began to change and then it played through to "Things Have Changed" and they certainly did. Sworn Bob fan ever since, have only seen him in concert once but I hope to many times in the future.

Yes, before anyone posts it I know how stupid I was back in the day.

Christmas In the Heart was the album that really made me sit up and take notice.

I guess it was the message of love and peace and Santa Claus. It really appealed to me and made me think we can cure the world of starving people if only we could take what is in those songs and put them in our hearts.

I think Bob was talking about a genorosity of spirit that had somewhat disappeared from the American landscape. But one that was there in the 1950s when there were no starving people.

If the world could only go back to that time.

Well, as Bob sang on one of records i have somewhere, you cant look backwards because your eyes are in the front of your head, but you can have that attitude in your heart that every day is Christmas Day.

Probably the older fans do not go on line or to forums like this as much as the next and younger generations . AS I have said before only Senior Mabel and my self admit to being 60 or over.

I was a tot at the time, walking around doing some shopping with my parents. This was the early 60's, and back then there were a lot of record stores. The stores would blast music into the streets. At the time, Peter Paul & Mary had a hit with Blowin in the Wind. I still remember when that came out, but this day, while shopping with the parents, I heard this strange, borderline scary (for a 4 year old) voice blaring in the street. It was Bob's version of that song.
in 75, when BOTT came out, I was just learning how to write songs. I wasn't a huge Dylan fan at the time, but heard a lot about him & wanted to learn how to write. Maybe the early memory of hearing him in the street stuck, but I can't say for sure. For no reason in particular, I bought it the day it came out. BOTT opened up so many possibilities for me as a novice songwriter. I loved the idea of the first person changing into the third person. I loved the open tunings. The album is almost like a painting. I was hooked. Then I went into his back catalogue, and you can guess the rest.
I voted 70's, but the seed was planted much earlier.
I guess the reasons why I became a Bob fan are complex. As mentioned, the multi-person narrative felt liberating, but that raw voice that I heard as a tot resonated. He showed how a voice didn't have to be technically great to be great. F--k American Idol. Rolling Stone had an article recently about Bob being the Godfather of Hip Hop. They make a good argument, but I see him (more than Iggy even) as being the Godfather of Punk.

Don't think of us "older folks" as necessarily ready to bolt this site - I fit that bill too!
But as I posted above, I've only been a Bob fan since 2006. I coulda/shoulda been a Bob fan in the early years- hell I lived in Chelsea, NYC in the early 70's while attending college and spent plenty of time in the Village. But somehow my mind was closed to Dylan then - go figure.

It is entirely possible that some long time fans- of any age - are bored with this place, but I'll bet for every one that leaves here, 2 more show up!

1981. 19 years old. Stoned out of my gourd. My older girlfriend had a copy of Blood on the Tracks. I lay on my back, with the headphones on, and went deep down the rabbit hole. Been travelling various Bob-routes ever since. Don't get stoned anymore. Don't need to.

The first time I heard Dylan was when I was 16 up in the hills of Derbyshire with a cycling club. We stopped at a cafe for a break and one bloke had dumped a dirty old transistor radio in the middle of the table. I was a shy lad in those days and rather introverted, and was just sitting staring into space while the others talked around me when suddenly this clanky rock music with the most amazing lyrics came crackling out of the speaker - it was Subteranean Homesick Blues and was the new single off Bringing It All Back Home. I went out and bought the album the next day, and gradually bought all his back catalogue and afterwards every new release too, at least up untill the late seventies. Can't stand his later stuff.

by "older" I didn't mean personal age but the time that passed since you became a fan.

I'm also a little past my childhood (66 years young next birthday), but am lucky enough to have been introduced to Bob's work back in '63. Even luckier to have started taking an interest in music about the time of 'Rock around the clock', and so to have grown up through all the early rockers, the trad boom, the Beatles, Stones et al, and everything else up to about the end of the sixties. Got married then, kids, job, etc., so didn't keep so up with it all after that (except for Dylan, of course). Emu and Mabel, you are not alone!

I gotta say this is one of the better threads I've seen here. Very interesting hearing everyone's stories. Young and old. I especially like the ones from the 60's when Bob was having his biggest impact. As I said above I got into him in the late 80's early 90's. Not a great time for Bob. I mean I like Oh, Mercy but it's no HW61!! It's cool to hear from people who we're into him when the classic 60's stuff was coming out.
Has LJ given his story yet?? That should be interesting to hear about before the NET ruined it for him

1988: 1st yr University and had to buy some CD's for my new player. Bought Freewheelin' and The Times.... . Essentially impulse purchases, because I really didn't know that much about Bobkins up to that point other than all the stereotypical images in the media (profit-driven that is).

HA!! Just mention LJ and a "Bobkins" pops out!

I think it's great to see so many members became fans in the 2000s - and so many young 'uns. Good on ya.

Did you attend any Bob shows in the 60s?

I became a fan the moment I listened to Blonde on Blonde the first time. The very moment was somewhere between Sooner or Later and I Want You. (Before that song I thought Visions of Johanna was dull, shame on me!) I knew right away that I was hooked. It was that special, strange feeling when you just know something is right.

This is now a year ago. I got BoB in february 2011 and it was my fourth Dylan album. The day I listened to it was also the day my parents split up. There was lots of fighting and tears and I remember hiding on the balcony one time so that my dad wouldn't find me, cause he was in such a maniac mood then.
In the middle of all this chaos I discovered my love for Dylan. I don't know if there is a coincidence.

I was listening to BoB this weekend a lot and a those crazy scenes came to me again. I have had no contact to my father since then and I also rarely see my mum now, cause I now live with my boyfriend in another town.

So yes I'm quite new to Dylan, is anybody else here who has just discovered Bob Dylan? Wish you all a nice weekend!

First I bought two Dylan's cassettes for a friend of mine, because she had asked me for, she wanted to bridge the gap in her musical education, i even didn't listen to it... then she became a fan, then she gave me as a present on my birthday two other Bob's cassettes, then i listened to it... and became a fan, too. It was in 1996, i was 22.
The two cassettes was The Times They Are A' Changin' and Bringing It All Back Home. And two first cassettes was the Budocan and the MTV Unplugged.
And before that birthday i hardly had heard a few Dylan's songs and I had seen a clip, because you could hear it at radio very seldom, and i had never tried to get some records because i wouldn't understand the lyrics with my "rudimentary English", and everybody told me that after all Dylan was The Poetry .