My Back Pages

I have a long history with Bob Dylan. When I got my first guitar—mail-ordered from Sears Roebuck for $18—his songs were some of my favorites to play, most notably “Masters of War.”

    Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive…
    You sit back and watch as the death count gets higher…
    You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins…

And there were so many more: Blowin' in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', Mr. Tambourine Man.

I never forgot Bob Dylan. Then recently, one of my Pandora radio stations played “My Back Pages” from his 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration—probably the best recording of this song. 

I was nearly in tears listening to it, written in the early 60s, played by a grand mix of musicians from this era who came together to celebrate Bob Dylan's first 30 years as a recording artist.

A friend of mine once told me that you have to have lived the 60s to understand it. It's the period I grew up in. I remember the Vietnam War, including the hundreds of Americans who died every week, sometimes for months at a time.

I remember when Detroit was on fire in 1967. The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I remember Nixon and his lying. In the end, he was a crook.

He resigned the same week I boarded a Greyhound bus with my guitar and bag, heading off to New York City to save the world. My elderly friend I made while away asked me to always stay a romantic. I returned on the same bus a year later, older than I was then but still a romantic.

I remember my fateful day in seminary, on my way to a life as a pastor, still trying to save the world. I walked back to my apartment, and within days I quit, returned to college to finish up a degree in mathematics and got myself a job in IT. 

What I had always planned had become more than I could do. 

I never looked back but I also never forgot this side of me. I married the girl of my dreams, had three boys and moved, ironically, to the small northern city Bob Dylan was born in. We bought a house with everything but a white-picket fence. And I got a cabin and a four-wheel drive truck, too.

Oh, I’ve liked my life—the hopes and dreams, for myself and the world. But each step I grew younger. The obvious became less so.

Now retired, I'm still playing my guitar. I spend a lot of time volunteering in the same human services I started as a teenager, still believing I can change something for the better. That maybe showing up, one person at a time, I can pass along something I’ve learned to anyone who cares.

I look at my kids and their generation, and recognize the same urgency I once felt, even if it shows up differently. They see problems we missed and push where we dropped off. And sometimes they simplify things the way we once did — because that’s often how change begins.

Maybe every generation needs its own version of certainty before it can learn humility.

I parted ways with Bob Dylan somewhere in my twenties. His most popular songs became a tiring reminder of bygone days. But a few years ago, I bought Blood on the Tracks and tried Dylan again for the first time, and I saw another side of him.

My Back Pages is a great example of the Bob Dylan I’ve come to know. He wrote it just a few years after he gained his reputation as a leader of the 60s protest movement. But apparently he came to see the black-and-white, good-vs-evil confidence this movement lived by as a rather simplistic view of big problems.

In this controversial song, he was saying that there may be other takes on complex issues like war and equality. That he was so much older then, and younger than that now.

My back pages don’t make me cynical; they make me patient. The work still matters. It just takes longer than a song, longer than a decade—sometimes more than a lifetime.