Summer of Love: Bob Dylan

It's hard to write about Bob Dylan. After all, it's all been said already. But in looking at the "summer of love" phenomenon, he cannot be ignored.

In some respects, he's been overrated, at least as a singer. In the years leading up to 1967, he would have been the first to admit to bewilderment at the fuss being made over him. As this interview with TIME magazine shows (in the clip below, which gets tiresome after a couple of minutes), he was rather cynical about it. Obviously he found a way to make a living doing what he liked best, which was songwriting. And if the above clip is any indication, it almost made up for the singing.

But people didn't seem to mind. Some people did mind, though, when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Still, they got over it. (The Grateful Dead didn't; the incident was their inspiration for going electric at the offset, but that's another story.)

Dylan was the subject of a 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home," which in turn was the subject of a post at mmwbh in September of 2005. For just over a year now, Dylan has hosted the Theme Time Radio Hour on XM Satellite Radio. It's quite good, actually.