To your tambourine in time

Posted at 3:41 PM on May 23, 2006 by Don Lee

Tomorrow is Bob Dylan’s 65th birthday. My birthday wish for him is to follow through on a statement he made in this 1966 interview:

Reporter: You said just a minute ago you were preparing to go to classical music. Could you tell me a little about that?
Bob Dylan: Well, I was going to be in the classical music field and I imagine it's going right along. I'll get there one of these records.
Reporter: Are you using the word classical perhaps a little differently than we?
Bob Dylan: A little bit, maybe. Just a hair.
Reporter: Could you explain that?
Bob Dylan: Well, I'm using it in the general sense of the word, thumbing a hair out.

Thumbing a hair out. I don't know what it means but it certainly makes me curious.

While we wait for Bob to deliver his classical record, we’ve got John Corigliano’s song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man. There’s no commercially available recording I know of, but thanks to New York public radio station WNYC, you can listen here. At the time he wrote the cycle in 2000, Corigliano readily admitted he’d never heard a Dylan song.