Not Across My Daughter’s Big Brass Bed You Don’t, Bob

‘Oh, the times they are a-changin,” alright, when today’s
teenagers come to know Bob Dylan as a sorry old man on television
selling ladies undergarments. Wizard on the harmonica? Rock icon?
Voice of the sixties? No longer, apparently. ‘Angry, dissipated and
possibly deranged … geezer sexually fixated on a girl young
enough to be his granddaughter’ were the words that came to Leslie
Bennetts’ mind when she watched Dylan play a song called ‘Love
Sick’ while ‘a nubile young model writhed around in her underwear
and stiletto heels in the new Victoria’s Secret commercial.’

Dylan’s move to the electric guitar in Newport in 1965,
prompting an outcry among folk traditionalists, was one thing. But
this corporate sellout by the man who asked, ‘How many times must
the cannon balls fly?’ and rallied around the wrongly imprisoned
boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter as the Vietnam War left a stain on
America’s soul is another story altogether. Why did he do it?
Bennetts asks. Nearly 40 years ago, she recalls, Dylan was asked
what, if anything, might tempt him to sell out. His answer —
‘Ladies’ undergarments.’

Sadly, as Bennetts and her husband find solace in Dylan’s
peacenik music from a time deserving of more and more comparisons
with the current quagmire as thousands die meaninglessly in Iraq,
their 15-year-old daughter will never understand ‘what made this
raspy-voiced guy so important, anyway.’

‘When the man who wrote ‘Forever Young’ starts leering at
jailbait during prime time, the result looks like a recruiting tool
for a pedophilia advocacy group.’
— Jacob Wheeler

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Not Across My Daughter’s Big Brass Bed You Don’t, Bob

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