The Day Detroit Fell

 

My name is Daniel Mackay and I was born in Detroit, Michigan in the early 1970s. I have one daughter, one wife, one dog, and many passions, Bob Dylan’s music being among them. I first got turned on to Dylan’s music in January of 1989 when I saw a film of Peter, Paul, & Mary singing “The Times They Are-A Changin’” at the Newport Folk Festival. Mary Travers defiantly shaking her blonde wind-swept hair from her face, jaw clenched as she sang “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land / And don’t criticize what you can’t understand” collided with my adolescent brain at precisely the right altitude. At that moment, the place that I was from fell away from my perception and the thrill of liberty beckoned.

 

Around the same time, it also seemed like every time I turned around, I would hear a song that I liked that had been written by this Dylan guy. I asked my older sister to pick me up some of his cassette tapes at the local music store one day and when she came home from the mall with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Greatest Hits and then, not long after, Highway 61 Revisited, I was hooked.

En bild som visar gul, inomhus, sitter, golv

Automatiskt genererad beskrivning

 

                                   

No doubt because of Dylan’s influence, I studied English Literature, eventually earning a PhD and going on to teach literature and writing at college. My dissertation examined both Walt Whitman and also twentieth-century American poetry.

 

Long ago, I moved to “the great north woods” of Oregon after completing some graduate work in New York City, where I authored a book on role-playing games (The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art). In addition to teaching in Oregon, I co-host a weekly Dylan radio show on KEPW (kepw.org, 97.3 FM-LP) in Eugene, Oregon: “Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers.”

 

About Bob