Bob Dylan’s unexpected shows at a kindergarten class
Bob Dylan has never been known for being predictable. The minute that people started getting too comfortable with him in one genre in performing one specific type of song, he was already looking to bend things in a different direction, whether that was going electric in the 1960s or finding more creative ways to piss off his audience when making the double album Self Portrait. That kind of demeanour isn’t exactly the friendliest to have in the public eye, but the most unexpected thing he could have done was win over the hearts of toddlers.
Because, really, everything that Dylan had ever performed had to come from someone who knew their shit. Even if he was writing the equivalent of a parable with ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, anyone with a cursory knowledge of race relations in America knows about the stakes that he’s talking about and the generational disease that comes with those who look down on someone who doesn’t look exactly like they do.
When looking at where Dylan was heading in the 1980s, though, it’s not like he didn’t have a tender side. We got to see a lot more of his back pages than even he bargained for on albums like Blood on the Tracks, but listening back to the songs on his born-again albums like Saved or Slow Train Coming, he did have a softer side that would have lent itself well to children’s songs, especially ‘Man Gave Names to All the Animals’.
After his career renaissance with Time Out of Mind in the late 1990s, though, Dylan had become a much different character. He had been on his Neverending Tour for years at that point, and even though he was still the travelling missionary of rock and roll at that point, he found some time to keep it in the family when ducking into a kindergarten class to serenade a bunch of kids.
Since Jakob Dylan’s son had begun going to school, Dylan would come off like the adorable granddad who played guitar and taught a bunch of kids about how much fun music could be. Despite being someone who seemed to have a scowl for the last 20 years of his life, that croaky voice was definitely going to be a switch-up for those five-year-olds rather than hearing whatever song happened to be in the latest Disney Channel series.
Suffice it to say, Dylan wasn’t going to be playing ‘Desolation Row’, either. He was still more than happy to play children’s tunes for his grandson, and since he had a habit of being weird during his contributions to Traveling Wilburys albums, it wasn’t out of the question for him to take a few different roads when teaching the kids how to sing.
Because that’s not too far off from how Dylan looked at himself when he first started. The most that anyone needed was a handful of chords to speak volumes when he began woodshedding his craft, and getting those children to sing along with him may have been the beginner’s version of what his heroes like Woody Guthrie were doing years before.
It wasn’t exactly the coolest move for a rock star to make, but Dylan never concerned himself with being cool. He lives by his own musical standards, and since his guitar was still one of the best communal instruments in existence, why not let kids know about the power of rock and roll while they’re still learning to read and write?
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