Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home



With eyes that casts experience and understanding, a young man, with birds-nest hair and a hook-shaped nose, stared back at me as he sat on an old couch. In his hands was a growing, gray cat and around him magazines of Time, cardboard sleeves holding records, and old-fashioned photos of past presidents ambushed his presence. The depiction fascinated me and, with great initiative, I seized my gaze away from the picture, and had delicately slid the record out of it’s case. From the album cover, made of a yellow, flimsy, and out-dated cardboard, Bob Dylan’s casting eyes shadowed me as my uneducated, lifeless eyes watched myself set the record’s sleeve down and place the dull, black disc on it’s turn table. I was given no warning or indication of what I was about to experience.

“Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government…”

As I walked away from the record player, the air was filled with characters that indicated an angelic boom. The music and shouts that vibrated from the speakers clocked into my hearing, and a euphoric feeling filled my chest as something stirred that I’d never felt before. I think that it might have been my soul as tears stained my ignorant eyes, and I realized in one moment I had finally found some sort of freedom.

The incident I encountered that day was arranged by fate. Curious about discovering the past generation’s music, I invested in a vinyl record that seemed to me, at the time, mundane and prosaic. With my grandfather’s turn table, I was introduced to extraordinary ballads and fresh thoughts and opinions. My feelings for music, people, freedom, truth, and heroes were altered.

Music is an everyday thing to my generation; it seems modern songs are created for the deaf sometimes. Today’s society is occupied with compact discs and mp3 players, what I believe to be cheap imitations of ballads. I prefer their ignorance wasn’t certain, though. An ordinary, ancient record to my generation is someone else’s imprint that the artist has left behind in the world. When I’m listening to cascades on vinyl, I’m not just hearing what the musician has to offer, I’m listening to their message and acknowledging the truth that dwells within the record. It’s like meeting myself for the first time, because my ideas and understandings are revealed. One who knows how to breathe air knows the sound of rain falling from Elysium and onto the roof of their home; they know of the easy, calm feelings that the tick, tick, tick, ticking constitutes. As they find peace in the downpour’s symphony, I find peace in a record’s symphony.

I remember a time in the past where I was in conflicts with the people in my surroundings. I was despondent and irritable from a hard day’s troubles, and the outcome consisted of thoughts that believed everything was meaningless. I fought with my friends before I rushed to a room where a record of a blues singer lay on a turn table, waiting for a genuine audience to play it’s unique melodies. The black disc radiated a hazy, but glossy gleam amongst the exhausted, opaque record player. As the record was spinning, it’s needle floated up and down as music filled the air and my head.  All of a sudden, some sort of wisdom and contentment emptied my scattered mind and inertia relaxed my body. The insight that overwhelmed me helped me decipher my anxiety and everything that was inconsequential had a purpose. I found equanimity in it’s declaration and tune. But alongside the freedom, I found inspiration and could finally determine and understand what a hero means to me.

Inspiring to their audience, a person who has done the things you would have done is a hero. They understand absolute freedom and real happiness. No matter where you are in life they will always inspire you in one way or another, doing the things that you would have done.

I remember I witnessed a time when I seasoned a vision. I was listening to Bringing It All Back Home, an album by Bob Dylan. With his first electric symphonies, he inspired me to do great things that will earn my place in history like the things he did to win his way to fame. I imagined a tremendous stage lit up by a spotlight of beaming brilliance. Artists with guitars and poets with diatonic harps played, not with time, but with eternity. I was a record producer with a responsibility of helping many musicians’ dreams become success and apart of reality. Once the album came to a halt, I was left staring into space overwhelmed by my dream. I came to a realization that the Jewish American, in a Carnaby street suit and looking like the dictionary definition of cool, was my hero. A record, that Bob Dylan created, influenced me in a way nothing else could. Like when the young man, with birds-nest hair, listened to his hero’s records when he was young. Staring at the albums cover while the tunes filled his head, Bob Dylan was moved. That same experience happened to me as I’ve listened to his vinyl records.

A few years ago listening to a record would seem absurd to me, but now, it’s the only way I’ll accept music, in it‘s purest form. Shaking, I wrote down my prophecy that night, and ever since then I’ve been content with where I’m heading, as long as my records keep spinning.