You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Bob Dylan on the Grammy’s. That was crazy, excruciatingly crazy.
In a show that saw Lady Ga Ga enter in an egg, Justin Bieber pull his collar up like he was cool, and Will.I.am look robotic in a suit accentuated with tin foil, Bob Dylan looked dead, his voice emanating from the crypt.
Dylan, once the voice of a generation, had been reduced to a bumbling, stumbling zombie of lost lyrics and guttural disassociation.
I found myself straining to hear the TV while he sang. I was adjusting the volume hoping amplitude of audio would somehow interpret the peregrine vocalizations of this aging rocker.
Somewhere between the 60’s and the world we live in now, Bob Dylan’s voice exited the super highway of sound that is tolerable to the human ear. His vocal chords dropped a tab of LSD and his voice hallucinated its way into obfuscation.
Even back in the day, understanding Bob Dylan was hard to do. He was half grunt, half-hearted enunciation. Dylan was like a singing centaur. One part harmony, one part snorting barn animal.
Now Bob Dylan is a wadded up piece of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of Usher’s Shoe.
It’s said that the Hopi Indians obscure dialect was the key to the U.S. Army’s code against the Nazis in WWII. In the late 60’s the Department of Defense used Bob Dylan’s vocalization patterns against Charlie on the Mekong Delta.
Now when Bob Dylan sings, dogs from Timbuktu to Tacoma wail with a pain that is profoundly sad.
So I’m watching the Grammy’s Sunday night and who stumbles onto the stage but an aging Bob Dylan, preserved in formaldehyde.
His skin is wrinkled like salami that has dried in the sun. His hair is all Albert Einstein, dryer than Brillo on an Arizona black top. But it is his voice, that scratchy, unintelligible voice, that catches my attention and makes me wince.
His song mechanics have deteriorated so badly, the words dribble out of his mouth like broken glass psycho babble.
Dylan sounds like a frog that has a frog in its throat.
Dylan sounds like the Aflac duck getting run over by a car with no muffler, like a taxi cab back firing in a Tijuana alley, like a spatula scrubbing a frying pan full of chicken fat, like sand paper rubbing a microphone in a fireworks display.
If you could see Dylan’s voice it would look like cigarette smoke swirling in a hospital ventilator. It would taste like sweet and sour pork left in the sun.
If his voice was played over the loud speakers at the zoo, Wolverines would gnaw through their cages to run away to eat rancid meat in a snow storm in Tibet.
Listening to Bob Dylan sing is like a pimple being popped with a switch blade knife, it’s like a car wreck inside a birthing suite, it’s like gravel being dumped in your eye.
Bob Dylan’s voice is on life support, hooked to defibrillator paddles ignited by jet fuel. Listening to his Grammy sounds is akin to shoving a mouth full of braces into a microwave oven.
In a show where Lady Gaga wore ass pants and Gwynth Paltrow got busy on a Baby Grand, Bob Dylan was a major disappointment.
It’s not like it was an AARP thing, because Barbara Streisand was brilliant. And Mick Jagger, whose voice has denigrated over the years, brought the crowd to its feet.
So Bob, forgive me, if I am harsh in my assessment of your guttural vocalizations.
I’m glad you are still alive, but sorry your voice is dead.
I’m just calling it as I see it.
And that is crazy