Yesterday a friend here on Micro.blog (@AndySylvester) posted to alert me that Bob Dylan might make an appearance on The Tonight Show last night. As I found out today, my college roommate had also called on the landline from Asia (Manila) to give me the same heads up. I’m sooooo glad that I didn’t insist that my wife stay up to watch it, because it was a silly waste of time. Bob was on camera for about one minute with Fallon, did not speak a word, and the purpose was just to produce a product placement for a new line of whiskey that Dylan is a partner in.

But sometimes one thing can lead to another! Tonight I searched for whatever media the show might have triggered, to have something I might point to here, for any who might have wondered how Andy’s advice came out. The full video is out there, and commentary from several sources. One of them ended with a pitch for a new podcast series called The Opus, which is now doing a series of four podcasts about Bob’s new bootleg box set on his masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks. The Opus was the treasure I found as a result of Andy giving me his heads up!

I already listened to the first two episodes of The Opus. Young musicians were discussing the genius of one of Dylan’s many great albums. It gave me such a nice feeling. We had always thought that his music would live forever, that we were so fortunate to live in the same time that he was creating and performing his music. And here I was witnessing this on the podcast, another generation of young people blown away by his brilliance, discussing it with the latest technology that seems to be all the rage these days. We used the Usenet newsgroup, rec.music.dylan, fifteen years after the album was released, to come to grips with his musical achievement and now more than 25 years after that, a new generation of music lovers were doing the same thing, using a different medium.

As I mentioned last night, Dylan had come to NYC for an eight day run (six shows) at the Beacon Theater in NYC. I strongly encourage any of you in the NY area to go see Bob at one of those shows. He does a little under 100 shows per year, but none of us will live forever, even though his MUSIC likely WILL live forever. If you’ve never seen him in the flesh, please do so during this week. You know, when I was first discovering his music (1967) he was holed up in Woodstock and not performing. We had to rely on playing his first seven albums over and over and over on our record players. Since then he has produced many more albums, but he has also made himself very available with live shows all over the world. Eliminate any possibility of experiencing FOMO (or not just the fear, but actually missing out) over this next week while he is so nearby. Go see one of his shows!