To my guitar teacher: Bob Dylan

I’ve been trying to get my head around the fact that Bob Dylan is 70.

It’s difficult to think of someone like Dylan being 70 without reminding myself just how old I am.

True, he’s only the latest of the Baby Boomer music icons to reach this milestone of age.

But Dylan’s birthday on May 24 is more personal than some of the others because I owe my guitar-playing genesis to him.

It was the Beatles who introduced me to the pop rock in 1964 that would help define me and 78 million other members of my generation.

But it was Dylan -- his songwriting and his guitar playing -- that led me to a long life of acoustic guitar playing.

Paul Simon ultimately taught me the beauty of melody and the folk ballad.

You know you won't get a lesson in melody from Dylan once you've heard him sing. But it was Bob Dylan who taught me the painstaking detail of teaching myself to play a guitar as a balladeer might.

The first songbook I owned after buying my first acoustic guitar in the summer of 1968 was from the 1967 “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.”

That greatest hits songbook of sheet music was my first exposure to guitar chords, with illustrations on how to position the fingers on the strings in order to create the music.

It wasn’t music for a while. It was an atonal mash of sound.

But practice -- as you know -- may not make perfect, but it can certainly improve one’s ability from atonal to a tune someone might recognize.

A song like “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” with its chords -- G, Em, C, G -- provided the incentive to play over and over again to not only build up the brain part of playing an instrument, but help me build the callouses I needed on the tips of my left fingers to firmly press the guitar strings.

I have my notations all through that songbook with chord transpositions for the songs I found easier to play in another key.

“My Back Pages” from that songbook was the inspiration for the theme of my high school yearbook -- the Exemplar -- from the Oswego Catholic High School class of 1971. I was the yearbook copy editor.

The occasion of Dylan’s 70th prompted a lot of discussion in publications like Rolling Stone Magazine on Dylan’s greatest songs over a very long career.

Rolling Stone’s panel picked “Like A Rolling Stone” as No. 1. No. 2 was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

My Dylan favorites will always be those songs contained in that 1967 songbook.

It’s a long relationship that continues to pay dividends today.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, let me play a song for you.