If you are up on your Dylanology or have read his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, you are aware of the importance Bob Dylan has always placed on family, and particularly his attempts at raising children in as normal an environment as possible for a Dad who doubled as a cultural icon at the zeitgeist.
Dylan has released an illustrated children's book based on one of my favorite of his many songs, Forever Young.
I don't have children, but I'm going to the bookstore to check it out, anyway.
Dylan's 1974 anthem unfolds as a series of vignettes following the growth of a musician/activist (his clean-cut blondness is a far cry from the scruffiness of the real Dylan). May you grow up to be righteous,/ May you grow up to be true finds the hero fist-bumping an African-American school chum; May you have a strong foundation/ When the winds of changes shift captures him on the front lines of a peace demonstration. Illustrator Paul Rogers's line drawings may surprise admirers of his Jazz ABZ: the chilly rendering style and the flat, digitally manipulated compositions recall 1960s low-budget animation. The key to this book's likeliest audience, however, rests in the many visual shout-outs to Dylan's career (they're all explained in an endnote). DA Pennebaker can be seen filming the peace march, while Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez and other hipster icons are among the marchers; another spread depicts the Greenwich Village clubs where Dylan played in the 1960s, and throws in references to both Lay, Lady, Lay (a big brass bed glimpsed through a window) and the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
Read Paul Roger's account of his collaboration here:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=talkbackCommentsFull&talk_back_header_id=6554876&articleid=CA6594957
(...and may you stay forever young.)
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