courtesy Jazz at Lincoln Center

Paul Simon and Wynton Marsalis
Rose Theater
Friday, April 20

Better than: Fighting the jazz wars.

"My father was the family bassman," sang Paul Simon on a song from Simon and Garfunkel's last album, a line as true as confessional poetry. Like Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, Simon grew up as the son of a bandleader (who led a big band for years under the name "Lee Simms"), and he would watch backstage at the Roseland Ballroom while his father prepared charts by Ellington and sequoias of swing, explaining to his son how he would rotate the keys of each song so that the listener—whether musically literate or not—would feel refreshed. (Paul Simon explained this method to Dick Cavett when he was trying to come up with a bridge to "Still Crazy After All These Years.")

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What do you do when you are the Cute Beatle approaching 70? Age—and those decades of inhaling herb—is finally catching up to those pipes, yet vanity or stubbornness prevents you from simply clipping on that capo to sing your classics in a lower key. Oh, and your name is Sir Paul and you're the only survivor of pop's most valuable (in every sense) conglomerate who is not Ringo.

There are some obvious choices. A reality show? Been there, done that. A Rick Rubin-produced warts and all expose? You would find that Paulie's gritty is everyone else's pretty. As the son of a dance hall bandleader, James Paul McCartney always deferred to the Great American Songbook's greatness. Moving from the stadiums (where, for a $500 ticket, he will do his damndest to hit a younger bloke's high notes) to LA's Capitol studios, where he crooned into Nat Cole's old mic, he is not only aging with dignity but with a subtle beauty young Paul may have missed a few decades ago, when the temptation to show off his octaves (and Little Richard-inspired holler) would be too great.

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(Part One is here.)

So here we are on the once-unthinkable occasion of Dylan turning 70.

When Dylan was starting out, old white men--I mean older than Pete and Woody--were mostly on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement. Older black men, if they were survivors like Howlin' Wolf or Son House, were people to aspire to. Dylan's version of being young--at least in the beginning--was to emulate the older guys on the folk blues records. Odetta, an older black woman, inspired him to go acoustic. But don't take it from me. Here he was in early '62: "I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people." This is Dylan at 21, talking to the great Nat Hentoff for the liner notes of his breakthrough Freewheelin' album, the one that started with "Blowin' in the Wind" and included other chestnuts he still performs: "Hard Rain"; "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"; "Girl From the North Country."

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About a year ago, I was putting a book about Bob Dylan to bed. Since I was looking at year's lead time, my plan was for Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale) to be released on Dylan's 70th birthday, for obvious reasons. I learned early on at my grandfather's funeral the biblical significance of threescore years and ten. Add two thousand years and the development of modern medicine, and you could say that yesterday's threescore years and ten could be today's fourscore years and ten, give or take--in other words, in twenty years, Bob Dylan might very well be Betty White. Still, 70 is a mighty powerful benchmark, and it officially puts the baby boomers, Dylan's original and most fervent demo, on notice that they are either officially old or, with the aid of the Facebook equivalent of 2031, could help snag Dylan a Saturday Night Live hosting stint.

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