Bobby Permanente

Could little Bobby Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota six months before the day that would live in infamy, have imagined as a kid that he would find fame as a spokesman for the next generation?

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand

What he wrote and sang in his 20s, during the 1960s, so eloquently portrayed the era.

Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command

The title song of his third album, released a few months after President Kennedy was assassinated, was the only “hit” on that album but became an anthem for boomers coming of age.

Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.

Yet in “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” his autobiography released a few months after his 63rd birthday in 2004, he says “… the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. … All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.”

Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand

And the newest reality for the man we know as Bob Dylan is that this song is on the audio track of a Kaiser Permanente television commercial.

For the times they are a-changin'.