We are moving on to the eighth album in my vinyl series. We’ve now arrived at a musical icon and arguably his most iconic album.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is considered by many to be the first protest album that helped spark the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and one of the greatest decades in rock ‘n’ roll history.

While I really like some of his songs, I would not put Dylan on my Desert Island Discs list. Yet without this album and some of his others, I am not sure that so much music I love would be the same. The song “Blowin’ In the Wind” inspired Sam Cooke to write “A Change is Gonna Come,” one of the most important civil rights anthems of the 1960s and one that means a lot to me personally. Dylan also influenced the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, Townes Van Zant, Sly and the Family Stone, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, The Minutemen, and many others.

On a more serious note, Bob’s Big Boy was a chain of restaurant franchises that started in Southern California in 1936. When I was a teenager, my buddies and I used to hang out at Bob’s Big Boy. I still have an original Big Boy doll and a knock-off that I got from a go-go bar in Thailand that had a Big Boy statue out front. We also used to hang out at VIP’s, a Pacific Northwest chain that got bought out by Denny’s. Their mascot was the Vippy Bunny. In Bellevue, we went to Sambo’s, another SoCal restaurant chain that collapsed under the weight of its racist imagery and corporate bankruptcy.

And of course, there was — and will always be — Denny’s. At one point, we had the Denny’s Travel Guide which was a map of all their restaurants. Our goal was to hit every Denny’s in North America. We did pretty well on the West Coast at least. I still have a picture of me driving drunk in front of Tijuana Denny’s in the 80s.

Acrylic on canvas. Measures 12” x 12”