Legend has long had it that sometime in late ’65 the once-friendly Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs had a falling out. While riding around Manhattan in a long black limousine, Dylan, who was into his “uptown Bob” phase, played a new unrecorded song for Ochs (reportedly “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“) and the latter, who had gradually developed a view that Dylan’s post-1963 material was too vague and mercurial and not political enough, told Dylan he didn’t like it.

“Whaddaya mean you don’t like it?” Dylan asked. “It’s not that good,” Ochs replied. Dylan told Ochs to get out of the limo.

I haven’t listened to “Window” in ages, and it’s a lot better than I’d remembered. I’m not saying Dylan was justified in giving Ochs the boot, but I understand why he might have succumbed to an angry impulse. It’s a good song. Ochs was wrong.

Dylan will turn 78 later this month. I don’t like to say or even think stuff like this, but he’s a year and a half older than effing Joe Biden. Like DeNiro and Scorsese, I wish Dylan could somehow stop aging and be allowed to remain on the planet earth forever.