Facing Bob Dylan
No Opening Act
Dylan and I stumbled down the middle aisle as Bob Dylan took the stage. Standing about twenty-five yards from us, the skinny minstrel gripped the microphone, his penetrating eyes peering straight ahead, seeming to stare straight through me. Part of me was already beginning to write the story, while another part wondered whether I was worthy of this encounter. The first part immediately answered the second: “Only if what you write about it proves you worthy.”
Here I was with Dylan, standing nakedly before Dylan, foolishly searching for an usher. We sought to find our proper place among these unlabeled seats, within the basketball gym turned makeshift auditorium, an appropriately inapt setting for an immortal poet about to mouth his songs.
I had met him many times in dreams, during which we had carried out muddled conversations, and within which I did the most of the talking and almost always began by mentioning that I’d studied under Allen Ginsberg when I was twenty.
Now, as I woke to this dream concert, I faced him in the flesh— the 79-year-old anomaly of anomalies, his facial skin drooping. Like one of the predicaments in his songs, there was no turning back, and no going forward—either for him or for me.
I looked around, noticing other dads with their sons, most of the sons younger than Dylan, and the dads younger than me—although I could pass for their age. I have aged very well, maybe better than Dylan has. I felt good about this and because I was sure that other than Dylan and Dylan, I was the only talented writer in the building.
For some of these fathers and sons, the night might have been the occasion of a cultural transmission across generations, even if it wasn’t recognized it as such. But for Dylan and me, this was not the case. Dylan later noted that his whole life had been narrated by Bob Dylan songs, which, while making the night surreal, also made it something other than an initiation ceremony.
No, that had already happened, beginning long ago. In fact, Dylan had been named after the man standing before us, although I’d lied about it for years. When he was a child, I would routinely tell anyone who asked that he was named after the lesser known but celebrated Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. The truth is that Dylan wouldn’t be Dylan if Dylan hadn’t adopted the first name Dylan as his surname.
Nevertheless, this was the first time Dylan and I had seen Bob Dylan together, and, despite our shared reverence for his monumental artistry, only the second time that either of us had seen him at all. So, after we’d been led to our proper seats, seats 1 and 2 in row JJ to be precise, or thirty-six rows from the stage, I turned to Dylan, my son—my eyes pointing upwards and sideways toward Bob Dylan—and said, “your namesake.” As if he didn’t know. A younger singer-songwriter, Dylan nevertheless smiled.
But what did this night mean to me individually? From age 16 on, my life has been accompanied by a Bob Dylan soundtrack. The “periods” have even aligned with some of Dylan’s periods. I had a religious experience and embraced Christianity in the early eighties. I fell away later, only to return again. There’s more. The love of my life was named Sarah, and like Bob Dylan’s Sara, my Sarah left me without explanation.
‘Twas Then He Felt Alone
Beginning with Things Have Changed, it is immediately clear to everyone that they have, especially since the folk days, when he used to care, but cares no more. Because things have changed, it follows for him that It Ain’t Me Babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe. And it never was. But it’s been Highway 61 Revisited ever since—a nomadic consequence of A Simple Twist of Fate, which happened before it happened.
Forever on the move, he nevertheless wonders how long he must wait—for another love, or another twist of fate. The latter would bring new love, but also steal it away. This is why he waits for another in the first place. Thus, he realizes that he Can’t Wait after all. What’s the use of waiting for another twist of fate? Instead, he will look forward to the day, When, as he says, I Paint My Masterpiece. Finally, every thing's gonna be different. Although if you were Honest with Me, he suggests, you’d admit that it won’t be, at all.
So much so that, as he tells it, Tryin’ to Get to Heaven is no more difficult, nay, probably even less so, than trying To Make You Feel My Love. For both, he will Pay in Blood, just like poor Lenny Bruce. But while Lenny Bruce is dead, he’s still important, even more than the Early Roman Kings. But not more than the Girl from the North Country, who was once nearby but always gone. Like Lenny, the Roman Kings, the lover of a twist of fate, and Sarah, she is lost and gone forever. But she was no one in particular, although everyone in great detail. She’ll be missed more than the others, as she is the others combined, yet more than the sum of their parts.
Although the spotlights dim after each and every song, It’s Not Dark Yet, at least not as long as another song follows. But it’s gettin’ there. At which point you won’t have ol’ Bob Dylan to kick around anymore, or least his vocals to make fun of, which you shouldn’t have anyway. If you did, you failed to recognize his vocal genius, akin to but not the same as his lyrical genius. If you don’t like that Bob Dylan is a creation of himself, you better go back to from where you came. Until you do, however, and even after, continue to expect Thunder on the Mountain. But remember, both Soon After Midnight and before, You Gotta Serve Somebody, either the Devil or the Lord, but not both or neither. If, like the nondescript, anonymous man in Ballad of the Thin Man, you’re still confused and need further instructions, just hold on a bit longer, and as you do, remember that while It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.
Shakespeare, He’s in the Alley
I listen to Dylan again, on Tuesday following the Sunday night concert. Shakespeare, he’s in the alley. Though the song goes on to speak of his pointed shoes and his bells, the point that is that he’s in the alley, no matter how he’s dressed or what he says and does. A poetic genius such as Shakespeare, if in fact a possibility, would not likely fare very well today. Despite his brilliance, or more accurately, because of it, in a world in which banal, narrow and petty competence is king, Shakespeare would be loser, a bum. The literary genius and sensibilities of Shakespeare would amount to liabilities, not assets.
So yes, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley. And so is Bob Dylan. You must be in the alley, to be Stuck Inside of Mobile, to glimpse the underbelly of the beast, to be a poet. But in a life’s work of mental and spiritual gymnastics, Dylan at once has hovered above and stood in the alley. His genius has been to both live and transcend the tragicomedy that he describes.
As should be obvious by now, my appreciation of Dylan goes well beyond the folk legend, the epochal lyricism of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. After issuing these and other indictments, he felt them boomerang. As he sang in “My Back Pages,” “I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach[ed].”
He would then emerge from the folk-conscious lyricism that captured what, at some level, everyone thought but only he could express. He’d instantly surpassed all predecessors, including his idol, Woody Guthrie. From there, he leaped into the abyss that gazes back, where the singular, solitary individual meets the haunted frightened trees. Of course, for the artist, the individual, the songwriter, the poet, the singular soul, there is no difference between the two encounters. Whether one issues jeremiads or disappears through the smoke rings of his mind, the existential aloneness is the same. The only difference is that the in the latter case, the existential aloneness has become the lyrical content itself.