I had gone with Artie Shein to see Bob.
It was 1965. We were in college at Buffalo, New York—a small town where "Mary Poppins" had played for four years to a full house and the most scenic place to take a date was the cemetery. The university community was out for this event—writers, artists, philosophers, all in denim. The locals were there too, some in sequins, others in lamé. There was great anticipation.
Dylan, it was rumored, might play the electric guitar. He had already done it in Manhattan and had been hit with tomatoes. His fans across the country were in rebellion. Everyone wanted to see it for themselves. He was the conscience of our generation—angry, judgmental, scornful for all that had been done in the name of God and capitalism. He was the poet screaming out in the wilderness. He was our collective righteous voice; how dare he amplify it without our consent.
Dylan appeared in whiteface—thick powder and red, red lips. He was small-boned, wiry, thin, an Afro of sorts. He came out playing. No talking to the audience. It was dramatic, confident. And the crowd went nuts. People screaming for him to get off, others booing, a cop at the foot of the stage to keep us from rushing him reminded me of those early rock concerts at the old Brooklyn Paramount. But no matter how loud we were, he was louder. He just kept playing. It was Highway 61 with those opening notes like a siren—an unprecedented optimism. That sadness of the acoustic guitar, that hesitancy and sense of doom and isolation were gone. Dylan had crossed a line. And we were with him or we were out of it. We didn't yet understand that we were destined to stay together. There was still the 50s to undo and there would be a war to stop. He wasn't waiting and we were too young to be left behind.
I had seen Dylan once before—the first time, I was with my only high school friend, Diana. Dede, as I called her. We were still kids, although far from innocent. We had skipped school many times to be in the Village. We were "into Jazz." We could sing all the Oscar Brown Junior songs, those of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. We had met Horace Silver. We were cool, only wore black, and were probably Beatniks on our way to becoming hippies. Wc read Baldwin, Richard Wright, scorned normal teenage life, wrote existentialist poetry, studied French and Latin, memorized Salinger, critiqued capitalism. And although we were not really folk singing types, when we found out that Joan Baez was to be at Forest Hills, we had to go. We certainly thought she was a bit too sweet and preferred Nina Simone but we were political and so was she. Baez looked ethereal that night and resist as we might, her quavering, ghostly voice brought tears to our eyes. Halfway through the concert she said to the audience, "There's someone here I'd like you to meet. You already know him, he wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind,' and 'Don't Think Twice'—the songs that made Peter, Paul and Mary famous. And he's here tonight." Silence: No one knew who he was. Then this straggly, small guy in some crumpled jacket and curly hair camc on stage—no shoes. He had a hook-up around his neck to balance his harmonica, while his hands held a guitar. Baez kissed him on the check (she was considerably taller) then exited. And without a word he began: "How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man? Yes, and how many seas must a white dove sail, before he sleeps in the sand?" This was something else, not just the lyrics which were clearly poems, but these words as sung by this voice I was mesmerized.
"Come ye masters of war. You that build the big guns...." Up till now it had all been melodic, harmonious, even the protest. But Dylan—tortured, twisted, guttural, that gravely hard-edged voice--- form become content—was defiant. He was fragile, waif-like but tough and that mix gave us strength. We knew it then as we bailed out of that gigantic stadium. We knew it in the years to follow as we waited impatiently for every new album, memorized all the words, analyzed their meaning, wondered about his life. And later, after he'd become the voice of college campuses and had been through it all, Baez predicted: "He's going downhill on golden roller. skates." But that summer night at Forest Hills, 1963, she had called him "Bobby."
By the third time I saw Bob everything had already happened, for him, for me, for the world—enough to fill ten Marge Piercy novels. He had tipped over the edge more than once with drugs, nearly died in that bike crash (or was it heroin?) after which he never looked the same, the boyishness had gone.
He'd been with the Band, without the Band, had become bigger, richer, had lasted longer, been more famous, loved, hated, had written more songs, sang more gigs, toured the country with greater bravado, had had more children, been more elusive and pervasive, had gone deeper, cut sharper, than any other rock star in our history. At times I had cared, stopped caring, then cared again. Perhaps because I'd been across the globe myself a few times, with as many permutations and as many close calls. Who was I to judge? And yet I did. All of us from Brooklyn had drawn the line when he went to the wailing wall and then became a Jew for Jesus: I mean, Bobby Zimmerman. It was hard not to lose interest. But after the 80s had tried to bury the 60s I began to wonder where he'd landed.
In 1989 my two dear student employees brought me to see Dylan once again. They had a fascination with my interest in him and had their own passion as well. I think they saw my attachment as an indication that I too had once been 21 and enamored with some rock star-perhaps a bit out of control. They had bought the tickets and drove us to this Holiday Inn at the edge of the world. As we got close, I started to hyperventilate and begged them not to leave me in such a desolate place. It felt threatening—chicken fried steak and vigilantes. Dropped somewhere in Indiana, this motel/hotel had a Hawaiian motif—dripping waterfall grotto, fake orchids, Mai Tai Drinks "on special." It seemed amazing that we were going to see Dylan here. It was hard to imagine that there was even an auditorium, but they reassured me that a lot of others would join us there as well. I was dubious. We watched people swimming, steam rising from the pool hydrating the paper flowers, and in the spirit of it all I ordered teriyaki shrimp and felt I had entered the inland American vortex, never to be seen again.
Where was I and where was Bob?
The auditorium was mobbed as promised. It resembled a high school assembly—shallow stage, thick curtains, tiered seats. People my age, people their age, people younger than all of us and older. The opening band from San Francisco was so loud and so bad that we sat with our hands over our ears, laughing and praying it would soon end. Had Dylan become just another act that survived generations? There were so many places to have been bumped off along the way. But he was still being heard—cross generations. And he was still an artist—musical integrity intact. His songs had become an animated history spanning thirty years.
He didn't talk now either, just came on in black leather pants, white shirt, a dark sport coat and started up. "Hey, Mister Tambourine Man play a song for me" He chewed the words, grinding them into some pure, pulverized state, become elixir. Older, thicker around the jaw, puffier, he looked physically worn down, but lighter of spirit and definitely more playful. At times I imagined he might even have smiled. There was a medley quality to the show which is always irritating but the band was superb—even that blond guy from Saturday Night Live with the asymmetrical hair—a bunch of pros. Dylan played his old songs but either slowed them down or sped them up. Each became a new thing, a parody of itself, or of our attachment to its former incarnation. These were his songs and he would do with this as he wished-even destroy them before our eyes. There would be no icons. "Ramona come closer shut softly your watery eyes" He sang it faster, each word pronounced deliberately but without differentiation, no value, no meaning for him or for us. He was doing his repertoire, his hits, but he was not about nostalgia. In fact, he refused to recreate the past. He changed it, adapted, shifted the tempo, the intonation. He made fun of himself, exaggerated his nasal voice, his earlier seriousness. The more the audience responded with laughter and applause the more enthusiastic he became. The more sacred the song the more he shuffled it like a card in a deck—any combination of qualities might result. He was playing, having fun. He seemed grateful to be alive, thrilled to be making music, heartened by the adoration that still existed, brilliant in doing himself. "If you're travelin' to that North Country fair, where the winds hit heavy, on the borderline...." Maybe even humored by this place—the waterfall, the constituency—new and old_the songs that just kept coming, the peace that he'd found. He stayed longer than planned, even said with gratitude that we had been "a great audience." It seemed to me that he'd survived and that we'd survived. Or so it appeared that night.
If there has Leen a voice to associate with social change, outrage, and vision, surely it has been his. If there has been a bard of my generation surely it has been him. And if we had become a bit lost surviving the last decades, well, so had he. Or how had we all ended up together in this god forsaken place?
When we got to the parking lot I felt an emptiness I could not explain. The 80s had stolen the collective soul of America. It seemed to have happened overnight. On the "El" platform one morning I looked around and realized I was with the living dead—all dressed in beige raincoats and attaché cases, everything new, including their haircuts. We the generation of rebellion had been displaced by them—the blank souls—with generic cleanliness and money. But it took a while to grasp what had occurred. We continued in our way to fight the fight, to move the country forward wherever we could, but those who had not been through the process of what we now call the "60s" could not know what had gone into the making of us all, what had deepened our vision, challenged our intellects—committed us forever to those early values, however corrupt the world around us became. And those who had not been there could not understand that in the 80s life became unbearably lonely. Even my young friends thought this is how it had always been. There was no longer one voice that could catalyze a generation or a moment in the great chain of being. There was no longer the concept of a generation. Now we were autonomous entities—individual circles of unique complexity and difference, little umbrellas stuck in our own sticky Mai Tai—as damning as that seemed.
It had never just been a "crush," my fascination with Dylan—it was just that he and I and millions of others had been walking a timeline together—so now and then it was good to check in and see how far we'd come.
Maybe Dylan's room overlooked the grotto and he was there gazing into the waterfall at this very moment. Perhaps his next big gig would be a benefit for the Rain Forest, AIDS, South Africa, or just a chance to make money for himself. Maybe there really was no need for sadness, and the 90s would revolutionize it all again—finally heal the ancient rift between body and spirit or else catapult us out of the physical plane forever. A major shift could be happening right now and I might simply be missing it. This was possible. But if it were, and if I was, I'd guess it might be an incremental adjustment that was occurring, not a big bang but rather a slow rumble, each particle redefining itself in history, trying to line up with the whole. For now, I was simply glad to get out of lndiana.