I first saw Bob Dylan in concert, after an up-until-then lifetime of desire to do so, in October 1981 in Penn State’s Rec Hall. It was right around my birthday – the tickets, as I recall, were a present. My romantic interest at the time and I had a pre-event dinner with friends – a co-worker and his wife – at their apartment: Chinese, complete with homemade fortune cookies that contained snippets of the master’s lyrics. Mine – specially selected, I’m certain – read: ‘Sometimes I might get drunk, walk like a duck and smell like a skunk.’
It was, appropriately, from ‘I Shall Be Free.’
Neither my relationship nor my friends’ marriage lasted. But Dylan did. He turns 70 today.
Something else lasted: my fascination, bordering, at times, on obsession, with Bob Dylan.
I remember as a kid listening to the old Zenith AM radio my mother had in the kitchen and hearing that voice, one unlike any I had theretofore heard (it was long before the Dylan imitation, good or bad, became part of the standard routine of so many comedians and folk singers, bad or good). The voice was nasal, of course, bearing little resemblance to the honey-throated crooners I was used to hearing on the radio or on my grandparents’ newly purchased TV.
But my Lord, how expressive it was! Plaintive: ‘How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?’ Prophetic: ‘It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.’ Pining: ‘I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe, where I’m bound, I can’t tell.’
And the poetry awakened something in the imagination of a 9-year-old Snyder County boy that, while often slumbering for days, has yet to fall permanently asleep.
I have since seen Dylan several times, listened to his recordings endlessly and read biographies – Penn State professor Toby Thompson’s ‘Positively Main Street’ is a good one – and autobiographies. I’ve tried to discern clues to his unknowable personality, to observe the shifts of a changeling, to follow someone who refused to be a leader.
‘It ain’t me, babe,’ Dylan sang in an acoustic encore that late October night almost 30 years ago. ‘It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.’
That was on the fall leg of Dylan’s ‘Shot of Love’ tour during his late ‘Evangelical Christian’ period. He’s also had a ‘Return to His Jewish Roots’ period, a ‘Nashville Country’ period, a ‘Traditional Bluesman’ period and countless other punctuation marks along the way. I’ve followed them all from a respectful distance, but that first time remains a special, indelible memory.
Today, Dylan is 70, and he is forever linked in my now-56-year-old mind to a State College of long ago and far away, yet one that is very much right here and right now.
At the late and lamented Brickhouse Tavern, every Tuesday was Dylan Day. I’d leave work early – ‘I have an interview with a source’ – arrive long before Happy Hour started and get lost in Rolling Rock and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ It’s where John Cunningham (of Screaming Ducks fame, but a formidable solo performer) sang ‘Jokerman’ every Friday night; where Dr. David Parry learned and sang ‘Visions of Johanna’ – all seven minutes and 30 seconds of it — for me, much to my surprise and delight.
But life goes on. ‘I don’t want to know where I’ve been,’ Dylan told an interviewer about his set lists dating to the early ’60s posted on the Internet. ‘I want to know where I’m going.’ Or as he said another time: ‘Nostalgia is death.’
Maybe. Maybe not.
When Dylan famously ‘went electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger – who turned 92 on May 3! – was overheard saying that he wanted to take a hatchet and cut the amplifier chords. Pete explained later that he was motivated not by righteous indignation over the star folk singer turning rock ‘n’ roller, but by the distortion that made understanding Dylan’s lyrics impossible.
I worked with Pete for several years at a magazine he helped found. We are cautioned about meeting our heroes. They often disappoint us, it seems, by turning out to be just as human as we are. But I found the private Pete Seeger and his public persona to be one and the same: sincere, idealistic and seemingly unable to have a conversation – in person or over the telephone — without breaking into song to illustrate a point.
So if Pete says it is so, I believe him.
(Seeger, too, has a central Pennsylvania connection. The Alan Seeger Natural Area, 10 miles south of the Tussey Mountain Ski Resort along Bear Meadows Road, is named in honor of Pete’s uncle, an American poet who died during World War I while serving in the French Foreign Legion. Pete told me he always wanted to come here and see it.)
I’ve interviewed musicians and politicians, Grammy Award-winners, senators, Congressmen and a president of the United States (who, thankfully, did not, as Bobby nee Zimmerman said he sometimes must, stand naked). But I have never met Bob Dylan. Were I to, I might be disappointed. Or, as with Seeger, proud of the association, however tenuous, to which I humbly lay claim.
But for that one October night in Rec Hall 30 years ago, and countless hours in the Brickhouse Tavern before it closed 20 years ago, I came, perhaps, close enough.
‘Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.’
