Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
I have to come clean.
For all of my life, I have not met Bob Dylan. In fact, not meeting Bob Dylan is a big part of my day-to-day. I can honestly say that my close, personal relationship with Bob Dylan, established when I was a teen and more deeply developed over subsequent decades, only exists to the extent that it has not happened yet. Sure, there was that time recently when my car almost collided with Dylan’s tour bus behind the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, but my wife, who is an excellent driver, deftly evaded the careening behemoth as it turned a blind corner and thus assured that our close, personal encounter was not to be. In my many years, though, one time, and only one time, my not meeting Bob Dylan was particularly remarkable.
My first Bob Dylan concert came upon me at a decidedly young age. I was 16, and it was October 1981. No, I did not somehow remember all this time that it was October 1981. As with many people my age who are familiar with the intricacies of The Google, I looked it up.
The concert was at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, which was a big indoor hockey hall or basketball bowl or concert cavern, depending on your preferred entertainment. It has since, in an apparent act of mercy, been imploded. I had been there before to see the Flyers and the Sixers and, I think, the Harlem Globetrotters and maybe the Ice Capades. I had also been there for several concerts, and I must say that the Spectrum’s fabled acoustics never failed to disappoint. The Spectrum was in fact the site of the very first concert I ever attended, which was a humdinger. I saw Eric Clapton with an opening act — some old fat guy sitting on a stool playing boring old-timey music. I booed him.
Some years later, when I began to appreciate and love the blues and to adore Muddy Waters, I was horrified to realize that I jeered the man himself. In my defense, I was probably about 14. Oh, and for the record, Clapton sucked.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder I ever went to a concert again.
So, here I was, a couple of years later, heading off with my girlfriend and another friend to see Dylan. I had grown enamored of Dylan’s music even though my awareness of it was limited to what I heard on the radio and a couple of albums I borrowed from someone’s mom — Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and the notoriously delirious record-company revenge album, Dylan.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder I became a Dylan fan at all.
As for my friends, neither was as big Dylan fan as I was. The one who wasn’t my girlfriend was probably there because he just liked going to rock concerts, any rock concert, to piss off his ultra-square parents. As for the other, she probably thought she had to fulfill some sort of girlfriendly obligation by suffering through a performance she cared little about.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder she continued to date me after that or at all for that matter.
Being so young, we got a ride from someone’s mom, so we arrived ridiculously early. The outer doors of the arena were open, but they would not let us into the seating bowl right away. While we waited, besotted by that distinctive mix of giddy excitement and utter boredom that teens experience with perplexing frequency, we suddenly could hear muffled music from inside — a band and some singers doing a sound check. We were confused because we had never heard Dylan with backing vocals.
Importantly, this concert occurred at the end of Dylan’s two-point-five-album gospel period, and we were blissfully ignorant of the fact that previously Dylan had been performing only his gospel tunes while preaching fire and brimstone from the stage. Fortunately, he had starting mixing in his older secular material by the time we saw him and had dropped the sermons. God only knows what would have come of my Dylan fandom if my first live show was a year or so earlier.
Thank you, hairy Jaysus!
Eventually, the doors swung open and we wandered around to find our seats. The arena was a standard oval with the stage at one end, and we were seated pretty high up and back — on the house-left side, for those keeping score at home. I was close to the aisle, and my friends were in the next two seats toward the stage. Since we were so early, there were only a few hundred people in this building built for tens of thousands, so it was a strange scene.
People see me all the time
And they just can't remember how to act
My friends were chatting away, which was odd because they usually did not get along as I recall. Meanwhile, I was all pumped up for my first Dylan concert, restlessly looking around and observing the few people present. It was all pretty sedate, though. Then, across the empty arena, this odd, creepy guy caught my attention. He had been skulking about way down toward the stage area and was now making his way quickly, straight along our row of seats.
I thought, what a weirdo! There were a dozen empty rows above and below us, but he chose the only occupied row — our row! — to do whatever he was doing. I did not feel threatened or anything like that. Just bemused and annoyed. Would he force us to stand up to let him out of the row?
He got within ten or twenty feet of us, and then stepped over the seats into the the next row down. It was hard to make out his face because he was wearing what we then all called a “sweatshirt with a hood” or “a hooded sweatshirt,” now known as a “hoodie.” It was gray, and he wore the hood up even though we were indoors.
Weirdo!
He continued down the row in front of us with my friends paying him no mind even as he passed right before them. When he got to me, he glanced my way. In that instant, I got a good peek at him. There was something extraordinary about this weirdo. I observed the curly mound of hair, the heavy eye makeup, and the intense blue eyes.
Just then I had an epiphany and jumped up exclaiming, “You’re Bob Dylan!”
The man looked right at me and said, with a perfect Bob Dylan sneer, “No, kid, I’m not me,” which is, to the best of my recollection, a verbatim recreation of precisely what did not happen.
Instead, I silently watched him turn to climb the stairs toward the tunnel behind. I interrupted my friends’ chit-chat then. “Did you see that guy?” They had barely registered his existence. I told them how he had come from the direction of the stage straight down our row, and all the rest. Everything I already told you. If you have forgotten, just go back and re-read it. I’ll wait.
My friends were unimpressed. I said, “Did you see his face?” Of course they hadn’t. “He was a total Dylan freak,” I told them. “He even was trying to look like Dylan. He had the same hair, and he was wearing makeup, I guess to make him look even more like Dylan. What a nut!” I thought him even odder for bothering to put on his Bob Dylan mask only to cover his masquerade with a hood.
You know, they refused Jesus, too
They got a little excited at all this information and wondered if it was indeed Bob Dylan himself. “No way,” I declared with all the swaggering confidence a teenaged Bob-splaner could muster. “Why would Dylan be wandering around? It’s just some goof who wants to be Dylan.” I had heard about fanatics like that.
Weirdo.
They shrugged and went back to chit-chatting before I noticed this same guy in the hoodie heading down an aisle much closer to the stage. “Hey, there’s that freak again,” I told my friends. We tracked him as he moved right toward offstage and then disappeared. I expressed surprise that security did not try to stop him and wondered where he was sitting. Was there seating behind the stage?
“That guy must be crazy,” I said. My friends shrugged again and kept talking.
Everybody's wearing a disguise
Some years later, I read that Dylan sometimes got performance jitters and would calm himself by meandering through concert venues in street clothes before the crowd showed up. While that was a compelling piece of information, I was still convinced, as I was from the get-go, that my wandering weirdo was just some Dylan wannabe.
Decades after that, as I became more immersed in Dylanology, I learned that Dylan’s preferred public garb when not performing was a gray hoodie, like the one my weirdo was wearing. If you have ever seen Dylan’s film Masked and Anonymous, and I recommend it, Jeff Bridges appears in his early scenes wearing such a hoodie, ostensibly as some sort of tribute to Dylan’s sartorial proclivities. Come to think of it, maybe it was Jeff Daniels who was wandering around Philly’s Spectrum in 1981.
No. I still maintain that I did not have a close encounter with Dylan even though, I admit, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It’s just too vexing to think otherwise. Besides, it is more fun to imagine that some obsessive Dylan wannabe was wandering around before my first Dylan concert. Right? That’s a better story, right? The alternative, as with Muddy Waters, is to acknowledge that by the tender age of 16 I had already twice blown an opportunity to fully appreciate a musical legend right in front of me.
That One Time I Did Not Meet Bob Dylan