Bobcat Nation:
Memoirs of a Young
Bob Dylan Fan
by Adam Selzer
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE:
By Way of Introduction
CHAPTER TWO:
A Brief Dylan Bio
CHAPTER THREE:
I Was a Teenage Bobcat
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Old, Weird America
Dalton and Atlanta GA, 2001
CHAPTER FIVE
Love, Theft, and Dutch Sailor's Eyes
Nashville 2001
CHAPTER SIX
Adam and Mike's Excellent Adventure
Newport Folk Festival 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN
Risking Your Life for the Rail
The Atlanta Lightning Storm, 2003
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cowboys and Hippies
Dylan and the Dead 2003 tour
CHAPTER NINE
We Can All Be Famous
For Fifteen People
Chicago and Atlanta, 2004
DYLAN REVIEWS
2005-Present
Chapter One:
By Way of Introduction
In February of 2002, Mike Johnson and I drove from Milledgeville, Georgia, to Birmingham, Alabama. On purpose.
Going to Alabama on purpose is not something you hear of people doing very often; Georgians speak of Alabama about the same way New Yorkers tend to think of New Jersey - and few people think of Georgia as the height of sophistication to begin with. Even the presence of three colleges in Milledgeville, one of which we attended, didn't make the town seem any less backwards. But, on the bright side, it wasn't in Alabama.
We were going for the same reason we always went to Alabama – to see a Bob Dylan concert. We had the option of seeing him closer to home, and had, in fact, taken it. We'd seen him in Atlanta a week before, and in Augusta the previous evening. But to see a third show in a week, a trip to Alabama was worth the effort.
The first trip I ever made into Alabama had been three years early, when I went to see Dylan play a show with swing-rockers The Brian Setzer Orchestra serving as the opening act (a double bill too strange to pass up). On the way, shortly after crossing the border, everyone in my car noticed a cloud formation in the sky that looked like Jesus sticking up his middle finger. Welcome to the Bible Belt, indeed!
On this particular evening, Alabama was on fire – literally. There was a lot of smoke coming from somewhere, though we couldn't figure out where it was coming from - maybe a controlled burn of a field, maybe a barbecue gone horribly wrong. For lack of a better idea, we took it to be a good omen that the show that night would be a good one. The show in Augusta the night before had been decent, but not great. Dylan himself had given the show a thumbs-down at the end of the encores (a very, very rare occurance, Dylan almost never comments on the quality of his own performance). Throughout the evening, he had missed a few vocal cues, never appeared to be particularly inspired, and often seemed to be in a bad mood. Not that we were disappointed; that show had featured a harmonica solo on "All Along the Watchtower," something that was never known to have happened in concert beforehand, which, along with Dylan's "thumbs-down," made the show an even worth seeing. But it wasn't enough to make the show a great one.
We were Bobcats. Hardcore Dylan fans. We never missed a Dylan show within reasonable driving distance, if we could help it, even if it meant driving into the heart of Alabama. The fact that the night before hadn't been up to snuff was meaningless; it was just like Dylan to follow a bad show with a great one.
We arrived at the venue in Birmingham several hours early, and didn't see anyone else present, but people gradually started to filter in. First came a girl who was reading The Great Gatsby, which Dylan had quoted directly in his most recent album, Love and Theft. Then came a guy who was supporting himself by selling fancy, designer bongs out of a suitcase.
"That's pretty brave," I said, "selling drug gear right out in the open like that."
"Nah," said Mike, who was a bit more drug-literate than I, and a lot less paranoid about cops. "You can't be arrested for selling a pipe with nothing in it."
This was a good point; as long as there was nothing in it, the police would have no way to prove that the pipes weren't designed for soap bubbles.
A woman came up and told us how she'd seen a cool guy posting on an internet mailing list, and e-mailed him to ask if he was, as she suspected, Bob Dylan. He'd replied that he was, and she'd exchanged e-mails with him for some time before determining that it might not really be him. She seemed very disappointed by this, so we politely refrained from laughing. Dylan is not the sort of rock star who has meet-n-greets with his fans, one radio station who asked to arrange a meet-up was told that he has relatives he hasn't met yet. The idea of Dylan talking to fans on the internet was downright comical; in a recent interview, he'd been asked whether he got online, and had replied "I'm afraid to go on the internet. I'm afraid some pervert will lure me someplace!" He's often been known to speak in italics.
Slowly, all of the regulars that we'd seen at several other shows began to filter in. My friend Sam arrived in the early evening, which was unusual, for him. If it had been a general admission show, he, along with most of the other regulars, would have been there in the early morning in an attempt to get a front-row seat.
Then, while walking around the venue, Mike and I noticed that we could hear some faint, familiar music coming from inside the building. The soundcheck was going on!
I'd spoken to several people who'd managed to hear the soundcheck at concerts before, and had always wanted to hear one myself. Being able to tell what's going on in the soundcheck is sort of a badge of honor among Bobcats.
The wall of the arena was covered with several metal doors, and we found that if we stuck our ears up to the cracks in the door, we could hear what was going on pretty well.
I noticed a guard staring at us.
"Do you think this could get us in trouble?" I asked Mike.
"What's he gonna say?" he asked. "‘Stop listening to the wall?'"
That worked for me. So, with a little concern that maybe one's ear could get stuck to cold metal, the way a tongue can get stuck to a frozen telephone pole, we pressed our ears against the cold dusty steel and tried to hear the band.
It took a moment to realize that the first song they were doing was "Emotionally Yours," with guitarist Larry Campbell (presumably) on violin. That song hadn't been played live in a decade! But it wasn't unusual for the band to soundcheck songs that never actually got played.
They then ran through "Not Dark Yet," "Honest With Me," and a couple of acoustic numbers that we couldn't quite identify before calling it a day. This was going to be a good show already; we already had a story to tell!
We wandered into the venue about an hour before showtime, spoke with my friend Sam and a few of the other regulars, then settled in for the show.
The countless fans who were waiting at home for the setlist to be posted online were probably disappointed; the show that night was primarily Greatest-Hits selections that had been played to death – "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Masters of War," "Tangled Up In Blue," "Like a Rolling Stone,"and the like. Setlist-watchers are more interested in obscure songs that rarely get performed. They found the setlist that night to be a terrible bore.
But we knew better – quite unlike the night before, Bob was ON that night, belting out the songs as though he'd just written them, getting both inventive and theatrical with his phrasing. He was clearly in a much better mood.
During "Things Have Changed," I waited for him to sing the line "feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet," then turned to the attractive girl behind me and said "nice to meet you!" She gave me one of the dirtiest looks I've ever been given.
But that didn't matter – the show was a killer, whether I was having any luck with flirting or not. Best of all, he did something he very rarely did on stage – he spoke. When he finished introducing the band, he approached the microphone and said "and....I guess that's about it!"
Hardcore Bob Dylan fans learn to appreciate subtle things fast. A Dylan concert is like fine wine; a novice might be turned off by the taste, but the connosseiours learn to appreciate the subtle differences in the flavors, textures and body from night to night.
And that night, to be a hardcore fan was a great thing. We were the ones who really noticed that "High Water" rocked like the soundtrack to the greatest western movie ever filmed. "Masters of War" was spat out with a vengeance. Even "Tangled Up In Blue," which had been played at nearly every concert for the past ten years, sounded better than I'd ever heard it.
Mike and I were college students with barely a dime between us. Travelling to three different Dylan shows in a week was something that we couldn't afford.
But that never stands in the way of a Bobcat.
These people are nuts.
I'm pretty sure that the Visa company must break out the good cookies in the cafeteria every time Bob Dylan announces a new tour. Or, at the very least, they probably start thinking that they should send people like me a nice card. Bob Dylan has played roughly 100 shows a year every year since the late 1980s, and quite a few people have gone into serious hock to see as many of these shows as possible.
Bob Dylan is by no means the best selling artist in the world; only a couple of his albums have gone platinum, and several never even went gold. But, as of this writing, typing "Bob Dylan" into the Yahoo search engine yields 2.4 million results.
Bobcats. The Bobsessive. Dylan Freaks. Call them (us) what you will, they walk among you. They're harder to spot than the tie-dyed Deadheads, but they're out there. Hanging around in Dylan chat rooms, waiting for the setlist of the night's concert to be posted. Telling anyone who'll listen that, when he sings "the next sixty seconds could be like an eternity" in "Things Have Changed," there are exactly sixty seconds left in the song. Collecting more bootleg concert tapes than any normal person would want. Their idea of a good time is sitting for hours outside of a venue where Dylan is playing, making sure they get a good spot on the floor.
And, of course, they're ready to punch anyone who says Dylan can't sing. So maybe the best way to identify them is by their bruised knuckles, because that one seems to come up a lot.
There's something about Dylan that inspires his fans to be, well, crazier than others. No one, to my knowledge, has ever tried to claim that Neil Diamond was a prophet. No one would claim that Paul McCartney "makes Shakespeare look like Billy Joel" (as George Harrison said of Dylan). And an awful lot of people may see a ton of Wayne Newton concerts, but no one seems to think he's the Messiah. I don't think Bob Dylan is, either, for the record. But I'm on board for comparisons with Shakespeare and the other great poets.
I find myself on the younger end of the Dylan Freak spectrum. When I was born, in 1980, Dylan was in the midst of his born-again Christian period. When he was in what most would consider his prime (1965-66), my parents were in elementary school. Most people my age seem to think of Dylan as "an old hippie who took a lot of drugs and is gonna die soon." We can try to point out that he was never what you'd call a hippie, that he probably took far less drugs than your average rock star in the sixties, and that he seems to be in pretty good health these days, but it's no use. To them, he's just the guy who sang that song "Hurricane." Or that "everybody must get stoned" song. Or "that one guy who can't sing." (grrrr.) Most of the world has been working for years to reduce Dylan to a single cliché. As a result, the average college-aged hardcore Dylan fan spends an awful lot of time explaining that "Mr. Tambourine Man" is not about a drug dealer.
Well, probably not, anyway.
I remember the first two albums I ever owned. One was Even Worse, Weird Al Yankovic's rip on Michael Jackson's Bad. The other was Kids Inc. Sing The Chart Hits. Kids Inc was a show on the Disney Channel featuring a band of kids who played music, primarily oldies, at a little diner called The Place. Quite a few of the first albums I owned as a kid were by bands featured in shows on The Disney Channel. I actually owned the album released by The Party, the badn consisting of members of the New Mickey Mouse Club. I was about as unhip as a kid could get, except for the fact that I listened to lots of hair-metal bands on Q102 FM and owned nearly every Billy Joel album. But, while hair bands have come to be seen as cool, in an ironic sort of way, Billy Joel has still not been declared acceptable by the hipsteratti.
I admit this all freely and without a trace of guilt or shame; no one is responsible for the music they listen to before the age of fourteen (and, even after, I can't think of many instances when one should be ashamed of enjoying music). These are, for better or worse, the records that originally shaped my musical tastes and ideas. And, in my own defense, I was able to recognize that Springsteen's "Thunder Road" had pretty good lyrics, even though the Kids Inc. version left out all but a few key lines. And I still listen to Billy Joel.
In middle school, I discovered Metallica. Or, rather, I became obsessed with them. Every spare minute of my time that wasn't devoted to collecting Star Wars memorabilia was suddenly devoted to heavy metal. My friends and I would get together to read every article published on bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera, poring over the lyric sheets, trying to figure out what each song was "about." Or, on days when we felt like going deeper, what they "meant." We even read the Book of Revelations with great interest, since an awful lot of metal bands seemed to take lines from that when they ran low on songwriting ideas.
In seventh grade, when asked to name a favorite poet (a situation that never seems to come up anymore), I immediately named James Hetfield, Metallica's singer and primary lyricist. On this one, I'll claim a little bit of shame. I can remember listening to the chorus of "Enter Sandman" and thinking that it was pure poetry ("Exit light, enter night / take my hand / we're off to never-never-land"). Today, looking back, most of the songs are perfectly functional metal lyrics, but, when separated from the music, sound absolutely stupid. Some of them sound pretty stupid even when still attached to the music. But all those songs about war, death, philosophy (of sorts) and politics were sort of revelatory to me. Even when there were politics implied, Billy Joel had never showed much outrage in his music. Anger, maybe, but not outrage.
Now, I'm not going to claim that heavy metal changed my life for the better; I'm older and, hopefully, I little bit wiser now. Recently I saw a commercial for a Monster Ballads CD which was filled with pictures of glammed-out metal singers, all singing the slow, sappy songs that filled out every single glam album to get the bands on Top 40 radio. The voice-over claimed that "they taught us how to live, and they taught us how to love." All I could think was "well, that explains a lot." Anyone who learned to live and love from the guy from Motley Crue is probably in need of some serious therapy. But metal singers were by no means afraid of singing about religion and politics, at least on the songs that didn't make the radio, and those were two subjects that Top 40 hits politely avoided. Metal bands sang about lots of issues that never seemed to come up in pop music, like dragons, time-travelling, Satan, and sex. In first grade, I didn't know that there was a difference between Lita Ford and Tiffany. Now I know – the difference is that Lita Ford made more direct references to getting laid.
Throughout Junior High, my taste in music expanded a bit; I started listening to stuff like Counting Crows, The Beatles, and other music that struck me as "artsy," which was a clear step up in terms of musical taste, but my taste was still far from maturing (and, God willing, my tastes will never be fully "mature," which I imagine would involve a whole lot of Lawrence Welk). In eighth grade, I got into "protest songs." Not necessarily good protest songs, mind you; I was still so easily impressed by song lyrics that the story of the People of the Valley discovering that the words "Peace On Earth" were a treasure in "One Tin Soldier" knocked me on my ass. It's a small miracle, one that one could probably even credit to Dylan, that I didn't grow up to have a lot of posters with corny inspirational quotes hanging all over the place.
Somewhere, vaguely, in the back of my mind, I had heard that real aficionados of protest music often cited Bob Dylan as the greatest writer of them all. I also knew that my friend, Seth, had, without any particular explanation, called Bob Dylan the "great godfather of heavy metal." I had the standard image of Dylan in my mind - and old guy, somewhat reclusive, who had written a lot of songs, probably so many that nobody even owned every one of his albums, and had a weird, nasal sort of voice. Played some harmonica. For one reason or another, though, it never occurred to me to look into his work.
Never, that is, until one night when I was riding around Des Moines with my friends Sean and Merideth in a van driven by Sean's father. These friends were also into "protest songs," and we sort of considered ourselves to be semi-intellectual.
"Here's a song you guys might like," said the driver, putting a tape into the stereo. "It's called 'With God On Our Side.'"
"That doesn't really sound like our kind of song," said one of us.
"Just listen to it," came the reply. "Bob Dylan wrote it."
And so he played us the song. Not Dylan's version of it; it was from a Judy Collins albums of Dylan covers. But Dylan's lyrics were unchanged.
Now we've got weapons
Of the chemical dust
and if fire them we're forced to
then fire them we must
one push of the button
and you shot the world wide
but you never ask questions
when God's on your side
Whoa.
Now, here we had a song that mixed both religion and politics, with an appropriately liberal slant on both, and without any silly back-story about the People on the Mountain or anything like that. I was blown away.
A week or so later, I moved to Atlanta, taking with me the advice that I would probably like Bob Dylan, particularly "With God on Our Side" and something called "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (heck, that just plain sounded artsy).
I bought the first Dylan CD I saw, Bringing it all Back Home, expecting to hear a hippie protest singer who didn't sing very well. What I got was a half-rock, half-folk album that was like nothing I'd ever really heard before, lyrically or otherwise. I very well remember when I first put that disc in my CD player, and hearing that first line of the rocked up beatnik-poetry extravaganza, "Subterranean Homesick Blues:" "Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine/I'm on the pavement, thinking 'bout the government." Hey! I'd heard that line quoted someplace before. I think they sang that one time on Murphy Brown.
And the great lines just kept coming. By the end of the album, I'd heard a bunch of lines that I'd heard quoted in the past. How could one album contain so many familiar lines? And how could a thirty-year-old album still sound so fresh? Most of the metal albums from the seventies sounded like they had come from a whole different planet. One listen to Bringing it all Back Home, and I was hooked.
Then I noticed the poem in the liner notes, in which Dylan wrote "i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me," then went on to describe the school system as "an invisible circle of which no one can think without consulting someone." To an eighth grader who had taught himself to question authority and fancied himself a bit of an intellectual, this was like the discovery of gold.
A few weeks later I bought the newly-released Bob Dylan: MTV Unplugged CD, which gave me versions of a few more of the "greatest hits" material, including "With God On Our Side," and a few more recent songs, such as "Dignity" and "Shooting Star," which showed me that he was still writing, and still doing good stuff. By fall, I had read a flimsy biography or two, and was titling every page of my social studies notes after a Dylan song. We were studying ancient Rome at the time; my notes had titles like "Just Like a Roman," "Rainy Day Romans #12 and 35," "Like a Roman Stone."
Clearly, my days of thinking that Metallica lyrics were the height of modern poetry were long gone.
<-Previous Next->