The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  On 60 Minutes in 2004, Dylan described what sounded like the flip side of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson’s crossroads deal with the devil. He said he still toured because in order to get where he was, he made an agreement—a “bargain,” he called it—with the “chief commander.”

  “On this earth?” interviewer Ed Bradley asked.

  “In this earth,” Dylan replied, “and in the world we can’t see.”

  5

  “HE CASTS A SPELL”

  Seven years after Saved, Dylan was at low ebb. Deep into his forties, his life seemed as chaotic as ever. In the years after his marriage to Sara foundered, Dylan had fallen into relationships with women one after another after another, several of whom were backup singers hired during his gospel years. He married and divorced once, or possibly twice, according to biographers; his was “a polygamously peripatetic lifestyle,” Heylin wrote in Behind the Shades. Dylan seemed to age in a matter of a few years. Where he appeared hale and strong in 1980, he looked haggard by 1985, his hair thinner, his face suddenly craggy, his vocal cords beginning to turn to gravel. It happened that quickly.

  Dylan’s standing as the most important artist of his generation was in grave danger. He had become, he later wrote, “a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.” His conversion had provoked a revolt in his base. Some fans left and never returned. He shot awkward music videos at the dawn of the MTV Age. He did a parody of himself for charity on “We Are the World.” With some two billion people in sixty countries watching on television, he played a set at Live Aid in Philadelphia that was so ramshackle his supporters could not bring themselves to defend it. He had become an embarrassment. The world had stopped listening.

  He was thinking of giving up music altogether. “I was going on my name for a long time—name and reputation, which was about all I had,” he would say later. “I had sort of fallen into an amnesia spell.” No longer able to put fans in seats, Dylan was touring with bigger artists, and in 1987, dates were scheduled with the Grateful Dead.

  At rehearsals, the band suggested playing some of his old songs, but he had lost touch with the words and couldn’t recapture the emotions that created them. Annoyed, he went for a walk. He wasn’t planning on going back to the rehearsal. After a few blocks, he heard jazz coming from a bar, and he walked inside to find an old man in a mohair suit singing ballads. He had a flash of realization. He felt as though the jazz cat was telling him, You should do it this way. He was reminded of a forgotten “formulaic approach to the vocal technique,” and energized, he returned to the rehearsals and sailed through the summer concerts on autopilot.

  In September, he set out for two months of shows with Tom Petty, beginning in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, then wending through Europe. In October the concert caravan made its way north from Milan to Locarno, Switzerland, a quaint lakeside city hemmed in by mountains. The stage was set up in the cobblestoned Piazza Grande on the edge of the city’s old district. Picturesque buildings lined the square, some painted in jaunty blues or yellows and roofed with red tile. Above shops and restaurants, flower boxes clung to the balconies. At the cafés and pizzerias, customers sat outside under striped awnings. In 1480, a Franciscan monk said the Virgin Mary appeared to him in the hills above town.

  The night was foggy and windy as Dylan took the stage. He began to sing, and made a frightening discovery. His new approach to singing was falling apart, right there in front of the crowd. He panicked. His throat closed.

  Then a thought flashed through his head, clear as a voice. It said, I’m determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not. “All of a sudden everything just exploded,” he said later. “It exploded every which way.”

  He was born again, again.

  “This gift was given back to me and I knew it,” Dylan said. “The essence was back.”

  After he described this drama in interviews a decade later, fans rooted around for the tape and searched for this mystical moment, listening for a hitch in his voice, a change in intensity, some evidence of his life-altering transformation captured on their cassettes. They didn’t find it, and most of them didn’t expect they would. It had always been hard to take Dylan at his word. But however it happened, Dylan had come to the realization that his life’s work was to be about one thing: performing music to crowds. That was what he wanted to do, and that was what he was going to do until he died, or until his audience stopped showing up. Like most epiphanies, it only seemed inevitable in hindsight.

  The Never Ending Tour started in the summer of 1988. (A British rock music writer coined the catchy phrase during an interview with Dylan, but when he wrote the story, he quoted Dylan saying it.) Backed by a taut three-piece band, Dylan played both his own songs and the traditional music he had long loved. The first shows lasted barely more than an hour and were met with brutal reviews. He mumbled. Everything was sloppy. He was galloping through songs at breakneck pace. But he persisted. He knew the tour would not take off right away. He was breaking everything down, and rebuilding it from the ground up would take time.

  Beyond the supposed groundbreaking new vocal technique—even aficionados would not notice much difference—Dylan decided that he needed something else: a new audience. As he looked out from the stage, his fans seemed like “cutouts from a shooting gallery.” He could not conceive of them as living, breathing people moved by his music. They had grown up with his records, and he felt bogged down by them and their demands and expectations. They came with baggage, “mental psychic stuff.” They couldn’t think of him in a fresh way, so they would only be confounded by this new turn of his. He was sure of it.

  “In many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot,” he would write in Chronicles. “They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was.”

  2

  Glen Dundas figured that the people who knew him in Thunder Bay, Ontario, his frigid home on the northwest shore of Lake Superior, would never believe half the stories he could tell about following Dylan around in the 1980s and 1990s. Their Glen Dundas was a quiet accountant whiling away his middle age. They didn’t know that when he traveled the world to see Dylan shows by the hundreds, he illicitly recorded most of them. That he had established himself as a respected hub in a global tape-trading network. That he and his wife, Madge, had like-minded friends in Sweden, Italy, England, Germany. That they had partied in their basement with Dylan’s guitar player and his security chief when the tour came through Canada. That Paul Shaffer had played his wedding in New York City. The Never Ending Tour literally changed Glen’s life. As far as he could tell, most of the people in Thunder Bay had no idea who Bob Dylan even was.

  Glen’s father worked in gold mines and grain elevators and drove a truck for the pulp and paper company. Glen never wanted that life. He dropped out of college—it wasn’t for him—and while he was trying to figure out what to do, he got a temporary job at the paper mill. They had an assignment tailor-made for newcomers and other unfortunates: “broke hustler.” The enormous mill machines sat idle on the weekends. On Monday mornings when they first coughed to life, they would not run smoothly and the paper would tear. The broke hustler clambered inside the burning machines and cleared the jams and stuffed the paper down giant holes. After everything was operating, he was tasked to fetch coffee for the other workers.

  Glen hated that shift, and dreaded the hassling he would get as he took the pick-me-up orders. Above all else, he hated being told what to do. So one Monday morning around nine-thirty he said, Fuck this. He grabbed his lunch pail and went home without telling anyone. Thinking he had fallen into the hole, the foreman shut down the operation until he figured out where Glen was. Later, a guy he grew up with told Glen he was an idiot. He had blown his chance to ever work in the mill again. Glen was flabbergasted. What could he say to make the guy understa
nd? He didn’t want to work in the mill. That was the whole point.

  No wonder he loved Dylan. It wasn’t just the music. The hardheaded side of Glen was continually amazed by Dylan’s attitude. “He’s always done what he wants to do,” he says. “He never thinks twice about doing it. It’s awesome, really.” Glen went on to become an accountant, and over time he became a company man with a corner office. When he was pushed out, he couldn’t say he was shocked. Looking back, it seemed inevitable. At a golf outing with some of his old colleagues not long after he left the company, one former coworker put it right: “Glen just doesn’t fit.”

  Glen had been a Dylan fan for years, but had only made it to a single show. In 1986, his first marriage over and newly out of work, Glen heard Dylan was coming through the Midwest. This time he was going. He was dating Madge at the time, and she was game. Glen sold fifty bootlegs to a collector for two tickets to the Chicago concert—eleventh row—and enough cash to see two additional shows. He and Madge headed south, and into a new life.

  One of the first people they met on the road was a man named Christian Behrens, who was in the middle of a month and a half following the tour with a recording machine. Glen was amazed: He had never heard of anybody doing that. That year, Behrens covered twenty-one thousand miles to see thirty-two concerts, driven by the sense that if he didn’t record them, nobody would—not even the musician himself. Dylan prohibited taping and photography, so it took some nerve and some guile. At the time, capturing the music in sufficiently high quality required smuggling in a heavy deck. The one Behrens lugged around was designed for journalists, not spies.

  To Glen there was a romance to the cause. Besides, he was a collector: If he had his own recordings he would be able to make trades. In 1988, at the dawn of the Never Ending Tour, he went into a Minneapolis camera shop and put down $500 for a Sony Walkman cassette recorder and a set of mics. The show was a few days later. Congenitally a worrier, he was in full fret as he wired up at the hotel, hiding the machine in his pants and the mics in his hair. Security wasn’t likely to pick him out for further screening. He was short, balding, unobtrusive. He usually wore black shirts, black jeans, and black basketball sneakers, which made him look like a roadie. If anybody was going to be stopped it was his friend Ken, who planned to videotape the concert. He had cinched a camera around his wife’s waist so it hung between her legs, hidden by a long dress. They got everything situated, walked over to the venue, and made it in unscathed.

  Every taper got preshow jitters. Some of them actually had nightmares about getting caught. They would compare notes with other tapers. They all had the same dreams. But more often than not, they came home with their illicit recordings. Sometimes security didn’t even care. Mitch’s tape-hunting friend Jeff Friedman started taping in 1974, and he would sweat every last detail. He flew to San Francisco and documented the first gospel shows at the Warfield in 1979. His gear was the size of a couple of laptops stacked together. His microphone was a foot and a half tall. He stashed everything at the bottom of a rucksack beneath piles of clothing. When the security men looked—if they looked—they just made sure he wasn’t selling unofficial Dylan T-shirts and let him pass.

  Short of mass strip searches, security could do little to combat the smugglers. The tapers had too many tricks. The ripping you heard in the bathrooms before a show was the sound of men pulling off gear taped to their legs and backs. They would disassemble their video cameras and give the parts to friends to smuggle inside. They would sneak gear inside a loaf of bread. One hid his lens inside a coffee thermos with a false bottom just an inch or two from the top. When he poured a little coffee in, it looked like a full pot. One guy stuffed all his gear inside a pillow and strapped it to his girlfriend so she looked like she was with child. At a major festival, where people posted flags to help friends find their spot, a taper posted his mic atop a giant pole hidden behind an arrow. In 1986, Behrens got to Berkeley to find particularly tight security. He came up with an unconventional plan. In the afternoon, he hopped on board a soda truck making a delivery inside the venue. He put his recorder in a plastic bag, hid the bag behind a plant, and slipped back outside. Returning through the gate later with his ticket, he was horrified to discover a guard stationed beside his plant. What to do, what to do? He walked up, concocted a story about some trouble in some other part of the theater, and when the guard went to deal with the matter, the taper grabbed the bag and got his tape. There were a thousand and one ways to get the stuff inside. Beating security became part of the buzz of the concert. One fan took to taunting security at the turnstiles. Don’t you see? You have no chance. We’re smarter than you.

  The tapers approached the concerts as they would a job. They scouted the venues closely, sometimes a day ahead of time. They were not on the road to drink and dance and blow off steam. If they wanted a decent tape, they couldn’t make any noise at all. They couldn’t talk to their friends. They couldn’t run to the bathroom. If they clapped, they did it quietly, preferably silently. They didn’t stand where they had the best view of the stage, like most fans, but where they could capture the best sound. Some of them would get as close to the speakers as possible to drown out gabbers. Others searched for a sweet spot farther back and centered between the speakers.

  If you saw them in the postconcert hotel party rooms, they were likely to be in a corner talking not about Dylan but about technical taping questions. Sometimes they would bring their recording of that night’s show to play on the stereo. The generous ones made instant copies. A guy from St. Louis had a computer in the back of his van, and he’d burn discs for friends so they could listen en route to the next show.

  Glen tapped into a network of men—the tapers were almost exclusively men—around the world. They tried to cover every show. He upgraded his cheap mics to Sennheisers, the gold standard of the era, and did his part. It gave Glen cachet. He wasn’t just buying or collecting the underground music everyone wanted; he was capturing it himself. The tapers believed they were doing important work. They were documenting music that otherwise would have floated off into the ether, never to be heard again. Maybe it was illegal in a technical sense. Maybe Dylan hated it, and hated them for doing it. But as far as Heylin, the biographer, was concerned, these men were “custodians of popular music.”

  A year after his first nerve-wracking experience as a taper, Glen flew over to Europe for a run of concerts. One night in the Hague, he scrambled for a spot up close. He ended up standing next to the speakers among three of the biggest names in taping circles. What was notable about the show was that Dylan performed an electric version of the traditional folk song “Trail of the Buffalo,” a real surprise. Collectors still consider it a favorite moment of the Never Ending Tour.

  Glen would remember that night for another reason: It was the night he knew he had joined the brotherhood. He was a taper, and proud of it.

  3

  Dylan played a four-night stand at New York’s Beacon Theater in 1989, and the crazies flew in from all over. Glen had met some of them at Dylan fan conventions in Chicago and Manchester, England. In the UK, the conventioneers listened to talks and tribute bands, while the Midwestern crowd spent most of the time in taping rooms. People brought audio cassettes and videotapes, and the dubbing went on twenty-four hours a day. Glen met a lot of people at these affairs, and one was a musician named Steve Keene who was capable of sounding a lot like Dylan. (He later released albums with Dylan bandmates.) He had recently won the big impersonator contest at a bar in the Village. He lived in New York, so in 1989 the traveling crowd relied on him to come through with tickets.

  He went to the Beacon the night before and waited in the line, which by four-thirty in the morning stretched down the block. Somehow Keene got enough tickets for everybody on his list. Glen and Madge had never been to the city before, and they stayed in a hotel that first night. But Keene let them crash at his place on Eighty-fifth Street the rest of the week, and so
on they knew enough New York City Dylan people that they hardly ever had to pay for a room again. A lot of longtime friendships began in 1989 at the Dublin House, an Irish bar on Seventy-ninth Street where a few dozen serious Dylan fans retired for postshow libations. The tour had been getting terrible reviews, but Glen and Madge didn’t care because they were in Manhattan, with their kind of people, people who got it.

  Onstage, Dylan looked pissed off, Glen thought. Like he wanted to be anywhere else. He tossed harmonicas across the stage. But the shows had fans buzzing. Dylan had just put out Oh Mercy, his best record in years, and he played a number of the songs live for the first time. A version of “Queen Jane Approximately” was a wonder to behold. On the last night, Glen and Madge ended up at the very front, and when Dylan shocked the crowd by singing “Precious Memories,” he was so close to them he might as well have been playing their living room back in Thunder Bay. He wore a gold lamé suit that night, and during the last song he wailed on the harmonica, jumped off the stage, shook hands, and walked off through the crowd, never to return.

  Glen and Madge started going to shows by the dozens. They carpooled and they crammed into hotel rooms. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of using lounge chairs from the pool as beds instead of sleeping on the floor. They got a decent night’s sleep but woke up with lines across their faces. They were semiprofessional fans fitting their lives around Dylan; they knew it was not normal behavior. Glen and Madge sometimes traveled with Bev Martin, a schoolteacher from Madison, Wisconsin. Bev thought the tour felt like the 1960s, when there was a sense of us versus them, the freaks versus the straights. It reminded her of the era when you could roll into a certain kind of city, a college town—Taos, Española, Ann Arbor—and find the record store or café and hook into the counterculture. On the road, they met doctors and drug dealers, left-­wingers and conservatives, old hippies and teenagers. If this gypsy band had anything in common, it was that—like Glen back in Thunder Bay—they didn’t fit. “We were all a little weird,” one of them said.