The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  They learned not to say much back home about these jaunts. People gave them strange looks when they did. Besides, more than a few of them were calling in sick from work or inventing ailing relatives so they could disappear for a few days. “People would not understand,” Bev said. “They would think you’re crazy.”

  Dylan was playing to almost nobody in America’s nowheresvilles: La Crosse, Sioux Falls, Fargo, Bismarck. It looked like it was being done on the cheap. Though the venues were small, they did not sell out. Once, Dylan implored the audience to come and fill the empty seats up close. “It was like a secret tour,” Bev said. Once, she walked into a record store near a venue where Dylan was playing and an employee asked, “Is he still alive?”

  The performances themselves felt chaotic and raw. You didn’t know what you might get from night to night. He would pull out obscure songs with lyrics that were not so easy to remember, songs that would not have made a top-one-hundred list of possible one-offs. Sometimes it was as if the band didn’t even know what it was going to play. To Heylin, the tour was a perfect metaphor for Dylan’s career: sprawling and messy, the highs jostling for attention with the many lows. For all the brilliant work that Dylan had produced, “there is nobody I can think of in his league who has produced work as bad as Bob Dylan,” Heylin would say. But they all kept going, year after year after year, searching for the jewels.

  In January 1990, Dylan played on short notice at a little club in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. One of the regular travelers who heard about it, Roy Cougle, had impacted wisdom teeth and was advised not to fly, so he hitched out of Chicago and made it as far as Cleveland before a snowstorm stopped him. He took a bus to New York and met up with a friend, who got them to Connecticut.

  Jeff Friedman, the taper and tape hunter, made it up for the show, but he got nabbed by security on the way in. He had his taping gear in the small of his back, and when they pulled his shirt up the wires came out. He was marched over to the box office and told to put the gear back in his car. He said he couldn’t; he had taken the train up. He offered to give up his batteries. Security accepted that deal, but, naturally, Jeff had brought extra batteries. He always brought extra batteries.

  For some reason he’d also brought extra cassettes that night, and he ended up needing them. Toad’s Place held only seven hundred people and the show had been billed as a tour “warm-up.” Not long after Dylan came on stage, wearing a black leather vest over a red T-shirt, the audience began to realize it would be a special night. Jeff felt like he’d arrived in heaven and walked into a random club to find the world’s greatest bar band playing. Dylan was in high spirits and fully engaged, not rushing, not angry, not listless. He played unexpected covers like “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” and rarities from his deep catalog like “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” and “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love).”

  Then, unbelievably, he started taking requests. “What you wanna hear?” he asked the crowd. “Ballad song, or up-tempo song?”

  Cougle yelled song titles all night, and deep into the fourth set he screamed out for “Joey.”

  Dylan laughed it off: “ ‘Joey’? ‘Joey’? Ha! Ha! Oh, no. It’s gonna take me all night.” The song, from 1975, was an ode to a New York City mobster, “Crazy Joey” Gallo. Rock critic Lester Bangs had called the song “one of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellently romanticist bullshit ever recorded.” Gallo was a “psychopath,” not a man worth celebrating.

  “‘Joey’!” Dylan said again. “You sing it! We’d be willing to play it for you if you sing it.” But the cheering crowd got behind the request and finally he relented. “All right, let’s try this. ‘Joey,’ okay. Yeah, here’s a song about a, sort of a, kind of a . . . hero of sorts. God knows there’s so few heroes left.”

  Dylan played four sets, four hours of music, fifty songs in all, including a joyous butchery of Springsteen’s pop hit “Dancing in the Dark.” (He didn’t know it; he made up a batch of nonsense verses on the fly.) Before he walked off the stage, Dylan gave Cougle a limp-fish handshake. The crowd broke up at two-thirty in the morning.

  A year later, Dylan staggered through Europe. In Glasgow, he dropped his guitar and wandered offstage midsong. He looked drunk. He sounded uninterested. As the tour moved on through Europe, the shows did not improve. “Every night he would get up on stage and murder masterpiece after masterpiece,” Heylin recalled. In Brussels, Dylan sang off-mic most of the night. From what the audience could hear, he was slurring. In London, fans could not believe how bad the show was; the regulars retired to the bar and drank like they were at a wake. In Stuttgart later that year, Dylan opened with a version of “New Morning” so unintelligible that it sparked an argument between two knowledgeable fans about what song he had played.

  But by the end of the year, he had turned it around again, and in 1992, Heylin flew from England to California simply because Dylan had started playing “Idiot Wind,” the classic from Blood on the Tracks, for the first time in sixteen years. Heylin needed to hear it live, and who knew if Dylan might just as suddenly yank it off the set list forever?

  As time went on, the music came to be less important; the regulars kept going because they wanted to see what would happen on the road before and after every show. They shadowed the crew, who, like the serious fans, arrived early and left late; inevitably they got to know each other. They would bullshit with the people who made sure the shows went off every night: Dylan’s muscle, the merchandise guy, the soundmen, the bus driver, the tour manager. Sometimes—by coincidence or by design—fans stayed at the same hotels as the band and ended up at the bar having drinks with the guitar player or the drummer. “I’m sure they just wondered what the fuck we were doing with our lives,” Roy Cougle said. “Don’t you have jobs?” He and another regular traveling companion, Keith Gubitz, got roadies to give them old laminated passes; even expired badges got them backstage. (A shirt that read SECURITY also worked for Roy.) Some fans started wearing a glow-in-the-dark dog on a string around their necks. Soon everybody had them, the crew, the roadies, even guys in the band. Gubitz said that on occasion, wearing a glowdog would actually get you inside. It got to the point where the band and crew took notice when the whacked-out superfans weren’t there.

  Soon enough they all felt like part of the tour family. When the show came through Thunder Bay in 1992, Glen drove from bar to bar searching for the crew. He found guitarist Bucky Baxter, and next thing he knew, Baxter was down in his basement doing his laundry and listening to old tapes. Dylan’s security chief, Jim Callaghan, had trouble getting back over the border, so he hung around in Thunder Bay partying with Glen while he waited.

  It helped to know the help. A while later, venue security in Chicago caught Glen and took the expensive battery for his taping machine. When Glen went to claim it after the show, he was told Callaghan had it. Glen figured he would get some ribbing but he wasn’t prepared for what Dylan’s security man did the following night in the lobby. He lumbered over and made a great show of ripping into the Canadian. Callaghan was a big man, built like a stevedore, and he towered over Glen. He turned to the others and told them to watch out for this concert scofflaw. You ever see this guy taping, you come and tell me!

  Then he opened the door of the theater and dragged Glen inside like a perp. But after Glen stopped stuttering, he realized it was a show. Callaghan gave him the battery back, smiled, and left him with a clear view of the sound check.

  The regulars would see Dylan all the time. He might be riding his bicycle in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes in the pouring rain, sometimes fifteen minutes before he went on stage. He’d be seen in trunks swimming laps at the pool or doing doughnuts in the parking lot on a motorcycle. If you were out at three in the morning you might see him taking a walk in the street. Some thought Dylan reversed his days. He performed a little while after waking up, then stayed up all night. The fans learned that he didn�
�t stay in the best hotels; that he preferred lodging where he could open the windows because he didn’t like air-conditioning; that he boxed on the road to stay in shape. He got a sweet tour bus and spent a lot of time on it. At the end of a show he’d hop aboard and head to the next city while the crowd drifted out. The smart fans knew to keep their distance or risk getting grief from tour managers. “We always tried to respect the bubble around Bob,” Cougle said. “I don’t think any of us tried to bum-rush Bob and ask him the meaning of life.”

  But, inevitably, they ran into him. There were a hundred stories of brief encounters, and despite his gruff reputation, many of them were pleasant enough, or not disagreeable, anyway.

  One year in New York, fans discovered that Dylan was hanging around in a tour bus behind the venue. He came outside wearing a cowboy hat and sucking on a cigar, and to their immense surprise, he began talking to them. Dylan asked them what they wanted to hear him play and people shouted requests. He laughed when he learned that one of the fans, an attractive woman, had red lacy underwear embroidered with the name BOB. She was going to throw them onto the stage—a lark, she swore. She was there with her husband.

  Somebody joked that Bob ought to wear them. But randy as ever, Dylan said he wanted to see them on the woman.

  Whoa, her husband said.

  Then a legendarily obnoxious New Jersey woman came up and started asking stupid questions, like whether Dylan was breast-fed as a boy.

  Just like that, he was gone.

  Sometimes Dylan would agree to sign autographs. Sometimes he would shut down. Sometimes nobody said anything.

  Once, a fan was at a hotel waiting for the elevator to the lobby when the doors opened and he came face-to-face with Dylan. The fan happened to be wearing a shirt advertising the organization behind the Telegraph, the big British fanzine. The front was emblazoned with a photograph of Dylan’s face and the words WANTED MAN.

  Dylan looked at the fan, looked at the shirt, looked away. Downstairs, the doors opened, and idol and fan parted wordlessly.

  4

  One morning in June 1990, Glen and Madge got breakfast and checked out of a hotel in Fargo, North Dakota. They had seen Dylan play a twenty-song set at the Civic Center the night before, and they had a three-hour drive west for Dylan’s Friday-night show in Bismarck. As they drove out of the Red River Valley toward the plains on I-94, they spotted a figure on the side of the road. It was a woman hitchhiking alone in the summer heat. She looked so vulnerable. Realizing it was a member of the tribe, they pulled over for her. That was the way it was on the road. They all needed the same basic things: tickets, a ride to the next town, a bed and a shower, some food. They might never have socialized with some of these fans if they lived in the same town. But out on the road, they took care of each other. When Glen stepped out of the car to offer the woman a ride, he saw her writing down his license plate number, a precaution by an experienced and wary traveler.

  Glen and Madge had seen her up front at the shows, sometimes talking to herself, tooting on her harmonica while Dylan performed, flipping coins at Dylan’s feet, putting up an umbrella, playing cards onstage. She told people her name was Sara Dylan—like Dylan’s first wife—and that she was his twin sister. Dylan didn’t know her because they were separated soon after their birth in France. He was adopted by Minnesotans; a couple in Texas raised her. If it bothered her that she couldn’t explain why he was thirteen years older, she didn’t say so. Fans thought she was unbalanced. On the other hand, they met lots of strange people on the road with Dylan.

  She wore her hair in a bun and favored long dresses and gloves. Waiting around at the shows, she seemed aloof. But on the way to Bismarck with Glen and Madge she chattered away. She told them she’d lived in Duluth for a time, and how, to help make ends meet, she sometimes lifted Bibles from hotel rooms and sold them to used-book stores. It never seemed that she had much money. She hitchhiked from show to show. She used to tell the front desk at the band hotels that she was Dylan’s sister and try to get a room on their tab. She could be quite convincing. The year before in New York, she managed to reserve eighteen rooms on the record company’s account.

  She traveled all over the world following the tour. It was her life. In 1986, she made it to Canada, where Dylan was playing an aging rock star in Hearts of Fire. A documentary filmmaker visiting the set to interview Dylan found himself staying in the room next to hers. “I had a drink with her and she tells me she’s your sister,” Christopher Sykes said when he met Dylan.

  “Well, there are people who follow me around, you know,” Dylan replied. “They have passports and they have driver’s licenses and they all have Dylan as their name. What can I do about that? I mean, I can’t do anything about that.” Sykes found Sara frightening. “Is that something that bothers you ever,” he asked Dylan, “the idea that because you are very famous, someone who thinks they love you might want to kill you?”

  “Well, that’s always the case, isn’t it? Isn’t that the way it always happens?” the singer answered. “Aren’t you usually killed by the person who loves you the most?”

  Keith Gubitz was one of Sara’s traveling companions, and he didn’t think she meant Dylan any harm. She could have sought him out every day on the road. Instead she went to the venue early, before the tour bus arrived, and hoped that when Dylan got off he would summon her. He never did, Keith said.

  But in 1990, she ran into him in the street in DeKalb, Illinois, and Dylan asked her what she wanted from him. Free tickets? Was that it?

  What she really wanted was for Dylan to love and accept her, Keith said. But in the moment of truth, she apparently didn’t tell him this. Did she want a ticket to the show? Sure. After that, she always had one waiting for her at the box office, as far as Keith could tell.

  Not everyone was so easily mollified. Moving away from New York had not made it harder for fans to find Dylan. His Malibu house and Santa Monica rehearsal space, Rundown Studios, were easy enough to locate, and in 1981, one of the obsessed stalked out there. Her name was Carmel Hubbell, and her story was that she and Dylan had had an affair in 1978 when the tour went through Kalamazoo, Michigan. She went west to pursue the relationship.

  At the time, Dylan and his people were on high alert: In December 1980, John Lennon was gunned down at the door of his Upper West Side building by a mentally ill fan who had approached him for an autograph.

  That summer, Hubbell stormed Rundown Studios issuing threats and had to be forcibly removed. Later, staff found threatening notes on their windshields. Hubbell walked onto Dylan’s property in Malibu nineteen times in less than a month, leaving behind notes to her “sweetheart,” a test tube full of nuts, and the key to her motel room. The letters got scarier as the days passed and she could not get through to Dylan. “Ms X = Ms Manson,” one read. Finally, Hubbell called one of Dylan’s backing singers and told her that her life was in danger. Dylan’s lawyers took Hubbell to court to end the harassment. By 1983, the singer was telling an interviewer that he had “walls up all over the place,” suggesting both human gatekeepers and concrete barriers. His office kept a list of potential threats; it had hundreds of names on it.

  Bev Martin, the Madison schoolteacher, couldn’t help but think Dylan was partly responsible for some of the unwanted attention. Onstage, he would flirt with women. He would walk up and play his guitar to them, stare into their eyes for an entire song, put a hand out and reach for them. Whether this was a stage act or a play for postshow action—both, probably, depending on the object of his attention—it hypnotized women. “He casts a spell,” one of them mused. Even psychologically balanced women were drawn to his magnetism. For others already predisposed to delusions, it stoked their fantasies. “All it takes is one time. He makes contact and they’re hooked for life,” Bev said. They fall in love, and hope Dylan will, too. “They think every song he writes he writes to them.”

  So there was the woman
from West Hollywood who wrote lengthy letters to Dylan and mailed them to his office in New York. She seemed to survive on apples and peanut butter and rice cakes and slept in her car. There was the woman who followed the bus to Malibu and was slapped with a cease-and-desist order. There was the woman who said she helped Dylan write songs on one of his records. (“It’s about mulberries,” she revealed.) There was the woman from Italy who tracked the tour around the globe and stood outside venues holding a sign for tickets. She lived a gypsy life, bumming rides and lodging from whoever would help. She told people that Dylan had supernatural powers and was speaking directly to her from the stage, that the concerts were elaborate rituals designed so Dylan could communicate with her, and the rest of us were irrelevant, mere set pieces.

  These women were almost always up at the front of the stage, dancing, swaying, some of them accompanying the music with ­theatrical interpretations. At a few concerts, security asked them to stay back and give someone else a chance. Dylan didn’t want them there, they were told.

  Women came and women went. Often they disappeared as mysteriously as they had materialized, and so it was with “Sara Dylan.” One day she was there, and the next day she was gone. In 1992, she followed the tour to Australia. She made it to the next stop in Maui but missed the concert two nights later in Waikiki. She wrote Keith saying she would meet him April 27 when the tour went to Seattle for a nineteen-date West Coast leg. She didn’t show up. Keith looked for her at shows for the next month, figuring she had changed her plans without telling anyone. But he never saw her.