The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  Keith was one of the few on the road who knew her given name, Renee Shapiro, and her hometown, Pharr, Texas. He went home and looked up the family. They told him that their daughter disappeared from time to time. Several years later, Keith called again, and when her mother picked up she broke into tears.

  In 2012, everyone’s worst fears were confirmed. A detective had called. Some of Shapiro’s belongings had been discovered inside a black zipped bag locked in a safety deposit box in Reno, Nevada. The owner was accused of killing four women in northern California, and police suspected him in other murders, including Shapiro’s. Investigators found Shapiro’s passport, her driver’s license, her business cards, and a slip of paper that suggested she was on her way to her next Dylan show—but never made it.

  The note, written by the suspected killer, read, “May 4 1992 Monday pm.” Dylan played San Francisco that night.

  5

  In one way, Keith Gubitz could relate to Sara. He too hoped that his hero would stop someday and notice him. The first time he saw a Dylan show, he was frustrated. His seats were in the far reaches of the arena. The man would never see him up there, he thought. So he pulled a lighter, flicked the switch, and hoped it might catch Dylan’s eye. “I just wanted him to know that I existed and that I loved what he did,” he said. “But it goes deeper than that. I don’t know why, but if Bob is sad, or his music is sad, I feel sad, and I feel sad for him. When he’s singing and he’s hurting, it hurts me, too.”

  More than a few people believed their long-distance relationship with Dylan was something special. The way they identified with him felt exclusive and intimate. They understood Dylan and his music in ways others did not. They were cautious when talking about this. They knew they were veering into hazardous waters.

  Keith made great sacrifices to get up close. He waited forever in lines for tickets, and then again to get onto the floor. He pushed for position. He sneaked into empty seats. If he still couldn’t get up front, he waited for the stage rush. Keith said that for a while, near the end of every concert, the road crew would encourage regulars to dash up to the stage and dance. After Keith made his first run, no Dylan concert was complete without it.

  He didn’t do it just to see better. He needed to be counted as present. He wanted to be seen.

  But even if he saw you, who could say it meant anything? Andrew Muir, of Cambridge, England, taught public speaking, and the trick he shared with nervous people was this: Gaze over the heads of your audience. They will believe you’re looking directly into their eyes. Was it not far more likely that Dylan was focusing on the middle distance, staring at the lights, lost in the music? Muir heard people say that Dylan was looking at them—them alone—and he wanted to slap them. “It’s madness!” he said. “It’s just not true.”

  Still, he couldn’t say it never happened. A legendary fan named Lambchop ended up at the front every time Dylan went to England. Lambchop was a character. He tried to support himself by playing the horses—his passport listed his job as professional gambler—and he smoked pot every day. “You could get a high from the wallpaper at his place,” a friend said. Lambchop wore a huge white hat, which he would wave at Dylan. Between songs he would shout, “Thanks for coming, Bob!” When the crowd screamed for songs, he would bellow, “You play what you want, fuck ’em, Bob!” If people sat down, he’d cry out, “They don’t fucking deserve it!”

  So Dylan noticed Lambchop. He could hardly have missed him. One night in Utrecht, Lambchop and Dylan had a brief conversation, front row to stage. The singer asked the fan why he’d missed some shows in the United States, and Lambchop said he hadn’t been invited.

  “How about giving the Chopper a hand!” Dylan told the crowd. “He’s seen me play more times than me!”

  Caroline Schwarz and Kait Runevitch knew that Dylan noticed them from the stage, and they didn’t care what anybody said. They believed what they believed. “All kinds of people experience this,” Kait said years later. “You can’t deny it’s happening.”

  The two of them met on the road. Caroline started seeing shows regularly after losing her job. Kait was between school and real life. Traveling to concerts by the dozens, they did what it took to get up front. Caroline admitted throwing an elbow or two. Snarky fans dubbed them the Glitter Girls because they favored cowboy hats and sparkly body makeup, boogied up front, and were not afraid to flaunt their cleavage.

  One night at a show in Joliet, Illinois, they got up close, and near the end of his set, Dylan sang “Honest with Me.” A man is telling his woman that he loves her but she needs to be straight with him. He sang, “You don’t understand it, my feeling for you—aw, you don’t,” and looked directly at her and Kait “with serious intent and fire,” Caroline wrote in her tour journal. A year later in Chicago, Caroline was at a show with another friend when Dylan eased into “Every Grain of Sand” and locked onto her again. “Bob sings my favorite line of this song full of favorite lines right fucking at me and it is almost too intense,” she reported in her journal. “I know now for sure, if I had any doubt, that he knows I’m here. And he’s looking at me and I’ve been singing it along softly and he gives me that squint, that level gaze, and he’s shaking his head softly with a smile and so am I. Yup, here we are again. Mmmmm. Something.” Two nights later, he pivoted and zeroed in on her during “Cold Irons Bound” as he sang the words, “I’m gonna remember forever all the joy we’ve shared.”

  Caroline swooned at “this blatant admission of affection” from her hero. She had never been happier in her life. She couldn’t lie and say it hadn’t dawned on her that if they went to show after show, maybe they would get to meet the man. One July evening in St. Paul, they were in their usual spot up front when Dylan’s stage manager appeared to fetch them. They walked backstage, legs shaking, and there was the legend standing between two trucks.

  Dylan wore motorcycle boots and what looked like a bowling shirt. He was smoking American Spirits. He told them he loved seeing them out there. He remarked about Kait’s green eyes, saying that he’d been looking for a woman with green eyes all his life. He asked what they did, and when Kait said she worked at an art gallery, he asked for a card. She scrawled her number on a piece of paper. He pocketed it.

  Then he got down to business. He wanted them to do something for him: start a fan club. Caroline and Kait were perplexed. Was he serious? Though there had never been an official club, there were a lot of fan communities. Wanted Man in England. The Cambridge Bob Dylan Society. The Dylan Pool, an online forum that ran a contest to guess which songs the singer would play onstage. The Usenet group rec.music.dylan and its offspring, the Exchange Dylan Lyrics Internet Service, or EDLIS, whose members met up at many concerts. Expecting Rain, a clearinghouse for Dylan news run by a man near the Arctic Circle in Norway.

  Dylan told Caroline and Kait they needed to spread the word. He performed for people like them—people who understood the songs and why he still traveled the globe singing them. The media got it wrong.

  Sure thing, they told him. Whatever you want.

  Back out front, they giggled throughout the show. When they got home they built a website and launched the Bob Dylan Fan Club.

  Dylan never called.

  6

  Michelle Engert, transcriber of the Blood on the Tracks notebook and tour regular in the early 1990s, couldn’t think of anything she wanted less than to meet Dylan. During her four years on the road, she went out of her way to not make contact with him. One night in Germany after a concert, Michelle’s friends stopped at a gas station in the middle of the night on the trip between towns. She walked through the sliding doors of the convenience store to buy some bottled water. She looked up and found herself face-to-face with Dylan. Startled, she turned around and went right back to the car. She didn’t even say hello to be polite. He was known to be mercurial and moody even with his bandmates and friends. Sometimes he could be the best friend in th
e world, people said; other times he could be rude or silent. What if they met and Dylan treated Michelle cruelly? She would never be able to enjoy the music again.

  Michelle stumbled into the orbit of the tour regulars when she was only eighteen. She had moved out of her parents’ home and gotten a job at a hair salon, but she had a major case of wanderlust. A friend introduced her to Keith Gubitz and Ray Cougle, who took her out west to see Dylan in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. She met Bev Martin and eventually fell in with Glen and Madge and their band of tourgoers. She was absorbed into the tribe, even though she was decades younger.

  She had an uncanny knack for getting a spot front and center. She might slip in a side door unnoticed before the venue opened. Or at a general admission show she’d bat her eyelashes at a guy up at the front and tell him how she’d driven all the way in from Chicago and she’d only seen Dylan a few times and could she scoot in here? They always said yes. She was young and attractive, with long black hair and alabaster skin. She would chat up strangers at the front of the line until there was no question she would be going in with them instead of heading to the back. She once went so far as to set up a row of chairs for herself and her pals between the stage and the actual front row, and somehow no one stopped her. She also became close to people in Dylan’s circle, the crew and the musicians and the security. In a jam she’d beg them for help. She always got in, by hook or by crook.

  In 1993, word spread that Dylan was going to play two nights at the tiny Supper Club in Manhattan, an acoustic performance that would be professionally filmed. All of the regulars sprang into action to get passes. They were free, but scarce: two per person. Fans started lining up the day before the tickets were available. But not everybody could get there in time—Glen and Madge had to arrange flights—so one of them started hiring people from a homeless shelter across the street. They paid guys $200 to wait around in line all night. Everyone scored tickets.

  Michelle got inside early with help from her friend, the sound engineer, and she watched the rehearsals crouched down under the mixing board. When the doors opened she had a head start, and she helped the rest of the regulars as they dashed for the tables up front.

  It was at the Supper Club that she and Dylan shared a moment. She would never forget it; it was hard to say whether he would even remember it. The band started in on “One More Cup of Coffee,” a song Dylan recorded in 1975. He could not recall the first line, so he turned to his bass player, Tony Garnier, who shrugged.

  “Your breath is sweet!” Michelle called out.

  Dylan looked over, smiled, and sang the song. After what Michelle thought was the last song of the night, she grabbed the set list off the stage, only to have Dylan return, and as she went to put the list back he called her over. “Okay,” he said, “now I want you to tell me the first line of ‘I Shall Be Released.’” She was overjoyed. It was the sweetest acknowledgment. She was twenty-two, and she wondered if the very best moment of her life had already happened.

  Once, after several years of traveling, Michelle had a conversation with Dylan’s guitar player at the time, Bucky Baxter, over breakfast at a German hotel.

  “When are you going to get your own life?” he asked her. “When are you going to go and do something? Because you can’t do this forever.”

  The idea stuck in her brain and weakened her resolve to stay with the tour. Then somewhere in Florida she finally decided that Baxter was right. She needed more from life than she could get being a full-time concertgoer. She got off the road and enrolled in college.

  Dylan’s songs had taught her something about love and politics, and about the power struggles in the world. They made her think about things from the underdog’s point of view. The songs pulled her into American history. Dylan listened to Guthrie, so she did, too, and you can’t listen to Guthrie without learning something about the Great Depression and the suffering of the dust bowl. “Bob brought me there,” she said. “Because he cared about it, I wanted to know what it was about. You either connect or you don’t, and I did.”

  When it came time to choose a topic for her undergraduate thesis, Michelle decided to go to the Mexican border and interview maquiladora laborers, who worked long hours for low wages to manufacture products for foreign markets. She couldn’t stomach the idea that the things she bought in Chicago were cheap because they were made by people working at cut rates. She decided to go to law school, and when she graduated she wanted to sue the corporations on behalf of these and other impoverished workers. She realized soon enough that she wouldn’t be able to do that right out of the classroom, but she found something else that made her feel like she was serving society: public defender.

  Michelle left the highway with street smarts. She learned how to be independent and fearless. She learned how to deal with people who were savvier than she was.

  Nobody would have believed it in a million years, but she was sure of it: Dylan had made her a better lawyer.

  7

  In Glen’s basement, an entire wall is given over to Dylan CDs. He collects a recording of every show, though he has less interest in listening to them these days; baseball, fantasy and the real thing, is his obsession. Over the years, when people shared recordings with Glen, he would jot down who taped the show and which songs Dylan played. That grew into Tangled Up in Tapes, a discography of underground recordings that earned him a measure of fame in the Dylan fan universe. Once, a woman came up to him on the road, and when he told her his name she said, “The Glen Dundas?” He couldn’t lie: He got a small charge from that. He might never have survived life in his little frozen Canadian town if not for all those nights following Dylan.

  One year, a Los Angeles Times music critic met Glen at a show, and Glen gave a copy of Tangled to the man, who then handed it to Dylan when they sat down for an interview. Dylan flipped through Glen’s book for a moment and handed it back. “I’ve already been all those places and done all those things,” he told the reporter. “Now, if you ever find a book out there that’s going to tell me where I’m going, I might be interested.”

  A quarter century after he started, he was still touring, and most of the world had no idea. Fifty years after he left Minnesota, people could still go and see him play. Those who studied Dylan’s music had a hard time wrapping their arms around the unpredictable mass of live performances. He said he had no choice. He made it sound like he’d become addicted. He said he wouldn’t retire until he couldn’t do it anymore. “It’s as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it,” he told one journalist in 1997. “I’m mortified to be on the stage. But then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be.”

  As time went on, some of the road regulars began to pass away. The survivors would write tributes and go to funerals. A lot of serious fans had long ago stopped going on the road to follow the tour as they once had—Glen and Madge included—and they could only shake their heads in wonder that Dylan, in his seventies, was still taking his act from city to city. Like clockwork, a new year arrived and new tour dates were announced. Beijing and Hong Kong. Brooklyn and Philadelphia. São Paolo and Buenos Aires. It really had become never ending, until it began to feel as if Dylan’s road show would somehow outlast them all.

  6

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  In September 2001, Dylan released an album with so many personalities that, a decade later, people were still trying to figure out who was who. “Love and Theft” choogled and swung. It sashayed. It burst into barroom rowdiness. There were bad jokes. There was Shakespearean burlesque and enough swagger for an army. “It speaks in a noble language,” Dylan said cryptically as he sent the record out into the world. “It speaks of the issues or the ideals of an age in some nation, and hopefully, it would also speak across the ages.” In case anyone thought about taking it too seriously, he also declared it a new gr
eatest-hits record. “Without the hits; not yet anyway.”

  It was the second new release of what will come to be regarded, presumably, as Late Dylan. When the era dawned with the release of Time Out of Mind in 1997, he had gone seven years without releasing an album of originals. It was the longest gap of his career, so long that some people wondered if he had given up songwriting forever—Dylan included. “I really thought I was through making records,” he recalled later. One reason was that he couldn’t write the kind of songs he wanted. He would sketch out a few verses, then lose the thread and abandon the song. “Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks,” he told one interviewer. “It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.” During this pause, Dylan immersed himself in the sort of traditional music he had loved since his days in Minneapolis and Greenwich Village. He had long been an aficionado of the hissy, antique recordings of early American artists: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, the Carter Family, the Memphis Jug Band, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, all those mysterious figures from generations past. Those songs were the roots of the music he grew up hearing, and they became the foundation of his own music. When the Never Ending Tour began in 1988, he sprinkled his sets with British, Scottish, and Irish folk ballads, rural blues, spirituals, and country standards. In 1992 and 1993, he set up in his garage studio in Malibu and, alone with an acoustic guitar and harmonicas, recorded two albums of traditional music, songs like “Frankie & Albert,” “Delia,” and “Ragged & Dirty.” Late Dylan flowered from this rich soil. He rediscovered his urge to write.

  But Dylan needed more than mere inspiration from the antediluvian songs; he needed the words themselves. His originals on Time Out of Mind were scattered with antecedents. “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” drew from familiar folk songs (“Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”) as well as a handful of songs that could be found by flipping through Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America. The title came from “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin’” (page 475), and distinctive phrases from “John the Revelator” (480), “Miss Mary Jane” (498), and “Buck-Eye ­Rabbit” (504).