The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  In his late twenties, Heylin quit his family’s insurance brokerage to become a writer full-time. He would go on to publish many Dylan books: a detailed timeline of Dylan’s life through 1995, assembled from articles, books, interviews, and whatever other records he could find; one book detailing Dylan’s recording sessions; three editions of a biography; and a song-by-song breakdown in two volumes. Add to that two others involving Dylan, plus guides to Dylan’s unreleased recordings and many articles, and you begin to wonder how he had time for the dozen-plus other books he’s written about music. Writers like Heylin battled against a culture of silence among those close to Dylan. This was a man who once said he felt the same way about people who sat for interviews with biographers as Civil War generals did about infiltrators in their ranks. “They’re spies,” Dylan said with a sneer. “All informers should be shot.”

  Heylin aimed to be a rock historian; he had two history degrees, and he considered himself “a scholar who prides himself on getting things right.” He had his detractors, who called him a train spotter obsessed with facts and dates, or who charged him with making unsupported assumptions and getting minor details wrong. (“We all get things wrong. I’ve never claimed I’m infallible,” he said. That’s why he kept digging. That’s why he revised his editions over the years.) But it is impossible to deny the importance of his work on Dylan. Even Gray recognized that. “His knowledge is immense, his research formidable, and his prose prolific,” he wrote in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. “He has unearthed so much of the information we have about Dylan’s recordings and his life, and has interpreted that information so forcefully, that had Heylin never interested himself in these subjects, the whole face of Dylanology would be different.” And, Gray added, “less combative.” Heylin is well-known for hammering anybody and everybody in print. He is quick to attack other Dylan writers for their faulty reasoning and flawed scholarship, and one of his books was famously “NOT dedicated to Jeff Rosen,” manager of the singer’s business and publishing operations. Andy Muir, who counts Heylin as a friend, said it is no surprise that this was the sort of biographer Dylan would attract: spiky and abrasive. “He torments people for fun,” Andy said with some admiration.

  Even Dylan himself is not safe from Heylin’s barbs. He counts the singer as an artistic genius, of course. And yet he’s like the brother who can’t bring himself to say a kind word without pairing it with a dig. “Mr. Heylin seems to feel himself in competition with his subject,” the New York Times wrote about his biography, “making gratuitous and unsupported ex-cathedra pronouncements on the relative merits of Mr. Dylan’s songs, career choices and romantic involvements. These seem designed, finally, to leave us with the impression that Mr. Dylan’s life and career would have gone much better if he had only let Mr. Heylin run it for him.”

  How could he have considered the last assertion an insult? His entire career had been built around the idea that of course he could do it better. Once, during a 1993 show in London, Heylin took out a newspaper and ostentatiously started reading. “I had just had enough,” he says. “I’d been there six nights, he was playing the same songs every night, he was murdering them every night, and I’d had enough.” For years he had considered Dylan the world’s greatest live performer, and as late as 2000 the singer was still capable of thrilling the biographer. But after 2003, Heylin had all but stopped going to the shows. “From a critical perspective, I have to step back and say, ‘Look, trust me, it’s worthless. Why are you listening to it?’ Unless you’re writing a book on the decline of Bob Dylan creatively, it’s a total waste of time.” He wondered whether Dylan kept going just to see who would last longer, him or the fans. “He’s winning,” he says. “Trust me.”

  The sense that the train could go off the tracks was always a key part of Dylan’s appeal. When he showed up at Gerde’s Folk City or the Gaslight in the early 1960s, he would do Chaplinesque comedy routines on the stage, looking like a rank amateur, and then the next minute he’d deliver something breathtaking. The Never Ending Tour had a similar dynamic. People went to shows for years in the hopes of hearing something rare and wonderful, a moment when suddenly Dylan came alive and gave a song some new twist. “The ability to fly by the seat of your pants is what defines him as a performance artist, and in order to do that you have to be prepared to fail,” Heylin says. Moments like those seem to be missing from Late Dylan. There is no longer that element of surprise, the sense that you might see something you’d never seen before and wouldn’t see again. “I don’t think I have any illusions about what I expect for the remainder of the Never Ending Tour,” Heylin said. “And as Bob himself has said, it has to end. None of us are immortal.”

  In 1992, he went to a show at a music festival in the South Florida Fairgrounds, which did not sound to Heylin like a particularly appropriate venue for a living legend. Instead of wandering around and eating corn dogs, the nuts stood outside for six hours to make sure they got up front. It was unpleasant, but when the show started, Dylan came on and did something Heylin had never seen him do before: He played the harmonica on the first nine songs, sometimes giving the audience three solos in a single song. For Heylin, it made the entire day worth it.

  But well into the third decade of the Never Ending Tour, he thought it highly unlikely that Dylan would do something as unpredictable and exciting and great as he had that night in Florida, and many other nights on the road.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Heylin said. “Is it sad? Well, you know, it happens to us all.”

  8

  ON THE RAIL

  At a general-admission concert, the way to score a spot at the foot of the stage is to be one of the first people in the door. Getting “on the rail,” as the regulars put it, was a practical matter for Charlie Cicirella. He was barely five feet tall, and since he wanted a clear line of sight, he went early and stood in line. He had very simple ideas about this. Everything flowed from one basic rule: Do the time. He was uncompromising about the people who gamed the system by coming late and cutting ahead. Pile a sleep deficit atop his usual ornery streak, and Charlie could be a monster. “I’ve got a reputation, and part of this reputation is irascibility,” he admitted. He wore it proudly. Whenever he made it to the rail, you could be sure he had earned it. “That’s why we get there early. We work for it.”

  Trouble broke out on every Dylan line. People cut in and refused to move. Sharp words were said, elbows thrown. But this week’s run of general-admission shows was in Manhattan, and Charlie was preparing for more difficulty than usual. New York City fans had a cutthroat reputation. During a multiple-night stand at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2003, it seemed like nobody got along. Fans walked outside after the encore and lined up immediately for the next night’s show, twenty-two hours off.

  This time Dylan was playing a trio of concerts at a club in Hell’s Kitchen called Terminal 5. The first show was on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 22, 2010. Charlie made plans to fly in from Cleveland on Sunday, but he was having some anxiety. He no longer had a driver’s license, and he didn’t know what airport security would do. But they waved him past and he made his flight. In New York, he took a taxi to the hostel where he was staying, dropped off his bag, and went directly uptown to the venue. He hoped to be first in line.

  Charlie arrived around ten P.M. and found a red chair by the door with a note taped to its back. Beautiful. Someone had the nerve to lay claim to the first spot without even being there. The trickster did not show up for hours, and when she did, around six A.M., Charlie challenged her claim and she immediately backed down. Obviously, this man wanted it more than she did.

  In the morning, cars poured off the West Side Highway, piloted by commuters wearing business suits and dresses. Some glanced over at the clutch of men and women loitering on the sidewalk, and you could almost see thought bubbles appear above their heads: When did the homeless shelter open up next to the Infiniti dealership?

&n
bsp; People flew in from all over the world to see the shows. There were fans from Norway and Italy, from Montana and California. They came because it was New York, the city where Dylan invented himself. But there was nothing at all romantic about this grimy sidewalk where two dozen people killed time in front of unmarked metal security doors.

  They milled around, read trashy magazines, did a little work, tried to sleep on the sidewalk.

  Suddenly, in the middle of this calm, Charlie started going ballistic.

  “We’re fucked!” he cried. “We’re fucked!”

  Security was saying they were going to let in the first 250 people to mingle in a rooftop bar. A while later, they would guide the crowd downstairs to the stage. Charlie could see only disaster. It would be a free-for-all. The people who had waited all this time would have no advantage. They would have to fight for their positions against fans who had arrived a few hours before the doors opened—people who had not paid their dues like he had.

  Charlie marched around back and tried to talk the security chief, a man named Stephan, out of this terrible plan. Stephan wore a black jacket, a spotless Yankees cap, and diamond earrings. He stood at attention, the classic bouncer’s pose: eyes forward, his back straight, chest puffed out. He towered over Charlie, whose floppy gray hair looked disheveled from his all-nighter.

  Politely, Charlie pleaded for Stephan to help preserve the line order.

  “The people that’s in front will be the first ones in,” Stephan promised.

  “I’ve seen this go soooo wrong,” Charlie countered.

  “It goes right.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, “but you haven’t seen Bob fans.”

  2

  In 2010, it was business as usual for Dylan. He was performing about as many concerts as he had when the Never Ending Tour began two decades earlier. If you waited outside a medium-size venue anywhere in the world, he was bound to stop by sooner or later. He played Tokyo in March, Athens and Istanbul in May. He started the month of June in Bucharest and he ended it in Bordeaux. He played a festival in England, then roamed through the Great Plains. Austin in August was sweltering. A few fans passed out from the heat waiting for him to come on in Lincoln.

  Two days later he played the world’s biggest biker rally, in Sturgis, South Dakota. The stage sat in the middle of a massive campground that looked like one of Dylan’s phantasmagoric songs brought to life. It was the freak-show circus from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the outlandish world of “Desolation Row,” the set for “Tombstone Blues.” The Buffalo Chip had a pool bar sponsored by Hedonism II, the racy Jamaican resort. It had a mechanical bull. It had a firing range. Bikers could ride right up to the stage and rev their motors. Women wore body paint instead of clothes; some men sprouted devil’s horns. The Coors spokesmodel was there, and so were the US Air Force recruiters. “It’s fucking insanity!” screamed a Dylan freak who had driven eleven hours from Winnipeg. “What is this place?” Before Dylan went on stage the mob saw a twenty-one-gun salute, a prowar rant by actor Lorenzo Lamas, and a scantily clad acrobat riding a motorcycle on a high wire. Two minutes after Dylan finished his act, ten women in string bikinis gyrated onto the stage to impress the clipboard-wielding judges of the Miss Buffalo Chip Beauty Pageant, followed shortly after by Kid Rock. The smattering of Dylan fans were wigged out by the scene but they thought their man put on a great show. The badass bikers from the Sons of Silence Motorcycle Club (motto: Donec Mors Non Separat, “Until Death Separates Us”) did not seem impressed. Dylan looked like he enjoyed himself.

  The Peripatetic One played his sixty-third show of the year at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival in September. On the last leg of the year, he’d do seven weeks of dates in college towns from Florida to Wisconsin, followed by the three shows in New York and a couple of casino gigs. When the shows were announced, Charlie mapped out a trip that would have him looping through the Midwest in late October and early November: Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Chicago, Indianapolis, Akron, Columbus. Six shows in ten days, more than a thousand miles round trip from his home outside Cleveland. He didn’t have much money in his bank account, but Charlie thought he could pull it off. If he was lucky, he’d catch the New York shows, too.

  Charlie was intense, conspiratorial, a bit pushy in a disarmingly self-conscious kind of way. The first time we spoke on the phone, he suggested I fly him to New York so he could show me how serious tourgoers did the line. He was full of confidence, almost bluster, but at the same time he could be sensitive. “If you talk to me for twenty minutes, not to blow my own horn, I think it could be more interesting than two other people you talk to for two hours,” he said. “Or maybe I just think I’m more interesting than most other people do, and in that case don’t tell me because it will really let me down.”

  He started writing poetry at fourteen, and reciting it soon after. After a little while at community college, he left home and followed a girl to Columbus, where he read his poetry on Mondays at a bar that hosted slams, Larry’s. It was the center of the little countercultural community in the city. The wooden tables were graffiti-scarred. Velvet Underground was on the jukebox. Word was that Dylan once overnighted in the apartment upstairs. A guy he met at Larry’s, impressed with Charlie’s stuff, introduced him to a man who could help him get published. The man was Jim Shepard, a lo-fi legend in underground music circles who founded a series of experimental rock bands—V-3, Vertical Slit—and made records largely outside of the studio system. Shepard also had a publishing outfit. The young poet handed him a manila folder filled with writing, and next thing he knew he had two chapbooks out.

  Shepard was the first person who made Charlie see that he could really be an artist. “With Shepard, all things were possible,” he said. “He pulled me off the street when I was having some problems. He turned me on to music and poetry and books. And he was like, ‘You want to be an artist, just go for it.’”

  They became friends and sometimes performed together. “Being on a stage with him was like being onstage with a caged panther,” Charlie wrote later. “He was manic—maniacal—incendiary.” Shepard was as outside the mainstream as anyone could be. One guy who knew him said that the best steady job he could remember him having was jukebox routeman. Shepard once told an interviewer, “I don’t watch the news. I don’t read the papers. I’m not really in touch with society. I was born. I’m here, but I don’t believe any of it.”

  Charlie tried to internalize Shepard’s philosophy, which was to work as if he had six months to live. That meant using his time to create, not sitting in some office cubicle or standing behind a retail counter at the mall. Charlie always had some creative project going. He produced a radio show and posted it online for friends—Radio Ether, he called it. He recorded his poems and uploaded them to a blog. Some pieces he did with musician friends, who improvised behind him on guitar or ukulele or cello or flute. He had a band, Root Cellar, that played sporadically. “I sing,” Charlie said. “I scream, actually.” They did a song called “Danger Pussy.” Often when Charlie made something, he didn’t do anything with it. “Mostly,” he said, “it goes into a drawer.”

  He could throw himself into all kinds of complex creative projects, but the mundane matters of life left him stumped. He didn’t know where to start. How did you get a driver’s license? What was the best way of buying a car? He thought his head would explode if he tried to do things like that. “My brain doesn’t work that way,” he said. “You want me to go out and get a job and work? I’ll do it. I’m going to have to do it sometime. Sometime soon. But that doesn’t make sense to me. I have to really feel something. It has to feel right.”

  He’d held down his share of jobs. He learned tarot so he could work a psychic call line at seven dollars an hour. For four years he managed a college bar in Columbus, but when that ended, he said he stopped caring about finding something else. He went numb.

  Jim Shepard killed himself in 1998, at age f
orty. Charlie hit rock bottom a few years later. On the verge of being evicted, he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to live with a girl he had met through Dylan fan circles. That lasted four months. Out of options, he moved back home to Cleveland. His last steady gig was at a Starbucks in the mall across the street from his mother’s home in Lyndhurst, Ohio, where he had been camped out on the couch for years. He drew unemployment for a while.

  But despite his bleak financial situation, he still found ways to see Dylan shows. By the time October arrived, he had tickets for the six Midwest concerts and a ride with a friend in Chicago. He planned to crash wherever he could and tap his limited funds for food and incidentals. It felt like a minor miracle to be able to go back on the road.

  Ann Arbor sucked. Kalamazoo was great. He thought Chicago was out of this world. “Just the way he said ‘para-lyzed ’ during ‘Positively Fourth Street’—it was just unbelievable,” Charlie said over dinner the next night in Indianapolis, a few hours before another show. “He spit it out. But he didn’t. He put it out there a little bit, and it was dangling off his tongue, and then he pulled it back in and then he pushed it out. Like a piano out of a window. Then it just came down”—Charlie smacked the table—“and it lay there on the sidewalk. He did ‘Positively Fourth Street’ like he wrote it seven minutes before he walked out on stage.”