The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  “Like he was angry?” someone asked.

  “No,” he said. “Like he was resigned. Like I just know how you are and you’re never going to fucking change and I’m on to you. And your little dog.”

  Charlie had arranged to eat at the kind of place where he thought he might run into Dylan, a restaurant called Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles that was attached to a Citgo gas station. Charlie struck up a conversation with one of the waitresses, whose name was Jolene.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “We’re going to see Bob Dylan, and he does a song called ‘Jolene.’ Has he ever eaten here?”

  “Bob Dylan?” Jolene asked. “If he has, I missed him.”

  As a teenager Charlie didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. He remembers walking home from school with kids who obviously didn’t want anything to do with him. But then one day he put on Highway 61 Revisited, which he had checked out of the library but was long overdue. The second time he listened to “Like a Rolling Stone,” something clicked. It was the first time he could ever remember not feeling alone. He never forgot how that comforted him as a teenager. “Somebody spoke to me,” he said. “Somebody understood.”

  So count Charlie among the people who wanted to meet Dylan one day. “I think he would think I was funny,” he says. “I really believe I could be the one guy who could talk to him without bullshit. He needs another Jewish poet now that Ginsberg is dead.”

  3

  He’d made it to New York, and now the concert was close. The sky grew dark and the white garage doors swung open and the venue lights flickered to life. At five P.M., the line was getting tense. Charlie had not been able to get the security man to change his plan, and he was edgy. More ticket holders arrived. Friends let latecomers break rank. Charlie mistakenly went after a woman who had been there all day.

  A reporter from Radio Ireland walked around sticking a microphone in people’s faces. “Have you seen Bob Dylan before?”

  “Seventeen times,” someone answered. “This will be eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.”

  “There is treatment for that,” the radio man said before moving down the line to the next willing interviewee. “What does Bob Dylan mean to you?”

  Security opened the gates and everybody rushed up to the third-floor bar. But instead of looking for beers, they turned around at the door and immediately stacked up a new line, which stretched up a set of stairs and around a balcony. Charlie salvaged the first spot.

  A woman who hadn’t waited long slipped in near the front, and someone started shouting, “Don’t talk to her!” as if by ignoring her they could make her disappear.

  A few minutes later they were off. Grown men and women dashed down the stairs, jog-walking like kids at a pool who didn’t want to be busted for running. They ran a few steps, walked, ran a few steps, looking around for guards all the while, and then sprinted for the promised land.

  When they got there, everyone suddenly became calm and quiet. It was like they’d shot the rapids and made it to the calm water below.

  After forty-five minutes, incense poured out of the tin buckets onstage—fans knew the brand, Nag Champa—signaling that Dylan was coming soon. At 8:04, amid a steady clapping from the crowd, he appeared from behind a curtain.

  The crowd hooted and screamed and throbbed as Dylan strode up to his organ with a disjointed lope, a walking jog. He wore the Late Dylan dress code: a black coat with white trim along the collar and cuffs; a white tuxedo shirt open at the collar; a bolo tie with a fancy slide, a shimmering eagle in flight on a pearly backdrop rimmed in silver; black pants with a stripe down each leg; a flat-brimmed hat with a brown feather in the band; boots that glittered silver in the lights; and gleaming gold-and-diamond bands on both his left and right ring fingers.

  Dylan settled in behind the organ and the band launched into the first song. “I’m gonna change my way of thinkin,’ make myself a different set of rules,” he barked. “Put my best foot forward, and stop being influenced by fools.” The song came from his first gospel album, Slow Train Coming, but Dylan had rewritten it in the ensuing thirty-one years. The original lyrics decried sons marrying mothers and fathers turning daughters into whores, and paraphrased Christ’s warning: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man comes.” Late Dylan was less Bible-thumping, and he sang a different version in New York. Where the old song lamented that “you forgot all about the golden rule,” now he flipped it: “We living by the golden rule, whoever got the gold rules.” Despite the retooling, he still sounded like a true believer. “Oh, Lord, I have no friend but you,” he yowled. He sang that “Jesus is coming.” The “storms on the ocean, out on the mountain, too,” evoked Jesus walking on water, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. But at the moment, nobody was thinking about any of that. “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” was no Sunday-morning hymn, no prayerful meditation; it rocked. Heads bobbed. Someone took a hit off a glass pipe, and a man in a fedora gripped the rail, rocked back, and started to boogie.

  At intervals, Dylan picked up a harmonica and went out to center stage, only a few feet from his rapt fans. He is not a tall man, but from the foot of the stage he towered over the crowd. Dylan performed “Tangled Up in Blue” this way. His kaleidoscopic song from Blood on the Tracks is about being on the road and still wondering about the woman he left behind. He preened a bit as the band started in, then stepped up and sang. His face was always in motion—a grimace, a baring of the teeth, a flash of the tongue. Something resembling a smile crossed his face, but it looked intentionally fake. He had begun to do a number of songs like this each night, out from behind the piano, pacing around. Between lines he would shrug his shoulders as if trying to adjust the suit coat. He would tug at his lapels. He would turn his back, wait for the moment, then face front and blow his harp, bent at the waist, one hand outstretched. He would strut around like a marionette street hustler, all jerky juke and jive.

  A few months earlier he’d turned “Lay, Lady, Lay” into a lascivious come-on for some woman in the front row. He threw his arms wide and grinned. He laughed, turning back to look at his drummer as if they shared an inside joke, like they had been talking about this woman earlier. He posed, a peacock, and then flipped sweaty gray curls off his neck. He shot his leg out like a runway model and tried to croon. Years earlier, he’d said that when he was up onstage with the crowd looking back at him, he couldn’t help but feel like he was in a burlesque show. By 2010, he was playing the part.

  The band played a gentle version of “Desolation Row” and charged through “Highway 61 Revisited,” where the promoter is cooking up a world war. But Dylan did not lean on nostalgia. He played his later songs as well, and they were fresher, more suited to his band and his rasp. Those songs swung, or settled into melancholy shadows, or skulked down dark streets. “Ain’t Talkin,’” from Modern Times, felt like a long creep through a desecrated Garden of Eden, a Cormac McCarthy novel in F minor. No one would argue the concert was classic Dylan. It wasn’t 1966, or even 1995, but up front, with the amps at 10 and the players so close they seemed larger than life, a kind of hypnosis set in. This was the drug the rail chasers were after.

  Then it was over, and Dylan came to center stage and stood with the band. He bowed, stone-faced, and walked off. Beyond introducing the musicians, the Sphinx hadn’t said a word. He exited a side door and stepped into an idling SUV before the house lights came on. The crowd started to file out, but the fans who had waited on the sidewalk all day weren’t ready for it to end. They milled about, chattering while the crew worked on the stage. Charlie debated whether to go sleep at the hostel or stay out all night. Get the hell to bed, his friends insisted. He relented. But he still planned on returning at four A.M. Five hours to go.

  First he needed a late dinner, and he walked to a deli down the street. He had discovered the joint the night before and immediate
ly fallen in love. Waiting for his sandwich, he started breaking down the show. “Unbelievable. Look, I was crying. I don’t know if it was because of the Nag Champa or the sleep deprivation. I’m sure not sleeping kicks it in. The whole show was great—but those first two or three songs were just, oh my God, they were out of the box.

  “It’s watching a man do what he loves, and it really reaffirms for me: Do what you love. I’m not saying you’ll be Bob Dylan, but just do what you love.

  “The best ‘Desolation’ I have ever heard. Now, I know when he does that weird singing thing, that staccato, it can be annoying, but this time it worked. I’ll tell you why. He was stepping into the microphone for the lyrics. And he was fierce tonight. He knew he was in New York City. This show tonight was something special.

  “I was right where he looks when he’s singing on the keyboard, and I’ll tell you this—even though it will sound crazy. It’s happened enough and it happened tonight. I’ll start screaming at important moments, and he’ll start responding to that. During ‘Thunder in the Mountain’ I started saying Go! Go! Go! And he just kicked it in. I know, I know. I sound like a crazy fan, but who knows?”

  He stopped talking and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “By the way,” he said. “I’m not getting there at four. I’m getting there at three.”

  4

  It was four A.M. on Wednesday now, thirty hours later, and the mysterious fan I came to think of as the Man in the Fedora hadn’t slept. For the third straight night he was on the sidewalk out in front of Terminal 5. He’d been front and center Monday and Tuesday. Last night, he and Charlie had drinks and dinner with a friend, and he invited Charlie to crash at the place where he was staying. But as soon as they got there, the Man in the Fedora decided that if he went to sleep, the alarm would go off just as he achieved rapid eye movement. He would have been shattered coming out of it. So instead of climbing into bed he showered, put on a pink shirt under a pinstriped suit, slipped a purple feather into the band of his hat, and hailed a cab. He left Charlie sleeping on the floor.

  They had met a few weeks earlier and spoken a lot in the line over the past two days. The man had spent the year seeing as many Dylan shows as possible, and he’d made it to upward of seventy of them, including Istanbul. He was friendly but cagey. (He insisted his name not appear in print. He had a good reason for it, he promised.) He spoke a lot but gave up little. He said he was a successful businessman who made enough money to retire early, and he was treating life as an adventure. “People who say there’s nothing to do, that freaks me out,” he said. He first saw Dylan in 1978. That year, an estimated two hundred thousand fans flocked to an airfield forty miles outside London to see Dylan. With his beads and top hat and leather jacket, “he was just the essence of a god,” the Man in the Fedora said. “Some kind of deity. It was like some sort of religious experience.”

  At three A.M., Charlie’s cell phone alarm trilled. Finding his friend gone, he hailed his own cab. Pulling up, he stepped out and asked, “Is Bob Dylan playing here tonight?” It seemed really funny at the time.

  Cold wind whipped off the Hudson, picking up speed through a tunnel down the street and then jetting across the line like ice water from a spigot. Charlie was wearing a flimsy coat and a thermal T-shirt. He sat down and leaned his head against the cold frame of the garage door. “I’m going to sleep in line,” he said. He knew he wouldn’t really be able to do it. “I slept in Columbus and a puddle of water passed by. I moved over and fell asleep again.” He was quiet for a minute or two. Then he picked his head up off the wall. “You know, after three nights of this, I won’t be able to feed myself.” Sleep deprivation was making him introspective. “How do we do this?” Charlie asked himself. “Woooooo. There are waves. In Detroit in ’05, I started to have a nervous breakdown. ‘Why am I such a mess? Why is my life such a mess?’ But once he started to do ‘I’ll Remember You,’ I felt that rush. You feel it. For me, part of it is I want to see if I can do it. Plus, whenever you get to the rail and he’s singing, it’s worth it. Just the moment it connects for you. Whatever happened during the day—if you’re tired or you’re hungry—it doesn’t matter.”

  By six A.M. the sky had gone from black to blue. The Man in the Fedora, standing and looking dapper, asked the assembled, “Does anybody else think the version of ‘Jolene’ was the best ever?”

  Charlie had done enough to establish his position at the head of the line, and he stood up and walked around the block to the corner store, which had coffee, water, egg breakfasts, soups, sandwiches, and, crucially, toilets. He had insisted that I meet him out front early and spend all day in line. By dawn, I was ready to surrender. “You’ve got to take it in stages,” he said. “Right now we’ve got to get food. There have been good shows, and tonight is going to be a motherfucking barn burner. Because he knows he’s in New York City. The one thing you cannot do is think about how many hours are left.” I’d already done it: fourteen.

  When Charlie returned, the line had grown but his spot was safe. Fourth in line was a sixty-five-year-old woman who had arrived around five. She zipped herself in a sleeping bag, which was inside a trash bag, and lay down atop a flattened box. She didn’t mind sleeping on the street. She was with family. “I’m close to all these people,” she explained. “Even if we only see each other five times a year, we take care of each other. It’s such a stressful situation. You’re bonded in blood. In friendship and trust and Bob.”

  A woman with a thin face, an easy smile, and long gray hair appeared at intervals, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. She was a computer programmer in Norway who had flown off for these shows without telling her boss. She would wait in line for a while, slip away to her hotel and write code, then come back and make sure she hadn’t lost her spot. She had to be close to the stage. “You get addicted,” she said. “Once you’ve been up there, you don’t want to go back.”

  Dylan’s days as a heartthrob were long gone, but still, a good number of the fans charging the rail every night were women, some of whom sought to position themselves where they could make eye contact. One of them had theories about the attraction. “He’s this elusive, mysterious, unavailable guy, and I think women in particular are drawn to that,” said Elizabeth Wolfson, a psychotherapist and clinical psychology professor in Santa Barbara. “That’s just my psychological interpretation. It’s like the elusive other that is so compelling you want him to draw you in. You want to make that connection.”

  At the shows, she added, the male fans were more interested in what song Dylan was going to play, or they were busy documenting it.

  “Women aren’t doing that,” she said. “They’re looking at his boots.”

  And they’re asking themselves questions: Why those pants? Did he just look at me? Is he married now? When Dylan began to wear bands on his ring fingers, the women were the first to notice. Wolfson knew she was generalizing. But those thoughts flashed through her own mind, much as she hated to admit it.

  When Dylan first arrived in the Village in 1961, emaciated and boyish, women reacted maternally. Wolfson still sensed that vibe from the women who waited in line. He looked fragile, vulnerable, almost elfin onstage. “You want to take care of him,” she said. “He’s so small up there, and he can be so awkward. There’s a Charlie Chaplin aspect to it.”

  All that said, the music was what kept Wolfson returning every night. “To the nondiscerning eye it looks the same night after night, but not to me. To me it’s different.” He might alter a phrase, change the intonation of a syllable. She might get a different feel from the band or the crowd. “I guess it’s like having sex,” she said. “Is it the same? Yes. But it’s always different. Are you going to stop because you did it before? If you find something in life that you enjoy and you’re passionate about, why would you stop?”

  The hours passed slowly on the third day in front of Terminal 5. People returned to hotel rooms to nap. They fetch
ed coffee and lunch. Random conversations percolated here and there down the line. And then, finally, we had made it to seven P.M. again. The crowd massed at barricades as the venue prepared to open the doors. Security looked over the bedraggled mob, amused. “Who’s number one here?” asked a plainclothes cop wearing a leather coat and a brush cut.

  “I am,” Charlie said.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Three fifteen.”

  “Whoa. You must be exhausted. I don’t have time for this sort of thing.”

  “We have jobs, too,” a woman said.

  “We’re not homeless,” said another.

  “We just look that way.”

  “Who came the farthest?” another cop asked.

  “She came from Oslo.”

  “Ireland!”

  “Wales!”

  “You must really like Bob Dylan.”

  The crowd rushed up to the bar and prepared for the dash downstairs. The fans were amped. I had been getting advice about how to claim and keep a spot on the rail. “Don’t let anybody push you,” one woman told me. “They’re all jackals.” I felt like I was an offensive lineman in the tunnel, bouncing around, pounding on my teammates’ shoulder pads, preparing to rush out onto the field and blow some defensive tackle off the line. “When you get down there, get big!” the sleeping-bag lady told me. She had ditched her parka, slipped into a frilly black cocktail dress, applied glittery eye shadow, and daubed gloss onto her lips. “Twenty dollars a tube,” she informed me. “We call this the Slutty Grandmother look.”

  The Man in the Fedora turned to me. “The excitement and anticipation could be measured on a Richter scale,” he said.

  “Can you imagine someone trying to get in front of this group now?” Charlie asked. He cackled.

  “Walk! Walk! Walk!” security said as they sent the crowd downstairs. “You’re the first ones in the club. Walk!” The rail in front of the piano was wide open, and I went for it and spread out my arms. The Man in the Fedora slid in next to me, and he made space between us for another guy who had been in line all three days. Charlie, a few spots down the rail, sent a text. “No matter what DON’T GIVE ANYONE UR SPOT EVEN FOR A SONG! No one is ur friend we’re in the heart of darkness and the ONLY SUN is up there on that stage. U know u worked 4 it so enjoy ur spoils!”