The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  Like the first night, the new material kept the concert afloat. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” (2009) was a dance song for anyone but the most sclerotic souls. If you’d read Scott Warmuth’s blog and you remembered where the lyrics came from, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” (2001) was a chain of flashing images—New Orleans and Lewis Carroll and Henry Timrod. On “Can’t Wait” (1997), the band played a bluesy stop-start groove for all it was worth.

  Halfway through the show Dylan stepped out to center stage and took the mic. “Forgetful heart . . . lost your power of recall,” he sang over a quiet violin and the thrum of a stand-up bass played with a bow. “Every little detail . . . you don’t remember at all.” This was Late Late Dylan. He had released “Forgetful Heart” the year before on Together Through Life, and onstage it had grown into as gripping a song as any, filled with ache. He lost the woman, but at the end he realizes that the affair may have always been an illusion: They never had a chance. Dylan wailed a spooky harmonica solo and as the song evaporated in the air he stepped forward and reached out his arms, as if the women up front were fading ghosts. They swooned. A thought crossed multiple minds up front: “That was for me.”

  The stage went dark and Dylan put down the harp and jog-walked back to the piano as the band launched into a rocking song from “Love and Theft” called “Honest with Me.” Glaring at the same women, he spat out the opening couplet. “Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps, some of these women they just give me the creeps.” As if to say, Pull yourself together. That, a minute ago? That was just an act.

  The show ended earsplittingly: “All Along the Watchtower” was the sound of a band trying to blow apart a room. The drums were as deafening as a firing squad. It was music for the Second Coming, and it was with this song that Dylan sent his followers back to the streets, as he had many times before. They walked out with their ears ringing and fateful lines (“The hour is getting late”) circling in their brains.

  “God bless ya, Bobby!” the Man in the Fedora yelled.

  Charlie was equal parts exhilarated and worn-out. Three days of anxiety and total joy were written on his face. He went back to the same deli, one last 10:30 P.M. meal. He was already thinking about tomorrow: subway, airport, plane, home. The noise would be rattling around in his brain for days.

  5

  When she was in her twenties, Elizabeth Wolfson went to California on a vacation. She rented a car and drove up to Malibu to see Dylan’s house with the onion dome. She knew it sounded like stalking, but she was not the first nor the last person to make that pilgrimage. She got lost but she didn’t give up. She wanted to find the place so desperately that she picked up a hitchhiker and asked for directions, and he knew the way.

  Soon she found herself walking through the gate and into the dirt back lot, past the decrepit vehicles and the empty guard shack and right up to the door. It was open.

  As she considered whether to cross the threshold or not, a guard showed up.

  “You have to leave,” he said.

  Now she was in her mid-fifties, and she had had a perfectly happy life, a great love, two children, a rewarding career. Two things were left on her life list: to write a book and to meet Bob Dylan. The book she could write. But she couldn’t figure out how she would meet Dylan. She was a goal-oriented person, and this drove her crazy. “Look, I’ve been listening to him since I was fifteen years old. That’s a lifetime. The passion has never wavered.” Blood on the Tracks, the record he wrote while his marriage disintegrated, was the soundtrack to her first breakup. Time Out of Mind, the 1997 album soaked in regret, appeared as her own marriage fell apart. (“It was so potent I could barely listen to it.”) “Forgetful Heart” appeared just as another relationship was ending. In between, there were all the songs about unrequited love.

  “He and I have been through a lot together and he doesn’t know it,” she said. “He doesn’t know I exist. Can you see how that would be frustrating? I don’t have any grandiose idea that because he’s affected me he’s going to care. I just think it’s not fair that it’s a one-way relationship.” She wasn’t delusional. She didn’t think he was going to ask her out on a date, or invite her to his home. But if he did she would have to drop everything and go. “I don’t think he’s Jesus, I don’t think he’s the messiah. He’s just a human being. But he’s filled with poetry.”

  Years ago, a writer asked Dylan about the people who made pilgrimages to see him at shows and wanted to meet him. What did he have for these fans? “In India,” he answered, “they have men that live in the Himalayas, and people make long journeys to sit at their feet. And what happens when they sit at their feet? Nothing. Nothing happens. They’re usually given a big dose of silence.”

  Once, Dylan and Elizabeth did communicate, wordlessly, from the rail to the stage. As he was taking his bow at the end of a concert in 2011, she gave a thumbs-up and he stuck his thumbs down. Was he not happy with the show? She gave two thumbs up, and he followed suit.

  Two thumbs up. It was a start.

  Postscript

  MIRRORS

  In 2009, a very long entry appeared on a blog called Radioactive Dylan. The author called it a “prematurely published Dylan obituary.” He explained that, listening to the radio one night, he heard a talk show playing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and for whatever reason he thought the host was going to say that he had queued up the song because Bob Dylan was dead. Just the idea of Dylan’s passing sent the writer to his keyboard, where he let loose a torrent of prose. The bulk of the post’s thirty-five thousand words was one uninterrupted paragraph—its multihued text the only aid to readers—­documenting his half of an imaginary conversation with a newcomer to Dylan fandom. He expounded on Dylan’s magnificence, and argued that while he knew about all the other great artists of history, Milton and Mozart and Melville, he had concluded that none of them outshined his hero. “Indeed, Dylan’s career stands as the strongest case for Artist of the Millennium.”

  The author was Bryan Styble, founder of the first Dylan fanzine, Talkin’ Bob Zimmerman Blues, and the man involved in acquiring the “armpit tape” copy of Dylan playing in the St. Paul attic apartment in 1960. Back then he went as Brian Stibal. He changed his name because he was tired of people mispronouncing it, though others thought he did it because those y’s gave him and Dylan something in common. Bryan was a self-described math nerd with Asperger’s. He could talk about almost any topic for hours, uninterrupted. (Later, he would be a radio host and a Jeopardy! contestant.) He was imposing, boisterous, very loud. He was aware of this. He knew it made people uncomfortable, that it made people misunderstand him. “I’m an intense person. That’s why people don’t like me.”

  When he was in his twenties, Bryan spent a lot of time listening to and thinking about Dylan. The singer had cautioned his fans not to conflate the music and the man. “I’m not the songs. It’s like somebody expecting Shakespeare to be Hamlet, or Goethe to be Faust,” he said. But Bryan thought Dylan was wrong. “It is my profound belief that more than any other artist in any medium in any era, Dylan blurs the line between art and artist,” Bryan told me once. “These songs were so personal that he couldn’t be telling stories.” This became the insight that propelled him: To understand the songs, he needed to know the man, personally. He needed to locate Dylan, and he needed to talk to him.

  In 1980, Bryan was hoping to break into television or radio broadcasting, and he faced a choice: New York or Los Angeles? He moved west, and he would be lying if he didn’t acknowledge that part of the reason was that his hero lived there. When he got to LA, he began driving past Dylan’s Santa Monica rehearsal space two and three times a week. If there was anything going on—players milling around, music blaring from open windows—he would stop and hang around. Later, he would make a point of driving past Dylan’s ex-wife’s Beverly Hills house on his way home from his job. He got to know the cars, memorizing the license plates so if
he spotted a powder-blue Mercury station wagon or a brown Mercedes or a Winnebago, he could know instantly that Dylan was nearby.

  He talked to his hero a number of times. He chatted Dylan up at a hotel pool, sat next to him at a club, nearly crushed him to death with his car. Notoriously, Bryan crashed one of Dylan’s sons’ bar mitzvahs. Seeing a mention of the event in an article, he started to call every synagogue in the area and ask what time it began. He hit pay dirt on only the second call. He and a friend threw on suits, raced to the synagogue, and sat in the back row.

  Bryan and Dylan had a few uncomfortable encounters, but mostly they went fine. One of Bryan’s friends said Dylan seemed to like him.

  “What do you think?” I asked Bryan once.

  “I think it’s a wonder he shook my hand. I don’t want to speculate,” he said. But a few minutes later he stopped midsentence and looked me in the eye. “I take that back. I do have a theory, and I happen to think it’s right. I don’t think it, I know it. I think he’s got a problem similar to my problem: being misunderstood, being misjudged. People take me the wrong way. I suspect it’s because they don’t listen to the words I say.”

  On October, 14, 1980, a Tuesday night, Bryan spotted the Mercedes parked in front of the rehearsal space. His man was inside. He decided to loiter in the darkness. He was going to wait all night if that’s what it took. Dylan walked out around 10:15 P.M. and put something in the car. When he turned around to lock up the studio, Bryan appeared.

  “Bob, can I talk to you for a second?”

  If Dylan was startled, he didn’t show it. He acted as though he saw Bryan all the time. They chatted about this and that: about why Dylan’s entourage sometimes hassled Bryan, about Dave Van Ronk playing in town. Bryan walked over to his car to get a copy of a review he’d written about Saved, and Dylan glanced at it and asked whether there was anything in there he could use in liner notes or concert programs. Dylan, who was making gospel records at the time, asked Bryan if he was a Christian, or a Jew, or just a heathen. Bryan lied: He hadn’t been converted, but he told Dylan he was a Jew. “I didn’t want to be a heathen.”

  Bryan tried to stay calm. It took all his concentration. This is going real good, he thought. Let’s not blow it. Their faces were so close that he could see how thick the lenses were in Dylan’s aviator glasses. Then his hero spoke the fourteen words that Bryan would carry with him for the rest of his life like a cherished heirloom.

  “Bryan,” he said, “you and the other people who understand why I’m not like anyone else . . .”

  Bryan missed whatever else Dylan said. He had heard all he needed to hear. The suggestion that Dylan knew that Bryan got him—that was all the validation he would ever need.

  That was all he had wanted from Bob Dylan.

  • • •

  In the summer of 2012, the Dylan myth-making operation sprang to life again. A new record was coming out, Tempest. The reliably enthusiastic music writers were invited to listening parties, then sent out into the world to buzz about it. One song leaked out, another was released with a music video. Fans were told that they could go to certain street corners—some of them tied to Dylan’s life, like a venue he played in Philadelphia—and listen to Tempest streaming over their iPhones. There were pop-up stores selling autographed copies of the record and posters and commemorative coins. It was a serious marketing blitz. Dylan was back. Again.

  As soon as they learned the title of the album and its track list, fans flew into action. First off, The Tempest was believed to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote on his own. Was this a hint that Dylan was ready to hang it up? One digger didn’t even wait for lyrics to begin looking for appropriations: He found the title of the opener, “Duquesne Whistle,” in a 1933 Time magazine reference to the Pennsylvania city’s steelworks. (In the song, it turned out, they were train whistles.) On the album cover, the title was written in bright red cursive, and the capital T looked a lot like a cross, so students of Dylan began flipping through their Bibles for references to the song titles. Someone discovered that the cover image—of a woman in rapture—was taken at a fountain in front of the Austrian Parliament building in the center of Vienna, and that was parsed for meaning.

  Critics and fans lavished Tempest with praise. A few made silly comparisons—best Dylan record since 1976, one critic declared it—but even Clinton Heylin and Andy Muir found a lot to like. After walking out of the Roundhouse in 2009, Andy had come back around on Dylan. Strangely, he fell back in love while listening to the record of Christmas songs Dylan released later that year. Somehow the man sounded so much more authentic croaking “O Little Town of Bethlehem” than he had in years. Andy had hoped he would find a way back into the fold, and sure enough, the next few times he saw Dylan in concert he enjoyed himself. When Tempest landed, Andy was his old ecstatic self again. He loved “Long and Wasted Years” so much that he put it on a continuous loop for a while and reveled in the glorious feeling of appreciating new Dylan.

  Scott Warmuth listened to that song and found that some of its words came from Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African-American Storytelling. Dylan borrowed from a tale of a buzzard who fools a rabbit and a squirrel into riding on his back so he can smash them to the ground and devour them. A monkey turns the tables on the bird. There they were again: tricksters. Tricksters tricking tricksters, in fact.

  Dylan sat down with Rolling Stone for the One Big Interview and spent some time launching attacks on anybody who had ever tried to figure him out. He and the interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, spoke about how Dylan changed after the motorcycle wreck in 1966. At one point, Dylan pulled out a paperback, the autobiography of infamous Hells Angel Sonny Barger, and insisted Gilmore read aloud from a passage about a motorcycle-club president who died in a wreck in the 1960s. The man’s name: Bobby Zimmerman.

  Dylan told Gilmore that the book opened his eyes. He suddenly and finally knew why he was so different from other people. He must have undergone a “transfiguration,” Dylan said. “So when you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I’ve lived through a lot. Have you ever heard of a book called No Man Knows My History? It’s about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. The title could refer to me.”

  The whole routine almost seemed like a send-up of the crazy efforts by critics, writers, and fans to explain Dylan. They poked and prodded at his songs, his biography, and his interviews, hoping these things would give up, finally, the secrets of his inner being. ­Gilmore played the straight man, as every journalist must, and tried to move the conversation onto safer, established ground. He returned to Dylan’s own crash in 1966. “Afterward, with the music made in Woodstock with the Band, and with John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, some were bewildered by your transformation,” Gilmore said. “You came back from that hiatus looking different, sounding different, in voice, music and words.”

  Dylan pounced. “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy? What the fuck is the matter with them?”

  So these things happened, he continued. “So fucking what? They want to know what can’t be known. They are searching—they are seekers. Like in the Pete Townshend song where he’s trying to find his way to 50 million fables.” In the song, the Seeker looks for answers from all his idols—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Timothy Leary—and he gets nowhere. He’s bound to die searching. “Why are they doing this? They don’t really know. It’s sad. It really is. May the Lord have mercy on them. They are lost souls.”

  Later in the conversation, he griped about the army of annotators trailing behind him. “There’s a whole world of scholars, professors, and Dylanologists, and everything I do affects them in some way. And, you know, in some ways, I’ve given them life. They’d be nowhere without me.”

  A week before Tempest arrived in record stores, the tour pass
ed through a little venue north of New York. The Capitol Theater in Port Chester was an old movie house that had been converted into a concert hall with room for eighteen hundred. The place had fallen into disrepair, but new owners restored it and booked Dylan for the grand reopening. Port Chester was only forty minutes by train from Manhattan, and all the regulars trekked up. Mitch Blank sat in the balcony. Jeff Friedman taped the concert. In the lobby, Nina Goss and Charlie Haeussler ran into Lucas Stensland, who had recently returned to New York from Minnesota.

  As the crowd waited for Dylan to come on, they noticed something new on the stage. There were five large mirrors facing out toward the crowd. They were round, oval, and rectangular, in beautiful frames, large enough to hang on a wall at home. One floated in front of Dylan’s keyboard, one was propped inside the open lid of a trunk, others leaned against pieces of stage gear.

  What were these doing there? Were they some kind of deterrent to surreptitious paparazzi? Dylan had long insisted that no photographs be taken at his concerts, and he could be camera-shy offstage. “Cameras make ghosts out of people,” he said. But the dictum had long been ignored by fans, and it was impossible to enforce in the smartphone age. Perhaps the mirrors were there to annoy the annoying. Their flashes would shoot back into their own eyes. Nobody could say for sure.

  But after his fuming comments in Rolling Stone appeared a week later, it didn’t seem unreasonable to ask if the mirrors were meant to send a sharper message to the audience at his feet: Take a look at yourselves, would you please?