Bob's Legend or Mine?

Perhaps the only predictable thing about Bob Dylan’s 50-year career is that he is nothing if not unpredictable. He’s spent much of his time heading in directions no-one ever expected. And in the last twenty years or so this has been particularly true of his live appearances.

I’ve seen Dylan a number of times. Football Park, Adelaide, 1978. Earls Court, London, 1981. Memorial Drive, Adelaide, 1986. And a whole bunch of times, starting in March 1992, at our ignominiously named Adelaide Entertainment Centre. Those first few were marked with a certain itching excitement, an expectation that only got worse as the date of the concert approached. Driving there, the anticipation was almost unbearable. And waiting outside with ticket in hand - well, let’s not go there.

Something happened, though, on 21 March 1992. Six long years had passed since Dylan’s last visit to Australia, and though I’d heard rumors, I simply refused to believe what the press was saying. But when Dylan emerged into the packed auditorium it was with barely a nod towards his audience. His singing was sloppy, his playing too, and he rushed through the songs as though he couldn’t wait to get off the stage. 

Yet I clung to the hope it was just a passing phase. I’d seen him during the Budokan album tour, and later with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, both times when he’d been at the top of his game. Another two concerts during the  nineties put paid to that notion. Incensed shouts echoed between the songs; for the first time at a concert I saw people walking out. With each subsequent tour the audience numbers diminished. I started wondering why Dylan bothered to tour at all. Did he need the money? Were we, his fans, poor saps who were being taken for a ride?

On Tuesday 19 March, then, you’ll understand why I was nervous. Yet, waiting for the lights to go down, I found myself considering this idea: perhaps mystery is part of the allure. (It might also be a touch masochistic.) Maybe (to fall victim to popular music lore) each performance is a unique experience, another notch in the gigantic totem of pop music history. Such is Dylan’s legend you want your concert experience to be everything the term “legend” says it should be - meaningful, a high point in your otherwise normal, run of the mill existence. 

You can see I was trying desperately hard to talk myself into having an experience that wouldn’t leave me feeling like I’d been ripped off - again.

And then it occurred to me. For Dylan, the sheer weight of his legend must be overwhelming. I began to suspect the last twenty years has been a deliberate exercise in extricating himself from it. Wasn’t it John Lennon who said the Beatles were just a band that happened to strike it very lucky? Couldn’t this thinking also apply to Dylan? 

So there I sat, me and five thousand others, waiting. And I, for one, waited with as few expectations as possible.

Yeah, right.

It’s difficult being in the same room as a music legend. It’s almost impossible - I discovered as soon as Dylan appeared - to shed the weight of history. And now I realize I’m talking, not about Dylan’s history, but my own. I was too young to witness, let alone appreciate, Dylan’s classic 1960s period. My knowledge of Civil Rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy, King was all gained second-hand through text books. At fourteen I somehow had Dylan and John Denver mixed into one (sorry, Bob), so that when Annie or Thank God I’m a Country Boy came on the radio I thought it was the same artist The Beatles had fallen over themselves to praise. (What the hell, I routinely wondered, were they thinking?) But then came that transformational Friday evening in winter 1976 when the Hard Rain concert was shown on television. (A class mate had nagged me about it; I knew I’d never hear the end of it come Monday if I didn’t have some comment to make.) Before even the first verse of the first song was over I was frantically gesticulating at my mother to be quiet while simultaneously trying to pick my jaw off the ground. That was the moment. I became a fan. I’ve been one ever since.

But back to Adelaide and now. I sat in the auditorium with the monolith of my own Dylan history weighing me down. The lights dimmed, the crowd brought the house down, and suddenly there Dylan was, looking smaller and more fragile than I’d ever seen him before. 

He nodded at his audience, took his position behind the keyboard, and let the music begin. And from the very first song - Gonna Change My Way of Thinking from his first gospel album, though it is Easter - I was put into a state of reverie, the visions flickering like an old Super-8 movie above the heads of the crowd. Suddenly it was 1981 and I was alone in a church in South London. With Senor (Tales of Yankee Power) I was lying on my best friend’s floor a few days after Christmas 1978. Tangled Up in Blue reminded me of how very young my wife was when we married. I relived the births of my children, our first house, my final year of university. Birthdays, weddings, funerals. Suddenly I understood Dylan’s legacy, the way it’s shaped my life. I saw how much of myself I owed to those songs.

Well, after all that, what about the concert itself? Dylan played a good show. Actually; it was more than that. He’s tried hard to rid himself of the legend, but all he did was remind me why that legend was there in the first place. I left having fallen in love with him all over again.