Dylan at 85

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

On Monday night, we saw Dylan in his 85th year at the Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota. He’s always doing something impossible like winning the Nobel Prize or singing for an hour and a half when it’s probably past his bedtime. I’m not a rabid Bob fan, but it was my third pilgrimage to hear him do what only he does, whining and rasping through his songs, and it carried a potent sweep of history, his, mine and ours. The history of our times. I remember the buzz on the street in the West Village as far back as 1961. Do the math. That’s sixty-five years ago. There was a new guy in town, a troubadour, and everyone was talking about him. Over cups of espresso that would make your hair fall out, under the arch in Washington Square Park. By 1965, he was writing lyrics about it “Because something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you Mister Jones?”

Photo by Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash

In the Berkshires, I saw him conventionally at Tanglewood but also memorably in 2006 at Wahconah Park, the minor league baseball stadium in Pittsfield, where we stood through the whole concert joyfully making public spectacles of ourselves as if we weren’t already on the old side. Like a long-lost second cousin, Bobby Zimmerman, even if I lost contact with him for years at a stretch, was always there, chronicling, giving us a glimpse of the big picture.

And there he was again in Minnesota, the homeland, where he was born in 1941. I’d never been to the venue and had visions of intoxicated crowds, long lines to get into the bathroom. But that was then, this is now. The event was modest, the seats not completely filled. There was an opening act, then Lucinda Williams. Lucinda at 73 could still sing and served up some hope. These are dire times and a gathering of some 15,000 people in Minnesota is an opportunity to give people something they are yearning for and can hold on to. The close ups of her face on the screens showed a woman long past caring about what she looked like. She looked lived-in, beat up. Her set was raw. We listened to her and we watched the dark shadows under her eyes and we waited for Dylan.

He came on around 9 o’clock wearing a white hoodie that was a cross between a ku klux klan outfit and a shroud, made a passing gesture to the crowd from the front of the stage, then retired far to the rear barricaded behind a keyboard. The images on the screens showed him receding into the dark with a handful of band members on each side of him. We never saw his face. At first I thought that, unlike Lucinda Williams, he didn’t want us to see what he looked like. Then people started talking about his much vaunted mystique. He doesn’t say a single word during the concert. He doesn’t even introduce the top-notch musicians backing him up. He protects himself from us, staying as far away as possible. I saw all of that, the separateness, the arrogance, but it landed in a different way for me. I identified with him. I saw that he was anticipating, rehearsing his end times and he insisted on doing it on his own terms.

Dylan is old and has arthritis in his hands. He can no longer play the guitar. So he gave us a few harmonica riffs which were a joy, but mostly he’s back there behind the piano singing over a basic blues keyboard back-up. Someone else is doing the flashy guitar solos. He does what he can still do, unapologetically, and he lets us know, singing Crossing the Rubicon and I Shall Be Released that he sees the other side coming into to focus, not so very far away. Being angry with him for not being the Dylan of Highway Sixty-One Revisited is like resisting one’s own passing. It’s not as if he tries to be twenty year old Bleecker Street Bob and can no longer sing. He can sing what he can sing and he was never Maria Callas. He gives you Dylan at 85 because, really, what’s the alternative? I wasn’t angry at him. It would have been like being angry at myself and I didn’t feel sorry for him. It would have been like feeling sorry for myself. We are old, Bob and I, but we are here in this tender moment and we have done a lot of living.

*************************************************************************************************************Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.