Bobcat Nation:
Memoirs of a Young
Bob Dylan Fan
by Adam Selzer
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE:
By Way of Introduction
CHAPTER TWO:
A Brief Dylan Bio
CHAPTER THREE:
I Was a Teenage Bobcat
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Old, Weird America
Dalton and Atlanta GA, 2001
CHAPTER FIVE
Love, Theft, and Those Dutch Sailors' Eyes
Nashville 2001
CHAPTER SIX
Adam and Mike's Excellent Adventure
Newport Folk Festival 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN
Risking Your Life for the Rail
The Atlanta Lightning Storm, 2003
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cowboys and Hippies
Dylan and the Dead 2003 tour
CHAPTER NINE
We Can All Be Famous
For Fifteen People
Chicago and Atlanta, 2004
DYLAN REVIEWS
2005-Present
Chapter Eight:
Cowboys and Hippies
Any reputable stinkologist, should such a thing exist, will surely tell you that cowboys smelled like crap.
In the height of the cowboy era, in the 19th century, cowboys were outnumbered by farmers by about 1000 to 1. They didn't live exciting or romantic lives; they just herded cattle around. It was a lonely, dirty life. One can imagine that cowboys did not have a whole lot of social status.
And yet, in the 1950's, several decades after most of them had ceased to exist, as such, it became immensely popular for kids to dress and act like cowboys. Not real cowboys, of course, but the image into which the figure of the cowboy had been molded over the years, which had very little to do with reality.
Today, we've done the same thing to hippies. Almost as soon as they emerged as a social group, the brightly dressed, socially conscious, radical, American hippie became a sort of romantic, heroic figure, but the fact is that they were actually outnumbered by squares, albeit probably by less than 1000 to 1, and generally smelled about as good as cowboys. Even during the height of the hippie era, George Harrison noticed the difference between the image of a hippie and the reality when he went to San Fransisco. "I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place, with groovy gypsy people making works of art and paintings and carvings in little workshops," he said. "But it was full of horrible spotty drop out kids on drugs." But there are a great number of people, of all ages, who are truly committed to living the life of the American hippie. Nowhere is this more evident than among fans of the Grateful Dead.
"Deadheads" can make Bobcats look like sissies. They spend years of their lives travelling around in VW buses that, by all rights, should have broken down for good in 1971, going from Dead (or Dead-related) concert to concert, setting up veritable villages in the stadium parking lots. They dress in tie-dyed clothing, put their hair in dreadlocks, and, though they're likely to deny it, take an awful lot of drugs. To some, this whole scene may make the Deadheads look like little more than an idealistic form of trailer trash, but, to others, it's a very beautiful, even spiritual, sort of scene.
This is actually the kind of scene many people expect at a Dylan concert, though, in reality, it's never that far out. There are hippies scattered from place to place, and sometimes there'll be a guy selling bongs on the steps outside of the venue, but, other than that, it mostly seems like any other concert, unless you start talking to the people who've been in line to get in since 8 am, hoping to hear the soundcheck.
In the Spring of 2003, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, inactive since guitarist Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, announced that they would reform and tour under the name The Dead, and that, at a number of shows, Bob Dylan would be the opening act, and would then sit in for part of their set. Two of the greatest icons of the great, mythic 1960s, sharing a stage. It seems, on paper, like a match made in heaven.
However, reaction in the Dylan community was mixed.
"That," said Peter Stone Brown, "is the worst news I've ever heard."
Dylan had worked with the Dead before, on a seven city mini-tour in 1987, where they acted as his backing band. All seven of those shows are on many fans' personal "ten worst shows" lists. I tried to point out to Peter that, though the performances of the shows had been very uneven, at best, the setlists had been great. The Dead had challenged him to try playing old songs from his back catalog that he'd never played before, such as "Joey," "Chimes of Freedom, and "Queen Jane Approximately."
"Yeah," Peter replied. "But Jerry was the one who knew all of those songs. And he's dead."
It seemed like a good point.
But, personally, I felt a sort of need to see a couple of the shows. We'd already seen that Dylan and the band were in a sort of transitional period, and I was excited to see how playing with The Dead might move this stylistic shift along. So I bought a ticket to the third show of the tour, which happened to be in Atlanta, and the fourth, which was in Joliet, a suburb of Chicago.
Peter was kind enough to hook me up with a couple of guys named Bill and Ken who could give me a ride from downtown Chicago to the venue, but gave me a friendly warning along with it. "You might have to listen to some Dead shit in Ken's car."
Deadheads generally like Dylan's music, but Bobcats rarely seem to care much for the Dead, for one reason or another. Maybe it's a feeling of competition, maybe it's the fact that Dylan fans are more likely to be interested in the words of a song than the instrumental jams. Bill and Ken, it seemed, were the rare fans who liked both.
I was never a huge Dead fan; I hadn't really listened to them at all since breaking up with a Deadhead about five years earlier. But I made up my mind to have a good time. "I will play hackey sack," I told myself. "I will buy a veggie burrito in the parking lot. And I will wear the hideous tie-dyed shirt I bought at that one Dylan show a few years earlier."
The t-shirt in question touched on my love of all things horribly tacky. After the Birmingham 99 show, I had been accosted in the parking lot by a guy selling bright, tie-dyed shirts which read "Dylan 99" over a picture of Dylan 76. At only five bucks, I only hoped one would be enough. For reasons I can no longer fathom, I wore it to school the next day. One of my teachers pretended not to recognize me. "I was looking for something more drab," he said. Ho, ho, ho.
I'll just touch briefly on the Atlanta show. Dylan was not in great form that night; the sound was muddy, and, though a few songs stood out as highlights, Dylan just never seemed to be on. On that night, though, the Dead played a lot of their greatest hits, the songs that even I knew, and I enjoyed them tremendously. In the middle of their rave-up performance of "Good Lovin," the rains (which had, as per my usual custom of getting wet at Dylan shows, had been coming down hard) stopped long enough for a huge rainbow to appear in the sky over the field. The rainbow got more applause than the band. I could, for at least that moment, imagine why people gave up their entire lives to follow the Dead around. We didn't see much of the parking lot village at that show, and I didn't wear the ugly shirt. I figured that I'd do those in Joliet, since, to get the true Dead experience, one had to travel.
Two days later, I set sail for Chicago. Since Chicago figures prominently in an upcoming chapter, I won't describe it much here. All I had time for after getting into town was grabbing a hot dog (which is gourmet eating in downtown Chicago) before heading over to meet up with Bill and Ken.
Unlike the typical deadhead method of sleeping in cars, Bill and Ken were staying at the Hilton. They were a very friendly, and fairly clean-cut, looking couple of guys. You wouldn't figure them for hippies if you passed them on the street at all.
As soon as I came into the room, Bill requested that I not give him any setlist spoilers. "I know we're going to hear ‘Joey,' though," he said., which was a bold prediction, considering that Dylan hardly ever played it. "Dylan always plays that one for the deadheads." He did a little impression of Dylan saying "I better re-learn ‘Joey.' Lot of people gonna be disappointed if I don't play that!" It was true, in fact, that Dylan only seemed to play the song "Joey" at shows when he was playing on the same bill as The Dead (or one of their splinter groups.) In a 1991 interview, when asked about the song, Dylan said "(Jerry Garcia) got me singing that song again. He said that's one of the best songs ever written. Coming from him ,it was hard to know which way to take that."
Now, I should point out that, while most people in this book are being called by their real names, Bill and Ken are not their real names. They were both extremely nice guys, and I don't want them to get in any trouble because I blabbed that they were smoking pot in the hotel room.
Bill made green tea while the three of us sat down to discuss past Dylan concert experiences. Ken had seen Dylan about 80 times since his first show in 1988, Bill had been to about 20 since 1991. Both listed "Idiot Wind," Dylan's howling song chronicalling the end of a relationship, as the song they most wanted to hear live, which is a very common choice among Bobcats. It's widely regarded as one of Dylan's greatest songs (Allen Ginsberg called it one of the three or four greatest blues songs ever written), but has only been played live a handful of times. It was on the set for most of the 1976 shows and about half of the 1992 shows, and that's it. It hasn't been heard from since.
Both Bill and Ken picked Pittsburgh, 1994, as their favorite Dylan show. "The crowd was just blown away," said Ken. "During ‘A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall,' people were getting up onstage. It was a great, great performance."
Kein also noted that the reason the crowd was so blown away might have been due to the fact that most Dylan concert-goers at the time were coming in with low expectations, based on bad reviews of other early 90's concerts.
"Back in those days," said Ken, "every time you told people you were going to a Dylan show, someone would say ‘man, I saw him about three years ago, and it sucked! He was drunk, and he only played for about twenty minutes!' That never happened!"
It could pointed out that there were some occasions in the early 90s when Bob was probably drunk onstage, rambling and slurring through his songs with a band that sounded as though it had never actually done anything so drastic as to rehearse.
"The 91 tour wasn't marketeted as the be-all, end-all, greatest hits package," said Bill. "It was kind of his grunge period."
I asked how Dead fans were different from Dylan fans.
"Well," said Ken, "they're both hyper-critical. People complain about every little thing. Before Jerry died, all you heard was how they weren't changing the set lists enough, Jerry wasn't playing enough solos, or he wasn't even onstage half the time."
Dead fans, however, are less likely to go to great lengths for the front row – most of them actually perfer the less crowded seats in the back, where they can wander around, dancing and spinning and lying in the grass. I myself had found the back much more enjoyable during the Dead's set in Atlanta.
We drove out through the beautiful downtown out into the outskirts of the suburbs. The concert was being held at the Route 66 Motor Speedway, and, from the outside, looked about a cheery as it sounded.
As we pulled into the parking lot, I got a cell phone call from a fellow named Dan Boger. I'd first talked to Dan over instant messages, during a period when he was impersonating Waylon Jennings online, a few months after Jennings died ("and don't give me any crap about being dead," he wrote, "because I'm obviously not.") I was a bit concerned about the guy at first – what can one make of a person who claims to be a dead country star, and further claims to have kicked Bob Dylan's ass on several occasions? – but through various detective work, I was able to figure out that Dan, surprise surprise, was not Waylon Jennings at all, but a high schooler from just outside of my native Des Moines. He and a friend had driven to Joliet for the show, and wanted to meet up with me.
"Just go to where all the Deadheads are," he said. "And look for the gold van."
I looked around what I could see of the parking lot. It was nothing but Deadheads as far as the eye could see, and there were gold vans everywhere. I promised to look for him.
Bill and Ken set up camp on the edge of the parking lot village, and, with Ken acting as Virgil to my Dante, we went off to explore.
The old main drag of the parking lot village is known as Shakedown Street. There, the Deadheads earn their living by selling various goods from booths that they pack up in their vans. Some sell veggie burritos or pizza, other sell beer or lemonade. T-shirts are in no short supply. The vast bulk, however, were selling something or another to do with drugs. Fancy, desgner bongs were set up in trays everywhere. Shirts and stickers decorated with drug stuff popped up being every other booth. Naturally, the smell of pot was particularly heavy in the air.
I finally arranged to meet up with Dan around the ticket booth area. He was about 16, and had the largest afro I had ever seen on a white person. "Mr. Boger," I said, shaking his hand. "At last we meet."
Along with Dan's friend, we walked off to explore the ins and outs of Shakedown Street. Dan was interested in buying one of the glass pipes; they were pretty expensive, but the chance to buy one didn't come up very often in Des Moines. Not one that nice, anyway.
After a while, I was getting exhausted. The heat was rough, the smoke in the air was actually making it hard to breath, and I needed to sit down. We adjourned to a nearby hill, and sat down. From the hill, we could see most of the parking lot pretty well. Never have I seen so many beat up vans in my life. I could imagine that, years ago, this would have been a terrifically colorful scene. The vans and the clothes must have, at one point, been bright and beautiful. Now everything was faded, needing a new coat of paint or maybe a good hard scrubbing. Or maybe it had been scrubbed once too often, and the color was fading.
Dan's friend was nervous, because he was carrying cigarettes and was under 18.
"Do you think I should sneak them in in my shoe?" he asked.
I laughed. "If these guards are checking anyone at all," I said, "underage smoking has got to be just about the least of their concern."
"I don't know," he said. "Cops get weird priorities sometimes."
It was obvious, though, that the cops that were there were pretty much turning a blind eye. Drug use was evident everywhere, a narc would have really had his hands full.
After some time, Dan and his friend headed back to their van to drop off their purchases, and I went to find Ken for advice on what food I ought to buy. He was wandering around the parking lot, videotaping everything, and, by this time, appeared to be happily baked. But I myself was starting to feel more than a bit loopy. The walk from the car to the venue itself had seemed like nothing, half a mile, tops, the first time I'd walked it, but, by the third time, it seemed immensely longer. The people were starting to look less like drop-outs on drugs and more like characters from Lewis Carroll.
Ken directed me to a bedraggled fellow who was selling Jerry Rolls – a sort of enormous egg roll.
"What do you want?" he asked me.
"A Jerry Roll, please," he said.
"One second," he replied.
A few moments later, he looked back up at me and said "what do you want?"
"A Jerry Roll, please," I repeated.
"One second," he replied.
We repeated this routine a couple of times before he fixed one up for me. Before handing it to be, he looked at me and asked "would you like to try my special homemade duck sauce with that? It's highly recommended."
"Sure!" I said, naive fool that I was.
The Jerry Roll was great. Really, really great. I was one hundred per cent confident that it was the best meal I'd ever had – but that was about the only clear thought I could muster up. After finishing the Jerry Roll, I realized that I'd had about all I could handle of Shake Down Street, and began the hike to the venue, which now seemed like a five mile wilderness trek that I somehow had to swim. The whole place now seemed like a swirling, hippie wilderness, and I was suddenly reminded of the fact that Alice had been desperate to get out of Wonderland.
Dizzily, I found my seat, next to a couple of girls.
"Hi!" I said, woozily. "Bob's going to play ‘Senor' tonight! I can feel it, man!'"
I overheard them say that they were from Iowa, and asked wherabouts.
"We're in school in Grinnell," they said.
"Really?" I asked, too out of it to be polite. "Do you shave your armpits?"
The college in Grinnell, Iowa is known all over the world for being an extremely radical school – too radical even for me. The town itself is a dumpy little place – except for the Long Horn Diner, where I once had the best roast beef sandwich of my life – with a dinky little main street and very little else. It was just about the last place in the world you'd expect to find a college known for its radical gay population.
Though they seemed amused, I felt embarrassed right away about the armpits remark, and, to keep myself from saying anything even sillier to them, I called my friend Carol in Atlanta.
"Bob's going to play ‘Senor' tonight," I told her. "Then I'm going to come back to Atlanta and watch ‘Full House.'"
"You do that," she said, chuckling.
I wandered out to the concession area, hoping to find something that could calm me down. I bought a four dollar smoothie that tasted absolutely great. In a few minutes, my head was back to normal, and I went back to my seat.
A fellow behind me tapped me on the shoulder.
"Hey buddy," he said. "You got any acid. Rocky wants some."
"Sorry, man," I said. "I don't partake."
"Rocky respects that. How bout any pot? Got any pot?"
"I don't partake," I said.
"Rocky respects that. Any hash?"
"I don't partake of any of it, man. I'm clean."
He began to clap. "Rocky applauds that."
Meanwhile, a guy a few seats away was trying to fold up the folding chairs that had been set up, explaining that he needed room for his "mind dancing."
The first act at the show was Robert Hunter, who had been the Dead's lyricist, but not a member of the band. He played a solo set on electric guitar, and gave a pretty good impression of what the Dead might have been like if their lead singer was Rudy Vallee. Meanwhile, the crew was setting up the stage around him. I hadn't known that the winds the night before had knocked all of the rigging down, and the show had very nearly been cancelled. The last three Dylan shows I'd seen had been drenched by heavy rain; this time, the rain had come ahead of me.
The crowd had barely started to filter in when Dylan took the stage, wearing what looked like a blue satin cowboy shirt and a pair of sunglasses, and ripped into the opener, "Silvio," which he had co-written with Robert Hunter in the late 80's.
The next song was the first indication that Bob was on that night – "If You See Her, Say Hello," the heartbreaking song he'd written after separating from his first wife. It had also been played in Atlanta, but in Joliet the sound was clear enough that I could make out all of the lyrical changes.
"If You See Her" has been rewritten from the album version every time it's been played live. In the first live versions, the ending lines had been changed, from the pensive "If she will come back again, I'm not that hard to find / tell her she can look me up if she's got the time" of the album version to the much more bitter "if she will come back again, of that there is no doubt / when that moment comes, Lord, give me the strength to keep her out."
As I've said, if there's one surefire way to tell that Dylan is "on," it's listening to hear if he throws in any extra lines, like "oh yes!" in between a couple of lines. In the very first verse of "If You See Her," he was throwing in "oh yes, it sure does," after "though our separation, it pierced me to the heart."
In the middle of the song came what may be the strangest lyrical change yet.
Album version:
I've never gotten used to it, I've just learned to turn it off
either I'm too sensitive, or else I'm getting soft.
Joliet version:
I've never gotten used to it, I've just learned to turn it off
her eyes were blue, her hair was too! Her voice was sweet and soft.
Her hair was blue? Was babe dating women from a nursing home or a punk rock band now?
The song ended with a great harmonica solo, and one of Freddie Koella's trademark jazzy solos that capture both the melody and and the mood of the song perfectly. I renewed my membership in the Freddie fan club.
Two songs later, I couldn't identify the song by the opening chords or the first line right away, so I assumed it was "Watching the River Flow." I always assume songs I don't recognize right away are "Watching the River Flow." But then I recognized the second line – "opened up his eyes to the tune of an accordion."
Hot damn, Bill had called it. "Joey!"
"Joey" is, frankly, not my favorite Dylan song. It's a long, somewhat cinematic biography of the Joey Gallo, a vicious gangster. Songs that glorify criminals are hard to pull off, and I never really felt that the album version worked. But in the Joliet performance, I could see clearly the song sort of presenting the life of Gallo like one of those old black and white films where you wind up rooting for the bad guy. That worked better.
One other song in the set bears a bit of recognition – "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."
"Hard Rain" was one of the first folk songs to get surreal – written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the song takes the structure of the folk song "Lord Randall" and throws in a bunch of surreal scenes to suggest a pre-apocalypic wasteland. "I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it / I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping / saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it." The fact that he was about 21 when he wrote has distressed scores of young songwriters ever since. Allen Ginsberg said that he cried when he first heard it, because he knew that the torch had been passed to the next generation of poets. The Joliet version of the song, despite Dylan screwing up the lines in the first verse, was a powerhouse arrangement that had been premiered in New Orleans a few months earlier. Instead of the lyrics being recited slowly, or howled, as they were in some version, they were spit out in syncopation.
I'll-tell-it-and-speak-it-and-think-it-and-BREATH it
and-reflect-from-the-mountain-so-all-souls-can-SEE it
I'll-stand-on-the-ocean-until-I-start-SINK-ing
but-know-my-song-well-before-I-start SING-ing
and it's a hard.... it's a hard! yes it is! it's hard, it's a hard
it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall!
The syncopation beat its way into me like a drum, and very nearly whipped me into a frenzy. I forgave the lyrical flubs and declared it the best performance of the song I'd ever seen. Remember that thing I said, way back several chapters ago, about moments or performances that hit you like a "lightning bolt of ecstacy?" This was one of those.
Bob was clearly in a great mood that night. Instead of his weird dance moves, he stood in front of the band during the guitar solos in "Honest With Me," striking James Dean poses. There were some jokes in the band intros ("On the orange guitar tonight, Larry Campbell. And, on the, uh, other orange guitar, Freddie Koella!")
When Bob took the stage during the Dead's set, I didn't recognize the first song at all, and asked the person sitting next to me what it was.
"Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad!" he said.
I nearly jumped out of my seat.
"Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" is a Woody Guthrie song (actually, it's older than that, but his version is certainly the best known of the old versions). When Dylan went to New York as a 19 year old kid, it wasn't to hit the big time as a songwriter, it was to meet Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized with Huntington's Cholera, a disease that was slowly wrecking his nervous system. In his early shows, he had been little more than a Woody Guthrie impersonator, playing most Guthrie's songs. But he hadn't played a Guthrie song onstage since the early 90's, when "Trail of the Buffalo" came up now and then.
Until that night.
Now, the arrangement was the arrangement that the Dead had been using for years, and I had the same problem I always had with it – that it's entirely too bouncy. They don't SOUND like they're going down the road feeling all that bad. But Dylan's voice, which, at that point, was shot to hell, made it work.
Next up was a haunting version of "Senor."
What do they put in that duck sauce, anyway?
After Dylan left the stage for good, I fought my way through the elbow to elbow crowd – the place was oversold by several thousand people, I'd say – and found Dan Boger out in the parking lot.
"Was that not the greatest thing you ever saw?" he asked, clearly elated by the show. Freddie's solo in "If You See Her" had made him into a member of the Freddie fan club right away, and the "Hard Rain" had really been one for the books.
The Dead's set that night wasn't nearly as easy to take for a novice like myself as the Atlanta show had been – there were just a few songs that I knew, and it tended to seem, as Dead concerts are known to seem, that they were just playing one song for about two hours. Giving up my near-the-stage seat for good, Dan and I roamed the grounds, enjoying the sights and sounds from the much less crowded general admission area. For some time, we talked to a kid who was communicating with his dad, a few rows over, by walkie-talkie. At about the age of six, he'd already seen the Dead countless times, but didn't seem interestec in talking about them. He mostly talked to us about video games.
Now, I also spoke to the kid's father, and he seemed like a good, concerned, parent, but I couldn't quite get comfortable with the fact that there were so many people bringing their young children to Shakedown Street.
It's a neat place. People really do live exactly the way they want to live, and do so in general peace and harmony.
But that doesn't mean it's a good place for kids.
Bill, Ken, and all of the other deadheads were overjoyed by the set – for a more experienced listener, it was apparently quite a great show.
As we drove back, I asked Ken if it was true that once, at some festival, the Dead had actually played a two hour version of "Dark Star."
"Yeah," he snarled, sarcastically, "it was the same festival where Bob showed up drunk and played for twenty minutes. In other words, it never happened."
He turned to Bill and asked if he'd like to get high.
"No, I don't think so," said Bill. "I'm through with getting high. I think it's just the straight and narrow from here on out......what kind of question is that? Of course I want to get high!"
The Dylan tour with the Dead wrapped up about a week later, and, after a few more shows in the U.S., he headed for a tour in Europe. When the recordings started to come in, our thoughts that the spring tour had been transitional where shown to have been correct. The band was playing tighter, more electric. There were new arrangements of songs that had been stuck in one arrangement for years. Electric versions of acoustic songs, and even more lyrical changes. The band was sounding less like any of the 90's bands, and more like the smooth, polished band from the ‘81 tour.
But it would be more than six months before I managed to see another show.