A week ago I went to see Bob Dylan play at Kings Theatre. The last time I knew of someone going to see Dylan play live was my high school friend Leigh (not her real name), who went to see him in 2006 or 2007—I don’t remember exactly which, but it was for sure one of those two because I do remember that when she told me we were in geography class, and that was in the 9th grade. I could be wrong about that. The geography class was taught by one of the football coaches; he was always making lawyer jokes, as we eventually learned, because his wife had left him for one. Leigh missed two days of classes so she and her mom could go to Virginia to see the show, and when she came back to school afterward she told me, from her seat one row to the right and one desk back from mine, that it had not been good. Dylan was sloppy and rude to the audience. But she was glad she went. We turned back to face forward in our seats and settled in for Coach Rollins’s (also not his real name! Protect the innocent!) routine drilling of the ninety-five counties of Tennessee and their respective seats.
In terms of my experience of Dylan, this high school context is pretty invaluable. I was introduced to him by my first and arguably only high-school boyfriend, who looked like a very tall version of Bob Dylan. (I don’t know how tall Dylan actually is so it’s possible that Tom—is this his real name?? Take one guess!—looked only like a tall version of him.) Tom gave me burned copies of The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Highway 61 Revisited. My favorite song was “One Too Many Mornings.” One time I got bored in chemistry class and wrote all the lyrics to it in my notebook and the girl who sat behind me saw it and thought that the first word was “damn” not “down” and frowned at me because you’re not supposed to curse. Generally I liked The Times better than Highway 61, which felt kind of inaccessible to me; I didn’t really get the imagery and felt like I was being held at a distance, which I now understand is kind of the whole point.
Like I told Sasha, who I went to the Kings show with, even though I’ve been listening to him for half my life, my knowledge of Dylan songs ends in 1985, more or less, meaning that I only knew about five of the songs he played last Wednesday, and of those actually recognized maybe two. Dylan is not playing the hits. It’s nearly impossible to understand anything he says; when he did the band go-round, I could’ve sworn he called every single person on stage “Donny.” (There’s just one, Donnie Herron, who plays, among other things, the pedal steel guitar.) And the songs, he just plays them whatever way he likes. One of my favorite Dylan performances is this one, of “Shelter from the Storm,” from 1976. I think it was recorded in Fort Collins, at Hughes Stadium; it’s on the live record from that same year, Hard Rain. I hesitate to write about it, don’t want to give it all away, but the departure from the original is both unsettling and thrilling. The Blood on the Tracks recording exists in the 1976 one in the same way that a parent’s DNA might exist in an estranged child. “I offered up my innocence; I got repaid with scorn” comes out of Dylan’s mouth not as lament but like he’s sharing a shock with a friend: I offered up my innocence; I got repaid with scorn—can you believe it?! And then the little guitar riff, over and over, a child making sure her joke landed: Get it? Get it? Get it?
I never really thought very much about Dylan as an individual—I just cared about the songs—until I watched Rolling Thunder Revue, which helped me understand that whatever Bob Dylan is up to is all we get to see, and that Robert Allen Zimmerman is present in Dylan the same way that “Shelter from the Storm” (Blood on the Tracks) is present in “Shelter from the Storm” (Hard Rain). Whatever the truth of Bob Dylan is exists in the space between the original recording and whatever he’s doing when he’s playing it live; it exists in the decision to play the songs in some weird, unpredictable, unexplainable way; it exists in the mumbling; it exists in denying his audience the satisfaction of recognition.