Chapter II: Do you remember...?

Ahoy, Rotterdam, Sept. 19, 1987

Bob Dylan photo: Ken Regan

As I follow Bob down the corridor to the stage, I can hear Roger McGuinn finishing "Mr. Tambourine Man" – Bob´s cue to go on. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are already on stage. They are Dylan´s band for the whole Temple in Flames tour.

When Bob takes the stage, he starts the slow waltz groove of “The Times They Are A-Changin´” and it sends a charge through the audience, the passion and urgency he wrote into it 24 years earlier resounding just as strongly as when it he wrote it. The first time I heard it,  I was only 11, at his concert in Berkeley right after the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when he went electric.  When he´d written it, in October 1963, the US was still in shock at how close we´d come to a nuclear war with Russia over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone was thinking what it would be like after an atomic bomb. The thought was terrifying. Every school held regular “duck and cover” drills, where we had to get under our desks in case the bombs shattered the windows. And every school kept drums of drinking water and hard crackers to keep us alive if it was too dangerous to let us go home through the radioactive air. A month after he wrote it, President Kennedy was gunned down in Houston. Bob opened a concert with the song the very next night, and the deep nerve it struck in the audience was so strong he was completely overwhelmed by their reaction.

Here in Rotterdam, the moment he starts singing, the spell is cast.  It´s not an old song, it sounds like he just wrote it. He sounds like he´s singing from a mountaintop, surveying the state of the world.  Europe is still suffering the consequences of the unthinkable: a nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine the previous year.  The deadly radioactivity rode the wind currents and landed on grasses in Finland making the reindeer meat deadly to eat, on vineyards from Germany to Greece making the wine unsafe to drink, on farms making lettuce too dangerous to be sold, milk a gamble, and in the Netherlands we are still scrubbing the vegetables, hoping radioactivity comes off with soap and water, trusting what the papers tell us, because we didn´t know what else to do.   

But it made everyone wonder, can we ever trust the people in power?  Ukraine was still part of the USSR then, and Moscow had heartlessly waited three days before even announcing the nuclear explosion and informing the people of Chernobyl their lives were in danger from radiation and they should leave the area immediately.  It was Sweden that first sounded the alarm, announcing two days after the explosion that there was deadly radioactive pollution blowing in from the south.  Nobody knew if the bread and milk and meat they ate and fed their children was deadly.  Chernobyl also reminded us how meaningless national borders were in the face of such a disaster, as toxic clouds don´t obey lines on a map, lines that get rearranged by wars.

The song reverberates through the crowd like the ringing of urgent bells. “You better start swimmin´ or you´ll sink like a stone”, he sings, and there´s a feeling that by being there with Dylan, with this song, we are in motion, we are aware, and swimming. 

I was amazed at the power he was putting into the songs. Many times in the show, watching from the wings, I felt transported into the darkness over the vast crowd, by the intensity of Bob´s singing.  It stopped feeling like a show. On “Queen Jane Approximately” it felt like a moment on a city street at night, where a man is telling his lover how he feels, and we happen to be nearby.  It almost seemed too personal, too private.  What are we doing there, eavesdropping on his love life?  At one point in the show the darkness lit up with tiny flickering stars. Fireflies. Lighters. 20,000 lighters. Waving in unison. Making him seem all the more alone up there, to me. By the end of the show, when he sings, “You Gotta Serve Somebody”, I feel lifted to that mountaintop he´s singing from, sharing that long view to the distant horizon

Bob Dylan, 1987, photo: Copyright Rob Verhorst

After the show, he headed straight for the shower in his dressing room, and told me to wait right there. When he stepped out, he was transformed. The shower had left his face looking soft as a baby´s; it was hard to believe he was the same man who minutes earlier had been like a storm-facing Odysseus on stage, taking all 20,000 of us with him as his sails filled with song, navigating the dangers of life and love and this war-torn world, on his epic quest for home.  On almost every song, from "The Times They Are A-Changin´" through "Chimes of Freedom", I had the impression he was finding the words in the moment, as if he were standing on the deck of his boat calling out to the thunder.  He wasn´t just going through the motions with these iconic songs but putting himself back into the creative fire from which they´d arisen.  His phrasing, his dynamics, changed these familiar songs into something new.  There were moments when he had us all in a time machine, but instead of the linear idea of `going back´ in time, he was bringing the birth of those songs into the present moment, a feat needing the toolkit of a mystic. 

And yet, to me, this silent moment now – alone in his dressing room, his hair and beard dripping, looking like a figure who had just stepped out of the river Jordan ­– felt more like an altered reality than all the surreal emotional landscapes he had just sailed us through. 

"Do you remember being Shakespeare?" I heard myself say, surprised that it came out as sound.  I thought I was just thinking it to myself.

He looked up, surprised by my question, stopped toweling his hair, and answered me with stillness, silently looking at me, I looking at him.  There was no tension in our gaze, no agenda, you could say, no lust, no answers, no words, no time.  That was the important part: no time.  One of those mysteriously suspended moments I´m sure we´ve all had, that go by in the space of a single heartbeat or the blink of an eye, but in that flicker of time all time stops, and rests in its true sky-like, borderless, going-nowhere nature.  Events move through it like winds and clouds, but the sky itself doesn´t move.  Those moments contain the unsolved mysteries.  Because when time stops, we are in the timeless space of the soul, and we suddenly see the story that we are in from the soul´s point of view.  Suddenly the air in the room is lighter, gravity feels lighter, and even the importance of many things is lighter.  If, as Shakespeare wrote, "All the world´s a stage and all the men and women merely players," then birth and death are our entrances and exits from the wings, and when this play is over, our soul gets an inspiration for a new script, finds a willing cast of characters, some new, some old, old friends, and we put on another show and give ourselves another opportunity to embody the highest emotions we can reach.

I have no idea how much clock time passed.  I remember wondering at one point if he might be getting cold.  I´d had no plans to ask him that question about remembering Shakespeare, but I could see he didn´t mind.  In fact, I knew ­then that´s exactly what I was there to do. 

He put on a bathrobe and sat down. "How was the show?"

"You sang so great, it was like you were writing those songs in front of us.  You made the roof disappear, and all the stars were there.  It felt like you were on a mountaintop, and we could all be there with you, but then everybody started waving their lighters, putting this distance between you and them. It was like they didn´t know how to stay with themselves, so they just dissolved into the darkness and turned you into the idol. And that was sad to see."

"I don´t want that. I hate it."

"I know ... maybe what you need is someone to go out before you and get the crowd to sing some tones, feel their own voice in their body.  If people feel their own voice, it keeps them here, instead of slipping away and just worshipping the idol.  I could do it.  I do that sometimes in my dance performances, get this half of the room to sing this phrase, and the other half an answer phrase.  Or it could just be an Ah.  Kind of like church.  It only takes a minute to work."

"Well, the backup singers could do that.  They know all about that... But that´s not what they´re there for."

"I understand.  Also, it really bothered me that Benmont blew those changes, and then he laughed, like he´s not taking it seriously.  How can the keyboard player slip-up like that in a Bob Dylan concert?  You deserve better."

"No, that was my fault," he said, grinning, with a little shrug of his shoulders. "Benmont´s fine.  I changed the chords on him."

"Oh...I didn´t hear that...well that explains it...  So... how do you feel?  You felt so sick before the show."

"Yeah, that´s gone.  I´m tired, but not sick.  What you did really helped.  It would be great if you could do that for me before every show.  Come with me.  I need you on the road with me.  And nobody talks to me the way you do.  I´ll let you try out your idea of getting the audience to hear themselves so they don´t disappear."

He got up to change into his clothes.  As if thinking out loud (we were both doing that) he said, "Why do I like you so much?"  

I actually had a hunch about that, but I didn´t say it.  The fact that he had asked it was almost proof that this hunch, and the source of it – a channeler I´d been introduced to in San Francisco, who had just come from doing a session for Shirley MacLaine ­– was right.  I thought to myself, "I knew this would happen."  Bob looked up at me with a sock in his hand and grinned.  Only then did I realize, for the second time, that a thought had escaped my mind of its own accord and he´d heard it.   

Now it was his turn to surprise me. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Careful...danger...This is Bob Dylan and you´re not dreaming...but who wouldn´t jump into his arms?  The fight you had before you left home tonight, him mocking you for the audacity and naivete to think you could get backstage.  The pact you´d made that morning, both of you desperate to finally quit smoking, really do it this time, and knowing he was holding the line all day kept you true to your word.  Then seeing him smoking when you got home.  And when you said he´d let you down he´d turned mean and you started shouting.  But there´s hope somewhere still in you.  And this isn´t what you´re meant to do with Bob, it´s too predictable, too common, too easy.  What feels right is where you were together in that empty space, that open space in which the possibility of past lives is not hard to imagine, that blue light out ahead, and a message I´m supposed to deliver, too secret for even me to know.

"Yeah, I do", I said. "Or I did until tonight. We had a bad fight before I left."  

"Well if something changes, let me know," he said, smiling, his eyebrows raised.  "Why don´t you come with me on the bus.  We´re in Copenhagen day after tomorrow.  You could get on there."

"Well I´ve got a job."

"Doin what?"

"Teaching dance at the Theaterschool in Amsterdam."

"You´re my dance teacher now.  Get someone to cover for you.  Come."

I had at that moment the sensation of sitting in a boat being carried by a swiftly flowing river. Everything that was about to happen had already been written.  Time isn´t linear, it doesn´t move like a train on a track, leaving the past behind to disappear like the last station.  It´s spherical.  What we separate into concepts of past, present and future are living currents that constantly influence each other, all held in the measureless womb of infinite, timeless creation.  

"Okay.  I´ll find a way... Where there´s a will... Somehow, I´ll see you in Copenhagen."

In fact, somewhere in my psyche I had known this was going to happen since I was 11, For years after that, I had a recurring daydream that I was sitting on a bench in a park, and I would see him walking from a long way off on the path through the trees, until he reached me and sat down. It was a meeting I knew was going to happen, a rendezvous, though I didn´t know that word then.  What I never understood until recently, was how we managed to conduct our conversations without saying a word.  Nor did we touch or even look at each other.  Then he got up to go, and I was always sorry he couldn´t stay longer.  These meetings had the vibe of two spies working on the same case, and I had information to give him.

Maybe the next time I see him, I´ll ask him if he remembers meeting in that park.

He took my hand, not like a handshake, but just to make it real.  That silence returned, making me think, as long as we keep this open sky as our touchstone, with no roles, no expectations, all will be well.

"Who are you?" he said. His head was tilted slightly, his eyes focused as if trying to read some fine print in my eyes.

I could not think of a single word to say.  I felt like a fool.  Everyone, I thought, should have some sort of answer, even if it´s not witty, or poetic.  But nothing came.  It took me three years before I tried – and failed miserably – to answer his question, in a letter. ("Write me", he had said when I left the tour.  "Write me the way you talk to me.")  But it took 30 years for him to answer mine, in his acceptance letter for the Nobel Prize in Literature.