Coming Down Slow

Copenhagen. 21 September 1987

Bob Dylan, on his 1966 world tour. Photo: Barry Feinstein This photo was taken 21 years before the 1987 concert in Copenhagen I´m writing about. But it captures better than any photo I´ve ever seen, the sense of his reaching into another state of being altogether when he sings, which takes us along with him when he does. In this post I try my best to describe the feeling when the show is over and all 5000 of you are having to let go of that place he took you to, and you´re coming down slow.

Bob has left the stage, and the air is still ringing with the last shimmering harmonies from the Queens of Rhythm, on “Gotta Serve Somebody”. He delivered the song emphatically, like a declaration of indisputable truth, and he´s right. He´s right. We are all broadcasting some kind of energy, and it has an effect, it helps make people sick, or helps make them well, makes them feel loved or hated, makes life feel like heaven or feel like hell. So when he says, “…it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” it´s not a philosophical position, it´s a fact, it´s physics, we all make some kind of wave, and if we keep that in mind, the world might be a better place. The whole time I was around him, the theme of responsibility was always close at hand, like his invisible walking stick, or better still, his talking stick, like the ones carved with details from their stories I´d seen old storytellers use.

Bob Dylan, Copenhagen, 1987 Photo: David Rose

Everything else he sang that night was a song, but “Gotta Serve Somebody” was a heart-to-heart talk, passing on some hard-won wisdom. Here´s what life has taught me. He put it at the end of the end, so it´s the last thing in your ears as you walk out into the night, get in your car and drive yourself home. You gotta serve somebody. And he does, and he has, every day on the road, every night on the stage, doing what he promised he would do. Whenever I heard him sing – or, on this tour, it was McGuinn who opened with it – “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me / I´m not sleepy and there is no place I´m going to/ Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me/ in the jingle jangle mornin´ I´ll come following you” – I heard him making a vow: that if the muse would give him the music, he would give his life to delivering it to the world. It made sense to me that every time he´d sung that to an audience, he was activating the holy principle of the triangle: a vow is between yourself and God, with another human being as a witness. And we, listening, are the witness, we´re part of that holy triangle. It´s a beautiful thing.