Seventeen In '88 - Installment 33: Back To Schooldays

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

Back To Schooldays

The night before the first day of the new school year is always the absolute worst. Do you remember the feeling of Sunday nights during the school year? That sad, sick feeling you used to get because the weekend is nearly over and you have to return to those gray walls and echoing hallways and musty textbooks tomorrow? The night before the first day of school was like that feeling, only amplified a thousand times over. Summer’s almost gone and the real world beckons. Only instead of beckoning, it DEMANDS.

I always had to have something to get me through that night. Something with an edge (or something that I at least perceived as "edgy", whatever that means) to cut against the dreariness of school life. Van Morrison would describe the feeling pretty accurately with the title “Keep Mediocrity At Bay”, but Iggy Pop may have summed it up best in "Some Weird Sin" from Lust For Life: "When things get too straight / I can't bear it" and "the sight of it all / makes me sad and ill / that's when I want some weird sin / just to relax with." I had that feeling exactly. Only Iggy's idea of some weird sin was probably a lot more dangerous and further out than anything I would have had the nerve for. Or access to. Given the choice between cutting up my torso with a razor while completely zonked out on heroin and simply staying at home watching A Clockwork Orange into the early morning hours, I'd settle for the latter. To each his own sense of edginess. 

And it was the latter I settled for the night before the first day of my senior year of high school. Kubrick’s film has always had appeal to the alternative/outsider crowd. I don’t think it’s the violence or the social commentary that holds the source of that appeal though. I think it’s purely a matter of style – the soundtrack of synthesizered-up Beethoven, or the design of the Korova Milkbar with the swirly lettering on the walls and tables made of plastic naked ladies. For heaven’s sake, the main character is wearing a bowler hat with suspenders, a codpiece, and one false eyelash, how could any arty outsider type resist?

Maybe there is something more complicated that draws people to A Clockwork Orange. The dichotomy between Alex Delarge’s obviously keen intelligence and his utterly amoral behavior is certainly a fascinating thing, and Malcolm McDowell's controlled, gleeful portrayal of the character is mesmerizing. He nails perfectly a facet of human personality that we all sometimes wish we didn’t have to keep under strict control – the desire to let go, to unleash the wanton, libidinous Id.

It was that sense of letting go that I think drew me to the other cultural artifact that got me through this time – the soundtrack to the film Performance, especially Mick Jagger’s sleazy, cataclysmic soundtrack contribution “Memo From Turner”.

In the movie Jagger plays Turner, a former rock star who has sealed himself off from the rest of the world in a shadowy, rambling London flat full of exotic ornamentation and occultish vibes. A sadistic gangster on the run from his employers rents Turner's basement flat, at which point the psychedelic sparks begin to fly. Turner and his female companion, the ever-bewitching Anita Pallenberg, have lots of fun playing mind games with their new tenant. Under the influence of some hallucinogenic mushrooms the gang enjoys a serious bout of gender and identity switching, much to the consternation of James Fox’s gangster. “I feel like a man!” he keeps shouting, though he's obviously beginning to doubt most everything, including the certainty of his own existence.

The subject matter, along with the Godard-influenced jump-cutting, was enough to fry my fragile seventeen-year old brain, but the movie really reaches a head with Jagger’s performance of “Memo From Turner”. The visuals could get the point across on their own - in the buildup to the song Jagger appears as a rockabilly dandy, teasing Fox verbally (“The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, is one that achieves madness. Right?” Right, of course.) Then he's a voodoo shaman, dancing wildly while brandishing, for some reason, a fluorescent light rod as a prop. And finally, as the song begins, Jagger becomes Fox’s gangster boss, in suit and tie, hair slicked back, singing to a roomful of heavies who begin stripping off their clothes as Jagger exhorts “Take ‘em off! Let’s have a look!”

But the song itself is the most powerful punch. It’s an explosion of razor-sharp sleaze, the words a torrent of mid-sixties Dylan verbiage shot through with William Burroughs’ sense of druggy nightmare. A menacing fuzz guitar figure carries the rhythm while slide guitar (which has to be played by Ry Cooder, though the credits are hazy, and have thus been the subject of much speculation, a fact complicated by the multiple known versions of the song) is layered on top for ornamentation. Jagger sings the song with a fierce combination of precise control and implied abandon, intoning the surreal, drug-and-death dealing lyric as though he knows answers to questions the rest of us haven’t even thought to ask.

He sings as someone apart from it all. That is, in a nutshell, why I think I found the song so powerful, and so useful. I played it every day before school for the first couple months of my senior year. It became ritual, a necessary motivating tool. Like aural coffee. Before going off into the cold, colorless school day, where I had to fake my way through the process of blending in, trying to be a part of it all, I desperately needed a voice from the other side to reassure me that another side did, in fact, exist.

It was a troublesome time. The events of summer, getting a job for the first time, trying to maneuver through the raptures and pitfalls of what was only my second real romantic relationship, not to mention random weirdness like getting lost or the night of the mysterious phone calls, or the very real murder that happened in our town, it was all getting to me as I geared up for my final go-round of school.

I knew I’d have to start making decisions soon, and that was something I did not want to do. As a result, uneasiness and confusion were the order of the day. Everything seemed off somehow.

It should have been a time of renewal, new beginnings. But all I could think about were endings. Like, for instance, the end of school life. Even given all of my confusion and dread re: the future, school couldn't end soon enough.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 32: The Phone Calls

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

The Phone Calls 

One night in late summer Elliot and I were hanging out with Max at his apartment when the phone rang. It was around midnight. Max answered and a voice on the other end stated each of our names in turn, then hung up. It was an odd thing, but we didn’t really think too hard about it. We assumed it was just someone we knew doing something weird just for the hell of it. In our little group of weirdos that kind of thing happened all the time. We forgot about it.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. I answered it this time. Same thing. Our names. Gruff voice, drawing out the syllables. Hang up. It was then that we started to sift through the possibilities of the caller’s identity. These were seriously limited by the plain fact that no one knew that we were all there together that night. Of course, any number of our friends might have guessed that we were, we hung out there a lot and most of our friends knew that. But why choose this particular night, this particular time, to make a random prank phone call just in the off chance that we might all be there at once? And if you’re gonna make prank calls, why not at least have a joke prepared?

A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time the caller engaged in a peculiar brand of conversation, disconnected words and phrases, sometimes touching on aspects of our personal lives - parents & girlfriend's names, our places of work, favorite bands. It was someone who obviously knew us pretty well. But no one we could think of seemed to fit the profile of someone who would do something so weird.  

During the hour between one and two a.m. the phone rang regularly every few minutes and each of us took turns trying to identify the voice. It was a male voice. Unusually deep, sometimes sounding as though it had been treated or filtered through some kind of electronic device. Standard horror movie stuff.

At this point, we were still having fun. The witty banter was flying. We pestered the caller as to his identity, to no avail. The caller still refused to speak in sentences, hewing to stray grunts and seemingly stream-of-consciousness fragments. Occasionally he'd say one of our names, as if to remind us that he knew them, in case we forgot. It was all very strange, but it was also kind of fun.

Then the phone went quiet for an hour or so. We were disappointed. We waited by the phone, dejected, still sorting through names trying to pinpoint the culprit, dismissing all of them for one reason or another. Ronnie Rawlings? No, he's at work, and probably wouldn't do something so odd anyway. One of Emily's brothers? No, they're too young, they wouldn't have the creative wherewithal, or the stamina. Then who?

Elliot sat in a chair with the phone resting on an arm, and when around three o’clock the phone finally rang again he picked it up and exclaimed “Thank God, we thought you’d never call back!”

For the next round of calls, the caller periodically played music – southern rock, country, not the kind of stuff that us or any of our friends could usually relate to, which further clouded the mystery. Who do we know that owns a Hank Jr. album?

At one point between calls we began to jokingly bandy about the possibility that the calls might be some kind of supernatural occurrence. Maybe a demon or a ghost. Maybe one of us calling from the distant future. Young and gullible as we were, though, we were still fairly down to earth by nature, so we dismissed that possibility out of hand. No way. Of course not.

At least, Max and I felt that way. Elliot, usually the sceptic among us, in this case held out for otherworldly. "You guys are just dismissing the idea that this might be something supernatural aren't you?" 

Well, yeah. But Elliot's willingness to believe must have planted seeds of doubt in my mind. I remembered New Year’s Eve and the ghost in the living room. I remembered the fear and confusion from being lost in the maze just a few nights before. And I remembered that ominous music from the dream with the sign pointing towards nowhere. Songs flitted through my head. Patti Smith’s “Elegie”, that eerie evocation of rock and roll spirits having flown (“its just…too bad…our friends…can’t be with us…todayyy”). The Meat Puppets’ “Two Rivers” rolling by, side by side, both flowing into a netherworld of ethereal guitar sounds and disembodied voices. Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”; the far-away stillness in the sound, a farewell from some other side of what may or may not be this life.

It is, after all, life and life only.

Around the same time as the night of the phone calls, something horrible had happened in our little town. An elderly woman was murdered in her car in the mall parking lot. Stabbed to death. In broad daylight. The murderer got away and couldn’t be found.

It was difficult to comprehend. The town, and everyone in it, was shaken. Our town, like any other small American town, was not necessarily a stranger to violence or death, but this was different somehow. The sheer randomness, and the brutality of it. The fact that there was no apparent motive. The fear that the killer would strike again lingered in everyone’s mind, coloring the atmosphere in ways both perceptible and imperceptible.

Honestly, I don’t remember if the murder happened before or after the night of the phone calls. So I’m not sure it was a factor in the way we responded to that night. Maybe it’s just the way the brain works in retrospect, but the fact of the murder seemed to be in the air that whole summer, even before it happened. 

So when we started discussing the supernatural possibilities it put a chill into the evening, despite our collective (admittedly somewhat shaky) inclination towards pragmatism, reality, cold hard facts. We knew the caller had to be someone we knew. But the calls increasingly wore our nerves down and with the late hour our defenses gave way to paranoia.

At one point, as if to test the supernatural theory, I picked up the phone and began reading passages from a Bible that was on hand. The voice on the other end reacted with full-on Exorcist-style moaning and animal growls. It shouted my name. I wish I could say that I thought it was just good weird fun, but the truth is it scared me shitless. 

Not too long after that we decided to leave the phone off the hook and try to sleep. It was five in the morning.

And then everything changes. In the days and weeks after the night of the phone calls, Elliot and Max and I each experienced unusual turbulence in our lives. Trouble at work. Trouble with family. Trouble with girlfriends. It became almost absurd. Jokingly, we attributed all of this misfortune to a malicious spell cast by the phone calls.

We did that jokingly, sure, but I think we really did almost believe it was true. Deep down, way deep down, we may actually have felt that what happened that night had really emanated from beyond, and whatever it was had pulled off some kind of bizarre curse.

Listen, as I write this, I swear I know full well that a simple explanation exists. I know that it actually was one of our friends or acquaintances playing an elaborate and really weird practical joke. But that doesn’t change the feeling of that night. Or the way that feeling colored our lives in the wake of that night.

And it doesn't change the fact that we never did figure out who it was. And it haunted us. We talked about it often through the next several years, never arriving at any conclusion, just acknowledging the eeriness and dread in the air that night and in the surrounding days and weeks.

Even thinking about it now, it still drives me crazy.

Seriously - who the fuck was that?

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 31: Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As outlined here a few weeks ago, my guidelines for living when I was seventeen years old dictated that I listen to music constantly, and stay awake late at night, every night. So I really, really liked doing both of those things at the same time. Music + nighttime = ideal state of being.

My father had been a rack-jobber in the sixties and seventies, traveling around Tennessee and Kentucky stocking music sections at department stores and college bookstores and, probably, head shops. (Remember head shops? Do those places still exist?) So he had accumulated an enormous collection of vinyl. By my mid-teens I was regularly pilfering from this stockpile, every few months coming away with a new stack of records to memorize, translate, or save for possible use at a later date.

In mid-summer 1988 I got off with quite a haul. I wrote about Patti Smith’s Horses here a couple weeks ago, but there were three others that I particularly associate with those long hot summer nights, sitting looking out the window at the trees and the stars and the sky, imagining the world had stopped, trying to parse some kind of discernable path to take in what looked like a very cloudy future.

All year long so much of the music I listened to seemed to me to have an eerie, ominous tone, if not on the surface, then just underneath it. Right around this time, late summer, that quality seemed to deepen in the music. Really, the whole mood of summer ’88 is covered in that weird feeling. And I guess it didn’t help that there was a killer on the loose in our little town. (More on that later. Unfortunately.)

Back then the full-length album was the music delivery method of choice. I liked a collection of songs unified by some combination of sound, theme or feel. I still do actually, even now, in this age of bite-size media/culture portions. Still, I would always choose one song from each album as a representative moment, one track that seemed to sum up or reflect the gist of the feeling of the others.

Since it sits in the running order between two tours de force, Neil Young’s “Ride My Llama” is an odd choice to represent his Rust Never Sleeps. But Rust Never Sleeps is an odd album, moving wildly between boundaries of time and place, loud and quiet, violence and peace. “Thrasher” is a long, wordy folksong that unwinds in a series of imagistic verses that the rock press at the time pounced on as Young’s comment on the lost, faded ambitions of Young’s generation, particularly his pals Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Pocahontas” is a poignant, if surreal, exploration of savagery, destiny, and the mercurial nature of the American spirit. Yeah, really. “Ride My Llama” is just the strange little song stuck between those two. In comparison, it’s slight, sparse. But it has a powerfully weird feeling on it’s own.

It’s about space travel, I guess. Neil meets a Martian who plays him some Martian music and shares some choice Martian weed.* “Like any other primitive would.” Then Neil decides he’s gonna ride that llama from Peru to Texarkana, for reasons unexplained. He does all of this against a backdrop of halting, choppy acoustic guitar, a haunted echo covering it all. I’d listen to it and look up at the stars and I wanted to be there with Neil and that Martian, even though I didn’t smoke weed.

*It could be Martian whiskey or wine, the song doesn’t clarify, but when dealing with Neil “Homegrown” Young, I just assume weed.

In addition to the ever-present ominous feeling, all of these summer ‘88 songs shared a common lyrical theme - travel. I’m only recognizing that in retrospect. Maybe that linked them in my subconscious. I knew I’d be going somewhere eventually. I just didn’t know where, and I was scared shitless of what the circumstance would be once I got there.

Bob Dylan sings about a similar feeling in “One More Cup Of Coffee”, from Desire, even if he layers it in a gauze of gypsy mysticism. Desire is all over the map, especially lyrically. It's full of long story-songs with tragic heroes and mystery figures harboring dark intentions. Some of these are drawn from real life – Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, in a song that oddly turned out to be a hit, and was used in the Carter biopic a couple decades later, and the mobster Joey Gallo, the latter of whom is depicted somewhat sympathetically. Lester Bangs called Dylan out for the latter in a great article called “Bob Dylan’s Dalliance With Mafia Chic”, probably rightfully so, though I guess it’s up to the listener to decide just how sympathetic the song really is.

Primarily I liked the album for its sound. Maybe it’s the violin, played by a just-picked-up-from-the-street Scarlet Rivera, and maybe it’s the aforementioned mystical tone Dylan spreads lyrically throughout the album like the Tarot cards on the back cover, but the album seems to have a kind of damp, wet quality about it. Maybe it was raining the first time I heard it, and I was looking out my window at the wet green trees, I don’t remember. I do know that I always like to imagine that everyone playing on the album is wearing streaked eye make-up with long colorful scarves and beads and bandanas and feathers. Not so far-fetched - that's pretty much what the participants of Dylan’s contemporaneous Rolling Thunder tour actually looked like.

“One More Cup Of Coffee” is the song that best captures the damp, mystic feeling of the album. I don’t know what the song is really about – there’s a mysterious, potentially deadly dark lady, with a weird family who can see into the future. Again, as in Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, the past, present and the future all converge. But Dylan’s song doesn’t have any of Young’s leavening sense of humor. There's a thick, dramatic atmosphere that borders on schmaltz, but beneath that there’s a real sense of foreboding, dread. Whatever reason Dylan has for traveling into the valley below, it doesn’t sound like he’s particularly looking forward to it.

Looking back, I guess I probably needed some respite from all that weird dread. That’s where baseball always enters the picture. (It was another guideline, one that still applies – baseball is life’s best mirror.) Often in the background on those long summer nights while this music played the baseball highlights would be flickering on my crappy little black and white television. I was and am an L.A. Dodgers fan, and being on the east coast meant that I would usually have to wait for the midnight or 1AM airing of Sportscenter to see the highlights from the west coast. On the night of August 20, 1988, a Saturday, the Dodgers entered the ninth inning down 3-2 to the Montreal Expos. I was at work at the radio station that night. Between punching in the latest Randy Travis and Highway 101 songs I was listening off-air to a CBS Radio Network feed of the game. This was the night that I realized that Kirk Gibson, rather than a simple mortal human being like the rest of us, might actually be Superman. 

Gibson had been having a great year, but plenty of players have great years every year. I was a pessimist, always convinced that the Dodgers would find a way to lose. I was ready for three quick outs, prepared to go home and watch highlights of a Dodger loss. Then Mickey Hatcher doubled, and Gibson followed with an RBI single to tie the game. 

Cool, I thought, at least now we’ll have a chance in extras. It’s probably a character flaw that I aim so low. Kirk Gibson, as always, wanted to win right now.

After a Mike Marshall fly out, Gibson stole second. 

Then things got crazy. 

Montreal reliever Joe Hesketh unfurled a wild pitch, moving Gibson over to third. At least, that’s what usually happens in baseball when the pitcher throws a wild pitch, the runner moves up a base. A base. Gibson, however, partly because he recognized that the foul ground at Dodger Stadium covered a whole lot of territory for the ball to roll around in, partly because he wanted to utilize the element of surprise, and partly because he is made up of nothing but pure unfathomable guts, barreled right around third, like a bull, or a very fast steamroller, and came all the way around to score, sliding into home and slapping it with a passion normally reserved for Game 7 of the World Series. 

In fact, less than two months later Gibson would author one of the great moments in World Series history. Even if you're not a baseball fan you've probably seen it; Gibson, on two bad legs, pumping his fists as he limps around the bases after hitting a shocker home run to win the game. That was one for ages, but when it happened I simply felt it as an echo of that August night against the Expos, when Gibson would not be denied. And even if Gibson had never had that World Series moment I’d still remember that earlier night, that incredible sense of determination.  

I guess all that doesn’t really have anything to with music, though. Except insomuch as music and baseball have always been entwined together in my little world, twin strands of ongoing, limitless lifeforce. And except insomuch as I probably had some of this music playing on the stereo as I waited to watch the highlights. Dylan’s Desire, or Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. Or Richard & Linda Thompson’s Pour Down Like Silver, which was the other big album around this time. 

Pour Down Like Silver is the Thompsons' spiritual album. In the mid-seventies Richard and Linda Thompson had converted to the Sufi religion. The effect it had on their music was significant. Wikipedia says that Sufi “is popular in such African countries as Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical expression of Islam.” Again, with the mysticism. It’s all over the music, along with a profound sense of stillness. Even when the songs are about movement, stillness wins out – “Jet plane in a rocking chair / roller coaster roll nowhere.”

Richard Thompson fans are especially passionate about the darker aspects of his music. A series of fanclub releases in the eighties bore the title Doom and Gloom From The Tomb. Pour Down Like Silver is not necessarily dark, but it is certainly deep, working as it does from a place of intense spiritual yearning.

Which is not to say that the songs can’t be appreciated right here on Earth. In fact, most of them could be interpreted as simple love songs. Even if, as in “Night Comes In”, amid some of the most vivid, searing guitar-playing of Richard Thompson’s career, the lovers dance until they fade away. Presumably leaving this realm to be closer to God.

The song that really got to me on those summer nights, the one that really grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go as I sat looking out the window, contemplating the heavens, or waiting for the baseball highlights, was “Beat The Retreat”.  The song shares plenty with some of my other favorite music of the time. Like Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” it moves at a funeral pace, with huge billowing clouds of empty, open space.  Like Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”, the sense of resignation, regret, is almost too much to bear.

Unlike “Bye Love”, though, it isn’t about leaving, it’s about coming home. So much of the album is about having a change of heart. In “Beat The Retreat” the singer has wandered off, away from home and loved ones, out into the wild. With a heavy heart, he’s now returning. Really, it’s probably allegorical, the singer has moved away from God, and is now trying to get back.

Who knows why this affected me in such a powerful way when I was seventeen. I didn’t have any inclination at the time to come home to God, or to come home at all. I only wanted out.

It’s altogether possible that I interpreted “home” as home plate, and the singer as Kirk Gibson storming around third on his way back where he belongs. Everything is a baseball metaphor. Yeah? No? Sigh.

Really, it was just the sound. And that feeling. That feeling of yearning, of searching for something else. Somewhere else. Whether it’s in that dark valley below, or on a spaceship with a stoner Martian.

Something about late summer, the air, the atmosphere, seems to break life open for all kinds of possibilities. That can be invigorating, but it can also be frightening. I’m not sure whether I heard all of this music as a key for letting those possibilities free, or a door for shutting them out. It worked both ways, I suppose. 

Hell, it doesn't matter. For years I've carried around this memory of these songs that, combined with what was going on in my world at the time, produced this distinct and terrible ominous feeling. But most of these memories are actually fond ones, and it's taken me writing all of this nonsense to realize that. Looking out that window, listening to Desire, waiting to watch the footage of Gibson roaring home. It was just life. Life and life only. And life needs a little color now and again, even if, often enough, the shades go dark.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 30: The Never Ending Beginning

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

The Never Ending Beginning

On July 22, 1988 Bob Dylan performed at Starwood Ampitheatre in Nashville, a show that my friends and I attended. This was among the earliest shows of what would come to be known as Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour”, which is still in progress today.

I’ve seen Dylan a number of times in the years since. Each show is generally a unique experience, but that 1988 show remains memorable not only because it was the first, but also because my friends and I all had a similar reaction to it; we thought it kind of sucked.

At the time Dylan was at a low point artistically. His recent albums had been misguided, uninspired affairs, with Dylan perversely attempting to make slick, radio-friendly product; a sharp contrast to the approach he'd taken to making records over the previous two decades. Realizing that it wasn’t working, Dylan found himself at a crossroads. He recalls this time with candid insight in his Chronicles Volume 1, explaining that he felt washed-up, directionless, not sure if the world needed more Bob Dylan music.

If my friends and I could have talked to him we would have told him “Screw all that, you’re Bob Dylan, man!” Teenagers always have snappy answers for difficult problems.

Turns out Dylan found the necessary inspiration elsewhere. As he recounts in Chronicles, somewhere near the end of the decade Dylan had a mysterious epiphany. Finding himself moved by the performance of an obscure jazz singer at an out-of-the-way little bar, Dylan came away with an idea – a whole new way of approaching his music. He spends many pages explaining the musical and practical implications of his new process, which is, typically, both absolutely fascinating and completely baffling. For page after page Dylan explicates the technical aspect of the approach in a way that is so confusing I would believe it was a put-on, if I weren’t absolutely certain that Dylan would never dream of doing such a thing. He is known for his sincerity, after all. Yes, kidding.

In layperson’s terms, the new approach turned out to be a pared-down band playing a free-wheeling (what other way to describe it?) setlist night after night (and eventually year after year) using a musical formula that Dylan stresses is not improvisatory, even though it often sounds like it.

What we heard that Saturday night in summer 1988 was the early fruit of his new approach, and we found it…odd. People often complain, especially upon hearing him live for the first time, that Dylan renders his songs unrecognizable by rearranging them drastically and delivering his lyrics in a voice that veers between mumble and croak. That complaint definitely held true for us. I think we got all the way down to the weatherman and the wind blowing before we recognized the opening number, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.  

In a way, I didn’t care. Such was the impact of the man’s mystique on my impressionable mind that merely being in the same outdoor amphitheater might have been rewarding enough. Concerts were still a new thing to me. At the time, the only major musical act I’d ever seen live had been R.E.M., so the weeks and days before the show had been full of giddy anticipation. Bob Dylan is coming here! And we’re gonna see him! 

Maybe it’s a fundamental fact of life that the build-up, the anticipation before a big event is usually more fun than the event itself. I remember my brain spinning with songs that I hoped he would play. “Maybe he’ll do “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”! Maybe he’ll do “To Ramona”!” That summer I had become enamored of the Desire album, so I harbored an altogether unreasonable hope that he might do “Oh, Sister”. 24 years later I’m still waiting for Bob Dylan to play “Oh, Sister”. This is what being a fan is about.

He did pepper the set with a few wild cards, as would become routine. (There’s even a website on which participants play a game trying to guess what songs Dylan is going to play.) In addition to warhorses like “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Like A Rolling Stone” he dragged out a rather affecting version of “I’ll Remember You” from the misbegotten Empire Burlesque, and much to our surprise and delight he also played “Simple Twist Of Fate” from Blood On The Tracks. Not that we were able to easily distinguish it.

It all went by in a blur. And of course it was anticlimactic. The performance sounded chaotic and rushed, as though the band felt they were being chased by unseen assailants. The arrangements sounded diffuse, shambolic. The set itself was short – just over an hour. And of course, Dylan mumbled all the words.

Being so enamored of Dylan and his myth meant that I searched for meaning in his every move,  so I strained to make excuses for the haphazard performance. “Maybe he played badly because that’s what we deserve!” I remember saying. “So, it’s okay to have contempt for your audience?” Elliot retorted. I had no response.

Through the years though, I’ve come to an understanding about the Dylan live experience, and how Dylan feels about his audience would seem to be a moot point. (And good luck figuring out how he feels, anyway.) Some people are of the opinion that the quality of a Dylan show is dependant on the mood that Dylan is in. Dylan contests this idea, insisting that his own emotions never enter the equation, that nothing in his shows is left to chance. I’ve come to believe that he’s not bullshitting. Maybe this is the re-emergent impulse of that seventeen year-old who still wants to look for ways to excuse a hero, that kid who’s still besotted by the myth, but I’ve seen Dylan live many times through the past two decades and I think whatever the specifics of the formula he decided on back in the late ‘80’s consist of, it’s working. Maybe the shows vary in intensity or tone, but the result is usually the same, at least soundwise. Drawing on the spirit and formal strictures of decades of American song, Dylan and his band create a sly, wildcat brand of music that is unerringly earthy, evocative, challenging, invigorating. He’s just consistently good, like the Stan Musial of rock and roll. Whether or not the listener enjoys it, is moved by it, is dependent on the mood of the listener, not Bob Dylan.

Expectations are a tricky thing. “What was it you wanted? Tell me again, I forgot.” Dylan would demand on his next album, knowing full well that if he asks a few thousand people, he’ll get a few thousand different answers. Art is subjective, of course, and people apply their own personal preconceptions to any artistic work, which can be especially complicated when the artist in question has previously created work that has profoundly affected them emotionally. This is particularly complicated in Dylan’s case. All through the years of the Never Ending Tour I’ve seen and heard people exulting, aloud, in print, online, about how the most recent Dylan performance was the best they’ve ever seen, the man has never seemed so vital, so alive, fiery and funny. And all through the years I’ve seen and heard people complaining, aloud, in print, online, that the most recent Dylan performance was a typically erratic one, with Dylan mumbling and growling unintelligibly while his backup group played a glorified bar-band brand of roots rock.

Maybe everyone is right. Dylan’s shows could be just an aural Rorschach test. Or maybe the experience of hearing Dylan’s music is just a slippery, ever-evolving process.

Perception, after all, is a tricky thing too, and this is one of the many things that Bob Dylan’s music communicates. The set that Bob Dylan recorded for MTV’s Unplugged in 1994 was widely derided at the time, for many of the same reasons listed above – bar band shabbiness, unintelligible singing, etc. Back then I didn’t necessarily disagree with that response. But I listen to it now and I’m startled at how direct, how purposeful and clear the music comes across. Even Dylan’s voice seems to have smoothed, attained a kind of clarity, with the age of the recording. Which makes me wonder if I would think the same about that 1988 show if I heard it again.

Who knows. Maybe the show really was as rushed and haphazard as we thought it was. It was early on in the process of Dylan discovering his true voice again, and maybe he hadn’t quite found his groove yet.

He would. Over the course of the next several months and years Dylan would slowly climb back into full-on cultural and artistic relevance. Summer 1988 had found his latest single, the Grateful Dead-alike (fitting, given the Robert Hunter co-writing credit) “Silvio”, getting all kinds of radio airplay, even hitting #5 on Billboard’s then-new Mainstream Rock chart. But that was maybe just a blip. Or maybe a warning shot. Later in the year he would find even bigger chart glory with his pals in the Traveling Wilburys. And in 1989 his Oh Mercy album got the best reviews of any Dylan album that decade. That same year my friends and I went to see Dylan again at the same venue. Part of Dylan’s strategy, for whatever reason, was to hit the same cities repeatedly, year after year. The crowd had been cut in half, but this time we thought the show was much better. 

Was it? Or were we just more attuned to it, having had the experience of seeing him the year before?

Dylan has been out there ever since, still on the road, headin' for another joint, night after night, year after year. Couple hundred dates most years. Band members come and go (and occasionally come back), and set lists mutate, but Dylan has stayed true to the same basic approach. It was a cool thing to see him at that point in his career, a point that ended up being so important, where having come to the crossroads he chose a path and resolved to stay on it.