When I was twelve years old, my father decided I was old enough to accompany him to a Bob Dylan concert. The year was 1989. I remember very little of the occasion. We sat outside in a smallish arena surrounded by throngs of people who had come to see Dylan on what he was calling The Never Ending Tour. The men and women who bookended my father and I all seemed to be getting a big kick out of the fact that I was there, amongst them, the music, the lights, the hazy sweet-earth smell of marijuana under the ink black sky.
What I recall most is Dylan onstage, a pied piper with a harmonica whose sound was by turns piercing and plaintive. At one point in the night, the overwhelming mass of people who surrounded me, who had at first inspired a dull fear in my gut, my father singing along in his tone-deaf raspy way, the foot stomping and hand clapping – all of it receded, even the back-up band seemed to grow fuzzy and blur to the sidelines of the stage, and I was left alone with Bob Dylan and his harmonica. A distinct feeling came over me that this man was somehow letting me in on a secret he kept wrapped up tight as a fist. It was a feeling more than anything, something unnamable and pure, but it made sense to my twelve-year-old soul.
Dylan, at a low-point in his life and career became a Born-again Christian, to the chagrin of many. What followed were three Gospel albums that, despite their sincerity, and the fact that he won a Grammy for “Gotta Serve Somebody,” quite honestly bore me to death. For a time, he refused to perform his classics. However, it wasn’t long, in the grand scheme of things, before he shed his skin once again and slithered out of the role of preacher. In the 1980’s Dylan released records, some of them decent (Infidels), toured with The Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, and even added vocals to a Kurtis Blow song. But one cannot help feeling that the 1980’s were not kind to Dylan.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Bob Dylan, Style icon.
