The Dylanologists (13 page)

A year after his first nerve-wracking experience as a taper, Glen flew over to Europe for a run of concerts. One night in the Hague, he scrambled for a spot up close. He ended up standing next to the speakers among three of the biggest names in taping circles. What was notable about the show was that Dylan performed an electric version of the traditional folk song “Trail of the Buffalo,” a real surprise. Collectors still consider it a favorite moment of the Never Ending Tour.

Glen would remember that night for another reason: It was the night he knew he had joined the brotherhood. He was a taper, and proud of it.

3

Dylan played a four-night stand at New York's Beacon Theater in 1989, and the crazies flew in from all over. Glen had met some of them at Dylan fan conventions in Chicago and Manchester, England. In the UK, the conventioneers listened to talks and tribute bands, while the Midwestern crowd spent most of the time in taping rooms. People brought audio cassettes and videotapes, and the dubbing went on twenty-four hours a day. Glen met a lot of people at these affairs, and one was a musician named Steve Keene who was capable of sounding a lot like Dylan. (He later released albums with Dylan bandmates.) He had recently won the big impersonator contest at a bar in the Village. He lived in New York, so in 1989 the traveling crowd relied on him to come through with tickets.

He went to the Beacon the night before and waited in the line, which by four-thirty in the morning stretched down the block. Somehow Keene got enough tickets for everybody on his list. Glen and Madge had never been to the city before, and they stayed in a hotel that first night. But Keene let them crash at his place on Eighty-fifth Street the rest of the week, and soon they knew enough New York City Dylan people that they hardly ever had to pay for a room again. A lot of longtime friendships began in 1989 at the Dublin House, an Irish bar on Seventy-ninth Street where a few dozen serious Dylan fans retired for postshow libations. The tour had been getting terrible reviews, but Glen and Madge didn't care because they were in Manhattan, with their kind of people, people who got it.

Onstage, Dylan looked pissed off, Glen thought. Like he wanted to be anywhere else. He tossed harmonicas across the stage. But the shows had fans buzzing. Dylan had just put out
Oh Mercy
, his best record in years, and he played a number of the songs live for the first time. A version of “Queen Jane Approximately” was a wonder to behold. On the last night, Glen and Madge ended up at the very front, and when Dylan shocked the crowd by singing “Precious Memories,” he was so close to them he might as well have been playing their living room back in Thunder Bay. He wore a gold lamé suit that night, and during the last song he wailed on the harmonica, jumped off the stage, shook hands, and walked off through the crowd, never to return.

Glen and Madge started going to shows by the dozens. They carpooled and they crammed into hotel rooms. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of using lounge chairs from the pool as beds instead of sleeping on the floor. They got a decent night's sleep but woke up with lines across their faces. They were semiprofessional fans fitting their lives around Dylan; they knew it was not normal behavior. Glen and Madge sometimes traveled with Bev Martin, a schoolteacher from Madison, Wisconsin. Bev thought the tour felt like the 1960s, when there was a sense of us versus them, the freaks versus the straights. It reminded her of the era when you could roll into a certain kind of city, a college town—Taos, Española, Ann Arbor—and find the record store or café and hook into the counterculture. On the road, they met doctors and drug dealers, left-­wingers and conservatives, old hippies and teenagers. If this gypsy band had anything in common, it was that—like Glen back in Thunder Bay—they didn't fit. “We were all a little weird,” one of them said.

They learned not to say much back home about these jaunts. People gave them strange looks when they did. Besides, more than a few of them were calling in sick from work or inventing ailing relatives so they could disappear for a few days. “People would not understand,” Bev said. “They would think you're crazy.”

Dylan was playing to almost nobody in America's nowheresvilles: La Crosse, Sioux Falls, Fargo, Bismarck. It looked like it was being done on the cheap. Though the venues were small, they did not sell out. Once, Dylan implored the audience to come and fill the empty seats up close. “It was like a secret tour,” Bev said. Once, she walked into a record store near a venue where Dylan was playing and an employee asked, “Is he still alive?”

The performances themselves felt chaotic and raw. You didn't know what you might get from night to night. He would pull out obscure songs with lyrics that were not so easy to remember, songs that would not have made a top-one-hundred list of possible one-offs. Sometimes it was as if the band didn't even know what it was going to play. To Heylin, the tour was a perfect metaphor for Dylan's career: sprawling and messy, the highs jostling for attention with the many lows. For all the brilliant work that Dylan had produced, “there is nobody I can think of in his league who has produced work as
bad
as Bob Dylan,” Heylin would say. But they all kept going, year after year after year, searching for the jewels.

In January 1990, Dylan played on short notice at a little club in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. One of the regular travelers who heard about it, Roy Cougle, had impacted wisdom teeth and was advised not to fly, so he hitched out of Chicago and made it as far as Cleveland before a snowstorm stopped him. He took a bus to New York and met up with a friend, who got them to Connecticut.

Jeff Friedman, the taper and tape hunter, made it up for the show, but he got nabbed by security on the way in. He had his taping gear in the small of his back, and when they pulled his shirt up the wires came out. He was marched over to the box office and told to put the gear back in his car. He said he couldn't; he had taken the train up. He offered to give up his batteries. Security accepted that deal, but, naturally, Jeff had brought extra batteries. He always brought extra batteries.

For some reason he'd also brought extra cassettes that night, and he ended up needing them. Toad's Place held only seven hundred people and the show had been billed as a tour “warm-up.” Not long after Dylan came on stage, wearing a black leather vest over a red T-shirt, the audience began to realize it would be a special night. Jeff felt like he'd arrived in heaven and walked into a random club to find the world's greatest bar band playing. Dylan was in high spirits and fully engaged, not rushing, not angry, not listless. He played unexpected covers like “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” and rarities from his deep catalog like “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” and “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love).”

Then, unbelievably, he started taking requests. “What you wanna hear?” he asked the crowd. “Ballad song, or up-tempo song?”

Cougle yelled song titles all night, and deep into the fourth set he screamed out for “Joey.”

Dylan laughed it off: “ ‘Joey'? ‘Joey'? Ha! Ha! Oh, no. It's gonna take me all night.” The song, from 1975, was an ode to a New York City mobster, “Crazy Joey” Gallo. Rock critic Lester Bangs had called the song “one of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellently romanticist bullshit ever recorded.” Gallo was a “psychopath,” not a man worth celebrating.

“‘Joey'!” Dylan said again. “You sing it! We'd be willing to play it for you if you sing it.” But the cheering crowd got behind the request and finally he relented. “All right, let's try this. ‘Joey,' okay. Yeah, here's a song about a, sort of a, kind of a . . . hero of sorts. God knows there's so few heroes left.”

Dylan played four sets, four hours of music, fifty songs in all, including a joyous butchery of Springsteen's pop hit “Dancing in the Dark.” (He didn't know it; he made up a batch of nonsense verses on the fly.) Before he walked off the stage, Dylan gave Cougle a limp-fish handshake. The crowd broke up at two-thirty in the morning.

A year later, Dylan staggered through Europe. In Glasgow, he dropped his guitar and wandered offstage midsong. He looked drunk. He sounded uninterested. As the tour moved on through Europe, the shows did not improve. “Every night he would get up on stage and
murder
masterpiece after masterpiece,” Heylin recalled. In Brussels, Dylan sang off-mic most of the night. From what the audience could hear, he was slurring. In London, fans could not believe how bad the show was; the regulars retired to the bar and drank like they were at a wake. In Stuttgart later that year, Dylan opened with a version of “New Morning” so unintelligible that it sparked an argument between two knowledgeable fans about what song he had played.

But by the end of the year, he had turned it around again, and in 1992, Heylin flew from England to California simply because Dylan had started playing “Idiot Wind,” the classic from
Blood on the Tracks
, for the first time in sixteen years. Heylin needed to hear it live, and who knew if Dylan might just as suddenly yank it off the set list forever?

As time went on, the music came to be less important; the regulars kept going because they wanted to see what would happen on the road before and after every show. They shadowed the crew, who, like the serious fans, arrived early and left late; inevitably they got to know each other. They would bullshit with the people who made sure the shows went off every night: Dylan's muscle, the merchandise guy, the soundmen, the bus driver, the tour manager. Sometimes—by coincidence or by design—fans stayed at the same hotels as the band and ended up at the bar having drinks with the guitar player or the drummer. “I'm sure they just wondered what the fuck we were doing with our lives,” Roy Cougle said. “
Don't you have jobs?
” He and another regular traveling companion, Keith Gubitz, got roadies to give them old laminated passes; even expired badges got them backstage. (A shirt that read
SECURITY
also worked for Roy.) Some fans started wearing a glow-in-the-dark dog on a string around their necks. Soon everybody had them, the crew, the roadies, even guys in the band. Gubitz said that on occasion, wearing a glowdog would actually get you inside. It got to the point where the band and crew took notice when the whacked-out superfans weren't there.

Soon enough they all felt like part of the tour family. When the show came through Thunder Bay in 1992, Glen drove from bar to bar searching for the crew. He found guitarist Bucky Baxter, and next thing he knew, Baxter was down in his basement doing his laundry and listening to old tapes. Dylan's security chief, Jim Callaghan, had trouble getting back over the border, so he hung around in Thunder Bay partying with Glen while he waited.

It helped to know the help. A while later, venue security in Chicago caught Glen and took the expensive battery for his taping machine. When Glen went to claim it after the show, he was told Callaghan had it. Glen figured he would get some ribbing but he wasn't prepared for what Dylan's security man did the following night in the lobby. He lumbered over and made a great show of ripping into the Canadian. Callaghan was a big man, built like a stevedore, and he towered over Glen. He turned to the others and told them to watch out for this concert scofflaw.
You ever see this guy taping, you come and tell me!

Then he opened the door of the theater and dragged Glen inside like a perp. But after Glen stopped stuttering, he realized it was a show. Callaghan gave him the battery back, smiled, and left him with a clear view of the sound check.

The regulars would see Dylan all the time. He might be riding his bicycle in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes in the pouring rain, sometimes fifteen minutes before he went on stage. He'd be seen in trunks swimming laps at the pool or doing doughnuts in the parking lot on a motorcycle. If you were out at three in the morning you might see him taking a walk in the street. Some thought Dylan reversed his days. He performed a little while after waking up, then stayed up all night. The fans learned that he didn't stay in the best hotels; that he preferred lodging where he could open the windows because he didn't like air-conditioning; that he boxed on the road to stay in shape. He got a sweet tour bus and spent a lot of time on it. At the end of a show he'd hop aboard and head to the next city while the crowd drifted out. The smart fans knew to keep their distance or risk getting grief from tour managers. “We always tried to respect the bubble around Bob,” Cougle said. “I don't think any of us tried to bum-rush Bob and ask him the meaning of life.”

But, inevitably, they ran into him. There were a hundred stories of brief encounters, and despite his gruff reputation, many of them were pleasant enough, or not disagreeable, anyway.

One year in New York, fans discovered that Dylan was hanging around in a tour bus behind the venue. He came outside wearing a cowboy hat and sucking on a cigar, and to their immense surprise, he began talking to them. Dylan asked them what they wanted to hear him play and people shouted requests. He laughed when he learned that one of the fans, an attractive woman, had red lacy underwear embroidered with the name
BOB.
She was going to throw them onto the stage—a lark, she swore. She was there with her husband.

Somebody joked that Bob ought to wear them. But randy as ever, Dylan said he wanted to see them on the woman.

Whoa
, her husband said.

Then a legendarily obnoxious New Jersey woman came up and started asking stupid questions, like whether Dylan was breast-fed as a boy.

Just like that, he was gone.

Sometimes Dylan would agree to sign autographs. Sometimes he would shut down. Sometimes nobody said anything.

Once, a fan was at a hotel waiting for the elevator to the lobby when the doors opened and he came face-to-face with Dylan. The fan happened to be wearing a shirt advertising the organization behind the
Telegraph
, the big British fanzine. The front was emblazoned with a photograph of Dylan's face and the words
WANTED MAN
.