The Dylanologists (14 page)

Dylan looked at the fan, looked at the shirt, looked away. Downstairs, the doors opened, and idol and fan parted wordlessly.

4

One morning in June 1990, Glen and Madge got breakfast and checked out of a hotel in Fargo, North Dakota. They had seen Dylan play a twenty-song set at the Civic Center the night before, and they had a three-hour drive west for Dylan's Friday-night show in Bismarck. As they drove out of the Red River Valley toward the plains on I-94, they spotted a figure on the side of the road. It was a woman hitchhiking alone in the summer heat. She looked so vulnerable. Realizing it was a member of the tribe, they pulled over for her. That was the way it was on the road. They all needed the same basic things: tickets, a ride to the next town, a bed and a shower, some food. They might never have socialized with some of these fans if they lived in the same town. But out on the road, they took care of each other. When Glen stepped out of the car to offer the woman a ride, he saw her writing down his license plate number, a precaution by an experienced and wary traveler.

Glen and Madge had seen her up front at the shows, sometimes talking to herself, tooting on her harmonica while Dylan performed, flipping coins at Dylan's feet, putting up an umbrella, playing cards onstage. She told people her name was Sara Dylan—like Dylan's first wife—and that she was his twin sister. Dylan didn't know her because they were separated soon after their birth in France. He was adopted by Minnesotans; a couple in Texas raised her. If it bothered her that she couldn't explain why he was thirteen years older, she didn't say so. Fans thought she was unbalanced. On the other hand, they met lots of strange people on the road with Dylan.

She wore her hair in a bun and favored long dresses and gloves. Waiting around at the shows, she seemed aloof. But on the way to Bismarck with Glen and Madge she chattered away. She told them she'd lived in Duluth for a time, and how, to help make ends meet, she sometimes lifted Bibles from hotel rooms and sold them to used-book stores. It never seemed that she had much money. She hitchhiked from show to show. She used to tell the front desk at the band hotels that she was Dylan's sister and try to get a room on their tab. She could be quite convincing. The year before in New York, she managed to reserve eighteen rooms on the record company's account.

She traveled all over the world following the tour. It was her life. In 1986, she made it to Canada, where Dylan was playing an aging rock star in
Hearts of Fire
. A documentary filmmaker visiting the set to interview Dylan found himself staying in the room next to hers. “I had a drink with her and she tells me she's your sister,” Christopher Sykes said when he met Dylan.

“Well, there are people who follow me around, you know,” Dylan replied. “They have passports and they have driver's licenses and they all have Dylan as their name. What can I do about that? I mean, I can't do anything about that.” Sykes found Sara frightening. “Is that something that bothers you ever,” he asked Dylan, “the idea that because you are very famous, someone who thinks they love you might want to kill you?”

“Well, that's always the case, isn't it? Isn't that the way it always happens?” the singer answered. “Aren't you usually killed by the person who loves you the most?”

Keith Gubitz was one of Sara's traveling companions, and he didn't think she meant Dylan any harm. She could have sought him out every day on the road. Instead she went to the venue early, before the tour bus arrived, and hoped that when Dylan got off
he
would summon
her
. He never did, Keith said.

But in 1990, she ran into him in the street in DeKalb, Illinois, and Dylan asked her what she wanted from him. Free tickets? Was that it?

What she really wanted was for Dylan to love and accept her, Keith said. But in the moment of truth, she apparently didn't tell him this. Did she want a ticket to the show? Sure. After that, she always had one waiting for her at the box office, as far as Keith could tell.

Not everyone was so easily mollified. Moving away from New York had not made it harder for fans to find Dylan. His Malibu house and Santa Monica rehearsal space, Rundown Studios, were easy enough to locate, and in 1981, one of the obsessed stalked out there. Her name was Carmel Hubbell, and her story was that she and Dylan had had an affair in 1978 when the tour went through Kalamazoo, Michigan. She went west to pursue the relationship.

At the time, Dylan and his people were on high alert: In December 1980, John Lennon was gunned down at the door of his Upper West Side building by a mentally ill fan who had approached him for an autograph.

That summer, Hubbell stormed Rundown Studios issuing threats and had to be forcibly removed. Later, staff found threatening notes on their windshields. Hubbell walked onto Dylan's property in Malibu nineteen times in less than a month, leaving behind notes to her “sweetheart,” a test tube full of nuts, and the key to her motel room. The letters got scarier as the days passed and she could not get through to Dylan. “Ms X = Ms Manson,” one read. Finally, Hubbell called one of Dylan's backing singers and told her that her life was in danger. Dylan's lawyers took Hubbell to court to end the harassment. By 1983, the singer was telling an interviewer that he had “walls up all over the place,” suggesting both human gatekeepers and concrete barriers. His office kept a list of potential threats; it had hundreds of names on it.

Bev Martin, the Madison schoolteacher, couldn't help but think Dylan was partly responsible for some of the unwanted attention. Onstage, he would flirt with women. He would walk up and play his guitar
to
them, stare into their eyes for an entire song, put a hand out and reach for them. Whether this was a stage act or a play for postshow action—both, probably, depending on the object of his attention—it hypnotized women. “He casts a spell,” one of them mused. Even psychologically balanced women were drawn to his magnetism. For others already predisposed to delusions, it stoked their fantasies. “All it takes is one time. He makes contact and they're hooked for life,” Bev said. They fall in love, and hope Dylan will, too. “They think every song he writes he writes to them.”

So there was the woman from West Hollywood who wrote lengthy letters to Dylan and mailed them to his office in New York. She seemed to survive on apples and peanut butter and rice cakes and slept in her car. There was the woman who followed the bus to Malibu and was slapped with a cease-and-desist order. There was the woman who said she helped Dylan write songs on one of his records. (“It's about mulberries,” she revealed.) There was the woman from Italy who tracked the tour around the globe and stood outside venues holding a sign for tickets. She lived a gypsy life, bumming rides and lodging from whoever would help. She told people that Dylan had supernatural powers and was speaking directly to her from the stage, that the concerts were elaborate rituals designed so Dylan could communicate with her, and the rest of us were irrelevant, mere set pieces.

These women were almost always up at the front of the stage, dancing, swaying, some of them accompanying the music with ­theatrical interpretations. At a few concerts, security asked them to stay back and give someone else a chance. Dylan didn't want them there, they were told.

Women came and women went. Often they disappeared as mysteriously as they had materialized, and so it was with “Sara Dylan.” One day she was there, and the next day she was gone. In 1992, she followed the tour to Australia. She made it to the next stop in Maui but missed the concert two nights later in Waikiki. She wrote Keith saying she would meet him April 27 when the tour went to Seattle for a nineteen-date West Coast leg. She didn't show up. Keith looked for her at shows for the next month, figuring she had changed her plans without telling anyone. But he never saw her.

Keith was one of the few on the road who knew her given name, Renee Shapiro, and her hometown, Pharr, Texas. He went home and looked up the family. They told him that their daughter disappeared from time to time. Several years later, Keith called again, and when her mother picked up she broke into tears.

In 2012, everyone's worst fears were confirmed. A detective had called. Some of Shapiro's belongings had been discovered inside a black zipped bag locked in a safety deposit box in Reno, Nevada. The owner was accused of killing four women in northern California, and police suspected him in other murders, including Shapiro's. Investigators found Shapiro's passport, her driver's license, her business cards, and a slip of paper that suggested she was on her way to her next Dylan show—but never made it.

The note, written by the suspected killer, read, “May 4 1992 Monday pm.” Dylan played San Francisco that night.

5

In one way, Keith Gubitz could relate to Sara. He too hoped that his hero would stop someday and notice him. The first time he saw a Dylan show, he was frustrated. His seats were in the far reaches of the arena. The man would never see him up there, he thought. So he pulled a lighter, flicked the switch, and hoped it might catch Dylan's eye. “I just wanted him to know that I existed and that I loved what he did,” he said. “But it goes deeper than that. I don't know why, but if Bob is sad, or his music is sad, I feel sad, and I feel sad for him. When he's singing and he's hurting, it hurts me, too.”

More than a few people believed their long-distance relationship with Dylan was something special. The way they identified with him felt exclusive and intimate. They understood Dylan and his music in ways others did not. They were cautious when talking about this. They knew they were veering into hazardous waters.

Keith made great sacrifices to get up close. He waited forever in lines for tickets, and then again to get onto the floor. He pushed for position. He sneaked into empty seats. If he still couldn't get up front, he waited for the stage rush. Keith said that for a while, near the end of every concert, the road crew would encourage regulars to dash up to the stage and dance. After Keith made his first run, no Dylan concert was complete without it.

He didn't do it just to see better. He needed to be counted as present. He wanted to be seen.

But even if he saw you, who could say it meant anything? Andrew Muir, of Cambridge, England, taught public speaking, and the trick he shared with nervous people was this: Gaze over the heads of your audience. They will believe you're looking directly into their eyes. Was it not far more likely that Dylan was focusing on the middle distance, staring at the lights, lost in the music? Muir heard people say that Dylan was looking at them—them alone—and he wanted to slap them. “It's madness!” he said. “It's just not true.”

Still, he couldn't say it never happened. A legendary fan named Lambchop ended up at the front every time Dylan went to England. Lambchop was a character. He tried to support himself by playing the horses—his passport listed his job as professional gambler—and he smoked pot every day. “You could get a high from the wallpaper at his place,” a friend said. Lambchop wore a huge white hat, which he would wave at Dylan. Between songs he would shout, “Thanks for coming, Bob!” When the crowd screamed for songs, he would bellow, “You play what you want, fuck 'em, Bob!” If people sat down, he'd cry out, “They don't fucking deserve it!”

So Dylan noticed Lambchop. He could hardly have missed him. One night in Utrecht, Lambchop and Dylan had a brief conversation, front row to stage. The singer asked the fan why he'd missed some shows in the United States, and Lambchop said he hadn't been invited.

“How about giving the Chopper a hand!” Dylan told the crowd. “He's seen me play more times than me!”

Caroline Schwarz and Kait Runevitch knew that Dylan noticed them from the stage, and they didn't care what anybody said. They believed what they believed. “All kinds of people experience this,” Kait said years later. “You can't deny it's happening.”

The two of them met on the road. Caroline started seeing shows regularly after losing her job. Kait was between school and real life. Traveling to concerts by the dozens, they did what it took to get up front. Caroline admitted throwing an elbow or two. Snarky fans dubbed them the Glitter Girls because they favored cowboy hats and sparkly body makeup, boogied up front, and were not afraid to flaunt their cleavage.

One night at a show in Joliet, Illinois, they got up close, and near the end of his set, Dylan sang “Honest with Me.” A man is telling his woman that he loves her but she needs to be straight with him. He sang, “You don't understand it, my feeling for you—
aw, you don't
,” and looked directly at her and Kait “with serious intent and fire,” Caroline wrote in her tour journal. A year later in Chicago, Caroline was at a show with another friend when Dylan eased into “Every Grain of Sand” and locked onto her again. “Bob sings my favorite line of this song full of favorite lines right fucking at me and it is almost too intense,” she reported in her journal. “I know now for sure, if I had any doubt, that he knows I'm here. And he's looking at me and I've been singing it along softly and he gives me that squint, that level gaze, and he's shaking his head softly with a smile and so am I. Yup, here we are again. Mmmmm. Something.” Two nights later, he pivoted and zeroed in on her during “Cold Irons Bound” as he sang the words, “I'm gonna remember forever all the joy we've shared.”

Caroline swooned at “this blatant admission of affection” from her hero. She had never been happier in her life. She couldn't lie and say it hadn't dawned on her that if they went to show after show, maybe they would get to meet the man. One July evening in St. Paul, they were in their usual spot up front when Dylan's stage manager appeared to fetch them. They walked backstage, legs shaking, and there was the legend standing between two trucks.

Dylan wore motorcycle boots and what looked like a bowling shirt. He was smoking American Spirits. He told them he loved seeing them out there. He remarked about Kait's green eyes, saying that he'd been looking for a woman with green eyes all his life. He asked what they did, and when Kait said she worked at an art gallery, he asked for a card. She scrawled her number on a piece of paper. He pocketed it.