The Dylanologists (21 page)

In 2002, Gray went to a show in Stockholm. He filed in with the regulars who followed Dylan around in what looked, to Gray's eyes, like a stupor; “These people depress me,” he wrote. He could only wonder how it felt for Dylan: “night after blurred night, seeing these defeated faces starting up at him in inexplicable glazed agitation?”

As for the show, he hated it. “Most of the time it seems to me that the real Bob Dylan is largely missing and he's busier faking it than trying his best,” he wrote. “Where once he was so alive, communicating so much quick creative intelligence so alertly and uniquely, now he snatches at showbiz cliché he once recoiled from.” When he had been at his best onstage, Dylan “lived in the dangerous moment.” In Stockholm he played it safe. “We expect much less now,” Gray wrote, “and get it.”

One night in the spring of 2009, Dylan played London's Roundhouse, a converted train-repair shed dating to 1846. It was located up the street from the Fluke's Cradle on Camden High Street, where Andy had nearly fainted getting Dylan to sign an issue of
Homer
sixteen years earlier. The Roundhouse gig proved to be a sought-after ticket. The venue held only three thousand people, and with Dylan releasing a new record two days later, fans were hoping he would play a few songs they hadn't heard before.

But when Andy got there, he had the sense that everybody was spoiling for a fight. Dylan had made it clear in the past that he didn't like seeing the same faces up front. On occasion, people who had waited in line all day were ordered
back
by security. Sometimes individuals were informed that Mr. Dylan did not want to see them at the rail. They were cleared out and replaced with hand-chosen concertgoers. One night the back of the line got into the venue first. This sort of thing happened a lot around 2000 and 2001. One regular took to calling it the
Fuck You, Everybody!
Tour. In Switzerland, a fan up front said Dylan leaned down and said he didn't
ever
want to see him at the rail again. The man swore that he had done nothing to trigger Dylan's temper. “I usually play to the people in the back,” Dylan said around that time. “I disregard the people in the front.” The superfans would be there every night no matter what he did. He wanted to reach people who had never seen him before.

Waiting for the Roundhouse show to begin, Andy could see Dylan standing just offstage. He didn't look happy about what he was seeing. “He was standing with the most depressed look on his face, really, really down, as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the world but here.” It could have been nothing. Dylan could have been preparing himself mentally to go on stage. Maybe it was just a trick of the lights. But Andy couldn't shake the feeling that the man was in a dark mood.

The lights went down, and it was Andy's turn to be sour. After a few songs, he decided he had heard enough. He walked out and headed home. He had better things to do. He checked the time on the way out. He'd lasted thirty-two minutes. “It was awful, it was just rubbish,” he said later. “Plinky-plonky piano. Singing every song the same. He was just faking it. His voice is gone and he's using tricks to replace emotion.”

Andy had made arrangements to see Dylan a week later in Edinburgh. He scored tickets in the front row and booked a flight. But a few days after the Roundhouse concert, he was still trying to reconcile his years of passion for Dylan with his bitter feelings about the show. It was psychologically traumatic. He felt guilty about leaving with his old hero up there onstage. “Thirty-four years of unalloyed love for the man, and I walked out on him.”

When the time came to leave for Scotland, Andy stayed home.

3

Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin, the world's most prolific Dylan writers, didn't get along. When the men crossed paths, they were loath to share even pleasantries, and by all accounts they held each other in mutual disrespect. It was probably unavoidable. Their personalities did not mesh. Gray was reserved, Heylin brash. They were men of ego, and they didn't put up with fools without good reason.

But on the question of the merits of Dylan's recent work, they were in general harmony. Gray was disappointed by every new set of Dylan originals after
“Love and Theft,”
while Heylin thought the critics had overrated even that album. “We've all had to watch this extraordinary process whereby he's sort of become this can-do-no-wrong figure, at the precise point when he does nothing
but
wrong,” Heylin said. He gave Dylan credit for moments of magnificence on
Modern Times
in 2006. But he had a hard time hearing fans rave about some recent concert performance of “Like a Rolling Stone,” as if it had been even a shadow of the howling wonder from the 1966 live shows. Those people needed “serious remedial care,” in his opinion. “The '66 version is one of the greatest things ever. And this”—Late Dylan in concert—“is beyond embarrassing, you know? The band stinks, Bob doesn't know the words, he can't sing for shit. Which bit of it is fantastic?”

To Heylin, argument was sport, his preferred method of communication. Even when he recounted a fact, he loaded it with an opinion, the opinion being that somebody else had it wrong. The man could launch a debate in an empty room. He was the kind of bully you could come to love if you didn't take whatever came out of his mouth to heart. Face to face, he could be charming and approachable. In his fifties, he still had a boyish face and a bottomless enthusiasm for music.

Heylin first saw Dylan during his return to England for a six-night stand at Earls Court in 1978. He was eighteen, and already a major fan and bootleg collector. (It was never
just
Dylan; he was also a punk music fan.) The concerts sparked a resurgence of interest, and soon the country's fans were coming together for Dylan conferences to trade tapes and talk about his music. At one of these the idea for a “Bob Dylan Information Office” came up, and in 1981, Wanted Man and its newsletter, the
Telegraph
, were born. Heylin was involved from the beginning. Later, the fanzine would evolve into a critical journal, but he always considered its main purpose to be historical. Let somebody else figure out what “Visions of Johanna” really meant. He wanted to dig for intel, and tapes. He was driven by the sense that the world, at that time, had forgotten how important Dylan was, and by the need to get the facts documented before they were lost or buried.

In his late twenties, Heylin quit his family's insurance brokerage to become a writer full-time. He would go on to publish many Dylan books: a detailed timeline of Dylan's life through 1995, assembled from articles, books, interviews, and whatever other records he could find; one book detailing Dylan's recording sessions; three editions of a biography; and a song-by-song breakdown in two volumes. Add to that two others involving Dylan, plus guides to Dylan's unreleased recordings and many articles, and you begin to wonder how he had time for the dozen-plus other books he's written about music. Writers like Heylin battled against a culture of silence among those close to Dylan. This was a man who once said he felt the same way about people who sat for interviews with biographers as Civil War generals did about infiltrators in their ranks. “They're spies,” Dylan said with a sneer. “All informers should be shot.”

Heylin aimed to be a rock historian; he had two history degrees, and he considered himself “a scholar who prides himself on getting things right.” He had his detractors, who called him a train spotter obsessed with facts and dates, or who charged him with making unsupported assumptions and getting minor details wrong. (“We all get things wrong. I've never claimed I'm infallible,” he said. That's why he kept digging. That's why he revised his editions over the years.) But it is impossible to deny the importance of his work on Dylan. Even Gray recognized that. “His knowledge is immense, his research formidable, and his prose prolific,” he wrote in
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
. “He has unearthed so much of the information we have about Dylan's recordings and his life, and has interpreted that information so forcefully, that had Heylin never interested himself in these subjects, the whole face of Dylanology would be different.” And, Gray added, “less combative.” Heylin is well-known for hammering anybody and everybody in print. He is quick to attack other Dylan writers for their faulty reasoning and flawed scholarship, and one of his books was famously “NOT dedicated to Jeff Rosen,” manager of the singer's business and publishing operations. Andy Muir, who counts Heylin as a friend, said it is no surprise that this was the sort of biographer Dylan would attract: spiky and abrasive. “He torments people for fun,” Andy said with some admiration.

Even Dylan himself is not safe from Heylin's barbs. He counts the singer as an artistic genius, of course. And yet he's like the brother who can't bring himself to say a kind word without pairing it with a dig. “Mr. Heylin seems to feel himself in competition with his subject,” the
New York Times
wrote about his biography, “making gratuitous and unsupported
ex-cathedra
pronouncements on the relative merits of Mr. Dylan's songs, career choices and romantic involvements. These seem designed, finally, to leave us with the impression that Mr. Dylan's life and career would have gone much better if he had only let Mr. Heylin run it for him.”

How could he have considered the last assertion an insult? His entire career had been built around the idea that
of course
he could do it better. Once, during a 1993 show in London, Heylin took out a newspaper and ostentatiously started reading. “I had just had enough,” he says. “I'd been there six nights, he was playing the same songs every night, he was
murdering
them every night, and I'd had enough.” For years he had considered Dylan the world's greatest live performer, and as late as 2000 the singer was still capable of thrilling the biographer. But after 2003, Heylin had all but stopped going to the shows. “From a critical perspective, I have to step back and say, ‘Look, trust me, it's worthless. Why are you listening to it?' Unless you're writing a book on the decline of Bob Dylan creatively, it's a total waste of time.” He wondered whether Dylan kept going just to see who would last longer, him or the fans. “He's winning,” he says. “Trust me.”

The sense that the train could go off the tracks was always a key part of Dylan's appeal. When he showed up at Gerde's Folk City or the Gaslight in the early 1960s, he would do Chaplinesque comedy routines on the stage, looking like a rank amateur, and then the next minute he'd deliver something breathtaking. The Never Ending Tour had a similar dynamic. People went to shows for years in the hopes of hearing something rare and wonderful, a moment when suddenly Dylan came alive and gave a song some new twist. “The ability to fly by the seat of your pants is what defines him as a performance artist, and in order to do that you have to be prepared to fail,” Heylin says. Moments like those seem to be missing from Late Dylan. There is no longer that element of surprise, the sense that you might see something you'd never seen before and wouldn't see again. “I don't think I have any illusions about what I expect for the remainder of the Never Ending Tour,” Heylin said. “And as Bob himself has said, it has to end. None of us are immortal.”

In 1992, he went to a show at a music festival in the South Florida Fairgrounds, which did not sound to Heylin like a particularly appropriate venue for a living legend. Instead of wandering around and eating corn dogs, the nuts stood outside for six hours to make sure they got up front. It was unpleasant, but when the show started, Dylan came on and did something Heylin had never seen him do before: He played the harmonica on the first nine songs, sometimes giving the audience three solos in a single song. For Heylin, it made the entire day worth it.

But well into the third decade of the Never Ending Tour, he thought it highly unlikely that Dylan would do something as unpredictable and exciting and
great
as he had that night in Florida, and many other nights on the road.

“That's not going to happen,” Heylin said. “Is it sad? Well, you know, it happens to us all.”

8

ON THE RAIL

A
t a general-admission concert, the way to score a spot at the foot of the stage is to be one of the first people in the door. Getting “on the rail,” as the regulars put it, was a practical matter for Charlie Cicirella. He was barely five feet tall, and since he wanted a clear line of sight, he went early and stood in line. He had very simple ideas about this. Everything flowed from one basic rule: Do the time. He was uncompromising about the people who gamed the system by coming late and cutting ahead. Pile a sleep deficit atop his usual ornery streak, and Charlie could be a monster. “I've got a reputation, and part of this reputation is irascibility,” he admitted. He wore it proudly. Whenever he made it to the rail, you could be sure he had earned it. “That's why we get there early. We work for it.”

Trouble broke out on every Dylan line. People cut in and refused to move. Sharp words were said, elbows thrown. But this week's run of general-admission shows was in Manhattan, and Charlie was preparing for more difficulty than usual. New York City fans had a cutthroat reputation. During a multiple-night stand at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2003, it seemed like nobody got along. Fans walked outside after the encore and lined up immediately for the next night's show, twenty-two hours off.

This time Dylan was playing a trio of concerts at a club in Hell's Kitchen called Terminal 5. The first show was on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 22, 2010. Charlie made plans to fly in from Cleveland on Sunday, but he was having some anxiety. He no longer had a driver's license, and he didn't know what airport security would do. But they waved him past and he made his flight. In New York, he took a taxi to the hostel where he was staying, dropped off his bag, and went directly uptown to the venue. He hoped to be first in line.

Charlie arrived around ten
P.M.
and found a red chair by the door with a note taped to its back. Beautiful. Someone had the nerve to lay claim to the first spot without even being there. The trickster did not show up for hours, and when she did, around six
A.M.
, Charlie challenged her claim and she immediately backed down. Obviously, this man wanted it more than she did.

In the morning, cars poured off the West Side Highway, piloted by commuters wearing business suits and dresses. Some glanced over at the clutch of men and women loitering on the sidewalk, and you could almost see thought bubbles appear above their heads:
When did the homeless shelter open up next to the Infiniti dealership?

People flew in from all over the world to see the shows. There were fans from Norway and Italy, from Montana and California. They came because it was New York, the city where Dylan invented himself. But there was nothing at all romantic about this grimy sidewalk where two dozen people killed time in front of unmarked metal security doors.

They milled around, read trashy magazines, did a little work, tried to sleep on the sidewalk.

Suddenly, in the middle of this calm, Charlie started going ballistic.

“We're fucked!” he cried. “We're fucked!”

Security was saying they were going to let in the first 250 people to mingle in a rooftop bar. A while later, they would guide the crowd downstairs to the stage. Charlie could see only disaster. It would be a free-for-all. The people who had waited all this time would have no advantage. They would have to fight for their positions against fans who had arrived a few hours before the doors opened—people who had not paid their dues like he had.

Charlie marched around back and tried to talk the security chief, a man named Stephan, out of this terrible plan. Stephan wore a black jacket, a spotless Yankees cap, and diamond earrings. He stood at attention, the classic bouncer's pose: eyes forward, his back straight, chest puffed out. He towered over Charlie, whose floppy gray hair looked disheveled from his all-nighter.

Politely, Charlie pleaded for Stephan to help preserve the line order.

“The people that's in front will be the first ones in,” Stephan promised.

“I've seen this go
soooo
wrong,” Charlie countered.

“It goes right.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “but you haven't seen Bob fans.”

2

In 2010, it was business as usual for Dylan. He was performing about as many concerts as he had when the Never Ending Tour began two decades earlier. If you waited outside a medium-size venue anywhere in the world, he was bound to stop by sooner or later. He played Tokyo in March, Athens and Istanbul in May. He started the month of June in Bucharest and he ended it in Bordeaux. He played a festival in England, then roamed through the Great Plains. Austin in August was sweltering. A few fans passed out from the heat waiting for him to come on in Lincoln.

Two days later he played the world's biggest biker rally, in Sturgis, South Dakota. The stage sat in the middle of a massive campground that looked like one of Dylan's phantasmagoric songs brought to life. It was the freak-show circus from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the outlandish world of “Desolation Row,” the set for “Tombstone Blues.” The Buffalo Chip had a pool bar sponsored by Hedonism II, the racy Jamaican resort. It had a mechanical bull. It had a firing range. Bikers could ride right up to the stage and rev their motors. Women wore body paint instead of clothes; some men sprouted devil's horns. The Coors spokesmodel was there, and so were the US Air Force recruiters. “It's fucking insanity!” screamed a Dylan freak who had driven eleven hours from Winnipeg. “What
is
this place?” Before Dylan went on stage the mob saw a twenty-one-gun salute, a prowar rant by actor Lorenzo Lamas, and a scantily clad acrobat riding a motorcycle on a high wire. Two minutes after Dylan finished his act, ten women in string bikinis gyrated onto the stage to impress the clipboard-wielding judges of the Miss Buffalo Chip Beauty Pageant, followed shortly after by Kid Rock. The smattering of Dylan fans were wigged out by the scene but they thought their man put on a great show. The badass bikers from the Sons of Silence Motorcycle Club (motto:
Donec Mors Non Separat
, “Until Death Separates Us”) did not seem impressed. Dylan looked like he enjoyed himself.

The Peripatetic One played his sixty-third show of the year at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival in September. On the last leg of the year, he'd do seven weeks of dates in college towns from Florida to Wisconsin, followed by the three shows in New York and a couple of casino gigs. When the shows were announced, Charlie mapped out a trip that would have him looping through the Midwest in late October and early November: Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Chicago, Indianapolis, Akron, Columbus. Six shows in ten days, more than a thousand miles round trip from his home outside Cleveland. He didn't have much money in his bank account, but Charlie thought he could pull it off. If he was lucky, he'd catch the New York shows, too.

Charlie was intense, conspiratorial, a bit pushy in a disarmingly self-conscious kind of way. The first time we spoke on the phone, he suggested I fly him to New York so he could show me how serious tourgoers did the line. He was full of confidence, almost bluster, but at the same time he could be sensitive. “If you talk to me for twenty minutes, not to blow my own horn, I think it could be more interesting than two other people you talk to for two hours,” he said. “Or maybe I just think I'm more interesting than most other people do, and in that case don't tell me because it will really let me down.”

He started writing poetry at fourteen, and reciting it soon after. After a little while at community college, he left home and followed a girl to Columbus, where he read his poetry on Mondays at a bar that hosted slams, Larry's. It was the center of the little countercultural community in the city. The wooden tables were graffiti-scarred. Velvet Underground was on the jukebox. Word was that Dylan once overnighted in the apartment upstairs. A guy he met at Larry's, impressed with Charlie's stuff, introduced him to a man who could help him get published. The man was Jim Shepard, a lo-fi legend in underground music circles who founded a series of experimental rock bands—V-3, Vertical Slit—and made records largely outside of the studio system. Shepard also had a publishing outfit. The young poet handed him a manila folder filled with writing, and next thing he knew he had two chapbooks out.

Shepard was the first person who made Charlie see that he could really be an artist. “With Shepard, all things were possible,” he said. “He pulled me off the street when I was having some problems. He turned me on to music and poetry and books. And he was like, ‘You want to be an artist, just go for it.'”

They became friends and sometimes performed together. “Being on a stage with him was like being onstage with a caged panther,” Charlie wrote later. “He was manic—maniacal—incendiary.” Shepard was as outside the mainstream as anyone could be. One guy who knew him said that the best steady job he could remember him having was jukebox routeman. Shepard once told an interviewer, “I don't watch the news. I don't read the papers. I'm not really in touch with society. I was born. I'm here, but I don't believe any of it.”

Charlie tried to internalize Shepard's philosophy, which was to work as if he had six months to live. That meant using his time to create, not sitting in some office cubicle or standing behind a retail counter at the mall. Charlie always had some creative project going. He produced a radio show and posted it online for friends—Radio Ether, he called it. He recorded his poems and uploaded them to a blog. Some pieces he did with musician friends, who improvised behind him on guitar or ukulele or cello or flute. He had a band, Root Cellar, that played sporadically. “I sing,” Charlie said. “I scream, actually.” They did a song called “Danger Pussy.” Often when Charlie made something, he didn't do anything with it. “Mostly,” he said, “it goes into a drawer.”

He could throw himself into all kinds of complex creative projects, but the mundane matters of life left him stumped. He didn't know where to start. How did you get a driver's license? What was the best way of buying a car? He thought his head would explode if he tried to do things like that. “My brain doesn't work that way,” he said. “You want me to go out and get a job and work? I'll do it. I'm going to have to do it sometime. Sometime soon. But that doesn't make
sense
to me. I have to really feel something. It has to feel right.”

He'd held down his share of jobs. He learned tarot so he could work a psychic call line at seven dollars an hour. For four years he managed a college bar in Columbus, but when that ended, he said he stopped caring about finding something else. He went numb.

Jim Shepard killed himself in 1998, at age forty. Charlie hit rock bottom a few years later. On the verge of being evicted, he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to live with a girl he had met through Dylan fan circles. That lasted four months. Out of options, he moved back home to Cleveland. His last steady gig was at a Starbucks in the mall across the street from his mother's home in Lyndhurst, Ohio, where he had been camped out on the couch for years. He drew unemployment for a while.

But despite his bleak financial situation, he still found ways to see Dylan shows. By the time October arrived, he had tickets for the six Midwest concerts and a ride with a friend in Chicago. He planned to crash wherever he could and tap his limited funds for food and incidentals. It felt like a minor miracle to be able to go back on the road.

Ann Arbor sucked. Kalamazoo was great. He thought Chicago was out of this world. “Just the way he said ‘para-
lyzed
' during ‘Positively Fourth Street'—it was just unbelievable,” Charlie said over dinner the next night in Indianapolis, a few hours before another show. “He spit it out. But he didn't. He put it out there a little bit, and it was dangling off his tongue, and then he pulled it back in and then he pushed it out. Like a piano out of a window. Then it just came down”—Charlie smacked the table—“and it lay there on the sidewalk. He did ‘Positively Fourth Street' like he wrote it seven minutes before he walked out on stage.”

“Like he was angry?” someone asked.

“No,” he said. “Like he was
resigned
. Like I just know how you are and you're never going to fucking change and I'm on to you. And your little dog.”

Charlie had arranged to eat at the kind of place where he thought he might run into Dylan, a restaurant called Maxine's Chicken & Waffles that was attached to a Citgo gas station. Charlie struck up a conversation with one of the waitresses, whose name was Jolene.

“That's funny,” he said. “We're going to see Bob Dylan, and he does a song called ‘Jolene.' Has he ever eaten here?”

“Bob Dylan?” Jolene asked. “If he has, I missed him.”

As a teenager Charlie didn't have a lot of friends. He wasn't comfortable in his own skin. He remembers walking home from school with kids who obviously didn't want anything to do with him. But then one day he put on
Highway 61 Revisited
, which he had checked out of the library but was long overdue. The second time he listened to “Like a Rolling Stone,” something clicked. It was the first time he could ever remember not feeling alone. He never forgot how that comforted him as a teenager. “Somebody spoke to me,” he said. “Somebody understood.”

So count Charlie among the people who wanted to meet Dylan one day. “I think he would think I was funny,” he says. “I really believe I could be the one guy who could talk to him without bullshit. He needs another Jewish poet now that Ginsberg is dead.”

3

He'd made it to New York, and now the concert was close. The sky grew dark and the white garage doors swung open and the venue lights flickered to life. At five
P.M.
, the line was getting tense. Charlie had not been able to get the security man to change his plan, and he was edgy. More ticket holders arrived. Friends let latecomers break rank. Charlie mistakenly went after a woman who had been there all day.