It’s embarrassing to say…

by Michael Estabrook

…but it was a religious experience for me.

“He did ‘Just like a woman.’ That’s my favorite of his songs.”

“But was he good, was the concert any good?”

“And he did ‘All along the watchtower’ and ‘Shooting star’ and ‘Like a rolling stone’ and ‘Rainy day women’ and ‘The times they are a-changin’.’”

My son, bless his heart, is squinting at me, “But was it any good?”

I smile at him. “Why yes, of course, Dave. It was Dylan, man. Of course it was good.” The question is alien to me, truly it is. I don’t know how to answer it. It’s like you’re eating your first hot meal in a month and someone asks, “Is there enough salt in the potatoes?”

“It was good, of course it was good, it was beyond good. It was Dylan, man.”

I have not been in tune with the music scene really for a couple decades. Being a child of the 60s, that’s where I still am.

But when my daughter came home from college a few weeks ago and asked if I’d like to see Bob Dylan in concert I jumped at it. I can’t believe it, Dylan in concert, and right down the road, too.

I had, in my time, seen lots of famous bands: Cream, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, BB King, The Eagles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Critters, The Duprees, Martha and the Vandellas, The Supremes . . . But Dylan, well, he’s simply the best of the best, in a class all by himself, in my opinion.

I asked around the office and the neighborhood to see if anyone else of our generation would like to go with us. But everybody, every single person said, “Oh no thanks, I can’t understand what he’s saying.” And I can’t understand that comment. Even Matthew, one of only a handful of people at work I respect and like said, “He should only write music, he shouldn’t sing anything. He can’t sing worth a damn.”

We, my wife and I, had recently been to a 50th birthday dinner party for one of our friends. Her husband surprised her by arranging a very fancy dinner at the Ritz Hotel in Boston. He invited six couples and flew their kids in from college. I brought the classical music, Brahms, Mozart, Albinoni, Paganini, Haydn. Brian or Peter or somebody took photos. It was a great meal, and there were some nice presents and conversation and all the rest.

“Michael’s all excited,” my wife says to Ken and Phyllis over our coffee and deserts. “We’re going to a Dylan concert next month.”

Ken screws up his face, “Oh, I would never waste my money on that. You can’t understand a word he says.” Ken is an engineer, one of those know-it-all engineers. He knows everything there is to know about building a bridge or a tunnel or a 747. He knows how to program a computer and how it works. He knows everything about all cities, how they’re laid out and where all the best restaurants are. He knows how cars work and can openers, scud missiles, jack hammers, fax machines and lawn fertilizer. He knows how carpet is made and ice cream and tofu, and the mechanics of open-heart surgery. He’s brilliant. He’s got the whole world all figured out. The world is his clam. Of course, he knows nothing at all about creativity, about human things or matters of the soul. He’s an engineer.

“But it doesn’t matter, Ken. It’s Dylan after all. It doesn’t matter what he sounds like.”

Old Ken doesn’t know what to say to me. He simply sits there stony as a statue, thinking I’m wasting my money, the ceiling lights glaring off his pasty white face, screwed and twisted into some mask like thing.

He would’ve been rather unhappy, I suspect, had he known what I really wanted to say to him. “You have no clue do you, buddy, not a fucking clue. Clueless Kenneth, that’s what we should be calling you. Fucking smug, know-it-all, flaming butt-hole jackass, computer software engineer moron.” Of course, I didn’t say anything like that. I didn’t want to ruin Suzanne’s 50th birthday dinner party.

I couldn’t find anyone in the office who was interested in going to a Bob Dylan concert in a college gymnasium with 3,000 screaming college kids, except for Gaston.

“Sure we’d like to go, Mike, sounds exciting. I don’t know his music much, but I’ve heard of him.”

“That’s OK,” I say, but I’m shocked in a way. He’s almost my age. How can you be almost my age and not know Dylan. Jesus. But I remind myself that Gaston has had bigger fish to fry in his life. His family fled Cuba in the early days of Castro. He grew up in Puerto Rico, moving later to the States. His wife is Puerto Rican. Both of them, especially her, are rather intense Hispanic rites activists. She almost hit me when I asked if they wanted to go with us to see West Side Story. Guess they never had time for anything non-Hispanic, guess they never had time for Dylan.

“That’s OK,” I say to Gaston, my friend, “It’ll be a great experience to get to know him.” I lend him my “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” CD so he can bone up.

We meet in Lexington and drive over to Bentley College together. Gaston has a new job so we talk about that. And it’s raining cats and dogs so we talk about that, too. We drop the ladies off at the gym and park up on the hill, behind my daughter’s dorm. Glad I know my way around here. The place is swarming with kids. There’s a long line to get in. But I’m glad. Dylan’s lyrics are still reaching the kids. I’m surprised we have to go through metal detectors, but glad the security is tight. Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He’s a national treasure after all.

It’s loud is what I can say, very loud. And the bleacher seats are hard. It’s like sitting on rocks. My companions are squirming, trying to sit on their coats. Eileen is wincing, Gaston is actually covering his ears. Oh well, I think, maybe this wasn’t exactly the right venue for them, for people among the uninitiated. My wife is smiling, so that’s good. I know she would prefer much of this being very different, but she’s smiling anyway.

I spend half the time watching him through our opera glasses. Just one week ago these opera glasses were used to soak up Donizetti’s great opera, The Elixir of Love. Strange world, I think, as Dylan rocks back and forth, his guitar wailing, the hot lights glaring off his white cowboy boots and hat.

He’s amazing, simply amazing.

“I never thought he could play the guitar like that. I mean, back in the 60s he was renowned for his lyrics, for his message. He was,” I grin in advance, “the watchtower for an entire generation. But Jesus, he can really play that thing.”

We’re walking in the rain, along with all the college kids. They’re shouting and kicking beer cans and jumping in puddles. I notice Eileen’s shoes. They are expensive shoes and she’s working hard not to ruin them by stepping in the mud.

Our ears are still ringing like crazy. “So what did you think? Was it OK for you?” I ask my wife.

“Yes, I’m OK. But it didn’t have to be that loud,” she says, holding her umbrella too low, almost poking my eye.

“No, I don’t suppose it did. The loudness sort of drove him into you, you know. Know what I mean, man?”

We get through the tangle of children, make our way back into Lexington, get a nice table at Vinny Testa’s. It’s so hard for me to talk about Dylan. I wish I could express why. My wife says, “Listening to him sure brought me back to my youth.” Maybe that’s why. Going back is always difficult, and emotional too. Listening to him was certainly a going back, but it’s more than that. His words still work, he’s still reaching the young people of today. That’s the cool part.

“But what makes him great do you think?” Gaston asks me peering over his menu, furrowing his brow. “It was too loud and you couldn’t understand what he was saying.”

Eileen chirps in, without looking up from her menu, “They should have had those screens with the words on it like they do at the opera.”

“Well,” what to say, “he became the voice of a whole generation. He captured our feelings about the war in Vietnam and about racism and poverty and the injustice of big time politics. He represented our spirit, the spirit of our generation.”

“I think I’ll get the raviolis,” Eileen says. “What about you, Gaston, what are you getting?”

“His music was so seminal it isn’t funny. So many bands today are still playing his music, still greatly affected by him.”

“Oh yes,” says Gaston, “like who?”

But I know he’s further from the modern music scene than I am so I try to think of something obvious. “You’ve heard ‘Knockin’ on heaven’s door’ right?”

“I think so. I’m going to get a small portion of the veal dish with pasta on the side.”

“Well, that’s his song.”

“Oh. What are you getting Pat? Should we get different dishes and share them?”

“OK, that’s a good idea.”

I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know how to capture how I really feel about this. All I know is that Bob Dylan isn’t like seeing and hearing any old band. He’s truly special. He’s unique. He’s not simply a living legend, an icon. He’s a creator. He’s made something out of nothing, made something where there was nothing before. That’s what I felt as I watched and listened, enraptured. But was I the only one? Am I some kind of idiot, not to be talking incessantly about how loud it was, how hard the damned bleacher seats were, and about how the kids shouldn’t be allowed to smoke pot in the gymnasium?

“He’s a true poet, you know,” I say trying to sum it all up. But they’re all dipping their bread into the garlic oil, snapping their lips and saying, “um-um, great bread.”

I’m no music critic. In fact, I don’t think music should be talked about, it should be listened to. I change the subject and in a minute our friends are telling us all about the big exotic trips they’ve taken recently. She went to China for the Women’s Conference, and they went to Japan and Egypt, Denmark and Hawaii. “Brazil, that’s where I want to go next. I love Brazilian music.”

And I’m listening to them and looking at her. She’s perfect. Her hair is perfect, immovable. Her makeup is perfect and her nails and her posh blue and black outfit. She has her Ph.D. and is a Harvard professor, and they have income from her apartment buildings and . . . well, we’re friends and all, but she’s about as far away from Bob Dylan as you can get.

“We’ve had a really interesting cultural month,” I offer. “Three weeks ago we saw Miss Saigon on Broadway, then last week it was the Lyric Opera doing Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love, and now this. And then in January we saw Tosca and just before that Grease. Man, that’s pretty cool, don’t you think?” We didn’t get to The Forbidden City or see the fucking Pyramids or lounge on the beaches of Waikiki, but we haven’t done half bad either, in the cultural arts area that is.

They just sit there and look at me, our two world traveler friends. They don’t say anything. It’s as if our lives don’t exist. We don’t have money. We don’t go anywhere big. Our kids are still living at home. We have so many debts.

“Pretty soon you’ll be able to travel,” she says, smiling and rolling her eyes. She has these know-it-all eyes. I wonder if she knows Ken the perfect engineer.

So the next day my son asks me how it was. Great, I say, just great, it was Dylan how could it not be great. He looks at me funny. He’s 23 years old. He’s not one of the Dylan generation. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to see him,” he said when I had asked if he wanted to go with us.

“It’s a little embarrassing, Dave, but it was, how shall I say it, a religious experience for me.” My son looks at me with his blank look. “When I first began dating your mother, that’s 30 years ago now, sometimes I’d go to midnight mass with her. I wasn’t religious and she isn’t now, as you know.” We don’t go to church now, never even went like everybody else does, “for the children.” It just seems like such hypocrisy, not wanting church for yourself but signing up the kids to go.

“But back then she was living at home still and her parents insisted on her going to church. It would have been unthinkable not to go. So I’d go with her now and then, especially if she went to midnight mass. And I remember one midnight mass on Christmas Eve, everybody wanting to get it done with, to get it over with, so Christmas Day would be free and clear. It was so crowded we literally couldn’t get into the church. We stood out in the outside lobby in the freezing cold, everybody stamping their feet, rubbing their hands together, trying to pray, to get their duty done. As I stood there I remember thinking, ‘God, this isn’t worship. How can you worship your God like this? How can you feel communion with a higher being standing out here in the cold in a herd of half-drunk stupid people.’”

My son blinks at me. He has no idea what I’m talking about. In fact, I guess I don’t either. This is all so hard to express. But I’ve gone this far.

“Well, I understand that now.”

“What?”

“I understand how you can be anyplace really and have a religious experience. We sat for two hours on hard uncomfortable benches. I used my opera glasses to see. There was smoking, some pot smoking, and it was so loud my ears are still ringing. And yet, it was grand and wonderful and sublime and . . . religious. I had a religious experience. I never thought I’d ever get to see Bob Dylan live, and I have. I’m so happy about it.”

“Oh,” says my son, “I see.”

17 Responses to “It’s embarrassing to say…”

~ This piece was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 and was filed under Short Story, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~