The Dylantantes Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jim Salvucci & The Dylantantes
Notes by an elite shock force of researchers, scholars, & stans on Bob Dylan &c. Another Side of Dylan Thinkers
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We change it up a bit in the spirit of holiday festivities and the New Year. Today, we’re going to have a pretty open roundtable. Our regular Bashers will have the opportunity to let loose in response to some open-ended prompts and will be selected to speak via a randomized spinner.
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A novelist and author of many short stories, John Radosta teaches high school English near Boston, Massachusetts. Under both a pseudonym and his real name, his fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Yellow Mama, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Wildside Black Cat, and Tough Crime. A veteran of more than 50 Bob Dylan concerts, he is the co-author with Keith Nainby of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage and Screen, as well as other Dylan and Woody Guthrie articles.
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Peter White is a retired professor of ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For 28 of his 33 years at the University he doubled as the Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Through six decades, Bob Dylan has been a constant. For 30 years he has hosted the Annual Bob Dylan Party. In 2023 he co-founded It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Reading), a Zoom-based Bob Dylan Book Club.
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Christopher Vanni is the author of two Substacks, one about Bob Dylan and one on Gene Clark, he's an advisor for the Bob Dylan Book Club—It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Reading—and he's the creator of a Bob Dylan Quiz that can be found on YouTube and in his feed on X. He is also passionate about golf, classic films, and history.
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The 1974 album Planet Waves marked a series of firsts for Bob Dylan. It was his first official album with The Band. It was his first record not on the Columbia label. And it was, believe it or not, his first No. 1 album.
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Todd Haynes' 2007 film, I’m Not There, is anything but your grandpa’s bio-pic. For one thing, absolutely no one in the film is named “Bob Dylan”—the feature’s ostensible subject. In fact, no one utters the words “Bob Dylan,” and many of the events depicted have, at most, a tangential relationship to the life and times of said Bob Dylan. On the other hand, Dylan’s music features prominently and wonderfully throughout/ and some settings, dialogue, and events are Dylan lyrics put to film.
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Last time we discussed just the covers that Bob Dylan and the members of what would become The Band recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. Be sure to check out part 1 if you missed it.
Today we are back with part 2 to explore the Bob Dylan originals recorded during those sessions.
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Only one year after the triumphal release of “Oh Mercy,” Dylan came out with 1990’s “Under the Red Sky.” The album is known for its all-star musicians—George Harrison, Slash, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Al Kooper, David Lindley, and others—and was produced by Don Was. It is filled with the language and structure of children’s songs and music—which is befitting an album dedicated to “Gabby Goo-Goo,” likely Dylan’s then-toddler daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. There are counting songs, fairytales, and echoes of nursery rhymes. But the songs often sport an ominous feel that is hard to shake, which, if we are being fair, is not too different from traditional children’s folk literature.
Scott Warmuth is a writer and musician from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His research and observations on the writing strategies of Bob Dylan are widely acknowledged and frequently referenced, notably in Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1983-2000. In 2014, writer Jonah Raskin dubbed Warmuth the dean of Dylanologists.
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Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the neighborhood famously known as Black Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was also the site of the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in May and June of 1921, almost exactly 103 years ago as of this writing.
My piece was an attempt to summarize the Race Massacre, which many still have never heard of, and to grapple with the placement of the Bob Dylan Center Archive in the neighboring Tulsa Arts District, itself a site of considerable racial tension.
I am revisiting the piece because of recent news that a decades-old attempt by survivors of the Massacre to obtain reparations has finally failed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
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Only one year after the triumphal release of “Oh Mercy,” Dylan came out with 1990’s “Under the Red Sky.” The album is known for its all-star musicians—George Harrison, Slash, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Al Kooper, David Lindley, and others—and was produced by Don Was. It is filled with the language and structure of children’s songs and music—which is befitting an album dedicated to “Gabby Goo-Goo,” likely Dylan’s then-toddler daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. There are counting songs, fairytales, and echoes of nursery rhymes. But the songs often sport an ominous feel that is hard to shake, which, if we are being fair, is not too different from traditional children’s folk literature.
Phil Hale lives in NYC and first saw Dylan live in '81 in London. Since then he has seen Dylan more than 100 times. While having no regrets he's not completely sold on the idea that it's the best use of his time either. That dichotomy has led to some attempts to write about Dylan to make sense of what seems like a grand obsession. Phil lived in Woodstock for a while and likes to think it was a coincidence. As a graduate in philosophy he is at least attuned to the idea that some things can be pursued at length and the answer never found. He's married, and if his wife entered a "eye roll when Dylan is mentioned" competition she would place highly if not outright win it. Despite this he salutes her patience.
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Twenty-one years ago, the whole wide world was stunned by the release of a new Bob Dylan project unlike any before, a feature-length movie of his own creation aimed at a generalish audience.
Led by a future Nobel Laureate co-crafting the satirical script, populated with a brilliantly star-studded cast, and helmed by a maverick director out to compose what he described as “a great Bob Dylan song” in film, Masked and Anonymous was destined to be a masterpiece. It. Could. Not. Fail.
You may know Dan Brown as the author of the bestseller The DaVinci Code, but you’ve got the wrong guy. This Dan Brown was born in Tarrytown N.Y, and after a stint in the United States Air Force he moved to New City, NY, entered into a career in the restaurant industry. For the last 15 years, he has been owner of the Wherehouse Restaurant in Newburgh, NY.
His lifelong passion for music has resulted in The Wherehouse being a hub for young local musicians to perform as well as network. The decor is also reflective of the passionate musical journey he has taken. And though he is a fan of many bands and performers, Bob Dylan stands above the crowd not only as a songwriter but most important as a storyteller. On more tidbit: the Wherehouse serves a drink called “Blood on the Tracks,” which features Bob Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey.
We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.
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Bob Dylan’s 15th, 16th, and 17th studio albums, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire, had been solid successes when he released Street-Legal in 1978. The album was not universally well received by critics although it was a commercial success.
The band was mostly drawn from the large ensemble performing during Dylan’s Japanese and Australian tours and notably included a chorus consisting of Dylan’s future wife Carolyn Dennis, veteran singer Jo Ann Harris, and Helena Sprigs, who was all of 17 at the time.
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Bob Dylan’s 31st studio album, “Love and Theft,” was released on September 11, 2001. The album’s lyrics are among the first to be heavily researched for references to and lifts from other works, and there are many—perhaps most notably some lines from Japanese true crime writer Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. The songs are rich with characters—men and women, real and fanciful—and events— as devastating as a flood and as benign as the sound of fornication in the room next door. And there is humor, including some hardcore dad jokes.
Sonically the album is as eclectic as any Dylan has released, spanning such genres as rockabilly, old-timey torch ballads, and some of the most hard-driving blues Dylan has ever produced.
Last year a New York Times article opened with
"Henry Bernstein has seen Bob Dylan 27 times in concert and owns three items autographed by him: a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album, a photograph of the singer and a “John Wesley Harding” songbook. His favorite song is “Tangled Up in Blue.”
Henry says this is a double crowning achievement in life. When he's not obsessing over Bob Dylan Henry works in Operations and Logistics for a local Jewish Day School in Chicago. His other great loves besides his family and Bob Dylan are Superman, Star Trek and the Chicago White Sox. In 2018 Henry along with his friend Rabbi Brandon Bernstein (no relation) took their love of Judaism and Comic Books and started a podcast called "Funny They Don't Look Jewish." Henry describes the podcast as a deep dive into explicit Jewish content within super-hero comic books. This can be a character identifying as Jewish, practicing Judaism, speaking Hebrew, learning Torah and everything in-between. Henry also co-hosts a podcast with Dr. Sam Brody called Superman & Lois & Pals, an episode by episode review of the popular CW tv show. Henry can be heard talking about Bob Dylan often on Pod Dylan. Henry credits his dear friend Rob Kelly with introducing him to the Bob Dylan Twitter community and giving him a platform to be a voice in that group.
Henry lives on the Northside of Chicago with his wife—a guitar playing rockstar rabbi—and his two young children, all of whom enjoy Bob Dylan and tolerate his obsession.
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Last year a New York Times article opened with
"Henry Bernstein has seen Bob Dylan 27 times in concert and owns three items autographed by him: a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album, a photograph of the singer and a “John Wesley Harding” songbook. His favorite song is “Tangled Up in Blue.”
Henry says this is a double crowning achievement in life. When he's not obsessing over Bob Dylan Henry works in Operations and Logistics for a local Jewish Day School in Chicago. His other great loves besides his family and Bob Dylan are Superman, Star Trek and the Chicago White Sox. In 2018 Henry along with his friend Rabbi Brandon Bernstein (no relation) took their love of Judaism and Comic Books and started a podcast called "Funny They Don't Look Jewish." Henry describes the podcast as a deep dive into explicit Jewish content within super-hero comic books. This can be a character identifying as Jewish, practicing Judaism, speaking Hebrew, learning Torah and everything in-between. Henry also co-hosts a podcast with Dr. Sam Brody called Superman & Lois & Pals, an episode by episode review of the popular CW tv show. Henry can be heard talking about Bob Dylan often on Pod Dylan. Henry credits his dear friend Rob Kelly with introducing him to the Bob Dylan Twitter community and giving him a platform to be a voice in that group.
Henry lives on the Northside of Chicago with his wife—a guitar playing rockstar rabbi—and his two young children, all of whom enjoy Bob Dylan and tolerate his obsession.
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As much as we love Bob Dylan’s many versions of his own music, we at Million $ Bash would be remiss if we did not discuss some of the gazillions of covers of Dylan’s work. Given the buzz emanating from Cat Power’s reconstruction of Dylan’s set from his 1966 British tour, it makes sense to discuss specifically covers of Dylan by women.
Bella Napolitano is a nineteen-year old from Baltimore, and is currently a Psychology major at Bard College in Upstate New York. Bella is an aspiring child psychologist, loves creating visual art, enjoys going on long walks, and is a live-music enthusiast. She has had lifelong exposure to Dylan’s music through her father and has developed a taste for it. She saw Dylan live for the first time in Baltimore on November 24th, 2023.
At about the 20:30 mark, Bella references her artwork. You can see the piece in the screenshot below.
For a video version of the Zoom interview, click below.
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Michael Johnson is a Dylan adventurer. He was born in 1956 and grew up at the Jersey Shore. His first concerts were at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ, starting with Black Sabbath in 1971. The next 3 plus years saw a huge shift largely as the result of him not filling out the selection cards from the Columbia Records Album Club and having to accept the album of the month, which transformed his musical horizons. He has had many jobs and started a career in teaching at age 42 in 2000. He has since transitioned from 8th-grade English teacher to school librarian, which was a survival move. Two major events in his life were sobriety in 1995 and marriage in 2015 at age 58.
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In this latest episode of the Million $ Bash roundtable, the gang goes at the surprise 2009 release of Christmas in the Heart, Bob Dylan’s first and perhaps only album of Christmas music, at least until there is a Bootleg Series box set of the session outtakes. The album is, unsurprisingly, contentious, and the M$B roundtable participants, despite their academic restraint, are not immune from that controversy. Enjoy this special holiday edition of the Million $ Bash!
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n this latest episode of the Million $ Bash roundtable, the gang talks about their contributions to the new collection, The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me, edited by our very own Erin Callahan and Court Carney and published by Routledge.
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Roberta Rakove is a partner in the firm of Rakove and Strassberger which advises and trains nonprofits and foundations on how to build effective advocacy. Prior to that she served for many years as the Senior Vice President for External Affairs for Sinai Health System in Chicago advocating on Medicaid(as in Shot of Love “Doctor can you hear me? I need some Medicaid”),immigration, and gun violence prevention. Since 1968 she has spent much of her free time obsessing about Bob Dylan and in 2022 coordinated an adult education class on Bob Dylan for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern University.
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Elizabeth Cantalamessa is currently a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Miami and an instructor at the University of Houston-Downtown. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and has published on topics including political speech, disagreement, and copyright law.
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In this latest episode of the Million Dollar Bash Roundtable, the gang takes on the Dylan songs they think deserve greater attention and recognition. Will sparks fly? Will inspiration flare? Well, there is only one way to find out!
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Laura Tenschert is a writer, podcaster, and musician living in London, UK. She is the creator of Definitely Dylan, a podcast about Bob Dylan’s work and creative process. The episodes on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Shadow Kingdom, and Dylan’s visual art have established her as a crucial voice on the artist’s recent work. Laura has presented and organised panels at the World of Bob Dylan conferences in Tulsa several times, and her work features regularly in books, zines, and other podcasts.
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Harold Lepidus is the author of Friends and Other Strangers - Bob Dylan Examined He also hosts the Boston Harold Podcast.
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The Stoics taught us that the contemplation of the fleeting nature of life helps prepare us for the end, encourages us to appreciate and make the best of the present, and softens the blow when we lose those we care about. In that spirit, The Dylantantes presents a Million Dollar Bash Roundtable focused on Bob Dylan’s legacy now and forevermore even as he embarks on a new leg of his latest tour.
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Rebecca Slaman is a freelance writer and editor. She has a BA from Fordham University in English and Classics. Her writing specializes in fan communities on social media. She has been cited as a Bob Dylan expert in speaking engagements at University of Tulsa and Florida International University. You can find her on Twitter @ithrewtheglass, on the web at http://rslaman.wixsite.com/website, and on Substack.
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Dr. Keith Nainby is Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Stanislaus. There, his primary academic interests include pedagogy, philosophy, and performance. Keith currently focuses on the cultural contexts of musical performances, such as listener engagements and fan communities. He has published a book and four essays, with a fifth forthcoming, on Bob Dylan (most with co-author John M. Radosta). His book on Taylor Swift and Swiftie identities is also forthcoming.
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Dr. Anne Marie Mai is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast (interview by Erin Callahan). The discussion ranges widely before zeroing in on Dylan and masculinity.
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In June of 2023, the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies held The World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa in conjunction with a new cultural event called Switchyard. The panelists start their postmortem of the World of Bob Dylan 2023 with a critique of this “mash-up.”
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The Philosophy of Modern Song and the Ambi-Modernist Impulse
A panel from the World of Bob Dylan, June 2, 2023, Tulsa, OK
The publication of Bob Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song in 2022 has elicited much commentary related to song selection, the question of breadth, and the notion of a central philosophy tying it all together. What this panel suggests is that this book contains thematic threads beyond the songs themselves that comment on Dylan’s relationship with the past and the contemporary moment.
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Roundtable Panelists:
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Rob Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University. He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
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Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
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Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
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Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
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Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
Comments are welcome.
Yours in Dylanology,Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Culture critic, artist, prolific podcaster, and host of Pod Dylan, Rob Kelly, is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Rob Kelly is an award-winning writer, illustrator, and pop culture historian. He was the creator/editor of the book HEY KIDS, COMICS!: TRUE-LIFE TALES FROM THE SPINNER RACK, and writes the Reel Retro Cinema column for 13ThDimension.com. He is the host of FADE OUT, MASHCAST, and TREASURYCAST, and co-hosts WHO'S WHO'S: THE DEFINITIVE PODCAST OF THE DC UNIVERSE and SUPERMAN MOVIE MINUTE. Most importantly for The Dylantantes, he is the longtime host of Pod Dylan*.
Comments are most welcome.
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Music and cultural journalist Allison Rapp is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Allison Rapp is a music and culture journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Rock Cellar, City Limits, and more. She currently works as an assistant editor at Ultimate Classic Rock where she's interviewed the likes of Peter Frampton, Roger McGuinn, John Oates and others. She tweets at @allisonrapp22.
Comments are most welcome.
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Dylanpreneur Craig Danuloff is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Craig Danuloff is host of the Dylan.FM, which is a podcast and website he’s running as part of the Freak Music Club. When not being an obsessive Dylan fan, he’s a technology entrepreneur who has founded a series of companies, most recently relating to consumer privacy and identity verification. 20+ years ago, Craig wrote 20+ computer books, mostly about software that no longer exists.
As part of Dylan.FM he does a weekly news recap of all things Dylan, that you can find at freakmusic.substack.com.
Comments are most welcome.
Yours in Dylanology,Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
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Just a few months ago, Bob Dylan released his second book of prose (third book ever), and loftily entitled it The Philosophy of Modern Song. The reviews have been mixed, but the book has already become the latest folder for the academic industrial complex. Here at The Dylantantes, we have decided that enough is enough and that it is time to put an end to all the speculation and debate. We present to you The Dylantantes’ One and Only Definitive and Final Roundtable on The Philosophy of Modern Song.
Roundtable Panelists:
Rob Reginio, Nina Goss, Court Carney, Erin Callahan, Graley Herren
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Dr Nina Goss is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast (interview by Erin Callahan)
Nina Goss was born and raised in New York. She earned her BA from University of Rochester and her MFA and PhD from the University of Washington and currently teaches at Fordham University. She is quite prolific in her work on Dylan. Since she started researching and writing about Dylan, Nina has been widely published in numerous collections, anthologies, and journals on Dylan, has edited the journal Montague Street and the anthologies Dylan at Play in 2011 and Tearing the World Apart in 2017, and has presented her work at conferences in the US and abroad.
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Dr. Robert Reginio is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Rob Reginio is a professor English at Alfred University in Western New York. He is the editor of and contributor to the collection Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art. He has published and presented widely on modernism and memory and has published pieces on Dylan and race and Dylan and Emmanuel Levinas. He is a member of the editorial board of The Dylan Review. He serves as the Hagar Professor of the Humanities at Alfred University and is currently at work on a book about the poetics of the Dylan album John Wesley Harding. He also provided a fantastic piece for The Dylantantes back in June of 2022 entitled “‘Is the Village Green Preservation Society:’ Notes on Dylan, Memory, and Pilgrimages.”
Comments are most welcome.
Yours in Dylanology, Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Dr. Graley Herren is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Graley is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, published by Anthem Press in 2021 and now available in paperback.
He is also the author of books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and many articles and book chapters, including several on Dylan. Each year he teaches a first-year seminar on Dylan, and he is currently working on a book studying all of Dylan’s concerts in the Cincinnati area.
Comments are most welcome.
Yours in Dylanology, Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
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An evening with Emma Swift and Robyn Hitchcock performing in an apartment in Chelsea
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Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
I have to come clean.
For all of my life, I have not met Bob Dylan. In fact, not meeting Bob Dylan is a big part of my day-to-day. I can honestly say that my close, personal relationship with Bob Dylan, established when I was a teen and more deeply developed over subsequent decades, only exists to the extent that it has not happened yet. Sure, there was that time recently when my car almost collided with Dylan’s tour bus behind the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, but my wife, who is an excellent driver, deftly evaded the careening behemoth as it turned a blind corner and thus assured that our close, personal encounter was not to be. In my many years, though, one time, and only one time, my not meeting Bob Dylan was particularly remarkable.
My first Bob Dylan concert came upon me at a decidedly young age. I was 16, and it was October 1981. No, I did not somehow remember all this time that it was October 1981. As with many people my age who are familiar with the intricacies of The Google, I looked it up.
The concert was at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, which was a big indoor hockey hall or basketball bowl or concert cavern, depending on your preferred entertainment. It has since, in an apparent act of mercy, been imploded. I had been there before to see the Flyers and the Sixers and, I think, the Harlem Globetrotters and maybe the Ice Capades. I had also been there for several concerts, and I must say that the Spectrum’s fabled acoustics never failed to disappoint. The Spectrum was in fact the site of the very first concert I ever attended, which was a humdinger. I saw Eric Clapton with an opening act — some old fat guy sitting on a stool playing boring old-timey music. I booed him.
Some years later, when I began to appreciate and love the blues and to adore Muddy Waters, I was horrified to realize that I jeered the man himself. In my defense, I was probably about 14. Oh, and for the record, Clapton sucked.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder I ever went to a concert again.
So, here I was, a couple of years later, heading off with my girlfriend and another friend to see Dylan. I had grown enamored of Dylan’s music even though my awareness of it was limited to what I heard on the radio and a couple of albums I borrowed from someone’s mom — Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and the notoriously delirious record-company revenge album, Dylan.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder I became a Dylan fan at all.
As for my friends, neither was as big Dylan fan as I was. The one who wasn’t my girlfriend was probably there because he just liked going to rock concerts, any rock concert, to piss off his ultra-square parents. As for the other, she probably thought she had to fulfill some sort of girlfriendly obligation by suffering through a performance she cared little about.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder she continued to date me after that or at all for that matter.
Being so young, we got a ride from someone’s mom, so we arrived ridiculously early. The outer doors of the arena were open, but they would not let us into the seating bowl right away. While we waited, besotted by that distinctive mix of giddy excitement and utter boredom that teens experience with perplexing frequency, we suddenly could hear muffled music from inside — a band and some singers doing a sound check. We were confused because we had never heard Dylan with backing vocals.
Importantly, this concert occurred at the end of Dylan’s two-point-five-album gospel period, and we were blissfully ignorant of the fact that previously Dylan had been performing only his gospel tunes while preaching fire and brimstone from the stage. Fortunately, he had starting mixing in his older secular material by the time we saw him and had dropped the sermons. God only knows what would have come of my Dylan fandom if my first live show was a year or so earlier.
Thank you, hairy Jaysus!
Eventually, the doors swung open and we wandered around to find our seats. The arena was a standard oval with the stage at one end, and we were seated pretty high up and back — on the house-left side, for those keeping score at home. I was close to the aisle, and my friends were in the next two seats toward the stage. Since we were so early, there were only a few hundred people in this building built for tens of thousands, so it was a strange scene.
People see me all the time
And they just can't remember how to act
My friends were chatting away, which was odd because they usually did not get along as I recall. Meanwhile, I was all pumped up for my first Dylan concert, restlessly looking around and observing the few people present. It was all pretty sedate, though. Then, across the empty arena, this odd, creepy guy caught my attention. He had been skulking about way down toward the stage area and was now making his way quickly, straight along our row of seats.
I thought, what a weirdo! There were a dozen empty rows above and below us, but he chose the only occupied row — our row! — to do whatever he was doing. I did not feel threatened or anything like that. Just bemused and annoyed. Would he force us to stand up to let him out of the row?
He got within ten or twenty feet of us, and then stepped over the seats into the the next row down. It was hard to make out his face because he was wearing what we then all called a “sweatshirt with a hood” or “a hooded sweatshirt,” now known as a “hoodie.” It was gray, and he wore the hood up even though we were indoors.
Weirdo!
He continued down the row in front of us with my friends paying him no mind even as he passed right before them. When he got to me, he glanced my way. In that instant, I got a good peek at him. There was something extraordinary about this weirdo. I observed the curly mound of hair, the heavy eye makeup, and the intense blue eyes.
Just then I had an epiphany and jumped up exclaiming, “You’re Bob Dylan!”
The man looked right at me and said, with a perfect Bob Dylan sneer, “No, kid, I’m not me,” which is, to the best of my recollection, a verbatim recreation of precisely what did not happen.
Instead, I silently watched him turn to climb the stairs toward the tunnel behind. I interrupted my friends’ chit-chat then. “Did you see that guy?” They had barely registered his existence. I told them how he had come from the direction of the stage straight down our row, and all the rest. Everything I already told you. If you have forgotten, just go back and re-read it. I’ll wait.
My friends were unimpressed. I said, “Did you see his face?” Of course they hadn’t. “He was a total Dylan freak,” I told them. “He even was trying to look like Dylan. He had the same hair, and he was wearing makeup, I guess to make him look even more like Dylan. What a nut!” I thought him even odder for bothering to put on his Bob Dylan mask only to cover his masquerade with a hood.
They got a little excited at all this information and wondered if it was indeed Bob Dylan himself. “No way,” I declared with all the swaggering confidence a teenaged Bob-splaner could muster. “Why would Dylan be wandering around? It’s just some goof who wants to be Dylan.” I had heard about fanatics like that.
Weirdo.
They shrugged and went back to chit-chatting before I noticed this same guy in the hoodie heading down an aisle much closer to the stage. “Hey, there’s that freak again,” I told my friends. We tracked him as he moved right toward offstage and then disappeared. I expressed surprise that security did not try to stop him and wondered where he was sitting. Was there seating behind the stage?
“That guy must be crazy,” I said. My friends shrugged again and kept talking.
Everybody's wearing a disguise
Some years later, I read that Dylan sometimes got performance jitters and would calm himself by meandering through concert venues in street clothes before the crowd showed up. While that was a compelling piece of information, I was still convinced, as I was from the get-go, that my wandering weirdo was just some Dylan wannabe.
Decades after that, as I became more immersed in Dylanology, I learned that Dylan’s preferred public garb when not performing was a gray hoodie, like the one my weirdo was wearing. If you have ever seen Dylan’s film Masked and Anonymous, and I recommend it, Jeff Bridges appears in his early scenes wearing such a hoodie, ostensibly as some sort of tribute to Dylan’s sartorial proclivities. Come to think of it, maybe it was Jeff Daniels who was wandering around Philly’s Spectrum in 1981.
No. I still maintain that I did not have a close encounter with Dylan even though, I admit, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It’s just too vexing to think otherwise. Besides, it is more fun to imagine that some obsessive Dylan wannabe was wandering around before my first Dylan concert. Right? That’s a better story, right? The alternative, as with Muddy Waters, is to acknowledge that by the tender age of 16 I had already twice blown an opportunity to fully appreciate a musical legend right in front of me.
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What Is It about Bob Dylan?
Dr. Court Carney is our second guest on The Dylantantes podcast.
Court is a history professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He is the author of Cutting Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear and is currently finishing a manuscript on the public memory and image of the infamous rat-b*d Nathan Bedford Forrest.
For fun, he is a member of a teaching/research group centered on Woodie Guthrie and is co-editing — along with our inaugural guest, Erin Callahan — a collection of essays exploring Dylan’s set lists.
Court and I speak about the importance of Dylan in our culture and across the generations. We wrap up with a discussion of Dylan and jazz.
Caveat Auditor
Despite my best efforts, there is a mysterious clicking throughout. I am still learning, but Court’s many insights are worth the aesthetic shortcomings.
Comments are most welcome.
Yours in Dylanology, Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com
Welcome to our numerous early subscribers! As we fill this site with content, we invite you to participate in the community by offering comments and suggestions.
You want to talk to me
Go ahead and talk
Whatever you got to say to me
Won’t come as any shock
I must be guilty of something
You just whisper it into my ear
Also, feel free to share the material widely.
Thanks for sailing with us!
What Is It about Bob Dylan?
This interview with Dr. Erin Callahan constitutes the inaugural podcast of The Dylantantes. Erin is a brilliant Bob Dylan thinker who has flown under the radar a bit, as we discuss during our conversation.
Erin teaches English at San Jacinto College in Texas. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
I am proud to have Erin as our inaugural guest, and I anticipate we will be hearing her compelling voice much more frequently both on this site and out there in the Dylan ether.
Caveat Auditor
The sound quality is a little harsh, particularly on my side. I am new to this podcast interview thing, but I know that the content will more than make up for the technical and aesthetic shortcomings.
Comments are most welcome.
Yours in Dylanology, Jim SalvucciThe Dylantantes
Thanks for visiting The Dylantantes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com