I'm not sure how I feel about Twyla Tharp’s upcoming musical about Bob Dylan. On the face of it, I have to say that viscerally, I just don’t like it. I can’t see myself putting on my best velvet dress and heading out to a musical. I don’t even like musicals, and much as I love all things Dylan, this is where I draw the line.

Maybe it’s because I can’t, or more, that I refuse to think of Dylan as some old guy that we supposedly ‘honor’ by attempting to freeze him in a musical on Broadway. It seems to me a bad note on which to end, if indeed it is there that he ends. I’d rather leave Dylan where he is now, and hey, if he wants to do another album after Modern Times, so much the better (tant mieux, right?) But a musical? I can’t help but think of all things campy; cheap and tacky with a bunch of aging fans (perhaps me included) sitting quiet in our numbered velvet-covered theater seats and listening politely to songs that used to really move us in every way and that had all the girls screaming and the guys rocking and rolling.

Dylan – or the Dylan we see portrayed the most in image anyway, will always be the Dylan of 65 or 66. They are the photographs in which that famous (and I confess, lovely) mop of unruly brown waves surround his face, backlit like a rock n roll halo; this is the Dylan we recognize and this is the Dylan we know. Sure, we know him now, and we like him now – I’ve liked every period pretty much, even the less popular and lesser known Dylan of the Nashville Skyline period (though Lay Lady Lay was a popular song).

Forget a musical. The Dylan I remember is the one from a quick scene in Eat the Document in which he is standing tall and straight on the roof of a thatched house somewhere in the far off countryside, far far away from L.A. That’s the Dylan I know and that’s the Dylan I want to remember, not some actor portraying Dylan and dancing around to his music with other dancers on a tacky stage. I’ll stick with the authentic article in his peg-leg pants.

Here, Dylan stands on the small house’s peaked and thatched roof. It seems nothing could push him off and at the time, it’s hard to imagine Dylan any other way than this confident and self-assured. He seems invincible, as if nothing could touch him. For such a simple snippet, it has burned itself indelibly into my brain. Dylan just standing there, arms folded, sporting those black, black RayBans that obscure his watery blue eyes and wearing his blue velvet jacket and peg-leg pants and cool boots. Why he seems utterly defiant.

It’s Dylan at his peak on a peak. That image is one of the first I think of when anyone mentions Dylan. That and the famous photograph of Dylan standing in the fore with Howard Alk in the background – the image used for the cover of No Direction Home. This does not surprise me. This is how we recognize Dylan. Ask yourself, even though No Direction Home was a review of Dylan’s whole career and an interview with him now, the image they chose to represent was one of the era that I too most like. It is iconic. There is just no getting around that fact.

No, it’s not dark yet, as Dylan tells us now, but it’s gettin’ there – and maybe we need to just accept that fact the way he seems to both accept it and sure, still fear it. “It’s Not Dark Yet” is one of my favorite Dylan songs ever – and that’s saying a lot. Listening to him sing of his own aging in so many ways helps me as I go through my own passages, and while I’m not quite where Dylan is, one day I will be, and I will say this much, I’m at that point where I no longer look forward to my birthday. There comes a point in everyone’s life in which your birthday is the time of the year you dread most because it is just another year that you speed to your own mortality and you know it. You can’t help but see it – wouldn’t it be great if we could just be ignorant of what happens as we age. Life is terminal, which sounds like an oxymoron.

Perhaps I simply need to accept that we are no longer a crowd that screams and hankers to be at the front of the stage or that even waits backstage to catch a glimpse of the man we so worship or even seek an autograph as Dylan pushes through a crowd of photographers, if indeed, he still does – and I don’t know the answer to that question. I would wager that if so, the crowd has grown sparse.

When I saw Dylan perform recently in Pawtucket, Rhode Island I so wanted to find the back exit of the stadium so that I could be there when Dylan exited, if only to catch a glimpse and hey, maybe even fulfill my life-long fantasy of just one kiss (another time and place and perhaps it would have been “One More Weekend,” but it’s not that time and place and never was for me for circumstances I never could control.) Before the show, I had been silently promising myself I would find my way backstage somehow and get a chance to meet the man if nothing else, if only for a moment or two, or perhaps now – perhaps he’d even give me more than a moment or two.

The fact of the matter is no matter how much I wanted to get backstage at that show, I sat (sat!!) at a Dylan show and clapped and hollered from the freakin’ bleachers. I didn’t even go down to the baseball field to be front and center because I didn’t want to deal with the crowd of several hundred or so that were standing around or laying about on their Mexican blankets on the mosquito rich field. So what the hell do I have to say? Maybe after all this, I am a hypocrite who belongs in a velvet seat in a music hall watching a Twyla Tharp production. Maybe things have just changed and unlike Dylan, I just can’t accept it. The times they are a changin’.

Hey, today in my inbox there was an email from www.bobdylan.com promoting the musical, so obviously the official site is behind the production, so why then, am I not?

I suppose no matter how much I try to accept the fact of change, I confess I don’t like it. I still want so much to be front and center, despite my action to the contrary. I still entertain the fantasy of being one of those people backstage pressed against him or his limousine and if asked, perhaps I’d even follow him to his room had I been of age in the sixties. I can’t deny the deep and throbbing visceral appeal I feel for Dylan. There’s nothing I can do about it and to deny it just seems silly. One can be a serious Dylanologist and writer and still feel desire. This does not necessarily reduce you to just another groupie. We all want a piece of Dylan – male or female, we all want or wanted something of him. Even Greil Marcus does. We all do.

One of Dylan’s early producers noted that in those early days when he first performed, Dylan once asked rather nervously if there was ‘anybody waiting backstage’ when the show was over. He wanted fame, and why not? He never made any secret of that. It’s why he went to New York in the first place and pursued it doggedly. Dylan always knew he’d be famous. He always knew he’d be ‘somebody.’ He was prescient in this way.

That he knew this so clearly does, I admit, strike me as odd, not because I don’t believe in Dylan – neve that, but because Dylan was never typical. Dylan wasn’t your average ‘folkie’ and he wasn’t rock n roll and was by no means what anyone would call an “easy listen.” Nobody sounds or sounded like Dylan except Dylan. Then and now, there are some who just don’t like that drawn out voice or whine. Ask me and I’ll tell you they just don’t get it, but there’s nothing to get or not get. In the final account, it’s a matter of subjective taste, and Dylan is now and always will be an acquired taste. You had to almost get used to him to like him.

Even now, when I have included Dylan in columns I’ve written in the List of the Moment for example, I find that the Dylan songs I’ve included are always the least popular. I don’t think for a minute it is because they are the least substantive songs at all – far from it. The Dylan songs would, to me anyway, say the most and be of most import but they are ‘harder’ and by no means easy. Dylan has never and does not make it easy for us. His words are not easy and his voice is not easy. Many would ask, quite legitimately, Then why bother? Ask me and I’ll tell you because the pay off is huge. I have never before been so moved by any musician (I would say poet, but Dylan would hate the label.)

The truth is, for all of his appeal, Dylan will always seel fewer albums than someone like Michael Jackson – a fact that disgusts me, not because of any charges against Jackson (musically, that isn’t important), but simply because I don’t see any true genius in Jackson’s work. It’s pure pop and while he may have had a few hits that appealed for a brief time, they are fleeting and forgettable. Dylan’s work has a timeless quality that will be as relevant twenty years from now as it is today – time has proven that.

Dylan’s words are those of a poet. Ask him and he’d deny it, but they are nonetheless, just as much as some of his songs, whether he wanted to admit it or not, were protest songs. But Dylan flips and flops on that. In Eat the Document he says to one reporter when asked whether or not his songs are protest songs Dylan says, “All of my songs are protest songs… All I do is protest.” He’s also denied being a poet and other times acknowledged that perhaps, yes, he is. He doesn’t want to be boxed in and I can’t say I blame him. I remember one reporter asking Dylan if he was ever really himself – are you ever not acting the reporter asks? I don’t recall Dylan answering, but it’s not a bad question. It’s a nervy question, especially to ask the cantankerous Dylan who often answered “You gotta lot a nerve to ask me a question like that… “ a phrase he repeated in many interviews.

So maybe none of us know Dylan and he’s always been on stage in one way or another. He’s always been a good actor – ‘a song and dance man’ as he once said. In that context then, a musical about him doesn’t seem so out of place. I know I won’t go. I know that I don’t need to go to know Dylan’s career or what I know of his life. So long I’ve studied Dylan that it has become a part of my own life and at this point I can’t get around that. Yes, there is always more to learn, but I can safely say that, as would any Dylanite, I know my Dylanology pretty well – I don’t need Twyla Tharp and Co. to tell me what I already know.

So, that said, to sit in a velvet chair and clap politely to actors portraying Dylan seems absurd, no? What are going to do anyway? Stand on thatched roof houses unafraid and cocksure? Are they going to fake protest and try to bring it forward? The answer to that question is yes. They are going to try to relive a time in history and freeze it there and encapsulate it, a task I find unnecessary when the real thing has been so well documented by Alk and Pennebaker.

What is a musical going to do except bring in more money, and maybe Dylan needs that money. I don’t know. If he’s okay with it, I suppose we should be as well. It’s not my decision and it’s presumptive and rather obnoxious even of me to think I know what is best. Still, I’d rather listen to his more recent albums. I’d rather listen to “Time Out of Mind” and “Modern Times” and his XM radio program and hear the real thing, but that’s just me.

At the end of the day, I’ll even buy that this is perhaps more about my own aging. Perhaps I don’t want to accept that I could be one just another lamb led to my own inevitable aging, sitting in a theater in my best dress, all made up to make a night on the town and then perhaps have a nice dinner and a bottle of Chateau Margaux. I still prefer to be screaming and getting off on his music and blasting Highway 61 in my car while I drive too fast down the highway, speeding forward and perhaps away from something I can’t accept; speeding forward to the past. Do you follow?

Surely even Dylan must miss the days at the Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall when tens of thousands flocked to see him. Or maybe that was too tiring (which no doubt it was) and this is now a mellower time and he’s settled into that. I honestly don’t know. I’ll take him either way, because each venue and each performance, no matter where, has its merit. The stadium tours that come around each year now are pretty great and I don’t mind the six or more hour wait in line before the gates open. It has become a part of the ritual.

We always wait for Dylan. I’ve written this before. We wait because he almost always gives us what we want or what we need. I am a junkie for his music – for that voice and those words. If I don’t hear Dylan for a while, I can feel myself jonesing – legs and palms shaking as I seek out that voice, those words, that face, that mop of curls, those long thin legs and scuffed boots.

So what’s my point? Several points I suppose – I don’t want a fake Dylan on stage because I still have the authentic article. I can’t bear the idea of or imagine Dylan not being here one day anymore than I can conceive of my own death. I’m sure Dylan doesn’t like the idea of this any more than I do. It is difficult for me to fathom a world without Dylan. It will mark the end of an era – and era that, unlike others, manages to span decades. Dylan is perhaps the only musician who could string it all together so seamlessly, carrying us through the sixties to he present like the Pied Piper or Tambourine Man we follow

I know that nobody else can lead me through these decades – musically speaking, which is important. Who else can voice what the rest of us want so much to say but just say. Most of us lack Dylan’s genius for putting his finger on the pulse of the time and the generation. He has spoken and still speaks to the collective consciousness.

That may be a lot to lay at his feet and I’m sure he wouldn’t like my saying this because it’s a heavy load to bear. That said, he need not feel any weight or responsibility for doing so or continuing to do so because he has just done it. I don’t think it came without effort, but at the end of the day Dylan succeeded where few, if any, ever did or could or will. Perhaps John Lennon would or could have done this but thanks to Mark David Chapman we will never know.

An aside: speaking of Chapman, why Catcher in the Rye played into his assassination of Lennon makes no sense to anyone who isn’t totally insane, and I don’t buy that Chapman is. Catcher in the Rye is just a convenient foil on which to hang an insanity defense. He was too calculated, getting Lennon’s autograph earlier in the day, shooting him later the same day. Catcher in the Rye seems like a bullshit cop-out for what was cold-blooded murder.

All this makes me think of the extra footage in “Eat the Document” of Dylan and Lennon in the back of the car as it winds through the streets of London , with Dylan clearly hung over or fucked-up on something – not a happy camper anyway, with Lennon talking about “Zoomton.” Great footage if you haven’t seen it. You can find it as bonus footage at the end of “Eat the Document.”

One can only wonder what Dylan must have felt when Lennon was shot, because at one time, while staying at a British hotel, the front desk received a death threat against Dylan from a man who said he was going to shoot Dylan. Of the threat, Dylan said, “I don’t mind being shot, but don’t tell me about it man…”

Any public figure who would dare to take on what the establishment is not puts himself at some risk. There will always be some crazed person, often in the guise of a fan, who believes the answer lies in a bullet and will rob us, as Chapman robbed us, of a great talent and fuck him for that.

But Dylan is here and as long as he is here, I have no need to see someone else act as if he is Dylan – it’s a sort of meta-Dylan and just too weird for me. I regret that I didn’t get backstage the last time I saw Dylan. I wanted so much to do so, but I just sat there at the end of the show after the encore. I watched him bow – which I thought was great because I felt that at that particular show there was a good symbiosis between Dylan and the audience this time, unlike last time when I saw him with Willie Nelson and the chemistry just didn’t work.

The truth is, my eyes are bigger than my belly. My pupils will always expand like a dark lens opening to let in more Dylan, but I didn’t have the guts to go backstage. I just didn’t, perhaps afraid of what I would meet there. Only then did I understand what it must be like to be on the other side of that experience, to be Dylan, exiting stage left, never quite knowing what or who you’ll meet at the back door.

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.