I stumbled on Martin Scorsese’s early Bob Dylan documentary. Then I saw last year’s movie about the singer, “A Complete Unknown.” These experiences had me thinking about the first time I saw Bob Dylan perform live. I had just started college.
I have no ability to perform music. I cannot carry a tune. I don’t play an instrument. Even so, I have always enjoyed music. My earliest musical exposures were limited. Music did not exactly saturate my early childhood home. We did not have a hi-fi or any kind of record player. The local station to which our radio was tuned had eclectic programming from Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club to Paul Harvey and only sometimes played music. Instead, a lot of my musical knowledge came from television variety shows, which, befitting their name, had a wide variety of musical acts.
Glen, my best friend in grade school, also shaped my musical tastes. Unlike me, he was a musician. He would tell me about new songs he had liked and when and where I could find them on the radio because some stations played the same song every day at a similar time. And thus, among many others, I learned about Jody Reynolds and “Endless Sleep,” a teenaged schlock song that still today can get stuck in my head.
I spent more time in cars as I got older. If a teenager was driving, the radio was inevitably tuned to the top forty station, WOKY, which was pronounced by the DJs to rhyme with its hometown, Milwaukee. (We could get a learner’s permit six months before our sixteenth birthday, and the goal was to pass the driver’s test and get a license on the sixteenth birthday. These were full licenses. Our driving was not limited in geography or to the time of day.) This was the beginning of rock n’ roll. Top forty radio was not just trite and tired music. New songs and new sounds seemed to come weekly. I, and many others my age, fell in love with the innovative music of Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Everley Brothers, the Beach Boys, and on and on. (I first heard Presley when in the car with my father. He was appalled. I knew the world had changed.)
I thought that I had a respectable grounding in modern music, but then I went to college. One of my three freshman roommates came with a collection of records, some of which were by artists unknown to me. There was Josh White, (“You gets no bread with one meatball” still carousels through my head some days.) There was the much different jazzy sound of Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross. There were many others but the most surprising was Bob Dylan, whose songs were not on any radio I listened to. I was fascinated by the lyrics he sang (“And I drove down 42nd Street/In my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war.”).
College, of course, is a time for new experiences, including music. A new experience was the social life. I was at a non-coed school. For days, maybe sometimes weeks, I hadno interchanges with anyone of the female persuasion, and when one occurred it was usually not with someone of a comparable age. However, on “big” weekends, girls (I did not consider myself a man, and I did not think of them as “women”) came for the weekend. Families in town rented out rooms for the dates, but the girls were allowed in our rooms up to a point. I don’t remember what the regular hours were, but on those big weekends, girls could be in the dorms until midnight. Upperclassman had a place to be at that bewitching hour. They were in clubs where partying went on until three or four o’clock, but freshmen were not club members and would have nothing to do once twelve o’clock struck. To avoid this, the university had midnight concerts, and to my surprise then and now, in November 1963, Bob Dylan was booked.
I don’t have the novelistic ability to capture the bizarreness. The calendar said it was the 60s, and Dylan helped define that time. But while perhaps what we now think of the 60s may have been emerging in the Greenwich Village that helped spawn Dylan, that new decade had not yet hit most of the country. Certainly it had not come to the central New Jersey, Ivy League campus filled with conformist boys who wanted to take their place with bankers and bankers’ lawyers and doctors with upscale practices.
I only knew of Dylan because my roommate had owned The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. A large portion of the audience had never heard of him. They were there, many slightly to extremely drunk (even though underage, no one stopped our campus drinking), because there was nowhere else to go. There was a stark contrast between the Ivy League audience dressed as preppies and preppy wannabes and Dylan, still in his acoustic stage, with his entourage dressed in jeans and leather vests and bandanas and motorcycle caps and cowboy hats. Many were shocked not only by his wardrobe but by his singing.
Dylan just introduced his songs and sang and made no comment about the audience. I still wonder what Dylan was thinking about while performing for us. But my admiration for Dylan increased that night.
