I'm (Still) Not There.

I mentioned in another post that I'm seeing Bob Dylan in concert next week (woo hoo!) but I'm missing out on the I-can-die-now combo of him and Elvis Costello (awww) because for reasons unexplained, E.C. is skipping Cincinnati. Maybe he's pissed that he didn't get here in time for the world's largest chicken dance, I don't know.

Anyway, last week I got an email from a friend in Chicago; her husband Steve’s birthday is later this month and she suggested that my wife and I go up there and join them for . . . the Elvis Costello/Bob Dylan concert at the Chicago Theatre (woo hoo!) So I'm thinking about Bob Dylan all over again and my mind is wandering all over the place. It occurs to me that I used a one of his lines as my "senior quote" (now there's a phrase that makes me cringe) when I graduated high school 25 years ago, and here I am today, and how many times have I quoted him just in this shiny, brand-new blog? I realize some people might see this as sad, sorry and even pathetic. I prefer to think of it as an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of thing.

I became a fan when I was maybe 15 years old. This was the late '70s, when Dylan was in his Jesus phase and liking him had long since ceased being cool. I was hooked pretty quickly after hearing Blood on the Tracks, and Steve (the same one who’s turning 44 later this month) and I dug through his catalog and we each developed our own set of favorites, making mixed-tape after mixed-tape.

He and I saw Dylan live in 1981 or '82; I remember turning to an acquaintance and saying, "If he leads off with 'Serve Somebody,' I'm walking out." But I stayed, we all stayed. What a show, a mere two-and-a-half decades ago.

Later, in college, a girlfriend taught me how to write "Bob Dylan" in Hebrew, which gave me innumerable notebook doodling ideas when I should have been taking notes in class. Meanwhile, that new skill was well-timed with the release of Infidels in 1983, one of several Dylan "comeback" albums, and his first secular music in years. A cassette of that record was the soundtrack of a 4 1/2-hour drive Steve and I took from Cincinnati to Ann Arbor, during which we drank beer and smoked cigars with the windows closed. When we showed up at the home of a friend of his, the friend’s minister father did not invite us in, despite our delightful manners. I guess he was more of a "Born-Again Bob" kind of guy.

Got out of college, moved to Chicago, and my first couple of years there passed in sort of a blur. I listened to Bob Dylan on and off, but I wouldn't say he provided the soundtrack for that period. In 1989, when I was in Rome on a boondoggle studying, I attended another Dylan show, this one with "festival seating," which I guess in Italy means pulling away the yellow police tape and letting the throng of drunks stampede to the stands. Being one of that throng, I don't remember much about the show except that Edie Brickell was the opening act and I think she really dug me.

So now I'm seeing him two more times in the next few weeks, once with a guy I've known since kindergarten. It's dawning on me as I write this that it's pretty cool to have been friends with someone for that long. I'm glad we're getting the chance to get together for something we'll both enjoy, and it'll be great fun to throw our underwear on the stage together.