Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy
Hearing Bob Dylan for the very first time
I haven’t seen A Complete Unknown yet as I am currently hanging out in rural Montana for a winter retreat. But I plan to as soon as I return to Bryn Mawr where I can walk to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute and see it as many times as I want. In the meantime, I have been listening to Dylan’s older music from the mid-late Sixties and watching videos and films like Don’t Look Back and No Direction Home. This cultural moment where Gen Z is being introduced to Dylan through one of its rising stars has also opened up doors to memories I have long kept tightly shut. In this post, I am sharing an essay I wrote about the first time I ever heard Bob Dylan and how his music intersected with my personal life. It’s not a story I am proud of. I have to engage my own shame and failure to understand what was going on. I’ll write again after I see the movie, but for now — the first time I ever heard Bob Dylan. In the comments, I would love for you to share your stories too.
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By the summer of 1968, smoking marijuana with my friends had become a tired ritual. Each hot and empty night followed the previous one in an endless cycle of semi-suburban tedium. First, my fifteen year old girlfriends and I would gather on the corner of Darlington and Flagstaff in our Pine Valley neighborhood. Then we’d wait for one of the older boys to drive up in his father’s Dodge Valiant or Chevy Malibu after scoring a couple of nickel bags from the local dealer in the parking lot of the Thriftway Super Market. We’d pile into his car and he’d chauffeur us to the house of whomever’s parents either weren’t home or were so clueless that they would barely shift their gaze from the hypnotic light flickering from the television set in the center of the living room as the five or more of us dull eyed teenagers made our way past them to their child’s bedroom or their finished basement.
That sweltering July night we ended up at Steve’s family’s apartment. That at least was a little break from the tired routine. Steve’s family lived in an apartment building, unlike the rest of us whose families inhabited small split level boxes with red roofs, white aluminum siding and black shutters. Evergreen Towers was the only luxury apartment in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960’s and just entering the elegant building and smiling innocently at the security guard at the night desk added a tinge of daring to our otherwise predictable escapade.
At sixteen, Steve was the youngest of three. His siblings were both grown men in their late twenties and his parents were considerably older than most of ours. They were also richer, or at least appeared to be by their lavish life style and expensive furniture. Steve was a bit indulged too – he had two cars at his disposal – a brand new Chevy Impala and a vintage green MG convertible. He had his own room at the end of a long hallway and that was where we gathered to smoke pot and listen to music on Steve’s brand new and top of the line stereo player.
I was fifteen at the time and crazy in love with Steve’s best friend D. I had been in love with him for almost two years and during that time my love had become somewhat of an obsession. I thought about him day in and day out. How he felt about me was always a mystery to me. He came in and out of my life at will and would go from confiding his deepest secrets and desires in me to ignoring me for weeks on end. And while I was more than a little happy to see him sitting on Steve’s bed, propped up against the wall and rolling a joint, I was also wary.
I never really enjoyed being high. I was the kind of person who was always worried about getting caught. So I was totally paranoid all of the time. Being high also exaggerated all of my feelings of self consciousness and I spent a good part of the time that I was high worried about how I looked, how I was sitting, how my voice sounded whether I was sitting too close to someone, whether I was making a stupid face. All of this worrying took an awful lot of work. I tried mightily not to be noticed — not to look stupid – not to laugh at the wrong time, not the say the wrong thing. Looking back, it was more like torture than pleasure. Just what a totally insecure adolescent self conscious girl needed – a drug to increase her self consciousness.
I was just getting to the part of my high where I was almost comfortable with myself — the part where I could feel safe enough to go sit alone in a corner on the floor and indulge in my favorite marijuana induced activity – imagining that I was on a very slow moving and erotic ferris wheel. Just when I was settling in a pleasing rhythm, Steve’s voice jolted me to attention.
He was standing above his stereo with a record in his hand. “You’ve got to hear this,” he said. “It will blow your mind.”
By the time the first song had finished playing, the night had changed – it was no longer just another night in a string of meaningless nights – This was the night when I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. And what a great person to listen to when you are high. “No body feeeeeeeeeeeels any pain” was the first line I heard sung by a plaintive voice which drew out the syllables and teased and tantalized the listener, bringing me to the brink of release.
“Marsha,” I thought I heard D. say through the haze.
“Yo Marsh,” he said again , because I guess I was too paranoid to acknowledge him the first time just in case he hadn’t been talking to me.
“I want you to listen closely to this next song. It reminds me of you,” he said in the prolonged silence between songs.
His words had put all of my senses on alert. I leaned forward and felt my blood begin to pulsate through my veins as a cascade of electric sound poured out of Steve’s stereo.
The first words of the song grabbed me by the throat.
Yoooooooou’ve got a lot of neeeeeeerve to say you are my frieeeeeeeeeeeend.
When I was doooooooown you just stood there griiiiiiiining.
Yooooo’ve got a lot of neeeeerve to say you’ve got a helping haaaandto lend
You just waaaaant to be on the side that’s wiiiiiiiiiiiiniing.
The rest of the song slammed me into the wall repeatedly until by the final verse all I could do was sit numbly and dumbly accepting the final blow.
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
Yooooou’d know what a draaaaaaaaag it is to seeeeeeee yooooooooooou
By the time the electric tidal wave of sound retreated I was devastated. To this day, I can hardly hear this song without feeling the acute meanness of the words and the sadistic glee with which they were sung. Someone else may have been the target of Dylan’s wrath and disdain, but D. had harnessed it for himself and redirected it at me — barrels blazing.
Maybe even at that time, there was a part of me that knew I didn’t deserve this attack. Maybe, a tiny voice inside my head was trying to tell me that this had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him and how he felt about himself. All I had been guilty of after all was loving him far more that I ever should have and believing in him when he hadn’t believed in himself. Once during one of our telephone conversations that would sometimes last all night long, he told me that he wanted to be a lawyer one day. The next day, I searched the Yellow Pages for a trophy store that I could get to by bus and with forty of the seventy-five dollars I had earned for a whole summer as a camp counselor, I bought him a custom made name plate for his future legal desk. It read “A. D., Esquire.”
I can’t remember what he said after I gave it to him or even if he said anything. I can’t even guess what he thought about my incredibly naive gift or if he was thinking about all that when he told me to listen to that song.. What I do remember is that when I finally got up the nerve to look at him after the song had ended, he wasn’t looking at me at all. Instead, he was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead with an empty look in his eyes.
That night, I had no way of knowing that the boredom would soon give way to increasingly dangerous behavior and by next summer – the summer of 69 — the summer of Woodstock and peace and love, these middle class white boys would already be addicted to heroin. Nor could I know that I would soon stop getting high altogether but I wouldn’t stop accompanying Steve and D. and their friends as they scored and shot scag in the same bedrooms and basements where we had once smoked pot.
In the psycho jargon of today, I became an enabler. By the time they picked up the needle, I had forsaken the joint. Someone had to remain alert as they drifted into their ecstatic oblivion. Someone had to hide the burnt spoons and throw away the bloody balls of cotton. And someone had to be there when D. outstretched his arms to me.
Despite his disdain for me, or perhaps because of it, my love for D. was a constant that he could rely on for years. Things would change: national leaders would be assassinated, men would walk on the moon, his father would get fired from his job, his grandmother would die, he would get thrown out of high school, he would discover heroin and his best friend Steve would die of an overdose and we’d go to his funeral instead of Woodstock. I’d go to college, discover the women’s movement, have my consciousness raised and one day in a righteous rage, send him a letter with the lyrics to Positively Fourth Street addressed directly to him.
I wish this is where the story ends. I wish I could tell you that I sent this essay to the New York Times and it was published in the “Modern Love” section and that D. read the essay, emailed me, arranged to meet, and we shared our life stories, embraced and forgave ourselves for hurting ourselves and each other in the past.
I wish that is what happened. But it’s not. After I finished writing this, I decided to google my old love. I hadn’t done that in a really long time. The last time I had looked him up, I learned that he was married and living in Florida. This time I typed his name into the search engine and found the MySpace page of a young man who called himself DJ D. And in a tiny line in the space marked “heroes” was written R.I.P. A. D. 12-28-51 – 10/7/02.
He had died four years before and I hadn’t known. His surviving son’s name was Steven.
Sometimes life just ends that way like this story – with no closure, only questions and regrets for missed opportunities. And a burning need to know more.
Love this story. While Dylan was a cultural phenomenon his lyrics and music intersected with and influenced our individual lives and can still evoke deep emotions. Thank you for sharing your memories.
When I was 14 my parents decided to send me to a all girls boarding school. I hated everything about that place and I can still go into a bit of a dark place if I think about those days too long. I would be happy to see it razed from the face of the Earth even now. I suppose I have to admit that the education was very good, classes conducted like college seminars and a great deal expected of us academically, but living there was difficult. I had little in common with the other girls and male teachers were actively engaging in what we then called "relationships" with the girls. All the girls knew about these "relationships" but never talked about them to our parents or other adults as students seemed to face worse consequences than than the teachers if anything came to light. It seemed anyone of us who were vulnerable were at least subjected to some testing to see how easily we would be to groom.
My second year at the school I was angry at being sent back after the summer. I knew what I was in for this time and I felt so completely alone. While my mother was packing up the car, on a whim, I grabbed the old record player that nobody had used for as long as I could remember, and a milk crate of my father's albums chosen because they looked cool, or I had heard the artist's name in passing. When I set up in my dorm room I had a weird collection of albums: Lead belly, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, John Denver, The Wolftones, The Clancy Brothers, The Woodstock album, Don McLean etc. Among those albums were 4 Dylan albums.
The first I put on was "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." I dropped the needle and his voice exploded out of the one working speaker. I sat on the floor and I listened to that album again and again and again. I listened until I knew every single word by heart. I was trapped behind thick granite walls and surrounded by a 10 foot tall black wrought iron fence with spikes on top and I was bereft and angry but I wasn't alone any longer. The other three albums were "Blood on the Tracks", "Desire" and "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid." Soon I was scouring the used record stores for more. It feels like I never would have survived those years without Dylan's voice and his poetry and how listening to his music lifted me up out of a hostile and unsafe environment. Like so many other young people who find Dylan it felt like he was speaking directly to me.