The Dylanologists by David Kinney

Author:David Kinney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Dylan played a four-night stand at New York’s Beacon Theater in 1989, and the crazies flew in from all over. Glen had met some of them at Dylan fan conventions in Chicago and Manchester, England. In the UK, the conventioneers listened to talks and tribute bands, while the Midwestern crowd spent most of the time in taping rooms. People brought audio cassettes and videotapes, and the dubbing went on twenty-four hours a day. Glen met a lot of people at these affairs, and one was a musician named Steve Keene who was capable of sounding a lot like Dylan. (He later released albums with Dylan bandmates.) He had recently won the big impersonator contest at a bar in the Village. He lived in New York, so in 1989 the traveling crowd relied on him to come through with tickets.

He went to the Beacon the night before and waited in the line, which by four-thirty in the morning stretched down the block. Somehow Keene got enough tickets for everybody on his list. Glen and Madge had never been to the city before, and they stayed in a hotel that first night. But Keene let them crash at his place on Eighty-fifth Street the rest of the week, and soon they knew enough New York City Dylan people that they hardly ever had to pay for a room again. A lot of longtime friendships began in 1989 at the Dublin House, an Irish bar on Seventy-ninth Street where a few dozen serious Dylan fans retired for postshow libations. The tour had been getting terrible reviews, but Glen and Madge didn’t care because they were in Manhattan, with their kind of people, people who got it.

Onstage, Dylan looked pissed off, Glen thought. Like he wanted to be anywhere else. He tossed harmonicas across the stage. But the shows had fans buzzing. Dylan had just put out Oh Mercy, his best record in years, and he played a number of the songs live for the first time. A version of “Queen Jane Approximately” was a wonder to behold. On the last night, Glen and Madge ended up at the very front, and when Dylan shocked the crowd by singing “Precious Memories,” he was so close to them he might as well have been playing their living room back in Thunder Bay. He wore a gold lamé suit that night, and during the last song he wailed on the harmonica, jumped off the stage, shook hands, and walked off through the crowd, never to return.

Glen and Madge started going to shows by the dozens. They carpooled and they crammed into hotel rooms. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of using lounge chairs from the pool as beds instead of sleeping on the floor. They got a decent night’s sleep but woke up with lines across their faces. They were semiprofessional fans fitting their lives around Dylan; they knew it was not normal behavior. Glen and Madge sometimes traveled with Bev Martin, a schoolteacher from Madison, Wisconsin.

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