The Dylanologists Read Online Free Page A

this old man’s music? She was strangely nervous, sitting there that night. Nina is a wisp of a woman with brown hair that bunches in tight coils. When she is engaged, her eyes don’t focus so much as penetrate. You can just about see the synapses firing. That night, she was no passive audience member. She concentrated, she worked .
    Dylan came on stage. He had the inscrutable look and the piercing blue eyes that have intimidated armies of admirers, and he swept away the woman in row eight. She told me later that she was “completely and utterly unprepared for what an extraordinarily expressive and communicative presence he was onstage.” She had been a lifelong opera aficionado, but Dylan killed her interest in it. It felt artificial, mannered, shallow. She had seen the best, but “they’re trained animals compared to what Dylan does,” she said. “My mother would probably put her head in the oven to hear me say that.”
    In the handful of years after her discovery, Nina’s life began to revolve around Dylan. She loitered on the Internet forums. She went to an adult-education class, dozens of shows, and a meet-up group, where she met Charlie. It made sense that she would find love in a Dylan circle: It was inconceivable for her to be with a man who was not equally consumed. She felt a burning need to write about Dylan, so she prepared a paper for a conference, and edited a book of academic writing, and started a thoughtful, earnest blog. She launched a journal, recruiting fresh voices to write for it in hopes that they would bring something new to the study of his music. She showed up at just about anything Dylan-related. When he played in New York, she waited in the long lines. When Fordham Law School hosted a day-long symposium about Dylan and the law, she sat and listened to every presentation.
    And now this week she was in Hibbing with Charlie. They tucked into the cherry pie à la mode (Bob’s favorite, honest) and Beatty’s banana chocolate-chip loaf bread (“a wonderful recipe and to make it is so easy, dear,” Mom said). They went to the basement cafeteria at the Memorial Building Arena for a rock ’n’ roll hop headlined by one of the guys who played guitar with Bob in high school. They rode on a tour bus to see the synagogue and the hotel where Bob had his bar mitzvah, and the lodgings of the rabbi who prepared him for it, and the shop where his father, Abe, worked, and the railroad crossing where Bob and his motorcycle were nearly jackhammered by a passing locomotive. They saw the old Zimmerman place. They visited Echo’s house, where people stood out front and snapped photos of the remains of the tree swing, so evocative of teen romance.
    Nina knew that nothing about these Dylan-themed adventures made her particularly unique. “There are all kinds of people who would lay claim to being the greatest Dylan fan in the world,” she said. “I would say I am. But the world is full of us.”
    The world was also full of people who looked at Dylan and were puzzled. They might have heard they should appreciate him as they would Shakespeare, Homer, Mozart. They might have heard that Dylan was a towering figure who changed the course of music, influenced everyone who followed, revolutionized songwriting. But they watched and they listened and they didn’t understand. Dylan appeared on television and he seemed entirely out of place, all peculiar mannerisms and gnomic pronouncements. Accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in 1991, he looked at the camera and said, “My daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man. But what he did tell me was this. He did say, ‘Son,’ he said—” He paused for a few interminable seconds, grinning and playing with a funny hat. “He said, ‘You know, it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will