Forever Young - A Fan Letter

I don’t actually remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan, but I know I was already steeped in the music of Joan Baez. Her beautiful, high voice, singing the Child ballads of her first album, spoke to me in a way music had not done before. The ballads hailed from England via remote areas of Appalachia where many of the songs and speech patterns of Elizabethan England had survived in their purest form. In her music I heard the voices of the mountain folk of my childhood.

The mournful lament of unrequited love and themes of betrayal and jealousy appealed to my adolescent sensibilities; the American songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, songs of protest, were right on time for my emerging sense of greater community and political awareness. Joan was suitably Bohemian, grew up mostly in California—Palo Alto, no less—went barefoot, was notoriously demanding onstage and added to my developing concept of a strong, beautiful woman. Once Franja and I had seen her in Carmel eating breakfast at an outdoor village café.

So when I first heard Dylan, my musical ear was tuned to Baez and, to a lesser extent, to Odetta and Judy Henske. There was something in his nasal, Midwestern intonation, curious phrasing and his furtive, inept stage presence that caught my imagination and never let go. His images were powerful, his delivery impassioned and quirky. Joan loved him and he loved her in troubled and uneasy ways and they were my people. Like hearing the Child ballads or listening to Delta Blues for the first time, when Dylan and Baez sang, something in my DNA settled down and paid attention.

I first saw him perform while I was still in high school. It was 1964, at the old San Jose Civic Auditorium—wooden seats and raised stage where the Friday night fights were held. I don’t remember a lot about the performance but looking back it was probably the first concert I had ever been to on my own, though I grew up going to theater with my family. If memory serves, I went to the concert with Connie Ratliff, my neighbor and friend who was home from college.

We went in and found our seats. The lights dimmed and the spotlight came on and out walked a skinny white guy with scruffy facial hair wearing a kind of cap, a harmonica holder around his neck and a big old acoustic guitar. There was no orchestra, no introduction, and no fanfare. Without a word, he began to furiously strum the guitar and sing. In my mind’s eye, I grab Connie’s hand and hold on for all I’m worth. I was a goner!

After his first song, he looked up from beneath his cap and the mop of curly brown hair at the sparse audience sprinkled about the auditorium and said, "Why don’t y’all move on down this way" as he gestured vaguely around the stage. We drifted, along with other audience members, toward the front. Bobby played for perhaps fifteen more minutes, with no commentary other than the occasional sound check or to drink from a thick white mug atop a stool onstage. Again, he gave pause, looked up for a moment and murmured into the Mic. "Joanee Baez is here."

She entered from the wings with her dark hair falling down her back, wearing a simple short dress and sandals, her guitar strapped across her lithe body. The audience was rapt...she, at any rate, was a big star. Bobby and Joan stood close, looked in each other’s eyes as they sang. Their individual styles complemented one another, hers sweet and polished, his rough and iconoclast, as they wove an intricate cloak of sound that would warm me for the rest of my life. I had never seen a young man wear his vulnerability on his sleeve to the extent that Bobby did in those days, or a young woman as clear and assertive as Joan. They challenged the stereotypes of the day. I think of live performance, whether theater or music, as a ritual involving audience and performer alike. That night our ritual honored youthful love and passion, vulnerability, anger, multicultural diversity and budding social conscience. The times they were a changing and change they did.

A scant few years later, a friend, Dan Rees, invited me to attend a Dylan concert in San Francisco at the Masonic Auditorium. Dan was a very quiet person, shy to the point of eccentricity. Because of my own social ineptitude, I didn’t know him very well, but he had the loveliest parties at his parents’ home in Los Gatos which were attended by a group of us "artistic types". His parents and their home symbolized culture and art to me. Their elegant, understated home was in an old neighborhood in town and I felt honored to be invited there, and those soirées are among my fondest memories.

I remember very little about the drive to the city or our arrival at the concert. I do remember that we had excellent seats, center stage near the front and that there was a palpable air of anticipation in the crowd. The venue was considerably more upscale than the last time I’d seen Dylan and it was crowded. Curiously, the front two rows were empty. Looking around, I recognized Miriam Makeba sitting near us wearing African dress and other important looking people. The house lights dimmed. There was a hush in the large hall broken by the sound of doors opening in the back, followed by a rumbling of heavy footsteps and clanking of chains. Turning in my seat, I saw men striding down the aisles on either side of the middle section. Anticipation continued to build as the San Francisco and Oakland Chapters of the Hell’s Angels filed in and took their places on the first two rows of the theater. The ritual had gained momentum and had taken to the streets.

Bob looked different that night. Still wiry and thin, he’d lost some of the scruffiness that was replaced by a wild growth of hair, tight pegged black jeans and black English boots. We weren’t sure what to expect from him—the wordsmith, the magician. Myth had it that he had offended the old guard folkies and had been booed offstage at the Newport Folk Festival when he broke tradition and rocked out with electric back up provided by Mike Bloomfield. Rumor abounded. He was an irrepressible misfit. That night at the Masonic Hall, he played for all he was worth--two long sets, the first set being acoustic and made up of "folk music". There was an intermission followed by a blast of energy in the form of a straight-up rock band. It was mind numbing. This was an artist and a poet of the first order and his medium was rock, down and dirty.

I’ve seen him twice more…once at the Warfield in San Francisco with David and Eleanor in the early eighties and, again, a few years ago at the "Shark Tank" in San Jose, still rocking at age sixty. The earlier concert took place during the gospel phase and I vaguely remember David, an editor for Rolling Stone and the music critic of our group, commenting that he thought Dylan was drunk. I know I was, having taken several long, medicinal pulls of Stoli from Eleanor’s freezer. I was sick with a fever and throat infection but didn’t want to miss the concert. I was swilling cough syrup from a bottle I carried in my pocket, so the evening is rather blurry, with one sublime moment when Dylan sat on the piano bench with Clydie King, one of the back-up singers, and they sang "Only the Good Die Young" a cappella. " I don’t know why, I just like that song" he muttered.

As the years rolled by, whenever I was at my lowest low, my most disoriented, strung out, cynical, or full of fear and sorrow, his words and sound reached me. His use of language was free and wild, his ability to tell a story, captivating. Throughout the years of self-absorption and chaos, there were also periods of incomprehensible beauty, when it was clear that our (often poor) choices had their roots in innocence—in finding beauty in the world and in love for one another. We planted gardens, went to work, raised children, paid taxes, painted pictures, wrote our own poems and songs and listened to Nashville Skyline.

As I explored this same theme in an earlier piece I wrote to remember our classmate, Billy Craddock, I glimpsed the extent to which Dylan’s lyrics had entered popular culture. How similar in some ways our backgrounds might have been—Bobby’s, in Hibbing ("where the winds hit heavy on the borderline") and ours in sunny, affluent Los Gatos. As I thought about Dylan’s "Captain A-rab" and about "Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot fighting in the captain’s tower", I asked myself, "was he in Mr. Ridgely’s English class, too?" I even found a photo of Bobby in high school and he looked, for the world, like our own (Jewish virtuoso) Rudy Giskin. Clearly, we were cut from the same American cloth as the 20th century was unfurling toward its end. Clearly, our lives are deeply entwined in many sweet and profound ways.

Over time my taste in music, always eclectic, has evolved, but as I reflect, the music of Dylan has remained a touchstone for me. Like memories of first love or of a first lover, his music has been way more than the sum of its parts. I hear the words "Ramona come closer shut softly your watery eyes…The pangs of your sadness will pass as your senses will rise" and I will forever have my head on Billy’s shoulder and he will be pushing the hair out of my eyes, comforting me. There are many other fragments of song that trigger many other of the memories residing in my heart, in a place where we are all forever safe, forever young. The music, as music does, brought us together, inspired us, articulated our struggles, touched our commonality and added grace to our dance.




Michael Edwards Dorenzo, July, 2004





Afterward: I've only written one other fan letter and it was (strangely) written to a nun, Sister Mary Corita, also an artist. I was embarrassed about that, too, but whaddaya know? She wrote back. It is in that spirit that I dedicate this to you all. As Lew put it so well, you know who you are.