Enough about the Village! The UWS Has Bragging Rights to Bob Dylan Too!

The world is sharply divided into two groups. The first hates the sound of Bob Dylan’s nasal voice, and the second reveres the singer-songwriter as a god. Put me firmly in the latter crowd. Ever since I heard Dylan’s snide, twangy 1965 song “Positively Fourth Street” as a 13-year-old, I’ve been hooked:

“Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, You’d know what a drag it is to see you.”

As the decades passed, my appreciation and affection for Dylan only grew. So did my collection of his albums, first in vinyl, then in CDs, then on iTunes. It hasn’t always easy to keep up with him: there have been 40 studio albums and 21 live ones. One hundred twenty five million albums sold worldwide, by the way. Dylan was indeed “the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond,” whom Joan Baez hailed. (He was also a crummy boyfriend, she soon found out. Enough about that.)

Dylan is now 83 years old and experiencing a renaissance that few octogenarians are granted. In the new box-office hit, A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet, the gifted 29-year-old Gen Z heartthrob, plays young Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minn., who arrived in Greenwich Village in January 1961 and began his meteoric rise to superstardom. Superannuated fans like me have been lining up at two different packed UWS theaters to watch a story that many of us know by heart. But this time, we are sharing the theater with a new generation that is just discovering Dylan.

It pleases me to know that the real Bob Dylan has a soft spot in his heart for the UWS. He has played dozens of times over the years at the Beacon Theatre. For those who were too young or too broke to attend, YouTube is full of videos of those appearances.

I got my own chance to see him at the Beacon in November 2014. My scalped $240 ticket was a Thanksgiving gift from my brother, who is also an ardent fan. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him afterwards that I hated the concert.

As a student in Ann Arbor in the 1970s, I was twice privileged to sit a million miles away from the stage and watch Dylan perform in his electrifying prime. But this time at the Beacon, sitting close to the stage, I was despondent. Dylan didn’t engage with the audience at all, he sang nothing recognizable, and his voice was gone. I heard an aging hippie grumbling in the lobby during the intermission, “We pay him all this money and he ignores us!”

The only memorable thing about the performance I saw was that a man jumped on stage and lunged towards Dylan, who was singing and playing the piano. Within seconds, the intruder was tackled by several beefy security guards who suddenly appeared. To his credit, Dylan didn’t miss a beat. It was impossible not to reflect upon the fact that John Lennon had been murdered a few blocks away by a deranged fan in 1980.

I left the Beacon heartbroken. I wrote Dylan off as being over-the-hill. (So was I, but who was counting?) I still listened to his old music constantly, but I didn’t expect to hear anything new from him. Wrong.

When Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2016, the first songwriter to ever do so, he was characteristically difficult to decipher after the announcement. It was announced that he would not be coming to Stockholm for the ceremony because of “pre-existing commitments.” (Novelist Phillip Roth, long considered a Nobel contender himself, famously quipped when he heard the winner’s name, “It’s okay, but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”)

In June of 2020, during the depths of the pandemic, Dylan’s latest album “Rough and Rowdy Ways” came out. It was a masterpiece that I cannot begin to describe adequately. The main song, “Murder Most Foul,” is a profound telling of John F. Kennedy’s murder. Dylan’s voice, which he reportedly rested before recording the album, was a revelation. And as if Dylan had heard the same grumbling Beacon old-timer at intermission, the album even contained this verse:

“You won’t amount too much, the people all said

’Cause I didn′t play guitar behind my head

Never pandered, never acted proud

Never took off my shoes, throw ′em in the crowd.”

–Goodbye, Jimmy Reed

Forgive me for selling you short, Bob! Please put me down for another overpriced scalped ticket at the Beacon the glorious day you return to the UWS.