My 20 Minutes With Bob Dylan

In which Fredrik Wikingsson a Bob Dylan fan from Sweden discovers the existential angst of one man clapping

When Bob Dylan fanatic Fredrik Wikingsson heard about a gaming company should hire legend to play for an audience of one person, he realizes that the person must be him.

Mr. Wikingsson is a good of a rock star devotee using Grant Maxwell’s religion metaphor How Does It Feel Presley Beatles Dylan and the Philosophy of Rock & Roll which is not a pejorative.

November 23, 2014 at 18:15

By Fredrik Wikingsson – The story began quarter past six in the evening in a hotel room on the eighteenth floor in downtown Philadelphia, even if the story also ends there.

In true conference hotel style, it is simply two beds joined into a queen-size bed and when my legs suddenly give way in the middle of the room and I stagger backwards so I end up soon in the joint between the beds, they drift apart, I lack the strength to hold it and slowly sink down the floor and where do I get seated until the tears start to fall from the cheeks down on my insanely hot tweed jacket.

I try to stay in this moment, bottle it in my head, preserving the spiritual I’ve just been through, but a rational, Inconvenient Truth reach me now: how hard I try gonna me in this moment it is already on the way away. And perhaps I will spend the rest of my life to chase the feeling of perfection and … what is it, yes, it is a feeling of finishing that still hums in me.

A finish. So it is.

The thing with the disc went to hell, but in case I am.

If this were a race, it has gone on for twenty-four years, and now I’m in-goal.

This I suddenly remember: Once in the late 90s, I sat on the train between Malmö and Copenhagen with two friends. One of them had a bit of speed in his pocket, and the conversation between us that have just been so jovial stiffened suddenly when a customs officer stepped into the carriage.

See – Would You Enjoy A One Man Concert From Bob Dylan?

When I, many years later, wander intoxicated around in the empty foyer of the concert hall Academy of Music in Philadelphia the memory pops up in your head without notice. Why is that?

Possibly because what I just experienced is so unlikely that I feel afraid of being caught. Anyone can come anytime now, and snatch it away from me. So it is.

The sweat ran and starts to weigh down my fine new tweed jacket. The pulse Pangar forehead. It is so incredibly hot. It sucks in the stomach, which in a long air pocket between heaven and Halifax. I try to regain the power to act, I clears my throat and start looking for a blue plastic bag that I put here somewhere.

I find it in exactly the same moment as a gentleman from Bob Dylan’s management will arrive, and it’s something with his chinos that calms me so that I can begin to thank him for this unbelievable happening before I stretch the limits of hospitality and asking if he would be willing to go backstage and ask Dylan to sign a disc I have with me.

“There should not be any problem, he says, and puts an arm on my shoulder.”

I love him.

He takes the bag from me, lifts the disc and stops the movement with a twisted grimace I did not think he was capable of.

“But …? What is this … Bob would never … Hahaha, put his name on that !? It surely you understand !? What were you thinking?”

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Bob Dylan music and videos can be purchased from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and iTunes

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20 minutes before

Now it happens. Now I’m in the middle of it.

Can you understand? I’m sitting all alone inside the Academy of Music in Philadelphia – that’s just me here – all around me there are 2,500 empty seats, beautifully dressed in red velvet, and in front of me, up on stage playing Bob Dylan and his band just for me.

Can you understand?

Recently he stepped out on stage, without fanfare, without notice, nodded to me (I just stared back, afraid that the slightest sudden movement would blow him off the stage), he began to buzz a little with his musicians, I heard every word, it felt like sitting in on Bob Dylan’s rehearsal, I got several minutes of this, and I hardly dared to breathe for here there was a spell that could be mined and words that could be missed and I wanted to stop time but I could not.

Now it’s a few minutes later and Bob Dylan sits at the piano and plays Buddy Holly’s soft and fine “Heartbeat“, he continues with Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill“, and when it fades out, it is so insanely silent in the room and it sounds so silly when one person clapping hands so I realize that I have to shout something, and what I comes from me is: “you guys sound great“, because I think that Dylan’s musician good can get a bout of ladle too.

And then Bob Dylan laughs

I would say he laughs heartily.

How many times have I seen Bob Dylan? Maybe 25 times? Have I ever seen him laugh? I think not. Is it important that he is laughing at something I said? Not necessarily.

The important thing is that he is … happy.

I’ve been so afraid of the surly Bob would show up tonight. It would have been reasonable. Dylan has never been the poster-boy for public marriage proposal, performed large parts of gigs with his back to the audience, hiding behind sunglasses, hoodies, muttered, staring angrily against the poor devils who paid a lot of money for the pleasure of seeing him.

That little laugh he now offers hints that he stands out with this, the absurd, almost comical situation – a gaming company from Åland has asked him to participate in an experiment on YouTube where he gets a generous payment, plays for an audience consisting of a single person – the funny thing in this getting to him. And because it also gets me, then we have … been met. Somehow.

You should just know how I look in the face when this occurs. Lobotomized people, they laugh? Not in “One Flew Over” in all cases. But now it’s like someone dropped into my head and made engagement there, which means I can not stop grinning. It tightens and pain soon in the cheeks. Now Dylan gets up from the piano, stands in front of the edge of the stage, a few feet away from me, he kicks off an interpretation of Chuck Willis “It’s Too Late (She’s Gone)”. He holds his harmonica blowing a few notes, hits a little wrong it seems, maybe he holds harmonica up and down, it does not matter, he spins it and continues.

According to the informal but ingrained driving schedule prevailing at Dylan concerts, now is the time one should cheer. Everyone does it. Let’s call it a collective autopilot that I always snorted at and dismissed as the most unsuspecting nostalgic during his gigs.

Watch now playing Bob harmonica, as he did in the sixties!

Although Dylan now abandoned the delicate virtuosity that characterized hi, for example during 1966- and 1981-tours and these days usually random blåser in munspelets right hand so it is like the gesture for those to raise their hands to the sky and screaming out his gratitude. But the gesture has never been the thing with Bob Dylan. He has demanded more than that of his audience, he has committed a career-harakiri again and again as if to say, “Well what do you think now?” There’ve been his greatness, in pånyttfödelserna. I have thought.

But something happens to me when he corrects the harmonica and begins to blow. There’s nothing in harmonica solo that will be written about in the New Yorker essays, there are some simple tones only, but it is during these few minutes of it – very unexpectedly – a failure for me.

I have thought that it was Dylan’s hindsight I swallowed by 24 years. The attitude and lyrics. The way to live. Uncompromising unit. He not busy being born is busy dying. Those where the text lines I scribbled into the ceiling to floor bed in the barracks when I did my military service and did not know where I would take the road of life. The whole bed was full of quotes, like a bulletin board with wisdom to download stability and control from.

But when he plays the harmonica for me, it’s something else going on. Nothing clever or witty, but something more abstract, that can not be tattooed on his arm.

Are you allowed to quote Woody Allen still, in this country? What is he saying in Manhattan: “Nothing that can be understood by the intellect is to know.”

So it is. I do not understand what is happening here this evening in Philadelphia when Bob Dylan plays the harmonica just for me, but it’s as if all the good times I’ve had with his music, all the thoughts I’ve had about him, all he has done with me, all he has meant to me, all this obsession now scaled down and summarized in a few simple tones, and everything I ever need to know about Bob Dylan fit in them.

There are so many Bob Dylan’s – 2000s cowboy uncle, monkshood old man who in 1993 went about juggled in Camden in the video for “Blood in my eyes,” the little desperate rocker in headband and leather gloves from 1986, nykristne dogmatist from 1979, painted white fury of 1975, complete skull from the charity concert to Chile in 1974, amphetamine skeleton from the spring of 1966, cherub from Gaslight gig in 1962 – all of his incarnations merge up there on stage, playing the harmonica for me, all of you, and I feel so much love for him for dried with us all, all our expectations and requirements.

A book about Bob Dylan’s “Show Us the Wind” and the title is an exact picture of the fans ‘strange’ expectations of Bob Dylan. Many of us are hoping he’ll tell us the truth, but the sounds of it there harmonica is what he says: “the truth can be found here too.”

People will see this movie and they will not understand.

It’s nothing.

Because I realize that this is the finish I waited so long for.

Then play Bob Dylan a blue that I never heard of, bowing low light, nods at me and says, “Hey, come back any time!”

And then he laughs again.

15 minutes earlier

You have time to think many thoughts while sitting alone in a silent theater, waiting for Bob Dylan to come in and play a few songs for one. It is also quite shiny forehead, because you’re nervous and you have a new jacket in tweed that is warm.

Many thoughts. I understand that this is an important moment in my life as I see now that many think tanks. I get around with the net in the skull – consciously and methodically – to collect and sort the 24-year obsession. I rake my mental stables, so that this moment will have the maximum opportunity to become what I hope.

A finish.  Why is it so important?

Why would it taste so Mumma with a payoff in the 24 years I had with Bob Dylan? All he has already given were good enough really – the discs, concerts, YouTube clips with the two press conferences in December 1965.

I think of how long I’ve been greedy for more. That it only took a few years of listening before I started going out into the world to find it where definitive moment that could elevate from the mundane stove making; a sort of coronation, or the finish.

It’s a sickness really, perhaps typical of our time. The more accessible kicks become, and the more people brag about them in their channels, the greater the need, we get to experience that special something, that thing that elevates us from the mass, there where one can write home about. But I think that it is not just about skrävlet towards others, without the feeling of crossing the finish line also can give meaning to all those years of obsession.

I planned on July 4, 2005 when I dragged with my wife to Fort Worth, Texas,  there could be a finish line, I thought, to see Bob Dylan Live! In Concert! the US National Day, on a fucking prairie. I bought a cowboy hat  because it was Bob, and I bought sugary popcorn (cracker jacks) I know that Bob likes and when he started playing so I stood there and closed his eyes and thought that now it could happen.

I think of the summer of 2004 when I dragged my long-suffering wife to West Saugerties in upstate New York and we found our way through the woods to 56 Parnassus Lane where we finally found the Big Pink, the pink house where Bob Dylan and The Band recorded so many nice songs in a basement summer in 1967.

I stood in front of that house, closed my eyes and did what I could to become engrossed in the moment. But nothing special happened, it was a house that was pink only. I gaskade up I asked my wife to take a picture and then we went and ate brownies at a café quite close to where Art Garfunkel would go there on the grass holding a year later.

I think of the summer of 1999 when I first looked my way through the woods to 56 Parnassus Lane and stood in front of Big Pink and closed my eyes, but something happened. Then a woman from Holland came up and offered to photograph me before I went to Woodstock where I had heard that there would be a place with incredible brownies.

I think of when Grandma died in 1997 and I sat in my room and played Dylan song “Worried Blues” on guitar for several hours because I thought there was consolation in the lyrics “I’m going where the chilly winds do not blow. ” And I remember I wondered if Bob Dylan could ever mean more to me than then.

I’m thinking of one day in April 1990 when me and my dad went into the Åhlens in Sundsvall and together bought Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” for 99 SEK. And I remember clearly how I was going to hell, 50 bucks was after all what I earned in the month of mucking out horse shit in a stable, but there was also a chance that my father would forget to claim back fifty note he loaned me that day (it did he does not).

And I think in the evening before Åhlens visit, when my father came into my room and said that television would soon show a black and white documentary about Bob Dylan, and I liked Simon & Garfunkel might be able to like Dylan, too, although he sang too fucking bad if you compared Art Garfunkel.

I think of all of this while I prepare for something that my entire adult life have actually led to. I see how it moves in the scenes, someone is coming out on stage. Soon it will begin. The textiles in me and I have time to think a thought to.

I think of a blue plastic bag that stands out in the foyer waiting for me. It has a vinyl record, and if everything goes as I hope it becomes soon a signed, concrete trophy that goes to show up on Instagram when all this spiritual is over.

Two days earlier

It smells like old cardboard inside the record store House of Oldies on Carmine Street in New York. A furtive thought to Håkan Nesser only, then I’m ready for it demanding conversation with the store owner. Sure lived Nesser here somewhere? Yes, he did, in his Manhattan period. I have time to think that I am good and generous to Nesser who thinks that his writing contains something that might be called a “Manhattan” period before the owner waving me away to the cashier and says he received a box containing repetitions to Dylan’s disputed 1978 world tour that I already have, admittedly on the CD, but the part I do not need to mention this in vinyl so I go straight to the point and ask instead what he has with Frank Sinatra.

I know that Dylan after the New Year will be releasing an album with Sinatra songs and my phenomenally insightful assumption is that Dylan is now tired of signing copies of  records like “Blonde on Blonde” or “Highway 61 Revisited”, but if a perceptive connoisseur bastard pops up with, say, Sinatra album “In the Wee small Hours” from 1955 so it signals something else – a silent nod from one connoisseur to another; an elegant gentleman agreement between about music’s timelessness and some of things of eternal value

(I make a mental note about that later that day to buy a tweed jacket).

The cover of “In the Wee Small Hours” is so fine. Sinatra is leaning against a wall and smoking. Next to him there are plenty of light blue areas where Dylan can put his signature. While I was waiting for the slow receipt printer I tell  the store owner my plan and she shakes her head.

Bad move, my friend. Why would he sign a Sinatra CD? He can not put his name on someone else’s work. It would be like to piss on Sinatra’s grave. What do you think, Dylan visited Sinatra’s grave, he would piss on it?

My smile is a person who knows a little better, which meant little longer, a person who studied Bob Dylan so thoroughly for 24 years now he almost knows him, a person who understands that you should reach Bob Dylan have to think a turn.

I mumble mysteriously, “We’ll see, will not we !?”

When I step out on Carmine Street with Sinatra album in a blue plastic bag, the air feels light and healthy. Two squirrels feast on a quarter of a donut, the leaves fall from the trees and this is undoubtedly the best of worlds.

Fredrik Wikingsson

[Source – Mina 20 minuter ensam med Bob Dylan Editor – translated from Swedish and our apologies to Mr. Wikingsson if the translation has any inaccuracies. Thanks to Kazuhiko Kato who posted the story on Facebook in Swedish.]

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