Chapter Ten
The difference between an event and reports of that event reminds me of the game Telephone, in which someone whispers a sentence into another person’s ear, who then whispers it into the next person’s ear, and on down the line. By the time it gets to the tenth person, “Joey’s going to visit his father” has become “Alice was arrested for farming Jonah’s goat.” Some of the early news reports after Bob’s April 11 concert were so far from the truth that they could only have been written by reporters playing Telephone.
Here’s what happened.
In Bob’s Dublin concert I played piano on “Highway 61 Revisited,” “In the Garden,” and “Ballad of a Thin Man.” I played and sang on “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Real Real Gone,” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Then I joined Elvis Costello and Van Morrison in singing backup on “I Shall Be Released.”
As usual with Bob, there were multiple encores, each of which elicited wildly enthusiastic chants of “More! More! More! More!” When the show was over I lined up at the front of the stage with Bob and his band and Van and Elvis to take our final band bow. When the applause and chanting didn’t abate, the stage manager signaled for the house lights to be turned on. The band members nearest stage left turned and walked down the stairway on our left. Bob, Van, Elvis, and the band members at center stage turned, walked upstage, and exited down a stairway behind the drums. The primary responsibility of Bob’s road crew was to look after Bob, and he was appropriately well attended. Others on the crew were using their flashlights to guide the other artists and band members offstage. The crew must have assumed that I, the only performer in proximity to stage right, was in good hands.
Unfortunately, the only hands around were mine. With John gone to escort Ambassador Smith and her party backstage, and with all the artists, band members, and other responsibilities that Bob’s crew had to look after, I literally slipped through the cracks. The stage right black curtain had seemed a logical point of exit for me. I thought it would lead to a stairway on my side of the stage. But when I stepped through the curtain there was nothing under my feet. I felt something strike my head as I fell off the edge of the platform, and then I blacked out. When I came to, I barely had time to notice that I was lying on a pile of black rubber cables before my head began to hurt. I touched the spot where it hurt and felt warm liquid oozing out of my head. I must have been in a mild state of delirium because I began repeating a mantra to reassure myself:
“It’s oozing. I must be okay. It’s not spurting. That wouldn’t be good. It’s oozing. Oozing is okay. I’m okay.”
Such was my habit: denial of personal pain.
Suddenly people began to converge. Some were wearing armbands with red crosses. They told me I had fallen fifteen feet to the arena floor. My landing had been cushioned by the piles of thick rubber electrical cables on the concrete. EMTs examined my head, stanched the bleeding, then loaded me carefully into an ambulance that would take me to the emergency room at Mater Misericordiae Hospital in North Dublin. When I arrived, the ER staff was occupied with several patients with injuries more serious than mine. Even so, they got to me fairly quickly. After examining my head, one of the doctors determined that my head injury was superficial. While he was treating the wound, he asked a question that earned him an A-plus on my “Diagnosing Patients” test.
“Are you feeling pain anywhere else?”
I was. It turned out that my head wound was the least of my injuries. My right wrist was broken, and I had fractured my left thumb. I would not be playing piano for a while. After X-raying my wrist and thumb, the medical attendants built a cast for my arm and put a splint on my thumb. Everything they needed was right there in the emergency room. Thankfully “everything” included an analgesic to relieve my pain.
Having heard me speak, the staff in the emergency room must have known that I wasn’t an Irish citizen. But if they knew that I had been injured in the line of performing with Bob Dylan, they gave no indication. As far as I could tell, they treated all their patients with the same combination of compassion, competence, personal attention, and quality of care. It being Ireland, liberal doses of humor were dispensed along with the health care.
When at last the medical staff informed me that they had done all they could for the time being, I sent John out to ask the head nurse when I could leave the hospital. While I was waiting for an answer someone brought a telephone over to me with a very long cord. It was Bob on the line. He, Van, and Elvis had been whisked out of the venue immediately after the show and hadn’t learned about my fall until they were on their way to the after-party. Bob’s tour manager had been trying to find out how I was doing, but no one would tell him. The news of my fall had cast a pall over the party. Everyone was imagining the worst. Bob said the crew in particular felt awful. To a man, every crew member blamed himself for not having thought to cover stage right.
Not wanting to ruin Bob’s party, I tried to put the best face on the situation.
“I’m doing well, Bob. The doctors are taking good care of me. Everything’s under control.”
“Are you gonna be okay?”
I assured him that I was. I had suffered no permanent damage, and I wanted him and everyone else to have a good time at the party.
“You know,” I said brightly, “you gave a really good performance at the Point tonight. You have every reason to celebrate.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Are they givin’ you everything you need?”
“They are. Please don’t be anxious. I’m fine.”
Bob wasn’t buying my attempt at a good face. We had come from the same culture in which Jewish mothers famously say, “I’m fine. I’ll just sit here in the dark.”
Finally, having exhausted all the ways he could tell me how sorry he was, Bob wished me a speedy recovery and put Van on.
Van didn’t have a lot to say that night—not that I minded. His words and music over the years have expressed thoughts and emotions familiar to me and pretty much everyone else on the planet. He expressed his sympathy and well-wishes in a few words and then handed the telephone over to Elvis. In contrast to Van, Elvis uses a profusion of words to express whatever he’s thinking at the moment, a quality appreciated by fans and friends alike. Elvis’s many words that night were as welcome as Van’s few.
As I handed the phone back to the attendant, John came in with the verdict from the head nurse. I would be released that night only in Bob’s song. The doctors wanted to keep me overnight to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. This gave reporters eight more hours to play the Telephone game. The next morning John told me he had received calls from friends and family in the United States who had heard either that Bob had pushed me or that he had hugged me too enthusiastically. The only fact that all the reports had gotten right was that I had fallen off the stage. John had also heard that there had been a flurry of phone calls among Bob’s managers, the business people at the Point, and an assortment of lawyers to discuss their concern that I might file a lawsuit, but I would never have done that. Still, the people at the Point and Bob’s team went out of their way to make sure I had everything I needed and appropriately offered to reimburse me for medical expenses.
As it turned out, reimbursement wasn’t an issue. Ireland had national health care. Every Irish citizen was covered. No one had to forgo seeing a doctor because she or he couldn’t afford it. At the Point, in the ambulance, in the emergency room at Mater, and during my overnight stay, I received excellent and efficient care that continued through several follow-up visits, checkups, multiple X-rays, a change of cast, the use of modern equipment, and ongoing medications. When on occasion I had to wait, it was never for more than twenty minutes. I suffered minimally, recovered completely, and for all that I paid a total of twelve Irish pounds—at the time approximately twenty-four dollars. And I wasn’t even an Irish citizen.