PROLOGUE
San Francisco Express Times
24 December 1968
Raised high above the audience were three paintings done in orange and red, somehow a confusion of the masks of comedy and tragedy, now in their own spotlights. The bass player, bending his instrument into circles, was bopping all over the stage, even in motion like a still photograph of the personality of movement which is the freedom of rock ’n’ roll. The singer was flashing a red axe at the lead guitarist, sending out the last lines of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” as he set up for the crash of notes that was sure to follow. They hit it; the two musicians whirled around the microphone, guitars only inches apart, fingers almost touching, the sounds climbing higher and up to the rafters, the roof getting in the way.
Moving out now, the singer twisted around with a grin for the crowd, the band on its own, building toward the final chorus, the singer framed by the tangles of his own hair, hands traveling fast over the red guitar:
You can do anything that you want to baby
That you want to baby
Yes, if you want to baby if you
Just don’t make me hurt!
That was Bob Dylan in the fall of 1965, over three years ago. Bob Dylan and the Hawks onstage—there’s been nothing like it before or since. Three years of memories, of waiting, scares of the end and false starts toward another chance. Will we remember the thrill of that last time? Memories turn inward and return with legends, images too big to hold.
Legends are out of sight but not quite out of mind; they never intrude, but only emerge out of the day, off the streets, out of the walls. Legends are supposed to represent the pomposity of death, but they can tell jokes, too. The legend of the sightless blues singer used to mean a lot in Berkeley; somehow that story brought people into contact with suffering and creation on the road, down the American highway, maybe to the mountain men before the beaver were trapped out of the high streams, back to Oedipus and Homer, the man who walked but couldn’t see, the man carried by his own secret knowledge.
It got to be something of a cult, and cults don’t tell jokes. People turned around and laughed at their legends, and lo, out of Blind Lemon Jefferson came Blind Joe Death and the immortal Blind Ebbets Field. New legends were appearing, though, some that at times seemed too grand to speak with, figures with an innocent grandeur that somehow made you nervous. Such was the mood one night in the old Jabberwock in Berkeley.
The place was filled and it was late, time for that ever-recurring Berkeley rumor. One guy turned to another and began it. “I heard ...I heard that Dylan’s in town.” Two minutes, and everyone in the place had heard it as well. By itself, the process began to grow. “Somebody said he might show up here, don’t know yet...” Every time the door opened or closed heads turned and eyes brightened and then turned away. Before half an hour had passed the tension was almost unbearable.
Backstage, eager minds were plotting. A man stepped onto the platform. Quiet came, and he began to speak. “Tonight a very wonderful thing has happened. As some of you may know, someone who has created much of our finest music has arrived in Berkeley—a singer, a musician, a songwriter. As a special favor, he has agreed to do a song for us, but because of complications in his contract—I just can’t explain them right now—he cannot allow us to announce his name. But,” he winked, “I’m sure you all know who I mean.” It was going to happen. Everybody beamed. The announcer retreated backstage, and returned. “I’ve just learned,” he said, “that because of those complications I just mentioned, B—, I mean, he, cannot actually appear in person. But”—and there was a pause—“he will perform!”
There was a great scuffling noise. Backstage, a figure was being lowered into a huge box, harmonica in hand. Out front, the audience edged closer. The announcer moved in for the kill. “And now, since he cannot actually appear in person, since we cannot actually pronounce his name, we bring you—Blind Steamer Trunk!” The enormous box was carried onto the stage, the lid propped up, and out of the old timbers and rusty hinges came a tantalizingly brief harmonica solo in the best Dylan style. The lid plopped down and the great box was borne way into the night. Blind Steamer Trunk belonged to the ages.
Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” on Long Distance Operator (Wanted Man bootleg, recorded Berkeley Community Theatre, 4 December 1965). An even hotter version can be found on the bootleg series volume 4: Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (Columbia, 1998, recorded Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May 1966).