Don't Look Back

This week's PBS broadcast of Martin Scorcese's "No Direction Home" consistently entertained and provided me with a few revelations. I was born late in 1963, just before Dylan released his third album, and I have never really grasped his phenomenal rise to icon, only hearing it through his music. This film nailed his charisma and eloquence. And the contemporary interviews surprised me because he still exudes certain Minnesotan sensibilities, for better or worse.

My Bob Dylan story is really a non-story, so I don't expect it to make headlines. I am a big fan, but I have never seen him live. And I've gone to great lengths to avoid that encounter. I had first started listening to him during my last two years of college, a well-worn vinyl copy of "The Times They Are A-changin'" purchased at Positively Fourth Street my first consistent reference beyond radio play. Along with Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska", Dylan's early albums inspired me to pick up the guitar, and I regularly kidnapped a six-string Ovation from Pete up the street.

After graduation, I enrolled in grad school in Stockholm, which proved to be a very foolish move academically. I had a wad of student loan money in hand and was sick of being told what to read. So, in addition to devouring the English literature section of a Swedish library, I purchased my first guitar, a Yamaha (thus an American spending Swedish currency for a Spanish instrument made by a Japanese company in Taiwan). A Finn in the dorm room across the hall taught me plenty, but during the long nights of my Scandinavian winter I was still basically a three-chord strummer.

On the train back from Copenhagen, where I had spent Christmas with friends, an American man much my senior struck up a conversation over my guitar and long hair. He introduced himself as Izzy Young, and the name struck a bell. I was at the time reading Robert Shelton's No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, and this was indeed the very Israel Young who had once run the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village and booked Dylan's first professional show. Izzy complimented me as a "freak" and told me to come and see him at his shop, Folklore Centrum, in south Stockholm. I wouldn't have called myself a guitar player yet, so I balked at visiting. But after I heard his voice on the radio speaking Swedish with a distinct Brooklyn accent, I screwed up my courage and took the subway to Södermalm.

Izzy introduced me to another American kid who was a very capable fiddler, and he encouraged us to do some street gigs together. Six months later, after I had holed up in the taiga for a few months, listening attentively to songs and earning the ability to sing and play simultaneously, I might have taken him up on it. But it never happened, and I averted buskerdom infamy.

Oh, right. This is supposed to be a Bob Dylan story. After dropping out of grad school and returning to watch the ice disappear from White Lake, I moved back to Minneapolis for a couple of months. Pete and Rolf and I nabbed some tickets to see Dylan and the Dead at Alpine Valley, and I was primed to finally see the artist I was emulating. And then, a few days before the show, Pete's brother Bill tempted me to accompany him back up to Alaska and work in the slime mill for the summer. We left the day before the show.

My guitar playing improved steadily until it panned out about five years later. Despite several other close encounters, Bob and I have yet to cross paths. These days, we both play a Montana Gibson.