Bob Dylan's Biggest Fans

Only a few people in entertainment retain real icon status for me. Bob Dylan is one. And so, I thought I would use the release of his newest album as an occasion to expound on my quote unquote relationship to the guy who had such a huge impact on my ideas about music and creativity when I was a kid. Although I was never “in love” with him, like I was with John Lennon,(perhaps because he seemed a little too incomprehensible and prickly as opposed to John Lennon who was just the right amount of incomprehensible and prickly) , I actually snuck out in the middle of the night once when I was in highschool and Dylan had just gone electric, and some how finagled a ticket to a performance he was giving at Berkeley High School.(!) Our tickets entitled my friends and I to sit on folding chairs on the apron of the stage, only a few feet from him. It was so surreal, even then, that I sometimes wonder if I made the whole thing up. Anyway, over time I have become a lot more jaded and cynical ( though I was doing a pretty good job of appearing to be both even back in highschool) but I still think Bob Dylan is a very big deal.

Cut to : Now. Bob Dylan lives in my neighborhood. And when I say “lives” I have no idea what that means. I don’t know if he’s ever there.  I have never seen him. I definitely LIVE in my neighborhood in every sense of the word. I know the cashiers at the markets by name. But I have never seen Bob Dylan standing in line with a cart full of groceries or at the dry cleaner with an arm full of pants. Perhaps he has his  foodstuffs airlifted in via heli-pad. Perhaps he is beyond the consumption of ordinary food. Maybe he throws out all his clothes after wearing them once, like I heard Jerry Lewis does with his socks. I don’t know.

Anyway, I do know two fairly amusing things about Bob Dylan. The first one is that he puts up the most enjoyable  Christmas decorations on his block. In a neighborhood that is filled with huge homes that are constantly in a state of always getting larger, and home owners who hire day laborers to carefully finesse the seasonal decorating of their yards almost as though they were actually department stores or hotels, someone at Bob Dylan’s property put up the string of lights that you see at the top of my blog page (http://merrillmarkoe.com/blog) I was so taken by his  approach  that I snuck out one night to take a picture. It reminded me of something my irritable  uncle might have done as a concession to his nagging wife. “There. Now ya happy? I put up the God Damn Christmas decorations!  So shut up and stop talking about it, for crying out loud.”

The second slightly amusing thing is  that Bob Dylan has apparently ticked off the people who live across the street from him. And when I say “live across the street from him”, these people  have a house and cars and a mailbox so I think they actually live there. But what they look out on is a part of the Dylan estate that is best described as a no-man's land. There is a chain link fence and just behind it are large rusting storage dumpsters as well as a number of deteriorated car exoskeletons that never move. There is also dirt road that leads to what, I do not know. Somewhere in the midst  of this tableau is a porto-potty which was apparently rented to accomodate the Dylan security staff members.  That is what is driving these particular neighbors to distraction.

I first read about it all when a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in the L.A. Times. It explained the nature of the brouhaha in general and the fact that the  people across the street had  apparently felt the need to deflect the wafting porto potty odors by filling their front yard full of fans.  We, at my home, looked at each other quizzically since we had walked down this block millions of times and couldn’t remember seeing any fans. So the next time I went out for “A Full Bob” (we have a couple of different  routes we take . The one that takes us past the Dylan storage dumpsters is about a three mile route that we refer to as “A Full Bob. “) I brought a camera. And there they were.  Poor Bob. Still being hounded by fans.