Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

Modern Times is Bob Dylan�s latest CD. It has been reviewed favorably by the usual suspects in the music criticism business, and rightfully so: this music puts old wine in new bottles, then drinks the wine and smashes the bottles in the street.

�I was thinkin� �bout Alicia Keeeeeeys,� Dylan drawls during the early moments of the CD�s opening song �Thunder On The Mountain,� letting her surname linger in the air like a meditative �Om.� I was greeted by those lyrics blasting from the CD player during a recent visit to my friend Ray�s Modesto apartment last Saturday. Ray and I went to high school and college together. We have continued to be part of each other�s lives during these past thirty-six years. Dylan�s music has always been there like trail markers.

One of our major touchstones during the end of adolescence in the early 1970s was an 8-track tape we called The Fishin� Tape. Ray had recorded Dylan�s �Nashville Skyline� and �Blood On The Tracks� onto a blank 8-track cartridge; we would listen to it in his car on our way to the San Joaquin River to drink beer and catch some catfish and the occasional undersized striped bass. After a while, we did not bother with the fishing poles, but continued to drive around and listen to The Fishin� Tape.

Ray and I roomed together in a dormitory during our first two years at Fresno State University. When Dylan�s �Desire� was first released in late 1975, Ray bought a copy of the album, transcribed the lyrics to �Hurricane� on notebook paper, and pinned the sheets to the corkboard on his side of the room. Most of our dormmates used their corkboard to attach posters, class schedules, and stuff from home. Not Ray.

I was at my parents� house in Manteca, busy at considering my responsibility for the reason �The One Who Got Away� got away, when Ray called one afternoon in 1978. He had just bought Dylan�s newest album �Street-Legal,� recorded it onto a blank cassette, and wondered whether I wanted to go for a drive, listen to it, and put something else in my head for a while. We picked up a friend and hit the road. At some point we found ourselves on a dirt road, surrounded by cornfields. Lost. I felt better, though.

�The One Who Got Away� visited me two years later. I was sharing a Santa Clara apartment with two of my best friends. Ray and his brother would soon be living in the apartment building next to ours, but that was still a few months away. �TOWGA� saw a copy of Slow Train Coming leaning against a coffee table and told me how surprised she was to discover I owned Dylan�s �Christian record.� I asked her whether she had heard it; she said she had not. I don�t remember what I told her other than how much I liked the record and took an unnecessarily snide tone per my description. I don�t think I felt better, though.

Twenty-six years later, I was in Ray�s Modesto apartment. Things have not been so good for Ray during the past few years: his parents were diagnosed with terminal illnesses, one after the other, and he lived with and cared for them at the family house in Modesto until their deaths. He sold the house and moved into an apartment. His own health is poor, he has a number of personal issues in serious need of resolution, and he has decided to move to Indiana for a fresh start. I was at his apartment, trying not to think about my friend moving two thousand miles away. I was hoping he will make some necessary changes in his life and that things will work out for him. I was thinking about some lines from Dylan�s 1963 song �Bob Dylan�s Dream�: �I wish, I wish, oh I wish in vain/That we could sit simply in that room again/Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat/I�d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.� Sometimes it is better to think about Alicia Keys.

To purchase a copy of Modern Times, visit your favorite record store or www.amazon.com.

Bob Dylan and his band will be performing at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on October 16. For additional information, visit www.ticketmaster.com.

The Fishin� Tape is missing in action.

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