Bob and Willy and Me...........Summer's End.

The trouble with waiting all (insert descriptive term for time period of choice here,ie: summer, semester, etc......) for anything to happen is that it eventually will happen...........and that right soon. The long awaited event will come to pass, and then be over, and the semi-void of anti-climax will drift in and settle over you like a Los Angelean Smog.

Don't get me wrong. This, in no way, takes anything away from the fun or quality inherent in an event. It just leaves you kind of deflated.........
I think that's where I've been for most of the past 60 or so days.

Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson together........in fucking Peoria, Illinois, no less...................at an outdoor concert!!!
Every last strand of culturally recombinant Hillbilly/Hippie DNA that serves to define my basic genetic make up was literally vibrating at the news.........

I couldn't wait to get tickets. I got tickets for each of my kids and their significant others......and an extra for each just in case they couldn't get a sitter and had to have a ticket for a grand-baby. I even got an extra ticket for myself, on the odd (and unlikely) chance that I might encounter someone I could stand to spend that much time with that:
A) wasn't related to me,
B)wasn't actively engaged in providing me with some form of sexual stimulation,
C)I wasn't bound by a blood oath not to do bodily harm to without serious and justifiable cause
D)wouldn't confuse my enthusiasm for the event coupled with their involvement in it for "significance"......
The latter eventuality did not prevail (said without any real chagrin)........

It was a drizzly evening, but August-in-Illinois warm.........very much like the misty dampness that greeted me most mornings when I ventured out of my assorted Bed and Breakfasts in Ireland. In a leather coat and a broadbrimmed fur-felt fedora, I was nearly impervious.......hardly needing the umbrella I carried.


Casey and Dianne at the concert...


Cassie and Hans.....

The concert, as I mentioned was open air.........held in the outfield of O'Brian Field, Peoria's minor league ball park.

The opening act was Hot Club of Cowtown, a sort of fiddle anchored, bluegrass-cum-country-rock outfit from Austin, Texas that, in and of itself, would be a hoot to go and listen to in a club or at a party somewhere..........enthusiastic, tight and having fun with each other and their music.

The intervals between acts, as one outfit tore down and the other set up could have been a little better organized.........bit too much "down-time".....but it's been a while since this old-timer has been to a concert so perhaps I'm suffering a perception error due to memory parallax.

At any rate, Casey kept me supplied with over-priced beers....which I was grateful for but weakly protested on general principle......ie:

That listed among the things you are better off passing up is...........

I) any draft beer for which you have to pay more than $2.00,

II) any episode of casual sex in which you have to invest more than: a)two hours of idle chat, b)4 draft beers or the equivalent number of "foo foo" cocktails.....(let's face it, if he or she thinks no more of themselves than to be willing to risk a physical intimacy indulging in something that is as meaningless as a hollywood kiss, with someone they don't know,don't like, don't want to be with and don't care if they ever see again, how much better than mediocre, assisted masturbation is it likely to be?)

........And then came Willy.


Willy.....arty, eh??

Willy was great..........as I would have expected him to be. Mother Nature seemed to be in on the act as lightening forked between the clouds at what I would have sworn were pre-arranged and appropriate moments in the program.......
and, of course, there was "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain". Hell, it was like a CMTV video..........I loved it.

However much I might have anticipated Willy Nelson, the desire to hear Bob Dylan exceeded that anticipation at least ten-fold.

I grew up with him........in a real sense. Through his music, from the "stand back, look at it, toss it all out and start all over again" beginnings, through all the evolutions.........to that final (and still fine-tuning) fuck you........this is where I ended up because this is who I am.

Dylan rocked..........and I mean rocked everything. Even the "old standards" came across as barely recognizable........dressed up in happy new rock and roll clothes.
Gone were the whiney, angsty tones of the prophet of cultural doom. Here was the celebration of music and lyrics that helped to define a base line split in the way people looked at things and accepted things both within and without.......and, for better or worse, challenged a generation to make up their own minds, and make their own mark.......and their own stupid, fucking mistakes.
I was absolutely delighted with it........hearing the old tunes tweaked was almost like being let in on a secret......one that you could share with a wink and a grin, right under the noses of the uninitiated........like the secret handshake of a fraternity that identifies a brother.

I didn't get a picture of Bob Dylan.........my camera batteries picked that instant to shoot craps and I didn't have a spare set with me. Perhaps a serendipitous lapse at that. A picture may have been just a little too cliche a thing to take away with me.......or even a somewhat blasphemous or profane thing to be tempted to post here......outside the sanctum sanctorum.

Thus freed of the obligation to take pictures,I danced my way through the Dylan set, in my understated old-guy way........rythms tamed in the passage and mellowed in the outward expression, but no less pagan in their origin..........

Kids........your wildness isn't freedom.........it's license. Sorry, but all the senseless, unrestrained self-indulgence, retro clothing, token new-age babble-osophy, and veggies grown with semi-slave, migrant labor, in labratory extracted and certified virgin elf-shit, on giant, corporate factory farms won't make hippies out of people who haven't a clue what a hippie was or is. It wasn't a destination, a designation, or a definition.........it was a journey, a trip (if you will), that began with a revelation.
Not a revolution so much as an evolution.

Kerouac wrote about the wasted dregs, the 4F's in Ozzie and Harriet's army..........Dylan sang about an optimistic vanguard, those who saw and sought some acceptable and viable alternative to a dogmatically, moralistic cultural jingoism, and inspired us all.

The absolutists are still at it, kids........and they are organized. They will never give up. The fight is yours.......they'll not get me, but look around you......

........I digress.

It was a night with two of the best story-teller, balladeers of our time.........(all that was missing was a walk on by Kristofferson).

Men that are, on the face it would seem, dichotomies in genre and style, but in reality a musical segue of life, love, the universe and everything..........

I shared it with my kids........all their lives really.......but, at last symbolically enough, on a sodden ball field in Averagetown, USA.

It was, as it was intended to be, the capper of the summer........(the capper di tutti capper???)........after that, for me at least, it was a matter of assessing realities and battening down the hatches (sorry for the crypticism decipherable only by the cognoscenti).........

I'm not ready to go quietly to that good night..........
I still rage against the dying of the light......

Thus endeth the entry...........