Does your favorite concert run in your head like a movie?
Last edited Sat Nov 5, 2022, 11:24 AM - Edit history (1)
...grainy and blurry, and wonderful.
Is it full of flashes of colored dots, slivers of remembered sounds, faded memories of a younger, more vibrant you living your best life?
Was the show so excellent that it was impossible to focus on most of the performance, and time flew by so disappointingly fast? Can you see your favorite moments running in a reel in your aging mind?
We all have our own favorites, probably several. I actually find myself unable to single out just one - so many and so many reasons to reminiscence. No need to try. Each event has its own story.
Have you told your story so many more times than you can remember, about the night music transcended all reality as if you had stepped through a portal in time? Is it all so unbelievable that part of you is sure you've exaggerated the whole thing, except for the way you know you felt at the time. That's never leaving you, is it?
That's how my wife and I talked incessantly about one particular Dylan concert, out of several, every single time we watched a clip of him in concert.
"Oh, but that one night, though," it'd start up between us, "That show was magic, we'd both say," and then retreat into the tiny concert hall in our head to see Bob leaning out over the packed, intimate crowd - and he was smiling - no, grinning, from ear to ear as the crowd roared out after almost every verse like revolutionaries rallying behind their returning hero.
I almost never saw Bob smile and dance around like that night. You could tell he got charged from the crowd right from the start, and it made the band light and happy. And, the music was flawless. Mostly tunes I didn't recognize, but that kept us hang on for the next tune.
Three encores with the Dead's Phil Lech coming onstage with his six string bass and amazing versions of 'Friend of the Devil' and 'Fade Away' for a finale.
Bob had been mostly absent for years since we saw him with the Dead and Tom Petty at RFK and he couldn't be heard over the music - his guitar wasn't just out of tune, it wasn't on at all for the first couple of songs - and a bemused Bob just strummed along with the band anyway.
My wife and I were out on out first date that we had been able to manage since moving to town with my Alzheimer's ailing dad. We'd secured a 'sitter,' just like we had done for our then-grown and flown children over the years of raising them, and it was very much the same fish out of water feeling we experienced as young parents; worrying about our charge at home, and practically guilty at leaving our responsibilities at home to enjoy ourselves.
It was real hostage stuff. When mom died, we found that dad wasn't able to function as independently as we'd thought. Right after wife and I had begun our caregiving odyssey her mother died, as well, and we were challenged to jump right from the anticipated end of raising our two grown sons, to caring for my dad in much the same way you would be there for a good teenager who needed constant supervision.
We'd started our time with dad scrunched up in his attic room in the middle of the summer, just to keep him straight and out of trouble before we could wrap him up and move him out with us.
So, there our sad sack selves were, out on the town, trying to make the most out of an event that was just another night out for many; with the improbable need to have it make up for the countless hours 'in the attic,' as we'd refer to our open-ended mission.
The hook to this story was that there was a fellow with a video camera hidden under his jacket in the seat right beside me filming the concert, bootlegging or whatever, I'd guess. I caught on because I bumped into him a few minutes into the show, saw he was filming and reflexively apologized, like, "oh, sorry man, didn't know you were filming."
Whatever care I might have had about the propriety of it all didn't take my attention away from the show, and this fellow filmed the entire performance beside us while we had the time of our lives. More importantly, I'm 99.9% certain I've found the very video on youtube...
I had a sudden impulse to look for a bootleg of the show (before phone cameras), and put 'Bob Dylan Baltimore Arena' into the Bing video search, and bingo, up popped this vid. Checked the date with the ticket stub in my concert ticket bowl, and sure enough, it was the same show. Same angle, same distance, and I'm almost sure I can hear my wife and I chattering between songs; even the camera shot taking a wild spin around the room right at about the point where I would have practically put my coat in his lap.
I watched it all the way through, and it was like a vivid dream. It was my wife's birthday, and she was just as captured by this complete film fleshing out the brief strips of memories we've carried around in our minds for 23 years. Simply magical to now be able to absorb what an amazing performance this was.
See for yourself... hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
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-Ron
...and you.
There's really nothing like having a recording of a precious event. We're fortunate music can hold so many memories. 