We pilgrimage to see the Bard:

By Dan Szczesny

Tonight, on the evening before my family drives north to pay our respects to Bob Dylan, my history with the Bard is on my mind. This will be the first time my 11-year-old daughter pays witness, and you never know when your life will change. Or where.

Magic can happen anywhere. My story with Mr. Zimmerman begins in a bowling alley.

But first, Dante.

Early on in Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, he addresses both his love, Beatrice, as well as the reader. The unnamed protagonist in the short volume of (mostly) love poetry is setting you up, suggesting his working memory begins not at birth, not early in life, but at the moment he finds love, the moment he found his love. Everything before doesn’t matter.

In that book which is my memory,

On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,

Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’

In the last year of my undergraduate degree in English at Buffalo State College, I had the chance to select some optional classes. One I picked was an Introduction to Dante, taught by an Irish professor whose name I’ve forgotten: a curly-haired, mischievous man who would recite Dante’s poetry in front of us and wore cardigans and sneakers.

I’d always been interested in Gustave Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and was eager to plunge into the depths of Hell and the lofty exaltation of Heaven. The professor had other ideas.

He insisted we go back to the beginning, go back to the sorrow and sentimentality of Dante’s early work. We had to study La Vita Nuova first.

I was unenthusiastic. Then, in a passing hallway conversation that would change my life, the professor – perhaps sensing my ambivalence – cornered me and suggested I look more closely at the text, try to find the connections.

He said it just like that. “Find the connections.”

“You remember when Dylan sings about getting that book of poems from the 13^th century?” the professor asked me. I didn’t. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I nodded. “That’s La Vita Nuova, man! That’s the book she gives him.”

I knew Bob Dylan. I didn’t change the station when his music came on, nor did I love him. I mean, “Like a Rolling Stone” was fine. Jimi Hendrix did a Dylan cover, right? Dylan was that hippie folk guy, like Joan Biaz or Arlo Guthrie, yeah?

But it wasn’t Dylan in and of himself – by which I mean his music or his celebrity – that became my revelation. Rather, it was those words that I discovered through Dylan. Find the connection.

A few weeks after my chat with my professor, a chat I had by then nearly forgotten, I found myself playing Asteroids in a bowling alley. This was a regular event. I grew up in Buffalo. I bowled on a league twice a week. No, not candlepin. Real bowling. My bowling ball was passed down to me from my father. This was the way.

Just off the main alley space, the Airport Lanes had a fairly sizable bar with a couple stand-up arcade games. Space Invaders, of course. Pac-Man. And my favorite, Asteroids. We’d circulate in and out of the bar sometimes to play in between games. I was there, alone at the console, blasting 2D asteroids, when THE song came on over the warbly bar speaker system.

“Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed, Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all, If her hair was still red…”

The song was background, static to me. But then Dylan got to that tenth verse. My universe exploded. She opens the book to a particular page and hands it to him. She wants him to read not just the book, but a poem. Which one?

Only one other time in my life did hearing music in a public place affect me like that. It was years later in a record shop in Philadelphia, I heard Thelonious Monk for the first time, and suddenly Jazz was standing right there in front of me.

For Dylan, though, I felt that connection across space and centuries.

Song lyrics could be poetry. Song lyrics could be poetry.

The next morning, I called the record shop in the mall – no internet then, remember.

“Listen,” I asked the clerk on the other end, “what Dylan album has the song about the Dante poetry?”

There was a long pause.

I pushed on. “The song with the line in the chorus, ‘Tiger Lovin’ Blues.’ What album is that?”

After an even longer pause, the clerk said, “Do you mean ‘Tangled Up in Blue?’”

“Yes!” I yelled into the phone, not even concerned about the absolute worst and most embarrassing misheard lyric faux pas. “That song! Do you have that song?”

“That’s Blood on the Tracks, man,” the clerk said. “Of course we have it.”

And so it came to pass. I listened to that album over and over. Poetry in lyrics. Not songs, but stories. The chord separations were entrancing. In that place I was at that time, Blood on the Tracks was my soundtrack.

This was late 1989, so I picked up Oh Mercy next. To this day I contend “Most of the Time” is one of the great love songs.

Then I went backwards. I knew “Like a Rolling Stone,” so I brought home this oddly titled album, Highway 61 Revisited. Try to imagine what it was like hearing THAT album for the first time. You can’t. I can’t. That would be like asking an astronaut how they felt seeing Earth from space the first time. You can’t describe that. You can only feel it.

I devoured it all. And when vinyl switched to CDs, I changed up as well. And now when I ask Alexa to play my favorite songs, Dylan comes on, over and over. Finally, in the midst of the pandemic, Dylan shocked the world one (perhaps) last time and released Rough and Rowdy Ways. I bought the vinyl and listened on headphones as the air outside my house swirled with disease. A few years later, that album seems forgotten. But not to me. It’s one of his best, and it saved me yet again.

I saw him in concert exactly once, and as other, better writers have pointed out, his live shows can be… challenging. But performance doesn’t matter. And it won’t, again, at least for me, when I see him today with my family. Perhaps as you’re reading this, he’s serenading us.

I don’t mean to put too fine a point on the obvious construct that a musical artist, that music in general, can profoundly impact your life. There’s nothing new about that sentiment, and it’s inarguable. But I do contend that without Dylan, I would be different. I would be lesser.

Now, with my children, I seek connection. My life of stories is, in part, because of his stories – not specific ones, of course, just his ability to tell them.

And so it goes. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. And until then, I’ll find the connections and tell the stories. I’ll tell the stories here, to you, so long as you all wish to hear them. And I’ll tell the stories to her, so long as she wishes to experience them with me. The latest story begins today when we pilgrimage north to witness The Bard. We’ll see you all after our reckoning.

Dan Szczesny is a long-time journalist, author, and librarian living in New Hampshire. He’s written several books of travel memoir, poetry, non-fiction and hiking guides. Along with his daughter, Dan writes a daily Substack newsletter called Day By Day, and he edits his daughter’s music interview Substack called Interviews By Uma.