Revisiting Highway 61 Revisited

Editor's note: This post turned out way longer than I intended. If you just want the gist of it, scroll down to the "Potbelly" graphic and read from there.

When I was a teenager I used to save the receipt for every CD that I bought because I thought that I if I ever got tired of it, I could try to return it for the full price instead of selling it used and getting ripped off. Back then, the backing inside of CD cases was always black, so I would pop it open and stick the receipt behind it (I lamented the day when CDs switched to clear backs on all cases and my receipt-saving days abruptly ended). I never even attempted to return any of my CDs because I was just too attached to them, but saving the receipts was not useless because each those receipts are now a chronicle of when I discovered certain artists.

By the receipt in the CD case of Highway 61 Revisited, I can cite November 4, 1995 as the day I discovered Bob Dylan. I remember the day clearly: I was at Salt City CDs, my favorite teenage music store haunt, just right next door to the Tower Theater. Bountiful never really had a cool record store and this was before we could drive, so we used to take an epic-length trek with much walking and several bus transfers to get out to the funky neighborhood of 9th and 9th in Salt Lake (it was considerably less funky when I went out last Christmas break - it looks all corporate and Disney-fied now). Back in November '95 I was just coming out of my all-Aerosmith-all-the-time phase and I needed some new tunes to fill the hole in my soul (little Aerosmith humor there). I saw Highway 61 sitting on a specials rack and I had heard "Like a Rolling Stone" a few times on the radio and liked it, so I took a chance and bought the album.

Over the next year I accumulated a flurry of receipts of other Bob Dylan albums - I just couldn't get enough of his stuff. But unlike my many other teenage musical obsessions (there was the all-Beatles phase, the all-Zeppelin phase, the all-Floyd phase, etc. with accompanying t-shirts and posters, of course), Bob Dylan made me want to go out and make music. I would listen to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or The Times They Are A-Changin' and I was astonished that someone could say so much and make such incredible music with just a voice, a guitar, and a harmonica.

So I went out and bought a harmonica and a contraption to hold it up in front of my face while I played my guitar, and I learned me some Dylan tunes. My first performance came in my 9th grade English class. We had to read a biography of the person of our choosing and then do an oral presentation about them. I naturally chose Dylan and for my project I busted out "Queen Jane Approximately" on my guitar/harmonica. Soon after that I played Dylan at retirement homes (my harmonica fell down during my performance and I had to stop and prop it up again - fortunately the most of audience didn't seem too aware of what was going on), church talent shows, my junior high Madrigal Variety Show. The zenith of my Dylan performances came when I was a sophomore at Woods Cross High and I sang "John Wesley Harding" at the talent assembly in front of the entire school.

But in high school I started to take music more seriously, doing things like taking voice lessons, being in the school musicals, taking music theory classes, and being a member (read: president) of the Madrigal choir (while I'm tooting my own horn, I was also my school's Music Sterling Scholar). With all this concentration on "real" music I pretty much stopped playing the guitar and Dylan stuff altogether.

It wasn't until I moved out to Michigan that I really started playing the guitar again. When I was all moving all my stuff into my apartment here I found my guitar among my things - I had hardly remembered even packing it. I pulled it out for the first time in years and found that I played about as well know as I did back then (which is really not saying that much). I'd forgotten how fun it was just to sit around and jam on my guitar, and I started playing quite a lot.

Soon thereafter my ward here had a talent show and I whipped out one of my old Dylan guitar/harmonica standbys, "To Ramona." After all the years of studying and performing opera, oratorio, art song, and other "real" music, I had forgotten how much fun it is to play these little four-chord Dylan tunes.

Let's speed this narrative along... there is a sandwich chain around here called Potbelly where they have live music during busy hours, and last fall I gave myself the goal of working up enough material to play a set there. Last week my roommate Seth had some coupons for free sandwiches there, so while we were there I asked what I would have to do to play there. They scheduled an audition time for me, so on Tuesday I went in at 3:30 p.m. when the place was absolutely dead and I played for the general manager and a few of the lower down managers. The told me, "Why don't you play us three songs and then we'll talk a little." So I played through three songs and they all just went about their business. So I kept playing. About ten songs later, I went up to the counter just to remind them that I was still there, and they said they let me keep playing because they liked me. I still don't have a definite date set that I am going to go play there because I told them that I wanted a few more weeks to work up more material, because I basically exhausted everything I had prepared in about a half hour. But be sure that when I play for real I will let y'all know about it.

But I was proud of myself for the way that the audition went. The whole time I was playing there were only maybe 6 customers total, and they were not paying attention to me at all except for at the end of songs, when they would give light applause and then go back to their conversations. But in a strange way, that was very comforting to me. It was like they were just accepting me playing as a given and enjoying it without overly scrutinizing me. I've never been very confident about my guitar playing ability, but when I made mistakes in my set, I could see that nobody noticed or cared and it wasn't a big deal. What a difference from the "real" music world I usually inhabit, where you know that everyone in the audience will pick up on your every mistake. This was just about having fun.

I tried to mix up my selections (I played some Beatles, Beck, Radiohead, Shins, some Brazilian stuff, a song from Buffy, even something from Sesame Street), but of course the bulk of my set was Dylan - it just had to be. I just printed out three more Dylan songs so I'm off to start learning to them.

P.S. - Thanks to my brother-in-law Lance for donating his old nylon-string guitar to me when I was about thirteen. It's the same guitar I still play today.