Knock Knock Knockin’ On Dylan’s Door

It all started so innocently, a simple ad in some online publication whose name I don’t even remember. Bob Dylan coming to California, it read. Really? THE Bob Dylan? The one whose songs we used to sing back in the day during lunch hour, sitting in a long-haired mournful circle on the junior high school’s front lawn? THAT Bob Dylan? Turns out it was, and that The Legend himself would be at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. Hmmm…I’ve only been to a handful of mega-concerts in my life…maybe it was time for a live concert. And it was Dylan…

Taking a trip down Memory Lane is tricky since so many of our most vivid memories were forged decades ago when we were young, passionate, and unjaded, not yet ground down by the inevitable tumble through the jaws of the grinder we call Growing Up. These memories burrow deeply into our bones where they live forever. The problem is that whatever the intensity of those memories, however timelessly we still see ourselves within them, the sad truth is that we’re just not the same people we were all those decades ago when we were actually living them.

The music bound us together, for it seemed at that time that the music spoke to us personally, with San Francisco at its beating heart. It was as if San Francisco set the soundtrack for everything that came after, instead of the other way around. The music uplifted us, separated us from the generation before, and defined us.

My own first live concert was in the summer of 1969, at Fillmore West, when Janis Joplin joined the Grateful Dead on stage. That unforgettable night, Deadheads galore were densely packed into a sweaty ball in the smoky, strobe-lit auditorium on South Van Ness Avenue. Some revelers may mostly remember the Dead; but my memory is solid Joplin. I found some film of that performance on YouTube. The grainy close-up images of Joplin took me right back to that undulating mass of humanity in what felt like a tiny space. I realized watching the film that I had been standing about 10 feet in front of Joplin at that moment, on that very night, in that very spot. The film couldn’t do justice to the real experience, of course: the screaming crowd mashed up with Joplin’s soaring emotion, the drops of sweat flying off the ends of her hair like tiny crystals in the bright stage lights, her passion too big for the hot room. Janis held us in the palm of her hand, raising us to our feet with her voice and crashing at the end as we ourselves crashed in exhausted heaps on the filthy floor.

But that was then. Back here in 2024, the concert experience bears little resemblance to its ancient 1969 iteration before cell phones, the internet, and guerilla marketing. The first unavoidable hurdle is buying a ticket. Unless you’re fortunate enough to be gifted a couple of tickets for your birthday, you’ll have to buy your tickets from a mega online ticketing corporation — you know, the ones recently called to account for their sneaky “extra” charges. The website we used featured a pious banner proclaiming its transparency, though if true I suspect those usurious charges have simply changed hats: they’re now upgrades to your so-called “concert experience,” starting with the ticket itself, which unsurprisingly mirrors our sharply stratified economic times. The Shoreline holds a maximum of 22,000 souls, though 16,000 of them are “lawn“ seats, in this case a muddy slope long ago scraped clean of any greenery beneath platoons of scurrying feet. The tickets range from $60 and change for the lawn to several hundred dollars for the first rows closest to the stage. (I paid $3.50 for my Fillmore West ticket, purchased at the door.) Buying a ticket these days is not as simple as inputting your credit card info and clicking the buy-it button. There are choices to be made. Lawn chair? ($15 online, $20 at the concert) Parking? Premier for $200, VIP for $75. The free option was not prominently featured online, and there is no box to choose it; but it does exist and involves walking a couple of hot, dusty miles to and fro. More on this later. Once you purchase your ticket you have to figure out how to get it into your cell phone, which doubles as your ticket. (I can hear techies harrumphing at the depths of my ignorance; I challenge them to a spelling bee…)

The next step was getting to the concert. Our houseguests (Michelle and Ben, formerly of Ukiah) drove because they thankfully knew how to operate the GPS in their car. All appeared rosy as the four of us set out on our 63-mile journey from the East Bay to Mountain View.

Once off the 101, however, the nightmare snarl began and $200 for preferred parking seemed more and more like a bargain not to be missed. Suffice to say that it took over an hour to travel the couple of miles to the parking lot, barely visible in the last quarter-mile beneath a cloud of choking dust and exhaust. Finally parked, we checked to make sure we weren’t carrying any of a long list of prohibited items: no food (except for what you can pack in a see-through Ziploc bag); no drinks, even water, if the bottle isn’t sealed; no folding chairs or blankets (unless rented onsite); no binoculars (a real bummer given our perches on the faraway not-lawn); and no pharmaceutically induced inappropriate behavior, including alcohol.

So we walked and walked to the amphitheater, eyes squinting as we trudged west into the setting sun along a rocky path. Once inside after managing to retrieve our tickets from my husband’s cell phone, we emerged from the turnstiles into a dizzy maelstrom of consumer opportunity. Duh. No wonder you can’t bring anything with you; you’re supposed to buy it all at the concert. Eateries of every conceivable origin, booths for wine, beer, or cocktails, t-shirts, hats, you name it. It was like going to the county fair, just five times more expensive. If there was a pfennig to be made, there was somebody selling it in a booth: the ultimate consumer experience.

Climbing halfway up the no-lawn lawn, it was time to choose a spot for our rented folding chairs and weary bones. We settled near the beginning of a haphazard row, reasoning that it would be easy to get in and out of. Wrong. What it did was set us up at the terminus of the pedestrian freeway that surged at our feet. One man tromped on my right foot, making me happy I was wearing my cowboy boots. Whew! Hobbling all those miles back to the car would have been Hell with an injured foot. We had missed the opening band so had time to check out the place before Dylan began. The huge overhead monitors (which made it almost possible to identify the ant-like performers on the faraway stage), blasted the commercials that I routinely mute if I’m watching TV at home. Devil Juice, anyone? Pizza? I wonder if Dylan would buy any of these junk edibles…

The amphitheater appeared to be sold out, and revealed some interesting demographics. First off, in our very large lawn section of several hundred, there were exactly two black people, both men: one was with a group of white men, and one sold lemonade from a tray suspended by a strap around his neck. Hmmmm…here we were in the heart of the Bay Area (6.7% black at last count), virtually across the street from Google, and there were basically no black people in the audience. Dylan was clearly not a draw for non-white folks, something that should probably have flashed brighter warning lights back in the ‘60s. Female attire fell roughly into two camps: old Boomers, who dressed as they probably did back in the 60s in flowing ground-length skirts, shawls and other bygone finery; and young nymphettes so scantily glad I averted my eyes when they walked by. I realize that times have changed and all but still puzzle over why so many young women, in the full flower of their equality, choose to dress like Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie (she of the “lookin’ like a model on the cover of a magazine, She’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen”). Go figure.

Dylan finally crossed the stage to his spot behind the keyboard. Though hard to see from the lawn you could sorta hear him, though I quickly realized I should have kept up with his recent music since I didn’t recognize any of it. Not true for second-act Willie Nelson, now 90, who along with his son offered up some old chestnuts like You Were Always on my Mind and Mamas, Don‘t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys. As the final act, it became increasingly difficult to follow Nelson since the Stampede to the Parking Lot began in earnest in the middle of his performance.

It took one hour to reach the parking lot and two hours to get out of it. During that time our friend Ben provided the following tutorial on creation of the parking lot, as told to Bruce McEwen:

Ben, a self-styled “cat wrangler” (veterinary assistant) grew up near the amphitheater, his dear old dad a cop in South San Francisco. He used to go duck hunting down behind the dump, upon which the amphitheater’s parking lots were built, the crust of dirt over the garbage covered up with “lawn” provided by Mancini Furniture; but it was well-trod lawn and we were glad to have a ground cloth. Dylan sang a song about a little boy and girl who got baked in a pie (Under The Red Sky), and later, tramping over the pie crust to the car Ben pointed out holes — which I took for gofer holes — but were actually vents for the methane gas to escape…

The escape route from the vast parking lot was shaped like an upside-down Christmas tree: the $200 parkers at the base, close to the exits, with all other branches from the peasants’ parking lot competing for limited opportunities to merge into The Road to the Outside World. Then it was drive drive drive again home, freeway after freeway unspooling before us in the wee hours. Arrival: 2 a.m.