A Bob Dylan Concert

I got to know Bob Dylan in my college years in the early 1990s, not too late for a Chinese. I heard some of his songs in the excellent Nanjing Music Radio, but mostly I read his lyrics in a book I had about Rock & Roll and they were like anthem to me at that time. I knew I found my spiritual home in his songs as well as many others' from the book. I never felt alone since then even though I barely listened to them since then.

Fifteen years had gone by and I lived in such a way and looked in such a way that you would never have guessed I had a heart of rock. Trotting in my silver high heels in the most sleek district of Shanghai, where glimmering towers of office buildings enslave thousands of decent-looking, well-educated citizens of this metropolitan, I always had this feeling that I'm an under-cover in the crowd and I often amuse myself with the imagination of me coming out of the closet, or the revolving door.

So when Bob Dylan dropped by Shanghai to give one concert on this foreign soil, I felt it my obligation to make the pilgrimage.

 

So I arrived at the Shanghai Stadium, and found with great comfort a Starbuck which I never knew existed to cater to my physical hunter and thirst just by the entrance. It's almost sold out by the time the concert opens.

 

We sit in the plastic seat at the far-back where the cheapest tickets belong, and found with dismay how small the figures appear on the stage and how impossible to actually see any face, let alone facial expressions. He's wearing a cap anyway.

 

As I was in the pit of fever for Weibo (the Chinese Twitter), I started to report the concert on it and here're my fires:

 

"Waiting for Bob Dylan!"

 

"Shanghai is still lukewarm towards Rock, they can't even fill a stadium of ten thousand"

 

"By eye count, one fourth are foreigners and there seem to be nobody from the 1990s"

 

"My blood still remembers the sound of electric guitar"

 

"Bob Dylan is a small white cap tonight, every other thing is surreal"

 

"Bob Dylan refuses to sing his old classics, a bad idea flash through, is he trying to force us to listen to his new songs (not so new anymore)"

 

" There are but ten glow stick in the stadium, do we have too high a CPI, or too old an audience"

 

"Bob Dylan actually sings pretty clear, much better than Jay Chow"

 

"Can Bob Dylan or anyone stay relevant for 40 years, except for Confucius, or God himself?"

 

"Bob Dylan really is strong for his age. Now this is a new idea: when he go to heaven and meet up the old guys such as Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendricks, Janis Joplin, would they laugh at him: look at you, how come you become so old?"

 

"Good night, Bob"

 

We came out and came back into the muddled air of Shanghai's night, I felt still unreal from the idea that I was just so close, and so far-away from Bob Dylan and everything he represented in my life. But I decided once and again that there's nothing more important as ART and there's nobody as precious as ARTIST and that I should finally throw myself into my destined journey as an artist as soon as possible. 

 

Moving just a few yards in the dispersing crowd however, amidst smart street vendors selling Bob Dylan CDs, I was greeted with a street artist performing on his guitar, trying to make a tune of some sort. This served as an unwelcome but live alert to my just inflated mood: he once believed in his art just as Bob Dylan had believed?