Bob Dylan Blues

Bob Dylan - Earls Court - 15^th June 1978

The story begins some 2½ years prior to this concert, when a spotty, unloved, geeky, 1st year Physics undergraduate was adopted into a small clique of much cooler humanities students. How or why this happened is still, to this day, a mystery. But it revolutionized the life of that student like being whizzed around on a whirligig.

I embraced this group like a child in a sweetshop (for that student was me) - I devoured all the treats I could lay my hands on. A flood of ideas and experiences washed over me, ideas from literature, philosophy and ways of being. However I did not drop out wholeheartedly, something held me in check and I steadfastly stuck to my Physics degree, attending the lectures, tutorials and lab sessions. But in my free time I orbited a different sun, and Bob Dylan orbited that sun too.

In our rooms, chewing the cud, Irvin would play Bob Dylan records - a lot of Blonde on Blonde, a ragbag of rock and blues - Blood on the Tracks, a masterpiece of restless emotion - Highway 61 Revisited, rebellious and raucous.

Two years passed by, full of life for a student living through his belated teenage years, devouring the opportunities to experience live music, sometimes taking chances and other times playing safe. Then came the announcement that Bob Dylan would be playing his first UK concert tour dates in 10 years with a string of appearances at London Earls Court in the summer of 1978. And unusually batches of tickets would be going on sale in major cities in the UK by personal application only, all at the same time - on the morning of Sunday 7th May, with a limit of 4 tickets per applicant.

A quick check revealed four of our group eager for a ticket, and because of the high demand, we surmised that to be in with a chance we would have to queue all night, but we could do so as a relay with only one person being in the queue at any time. So we organized a rota of four hour shifts - I took the night shift up until 2 a.m. The queue ran along the pavement from the council offices at the bottom of New Walk in Leicester. I sat on the hard flagstones and whiled away the hours. Everything was orderly and peaceful and after my stint I went home to bed. In the morning came the news that we had been successful and the precious paper ticket was passed to me.

I continued to study conscientiously towards my final undergraduate exams, putting in long hours in the library revising. The three written exams were completed before the Dylan concert but when the timetable for the oral examination was posted on the noticeboard I discovered I had been allocated the first slot on the morning of 16th June, i.e. the morning after the Dylan concert. Checking the train timetable showed that the first train back from London in the morning would not get me back in time for the exam. So I went to see my tutor T. B. (Tibby) Jones - a short, brusque, unsympathetic man from the atmospheric physics department. The conversation went something like this:

Me:	Would it be possible to move my oral examination to the afternoon of the 16th?
Jones:	Why is that?
Me:	I have a prior appointment that means I cannot make the earlier time.
Jones:	What is that?
Me:	I have to be in London the evening before and the first train in the morning does not get me back in time.
Jones:	Why do you have to be in London?
Me:	(becoming exasperated) I am going to a Bob Dylan concert and there is no train back afterwards.
Jones:	(clearly not a Dylan fan) That is not a good enough reason to change it.

So what to do? The only option was to take the last train home on the evening of the concert - but that would mean having to leave before the end. Did I really want a degree after putting in 3 years of effort - too right I did.

So the four of us set off for London - little realizing it was the farewell tour for this band. With youthful optimism you do not imagine that there would not be many more moments together as a group - a culmination of 2½ years of shared student experiences that for me was an awakening from an extended adolescence. We arrived at the concert hall in plenty of time and hung about until they opened the doors and waited inside for the concert to begin. Maybe I could have asked Dylan to start early so I could see the whole set, but there was the usual impatient wait for the concert to start.

And then he was on stage, this mythical figure who had sheperded me on my student journey. He brought with him a large band plus backing singers (from the Street Legal sessions), and in the vast concert hall with no video screens to assist he did not command the stage - I guess by design, he was there to sing his songs.

In the first half of the show he played old and new, all time classics and songs I did not know. Using the band to re-image the songs into a fuller yet flatter style with less emphasis on the delivery of those extraordinary lyrics which live in their own singular world.

And when the half-time break came I had to escape, leaving my camarades behind. Leaving a concert is usually to be part of a flow of scattering people, but here it was reduced to a trickle of one watched over by some security guards. I crossed London on the tube and beneath the vast engine shed of St. Pancras Station caught the train back to Leicester.

The next morning I arrived as scheduled for my oral exam. Tibby Jones was in charge of the viva with the goal of validating my knowledge of the subject of my degree. I managed to make it through without any major disasters and at the end, clearly remembering our previous conversation, Jones said to me I think you will be happy that you made the effort to turn up. No I am not fucking happy that I made the effort, you horrible little man, was what I said in my head but did not utter. I merely smiled a forced smile and left.

That should have been that, I walked away with my well-earned degree, but there is a postscript. Some years later my father, who worked as a broadcasting engineer, investigating and designing aerials for the BBC, returned from a conference held by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, and told me he had met someone from Leicester University, someone called Professor Tudor Jones, and what a nice man he seemed. Nice man, my arse - was my polite reply - you don't know the half of it!

© Nick 2020