As he takes the stage, Bob Dylan tends to look as if he has just walked into the wrong room. There seems to be a sense of accident about the whole thing; as if "the road" really has brought him stumbling into your town without the benefit of promotion and publicity. It's a low-key approach which retains an air of the troubadour trekking from place to place, the whole thing anything but glamorous. Apart from a spectacular collection of shirts and, of course, the price of the tickets, there seem to be few outward trappings of status. It's as if a Guthrie or a Blind Lemon is just doing his travelling musician thing.
It was with these contradictions very much in evidence that Bob Dylan appeared on the banks of the Boyne back in 1984. Looking both startled and stern, he was covered in orange make-up, wore black eyeliner and sported a dangling ear-ring which quivered by his cheek. It was quite a sight as he dug his fingers into his temples, shook his head as if to clear it, and seemed to wonder what we were all doing there - the multitude of Dylanites who tail him everywhere he goes. I was right at the front on that sunny Slane day, ecstatic, confused and more than a little bewildered. It was my first sight of someone whose voice I had lived with for many, many years. At last, it was a rub of the relic.
I first heard of Bob Dylan when a neighbour named a son after him. That kind of thing was unheard of in those days - anything beyond John, James and Joseph was considered a bit fancy - and this new young Dylan had been baptised in honour of some American folk singer who sang through his nose! It wasn't Dylan Thomas, it wasn't even Dylan from The Magic Round- about - it was some kind of hippie who, in local parlance, could sing none. It was unsettling.
Perhaps it wasn't quite so outrageous when it was discovered that Bob Dylan was the man who had written Blowing in the Wind - a song of some vaguely religious and noble sentiment beloved of guitar-toting nuns and girl-guide campfires. But while that might have called off the hounds of disapproval, it didn't assist me at all. Blowing in the Wind developed an unfortunate association with trendy clerics which lingered for years, and soon I suspected that this man Dylan might also have written I Am The Lord of The Dance - on the basis of which I ignored him for too many of my young years. I would make up for it later, however, when the penny finally dropped.
The double album Live at the Budokan - which we instantly renamed Live at Bundoran - proved to be the revelation. I set about catching up on everything I had missed, and found just about all of it to be truly wonderful. Some of my hard-rockin' friends were cruel, but others (mainly the ones who wrote doggerel and didn't know many girls) discovered Dylan too, and, in those many private moments in maths class, took to writing bits of Dylan lyrics on the backs of jotters. A particular favourite was
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles.
The next step was to save up for a 25 quid guitar and wait patiently for some possible excuse to wear a hat. Quite soon, all harnessed up with a harmonica (but still no hat), I realised with some shock that I could manage to sound reasonably like him. I sang through my nose and messed with the lines the same way he did and it made an Enniskillen bedroom feel like a New York coffee-house; rainy, late-night and romantic. At other times a Fermanagh road could be Highway 61 and lonesome. That's the age I was. I'm sure I sounded, again in local parlance, "cat" - but finding Bob Dylan had undoubtedly been some small form of salvation.
Slane Castle in 1984 was the first of many Dylan pilgrimages - many of them undeniably peculiar experiences, given the nature of things. These were not exactly performances as we had come to recognise them; to turn up at all seemed like a pure act of faith. The songs often took some serious decoding, and it often seemed as if Dylan was trying very hard to convince us that he wasn't really Bob Dylan at all, deconstructing his own myth with rather too much success. At times like these I found myself behaving less like a fan and more like a supporter, cheering on my man when he made the odd good move. It was like watching Arsenal - and I began to wonder why I put myself through it time after time. "C'mon Bob! Good man Bob! Now do that again! That's more like it!"
Of course the reason for regular attendance was that Dylan, even at his worst, was extraordinary. Even with his hood up I could still see the figure I had watched over and over again on The Last Waltz - unassailably cool, the camera descending on the broad white hat, the nose, the curls and the piercing eyes. That was the Bob Dylan who shrugged and bared his top teeth in a smile and rode nonchalantly up and down on the beat - patently wise, passionate, goodnatured and impressively careless. Bob in the hood was rather hard to fathom but, now and again, the words would hit you and you knew you were in the presence of genius.
Genius is a big word, but it applies to all the Bob Dylans. The first one the world got to hear about emerged within the folk scene. It was a revival which had kicked off in New York in the 1940s and had continued until the boom of the early 1960s. Dylan, who had bought the shades and changed his name, joined in with considerable zeal and modelled himself on Woody Guthrie and on black blues singers like Jessie Fuller. He wasn't a copyist in any bad sense of the word, but it would be a mistake to believe that one day he had just wandered out into the backwoods with a guitar on his back. He was, rather, a serious devotee with an equally serious talent.