I’m pretty certain it was Moira who said, “Wait!” twice, the second time with less conviction and volume, as though she was already wondering what she was doing. This is ironic because Moira knew more about Dylan than Darlene and Marilyn combined. Marilyn and Darlene are the two closest to the flagpole, raising it my sister is the soldier at the back, reaching for the pole but not quite touching it. The only things missing are the fourth Marine and the flag.
I hadn’t seen the famous Second World War photo of US Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima at this point in my life, but memory is a fluid thing, and in my mind’s eye, that’s the pose the three of them assume. “But I forget the words.”Īnd my sister and her friends rose, as one, to tell him what they were.
NIGHT CALL HAT HOW TO
“I don’t know how to tell you this, man,” he said, laughing a little. But he kept on strumming-longer, I thought, than he should have. Dylan sang the first verse and then strummed a bit while everyone waited for the second. The second song he started I knew less well, possibly because it was newer: “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The song was about a rich white man who killed a Black maid, Hattie Carroll, with his cane. I knew this as soon as he started singing his first song, “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” I was surprised at how well I knew it-I had only heard it before drifting up through my bedroom floor from the laundry room. He adjusted his harmonica holder, which looked like my cousin Miles’s dental headgear, and said, “Hey, man,” to the audience, just those two words, and strummed his guitar once. Who wore a scarf inside? His hair was electric and crazy. He was wearing a blue shirt and, for some reason, a scarf. Then Dylan came out of the wings, and everyone started clapping. It reminded me vaguely of being in synagogue. We sat down, and the lights dimmed on everything but the stage. Our seats, on the other hand, were terrific, even I knew that: not front row but close enough, three or maybe four rows back, centre section. When we finally walked up to Massey Hall, I remember being struck by how unimpressive the entrance was it was flanked by a set of matching fire escapes and looked more like the back of a building than the front of one. Neither did the length of time it took Marilyn to find a parking spot she could fit the car into. I remember thinking I might get the chance to be squashed into the back seat with Darlene, but I was instructed by my sister to ride shotgun beside Marilyn, which did not make me happy. The car we went in-which belonged to Moira’s other friend, a tall, politically serious girl named Marilyn Stransman-was a white Chevy II convertible with a red vinyl interior. What’s important, though, is that, regardless of the exact reason, I was there. Instead of hopping down right away to go to the phone, she crooked her index finger at me and, when I reached the dryer, leaned over, whispered, “Happy birthday,” and French kissed me. When I came into the laundry room, Darlene, who was small and beautiful in a way that made her seem always slightly out of focus, was sitting on the dryer, smoking a cigarette. At one point, Darlene’s mother called our house looking for her, and my mother sent me downstairs to tell her she was wanted on the phone. The last time I’d seen Darlene was at my birthday party, in September, when Moira had had people over not for my party but to listen to music-Dylan, probably-in our basement laundry room. This was Darlene Burke, one of my sister’s two friends who came with us that night.
Even if the concert was a parental decree, though, I can think of just one reason why I would have surrendered without more of a fight.
Possibly it was a directive from my parents, who were away in New York on their annual fall expedition to hear jazz and didn’t trust me to spend any time at home alone (at least not since their Manhattan trip the previous year, when I enjoyed several unsupervised nights at our house with half a dozen of my friends, deep-frying food in the kitchen and playing hockey in the living room). I don’t remember exactly how I ended up being dragged along to hear Dylan, whose voice at the time I thought was beyond bad. Dylan was twenty-three at the time Massey Hall, which was on its way to becoming one of the most iconic concert venues on the continent, was seventy. In November 1964, shortly after I turned fourteen, I drove downtown with my older sister, Moira, and two of her high school friends-all of them seventeen-to see Bob Dylan perform at Toronto’s Massey Hall. “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.”
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