Travel Blog

Saturday evening I went to the Broward Center to see Bob Dylan. I wouldn’t have gone if he’d been in a big arena, but I liked the fact that he had chosen an elegant concert hall that was almost literally down the street. I still regret not seeing Sinatra when he performed there in the ’90s, even though his voice was shot by then. For Dylan, a shot voice was signature, and immutable.   

Though I had heard of concerts where he didn’t even try, treating his audiences with a kind of contempt.

A multigenerational crowd loitered in the lobby. Men outnumbered women, a few of them paunchy in black, declarative T-shirts. My seat in the mezzanine was between two large males. Rick, who introduced himself first, was with his wife; Steve sat with his wife and 20-something daughter. “She told me about the concert,” he explained. “I didn’t even know she listened to Dylan.” Then he launched into a detailed history of the music scene in Detroit.  

The curtain went up, thankfully, a little after 8, revealing a dimly lit stage with Dylan seated in the center at a piano. A more dignified pose, I thought, than sitting with a guitar (à la Willie Nelson). Without introduction, the band launched into the first song. Followed by the next one. After about the fourth, a woman shouted “Like a Rolling Stone!,” which of course Dylan ignored. “Gods do not answer letters,” John Updike wrote of Ted Williams’ refusal to come out of the dugout after hitting a home run in his final at-bat.

A couple times people started clapping rhythmically to a melody, then quickly stopped. They craved the shared, raucous communion of a rock concert, but the so-called Rough and Rowdy Ways tour had more in common with a recital. People listened silently, reverently, straining to make out the words of a laureate. Up in the mezzanine, I failed miserably; the most success I had was with a song about Key West.

But the voice – that voice that has been wailing in the background of my life for more than half century – had a hypnotic effect. The hall at times took on the stillness of a dream, not least because I was hearing Bob Dylan on the banks of the New River.

Outside, afterwards, I passed a middle-aged couple speaking Spanish. The woman was from Costa Rica, the man from Venezuela, though they now lived in Hallandale.

“Did you have trouble understanding him?” I asked.

“Yes,” the woman said. “But he was still great.”

I asked them about the final song. Dylan had played the harmonica and it had given me chills. I told them I thought I had heard faint echoes of “Blowing in the Wind.”

“That’s because you wanted to,” the woman informed me.

Waiting for Hania to pick me up, I saw a young man in troubadour attire – black jeans, black jacket, black hat – standing by the gate of the dressing room parking lot. He was a friend of one of the band members, he told me, and had caught only the tail end of the concert. I confessed that this was my first Dylan show.

“It’s good you came,” he said. “It’s important that we pay our respects.”