My friend has been dead now more than 15 years-but when I think of him, that song soon follows. Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore Its elegiac qualities firmly in place, there are specifics in “Trying to Get to Heaven” (which some say Dylan wrote in honor of his friend, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, who died at age 53 in 1995) that always summon my friend, who had fled his native Missouri for New York as a young man, back to me. Just as texts by Shakespeare and by Keats have been the texts I connect with the lives and deaths of other loved ones, Time Out of Mind has become the text I associate with the life and death of that friend. Less than two years later he was dead, at 51. Not long after he introduced me to Time Out of Mind, my best-ever bar buddy found out he had advanced cancer. In the song’s next line, when he sings “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain,” we know this we get it we feel it. It’s a beautifully humane record, in which humanity is both disclosed and honored by acknowledging our shared regrets, the loss that none of can escape, the suffering that binds us one to all. In “Not Dark Yet,” one of his finest songs, Dylan wrote, “Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain,” and nothing seems further from the truth. I vividly remember a couple I saw at Giants Stadium who’d had t-shirts made that said “We’re Here for Bob,” to make it perfectly clear. And the pairing had brought an uncomfortable schism into the generally peaceable world of Grateful Dead tour: There were those who had come only for Dylan, and they made their allegiance known, as if the rest of us were an embarrassment to them. Knocked Out Loaded, one of his weakest albums, had come out the year before to a largely poor reception. When I dropped out of high school at age 16 to follow the Grateful Dead, I felt lucky to be just in time for Dylan’s tour with the band, even though he was arguably at a low point: not in great voice, often unenergetic, far from the heights of his creative power. More than its iconic title track, I treasured its sad, strong, conscientious ballads defiantly about and against injustice: “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “North Country Blues.” I would come to love much of Bob Dylan’s output, but it was that young, prophetic Dylan, speaker of truth to power, who had captivated me. The Dylan of his third record, The Times They Are A-Changin’ was the first Dylan that mattered to me. Time Out of Mind would become an essential record for one who felt like a person out of her time. A mistake had been made, and I’d gone through most of my life feeling as though I were a temporal changeling. I was more than a generation younger, but was one of those 1990s twentysomethings who had appropriated the 1960s and 1970s as the era-politically, musically, and in even broader cultural ways-to which I had rightly belonged.
My friend was a close contemporary of Dylan’s he had been born in 1946, the newest Nobel laureate in literature had come into the world five years earlier. I took all of this friend’s recommendations seriously. “Have you heard Bob Dylan’s new record?” my favorite-ever bar buddy asked me, in his deep, low Ozarks drawl, sometime late in 1997.
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