Dylan, the Probe, and Me

Bob Dylan in Miami

The first time I remember listening to Bob Dylan, I was seventeen years old and sitting in my best friend’s red Ford Probe, a beat-up, yet seemingly indestructible car that had been getting us around Miami for the better part of two years. It was in this glorious red car that we met up with girls in random parks and drove aimlessly around town listening to music and drinking cheap booze, ending up in neighborhoods we never even knew existed. We were young men in search of identity and romance and magic and America, and the Probe drove us toward this mystical American transcendence we so hoped existed and would transform us into the men of iconic grandeur we believed ourselves to be.

My best friend must’ve put fifty-thousand miles on the Probe in those couple of years, such was our search for America and ourselves, but some of the most important moments of our lives occurred after we parked that red steel beast wherever we wanted after yet another night of failed adventure. Sometimes, after hours of driving around in search of whatever the Miami night had to offer, we’d park the Probe in a McDonald’s parking lot after ordering half a dozen burgers and stew in our beautiful, boyish malaise. We were Cuban-American kids, first generation Americans, and more than anything we wanted to be American, which is to say, some Johnny Cash/Jack Kerouac amalgam. To be a great American man, was—and still is—the great desire of my life, which is what so many of our conversations were about back then. We read American literature and listened to American music and sat for hours in that American-made Ford Probe talking about our latest discoveries. Oh, how many discoveries does a seventeen-year-old boy make when he is searching for discoveries!

We sat parked in front of our houses and outside of malls, and one time, overtaken by a deep, deep longing—oh, how did we long! —I remember my best friend stopping the Probe in the middle of the highway as crazy Miami drivers honked as they zoomed past us. We must’ve been looking for a cinematic moment in hopes of sparking the birth of our true selves and the inception of our real lives, but all we did was barely avoid an accident and feel let down once more by our seemingly unending Cuban-American boyhoods. And yet, we continued to park the Probe and listen to tunes—as my best friend and I still call them—and talk and hope and yearn and yearn and yearn.

After baseball practice at some point during our senior year, my best friend and I were sitting in the Probe lamenting our current condition as cliché Cuban-American jocks. We wanted to be men of aesthetics and culture, artists, and yet here we were hitting baseballs and turning double plays and being controlled by less than mediocre men who had no idea who Neal Cassady was. These weren’t dire straits, of course, but as we sat in the Probe in full uniform, I was convinced that this would be it—my best friend and I always waiting for something to happen and nothing ever happening. My life would never begin, and I would die before being born, more glove and cleats than man. I would end up a high school baseball coach, marooned in Miami for the rest of my days, forever a Cuban-American and never an American. It was in this state of adolescent despondence that my best friend pulled out yet another CD. At this point in our friendship, we’d listened to so much music—Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Zeppelin—none of which had had the transformative effects I’d been desiring, so I was less than hopeless when my best friend shoved the CD case in my face. I didn’t look at it, swatting it away, as all the music we’d been marinating in had failed us, but my best friend kept waving the CD. I looked at him, his eyes widening as he nodded. Not even Trent Reznor’s screams had induced this deranged look in my best friend’s face, so I finally grabbed the CD. I brought it close and saw a squirrelly looking young man—not much older than my best friend and me—with crazy hair and a distant look in his eyes. Was this the guy? Would his tunes be the tunes that would change everything? The CD was The Essential Bob Dylan, a double-CD set released by Columbia Records on October 31, 2000.

Years later, not quite the man I wanted to be and not quite the failure I could’ve been, more than anything, I’m a Dylan obsessive, a fan of all the different identities the man has imposed on himself throughout his mercurial and often times bewildering career. But whenever I think of him, the face I see is that of the young twenty-something Dylan on the cover of The Essential Bob Dylan—the first time I ever saw him. This doughy faced, curly-haired kid isn’t going to be the one, I remember thinking. This one, like all the others, will fail to begin the transformation. I handed the CD back to my best friend, sighed—as I was sighing in resignation a lot back then—and waited. I was convinced nothing was going to happen, but what happened next is perhaps the clearest memory of my life. It was, as they say, the beginning of everything.

I was sitting in the passenger side seat of the Probe, my baseball cap on the dashboard, staring straight ahead at the chain-link fence separating the outfield from the school parking lot. I waited for the song, completely unaware that at this point in his life Dylan was heading into his sixties and had already released over two dozen records, most of which had been considered masterpieces while others—especially during his lost 80s years—were critically panned and basically deemed musical abominations. I’d more than likely heard “Like a Rolling Stone” at a party or on the radio, but I’d never really listened to it, which is to say that it hadn’t been the right song at the right time. This was definitely the right time now, all I needed was the right song, and I’ve often wondered just what would’ve happened if my best friend had chosen a different Dylan song and not the one he selected that ended up changing my life. Would my transformation have begun if a different Dylan song had played? Or would’ve any Dylan song done the trick? My feeling is that I would’ve been a Dylan fan regardless of the tune I’d heard, but only the one that played that day could’ve initiated the transformation I’d been so desperate for. The song my best friend selected or randomly played—we’ve never figured out how it exactly went down—was “Not Dark Yet,” a song off of Dylan’s 1998 Grammy-winning album of the year, Time out of Mind.

“Not Dark Yet” starts with an otherworldly guitar riff, which, at the time, to my seventeen-year-old years, sounded like garbage cans collapsing to the ground. To this day, even though I don’t quite hear them anymore, if I’m with my best friend and I want to listen to “Not Dark Yet,” without fail, I’ll say, “Play the garbage cans.” Sitting in the Probe as I heard those garbage cans collapsing, staring at the chain-link fence, I immediately knew that this was the song I’d been waiting for. I’d heard a lone riff, the most ominous, powerful sound I’ve heard to this day, and I was floored. Dylan had yet to utter a single word—he doesn’t say anything for the first twenty-seven seconds of the song—and yet I instantly knew that he would be the one to begin the transformation. I sat in silence as the chain-link fence somehow began to disappear and Dylan’s backing band joined him, waiting for the first lyrics from this song that had already changed my life. What happened in those twenty-seven seconds before Dylan begins to sing? Everything. Nothing. Death. Rebirth. Then, at the twenty-seven second mark, this Bob Dylan, whoever the hell he was, finally sang: “Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day…”

It happened. It had finally happened. But to describe what had happened would be pure folly, as how does one begin to describe the feeling of understanding everything that had previously eluded them? Do you simply say you now understood and leave it at that? It’s not enough, especially when that deep understanding unleashed another world underneath the world of logic and sense that you’d been hoping existed yet had never encountered. This was the world of magic and mystery, of that old, weird America, and finally, at seventeen, after what had felt like a century’s wait, I’d been allowed entry. In this first truly transcendent moment of my life, as shadows did indeed fall over the red Ford Probe, I exhaled and sank into the passenger seat, as my best friend, along with everything else around me, disappeared. There was no longer a chain-link fence, or a baseball field, or even the sport of baseball, the game that had consumed the entirety of my life up until that point.

All this time, I’d been yearning for disappearance, and here I was, after a single lyric—a mere guttural utterance, really—beginning to disappear. I saw the rest of my life unfold before me, which is to say that I saw nothing—exactly what I’d always wanted to see. I was no longer Cuban-American or a child of immigrants or a talented, young shortstop being recruited by top universities, but a blank slate. It was this blankness, no future or past or even present, that was true freedom—the only freedom. In that blankness, if you chose, you could create yourself or recreate yourself or even extinguish yourself altogether. As I sank deeper and deeper into the passenger seat, until not even the seat remained, I embraced the blankness for the first time in my life, as this Dylan, this ghost of a man, continued: “It’s too hot to sleep and time is running away. Feel like my soul has turned into steel. I’ve got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.” These were the last words I remember hearing the first time I heard the song, as the red Probe and my best friend and Miami, as well as myself, had vanished. I’d disappeared into the song, which is to say that I was the song, which is to say that the song no longer existed.

The dream of America is the dream of the blank slate, which would make Dylan, the master of the continuous blank slate, the quintessential American artist. His true genius is that in his quest to redefine and recreate himself, he conjures musical landscapes that elicit this same sense of blankness in his listeners. I didn’t understand what had washed over me the first time I’d listened to “Not Dark Yet,” but years later, perhaps on the thousandth listen, I realized that the song hadn’t added to the landscape of my life but had wiped it away entirely. I was caught off guard by this blankness because so much of the fear of adolescence is to be perceived as blank, and so you throw everything and anything that you deem cool or worthy at the messy canvas that is your life in hopes of fashioning a workable identity. This makes for a chaotic landscape, as one is constantly adding songs and books and affectations, but all of it paled in comparison to the erasure induced by the opening salvo of “Not Dark Yet” and what it meant: I’d been subtracted into nothing. What I’d felt in that moment was the onset of the blankness and the chaotic freedom that always accompanies it. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” as another Dylan song says. And yet I felt as if I had everything to gain. If all of this sounds woo-woo and magical, it’s because it is, but it explains why Dylan’s most devoted fans are so obsessed with the man and is music: the songs, if they catch you at the right time, can have transformative powers.

Time out of Mind was Dylan’s thirtieth studio album, a record, considered by many, to be a late career resurrection from a man who had long been creatively spent. The Bob Dylan of the sixties, the voice of a generation, the mystic and the prophet, had long been replaced by a mere mortal, and it was this Dylan—Dylan as man—that I had discovered. In previous records, Dylan had tackled the social ills of the time—all the sixties folk stuff—and the dissolution of his marriage—Blood on the Tracks—but Time out of Mind was the first time Dylan had sung about his mortality and the deep, existential dread brought about by the specter of death. This was Dylan at his most highly personal, even if the songs, like most Dylan songs, were laced in metaphor and obfuscation. You feel the songs, because for the first time ever, Dylan is too beaten down and unable to cloak himself in the Bob Dylan persona. This is not Bob Dylan as song-and-dance-man or as the precocious genius who’d gone electric or the born-again Christian, but Dylan as tired, middle-aged man in despair, which he perfectly captures in “Not Dark Yet.”

 A seventeen-year-old boy certainly isn’t encumbered by the world-weariness and malaise of a man nearing sixty, but if you are a certain type of boy, one who longs to be something more than what you are, or someone else entirely, it can most definitely feel like you are. At that point in my life, heading into manhood and being steered in directions not of my choosing, without any hyperbole, I can honestly say that it felt as if it were not dark yet, but it was getting there. I was not quite Cuban and not quite American and not quite a jock, and especially not quite the blankness on the other side of which one’s true identity manifested. I needed a conduit to guide me to this blankness, and it was only this down and out Dylan welcoming the abyss, and not his previous incarnations, that could’ve led me there. Somehow, miraculously, magically, the right record by the right version of the right artist had found me at exactly the right time.

When “Not Dark Yet” finished, after a few seconds—minutes? Days? —of silence and I returned to my body and the red Probe and Miami, I immediately said, “Play it again.” My best friend, coming out of his very own fugue state, simply nodded and played the song again. After the second time, without being prompted, he played “Not Dark Yet” a third time. After the third and final time of the day—we’d play it on a loop for months to come—I said “damn” or he said “fuck” and then we just sat in the red Probe as we’d done hundreds of times, but this day, this moment, was different. I’d changed, as had the Probe and the city and even the chain-link fence and that hilarious baseball field beyond it, which is what must’ve sent me into the near-demented fit of laughter that followed. The baseball field, the place outside of my house I’d spent the most time, with its white bases and orange clay and perfectly manicured infield, was the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen, and so I cracked up, joined by my best friend. We laughed and laughed and laughed and bounced in our seats and slapped at the dashboard and that majestic Ford Probe, the greatest clunker the world has ever seen, rocked and bounced and started cracking up, too, and finally, finally, I was born.

What happened afterward? What happens after any birth? The beginning. Baseball would come to an end eventually. I’d decide, like so many Dylan acolytes before me, to become a writer. The Probe, sadly, would ride her last ride and play her last tune. I embraced the absurdity and the magic, which I encountered once again in researching this essay. I’ve listed to “Not Dark Yet,” as well as the rest of Time Out of Mind, hundreds of thousands of times, so the record and the song have a lost a little of its magic—just a little—but to my surprise it became more magical than ever when I decided to find out where the record had been recorded and I discovered that in late 1996, Bob Dylan and his band set up shop in Miami, and with the help of master producer Daniel Lanois, recorded the album that would put the wheels in motion for me. The most important song of my life, the song that began my life in earnest, I should’ve known, had been recorded in my very own city, as if it had been recorded just for me—because like all songs we claim as our own, of course it was. After making this final discovery, I put on “Not Dark Yet” for the millionth time and heard it for the first time all over again.