Tangled up in Bob: Dylan draws fans> ’60s icon has broad appeal in ’90s

You can wax sentimental as much as you’d like about hippies and Woodstock and bell bottoms and VW buses and psychedelics (in any form), but the 1960s are over, man. This is the ’90s. We have cafe latte and Web sites and ska and cha and mosh pits.

The times have, like, totally a-changed.

So why, then, is Bob Dylan still such a hot sell on the concert circuit?

Last April, he performed to two sold-out houses at the Maine Center for the Arts. The crowd was an amazing mix of baby boomers, their children, and a whole new fan base born about the same time Dylan was going through his own born-again Christian phase.

It’s rumored that one of last week’s concerts in Canada’s maritimes, where the current tour began, sold out within the first day. And when Dylan’s equipment got stuck on a ferry just outside of icy Newfoundland and all the dates of his concerts had to be switched, the houses were still full. They were in Japan, when he was there earlier this year, and they most likely will be as he moves down the coast over the next few months before meeting up for a few gigs with Van Morrison in the British Isles.

When tickets went on sale in March for tonight’s concert, one woman reportedly drove from her coastal home on a sleeting winter night to wait in line outdoors so she could be the first person to buy a ticket.

“He’s really doing the best shows of his career,” says Stephen Bailey, president and owner of RainWater Concerts, the Portland area concert promotion company that arranged Dylan’s Bangor appearance. “One of the things about Dylan lately — over the last three or four years — is that his career has become current. It’s not a reminiscence of the folk era.”

Indeed, anyone who attended the concerts last spring knows Dylan rocks. He played two electric sets and an acoustic set, as well as encores with those ever-favorite lyrics among college crowds: Everybody must get stoned. There’s no question that it was the most popular performing arts event of last season.

It could be because Dylan’s voice spoke for a whole generation that was both idealist and radical, that today’s youngest fans grew up listening to their parents play Dylan, and that they find something fascinating and familiar about the phenomenon.

It could be they simply like the musicality of the beat, which is so often missing from today’s techno music.

Or it could be they like the idea that the 1960s were liberal about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — pervasive topics among youths.

Hardcore Dylan fan Ron Heller saw Dylan in the 1970s, but didn’t attend either of the Orono concerts, and he won’t be at tonight’s concert either (because he’s recovering from surgery). He wanted to go, and like a lot of first-round Dylan fans, he wanted to take his 10-year-old son to hear the rock-folk legend. Heller readily remembers being a freshman in college in New York and listening to Dylan recordings for hours in the school library.

“He and the Beatles set the tone for my formative years,” says Heller, who is the finance director for the city of Bangor. “I won’t say he was prophetic. OK, yeah, he was the prophetic voice of the ’60s that mirrored and established the direction, the context and the mindset to which a lot of people responded.”

And although the times they seem to have a-changed, there’s a sense that very little has changed among music lovers who like to think when they rock.

“I don’t think it’s all young people,” says John Nelson, a 17-year-old junior at Bangor High School. “Everyone seems to be coming back to the ’60s. That era seemed to have more feeling. It was inspiring.”

Nelson, who has never seen Dylan in concert, was invited to the concert by his friend’s father.

“I’ve always loved Dylan and thought I should go before he stops touring, and he’s getting up there, you know,” he says.

Inveterate fans, such as Hunter Smith, who is a student at the University of Maine, don’t really think along those lines. His parents’ generation were attracted to Dylan the protest singer, he says, and his twentysomething generation is more attracted to Dylan “the loner who bucks the system.”

Smith, who arrived at the Civic Center at 5 a.m. to get in line for tickets the day they went on sale, says he wasn’t there just to get front-row, center tickets, but out of reverence for Dylan the legend.

“I didn’t care where the seat was,” he says. “I knew I was going to get a ticket. It was more like a monk taking a vow of silence. People are there not so much for selfish reasons — to be able to see him. But just to show up and pay their respects. This was a very short line of very dedicated people.”

Apparently, that’s not something that’s going to a-change with the times.

At press time yesterday, there were still tickets available for tonight’s concert at 8 p.m. at the Bangor Civic Center.