It was two grand old icons in their late model glory.

The theater, a grand birthday cake of architectural exuberance from the Twenties, whose Moorish Rococo witnessed vaudeville, only to be replaced by moving pictures, only to be replaced by Rev. Ike’s campaign to fleece the poor, only to be replaced by rock n roll.

 And Bob Dylan.

 There he was, still there, still skinny, still rocking, still His Bobness all these decades later.

 This is not the space to explain Bob Dylan. I could write a book about it. Actually, I did. (Oh, My Name It Is Nothing. The unsung words of Bob Dylan)

 This is a place of short, pithy observation. So what shall we observe of the man who is the foundation upon which rock is built? The man who is the oxygen within which rock n roll has breathed since 1964?

 He brought intellect, poetry, hipness, bohemian culture, ferocity and surrealism to the great American jukebox. He made an art form out of a bubblegum genre manufactured for adolescents. He could have left us in the Woody Guthrie folkie phase, walking the streets of Greenwich Village in boots and ragged jeans. He could have left us as the towering icon who, as one critic described it, “berserked himself into genius” and produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Re-visited and Blonde on Blonde all within 16 months, an upheaval of creativity that changed how we write, sing and hear music forever. He could have left us in the country-gentleman family-man phase he retreated into after the drug-addled fame that could and should have destroyed him. He could have left us as the born-again Christian only a nice Jewish boy in a lot of trouble could have become. He could have left us as the preternaturally weird, forgotten, mocked former Sixties icon in the Eighties, worshipped now only by a few in the US and more in England. He could have left us after his final resurrection into his greatest phase of commercial success.

 But he didn’t. He just stood there swaying fifteen rows from my son and me on the stage of the United Palace Theater, growling happily, banging on the organ, fronting “the best band in the land.”

 He had even outlived Rev. Ike, whose final justification sits on a sign in the opulence of the lobby. “I am not the opinions of others.”

 I wrote an inscription in a book for my son when he was born: “When’s he’s sixteen, may a Bob Dylan come along for him too.”

 It did. It just turned out to be Bob Dylan.

He sits at the dinner table devouring Nordic-sized portions of food. The plumbing in his ravaged body groans under the load. Kristen smiles, the big toothpaste grin the photographers ate up in Paris. Now the smile is only for him, sitting together with her family in her mother’s home in Copenhagen.

His muse had failed him at the Isle of Wight. The long fingers, beloved of the gods, failed him as the fog and chill engulfed the stage. The rioters were carrying on out there, somewhere in the dark. He couldn’t see them, but he heard them tearing down the fences. The tempo of chaos, the chill of an island somewhere off of England, his physical breakdown, they were all coalescing. Even Red House eluded him, the slow blues that was always money in the bank.

Two days later, in Arhus, he collapsed in the dressing room. He was sick. He was exhausted. He asked for cocaine. They had none. He didn’t return to the stage, and a tiny silver plane transported them from Arhus to Copenhagen, Kirsten gripping his enormous hand. They checked into the airport hotel, he lit a joint, but she had an idea. She decided take him home, to mother Birthe Nefer’s house, for solace and home cooking, Danish style.

He fell asleep on the big upstairs bed. He slept so seldom these days. And now Birthe feeds him, and he smiles, boiled meat and potato dumplings wending their way into his dark, emaciated, body.

He looks around suddenly. “What is this?” he asks, incredulous. He looks at brothers and sisters and parents all surrounding him in this country kitchen in Denmark. The serenity, the sheer fact of total acceptance, is jarring.  “I can’t believe this,” he says, looking around at smiling faces. “Why are you so good to each other?”  Kirsten Nefer smiles, and tears up. She realizes that never before, not one time in his short and utterly unique life, has Jimi Hendrix ever sat at a table with a family eating dinner. Eighteen days later, he will be dead in Monika Danneman’s apartment in London.

To ride the Dionysian instrument further than it has ever gone. To be not merely famous but beloved, and to be not merely beloved but iconic. To become permanent. To become a meaning, not a man.  People dream of such things, sitting at the table

Meanwhile, Jimi dreams of sitting at the table.

(This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Marketplace of Meanings. Adventures in the hallucination of culture.
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