Something's happening here (16/4/13)

Bob Dylan generally has a lyric to suit any circumstance . I tend to fall back on "my weariness amazes me."

I've been back at work for two days, a late shift into an early shift, another early tomorrow then two lates on the bounce. Two days in and I'm already exhausted and ill. The entire right side of my head feels like it wants to be somewhere about 2 feet to the right of where it actually is, it's all fuzzy, my eye feels like someone's pushing a spoon onto it from the inside and my ear feels wrong.

I think I may be allergic to work.

But that's okay because I've finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

I want to be Bob Dylan. In 1966.

Lets be specific then, if you're voicing your ambitions then there's no point being vague about them. I want to be Bob Dylan on stage at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on the 17th of May 1966. The night he changed absolutely everything.

It's easy to check this out. They finally released it on CD in 1998, 32 years late and and about 30 after it first started showing up on bootlegs. And it's astounding.

To be stood there on that stage during the second set of the night, the electric set when he was backed by a band that went on to be massive in their own right as The Band, making a noise like nothing that anyone had ever heard before, wild swirling keyboards, stinging guitars, pounding rhythms at ridiculous volumes, bludgeoning an audience that thought it was getting a protest singer.

There's an acoustic set first and it's not like he wants to get this material out of the way so he can get to the new stuff, the loud stuff, the interesting stuff. He's dragging these songs out, extending them, playing with the length of his vowels, reinventing himself for his own amusement. The harmonica solos seem to last for years and have brilliantly little to do with the songs, Dylan is somewhere else, the room is nothing to do with him. He gives them 12 minutes of Desolation Row because he wants to and he can. The playing on Mr Tambourine man is unreal, he just goes on. And on. And on. If you've ever wanted to hear a 'mouth harp' played contemptuously this is your first port of call.

And then the band comes on and the audience is lost. It's too loud, too vicious, too bloody far ahead of its time. As the slow hand clapping starts from sections of the audience the band decide to take longer between songs, tuning up becomes an item of torture, the slow clapping becomes louder so Dylan talks quieter. And quieter. Until they have to shut up to hear what he's saying. Which was nothing but vague mumbling in the first place. Which was the point. Sheer bloody mindedness for an audience that just doesn't get songs that they will swear blind that they always loved in a year's time.

And then someone decides that they have a comment to make. That they have some kind of valid input. That their opinion counts in this new world that they're watching being born but unable to recognise.

"Judas" they cry under the impression that they've been betrayed, that the Bob that was one of them, the folk singer, the protest singer, the leader, has gone, has abandoned them for this....noise.

"I don't believe you" says this new Bob Dylan " You're a liar."

And then he turns to his band, to the band that will soon be The Band, and he gives one simple instruction. One simple instruction that will give the perfect reply to the audience he no longer needs.

"Play it fucking loud."

They do. It's the greatest noise that you'll ever hear. It goes on forever and it's just given rock a new language to play with, no it hasn't it's just looked at Rock'n'Roll and at pop and folk and blues and decided it doesn't like any of them, none of them are big enough, so it's invented Rock music and literacy in music and intelligence and a place for the Beat poets and it's given people the tool that they'll need to say what they're going to say in the next decade.

He was 24, living on a diet of amphetamines and very little else and the world wanted too much from him. Years later he would say "If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd think that Bob Dylan had all the answers too." It couldn't last. He wouldn't be this great again and when he was, he was another different Dylan.

But this night? This night changes The Beatles and gives us Hendrix and opens up the opportunities for everyone that would come through. This is the night that changes music forever.

So, when I grow up I want to be Bob Dylan on May 17th, 1966.