Years before Eric Burdon penned the classic war protest song Sky Pilot, chronicling the part religion played in manipulating the acts and consciences of fighting men, and even longer before Creedence made it clear that they were not Fortunate Sons, there was a voice of protest, more subtle and abstract, its raspy, nasal twang almost as pleasant as finger-nails on a chalk board. It was the voice, harmonica, and guitar of that lone troubadour and poet, Bob Dylan. I had the good fortune to see him perform. At the time, the Vietnam conflict was, for the U.S., in its infancy, and I was a recent and future player in that conflict. For the French, the conflict was finished. For the people of South East Asia, the wars had been virtually continuous for a thousand years.
My ship-mate, one time sparring partner, and drinking cohort Ken Wetzler and I entered the Waikiki Shell through the general admission gate, then found a spot on the grassy slope facing the lighted stage that warm first night of August in 1965. Each of us carried a newly purchased bamboo mat snugly rolled around an unopened bottle of fortified wine. The ticket taker at the gate was not interested in what might be rolled up in the mats. In center stage stood a lone chrome microphone stand with a high mike for the singer, and a waist high mike for his guitar, already leaning in its stand. A tall stool stood next to a shorter, small square table. Eventually, a lone coffee cup, contents unknown, would occupy the table, and provide sips to its owner between songs.
The Shell was slowly filling with spectators. The "blue hairs" were occupying the spendy seats, actual chairs, up front. The great unwashed, including Ken and me, were settling in on bamboo mats,on the grass, well away from the stage, in the darkest part of the venue. Our ship, the USS Abnaki, had recently returned to its home-port of Pearl Harbor from South East Asia, more specifically, Yankee Station off Vietnam where our ship spent months shadowing whichever Russian spy ship happened to be in the neighborhood, intent on messing with U.S. flight operations over North Vietnam.
We had booked a hotel room nearby, though not near the beach. That would have been way beyond our financial means. This expensive night in Waikiki was entirely dedicated to attending a Bob Dylan concert. The irony of funding a concert mostly comprised of songs of peace and protest using our recently earned military hazardous duty (combat) pay was entirely lost on us at the time. I was 21. Many of life's obvious ironies were lost on me then, and Ken was no "light" in the darkness either. We were drawn to that evening by our common love of certain music, performers, and songs, among them Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Rolling Stones.
Back on the ship our shared record player and collection of LP vinyl was safely stowed in the Tech Shack…an area well below the main deck, accessed by round pull-down man-hatches and vertical latters, in a caged space where several Electronics Technicians labored at all hours. Our Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Rolling Stones vinyl never left the safe confines of the Tech Shack. Add to that safe confine the fact that the space was well below the center of gravity of the rolling ship which made it less likely the stylus would skid across the vinyl when the ship rolled badly. We who co-owned the simple record player had monetized our asset, renting it out to select listeners for a price, but only if it never left its safe harbor in the cage, and was not scheduled to be in use by any of its 5 or 6 co-owners.
So when Wetzler and I walked through the general admission gate and found adjacent spots on the grassy slope well back from the lights of the Shell venue, we had a sense of what to expect. We were Dylan fans, though neither of us had attended a live concert of his before. The police presence was fairly visible, and having some history with the HPD we knew there would be a sizable plainclothes presence as well, so we kept the wine out of sight until the lights turned down, and the spot light focused on the single 3-legged stool in center-stage.
As the high-dollar seats filled up closest to the stage the police presence grew until there was a line of cops, arm’s length from each other, backs to the stage, facing the audience. That blue-line seemed to emphasize the idea that this concert might be a celebration of protest, of resistance, of questioning authority, if not outright challenge to the powers that be, best represented by the fur-garbed, diamond studded blue-hairs now settling in facing the cops.
There was no opening act preceding Bob. A deep male voice, invisible off stage, simply announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen…Bob Dylan” then this skinny, pale “kid” with an unruly mop of hair ambled onto the stage, a harmonica hanging in its fixture around his neck, and into the bright circle enveloping the chair, microphone, table, and acoustic guitar resting in its stand. He pulled the top mike down to his level, and muttered a brief, unintelligible nasal greeting. For the next 45-minutes he sang them all…all the album songs that had elevated him from a lone voice in NYC’s Village, to the poet laureate of the U.S. At the end of that set he wordlessly, and unceremoniously left the stage.
Maybe those in the spendy seats thought it was over, or maybe they just needed it to be. As I remember the tourists in the real seats began abandoning the Shell in a stream, until there were few “blue hairs” remaining. The disembodied male voice hurriedly announced that this was a brief intermission, but the concert would continue. Virtually all the monied occupants of the stage side seats were long gone. I’ve often wondered if most of them up front even knew who Bob Dylan was. Perhaps they were just at some random concert because they were lounging nearby at one of the beach hotels, and looking for a night out. One thing was clear. They were not Dylan’s fans.
Dylan took his time coming back for the 2nd set. But, when he did return he stepped out beyond the circle of the spot light, held his hand up to shade his eyes, and commented on the empty seats, remarking something to the effect that it felt like no one was there at all. He could not see or hear those of us back in the darkness, on our bamboo mats, laying on the grass. So, he grabbed the top mike, made a beckoning motion with one arm and said, “You guys back there...come on down!” The cops immediately intervened with the early usurpers of the high priced seats, night-sticks in hand, banishing them back to the cheap seats. Dylan futilely protested to the uniformed police, but when rebuffed simply refused to restart the show. He put his guitar in the stand, picked up his coffee cup, and sat down silently on the stool. It seemed the show would end in stalemate.
From the darkness I watched as uniforms, tropical shirts, suits, white shirts and ties bustled back and forth, clumping up for brief inaudible desperate looking conversations, then separated to scurry to another assorted clump of responsibility, to talk and gesture in hushed animation. Bob sat on his stool, sipping the contents of his cup as he looked on bemused, maybe puzzled or quizzical until a frazzled looking cop with lots of brass on his shoulders and gold on his hat motioned to the faceless darkness to come forward, then beat a retreat as the now energized crowd noisily claimed the the expensive seats in a wave of occupation. Bob appeared to love it. Revolution was in the air! He waited for the noise to subside. Wetzler and I stayed in the darkness on our mats, tending to our wine (now becoming less weighty in the bottles), savoring our buzz, and casually smoking our Marlboros. Smoking was banned in the expensive seats.
Dylan’s 2nd set was made up of some old, and some new. Dylan was one of the most prolific singer/song writers of that decade so he already had an abundance of recognizable and popular material. That night he mixed in some I’d never heard. They seemed almost experimental in nature, but many would become standard Dylan. In one instance, he "stumbled" starting the song at least three times, apparently forgetting the words, before catching the momentum. The passage of time, and maybe the Mogan-David fortified wine, have conspired to wipe the names of that evening’s playlist from my old memory.
But, I remember it as my first concert, and my first up close and personal view of the intelligent use of passive-resistance against authority…not exactly the stuff of Mahatma Gandhi in India 20-some years earlier against the British Empire, but impressive to me, a 21-year old U.S. Navy sailor freshly returned from Yankee Station, funding my evening with Vietnam combat pay, and quietly singing along in the darkness with songs of peace and protest, "...a hard rain's a- gonna fall..." We were blissfully unaware of how hard that rain would be. LBJ, who had been President for just under two years, was quietly building up troops in Vietnam in a reversal of Kennedy's plans which died with him in Dallas. The war would soon grow from a disagreeable nightly news feature to a social cleaver which would brutally divide the nation, and set us out on a course of more, and more division.
But, on this night a hard-rain was just a poetic, abstract threat. The "body counts" were still small. The economy was burgeoning. The nation was busy and distracted, doing what it did best, "making hay" before the storm came.
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