Slow Train Café

Muscle and Bone ventured out on slick and splattery I-480 last night with a car full of gear, heads full of lyrics and shoulders taut with wonder. As in, ‘wonder if anybody’ll show up?’

It rained non-stop from load in to load out at the Slow Train Café. Cold, splashy, puddly rain that might keep show goers home with a good book. But Oberlin is different, so it seems. Even with college on break, pain pourin’ down and a chill wind brewing, listeners braved the puddles, took their seats and tuned in.

Garrett, Slow Train’s sound guru, gave us the kind of monitor mix you might expect from an Oberlin grad who toured with a band and comes at music from a visceral perspective. ‘This is just the kind of vibe I needed to hear tonight,’ he told us. ‘It’s your stage. I’m here to make you feel comfortable and sound good.’

Grin. Forgive us for ever doubting heaven exists.

Dan and Kylie at the counter stacked our plates with lavender vanilla scones, pressing herb tea and black coffee into our respective palms. Baristas do grow on niceness trees, do they not?

The Slow Train Café was peopled with eclectic individuals. Jazz musician who’s teenager in tow has loved Dylan since third grade. Irish musician with companion who asked which Tempest tunes we plan to cover (Duquesne Whistle fyi). Linda and Larry, who listened with a kind of blessed intensity you can only do your best to deserve. A slim youth rolled a cigarette in preparation to smoke outside; song after song he sat, rapt and then clapping, never quite leaving his stool. A computer user in a corner booth slid toward the isle for great gulps of songs. The bard does break the lesser spells with magic of his own.

There was a momentary suspension of conversation, wine tasting, table bussing and phone tapping when ‘Don’t Think Twice’ commandeered the stage. Garrett nudged up the volume for the fingerpicked guitar, the Irish musician glanced furtively at the room, daring anyone to interrupt a masterpiece with mere human wants and needs, and the rain on the window danced in tandem with a long goodbye so many ache to say.

There is no proper way to say what a night like this does for the heart of an artist. But when we record these songs next week, if we manage to capture a fraction of the warmth and passion let loose in a rain soaked enclave on College Street, we’ll have an album like no other.

Empathy in concert

(Bob Dylan’s) uncanny relevance comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can. -- Kurt Gegenhuber

From the Dylan poster on my nephew’s wall to the devoted Dylan fans at Muscle and Bone shows to the calliope of artists who perform and transform Dylan songs, it’s obvious that Dylan’s relevance metric remains high. Gegenhuber says this relevance hinges on empathy.

My latest conversation with empathy started this spring while designing anti-bullying programs for schools. Pre-schoolers just exploring friendship and older kids working out social puzzles test their capacity to occupy someone else’s point of view. If they fail the empathy test, they might fall into the bully trap where they can only find emotional highs by inflicting pain.

It’s not too farfetched to see empathy as the touchstone of a civilized world.

Even as I traveled north to carve out empathy lessons from world folk tales, I happened upon What Good Am I? on a Dylan playlist. I may as well have googled, ‘song that captures the nuance of empathy,’ so perfect is this one for teaching kids to be kids (ie. not bullies).

This is the relevance of Dylan’s work: it illuminates our capacity for human empathy. His characters say things like, ‘You’re right from your side, I’m right from mine,’ and ‘I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too.’ He conjures up sympathetic outliers (Your daddy he's an outlaw and a wanderer by trade) and understudies (The vagabond who’s rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore). Songs like Hollis Brown and Queen Jane Approximately empathize with their namesakes from start to finish.

Dylan songs team with riotously unorthodox role models with enormous hearts. He lets us experience strangers without judgement, within a frame of tolerance. He eloquently demonstrates how art in the hands of a master fuels our empathy, perhaps our most elegant human instinct.

Painting by Manoel Lopes Rodrigues

A father’s optimism

I just spent a week with elders down near Asheville, North Carolina. Here on my own back porch again, the tree house that folds out into green leaves and bird song, I’m impressed by how this place restores my artist heart.

Travel is healthy no matter the destination (now there’s a bold assertion) and this trip woke me up. The drive down was only the beginning, listening to Ric Elias describe in his TED Talk what went through his mind as he braced for impact when his flight crash-landed on the Hudson River in New York 2009.

“I regretted time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter.”

Thanks to Captain Sully, Elias got a second chance to reset priorities.

Further on down I-77, a longevity expert talking TED said we get happier as we age, mainly because we finally grasp our mortality. Considering our limited time left, we tend to focus on the positive. Professor Laura Carstensen had solid studies to back this up.

My anecdotal findings at Carolina Village shows residents focused on TV, old favorites like Mash and Matlock shuffled with ads for drugs with endless side effects, foods with soaring calorie counts, politicians with impossible promises. Clearly, odds are stacked against the positive here.

Village elders are fascinated with and put out by the interminable gestation (January ’13 is the due date) of their new dining room, the construction of which requires long detours by walker, cane and motorized scooter to get to the quite serviceable make-shift eating area. I once took my lap top to a sunny corner lounge around lunch time, planning to get some work done to the hum of washer and dryer. Plop. Plop. I look up from my little hexagonal table with plastic begonia centerpiece to see elderly chap and swooning madam on adjacent sofas, she with a basket of tupperwared pasta salad and soup de jour for a future meal, he with a kind smile, both with labored breath and tales of woe regarding their daily trek for nourishment. ‘Do you feel stronger since you’ve been walking more?’ I ask, full of hope. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replies.

Still no sign of the positivity Professor Carstensen’s research had promised.

Conversation at the Village covers the practical (does your detergent give lots of suds? - look at mine - no suds!), the historical (I used to build houses with your father) and the wistful (I lost my wife 2 years ago; I’m ready to follow her). Intricate webs of inquiry suss out health issues, lunch dates, card games, great grandchild wonderfulness and the Cary Grant/ Deborah Kerr movie on Tuesday night with free popcorn optional, hankies a must. But the content, I finally figured out, is less important than the simple, infinitely positive act of connecting.

I’m not ready to slow down and smell the sclerosis (sorry), but the elders have given me what a flock of birds and a steely nerved pilot gave Ric Elias - a glimpse of my options from here on out. Elias ends his talk by saying, ‘The only goal I have in life is being a good dad.’ And what about me and my number one goal? Be a good artist? Yep, that’ll positively do.

Painting by Carl Gussow

My Queen Jane

What you say to your audience between songs is an art in itself. Walter and I don’t want to break the spell of Dylan’s lyrics with stray patter in our Muscle and Bone shows. So this story, though umbilically melded to Queen Jane Approximately for me, is better essay than segue.

My mother the painter, Jane Weber, raised her children to recognize beauty, to seek it out. What a gift she gave us. In the summer before she died, as my father cared for her in sickness and faith, I’d check in by phone between visits. One evening I ducked out of the café where the songwriters were gathered and called the folks. Once we’d covered the physical discomforts Mom was dealing with, I told them about the small corner of Ohio City spread out before me. White lights on tree branches, muted conversation of people gathered around tables under the street lamps, music wafting over it all. When I stopped talking I heard Mom’s frail voice say, ‘Thank you for telling us what you see.’

I don’t think my heart had ever broken quite that way before.

Mom’s world, and in many ways Dad’s too, had shrunk so small by then. Yet she had one more gift to give me as I stood among the vibrant, throbbing world she only knew through stories. In a time when I felt helpless to comfort her, Mom told me how; just tell her my stories.

Whenever we sing Queen Jane Approximately, I’m reporting my surroundings to her still. Look, Mom, do you see the listeners basking in this warm music? Do you feel their joy, their memories, their dreams? Do you hear the lyrics made of words you loved so much, and the clapping, like roof tiles under an all night rain?

For a short while, in the refrain, she is there when I call, ‘Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?’

Photo of Janie Weber