The Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello concert pairs up two guys who have done more to shape my musical tastes than anyone else currently alive.
It’s not every day that two huge legends of rock music come to your backyard for a concert. So when I heard the news that Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan would be sharing a bill at Littlejohn Coliseum on Sept. 23, I was psyched. Seeing as I now work for a certain “youth alternative weekly” aimed at the Upstate market, I figured only naturally that when Bobby D. and Declan come to town they’d look me up for a guided tour of the area. We could hang out in Books-A-Million, comparing the number of books devoted to Dylan versus those about Elvis. Or maybe share a tandem bike ride through downtown C-Town on a bright summer day.
Yeah, I don’t see that happening either, but I am excited about the concert. For one thing, it pairs up two guys who have done more to shape my musical tastes than anyone else currently alive. Considering that two-fourths of the Beatles are no more, three-fourths of the original Ramones are playing a benefit gig with Marvin Gaye and Ian Curtis in Heaven (to petition God about allowing Keith Moon up there), and no one in the Eagles has had the decency to overdose yet, this is likely to be my only chance to see great artists up close and personal. That is, if I can score a press pass.
You see, friends, I am fully prepared to use my status as Bootleg’s resident curmudgeon to score a chance to hang out with Elvis and Bob. Now, am I a journalist, per se? Nope, I just sit in front of my laptop for an hour at most, trying to think of something profound to say about pop culture, and usually I end up ripping off P.J. O’Rourke or Al Franken. That’s just how I roll.
But I’m not completely in the Bill O’Reilly “it’s true because I say it is” camp either. I respect facts, truth and all the other crap that goes into news stories. Let’s say that a cat gets stuck in a tree. I’m not going to decry the state of a country run by liberal cat-haters or accuse the cat’s owner of being a negligent illegal immigrant parent who’s in the country without proper legal documentation, and “that’s” why the cat is up there. No, I would just say that there’s a cat in a tree, and it probably doesn’t want any O’Reilly Factor windbreakers or coffee mugs.
My point in all of this? I don’t know, my assignment was simply to write something about the Elvis Costello/Bob Dylan concert. Did I mention how much I’d like to go to that?
But picture with me, if you will, the idea of me interviewing two of the biggest icons in rock music and asking them what their favorite flavor of potato chip is. Wouldn’t you like to know that, dear readers? I know I would.
At any rate, even if you’re not like me (i.e., willing to sell his soul for a press pass), you should check out the concert. It’s gonna be huge, at least until Celine Dion hits town to promote her collaboration with Timbaland. (Oh, I am so totally not making this up. I wish I were, but I heard it on the radio.) If you’re at the show and you see a mysterious-yet-devastatingly-handsome man hanging around the edges of the stage, that means that somewhere up in Heaven an angel got its wings.
