Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe. I’ve usually felt more or less in my element at the shows I’ve attended. But from the moment Sadi and I arrived to stand on line outside the gate, I was hit by a kind of cognitive dissonance. Were these fat, gray, sloppy people my contemporaries? Is this what had become of my generation? (This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife.) Sure we’ve all gotten older. I no longer have the brown, wavy locks I had as a young man. Dylan is no longer the thirty-something visionary gesturing like a shaman during “Isis,” as I saw him do in 1975 at the New Haven Coliseum. This wasn’t New Haven, where Jim Morrison had his legendary arrest for indecent exposure. This was Brockton, a small South Shore Massachusetts town with little to say for itself. And the people around us looked like they had never heard of Jim Morrison, and only vaguely of Bob Dylan.

But it’s not about age, or class, or education. It’s about hope, something the people around us didn’t seem to have in abundance. These were not the idealistic, romance-addled kids who followed Dylan in his heyday, who grooved on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and who knew both what the Weathermen were and which way the wind blows, or so they thought. Those kids had at least the illusory promise of youth, a naïve faith to keep them angry and shouting and alive. These aren’t even the purists who booed Dylan when he first walked out with Strat in hand—it’s hard to imagine these people ever having that kind of passion. I don’t know what they were listening to back when Dylan sported a Jewfro, cigarette, and truckloads of attitude, but I’m sure it wasn’t “Desolation Row.” This crowd looks like it’s been weaned from the start on nothing but vaguely belligerent, unreflecting frustration. Their hopes and dreams are pinned to getting by on the day job, putting that addition on the pool shack, getting the alimony check on time. There was a palpable surliness in the air that Sunday evening—at life, at the comparatively few young people in the audience (looking as out of place in this crowd as their grandparents would have at Woodstock), at the world for not loving us enough and at ourselves for not being the invincible guardian angels we like to fancy. No wonder the guy with boots at the end of our row stomped hard enough during Willie Nelson’s set to make the bleachers vibrate: how often does he get to feel that understood, that validated?