133 1/3: Forever Young

Last month the Tacoma music community said farewell to a fallen friend along with a piece of its innocence.

I lost three of my closest friends in the span of three years, none of them over thirty — the first in an avalanche, the second in a plane crash and the third to alcohol. The last funeral was in Spokane. My band had a show booked that night at the Sunset Tavern, opening for Portland’s Talkdemonic — a breakthrough for us. I’d planned to leave the service early to make Seattle in time for the gig, but called and canceled as I left the church for the long, slow drive to the grave. It was the only thing to do. I had a coffin to carry.

The Sunset never asked us back. The band lasted maybe six more months. The late nights, the long miles, the cheap beer, the ringing ears — all the things I’d once found romantic about rock and roll — I now found tedious and sad. I quit my job, wrote a sad, tedious novel, tried halfheartedly to sell it, and gave up. Disillusioned and bitter, I cinched my world down to a size I could manage and understand: family, home, work. I was thirtyone. I was offi cially no longer young.

It was eerie, then, to hear Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” playing on continuous repeat outside Doyle’s Public House October 2 as hundreds gathered to mourn fallen Tacoma rock luminary Brian Redman. The beloved thirty-one-year-old front man (the Dirty Knockers), bassist (3 Inches of Blood, Trial) and bartender (Doyle’s) was killed in a Vespa crash on September 27. Six days later, the stunned community had come to say goodbye. Friends embraced on the sidewalk, lit cigarettes, shook their heads and cried. “May God rest and keep you always / May your wishes all come true,”Dylan sang. I went up the hill to the Hub, ordered a beer and began writing this column.

“Forever Young” first appeared, in two different versions, on Dylan’s 1974 release Planet Waves. Waves was Dylan’s fourteenth album, and his best in years. More important, it kicked off Dylan’s first tour since going underground in 1966 after a serious motorcycle crash. “Forever Young,” the most memorable cut, is one of Dylan’s simplest, with some of his most simplistic lyrics. Gone are the tambourine men, rag-wearing Napoleons and mustached Mona Lisas of his early career. In their place is a catalogue of threadbare platitudes that has been reliably tugging at heartstrings for more than thirty-five years. Despite the greeting-card clichés, the fi ve-minute, mostly acoustic version on side A — the version played in memory of Brian Redman — is a melancholy, haunting song. It’s a eulogy. The youth it celebrates is the youth Bob Dylan lost in 1966 on a road in upstate New York, the youth I lost at thirty-one, the youth we all lose at some point in our lives — the wild, hopeful, boundless youth that is eternal until suddenly it is not.

Details about Dylan’s accident on July 29, 1966, true to Dylan form, are murky. This much, however, is certain: He was a different Dylan afterwards. According to his biographer Robert Shelton, “he was riding along Striebel Road, not far from his Woodstock home, taking the bike into the garage for repairs, when the back wheel locked and he went hurtling over the handlebars.” He reportedly suffered a broken vertebra in his neck. He was twenty-five. He was not only young, but the very face of youth, the so-called voice of his generation. But no one ages faster than the poster child. In just fi ve years since signing his fi rst record contract, he had lived the entire lifecycle of a major artist. He had gone from anonymous to idolized to vilified to canonized, and now he disappeared. He canceled his hellish touring schedule. He avoided fans and the press. He cinched his world down to a size he could manage and understand. He stayed home, wrote, raised a family, recorded and rarely performed. He stopped shaving. The face of youth grew a beard.

“Forever Young” was still playing at Doyle’s that evening when I returned from the Hub, understanding something I hadn’t when I’d left. The faces outside looked weary and confused. Most of these people were between twenty-five and thirty-five, the age when weariness and confusion start to turn from romantic to chronic. “May you always know the truth / And see the lights surrounding you,” crooned Dylan, knowing damn well you couldn’t. The sky threatened rain. Sound checks started in the parking lot tent as the stage crew readied a fi fteen-band tribute. A slide show played in the bar: pictures of Redman as a kid, pictures imbued with the amber glow of growing up, as so many of us did, with Oscar Meyer, Night Rider and Saturday morning cartoons. I saw myself in those pictures, in the tired, lost faces around me. I saw myself making a phone call outside a Spokane church, saw myself fl ying past the handlebars. I saw innocence colliding everywhere with the inevitable. For many mourners, the lark was over. They could no longer be forever young.

As I finish writing this, my sons, ages five and three, are building a fortress out of stuff from the recycling bin. On a plastic tub, they’ve fashioned a plank out of popsicle sticks. They tell me it’s a diving board. Now one of them has tied an action fi gure to it. If they hadn’t ruined the needle playing their scratchy Sesame Street records, I’d put Planet Waves on the turntable right now, side A, last track. I’d turn it all the way up. I’d sing along with the chorus, “May you staaaaaaay forever young.” But I wouldn’t hold out much hope.