Guillermo Vilas, The Beatles, the attack on the Twin Towers and Bob Dylan.
We repeat: what does the attack on the Twin Towers have to do with our Guillermo Vilas, Bob Dylan and the Beatles?
Spoiler alert: the answer is a date, Sept. 11Y Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, in Queens, New York, home until 1977 of the US.Open. Guest artist: Andrés Calamaro. As we will see, in these two variables, from 1964 to 2001, a series of events will occur that link these characters.
A film capable of being dissected into different scenes that – casually or casually – end up being connected. The plot includes the most “productive” joint in rock history and the two CDE (Close encounter with Dylan) most appreciated by Argentine dilanology …
Mandatory brackets: (Dylanology: the most secretly public lodge on the Rock & Pop planet. It is made up of, all over the world, dylanites and dylanologists, strange people who seem to live for and for everything that obviously has to do with Bob Dylan. In short, it can be said that they are people for whom all paths of a conversation do not lead to Rome but to … you know who.
At times thick people, persevering on the subject, to the point that in the merchandising stands of Dylan’s recitals you get to a t-shirt that says: Be careful, don’t talk about Dylan in front of this man! It’s not a joke.)
We said, let it know, up to here, the two most precious encounters of Creole dilanology, therefore, are those they once had with Bob Dylan, first Guillermo Vilas and then Andrés Calamaro. You will see.
August 28, 1964, Forest Hills Stadium
The day the Beatles, according to their own confession, smoked marijuana for the first time invited by Bob Dylan, he had just performed for the first time in a huge concert in New York. We are right at a time when pop culture is incubating a new global disease: Beatlemania.
A few months earlier, in February, appearing for the first time on American TV on the Ed Sullivan Show, 77 million Americans (valuation record at the time) happily watched the Liverpool fringes settling into their homes. After acting for 15,983 people –Read: hysterical teenagers to the point of fainting- in that tennis stadium, they were ready to meet Dylan.
August 28, 1965, Forest Hills Stadium
There are coincidental dates, as if they insist on telling us something. Exactly one year after that Beatles show, Dylan infuriates his audience in the same stadium. He just made an important decision … for his career and for all of rock.
It’s the time when the folk singer, “The voice of a generation”, decides to change the more harmonic acoustic guitar kit with a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Accompanied for the first time by a band, Dylan transforms and transforms rock. A sub-genre is born: folk-rock.
For nearly a year he will receive boos every time, in the second part of his shows – the first part is acoustic – he electrifies with his new band. They consider him a traitor. “Down from!” they shout at him.
September 11, 1977, Forest Hills Stadium: Guillermo Vilas wins the US Open by beating Jimmy Connors
That day (what a date!), Beating Jimmy Connors, No. 1 in the world, 2-6, 6-3, 7-6 and 6-0, Guillermo Vilas should have been considered the best tennis player in the world.
Despite reaching the final in Australia in the same season, and triumphs at Roland Garros and Forest Hills, the Argentine was unfairly considered the No. 2 in the world in the ATP ranking. Many years later, the journalist Eduardo Puppo, after an investigation of over 10 years, he managed to prove that Vilas not only deserved to be considered the best in the world in ’77; he should have been at the top in 1975 as well (finished # 2). Once, on the Vilas racket, recalling those days, Vilas recounted his “bizarre” encounter with Dylan.
September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, New York
Again, throughout history, some dates insist on being related – causally or accidentally – in the strangest way.
On the same day bin Laden carried out the fiercest attack on his territory against the United States since Pearl Harbor, that same date was already foreseen in the death calendar.
Long before that tragic day, someone in Sony marketing had decided that Love and theftBob Dylan’s new album, was released on September 11, 2001.
Two days after the attacks, Dylan was supposed to meet Mikael Gilmore of rolling stoneto talk about the brand new release.
Impossible not to focus on what happened, especially considering that in one of the numbers, Mississippi – recorded in May in New York – Dylan sings an extraordinarily apocalyptic verse with his “new” cavernous voice: “Heaven full of fire, pain that pours down” (The fiery sky, the pain that pours …).
-What can you comment on the attack? Gilmore asked him.
–One of Rudyard Kipling’s poems comes to mind, Lords-Ranks -Replied Dylan, future Nobel Prize for Literature, again the cavernous voice, but alive and direct-:
“We abandon hope and honor, we are lost by love and truth / We fall step by step / And the measure of our torment is that of our youth / Help us, Lord, because we have known the worst even when we are young”. In any case, in these times, my thoughts are for young people. It’s the only way to express it.
1999, Spain, Andrés Calamaro meets Bob Dylan
“All very strange and bizarre,” Vilas insisted on his meeting with Dylan. And he seemed to relax when we told him something similar had happened to Squid in his ECD.
It happened during Dylan’s long Spanish tour in 1999. AC made a dream come true: it opened for Bob in 9 of the 11 shows around the peninsula between April 9 and 22. Not happy with the opening for his idol, from the first day Andrés – almost always in the company of his friend and journalist Bebe Contepomi – tried to get in touch with Dylan. The mission was not easy and took place step by step.
As a tribute, Andrés had included two Dylanian songs in his unplugged set: Seven days and – squared attribute – Can not help Falling in love With You, an Elvis standard once covered by Dylan. In San Sebastián there was a first approach, just a gesture of passing into the dressing room area.
A few days later, in Valencia, there was another one approach no luck though. Two days later, in Malaga, hope grew. In the absence of personal contact, after singing Blowing in the windDylan walked over to the microphone and said to the audience: “Thanks! How about a band for my friend Andrés Calamaro, the king of rhythm! ” (therefore, in English and Spanish).
The first prize would come to the next stage, Granada, on April 18. Andrés was finally able to exchange a few words with Dylan. Explanation AC because he had chosen those topics and given them Brutal Honesty.
Suddenly, as if preparing to flee, Dylan asked him to take off his glasses and before getting lost in his camper he looked at him and said:
– Not blue – in musical key, “They are not sad.”
1981, London, Guillermo Vilas meets Dylan
“It must have been at Wimbledon’81, because I remember losing an incredible match in the first round with Australian (Mark) Enmondson in the fifth – remembers Guillermo.
“Dylan was giving concerts at Earls Court, a very famous London recital hall, as I knew his manager, after the show they invited me into the dressing room. I remember two things: many joints and many people. Someone introduced me and Dylan gave me a hand tender -I remember clearly-. I was surprised by his question and hearing that unmistakable voice in person:
–Guochudu? (What do you do? / What do you do?) Vilas said, mimicking Dylan’s nasal voice.
-Tennis player -I tell him-, and there he tells me a very strange thing.
-Tennis … – he murmurs thoughtfully, and concluded-: Chu men, guan network (Two men, one net). “Two men and a network”he tells me and starts talking to someone else as if to leave.
I was thinking what Catzo meant when she suddenly confronted me again and whispered something even more bizarre: “tangled in the grass”He tells me and leaves. That night, having dinner with friends who were Dylan’s fans, they explained the song to me.
Vilas knew this Tangled in the bluethe theme that opens Blood on the trackshis best album of the 70s, is one of those classics that Dylan has been playing live since 1975.
Grass means grass. In tennis jargon, Wimbledon is played “on grass”. In rock jargon, grass it’s marijuana (as a joint, grass or pot, all synonyms).
August 28, 1964, Delmonico Hotel, Manhattan, New York
The Beatles Dig Dylan! (The Beatles like Dylan!)titled Melody maker in early 1964, perhaps the first public display of his admiration for Minnesotan.
For his part, in those days, Dylan also complimented them: “The Beatles did things that nobody did,” he would have said at the time. “His chords were great. This could only be done with other musicians; they made me think of a band …
Everyone else thought it was for the quinceañeras, which would come right away. But it was clear to me that they would hold out. In my mind, the Beatles had done it. It seemed to me that they had drawn a line of demarcation“.
The “matchmaker” was the reporter of the Saturday night mail, Al Aronowitz, who had befriended both Lennon and Dylan. The summit was held at the Delmónico Hotel, on Park Avenue, the most sophisticated part of Manhattan. Dylan arrived there with Aronowitz and Victor Maymudes, his road manager for the musician.
There they were, John, Paul, George and Ringo and Brian Epstein, trying to be good hosts. Drinking, Epstein offered champagne, Dylan preferred cheap wine, his favorite drink. It didn’t take long for Bob to offer to smoke marijuana, a regular intake among his uses. To his surprise, The Beatles told him they preferred “the pills” (amphetamines). They had never smoked a joint, they explained.
Back then, Lennon and McCartney’s I Want To Hold Your Hand was topping the charts and Bob had no doubts about the lyrics. they did not sing I’m hiding”? No, the Fab Four corrected it, what they said was I can’t hide.
Maymudes mixed several rods, Dylan passed them to Lennon, who preferred Ringo to start: “My real tester!” (“My real taste”), John joked.
The anecdote is well known: inexperienced, Ringo omitted the usual “share” rule, he smoked the joint by himself as if it were a Marlboro, and a few minutes later the drummer couldn’t stop laughing.
“Until then we didn’t go beyond whiskey with Coke. Somehow everything changed that day, “Paul McCartney later recounted.
CJL
Cesare Litvak
Source: Clarin
