Bums on Seats – An Irishman’s Diary about the problem of substandard audiences

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize has been criticised by some as a betrayal of pure literature – the written word, devoid of musical accompaniment. But it did at least send me back to rereading his prose memoir, Chronicles Volume 1. And this time, I was looking for literary influences.

There are plenty on display, his adopted name included. The younger Dylan also enjoyed Balzac (“hilarious“), Milton (“folk-song lyrics”), and HG Wells, among many others. He was deeply impressed by the image of an 82-year-old Tolstoy walking “into the snowy woods”, albeit he pronounced him dead there, a little prematurely.

And he even compares himself to Dostoevsky at one point, after the latter’s release from Siberian prison: “He [...] wrote stories to ward off his creditors. Just like in the early ’70s, I wrote albums to ward off mine”.

But I was reminded too of the Joycean epiphany at the book’s heart, which among other things involved Dylan trying to lose his audience. It happened in 1987 when, after years of enormous fame, he suffered an artistic crisis.

‘Sing forever’

The personal part of it was solved, mystically, in a bar in California, where he claims to have seen an old jazz man performing in a way that opened a “window to my soul”. Then and there, Dylan saw his own way forward, one in which he could “sing forever”.

But first he had to kill off his older fans, figuratively anyway. They had grown up with his records, he reasoned, and would be incapable of accepting the new him. As he put it: “In many ways, this audience was past its prime and its reflexes were shot. They came to stare and not participate”.

So he devised a sort of three-year redundancy plan. His projections were based on laying off 50 per cent of his older audience in the first 12 months, and the rest in the second, with newcomers taking up the slack accordingly. By year three, he would have a whole different fanbase.

Apparently, the plan worked. If you attended a Dylan concert in the late 1980s and said “never again”, you know now what happened. The problem wasn’t him. It was you.

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Speaking of inadequate audiences, our letters page has featured another outburst of complaints this week about concert-goers talking, texting, and eating loudly during shows.

But distractions are not always noisy. The wrong sort of silence can be a problem too, as I was reminded while attending Chekhov's The Seagull recently.

No sooner had the house lights gone down for Act 1 than I realised the man immediately to my left had fallen asleep.

Of course, sleep is not uncommon at plays and classical music concerts, where the combination of comfortable seating, warmth, darkness, and high art can be as effective as Dozol.

But normally, the risk increases over the duration of the concert, with a spike 15 minutes after the interval, when drink has been added to the mix and it’s getting near bedtime.

Snoring

Whereas this man was out with such alacrity, it was as if he had come for that purpose. And it’s not that he was snoring, although as the neighbour of a sleeper, you do inevitably worry that he will start snoring soon, and at some especially sensitive moment in the play. So while he snoozes blissfully, you’re on edge.

The other worry is that he will gradually slide out of the vertical. And that when his head finds a shoulder to rest on, it will be your shoulder, not his wife’s (if that’s who the woman on his other side is, although she seems to be as unaware of his narcolepsy as he).

This didn’t happen at the Chekhov play, luckily, but every time he shifted in his seat, I feared the worst.

Nudge

As public sleepers always do, the man woke with a guilty start occasionally, disturbed by a noise, or by a nudge of my elbow.

Then, always, there was the furtive look around, the I-hope-I-wasn’t-snoring expression, and the brief, pretended re-engagement with events on stage. Then he was gone again.

On the plus side, I suppose it added a layer of tension to Chekhov’s work, which is not as dramatic today as it was on its opening night in 1896, when audiences hated it.

I did find myself wondering at one point if my neighbour would make it through the entire thing asleep. But the suspense didn’t last. In a surprise development, he woke up fully in time for the interval.