1976: Bob Dylan, Desire

By Matt Mitchell

If you were at a graduation open house on Helsey Fusselman in Southington, Ohio, at a gray ranch-style home a quarter-mile off the road, in early July of 2016, you can still hear the nasally croon of Bob Dylan singing “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun” over and over. Just like if you were in a bar in that same town on November 30th, 1987, during Monday Night Football, watching Bo Jackson run over Brian Bosworth, mouth-footed Seattle Seahawk long-overdue of an Auburn express to the chin, you can still hear the explosion of polycarbonate ringing in your ears in the ESPN replay over and over.

Months after that night, in the summer of 1988, against the Toronto Blue Jays, Bo lost a fly ball in the lights of Exhibition Stadium. In a split-second of bad circumstance, a split-second that would throw a normal outfield off-balance just enough to allow the hitter to snag a double, maybe a triple if they’re quick enough, Bo darted sideways, stretched his six-foot, 220-pound body into a zeppelin and snatched the pop fly out of the air, as if he hadn’t missed a single beat in the first place.

It was moments like that, in those two seasons of baseball that sandwiched Bo’s greatest feat, his trucking of loudmouthed Bosworth, his breaking of the Raiders’ single-game rushing record, that taught me how there is something magical and eviscerating about the things we create in-between other things.

Because, much like Bo Jackson in 1987, Bob Dylan also created his best piece of work in-between two legs of a campaign. When The Rolling Thunder Revue tour kicked off on Devil’s Night in 1975, Dylan had just released Blood on the Tracks, an album many consider to be his best. An album about two lovers talking to each other, on the brink of estrangement. Blood on the Tracks says everything anyone could want an album to say. But it was in the space between the first and second leg of the tour, when Dylan returned to the studio to record 10 songs he had been workshopping on tour. Those 10 songs, which were later cut down to nine songs, became Desire.

But Desire, the album Dylan wrote and recorded in the space between the first and second legs of the tour, Desire says everything anyone needs an album to say. An album so good, “Abandoned Love” was recorded for it but didn’t make the final track listing. Desire is a love-letter to non-cohesiveness, a quiet illustration of a life torn apart by distance, but it’s also a messy caravan of 56 minutes, its best song, “Hurricane,” is the only one that doesn’t fit in the tracklist. Desire, if nothing else, is a sprawling “I love you and I hear you” after a separation.    

For The Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan sometimes performed in sweat-splotched white makeup or plastic masks, feathered western shirts, and wide-brimmed fedoras. A heckler once asked him what was up with the mask, and Dylan told him “the meaning is in the words.” But, on the cover of Desire, which is the best Bob Dylan album cover and I will die on that hill, Dylan wears no mask—a true testament to the recurring theme of the album, a welling soul of vulnerability, a body we see as our own.

Growing up in a neighborhood with no other kids, on a highway I was never allowed to bike down, all I had was music. Beyond my backyard, through a heavy, half-mile-long set of woods, was Helsey Fusselman, the road my best friend, Steven, lived on. We took the same bus to school, and in middle school we’d sit on the same bench seat, sharing a set of headphones plugged into my iPod Shuffle, and listened to 1980s glam rock in protest of our bus driver’s non-negotiable blaring of 1970s soft rock.

But then we got to high school, and our tastes changed. We started watching Turner Classic Movies marathons and falling in love with Audrey Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock. Started listening to softer tunes and getting our act together. Just as someone my age was introduced to Eminem or Kanye West through the Kiss FM top-100 every summer weekend, I came to Bob Dylan’s Desire through Steven, the patron saint of word-of-mouth music suggestions, which were more like prophecies we had to worship in order to feel alive. It was a discovery that turned into a transcendent love.

(We loved Bob Dylan so much we even ripped off the 2007 Todd Haynes film I’m Not There in our video production class and turned it into our own biopic about the anxieties and expectations of delivering the morning announcements every day.)

At his graduation open house, Steven and I played cornhole against some of our friends. In the backyard, where throngs of his family stood, drinking cheap beer and smoking cigarettes, there was a gazebo. A gazebo with a television set in it. It was one of those box televisions with only a few channels. We rigged a DVD player up to it to watch Blow-Up, a now-obscure 1966 Italian flick Steven convinced a half dozen people in our grade to watch—which was a testament to his persistence on getting everyone to love what he loved, since the film was only available on a DVD, copies of which went for $30+ online and were sometimes shipped in French.

But there was also a hunk of stereo with a CD player, and Steven thought it was choice to play his copy of Desire while we tossed bags. Once the disc arrived at “Romance in Durango,” Steven went into the gazebo and let the song play until the “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun” opening line finished, and then he’d promptly rewind the track and listen to it again. He did that for 30 minutes, and no one cared. There was something fascinating about the way Steven’s house radiated some type of endorphin that turned Desire into consumable Top-40 pop. Our friends, all of whom were into next week’s top hits, were suddenly singing “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun,” as if we were born knowing those lyrics.

We spent that entire night together in the gazebo, after our friends, all of them drunk or stoned or both, wandered to their cars to sleep. We talked about going into the real world, about our fears that were beginning to swallow us up, how he was going to California but couldn’t decide when.

The day before Steven actually did leave for California, he pulled into my driveway unannounced. I came to the front door and saw him standing beside the driver’s side door, one hand on the roof, the other in his pocket, “Hurricane” leaking out of his Y2K-era stereo that skipped, as if he’d queued Desire intentionally to sync up with his arrival. I came outside, we talked shit for a few minutes, and he begged me to go on a drive with him before he left. But I declined. My partner at the time was in the house, and I couldn’t leave them without warning. What felt like the right decision at the time doesn’t anymore.

Not only was Desire the last album I listened to with Steven before he left for California, but it was also the first album we listened to when he picked me up from my Long Beach motel almost three years later.

I had spent a month traveling from Seattle to Los Angeles, studying the great trees of the Pacific Northwest, and I was excited to end my trip by reuniting with an old friend. He pulled up in his car, a different one than the beater he left Ohio in, and I could hear the stereo blaring from 50 feet away, which was customary in his car. We drove around the city, listening to “Isis,” I sparingly pointed at things I wanted to know more about. But Los Angeles had become Steven’s city, something only he understood and could explain, just as Dylan was to him in high school. It was as if he’d put a mask on, one that somehow turned his grayed California sky blue.

The two of us walked up and down Sunset Boulevard, he proudly showed me the Church of Scientology he’d been kicked out of, we walked past a sports memorabilia shop that weirdly only had Bo Jackson jerseys in the window, we spent $50 on a VR simulation that wasn’t worth it, bought a hundred dollars worth of records at Amoeba. Customary touristy things, I guess. But I didn’t care about the touristy things. I wanted to hear about the things Steven had been doing since graduation, like him getting mentored by Carmen Argenziano, or the shit he was learning in acting school, maybe even something about the bit role he had in an upcoming indie film. Just like I wanted him to ask about the book of poetry I had coming out later in the summer, or what I had been studying for the last month.

But it wasn’t until that night, as he drove me around the city looking for a CVS that sold high-dosage allergy medication I desperately needed, that Steven finally took off his mask and poured all of his vulnerabilities and heartbreaks out to me for the first time since we were in his gazebo, trying to explain that he felt as hollow in California as he did in Ohio, but all I could think about was how the movies never tell us how cold Los Angeles is after dark. What a stupid thing to think about.

Something Desire can teach a listener is you can’t always make a home inside of somebody else’s. I was supposed to spend that night at Steven’s place, but I asked him to take me to the airport 10 hours early. Because I wanted to go home, to the place we’d once known each other, genuinely, in. Before going to my gate, I told him I loved him, practically barking it against silence, and that was that, because sometimes you don’t know you’ve outgrown someone until they don’t say it back.

Outgrowing someone you love is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is just a natural part of life. Our fathers loved and lost guys we could’ve called “uncle” long before we were born, and we will surely do the same for our own children. Evidenced in “Sara,” the final track on Desire, distance can often lead to having a better appreciation for the core love you hold for someone. Though Steven and I have outgrown our relationship, becoming different people, we still love each other. And sometimes that is enough.

So, in fading white letters on the LP’s insert, it says: “Dylan’s songs of redemption, if he can do it we can do it.” Redemption doesn’t have to be a prophetic act. Sometimes all it takes is staying in touch. There can be so much love in a single, distanced touch.  

I think about the time Steven and I talked for the first time in months, months after an awkward goodbye hug at LAX, when I asked him if Desire was still his favorite Bob Dylan album, and he replied “yes” in a way so devastatingly slow, it was as if he meant to say “wherever we travel, we’re never apart,” but couldn’t bring himself to hit send.

Matt Mitchell is a gluten-free, heartbroken, intersex writer from Ohio. He is the author of “The Neon Hollywood Cowboy” (Big Lucks, 2021).