July 13, 1985. The USA close-out performance of Live Aid. Soooooooooo, my day started with catching performances like David Crosby joining band members, though he was on the lam from a half-way house in Texas (ala Berris Fueller on TV at a Cubs baseball game while he was supposed to be in class). I might be off-base in that remembrance, though. There were many acts reuniting for the event, and many acts I had interest in seeing. A relative came by and kept going on and on about the acts I had less interest in seeing (Madonna, Duran Duran), so, I left. Seeing this as my generation’s Woodstock or Monterey Pop Festival, let’s say I “split”. Somehow, I ended up at a house of some 20 teenagers and young adults. There were mutual friends there and some folks I did not know. I was 20 years old and it was a party house of all folks around my age. The TV was on Live Aid and we all watched things unfold into the night hours. As I discovered Bob Dylan was going to close the show it made me sit on the edge of my seat. I was excited, especially as I was in a fierce period of being under his influence at the moment. Oh, I had bought a harp rack, written lots of new songs under his inspiration, read Guthrie’s Bound For Glory, etc. This would be a great finale to a historic event! I had seen my favorite artist really blow it when the UK Live Aid show (earlier)ended with Let It Be having no vocals. McCartney’s one-song performance was a let down as the lone performer onstage neglected to turn a switch of his microphone to “on”. But, hey, Mr. Tambourine Man would kill it with a performance that would demonstrate why he should be the final act! When he walked out with an acoustic guitar, no band, the room full of youngsters around me began the onslaught of comments. About half of them had never heard of Dylan and questioned why he was going last. Yes, I said that-they had never heard of Bob Dylan. The other half of my room had heard him on radio occasionally and the totality of their knowledge was that he ”could not sing”. A few did the predictable thing and did bad imitations of his voice. Then, it became evident that Ron Wood and Keith Richards of the Stones would flank Dylan with their acoustic guitars. I grew more excited at what was to be! Once the three legendary rock stars began the triple acoustic guitar playing I started to slide down into my seat. Dylan chose to be a 1963-4 version of himself for this mini-set with songs from his very first few albums. There was Ballad Of Hollis Brown, When The Ship Comes In, Blowin’ In The Wind, etc. In the mix from the television his guitar was faint. His voice was way out front and, at times, pitchy. I knew these songs well, but, this rendering was not doing them justice. The guitar of Wood was inaudible for a song or more , as he attempted to play slide guitar. He seemed to be unable to hear it from the monitors, a nightmare in a full stadium with lots of noise. The real embarrassment was Richards. He chose to be a 1981 version of himself, with leg kicks and attitude-laden power strums. Only, the singer was not in a football uniform and prancing away on a runway. And, all his plastic showman mannerisms had a silent guitar attached to it. He, too, was inaudible. The overall sound was very bad. I was happy to see Keith allow his cig, finally, to fall from his mouth. It was not helping things by dangling there. No, it was not improving the performance. Even I understood When The Ship Comes In was not When The Whip Comes Down. As the houseful of undereducated music aficionados around me unleashed the harshest of criticism, well, I had to endure two undesirable things: the bad performance AND the tongue lashing party idiots. I was hugely disappointed by Dylan and his Rolling Stones. The mass audience, worldwide, saw such an amateur performance by such legends. How could this be? Well, many years later Bob Dylan would report in a book that a humongous stage of singers, a choir, were running through We Are The World just behind the curtain. It was to be the grand finale after Dylan’s set, drawing the entirety of Live Aid to a close. While the three acoustic guitar players tried to perform the “stripped-down” songs in front of a full stadium of people in front of them, there were tens and tens of singers rehearsing A SONG behind them. Trying to play one song, while another song is going on loudly nearby, is very difficult. Dylan trudged on with his songs, trying to be a team player. He was being professional under those circumstances. However, millions and many millions of people would never really experience Bob Dylan because of the catastrophic version of him they witnessed. I am sure the 20 “MTV generation” fans around me in that room never went and listened to The Times They Are a’ Changin’ album, one of the great albums of all-time.