To get to the train station in Prague, you take a tram and then walk through a park. You can’t see the station from the tram stop. Inside, it’s spacious and modern, filled with small cafés and shops and a grocery store. It’s everything you would expect of a train station. Electronic boards announce departures and arrivals; escalators move people from one floor to another; wide and well-marked corridors lead to the tracks. Outside, from an American perspective, one thing is glaringly missing: any hint of a parking lot.
It’s wonderful. Prague is a busy, bustling, old but modern city, visited by millions of tourists a year. It’s blessed with a great public transportation system. Plenty of cars ply the streets. But you can’t drive to the train station. The city has chosen not to blight its downtown with a huge swath of asphalt, as so many American cities have done.
I came to Prague to see Bob Dylan, my favorite Nobel Prize winning musician. I’ve seen him about ten times since 1975. When I learned in December that his spring European tour would stop in Prague for three nights, it seemed like a good reason to visit a city I’d heard much about but never seen. I bought a ticket and began planning a trip.
Prague is as far from Blagoevgrad as is Bangor from Detroit. I could have flown, but I used buses and trains, and saw a bit of central Europe. I found an inexpensive hotel a short distance from the center of town. For the equivalent of five American dollars, you can buy a 24-hour tram pass that takes you anywhere in the city.
I arrived on Saturday, the day before the show, and set out to locate the venue: a small theater called the Lucerna Velky Sal. Although I looked it up on Google, I had to ask directions at an information kiosk. The old part of Prague consists of narrow stone streets that weave between public squares in a pattern nothing like modern city blocks. Finally, down a small side street, I spotted a theater marquee: Lucerna.
At first I thought there was some mistake. I found myself in an indoor mall that included a music store, several other shops, a restaurant, and a movie theater. The Velky Sal was a small lobby behind plate glass and a locked door. Stairs led down to an out-of-sight venue that turned out to be the theater.
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Here I met a young guy from Sweden and an older couple from the United Kingdom who were, like me, looking around and wondering if this was the right place. We had no trouble recognizing one another. Though less flamboyant, Dylan’s fans are a tribe as surely as the Deadheads and Jimmy Buffett’s followers.
Early the next morning, a truck occupied the parking space outside the theater, and a few roadies unloaded crates and wheeled them inside. It was gone an hour later. At four in the afternoon, yellow-clad security people filled the lobby, but there was still no sign of the artist or the event.
Two hours before show time, someone put up a poster. A few standing-room tickets were quickly snatched up. The doors opened at seven, and by the time Dylan and his band took the stage, punctually at eight, the theater, which had two balconies but could not have seated more than 2,500, was packed. Somehow, the tribe had gotten the word.
Can I just say that the concert was, if possible, beyond expectations? It had been five years, and the 77-year-old singer with the sandpaper voice has only gotten younger. But then, he famously wrote a song about that – when he was twenty-three.
In Budapest on the way back to Bulgaria, I saw a larger than life banner of Iggy Pop, who will play there in July, on the side of a building. This, I thought, is the difference between Dylan and every other rock star in the world. He can do an intimate show in a beautiful old theater, with zero publicity, and people will show up. Parents bring their kids to Dylan concerts. No one lives forever, but sixty years from now, those kids will have something to tell their grandchildren.
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