Not over the fact that this 30th Anniversary Bob Dylan Concert Celebration happened 29 years ago (10.16.92) at Madison Square Garden, or the fact that it was probably the greatest boomer-rocker ensemble performance of all time, or the fact that I betrayed myself by not flying back to New York and somehow snagging a pair of tickets.
But over the glorious fact that there were no wokesters back then, and the Millennials who were destined to bring the terror to American culture (the worst era of witch-burning horror since the early ’50s) were toddlers back then…they couldn’t know and of course we didn’t know either, and everything seemed…well, not untroubled (life’s a constant vale of troubles) but at least the Monsters Wouldn’t Arrive on Maple Street for at least another 25 or 26 years or so and all was relatively “well”, so to speak.
George H.W. Bush was in the White House, Bill Clinton hadn’t been elected yet, Jett and Dylan were 4 and 2 years old respectively, I was driving a spiffy, semi-newish black 240SX Nissan and writing for Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times Sunday “Calendar” section and even the N.Y. Times, and my first trip to the Cannes Film Festival had happened five months earlier.