070507 Bob Dylan, Ottawa, ON

On July 5th, 2007 I joined everybody else in Ottawa at LeBreton Flats for the much-anticipated appearance of the great Bob Dylan at the also great (for a few years, anyway) Ottawa Bluesfest.  It’s not like the whole city was really there or anything, though when one was left to navigate the clustered concert pitch it sure seemed like it.

The 2007 season was the peak of the great Bluesfest lawnchair wars, and the Dylan show itself might very well have marked the summit of the apex of the pinnacle of that peak.  Though the ire between the standers and the sitters (aka the concert goers/music fans versus the almost-stayed-home-and-watched-television-instead apathetic casual listener crowd) had been building for a few years, the growth of the festival had only increased the agitation between the two competing factions.  And of course an act like Bob Dylan drew out these two groups with equal and opposite ferocity.

As a result, the lawn outside of the War Museum was swarming with chaotically self-imposed stands of chairs surrounded by stuffed-in crowds of standers, much to the frustration of both parties.  As I was weaving through this mess trying to return to my circle of friends from the beer stand one of these sitters took a stand right in front of me.

I’ll pick up the story as it was printed in The Ottawa Citizen the following day:

At Thursday’s Bob Dylan show, some members of the crowd were equally territorial, said Todd Snelgrove.

“I was trying to walk from one area to another and this lady in a lawn chair stood up and wouldn’t let me walk by.  She said ‘You can’t walk up here.  I have my lawn chair up here, I’m guarding it, and nobody’s walking by,’” he said.  

Mr. Snelgrove said he “didn’t want to start trouble” [which refers to the fact that I seriously considered dumping one of my beers over her head but figured she wasn’t worth the $6] so he walked away, but turned around and saw the woman stopping everybody else who attempted to cross.  He also said the lawn chairs force standers onto a narrow path, a recipe for a potentially dangerous situation.  “The exits aren’t well thought out this year,’ he said.  “What if something really horrible happened?”  [Though in truth I felt like the real danger would come when someone finally got fed up enough to fling one of the offending lawnchairs willy-nilly into the crowd.]

The lady stood there and forced me to decide between a physical interaction and backtracking through a massive crowd made even more dense by the obese amount of space lawnchairs take up.  Luckily I found the strength to do the wrong thing and I backtracked.  Despite this unnecessary delay I made it back to my crew before the music started and found myself among good friends on a beautiful night, all of which helped me squelch any discomposure that crazy lady might have planted in me.

And then Bob Dylan came on and elevated us all over and above these petty differences with a set that gloriously enchanted every music fan who heard it while it equally frustrated all of the casual legend-gawkers who were mortified that Dylan had breathed new life into his old songs rather than creating note-for-note replications of tracks he recorded when he was barely out of his teenaged years).  

By the time Dylan had delivered a handful of hits like Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 or Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right in his new and nearly indecipherable triplet vocal style countless chairs behind me were folded up and taken home by disgruntled owners who will forever claim that Dylan sucks live because they didn’t “get” it, which eased the pressure on the big lawn and allowed things up front to get a little roomier.  It didn’t hurt that the bigscreens were shut off for the entire set too, taking even more of a sheen away from the almost-stayed-home-to-watch-television crowd.

Once Dylan got around to classic gold like Tangled Up in Blue and Highway 61 Revisited we the faithful were throwing up our arms in glory, and when he delivered his great Masters of War in the shadow of the War Museum we all knew we were standing (yes, standing in exactly the right place at the right time.  The encore of Like a Rolling Stone, Thunder on the Mountain and All Along the Watchtower was so much more icing on the cake, and by the time I walked out of there and retrieved my bike from the cycle valet the lawnchair angst had been left well behind me.

Though of course it would end up right in front of me again the next day the moment I arrived back at Bluesfest.  With this in mind m’lady and I decided to do something about it.