The Day Bob Dylan ruined my life

Theme parties are Jerome's big thing. Eurovision, Wimbledon: you name it, Jerome throws a bash and I go along with it for a quiet life. But enough is enough, and last week was too much. I was having no hand, act or part in a Bob Dylan Birthday Party party. I hate Bob Dylan, although I'm reliably informed he thinks highly of me. By Thursday, Jerome had taken to sulking around the flat.

"Everybody loves Bob Dylan," he muttered.

"Yeah, well, I'm not everybody!"

"What's yer problem? What's yer problem?"

He shook his head and walked out of the kitchen.

I have two problems with Bob Dylan. First, the age gap. While his generation was lapping up free love, my peers were peering through the window of Sex, Malcolm McLaren's shop, where love was anything but free. My second issue with the work of Bob Dylan is more personal.

October 1979. I had just turned 18 and was gagging for my first legal drink. But I was in the town of Lubbock, Texas, where the legal drinking age was 21. I had no intention of hanging around for another three years, so I decided to move to Tennessee.

There I was in Lubbock bus station, sipping soda through a straw and feeling sorry for myself, when I met Loretta. It was my safety-pin-pierced ear lobe that attracted her attention. I suppose any relationship we might have had was doomed from the outset. It wasn't so much that she was an older woman, more that I was a younger man. We talked and shared another soda, and over the course of our conversation I divulged my disillusion with the drinking code in Texas. That's when she told me about the Gene Pool, a beat club where you could drink until dawn, unhindered by licensing laws. I had never seen so many black polo necks and berets, and there wasn't a drop of Beamish to be had, but the wine was bearable if you could put up with the incessant babble of poets.

That first night, having consumed six or seven pints of red wine, I fell madly in love with Loretta. Before I knew it, I was part of the scene: black polo neck, the works.

As the weeks rolled on, I even began reciting verse. The Bould Thady Quill was a big hit with the beatniks.

Life was wonderful, except I never knew where I stood with Loretta. Was she or wasn't she my woman? Yes, we swore undying love, but the Gene Pool was an all-for-one, one-for-all sexual free-for-all, and deep down I was still a Catholic. I confronted Loretta with my conundrum. She just scribbled down a poem, handed it to me and walked away. And that was it. She moved to another table and I was out of the in crowd. The next morning I hopped on a Greyhound to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I spent two weeks trying to piece together my shredded heart and make sense of a scribbled poem. I showed the well-thumbed scrap of paper to Kin Chung, a work colleague.

"Ah, Forever Young - Bobby Dylan!" said he.

"Bobby who?" said me.

"You know, 'the answer is blowing in the wind'," said he.

"What answer?"

Kin Chung then gave me the A-Z of Robert Allen Zimmerman, before singing Forever Young.

At my young age and delicate state of mind, it was as if each word, line and verse was put there to taunt me. I had visions of those black-polo-necked, red-necked Texan beatniks laughing and Loretta sneering. Where did that Robert Zimmerman fella get off at ridiculing me? That day Bob Dylan ruined my life. But friendship knows no bounds, so as a compromise, Jerome and I rented Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973) in honour of Dylan's 60th. I'm a big fan of Peckinpah's interpretation of the wild west - Ride The High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), to name but a few - but I've stopped short at Pat Garret And Billy The Kid because of Dylan's soundtrack and acting part.

Not a lot happens in the film, but therein lies its beauty. The focus is on the characters who inhabit every millimetre of this wide-screen classic, rather than indulging contrived situations. A bit like the great Mississippi itself, it is wide and slow-moving, but it just keeps rolling along.

Dylan's soundtrack is made to measure, haunting and powerful, lyrics drifting in and out seamlessly. This is a film in which John Coquillon's photography captures Peckinpah's vision. For me, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is a western of westerns, and a film I will revisit.

Looking back in mature recollection to those days in Tennessee when bitterness overruled my brain, I knew Dylan was innocent of any bad intent towards me. In fact, I remember that, on the advice of Kin Chung, I decided I needed closure on the Loretta affair.

So, rather than vent my bile in a letter or a long-distance phone call, I sent her a line from "All my exes live in Texas, and that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee."