This story is going to wend its way around to Mike Peters eventually, I promise.
Brian and I have seen Bob Dylan live in concert together twice: once in Chicago in late 2014 and once in Connecticut in the summer of 2017. Brian is a huge, lifelong Dylan fan and had seen him play numerous other times. But I’d never listened to him much or seen him live before, so I was happy to finally get to check out what the big deal is. (I wrote a bit about what I perceive the big deal to be here.)
At some point after the 2017 show, we were having dinner with one of Brian’s dearest friends, a Boston-born bass player, a cranky guy with a heart of gold. We were talking about what concerts we’d all seen recently, and I mentioned how we’d just seen Dylan for the second time and how much I’d enjoyed the show, even as a relative newcomer to Dylan’s music. The bass player took a moment then pronounced his verdict: “I saw Dylan live in the late ’80s. Sucked. The Alarm opened for him and blew him off the stage.”
He was so vehement about it, even though neither Brian nor I particularly cared that he’d disagreed with us about Dylan’s live merits, that it became a running joke with us. Anytime a Dylan song would come up on shuffle on our iPhones, or on the rare occasion we’d hear The Alarm’s “Rain in the Summertime” on the radio, one of us would have to say, like a mantra, “The Alarm blew him off the stage.”
Maybe a year or so after that, we were hanging out with Brian’s bass player friend again. Somehow the conversation rolled back around to Bob Dylan, and, without fail, the bass player repeated his anecdote almost completely verbatim: “I saw Dylan live in the late ’80s. Sucked. The Alarm opened for him and blew him off the stage.” Brian and I could barely make eye contact with each other, at the risk of devolving into hysterical laughter.
So to really drive home how funny we found not just the story but his friend’s commitment to his assessment, Brian, of course, wrote a song about it. A song that we just happened to include in our set the next time we booked a gig with our friend in early 2019. It’s called–what else–“Mike Peters” and you can listen to our performance of it in this YouTube video:
To this date, it’s the only time we’ve ever played it and probably the only time we ever will.
Thank you for the music and the (unintentional) laughs, Mike Peters.
Queen of Peaches 