AUDITIONING FOR ‘DYLAN’: LIKE A ROLLING CLONE

In one corner a scruffy, skinny kid with close-cropped hair was strumming a guitar, looking an awful lot like Bob Dylan in his Greenwich Village folk days.

Across the room a gypsy-style Dylan wore a leather vest and a red bandana, as if he had stepped out of the Rolling Thunder Review.

There were a host of Dylans clad in paisley shirts, motorcyle jackets and Ray-Ban sunglasses, with cigarettes dangling from their lips. You’d almost bet they’d dug up the outfit Dylan wore on the cover of his “Bringing It All Back Home” album.

The setting may have been Ohio Avenue in West L.A., but it looked more like Highway 61 Revisited than the Odyssey Theatre. Toting beat-up guitars and sporting faded jeans, 30 Bob Dylans converged on the local playhouse the other day, all eager to audition for the lead role in a stage show called “Dylan: Words and Music.”

It’s hard to imagine what the real Dylan would have made of all this. He certainly doesn’t have to worry about any competition. Most of the aspirants, who were asked to perform a Dylan tune and then read some short excerpts from the script of the show by producer/director Peter Landecker, seemed nervous, often forgetting lyrics and crooning out of tune.

Some Dylans were spooked by their unlikely status as Dylan stand-ins. One forgot his guitar, though he insisted that he could play with proficiency. One broke a string on the way over, but brought a backup guitar, a banged-up heirloom that his grandfather bought from a Sears catalogue in 1920. One played a song he wrote himself instead of an actual Dylan composition. It helped him “get in the mood” to be Dylan.

Nearly everybody was dressed for success, the uniform of the day amounting to faded denims, jean jackets and black boots. Except for one young man who came outfitted as a college professor, wearing a tweed jacket and corduroys. One Dylan asked him, “Hey, what are you doing--auditioning to be his manager?”

The great thing is that lack of experience is hardly a drawback. Dylans here included Tom Swift, who said he was actually a Dylan bodyguard on the singer’s 1974 tour with the Band, and David Douglas, a comic who said he does impressions of everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Jim Morrison to the Bee Gees and Sarah Vaughan.

Another of the Dylans was John Marlo, a 28-year-old actor whose most recent role was playing a homosexual on “Divorce Court.”

Sitting on a couch in the Odyssey lobby, tuning his guitar and adjusting his harmonica holder, he was brooding over this momentous opportunity.

“This really brings back memories for me, of the days when I used to think I was Dylan,” said the actor, who had apparently gone to great lengths to make a good impression--he was dressed all in black, had gold tint in his hair and wore heavy makeup and a putty nose.

“I flunked out of school at Marquette University, but I used to play the coffee-houses a lot, and I’d always played Dylan songs. They were simple to play, even if I never really mastered the voice--or the guitar or harmonica, for that matter.”

He shrugged. “I’m gonna play ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ‘ ‘cause that’s the song where I figure I sound most like him. I just want to make a good impression. To me, Dylan was a prophet in his own time. He was really a vehicle for the rest of the world.”

OK. But what about the putty nose? “Well, my real nose doesn’t really look much like Dylan’s. And I live with this girl who’s a makeup artist. . . .”

The man behind this unusual venture is Peter Landecker, a boyish, 26-year-old UCLA graduate who’s acted, founded a theater company (the L.A. Test Stage), worked as a development exec for a film company and, most recently, served as a researcher and producer for the Voyager Video Disc firm. However, he always dreamed of putting together a stage show that would dramatize Dylan’s life story, using a panoramic view of lyrics, music, interviews, monologues and poetry.

While still in college, Landecker performed an unauthorized Dylan show himself. It was “sloppy, but with a lot of soul.” In 1980, he got a lucky break. He ran into Dylan at a gas station on Sunset Boulevard. When Landecker told Dylan about his recent UCLA stage show, he received a warm response. “I figured I had nothing to lose, so I told him I wanted the rights to do a show about him.”

According to Landecker, Dylan had initial reservations--”he didn’t want it to be like all those Beatlemania and Elvis impersonator shows, which he thought were kind of cheap,” Landecker explained. But after years of negotiations, Landecker finally won the exclusive rights to a stage version of Dylan’s story, which he says will premiere in San Francisco next spring.

(A Dylan publishing representative confirmed this: “Landecker’s show is authorized and legitimate--he has the North American rights to do the show.”)

Not that it was easy. “There have been so many obstacles that I could write a book just about the process of getting the rights,” he said. He declined to elaborate, saying that he didn’t want to ruffle feathers before the show opens.

“The whole thing with Dylan is that every time I’d meet him, he’d be a different person. The first time I saw him, he was real shy. Sometimes he’s been very open and friendly, other times a little bit curt.

“But I think he’s going along with this because he understands it’s going to be a celebration, not an impersonation. Dylan is so important because he’s one of the few performers in our lifetime who’s captured the spirit of the individual--that if you stay true to your conscience, it can take you anywhere. And that’s what I’ve been looking for here. Not an exact replica of Dylan, but someone who can re-create his spirit on stage.”

As for this day’s Dylans, the spirits were willing, but the fleshes were sometimes weak. One, who yawned repeatedly during his early afternoon reading, finally ground to a halt, saying “Geez, it’s a little early to be doing this stage stuff, isn’t it?”

Another, after finishing his audition, asked Landecker what he thought. Eyeing the young man, who bore a closer resemblance to Billy Joel than Bob Dylan, the producer said diplomatically: “Your reading was excellent, but your problem is your look. You just don’t resemble Dylan very much.”

The actor responded: “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But we could fix that. I can do anything with this hair. I could make it black, or curly. And we could use makeup. . . . “

Landecker nodded. “Sure. I guess with a little work on your nose, and your face, maybe you could look a little closer.”

There were certainly plenty of bona fide Dylanatics on hand. Andreas Wijkstorm, 22, said he could play any Dylan song that the master had ever written. “I picked ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ just ‘cause it was the first tune that came into my head,” said the Swedish-born guitarist, who had a scraggly beard, a fringed leather jacket and a pair of high-top sneakers, one red and one black.

“When I grew up in Sweden, all my friends were into AC/DC and Alice Cooper, and I was kind of a freak because I was into folk music. But Dylan was really a big deal to me. From about age 16 to 20, I tried to do everything Dylan did, even bumming around Europe like he used to bum around here, though I guess he’s not really into that anymore.

“Now guess I still look up to him, even if he’s not a real hero anymore. I mean, I don’t want to find out what color underwear he wears. I grew out of that.”

Mike Dominguez, 28, had been working on his Dylan technique: “I listened to every song of his I could find. Then I tried to get beneath the surface of the words, and smoked a lot of cigarettes to get my voice real gravelly. I think it worked.”

Perched nearby, Wijkstorm offered a helpful tip: “If it’s the voice you’re after, whiskey works even better.”

Not everyone was there because Dylan had changed their life. For Paisley Spurs (“my real name”), the audition was strictly a job opportunity: “I mean, I like the guy OK, but this is mostly a way to get recognition and make some money.” Spurs said he recently played the lead role in a Long Beach Theater production of “My Jewish Vampire.”

David Douglas, 27, a comic impressionist who came to auditions wearing a Bob Dylan/Tom Petty Summer Tour T-shirt, was equally businesslike: “Dylan’s a good songwriter, but my favorite is Donald Fagen,” he said. For Jerry Pavlon, 25, an actor who plays a Harvard law student in the upcoming film, “Soul Man,” the casting call was “just another audition, though it is a special audition. After all, Dylan is not my idol. He’s a great songwriter, but a lousy singer.”

Asked what prompted him to try out for the show, Pavlon said with a grin: “My agent.”

Landecker said he’ll put on similar auditions in San Francisco and New York. He’s already received numerous video-taped applications from would-be Dylans: “I’d say about half of the guys had some real talent, which is pretty remarkable. I even liked the guy who wore the putty nose. That took a lot of effort, even if he didn’t really look at all like Dylan.”

“Several” Dylans had potential, though he clearly seemed most taken by Timothy Elwell, a young actor who was asked to study a separate script and perform a second reading after most of the other candidates had departed.

At 21, Elwell was perhaps the youngest of all the Dylans and easily the most charismatic. He also picked the most intriguing Dylan selection during his audition--while the others stuck to popular Dylan hits, Elwell strummed “To Ramona,” one of Dylan’s most sorrowful early songs.

Tall and skinny, Elwell wore torn jeans, a ragged work shirt and you could see one of his big toes sticking through a hole in his shoes. Though he was very quiet, both on and off stage, he had the earnest, intense look of a young Dylan who’d just come back from a visit with Woody Guthrie.

“I think Dylan’s been the biggest influence on my entire life, besides my own father,” he said in a quiet Midwestern drawl. “I grew up in Wheaton, Ill., and I remember when I was about 10 or 11, really getting into ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ I must’ve played it 15 times a day. I was really caught up in Dylan--I had about 50 or 60 bootlegs of his too.

“I just think he’s totally different than other people in pop music. I mean, the difference between Dylan and Madonna, well it’s like the difference between black and white.”

Elwell said that as he’s grown up, his vision of Dylan has changed, from hero worship to something closer to respect.

“If I had a problem, it was that I idealized him too much,” he said. “Now I just admire the guy. Which I figure is more than enough these days.”