Late night, early morning really. London at its coldest. Nerves jangling to music. A DVD version of Baez singing ‘Love is just a four letter word’…and there’s the ghost of old man Dylan, rather young man, or better still boy Dylan, floating menacingly above the tragi-melody of her rendition. At a cleverly chosen juncture, a passable imitation of the great man’s voice rings through her, before she bends back into her own tones…enough said. I know you hang over this song, I know it can never be fully mine without summoning you from our past, our shared history, as you were and as you never were…but this is not a reproach, not now, let this be a shared joke between us, though I alone will laugh at it.

The DVD – Scorsese’s marvelous if somewhat hagiographic documentary – moves on to Dylan himself, barely more than a child, a rebellious adolescent with a voice and a vocabulary none had possessed yet, or has since. He sings, in front of a visibly gloomy Donovan, a haunting early version of ‘love minus zero’, in that voice, world-weary but angrily young, bitter yet joyously high-spirited, wary but knowing, hard yet tender. I haven’t heard it sung better – compassion, sweetness and brittle danger resonate with one another in that voice. In that music. We move, instantly, into that maddened Newcastle performance of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, when a junked-out Dylan cups his hands, and blazes into the mike like lava, ‘you’re invisible, you got no secrets…to conceaaaaaal’…blotting out in that scream and in that gesture the history that gave him his power, the political world he fed off, and the doomed, failed escape from it which nonetheless succeeded, producing the greatest writing rock music will ever know. The crowd is edgy, stunned, shocked…Dylan feeds off that shock, ripping at it with his teeth, his eyes, and his breath.

And I wonder, watching all of this at a distance of four decades, about the nature of that peculiar intensity that binds me to this re-re-reproduction, through digital technology, of that moment in time and in music, about my investment in what haunts me. The nervous drive that fuses my body and mind with that moment, dimly imagined and dimly represented in the shaking motions of the camera, the machinic pulsation between us, this radiation and interlocution of distant presents and disentangling histories. How can this be named? Awe, rapture, resonance…all true, but all inadequate. Perhaps the only word that can catch it is love, at its richest and in its most ambivalent manifestations. Tenderness and desire, devotion and obsession, longing and, above all, excitement.

And it holds, though with a greater melodic softness, into the music I play next, the dancing, shimmering guitar-work of Jerry Garcia. His music moves me like the music of none I’ve heard…each note plucks out unexpected juxtapositions of sweetness, mystery, mourning and ecstasy. Garcia died horribly, but I like to think of his life as happy. The live recordings of his performances convey this to me somehow. The earlier days: the poet in a community of poets, the purveyor of lyric, the gentle, already slightly burly bearded guitarist weaving his magic with an almost diffident grace. The later days: an older, more twinkling magician, more a touch of the professional performer, perhaps, but also a more meditative wisdom at work, reflective as his earlier work was exploratory, interpretive as his earlier work was innovative. After the watershed with the Dead in the early and mid 1970s, his best work came well into his forties, from the early 1980s. There’s more mastery in the construction, the finesse that comes of re-tuning and reworking the same sets for decades. The best work comes live, there are few outstanding studio recordings in the decade before his death. Psychedelia, hippie freedom, country and bluegrass renewals…these cannot generate a new music in the 1980s, but remain Garcia’s musical referents. So he begins to re-interpret the music that swayed the Dead in the 70s. And operatic crescendos, darkly beautiful narratives are produced, and leap out from the guitar and voice at screaming audiences…there’s not just commerce, but mischief in how he plays with them. A wise ageing man, looking older than he is, a Father Christmas figure, with a big round belly and a sweet smile and a white beard…avuncular to the core. But something hides and dances beneath that, to the last days before the drug overdose that killed him. An elvish magic, to tiredly evoke tolkien, an elvish and impish and druidical magic, obvious yet hidden, dark but kind.

Nostalgia's a strange thing. How is it possible to feel nostalgic for a time and place you'd never known? But I do.