It's Bob Dylan's birthday on May 24th. He will be 83. He has inspired me since I was 21. I saw him live twice. Here's a piece I wrote about a Bob Dylan convention in Manchester.
"I met him once. Yeah, really. Bob Dylan," said Larry Eden, 40, flicking back the shoulder length black hair that draped his Dylan tee shirt.
"I was going to be so cool. But when I approached him for an autograph my mouth just dried up, my legs turned to jelly and the words were strangled in my throat.
"As he signed the picture I was shakily holding I just stammered 'thanks' and he said 'why, you're welcome man'.
"I stood there, frozen in wonder."
The times may be a-changin' but Dylan fans' adoration of their Messiah is both enduring and obsessive.
Damn the Guardian critic who claimed he sings "like a sea lion with emphysema".
His hardcore followers would buy tapes of Dylan gargling mouthwash.
Larry, in Manchester for Bringing It All Back Home, a Dylan convention, is arguably his most devoted British disciple.
Whenever the increasingly crumpled troubadour from Duluth, Minnesota appears at the Hammersmith Odeon Larry, known as Lamb Chop, is always in the front row in the same seat, A 18.
He makes sure because over the years he has badgered Dylan's concert promoter to confide in advance when tickets will go on sale.
Larry is always first in the queue, sometimes 36 hours before the box office opens, with his portable barbecue.
So methodical, he evens organises a queueing system using cloak room tickets so that when other fans turn up they can go for a drink or a stroll knowing their place is safe.
His contact in the promoter's office was stunned when Larry found out his birthday and sent him a card.
Once, touched by Larry's commitment to Dylan, the man offered to post him two tickets in row four.
No good, said Larry. It has to be A 18. And anyway, it's not right to accept such a perk. Larry has to prove his devotion through the pavement vigil.
A professional gambler from Ilford, Essex, Larry is always first with news of a new tour. Then he'll run up a £500 phone bill to inform a network of fans.
He has been known to stand up at concerts and round on casual ticket holders in the audience by screaming at the top of his voice: "You don't deserve this."
Talking of birthdays, Larry, who is divorced but has a Dylan-loving girlfriend, always celebrates Dylan's on May 24th.
Coincidentally, his daughter, now 10, and called Bobby, of course, is exactly half a year older on the same day, so she gets half a cake.
His greatest momento is one of Bob's plectrums which the legend threw into the audience.
"Without me moving it landed straight in my hand," said Larry. "Amazing."
He also treasures a plastic cup Dylan once drank from on stage, which Larry begged from a roadie.
Sacha's Hotel is now filling up with more than 350 fans from Somerset, Stuttgart and even Surinam.
In the foyer a young man, who clearly wasn't even born when Dylan erupted onto the pop scene in the sixties with his leather cap and protest songs, strums It's All Over Now Baby Blue on acoustic guitar.
The strains of Mr Tambourine Man are echoing down the corridor from a video theatre showing eight film compilations.
Next door the first of three Dylan lectures is about to start and in the main hall there's a sale of Dylan memorabilia, tapes, CDs, books, photographs and posters.
Larry converted to Dylan aged 14.
Ten years later his entire record collection, including other artists' work, was stolen in a burglary.
When he came to replace it, he realised no other musician compared to the great Robert Allen Zimmerman so since then he has never bought or even listened to any other singer.
Is he completely barmy?
"Some people may think so.
"But I believe Bob Dylan is the most important human being of the twentieth century and in two or three hundred years' time, if we haven't blown ourselves up by then, he will prove to be as great an influence on culture as Shakespeare."
Larry's flat is a shrine, filled with 900 tapes.
But even that doesn't match John Green's collection.
He's what Dylanologists call a "completist", one of only a handful in the country.
He has a tape and/or CD of every single Dylan concert where recording equipment - official or unofficial - was present.
Such is the global organisation he has built up that within two days of Dylan performing anywhere in the world John will receive a copy of the playlist and within about a week he'll have a tape of the show.
Sometimes a CD and a video of the gig will follow too.
A 38-year-old accountant with Touche Ross, he reckons following Dylan costs him £10,000 a year.
"It seems impossible to justify such expenditure. But it's like an addiction," he admits.
Here I declare an interest, admitting that I was once a Dylan buff and years ago sent postal orders off to an address in Liverpool to receive tapes of obscure Dylan shows so crackly you could hardly hear the music.
But when, in the eighties, Dylan "got religion" and produced a trilogy of appallingly bland albums my devotion lapsed and family, career and other hobbies shunted his LPs to the back of the wardrobe.
John, a bachelor, from Northampton, looks on disapprovingly.
His collection of more than 2,000 tapes includes a much prized 40 minute recording of Dylan "messing about" on guitar in a Denver hotel room in 1966.
He also has recordings of people giving Dylan talks.
Since 1990 he has followed the singer abroad at least once a year.
In July he's off to watch three gigs in France, returns home for two days and then flies out for two more shows in Germany.
He and 13 friends also compile a monthly magazine called Freewheelin' now on issue 105, which they circulate just between themselves.
"Dylan is just the best. A wonderful songwriter but above all an incredible stage performer," says John.
"He's incapable of playing a song the same way twice.
"It's always fascinating to watch him, even when he's off form and murdering his own songs, as he did repeatedly in shows in 1991.
"You sit there enthralled by just how bad he is, knowing that next time he'll sparkle again."
In the main hall 35-year-old John Hume is selling copies of some of the 10,000 photographs he has taken of Dylan.
No photographer in the world has had the great man in their viewfinder more often.
But John, from Belfast but now living in Cradley, Worcestershire, is not a professional snapper.
He's a management trainer who first saw Dylan at Earl's Court in 1978 and later began taking his camera along to provide a souvenir of each show.
Since then he has photographed more than 100 performances, always without permission.
"I've only been seriously hassled by security men three or four times," says John, who is as discreet as possible and never uses flash.
"They took my film off me in Boston, Saratoga and Luxembourg. But I've never been thrown out."
His greatest triumph was covering the now famous Supper Club concert, a highly secretive Dylan appearance before just 400 fans in a tiny New York venue last November.
But the most ethereal location, he reckons, was Juan Les Pins, France in July 1992 where Dylan played in the open air with the Mediterranean lapping at the back of the stage.
John is now so well known at gigs that even members of Dylan's backing band ask for copies of his pictures.
He also met the woman in his life, Di, 44, at a previous Dylan convention.
Equally, Dylan has also split up many couples.
Derek Barker, 40, the co-organiser of the current get-together doesn't actually blame Dylan for his own divorce.
But his wife's antipathy certainly didn't help their childless relationship.
"When I told a friend we were parting amicably," confided Derek, a security consultant from Coventry "he replied 'thank goodness for that. I thought she might have scratched one of your LPs'."
Derek underwent a Pauline conversion to Dylan at the Earl's Court concert in 1978.
"It changed my life," he confessed.
Almost every waking hour outside work is now devoted to The Man.
He launched a newsletter called Isis which has now grown into a 60-page bi-monthly A4 magazine, with a print run of around 2,500.
It's available on subscription and on sale at Virgin and Tower record stores. But the £3 cover charge only just meets overheads.
"It's a labour of love," says Derek, who produces the entire publication using desktop technology.
The current issue, on sale at the convention, includes a record of the playlist for each concert in Dylan's Far East tour in February 1994.
On the letters' page is a lengthy discussion on whether Dylan's song Went To See The Gypsy could in fact be a veiled reference to a meeting with Elvis Presley, though scholars are sceptical.
And among the advertisements is one for a book of transcripts of radio phone-ins with Dylan between 1966 and 1974 with expert analysis of what him cryptic responses really meant.
Hungry As A Racoon (Bob Dylan Talks To His Fans And Other Strangers) is priced at £9.50.
In the evening the fans are entertained by a handful of Dylan sound alikes, including 32-year-old Geordie Mike Kirkup, a cinema's publicity officer.
"The songs are easy to play because there are only three or four chords to learn."
Last year's imitators contest was won by American Steven Keene who flew in from New York just to perform and has now recorded an album of Dylanesque music.
Just before I leave I tell 34-year-old Dutch journalist and fan Sjoerd de Jong, about John Green's annual investment on Dylan.
"Wow, £10,000," he says, shaking his head.
"Not even Bob Dylan spends £10,000 a year on Bob Dylan."
For a moment he'd forgotten he had fixed a week's holiday to coincide with the event.
Well, even obsession is relative.
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