How the Bob Dylan Concert for One Person Came to Be

An interview with 'Experiment Ensam' director Anders Helgeson

Screengrab from Experiment Ensam

A few days ago, I spoke with Fredrik Wikingsson. He’s the man in that screengrab right there, getting a Bob Dylan concert just for him. If you haven’t read that one yet, he had one heck of a story, and I encourage you to catch up. To summarize: A Finnish gaming company recorded a series of short films, Experiment Ensam, about people experiencing group activities all alone. One of those activities was attending a Dylan concert.

How did this happen, that Bob Dylan agreed to perform a short concert for just one person in the audience? Wikingsson didn’t know; the premise of the series involved keeping him somewhat in the dark about how the sausage was made. So I spoke with Experiment Ensam director Anders Helgeson. Wikingsson shared his experience in front of the camera. Now, Helgeson tells us what happened behind the scenes.

I’ll once again embed the full 14-minute video, and once again encourage you to watch it. For one, it’s fascinating, and also I think you’ll get more out of this conversation if you’ve seen it.

Here’s my conversation with director Anders Helgeson:

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How did you get involved in that show?

It was a commercial. Not a TV commercial, it was like longer segments on YouTube, “spending time with the brand” kind of commercial. Infotainment. It was kind of a social experiment where one person was put in different situations that you normally do with your friends, like singing karaoke, and he was trying to do them all alone. There was a psychologist involved. The slogan for the campaign was, if you translate it to English, “it’s more fun doing it together.” Something like that.

I think there were four or six episodes. This was the finale.

Were you the director for the whole series?

Yeah. We always knew we wanted to do the finale of a live show. That was the aim all along. They were pulling some strings trying to get, at first, I think a Swedish band to perform. Then there was some rumor about Iron Maiden maybe were interested. And then it just was like, “You won’t believe who just said yes. Bob Dylan.”

I didn’t understand anything. “Why is he doing this?” It just didn’t make sense. But it was unbelievable. It was the probably the best name we could have ever gotten for this thing.

There was a lot of hush-hush things going on in the background. I don’t know who actually pulled it off. Some guy in Stockholm with connections in LA, probably.

If a gambling company was behind this whole thing, there must have been some money involved.

Yeah, but I think it’s nowhere near, like, silly money. The overall feeling was that he surely wasn’t doing this only for monetary reasons. He must have found the idea interesting.

Why did the idea of having a concert, whether it was Iron Maiden or Bob Dylan or anyone else, make sense to be the final episode?

It’s probably the ultimate visual experience. If you have a totally empty concert hall, it would look just look amazing, and people would be just, “I want to see what happens with this guy.”

Once you land on Bob Dylan, how did you end up in that theater in Philadelphia specifically?

It was one of the venues where he played for more than one night.

We said, “You can just do the soundcheck. You won’t notice we are there. There will just be one guy sitting in the audience, and there’s no retakes, no directing. You just go on, do your thing, and get offstage.” But they actually took it quite seriously. They had already done the soundcheck.

We actually went there one day ahead of the shoot. We were supposed to meet [Dylan manager] Jeff Rosen. Fredrik was just starstruck by just that fact, that we’re going to meet Jeff Rosen.

That’s how you know he’s a real Dylan nerd.

Yeah. And did he tell you about the Sinatra albums?

He did. Whoops.

We took it very seriously, the psychological social experiment thing. So Fredrik was back in New York when we went down to Philly.

We had a meeting with Jeff. I was told, “Just explain roughly what the idea is, where we’re going to put the cameras, how it’s going to work. Explain that to Jeff, five or ten minutes, and we will go back to New York.”

So I went up to Jeff, and he said, “No, it’s better to talk directly to Bob. He’s coming here now.”