When Bob Dylan played at the UW in 1978, Seattle Times rock critic Patrick MacDonald got the opportunity to meet him — but he almost turned it down.

Backstage after the performance, a friend in the music business asked MacDonald if he’d like to meet Dylan. The 1970 UW graduate had always wanted to, but he didn’t want to be just another pestering fan. He respected Dylan too much. But his friend insisted.

“He knocked on the door and Dylan didn’t answer right away,” MacDonald said. “And I thought, ‘Damn, damn, damn. I don’t want to be somebody bugging him.’ So I said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s forget it.’ And then the door opens and he’s standing there drying his hands with a towel, looking at us [inquisitively]. And [my friend] said, ‘This is Patrick MacDonald from The Seattle Times, and he’d like to meet you.’ I just wanted to sink into the ground.”

Dylan greeted him with a limp handshake.

“But then I noticed on his table — and I’m so happy I did — a paperback copy of Ray Charles’ autobiography,” MacDonald said. “So I pointed to it and I said, ‘Has he got to Seattle yet?’ He looked at the book and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s so weird — I’m sitting here in Seattle, and I’m reading, and I didn’t even know that Ray Charles started his career in Seattle.’ So we just sat and started talking as two fans of Ray Charles. And pretty soon I realized, ‘Jeez, I’m bantering back and forth with goddamn Bob Dylan about music.’”

Eventually Dylan needed to go to catch a plane, but he didn’t want to end his conversation with MacDonald.

“He said, ‘Come on, why don’t you come to the airport with me? It will be fun,’” MacDonald recounted. “I had to write my story that night, and I stupidly said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I can’t. I have to write my review.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And as he was driving off I thought, ‘Damn, damn, damn. I could have stayed up all night and written that damn review. Why didn’t I get in that limo and ride with him?’ But at least I met him.”

Not only has he talked about Ray Charles with Bob Dylan, MacDonald, 63, has met and interviewed Ray Charles himself, as well as Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Tina Turner, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Eminem and countless other big musicians.

“I’ve been so fortunate to be involved with musicians all my life,” MacDonald said. “I love musicians now more than ever. I just feel honored to have been involved even in a peripheral way with what musicians do.”

MacDonald has covered music in the print and broadcast industries for more than 40 years. In high school and college he was an arts critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In the late 1960s he worked as a disc jockey at a progressive rock radio station. He also worked as a freelance writer for other publications, such as Rolling Stone. He’s been a rock critic at The Seattle Times for 35 years.

“I’ve been so blessed, I’ve been so lucky and I’m so thankful that I’ve spent my whole working career involved in things that I love: writing, music and newspapers,” MacDonald said. “I didn’t think I could fashion a career out of my passions, but that’s the way it worked out. And here I am still doing it, still loving it.”

MacDonald’s love for music — especially rock ‘n’ roll — and his focus on writing music reviews made him a rock critic before rock critics were standard in the newsroom.

“Pat is sort of a pioneer,” said Gene Stout, the pop music critic at the Seattle P-I. “For the early part of his career he was sort of the only great game in town. He was doing something very few other papers were really committed to. In the ‘60s, rock criticism and rock journalism were just in their infancy. He’s been at it since the very beginning and is quite a significant player in that respect.”

His experience in the field of rock journalism has made him an authority in Seattle, said Lynn Jacobson, The Seattle Times Sunday Arts & Entertainment editor.

“People know that when they read his work they’re reading an expert,” she said. “He brings a long-term Seattle perspective. When he’s writing about shows that might have happened 20 or 25 years ago, he’s writing from firsthand experience. He knows how the city has changed and how its musical taste has changed.”

Jacobson said that after so many decades as a rock critic for The Seattle Times, MacDonald is a master of music criticism.

“His reviews do everything that a music review should do,” she said. “They set the stage, they bring you up to date as a reader on a musician’s recent history, they assess the musicianship of the performance and they entertain. So he’s not just writing about entertainment, but he’s being entertaining at the same time. And he makes it all look really easy.”

MacDonald, however, still considers himself to be learning journalism and the craft of writing.

“I don’t want to say writing comes easily to me because I don’t want it to be that way,” he said. “I don’t want to be glib and I don’t want to use clichés. And mostly, I want to engage the reader. I want the first paragraph to lead into the second, and if I can get them all the way through — that’s my goal.”

MacDonald said he tries to take the reader to the concert in his writing — especially the reader who hasn’t been to a concert in 20 years.

“I think he has a very enthusiastic style of writing,” Stout said. “He captures the essence of a group and conveys the excitement of what a live performance might be like.

“He also brought a fairly strong critical eye as far as what was right, what was wrong about a given group or a given performance, and that’s what being a critic is all about — offering perspective,” he added. “Whether the readers agree with that perspective is another matter, but he’s always very good at that.”

MacDonald said as a rock critic he needs to write what he thinks in his reviews, even if it offends someone.

“There were a few times when I was a young man where I shifted a review because I didn’t want to offend,” he said. “I wanted to go along with the audience because I thought I was the one out of step. But then I couldn’t live with that. I have to be honest with myself. I can’t live with myself otherwise. I have to say what I think, and come what may.”

Jacobson said MacDonald brings an open and engaging voice to his reviews, and readers respond to that.

“We see the letters that people write to him, and they say ‘I’ve been reading your reviews for 15 years and I disagreed with this,’ and ‘How come you didn’t do that?’ and ‘I really love what you did with such-and-so,’” Jacobson said. “They write to him like they know him, which they do over all this time. And he’s really great about writing back to readers and engaging people in conversations about music.”

At 63, MacDonald is sometimes painted as old and out of touch with popular music and younger readers. But Jacobson said those who complain about MacDonald being too old must not read him regularly.

“If they did they would see that he’s really open to all kinds of music, and he’s not bound by the age of the performers or the crowd,” she said.

“He doesn’t dismiss genres as being too pop or too silly or too this or too that,” Jacobson added. “He likes all kinds of music: world music, jazz, country music, hard rock. He just has very, very eclectic tastes. You would think that some reviewers, having been at it for a long time, would get sort of more closed-minded about what they liked and what they didn’t like, and he’s sort of the opposite.”

MacDonald doesn’t think he’s out of touch, either, and he said he’s definitely not ready to retire. He attributes an open mind and an adventurous attitude — important traits for a rock critic — to music.

“I don’t want to use the cliché that it keeps me young, because I’m not young,” he said. “But music does [something] to me. I find myself very much like when I was in college, when I was a teenager I’d go home and play the latest music. I never lose what music can do to you. How music can change your mood, how it can inspire you. It can even help you to express sorrow and pain and all of those things. It helps me to cope, it helps me to live. It’s so vital to me.”

Stout commends him for continuing to write.

“What he brings is perspective, and as long as he’s not in a state of mind where he’s just dismissing everything new — which is not the case with him — I don’t think there’s an age limit on that,” Stout said. “Some people might think that’s the case, but a lot of the rock musicians and pop musicians he’s covering … are older than he is. If Tony Bennett at 82 years old is still going out there and can offer vital performances, then music writers can also prevail for a long time.”

MacDonald said music renews him and inspires him to continue writing year after year because artists are constantly finding new ways to express themselves musically.

“Nothing can stop an artist,” he said. “[Through] wars, depressions, economic collapse, artists go on. Bob Dylan will be writing on his death bed. He can’t help it. It’s what he is.”