The Show’s the Thing: Dylan in Performance
Like the poems of the Greeks and Romans, Bob Dylan’s song is meant to be experienced in performance. Dylan himself captured the essence of the matter in an interview with music critic Jon Pareles, two days before the release of his 1997 comeback album, Time Out of Mind:
A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing. . . . I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be.
In the words of Bob Dylan, “Any minute of the day, the bubble could burst” (“Sugar Baby,” 2012). When that day comes, the Tulsa archive and other resources will preserve a simulacrum, an image or likeness, of the man and his performance. As such, it will be without full human essence, and it is that yearning for that human experience that keeps us coming back to Dylan.
That’s why I decided to get myself down for one of the last shows of the 2016 fall tour, in Clearwater, Florida, on November 19. “Had to go to Florida,” as the 2001 song “Po’ Boy” put it. All 2,180 seats at Ruth Eckerd Hall were filled, a beautiful venue with perfect acoustics on the shores of Alligator Lake, south of Safety Harbor. I had last seen Dylan and his band earlier in the year, on July 14, that time on the Boston waterfront. I partly felt an urge to see a post-Nobel Dylan concert. I was pretty sure nothing would be revealed in Clearwater or anywhere else—just a performance, from Stu Kimball’s opening guitar stage left, to Dylan and the band lined up and motionless under the closing lights. These days you have the words, the song, the band, and you have voice, gesture, and presence of Dylan, and that’s likely all there will be from here on out. The concert was brilliant from start to finish, as revealed on a recording available on YouTube at the time of writing. There was also something about the story or drama that Dylan’s setlist had become that induced me to get one last concert in. I had gotten an inkling in Boston, and it came home powerfully in Clearwater.
UNCOVERING THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK
Six of the songs in the concert were from the new “cover” albums, the only studio recordings that Dylan has put out since Tempest in 2012. In Boston the number of those songs had been eight, including the final performance of the tour for Irving Berlin’s song from 1932, “How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky)?” David Kemper, a drummer for the Jerry Garcia Band who played with Dylan from 1996 to 2001, tells of going into the studio for four days before a tour, also doing old songs, like Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody Some Time.” When the band recorded “Love and Theft” in 2001, Kemper recalls Dylan saying:
“All right, the first song we’re going to start with is this song,” and he’d play it on the guitar and then he’d say “I want to do it in the style of this song,” and he’d play an early song. Like he started with “Summer Days” and he’d play a song called “Rebecca” by Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner. . . . It was like, “Oh my God, he’s been teaching us this music [all along]—not literally these songs, but these styles.”
Some years later, Dylan would begin to bring such songs into his concerts, at first just one song. On October 26, 2014, he was in Hollywood for the last of a three-night stand at the Dolby Theatre. He and his band closed with a single encore, “Stay With Me,” a song written by Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh for the 1963 film The Cardinal, starring Tom Tryon. It is a short song, at home in that movie, where it comes across as a sort of prayer:
Should my heart not be humble, should my eyes fail to see,
Should my feet sometimes stumble on the way, stay with me. . . .
Once Frank Sinatra covered it in 1964, the song became more secular, though no less poignant, without any specific cultural context. By the end of the fall of 2014, in the hands of Bob Dylan, “Stay With Me” had, in the words of music journalist David Fricke, been turned into “the most fundamental of Great American Songs: a blues.”
The success in performance of “Stay With Me” may have helped Dylan decide to lay down these American standard songs of the middle third of the twentieth century—“the same songs that rock ’n’ roll came to destroy,” as Dylan put it in an interview with Robert Love. Shadows in the Night was released on February 3, 2015. Dylan was clearly proud to have his five-piece band backing what was initially described as a “Sinatra cover album” but came to be seen as something more than that as the other albums followed. In place of an orchestra, Dylan’s voice is accompanied by the touring band that has now been with him for quite some time, with horns added for some songs. The critical response was overwhelmingly positive, with Triplicate topping the British charts within a week of its release. Once again, Dylan knew what he was doing, and what he was doing was “uncovering,” not covering, these songs, bringing them back to life as surely as he had brought Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Timrod back from their “crumblin’ tombs.”
In the interview with Love, Dylan confirmed Kemper’s memory of playing such songs as far back as 2001, when the drummer left the band. The songs, Dylan revealed, all seem connected one way or another: “We were playing a lot of these songs at sound checks on stages around the world without a vocal mic, and you could hear everything. You usually hear these songs with a full-out orchestra. But I was playing them with a five-piece band and didn’t miss the orchestra.”
For these songs, the studio was only the start. They had started out in sound checks, Dylan’s way of teaching his band about the old “standards,” and had then been taken into the studio. Now they were back onstage, in performance, almost a third of the setlist in recent performances. That’s where they needed to be heard to see how well they fit particularly with Dylan’s own more recent songs. With the exception of “Some Enchanted Evening,” all the songs from Shadows in the Night soon joined “Stay With Me” and became part of Dylan’s performance, through the spring and summer concerts of 2015.
In reality, Dylan has given new life to these songs, particularly in performance. They are not just revived, they are transformed, even transfigured, by virtue of Dylan’s incorporating them into his own story. If you listen to the forty-one-year-old Sinatra singing “Autumn Leaves” in 1957, backed by an orchestra and in his full maturity, that is a fine experience, but it is just a song, covered by Sinatra, sung beautifully. Hearing Dylan end a concert with his version of the song, with Donnie Herron’s steel guitar lead-in replacing the string section—and outdoing the orchestra in its plaintive qualities as an interpretation of the song—is a different experience, because Dylan, aged seventy-five, also singing beautifully, had integrated the song into the story of his own songbook.
On December 20, 2016, NBC aired The Best Is Yet to Come, a concert in honor of the singer Tony Bennett’s ninetieth birthday a few days earlier. The show was filmed on September 15 at Radio City Music Hall. On October 28, on the band’s day off between concerts at Jackson, Mississippi, and Huntsville, Alabama, Dylan went into Workplay Studios in Birmingham, Alabama, and recorded a video of a Charles Strouse and Lee Richard Adams song from 1962, “Once Upon a Time”—covered by Bennett, Sinatra, and others—which was then shown during the NBC concert. It would eventually be released on the first disc of Triplicate. Both there and when I first heard it on TV, it somehow took me back to the great 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone,” which shares its opening with the title of the “cover song,” “Once upon a time. . . .” In that studio Dylan’s words and the band’s accompaniment express the melancholic sense of a world that is past, never to be brought back: “Once upon a time, the world was sweeter than we knew / Everything was ours; how happy we were then / But somehow once upon a time never comes again.” If that is too melancholy for you, YouTube will get you to the 1965 song itself, performed two weeks earlier by the same musicians in 2016 at the Desert Trip concert, on October 14, the day after the announcement of the Nobel Prize. There you’ll find the other Dylan singing a great, driving version, the guitars of Charlie Sexton and Donnie Herron unleashed as they follow Dylan’s singing: “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine. . . .” Bob Dylan’s world encompasses both songs and everything in between.
The band in these more recent concerts is now truly backing Dylan and his songs. Something has happened in the days since the performances of 2009–10, when Sexton returned to the band after leaving it in 2002, and Dylan seemed happy to showcase the new guitarist who was so right for the music that ended up on Tempest. Sexton is as good as ever, but he and all of the musicians are now there in the service of the band, the concert, the songs, and the singer. It is the songs, Dylan’s performance, the integrity and completeness of the concert, and the story it tells, that are always the focus.
Dylan has scattered the songs of Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels, and Triplicate across his set, mingling them with his own original songs, particularly those of the twenty-first century. He has given himself material for concerts for years to come, even if he makes no more records. In this setting the covers are no longer covers, no longer belong to anyone but Dylan, are part of his performative essence. Just as a line of Virgil in “Lonesome Day Blues” or Homer in “Early Roman Kings” no longer belongs to those ancient poets, but is stolen, a part of the song, these standards now belong to Dylan, precisely because they are heard in the arrangement and the performance of Dylan. And in the setting of a concert, individual songs become part of a larger, connected fabric. The new songs, as he told Love, “fall together to create a certain kind of drama.” And now, integrated with the new, deliberately restricted setlists of these years, they participate in a larger drama, telling the story of Dylan’s journey through the years.
Dylan at the end of the interview tries to explain to Love how he puts together a show:
It starts like this. What kind of song do I need to play in my show? What don’t I have? It always starts with what I don’t have instead of doing more of the same. I need all kinds of songs—fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas—and they all get juggled around during a live show. I’ve been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I’m always starting with that.
“A certain kind of drama,” and “the feeling of a Shakespearean drama.” As before, Dylan goes back to Shakespeare, giving a foretaste of the Nobel acceptance speech he would deliver at the end of the following year, with which this book will close: “like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters.”
“I WAS THINKING IN TRIADS”
In 2010, Clinton Heylin introduced his chapter on the songs that would come out on Modern Times with a perceptive observation:
In days of yore, Dylan had been something of a master when it came to producing trilogies of albums that served as the building blocks for a greater whole—witness the three acoustic albums he recorded between 1962 and 1964, the great electric trio of 1965–66, that (anti-)romantic trio he completed between November 1973 and July 1975, and the so-called religious trilogy released in the years 1979–81. The album he recorded in February 2006 proved to be the last volume of a trilogy of albums all hewn from the same pre-rock era of influences.
When Tempest came out in 2012, the trilogy seemed more easily to consist of that album and its two predecessors, Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006), with Time Out of Mind (1997) serving as the transitional comeback album. And Dylan continued with trilogies. In 2016, Dylan was working on the three-disc, thirty-song Triplicate, each of its sides more or less thirty-two minutes long. The songs could have fit on a double album, even though Dylan claimed for the thirty-two minutes “that’s about the limit to the number of minutes on a long-playing record where the sound’s most powerful.” The real reason may have been somewhat different, more to do with formal expectations, with associations and connections to other triads in the old traditions in which he works. Flanagan also asked whether the title Triplicate brings to mind Frank Sinatra’s trilogy of 1980, Past Present Future. “Yeah, in some ways, the idea of it,” Dylan replied, adding, “I was thinking in triads anyway, like Aeschylus, The Oresteia, the three linked Greek plays. I envisioned something like that.” I myself had wondered about a connection to Dante, whose trilogy, The Divine Comedy, has similar triadic perfection: Inferno 34 cantos long—Canto 1 is introductory, Purgatory and Paradise 33 cantos each, for a total of 100. That is also the tally of the satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour triad, with 100 episodes also across a triad of years from May 3, 2006, to April 15, 2009. But Dylan’s mind indeed seems to have been more on drama, perhaps, as he says, on Aeschylus, but also on Shakespeare.
Why was Dylan thinking in triads in late 2016? I suggest it was because he was shaping his concerts of this period as dramatic trilogies, as he has more or less said, with the songs of the cover albums participating in the drama and movement of very specifically selected songs from his own arsenal. Starting in the fall of 2016, he limited his repertoire to the three great, or classic, periods of his musical career, all the songs, starting in Phoenix on October 16, right after the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, coming from (a) 1963–66, (b) 1975, Blood on the Tracks, or (c) the post-1997 period, when the gift was given back with Time Out of Mind. These shows themselves also have a triadic essence, roughly three sections of six or seven songs. For the first section in every concert of the fall tour, the second and third songs were “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from 1963 and “Highway 61 Revisited” from 1965. This section has also featured a further triad in positions 5, 6, and 7: two songs from the recent “cover” albums, “Full Moon and Empty Arms” and “Melancholy Mood,” in all twenty-six fall 2016 concerts framing and contrasting with the ominous, driving “Pay in Blood.” That pattern continued in 2017, with new American standards stepping up to surround “Pay in Blood.” “Desolation Row,” also from 1965, was positioned later, the fifteenth song. At Clearwater, it featured Dylan sitting at the piano and turning to the audience as his facial expression seemed to act out the various masked characters in the song, itself a drama in its own right, whose faces, as the last verse puts it, Dylan had to rearrange as he gives “them all another name.” The middle section of the triad was anchored by two songs from Blood on the Tracks, the middle classic period “Tangled Up in Blue” in tenth place and “Simple Twist of Fate” in the twelfth. “High Water Rising (For Charley Patton)” from 2001 and “Early Roman Kings” keep up the tempo and drive of this middle section, in which none of the American standards disrupted the focus on the run of six original Dylan songs, all with rich and complex poetic stories and visual imagery. In contrast, the third and final section as the evening draws to a close is characterized by a more melancholic mood, starting with the world-weary songs “Soon After Midnight” and “Long and Wasted Years,” from the 2012 album Tempest, pinnacle of the long third classic period. Those two songs were joined by three from the American songbook, “I Could Have Told You,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “Autumn Leaves,” totally at home and a fitting close to the main concert, with Dylan’s voice clear and beautiful: “But I miss you most of all / My darling / When autumn leaves / Start to fall.” This has nothing to do with Frank Sinatra, everything to do with the drama of the concert.
The performance at Clearwater was representative of all the fall shows, and the pattern continued in the spring and summer tours of 2017, though with “Tangled Up in Blue” the only representative of the seventies, as in some of the concerts from the previous fall. Here is the pattern, this specifically from Clearwater:
1. “Things Have Changed” (The Essential Bob Dylan, 2000)
2. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)
3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
4. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” (Together Through Life, 2009)
5. “Full Moon and Empty Arms” (Shadows in the Night,2015)
6. “Pay in Blood” (Tempest, 2012)
7. “Melancholy Mood” (Fallen Angels, 2016)
8. “Duquesne Whistle” (Tempest, 2012)
9. “Love Sick” (Time Out of Mind, 1997)
10. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)
11. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” (“Love and Theft,” 2001)
12. “Simple Twist of Fate” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)
13. “Early Roman Kings” (Tempest, 2012)
14. “I Could Have Told You” (Triplicate, Disc 1: ’Til The Sun Goes Down, 2017)
15. “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
16. “Soon After Midnight” (Tempest, 2012)
17. “All or Nothing at All” (Fallen Angels, 2016)
18. “Long and Wasted Years” (Tempest, 2012)
19. “Autumn Leaves” (Shadows in the Night, 2015)
ENCORE
20. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1962)
21. “Stay With Me” (Shadows in the Night, 2015)
The setlist for the shows in the fall of 2016 were highly distinctive, on paper, and as experienced in concert. What I heard in Clearwater on November 19 was completely new, completely different from what I had heard in the summer. Through ordering and repetition, what Dylan and his band were playing night after night were songs that added up to something that went beyond the sum of the parts, that had a certain narrative quality, told a connected story. That sum of the parts has a life of its own, in a sense is a life of Dylan, but also a life that his songs have constructed in the minds of those who have followed him and lived through his songs. He has, with the help of these songs and the support they lend to his own songbook, created a dramatic story of great beauty and power.
Then in June 2017 a funny thing happened, or rather two funny things. Dylan started the summer tour on June 13 with a three-night stand at the beautiful, renovated Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. After a diversion to the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware, the regular performances resumed in Wallingford, Connecticut, and points north in New England, New York, and Canada. With the—as always—kind help of the Bob Dylan office, to which I had sent a manuscript of this book on June 6, I had secured tickets for the second night in Port Chester on June 14, and in Providence, Rhode Island, a week later. I was looking forward to versions of the triadic setlist, but for my two shows and the three shows in between—but none before or after for the last year—the triad evaporated. “Tangled Up in Blue” was nowhere to be heard, taking with it any trace of the seventies, leaving only the first and last elements of the triad. “Tangled” came back at the next concert in Kingston, New York, and stayed for the remainder of the tour through the month of July, so restoring the triad.
As if by way of compensation, something else happened, starting with that same second Port Chester show. After the perennial opener “Things Have Changed,” much to the delight of the crowd Dylan strapped on his guitar for a beautiful version of “To Ramona,” one of the two mid-sixties songs that had anchored what was supposed in my mind to be first triad. “He didn’t do that last night,” said the man sitting next to me, who had earlier informed me “I’m Bob’s lawyer.” “That’s right,” I replied, “he’s only picked it up once since October 13, the night of the Nobel announcement.” That was pretty much when the triple structure of the concerts began, Dylan that night playing guitar for one song, “Simple Twist of Fate.” I felt lucky to have experienced the sight and sound of the occasion eight months later in Port Chester. What I didn’t know at the time was that we were witnessing a new performance triad, as Dylan again took up the guitar at the next two regular shows, for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and then again for “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” so bringing back one of the many great songs on which the curtain had closed in those two nights in Rome in 2013. I don’t know what all of this means. As Dylan would say, “you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.”
CURTAIN OPENING AND CLOSING
The Clearwater show began with “Things Have Changed,” invariably the opener of the last four years, since April 5, 2013, in Buffalo, the first show of that year, the year in which performance setlists were radically restricted, with only twenty-six songs appearing five times or more in that year’s eighty-five concerts, half the total number of songs played the previous year. The Oscar the song won for best original song in the movie Wonder Boys—or perhaps a facsimile of it—tours with Dylan and sits on top of the amplifier by his piano. Director Curtis Hanson said of the sound track, “Every song reflects the movie’s themes of searching for past promise, future success and a sense of purpose.” Much of the lyric quality of “Things Have Changed” is quite surreal: doing the jitterbug rag and dressing in drag; falling in love with the first woman he meets, putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street; having Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy jumping in the lake. But much is quite clear and seems to capture what is happening in his music, including that surreal songwriting:
Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too
Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.
And then the close of the refrain, “I used to care, but things have changed,” a phrase like so many in Dylan that stays relevant whatever the particular change his art is putting in play. In that sense the song is like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which came back as a closing song in the 2017 concerts, its refrain a challenge, once upon a time to folkies, now to new critics of the things that have changed, particularly the integration of songs from the American Songbook: “Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?”
“Stay With Me” closed the Clearwater concert. I had heard that in Boston and was half-hoping for the wistful and beautiful “Why Try to Change Me Now?” my favorite from Shadows in the Night, the title recalling that of the opener. That song was written by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy in 1952, and was covered by Sinatra in 1959 and Fiona Apple in 2009. This circle game defines, gives a frame to what comes in between. Things have always changed for Dylan, from the “Times” of his 1963 album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, through what has happened at various phases of his life.
The things that have changed with his recent song list include creating a life in song, its dramatic qualities marking it as a self-contained performance, with a beginning, middle, and end, darkness onstage between the songs—or scenes—and no words other than the songs—just like a play. In the 2015 AARP interview, Dylan had Shakespeare on his mind, and at one point aligned plays and songs in ways that look ahead to the process he was working on with his concerts. Asked if he wished he had written some of the standards that were to become part of the drama of his concerts, he went off topic:
I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It’s like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else somebody has a great version.
Perhaps not so off-topic. Songs, concerts, and plays finally come together.
DYLAN AND HIS FANS
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for those who’ve sailed with me
—Bob Dylan, “Mississippi”
Bob Dylan may not say anything to his audience, but he is curious about who’s out there; he’s taking it all in. “What are you seeing from the stage?” Robert Love asked him:
Definitely not a sea of conformity. People I cannot categorize easily. I see a guy dressed up in a suit and tie next to a guy in blue jeans. I see another guy in a sport coat next to another guy wearing a T-shirt. I see a woman sometimes in evening gowns, and I see punk-looking girls. I can see there’s a difference in character, and it has nothing to do with age. I went to an Elton John show; there must have been at least three generations of people there. But they were all the same. Even the little kids. They looked just like their grandparents. It was strange.
There is something about being in a Dylan audience. The Clearwater crowd was on the older side, given the location, though there was a good mix of ages and there I even talked to a family with all three generations present, and it was true, they didn’t look the same! The Boston crowd was pretty varied, quite a bit younger on average, baby boomers to millennials, and kids coming along for the ride.
The variety in Dylan’s audience has more to do with the complexities of his long career, perhaps also his fame, though fewer seem go to a Bob Dylan concert to say they are going to a Bob Dylan concert. Until recently that could be a cause of serious distraction, with people reading their devices and texting, or talking during the songs. It was good to find a no-phones rule in Clearwater, also no coming back into the hall during a song. Again, that’s what happens when you go to Shakespeare or the opera, another sign of what’s going on with Dylan’s concerts.
Particular phases and changes have brought in new followers, just as they have driven out others—and not just in the 1960s and ’70s. It is true that if you liked country music, Nashville Skyline created a new appeal and attracted a different crowd from what went before, but Dylan wasn’t touring in the years after that album came out, and I don’t think people were really listening to that record as having much to do with country. The Christian period attracted some for the message, but that particular group would have been drifting away by Shot of Love, long gone by the time Infidels in 1983 seemed to renounce the solely Christian songs of 1979, explicit, unambiguous songs like “When He Returns,” which Dylan abruptly stopped playing in November 1981. I have a friend who became a fan through the accident of playing Under the Red Sky to her small children when it came out in 1990. Why not? “Wiggle Wiggle,” “Handy, Dandy,” even “Under the Red Sky” work as well as anything for that purpose. Over my forty years of teaching I’ve encountered students who came on board at various stages, for the new music they discover on their own or the old music of their parents—or grandparents—who have long since stopped going to concerts but are still playing and listening to some songs.
The Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on the Boston waterfront is a pretty upscale place for a concert, a far cry from the minor-league baseball parks of a few years ago. As I do some of the time, I went on my own, and spoke to various people before the show. I ended up sitting next to a movie director from Los Angeles, who later sent me a bootleg version of “Highlands.” In Clearwater there was a young woman singing and playing acoustic guitar in the outside bar area of Ruth Eckerd Hall. There I struck up a conversation with a couple named John and Sue, who had retired down there. “I’m one of the lucky ones who could,” said John, who was originally from Danbury, Connecticut. Dylan had been there a year or two before. “How do you like the old standards?” I asked. Sue’s response pretty much got it: “I don’t mind what he sings. I’ll listen to it whatever it is.” In the show itself I was next to a young man from Croatia. It was his first show, but he knew the songs pretty well and was clearly enjoying it. He was with a German friend, who was more seasoned and had come over for Dylan and Neil Young at the Desert Trip the month before. If you follow the reviews on expectingrain.com, you see a lot of people planning vacations around Dylan. A year or two ago I met an Australian woman who was going to a number of shows while seeing something of the country, not a bad idea for a vacation. A number, like John and Sue in Clearwater, are locals. They just go when Dylan is in town, or close enough. I’ll generally get to two or three a year myself.
Then there are some who just stay with the tour, all the way, day after day, show after show. I’ve met a few and have to say some of them remind me of the chess players I’ve seen in Harvard Square, playing chess all day long, decade after decade. You wonder how Dylan feels about those ones. For such a fan Dylan has become the Siren of the Odyssey: “no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father’s face.” And yet, there’s a bit of that in many of us. We all flirt with it, just as Odysseus did. Ask my wife and children. And it goes in both directions. Dylan seems to need his fans as much as they need him—as he said, “it’s the only place where I’m happy.”
Part of the performance has to do with meeting people for the first time in a crowded bar or some burger place before the show, sharing stories, knowing you’re going to add a chapter. For that evening, the rest of your life’s activities, day jobs, worries about family, pretty much everything else, recedes and is replaced by a leveling, shared anticipation of how Bob and the band will be, what he will sing, even these days when you know, within a song or two, just what he’ll be singing. The performance spills over into these moments, as precious as the shows, because they are part of the shows. This must be what it was like getting ready for the visit of the itinerant lyre players of ancient Greece, who would travel all around the Mediterranean playing to crowds, or talking with friends in ancient Athens in between the plays of a Greek tragic trilogy, say Aeschylus’s Oresteia, where participating in a play by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides and shared Athenian citizenship were the same thing.
I felt a version of this after the Clearwater show. As I walked out into the warm November night, most people seemed to be smiling, glowing with warmth at what was an utterly perfect performance from start to finish. You know they’ll be back. But for others that may have been the last waltz. I overheard three groups as I was leaving. One man, in his late thirties, far from sharing in the glow, was pretty angry: “No fucking country rock!” he exclaimed to the woman he was with. “He was like fucking Lawrence Welk! I slept in my car to do this. Prick!” Noticing my interest, she asked him to moderate his language. I wondered how she had liked the concert. Two women, also in their thirties or so, were more neutral: “Some of the words you could understand fine. If he wanted to, he could sing so you could understand everything.” Her friend agreed. I thought Dylan’s voice was magnificent, but if you didn’t know a song like “High Water (For Charley Patton)” the lyrics might have been tough to pick up. Then there were two college kids, a little more knowledgeable it seemed, one of them complaining, “The only classic he’s done in recent setlists is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and he didn’t even do that!” I couldn’t resist intruding at this point, noting that he had in fact done the song, as the first of the two closers tonight as for some time. He didn’t believe me, and I moved on, not wanting to press the point.
In all of these cases there was something at stake, something to do with memory, song, and shared human emotions and the joy, sorrow, or pain that is involved in listening to Bob Dylan. A long-dead grandfather; lost lover; wife, or husband, a friend who never made it through—a casualty perhaps of Vietnam, heroin, AIDS, Iraq, Afghanistan. Or to put it more simply, music and song are an essential part of being human, and particularly of being in the company of other humans. The music of our youth in particular stays with us. When it changes too much in performance, the singer may be doing things to those memories.
“He’s just changed altogether,” says the young English fan in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home. “He’s changed from what he was, he’s not the same as what he was at first.” “I didn’t even recognize him,” laments his friend. “Bob Dylan was a bastard in the second half,” says another, referring to the electric backing of the Hawks from the tour of 1966, when Dylan did his famous half-acoustic, half-electric concerts. They should have known. He had already told them in March 1965, when Bringing It All Back Home came out, with the electric version of “Maggie’s Farm”:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
Why has this been going on for more than fifty years? And why do people keep coming back? Because Dylan has become a classic, in fact always was, and that matters in the lives of the millions he has touched, even if he’s moved on down the road from where they met him. That can disappoint those in search of where he was and they were on whatever occasion he mattered. And how does Dylan feel about that? “I used to care but things have changed,” he sings. I say he cares, but that above all he cares, and always has cared, about his art and a vision that is the gift of genius. On to Stockholm!