The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances, ed. by Erin C. Callahan and Court Carney. London: Routledge, 2023, 246 pp.
REVIEW BY Andrea Cossu, University of Trento
For many of us who attended Bob Dylan’s shows in the early- to mid-1990s, “All Along the Watchtower” as the third song was the only predictable thing that could happen during the set. Everything else – a tender “Born in Time,” a ferocious “Maggie’s Farm,” a devilish “Cold Irons Bound” or, and this really took me by surprise back in 1992, an undecipherable “Idiot Wind” – was part of the chase for the unexpected. Old and new fans alike learned how to live with the feeling that everything could happen, and surprises rarely had to do with the perceived quality of the show. Things have become more predictable in the past ten years, since the introduction of fixed setlists, and yet one can still witness the excitement spreading through the crowd, such as, among the shows I recently attended, when Dylan gave a tender rendition of “Only a River” in Rome, or brought his band to his youthful past with a rocking “Not Fade Away” in Milan.
I have often wondered, as a scholar, whether my interest in performance and its contingency comes from my teenage days of seeing Bob Dylan in Italy, or if my interest in Dylan as a performer comes from my training as a sociologist who pays attention to the scripted or unscripted performative character of communal action. The two threads are intertwined, and it is from the many points of their convergence that I praise the fact that, alongside others, the contributors to this book have put Bob Dylan’s shows (tours, setlists, individual songs) at the center of their analyses.
This centering is no easy feat, even for a team of scholars as large as the one that Erin Callahan and Court Carney have assembled for The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances. Consider that Bob Dylan has played in excess of 4,000 live shows since his debut as a teenage rock and roller, and that many of these performances took place since the beginning, in 1988, of the Never Ending Tour. It is indeed one of the many strengths of the book that the chapters do not focus only on the perceived heyday of Dylan’s career (the 1960s and the mid-1970s) as they follow the complex relationship between Dylan and live performance across decades. The chapters also focus on post-1988 Dylan, which speaks to the current revisionism in Dylan studies to move toward the centrality of performance and consider that Dylan – even as a showman and as a performer – cannot be typecast by nostalgia.
Indeed, four of the chapters focus on the 1960s (Carney; McAslan; Naimby and Radosta; and Isom); three on the Rolling Thunder Revue (Landgraf, Tebbe, Martinez); two on the controversies surrounding the “born again” tours (Herren and Salvucci). The remaining chapters take the reader through the musical landscape and the references that Dylan explored in “Murder Most Foul” but which, in reality, constitute the essence of the Never Ending Tour, The Philosophy of Modern Song, and of Theme Time Radio Hour. From these later explorations in the complexity of popular music, Dylan reveals the reticular, sometimes rhizomatic connection to an idealized vision of America (“a rising tide”) that is apprehended through popular music and which ideally connects Dylan to multiple pasts, including his own. This idea of a “tradition” – live and in person – proves much more complicated than the Nobel Prize in Literature commendations reveal.
While organized in a chronology that, in broad sketches, follows Dylan’s trajectory as a live performer – starting with his capacity to adopt a Guthrie-like persona through to the most recent shows that, after the forced stop due to the pandemic, brought Dylan back on stage – there are common threads and overlapping themes. Most deal with varieties of temporality, and ideas of performativity, which only rarely get their due consideration in Dylan scholarship.
On the other hand, setlists may appear at first sight an odd place from where to assess Dylan’s artistic impact. And yet, as Callahan and Carney remind us, “Setlist construction thus allowed Dylan additional creative expression during live performances. He contemplated not only how he plays the songs but also their selection and order to create unique collections and sequences, playing into and off each other sonically and lyrically” (xii). From this perspective, setlists are a narrative. The sequential element is not a mere juxtaposition of songs, but a fundamental component in the creation of a performed “text” in which the artist conveys broader meanings to the audience. Individual songs, even the seldom performed ones, or the one-offs, function therefore as anchors in such a narrative, which may be constructed as a set of references that connect Dylan’s performance on stage, subtle hints about his personal life, an ambivalent relationship to audiences, and a goldmine of hypotheses about where Dylan was at – artistically and aesthetically – at any given point in his career.
Appropriately, two of the main themes that connect many of the essays, temporality and the performance of artistic persona, are at the center of Court Carney’s “Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Implications of the Past.” As Dylan recalled in Chronicles: Volume One, he had originally come to New York “to find singers, the ones I’d heard on record, most of all to find Woody Guthrie.”[1] It also seems, as Carney argues, that “the teenaged Dylan seemed to understand the meaning embedded in Guthrie and his music – the ancient past drawn from the folk tradition but embodied in a tangible person still alive.” Dylan was not, therefore, simply searching for an improbable idol, but for an entry point, embodied in an ailing singer, that could enable him to start connecting the past to present and to craft a vision of America that many, from Sean Wilentz to Greil Marcus, have pointed out as the key to understanding Dylan’s journey through music. In this regard, Guthrie’s songs have thus acted as a roadmap to which Dylan returned in several moments of his career, long after he outgrew the tight clothes of the Guthrie imitator. Indeed, as Carney writes, “Bob Dylan has routinely returned to Woody Guthrie to telegraph his own past and how it connects to a larger, more mysterious narrative of belonging and creativity” (p. 8). It happened at crucial points even when Dylan was already a well-established rock star: in 1968, to mark a return to performing after the fabled motorcycle incident; in 1975 and 1976, when “This Land Is Your Land” and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” were nightly highlights of the Rolling Thunder Revue; and at the beginning of the Never Ending Tour, when Dylan routinely shuffled the cards of time and tradition to produce a puzzling, yet ultimately homogenous, image of the artist as both the carrier of a larger tradition (to which he has proved always faithful) and of its own past (which he has preferred to reinvent in multiple ways).
More than many of Dylan’s fellow performers, friends, and acquaintances who were at the center of the urban folk scene – Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez – Guthrie embodied the “folk process,” that endless adaptation and appropriation of material that defies established notions of copyright and originality and which Dylan has explored throughout his career. In this regard, Simon McAslan’s description of Dylan’s “pivotal performance” at the Finjan Club in Montreal (1962) sees the making of Bob Dylan as an artist torn between the role of the original songwriter and that of the carrier of the folk process in the age of mechanical reproduction and copyright law. In this regard, McAslan’s essay is as much a snapshot of how much Dylan owed to the folk process as it is a review of an early turning point. However, the key point of McAslan’s argument is that at the Finjan Club “Bob Dylan is, in effect, practicing to become ‘Bob Dylan’” (12). This early incarnation of Bob Dylan is a person who, by “not distinguishing his songs from others . . . presents himself as more performer than songwriter” (12).
Since, as I have argued in It Ain’t Me Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity,[2] all the key transitions in Bob Dylan’s career have been marked by and achieved through performance (from going electric to being born again), McAslan’s point can also be applied to many other chapters in this book. Not last Nainby and Radosta’s analysis of Dylan’s engagement with audiences in ’64-’66, the years of the irreversible transition to “folk rock” and of the creation of a coalition and an infrastructure for the production and interpretation of rock music. Particularly after Newport, Dylan’s shows became the setting of a nightly social drama, which produced simultaneously a breach with the audience and recreated “Bob Dylan.” On one hand he was signaling “a clear pulling away from the folk idiom” (24) through “both his choice of a setlist for the show and his approach to framing the songs in his spoken introductions and in his ensuing vocal performances” (24). On the other, scholars can approach this confrontational transition from a perspective that brings into the picture both shifting cultural structures (the complex of symbols, scripts, narratives, and styles established in the folk scene and emerging in rock music), and how the artist and the audience aligned (or misaligned) to them in the context of live performance. Here, the yells, the insults, the slow clapping, the monologues, the accusations of Judas or Liar, even the long pauses, build a local, highly interactional picture of the transition. And yet – unfortunately, in the opinion of this writer – the authors have refrained from such an analysis, which could have enriched their enjoyable account of selected performances from the years of the “electric turn.”
Like the electric tours of 1965 and 1966, the Rolling Thunder Revue has been traditionally not only a fan favorite, but also a favorite focus for critics and scholars. It is no surprise, then, that three of the chapters focus on different aspects of how songs, setlists, and performance shaped one of the most creative periods of Dylan’s career and his image on stage.
Skye Landgraf explores the politics and performance of “Hurricane,” a song that has probably haunted Dylan more than he originally wished for. While “George Jackson” in 1971 fell quickly into relative obscurity, “Hurricane” has been a mainstay of Dylan’s greatest hits collections and has been prominent in movie soundtracks, even though he’s only played it a handful of times in a live setting. The song contains a deeper motive, Landgraf argues, and it lies in the fact that it came at a “pivotal moment” of reinvention, in which Dylan was willing to explore “musical roots” that “are inevitably always deeply linked to and steeped within a history of Black culture and political work” (38). Yet, Landgraf also makes a more controversial statement that Dylan has somehow “profited off of Blackness” (39), to the point that he has overshadowed with his legacy a myriad “Black voices” (47). True, images of Black America are everywhere in Dylan’s oeuvre, as respectful appropriation and as a common code rooted in the folk process. We see that in the trajectory that links Hattie Carroll to blackface minstrelsy, and yet I would like to point out to a crucial aspects of Dylan’s relation to Black culture: that it is always, sometimes problematically, linked to a white counterpart, in a contact that does not only shape tense racial relations, durable inequalities, and institutional racism, but also the landscape of folk and vernacular music.
Tradition and memory also lie at the center of Jason Tebbe’s reconstruction of the political climate around the Rolling Thunder Revue, which he frames as encapsulated in “Bicentennial Nostalgia” and the public debate over the meaning of the anniversary. The Revue, too, “was a kind of intervention in the febrile national discourse, one that articulated an alternative notion of America in the midst of a largely empty and consumeristic Bicentennial event” (64). Around the same time, sociologist Robert Bellah was writing of a “broken covenant,” of the deep narratives and values of America facing, in his words, a time of trial. The Rolling Thunder Revue was, if we follow Tebbe’s argument, a sonic, performative instance of such a crisis, and yet it worked mainly through the creation of an inclusive narrative: it tried to hold together collective commitment and American individualism; the exploration, through places and persons, of another, more vernacular America; the link to folk music and its transformations into a broader style of “Americana.” These deep themes, which are at the center of Dylan’s poetics, would, more than ten years later, come to maturity in the Never Ending Tour.
The last essay that focuses on the Revue, Sarah Martinez’s account of “Spontaneous Performativity” is one of the book’s highlights. Linking the performance theories of Philip Auslander and Richard Schechner to ideas about repetition and authenticity (with performance being a key medium of authentication), Martinez correctly describes the performative process as one of convergence between actors and audiences. She advances the argument that the spontaneity of the tour amplified “Bob Dylan’s conception of art” as one that “has always been as a living, layered body that is ruled by the principles of change, fluidity, and reinvention” (86). In this regard, her analysis of the setlists and of the NBC special Hard Rain, and of Scorsese’s documentary about the Rolling Thunder Revue (surprisingly not taking Renaldo & Clara into consideration) brings us closer to an understanding of Dylan as primarily a performing artist. Others, including Paul Williams and Betsie Bowden, have repeatedly stressed this point, as has Dylan himself, not least with his Nobel Lecture.
Perhaps the most radical reinvention Dylan underwent was not going electric, but going Christian and enraging much of his audience with the Gospel Tours. While the two essays that center on that period (Herren’s analysis of the “Warfield Cycle” and Salvucci’s take on the Tour of 1981) do not focus primarily on the 1979 shows (in this writer’s opinion, one of the absolute peaks of Dylan’s career as a performing artist), they cover relatively new territory. Both essays bring attention not only to the brilliance of those shows, but also to Dylan’s ability to craft a new persona through his contact with another genre: the white and Black streams of southern gospel that have always featured prominently in his career, from “No More Auction Block” to the fascinating covers of the Stanley Brothers that graced many shows at the turn of the century. Those gospel-fueled shows were, in Herren’s words, “stable and consistent,” carefully scripted shows with a “dramatic structure” that had at its center “the quest for righteousness, reunification, and redemption” (97). At the same time, the return to secular songs after the fracas of 1979 also meant a reconciliation with the past achieved (in Salvucci’s words) through the creation of the setlists as a “text” (121) that synthesizes gospel, secular, and folk songs in an attempt at reinvention.
Indeed, if one looks at the setlist of the first show ever of what became known as the Never Ending Tour, the three strands (four, if we consider the blues) that constitute the coordinates of Dylan’s career are all mixed together. When Dylan played Concord, California on June 7, 1988, with an unexpected reshuffling of the band after touring with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as well as the Grateful Dead, he rocked the first ever performance of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and the first electric “Gates of Eden,” but also “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “In the Garden,” and gifted his audience with stunning performances of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Never Ending Tour comes under analysis in four chapters, and also in two sections entitled “Encore” (Jeff Fallis) and “Epilogue” (Callahan and Carney).
The Never Ending Tour has been, in many regards, Dylan’s opus magnum. It is the summa of reinvention; and often a tightrope walk between successful landing and performative shipwreck. Most of all, the tour has shown to progressively smaller and more dedicated audiences the breadth of the musical landscape Dylan inhabits, and his legitimacy in carrying the torch of an American canon that relies less on rock music than on the inclusion of every facet of American popular music: gospel and country, rockabilly and Tin Pan Alley, topical song and torch ballad.
That Dylan inhabits this space is arguably his greatest achievement as an artist. In this regard, anachronistically, the essay that McKenzie Isom has dedicated to Nashville Skyline, John Wesley Harding, and the relationship of Bob Dylan to country music is probably an ideal connection to the Never Ending Tour, much more than it is to the 1960s. For years on the Never Ending Tour many of those songs displayed the core quality that Isom assigns to those seemingly “minor” albums: he argues that “Dylan instead sought a way to return to his roots and create music that was not only personal but also unaffected by the trappings of fame and celebrity” (61).
Dylan’s return to his roots – via his songs or via the countless covers played during the Never Ending Tour – was often visible on stage, both through the choice of songs or the choice of arrangements, in a process that, as I have argued elsewhere,[3] can lead songs as diverse as “It’s Alright Ma,” “High Water (For Charley Patton),” and “The Coo Coo Bird” by Clarence Ashley to be compressed in a “timelessness” where Dylan’s work, traditional folksong, and the intersecting memories of “tradition” and “Bob Dylan” share the same space of meaning. Robert Reginio shares the same attitude when he notes the juxtaposition of roots songs and songs from “Love and Theft”, an album connected to John Wesley Harding and The Anthology of American Folk Music, to the point that song sequences result in the “blending [of] roots music with Dylan’s intertextual lyrical preoccupations” (133). Reginio’s examples are two distinct performances of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” in 1962 and 1999, with the latter being a carefully chosen example of the Never Ending Tour as the environment to recast “Dylan’s “anthemic” songs and to show how Dylan’s revisiting (and revising) of this early anthem “signals the direction his songwriting was taking at the end of the millennium” (133). Reginio’s analysis is convincing, particularly because he is the most explicit in describing the Never Ending Tour as a context of multiple takes on memory – the past and the present – in which genres blur along with the image of Bob Dylan. Reginio’s is a wonderful take on a theme that Dylan highlighted early on in his career, that of the mystery of folk music as being anything but simple, full as it is of “legend, myth, bible, and ghosts” (as he told journalists Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston).[4]
Quite surprisingly, the other chapters skip much of the Never Ending Tour (both the good and the bad) to focus on the past decade (although one of the authors, Nina Goss, edited a collection a few years ago on Bob Dylan in the 2000s).[5] Erin Callahan reflects on the later years of the Never Ending Tour by focusing on the change that occurred in earnest after 2013 and the release of Tempest. Years of what has become known as “the set,” of fixed setlists with fewer changes, find Dylan exploring “the themes of change, temporality, and looming annihilation, presenting contemporary American life as bleak and apocalyptic” (146). This apocalypse has been a recurring theme since “Hard Rain”: it acquired religious overtones with the Gospel Years, connecting poetically to Dylan’s vision of fate and individual responsibility. In the context of “the set,” Callahan sees unity in “The repetition of these songs in performance [as they] construct meaning by their order, thematic connections, and use of language and images” (157).
On another path, Goss identifies one of the moments in which Dylan caught us all off guard – the release of Shadow Kingdom during a summer still shut down by the pandemic – as a “dislocation of time; dislocation of self; dislocation between self and other” (162). The very decision to follow Dylan in the assumption that performances are central dislocates not only the artist, but also the fan into a “grayscale realm that is out of time” (163). This “dislocation” involves first and foremost the audience: “To know Bob Dylan live, to engage as fully as possible with a live performance of one song, or the emotional and thematic life of a full concert, you need not to have been there” (169). Again, time and place collapse and are reassembled in an encyclopedic space (to quote from Italian semiotician Umberto Eco) where performances lead in all directions and trace unpredictable paths that confuse our experience of “Bob Dylan” and make it highly personal.
The dislocation that Goss highlights as a key feature of Bob Dylan’s presence on stage, however, should be tempered by the idea that performances are also highly local events in which the artist is not only engaged in creating a space for the activities of meaning-making carried out by audiences, but also actively involved in the performance of his “musical persona,” as Philip Auslander would argue.[6] On one side, therefore, the success of the performer rests at least in part on the projection of representations, and meanings, from the audience; on the other, what is perceived as exceptionality, or even a charismatic quality, is the result of the artist’s capacity (and Dylan is no exception) to perform his role as a performer. And in this regard Dylan shares the stage with other great performers like Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, or Lady Gaga, each with a distinct performative style or persona. There is an ongoing tension, therefore, between routine and creativity, in which Dylan has been able to adopt a strategy that makes the creativity of performance a central component of a ”professionalized” musical persona.
Performance – in the here-and-now – mediates this confusion and puzzlement. As Laura Tenschert argues in the final chapter, “performance is a way to actively deal with the shadow cast by the past: by providing [Dylan] with an opportunity to engage his creativity on a regular basis, and therefore also to always live in the potential of the next masterpiece” (173). This potential of anticipation does not rest solely on Dylan, but also on the audience.
Many of the essays contained in this book focus – sometimes exceedingly – on the artist, and yet they contain compelling insight into what needs to be done in order to bring the interaction between audience and artist into a closer analytical framework. As many essays highlight, the connection of performance to social context is relevant and needs further investigation because it might lead, if not closer to unlocking the mystery of why Dylan has fascinated us for six decades, then at least to a proper appreciation of what makes Dylan stand out.
[1] Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 9.
[2] Andrea Cossu, It Ain’t Me, Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity (Boulder: Paradigm, 2012).
[3] Andrea Cossu “Down the Foggy Ruins of Time: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Timelessness,” in Nina Goss and Eric Hoffman (eds) Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017), pp. 45-62.
[4] Quoted from Jonathan Cott (ed) Dylan on Dylan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006), p. 50.
[5] Nina Goss and Eric Hoffman (eds) Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017).
[6] Philip Auslander In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).
