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Review of The Wandering Painting

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Norman Raeben (1901-1978): The Wandering Painting, edited by Fabio Fantuzzi. Livorno, Italy: Sillabe, 2025, pp. 250.

Reviewed by Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

 

This luscious book is the catalog of Norman Raeben’s exhibition hosted in Venice, Italy by the Venice Jewish Museum and other artistic associations (Ikona, Lab Space, Azzime) from November 24, 2024, to January 14, 2025. The project was conceived and directed by Fabio Fantuzzi, with the supervision of Stefania Portinari (associate professor of Art History at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice) and funded by the European Union under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant. It contains a preface by Dario Calimani (President of the Jewish Community in Venice), introduction by Fabio Fantuzzi, six essays by various authors (one was a Norman Raeben student), and, possibly, the most complete selection of paintings, drawings, and studio works from Norman Raeben, the painter-teacher who perhaps never knew the impact he had on that scruffy guy who in the early months of 1974 took painting classes in his studio on the eleventh floor of the Carnegie Hall building in New York. Raeben would certainly have been surprised to know that his teaching helped Dylan conceive a new approach to the narrative ballad genre, one in which the song must be contemplated like a painting where different events seem to happen at the same time, or in no time at all.

 

“I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”[1] This is Dylan’s first oblique reference to Norman Raeben, given in a 1978 interview (all other references are oblique as well). As we know, the immediate result of this re-learning was the manipulation of time in the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks, where it is often impossible to place the events described in a linear chronology. Dylan’s newly found ability to suspend or twist narrative time shows up in other songs of the 1970s, such as “Isis,” “Señor,” and “No Time to Think” (a title, as Chistopher Ricks observed, that must be read both ways, “there’s no time to think” and there’s “no-time” to think about).[2] In fact, Dylan’s new style extends all over the 1980s, leaving traces in “Jokerman,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Foot of Pride,” and “Brownsville Girl” (and, years later, “Highlands” and “Tempest”). The process that Dylan learned was his personal adaptation of Horace’s well-known saying, namely, that painting and poetry have a lot in common (ut pictura poesis, or “as is painting, so is poetry,” Ars poetica, 361). The seven stanzas of “Tangled Up in Blue” are either the story in chronological order of a man desperately in love with the same woman or the same story with scrambled chronology. The song could also be the story of one man chasing seven different women, or seven men chasing the same woman. The listener is supposed to “stop time” and contemplate the song as one synchronic event.

 

Dylan, who attended Raeben’s classes five days a week (something that he had never done, that is, sit down in a classroom and pay attention, since his high school years) never revealed the name of his teacher, probably to protect him from unwanted exposure. The first Dylan sleuth to name him was Bert Cartwright in the early 1990s.[3] Clinton Heylin, Howard Sounes, and Sean Wilentz picked up from Cartwright. When I was working on the first edition of my Dylan book, I did some research at the Bobst Library of NYU, and I found more biographical details in the Who’s Who in American Art.[4] Ten years later, my few pages on Raeben spurred Fabio Fantuzzi, then an undergraduate student at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, to investigate further. He wrote to me, asking if I thought that he could submit a Norman Raeben research project for a Ph.D. in American Studies. I remember that I was skeptical. I was afraid that no American Studies professor in any Italian university might find the Raeben project worthy of a doctoral fellowship. How wrong I was! He was accepted at Università Roma Tre under the guidance of Professor Maria Anita Stefanelli and immediately started hunting the legacy of Norman Raeben. He went to New York, found Raeben’s old students, interviewed them, found the location of his remaining paintings, motivated art historians to delve into the life and works of a quasi-forgotten heir to the Ashcan School of realist painting, wrote his dissertation, and published his first findings in a 2020 book on Dylan as an artist.[5] Fantuzzi has now crowned his research with this gorgeous catalog, which will be the mandatory reference for anyone who wants to know about this Norman Raeben, Dylan or not. Raeben was born Numa Rabinovitz in Ukraine and was the youngest son of Shalom Rabinovitz, better known as Shalom Aleichem, one of the major figures of modern Yiddish literature, and whose stories inspired the musical The Fiddler on the Roof.

 

The Wandering Painting is a tribute to Norman Raeben with and without Dylan, as it should be, because there’s a lot to say about Raeben himself: “a sophisticated artist,” Fantuzzi writes in his introduction, and:

 

an erudite, influential teacher whose long career spanned across some of the most influential 20th-century American and European artistic movements and cultural milieus […] The project analyzed Raeben’s career and his artistic collaborations as a case study to deepen the knowledge of the evolution of Ukrainian Yiddish-derived culture and art in New York in the 20th century. […]  The most substantial part of the research, however, consisted in examining private collections belonging to the artist’s students, collaborators, and relatives. The study of these archives uncovered a wide range of information […]; it also unearthed a corpus of unpublished materials, including letters and documents, videos and audios of his lessons, various lectures, excerpts of an unfinished book on art history, and an extensive collection of his paintings. (pp. 11-12)

 

During the 1920s and 1930s, Raeben’s works were displayed in several collective exhibitions. In 1946, he opened his school in the heart of New York, and it is amazing that the Venice retrospective of his work has been the first. Raeben, who was good at many things, was not good at publicizing himself. It is also true that many of his works, located in a studio in Connecticut, were lost in a fire.

 

Why “The Wandering Painting”? Because, as Fantuzzi explains, “most of his works were made ‘on the road’.” Moreover, and starting from the mid-1930s, “Raeben stopped giving titles to cityscapes and intentionally did not provide indications, dates, or progressive numbering, forcing the viewer into a journey, both real and ideal, among and within the works in a circular path with no beginning and no end.” Just like in “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Where Are You Tonight,” and possibly “Changing of the Guards,” “the journey thus becomes the very substance of the artistic process as both subject and method. Such transposition of a wandering approach, rooted within traditional Jewish and American culture, into painting foreshadowed the incoming cultural zeitgeist that shortly thereafter would mark the essence of 1950s and 1960s Americanism” (p. 12). That may very well be, but it must be remembered that the zeitgeist that put people on the move, albeit anticipated by the Beatniks, only began in the second half of the 1960s.

 

Clearly a post-impressionist modernist, leaning sometimes toward expressionism (no mere “copy from life” was allowed in his school), Raeben was neither avant-garde nor retro-garde. Raeben could do good, traditional portraits, and he did them on commission. In his personal work, however, as Fantuzzi says, he was “mid-garde,” between the realism of the Ashcan school and a more stylized approach to the American genre of cityscape. In fact, the similarities between Raeben’s cityscapes and the 1990s Dylan paintings cannot be missed. In more recent years, however, Dylan’s large paintings have moved toward a stricter realism that probably would not have impressed his old teacher that much, but that’s a different story.[6]

 

The volume includes six essays: “Locating Norman Raeben in American Art,” by Andrea Pappas; “‘Way of Seeing and Being Seen’: Norman Raeben in Paris,” by Stefania Portinari; “Norman Raeben, American in Paris, European in New York,” by Nico Stringa; “Portraits of Wandering: An Artistic Journey from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan,” by Fabio Fantuzzi; “Norman Raeben: Art Telescopes Time,” by Roz Jacobs (one of Raeben’s students), plus the technical approach of Antonella Martinato in “Maintenance and Conservative Restoration Process Diagnostics and Study of Materials.” Except Fantuzzi, the authors are not Dylan scholars, yet they share the temptation to understand what made Raeben so important to Dylan. Because, as it seems, Raeben showed Dylan the way to consciously regain access to his unconscious, Portinari comments:

 

When Dylan attended that school for two months in the spring of 1974, he was encouraged not to focus on details and was taught ‘to see,’ to become aware of what he already felt ‘in an unconscious way.’ He benefited from a welcoming philosophical counseling environment that fit within a culture of synesthesia, very Yiddish yet also idealistic, existing in America within the intellectual climate of neo-avant-gardes, stemming from the European theosophies that passed to the Bauhaus masters exiled in America, to the 1970s climate of minimalist artist-thinkers like Sol LeWitt and Smithson. (p. 37)

 

Certainly, any investigation on “theosophies” that were passed on to Dylan, no matter how second-hand they were, would be fascinating. I have doubts, however, that it will ever be undertaken, except maybe for the Tarot symbolism in Desire.

 

Fantuzzi’s essay opens with Raeben’s alleged portrait of Bob Dylan, showing a bespectacled young man in a light-brown jacket, just a hint of a beard, and sleeves that end without hands coming out of them. The Poet with No Hands (A Portrait of Bob Dylan) is now at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (reproduced in the book at page 46, 54, and 79). Before we delve into the psychoanalytic interpretation game of the poet with no hands, however, Fantuzzi informs us that Raeben did that painting as an exercise a few days before Dylan showed up at his school. So, was the title already there or did Raeben add it later? Did he retouch the painting to make it more a portrait of Dylan? We don’t know, and Fantuzzi doesn’t say. A better question would be, did Dylan have heart and mind but no “hand” at painting (or writing) when he enrolled in Raeben’s class? And did he regain his “hand” afterward”? There is no doubt about that. We leave the rest to the goddess of synchronicity.

 

The second part of the volume is dedicated to the retrospective. As Fantuzzi explains, placing Raeben’s paintings in any order is a difficult task. Fantuzzi has done all he could to reverse the artist’s decision, date, and locate the paintings, as it was his duty to do so (artists and scholars rarely see eye to eye on these matters), and the result is impressive in terms of scope and precision. Thanks to The Wandering Painting, we can see now in sequence the portraits of Raeben’s father and mother dating back to the 1920s, many cityscapes and landscapes from places known and unknown (Venice included), charming drawings, nudes and dancers reminding us of Degas, figure studies oscillating between cubism and realism, many instances where the brush strokes break free from realism to create a structure of pure signs, and studio works that do not seem to need further completion.

 

In the end, was Norman Raeben a “great painter”? Maybe not, but that’s not the point (Dylan isn’t a “great painter” either). Because of his European upbringing and the time he spent in Paris, where he was familiar with Chagall, Matisse, and Soutine, Raeben never really broke with post-impressionism. He did not become a fully “American artist” like the new masters of abstract expressionism – who were not “great painters” either, yet were able to conjure up great paintings from pure concepts. Still, Raeben was a painter, to the extent that he had a vision of the America he wanted to portray. The world is full of “great painters,” just as it is full of “great poets.” What we miss, most of the time, are just painters, like Raeben, and just poets, like Dylan.

 

[1] Interview with Jonathan Cott, “Rolling Stone,” November 16, 1978, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. By Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), 260.

[2] “In terms of the transitory language, it is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be promptly thought about is that there’s no time.” Christopher Ricks, “American English and the Inherently Transitory,” in C. Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 427.

[3] Bert Cartwright, “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. by John Bauldie (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 85-90.

[4] Alessandro Carrera, La voce di Bob Dylan. Una spiegazione dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001, 2011), 296-310. The title of the third, expanded edition is slightly different: La voce di Bob Dylan. Un racconto dell’America (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2021). In his bibliographical references, Fabio Fantuzzi has conflated the two titles.

[5] Fabio Fantuzzi, “Painting Songs, Composing Paintings: Norman Raeben and Bob Dylan,” in Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe, ed. by Maria Anita Stefanelli, Fabio Fantuzzi, and Alessandro Carrera (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020), 209-232.

[6] For an assessment of Dylan as a painter, see Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum, ed. by Shai Baitel (Milan: Skira -MAXXI Museum, 2022), and Alessandro Carrera, “Bob Dylan: pittore realista americano (minore),” in Changes. Riscritture, sconfinamenti, talenti plurimi, ed. by Angela Albanese (Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis, 2024), 71-88.

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Review of Bob Dylan: Point Blank

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Bob Dylan: Point Blank. Halcyon Gallery, London. 9 May–6 July 2025.

Reviewed by Angus Gibson

 

Point Blank is an exhibition of 97 new paintings by Bob Dylan at the Halcyon Gallery on London’s New Bond St from May 9th to July 6th, 2025. The gallery is located in the heart of Mayfair, one of the city’s wealthiest districts. King Charles III has his suits made around the corner at Anderson & Sheppard on Old Burlington Street, and the Halcyon itself is flanked by high-fashion boutiques Gucci and Balenciaga. Dylan has regularly presented his artwork at the Halcyon since 2008’s Drawn Blank. On each visit the Dylan fans – imitating our man’s scruffy Greenwich Village style – stand in contrast to the sharply-dressed locals.

 

On one level, Dylan’s now extensive collection of artwork is a commercial enterprise, no different to the luxury handbags and jewelry in the windows of New Bond St’s other shops. Signed prints start at £1,950 ($2,645). An original costs tens of thousands. But the gallery’s plush location also has a rich and authentic artistic history. Handel lived a stone’s throw away at 25 Brook St, in an apartment later rented by Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles’ Apple Records was headquartered at 3 Saville Row, and if you stood outside the Halycon Gallery on January 30th, 1969, you would have heard the Fab Four’s final concert booming out from a nearby rooftop. Notably, Robert Fraser’s Indica art gallery was once in the neighborhood at 6 Mason’s Yard. Here, John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney bought the Matisse painting that inspired the band’s apple logo.

 

Art and commerce have long been interwoven in Mayfair, and this duality is also present in Dylan’s artwork. Though Dylan has painted since at least the mid-60s, he held his first exhibition in 2008, titled Drawn Blank and composed of watercolors based on sketches made in the late 80s and early 90s.[1] After this first exhibition, new collections – from oil paintings to metalworks – followed routinely: the Brazil Series (2010), the Asia Series (2011), Revisionist Art (2012), Face Value (2013), Mood Swings (2013), the New Orleans Series (2013), The Beaten Path (2016), Mondo Scripto (2018), and Deep Focus (2021). Thousands of signed prints from each series are distributed by Castle Fine Art, who also sell works by other celebrity painters such as Billy Connolly and Ron Wood. Dylan has grossed millions of dollars from this business model.

 

It would be wholly unfair, however, to dismiss Dylan’s efforts purely as a cash grab. One of the joys of regularly visiting Dylan’s shows at the Halcyon is witnessing his progress as a painter. What started with Drawn Blank – as relatively simple pencil lines and watercolors – has advanced in ambition both technically and compositionally, culminating in the epic landscapes of The Beaten Path and Hopper-esque oil paintings of Deep Focus. Slowly, Dylan has won over the art establishment. Critic and Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones wrote of The Beaten Path: “[Dylan’s] drawings are intricate, sincere, charged with curiosity …  He has a surprising amount in common with [David] Hockney. His art looks more serious with every exhibition.”[2]

 

We can look at Point Blank, therefore, as Dylan showing off his development as a painter in comparison to his first show, Drawn Blank, as the similar titles suggest.[3] Like that earlier collection, the works in Point Blank started as pencil sketches on thick drawing paper that the artist later painted over in acrylic, using broad brush strokes and bold color. But unlike Drawn Blank, which dazzled in bright primary colors, Point Blank’s use of color is more sophisticated, preferring earthy tones, dark blues and lipstick red. The subject matter is also more varied and complex: portraits of musicians, boxers, cowboys; still life studies of eggboxes, Scotch tape, binoculars; landscapes of rural America. Dylan’s brushwork is also now more skilled; he uses thick blotches of paint to add texture in places, and he frames his subjects with big rectangles of color that have an almost Rothko-like quality. As such, Point Blank evidences Dylan’s considerable progression as a painter.

 

As you enter the Halycon Gallery, you are greeted with a quote from Dylan printed in large black letters on the wall making this connection, while considering his work in poetic but vague terms:

 

The Point Blank series is an extension of the Drawn Blank series that was done some years ago. It can be looked at as an update, or a continual refinement of a certain process … The idea was not only to observe the human condition but to throw myself into it with great urgency … to create living breathing entities that have emotional resonance, colours used as weapons and mood setters.

 

This is evocative writing, but it doesn’t tell us much about Dylan’s real process. It’s naive to expect much insight from the ever-vague artist – especially in a sales blurb – but if Dylan is a serious painter now, it would be fascinating to know how he actually paints. Where does he work – on the road or at home? What brushes does he use? Dylan has previously described his technique in itemized detail, writing in a 2016 Vanity Fair article (“Why Bob Dylan Paints”) of his system for composing The Beaten Path landscapes: “I went to the camera-obscura method … I put a 58-mm 0.43x wide-angle conversion lens onto a used Nikon D3300 Af-p on quite a few paintings.”[4] The promotional literature accompanying Point Blank is less elucidatory. While a line such as “the idea was not only to observe the human condition but to throw myself into it with great urgency” might describe Dylan’s artistry as a whole, it doesn’t shed much light on Dylan the painter. Still, the evidence of his work – whatever the process – is proudly displayed across Halycon’s two floors.

 

The first paintings on ground level are a dozen or so portraits. These are reminiscent of Dylan’s earlier Face Value collection and display a great leap forward in ability from Self Portrait’s album cover. Unlike that LP sleeve, painted in an underdeveloped style over fifty years ago, the faces here are well-defined and carry emotive human expressions. Dylan tempts the viewer to imagine each subject’s back story. The viewer is led to ask: why is one woman wearing 1920s flying goggles? Is the man with the clean-cut hair and 1940s-style shirt from decades past, or a character from the present day wearing vintage clothes? Some portraits have odd proportions. There is a bearded man with an unusually thin head; another man with an unnaturally bulky chin holds his hand to his eye as if peering through a telescope. Ten years ago, critics might have attributed these strange proportions to Dylan’s poor draftmanship. But there’s now enough evidence to suggest he’s a skilled drawer, making deliberate and effective choices. The strangely-shaped faces make the viewer feel like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” staring back at a rogues gallery of sword-swallowers, lepers, and crooks. And the titles of these portraits in the accompanying catalogue add to this sense of carnival. Dylan has evidently enjoyed creating exotic names for each subject: “Dennis Manga (Man with a Crooked Smile),” “Peeping Tom,” “Vag Siska (Stunt Flyer),” and “Mr. Soup Can,” to cite a few.[5]

 

Among the most interesting entries in the catalogue is the portrait of “Vera Silverlake,” a Black woman with striking features. Like a number of works in the catalogue, this portrait is paired with short prose. However, unlike others, the text beside “Vera Silverlake” is written in first person and uses Dylan’s distinctive voice:

 

I dreamed about her the other night, we were in the bar at the Adolphus Hotel and she was talking about my Nobel Prize, and said that “The only people pissed off about you winning that, were white people. You deserve that Nobel prize honey, you really do. At your best, you’re wonderful.” I asked her if I could see her later. She wrote down her address and gave me instructions on how to get there. Then I woke up. It was one of my better dreams.[6]

 

It’s unclear if Dylan wrote this himself. The catalogue’s title page notes “Text by Eddie Gorodetsky, Lucy Sante, and Jackie Hamilton,” though the individual entries aren’t credited. And while Gorodetsky and Sante regularly collaborate with Dylan, at the time of writing it’s not obviously clear who Jackie Hamilton is.[7] This mystery aside, the catalogue is a worthwhile purchase at £45 ($61), with a hardcover, thick high-quality paperstock, and 193 pages of Dylan’s original pencil sketches shown before he added paint.

 

The rear half of the ground floor contains still life studies and a series of paintings of musicians. The still life paintings detail a variety of eccentric objects. A box of eggs recalls the scene in Hearts of Fire (1987), where Dylan’s character opens a fridge filled only with eggboxes.[8] A painting of a Scotch tape holder is particularly intriguing. While Dylan’s compositions have historically tended towards cliché – open highways, fifties diners, retro Cadillacs – this painting looks genuinely original. Another study is of a wooden crate of grapes, emblazoned with a cartoon logo of a woman holding a bowl of fruit under the words “MIXED GRAPES.” The woman’s face is visibly contorted as if to emphasize that she is part of a logo branded on the box, not a real person. This brings to mind the Ekphrasis – where art depicts other art – discussed in relation to Dylan by Raphael Falco previously in this journal, as well as Warhol’s Brillo box pop art.[9]

 

On the opposite wall from the still life, the series of musicians is presented as a set of four paintings: two pianists, a guitarist, and a saxophonist. Placed together, they look like a band, with each dressed in a 50s-style suit like some well-regarded jazz combo. It’s hard to view the piano players and not think of Dylan’s current live shows, where he’s usually seen behind a baby grand. These aren’t self portraits, but they are evidence of a musician studying the poses of other musicians. The viewer is naturally inclined to wonder what, if anything, these paintings can tell us about Dylan’s own impression of himself as a pianist.

 

A disappointing aspect of this set of paintings, and indeed of others in Point Blank, is Dylan’s inability to competently draw fingers. In the painting “Young Man with a Horn,” the saxophone player’s digits are long and bulky, like lifeless sausages indelicately sprawled over the instrument. Unlike the misshapen heads in other portraits, this rendering does not have any positive effect, nor does it suggest controlled distortion. Rather it looks amateurish. Dylan’s artistic skill has advanced greatly, but he can still improve if he is to finally paint his masterpiece.

 

Downstairs, the basement is furnished with a similar number of paintings as upstairs and a short film that plays on a loop. The film is a dull hagiography that merely lists Dylan’s various awards, as if to convince deep-pocketed but uncultured clientele of his worth. It’s an unnecessary addition, as the quality of the paintings here is enough to speak for Dylan’s talent alone.

 

As with the quartet of musicians on the level above, the basement walls display several sets of paintings arranged around coherent themes. There is a set of characters in evening wear. One sports a mask and cocktail dress, like the woman on the rear cover of Shadows in the Night. In the next picture, a man in a tuxedo lies on a table. It is unclear whether he is dead or alive. Another set of paintings depicts landscapes, while a further set collects nudes.

 

Of particular interest is a group of four paintings showing couples. Upon first look, they each appear heteronormative, but this assumption gives way on further inspection. One painting is of a pair in a passionate embrace. But up close, the male subject has feminine features accentuated with makeup. A second picture, called “Outlaws,” shows two people in a window. One is wearing a polka-dot dress and hat, the other is in a shirt and tie. Both have feminine features and also seem to be wearing makeup. Someone else’s hand is reaching across them towards the window, as if trying to halt their escape. Awareness of the discipline of gender studies is growing among Dylan scholars, following the “Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity” conference at the University of Southern Denmark in 2024.[10] An examination of these paintings from such a perspective may prove worthwhile.

 

The most moving set of paintings in Point Blank is a collection of eight pictures illustrating a 1940s house. It looks very much like the sort you might find in northern Minnesota. One shows a fireplace, another a staircase, one more a kitchen. But a painting of a crib below a small bedroom window caught my eye. I visited Dylan’s family home in Hibbing, Minnesota recently; the room in this painting, with the upstairs window and neat period furniture, looks strikingly like Dylan’s childhood bedroom. Many people remember the view from an early bedroom window, and carry it with them forever. It’s touching to think that Dylan might have done the same, remembering it one day as he sat down to paint. This picture, titled “Crib” in the catalogue, gets to the heart of Point Blank. Most of these images are about memory. They depict scenes from the past: people in archaic clothes, 50s cars, old-timey gamblers and boxers. Just as Dylan’s music in the two decades since “Love & Theft” has increasingly taken influence from the music of his childhood (Frank Sinatra, Bob Wills, Hank Williams), so too has his visual art focused on subjects from the pre-Bob Dylan era (cowboys, jazz musicians, men in hats and ties). The viewer is left to consider whether these paintings, like “Crib,” are from Dylan’s own memory, or are merely a nostalgic invention of  his imagination.

 

I asked myself this question as I left the gallery and walked past the diamond rings and shiny watches in neighboring windows. Ultimately, for those who buy paintings from the Halcyon Gallery, Dylan’s artwork may be nothing more than another of Mayfair’s superficial luxury gifts – and for Dylan another large check. But there’s more to Point Blank than naked commerce. Dylan is adroitly displaying the progress he’s made as an artist since 2008’s Drawn Blank, and in doing so is furthering his exploration of pre-1960s American culture. That it’s on display in Mayfair, where London’s old-school financiers have long cut loose with artsy bohemians, is perfectly fitting.

 

Angus Gibson is managing editor of the Dylan Review.

 

[1] Notable early paintings include covers for Sing Out! magazine and The Band’s Music from Big Pink, and illustrations for the book Writings & Drawings (1973).

[2] Jonathan Jones. “Bob Dylan: a Hockney-like painter of America’s strange essence” The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/nov/08/bob-dylan-paintings-halcyon-gallery-london-beaten-path

[3] The title may also reference the 1967 spy film Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, as suggested by Expecting Rain user Mirte (https://expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?t=108402). Indeed, Scott Warmuth has noted (https://www.instagram.com/p/DDDdS7nu9uQ/?img_index=1) that a number of Dylan’s paintings from the recent series Deep Focus are based on stills from Hollywood movies of the late sixties and early seventies. The film Point Blank is of this era, but none of Dylan’s compositions in the Point Blank appear to be based on film stills.

[4] Bob Dylan. “In His Own Words: Why Bob Dylan Paints.” Vanity Fair, 2 Nov. 2016. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/11/why-bob-dylan-paints

[5] Bob Dylan. Point Blank (Quick Studies). Castle Fine Art, 2025.

[6] Dylan, Point Blank, p.126.

[7] Eddie Gorodesky is credited as writer and producer of Theme Time Radio Hour and received thanks as Dylan’s “fishing buddy” in The Philosophy of Modern Song. Lucy Sante wrote the sermons for the film Trouble No More, included in Bootleg Series Vol. 13.

[8] Hearts of Fire. Directed by Richard Marquand, performances by Bob Dylan, Fiona, and Rupert Everett, Lorimar Motion Pictures, 1987.

[9] Raphael Falco, “‘Unheard Melodies’: Ekphrasis and Possible Gaze in Dylan’s Lyrics,” Dylan Review, 5.1 Spring/Summer, 2023.

[10] Bob Dylan: Questions on Masculinity.” Conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 23–24 May 2024. event.sdu.dk/dylan/conference.

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Review of Bob Dylan on Film

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Jonathan Hodgers. Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals. London: Routledge. 2024. 252 pp.

Reviewed by Timothy Hampton, University of California, Berkeley

 

Lovers of classic Hollywood cinema will remember a feature of many films featuring the devastatingly handsome Cary Grant. Grant was a heart throb, but his films often made fun of his good looks. No matter how debonaire or brave Grant appeared to be, some part of his character was always standing back and casting an ironic eye on his own movie idol persona. This quirk of Grant’s filmography is worth recalling when we consider Jonathan Hodgers’ scrupulously researched and insightful account of Bob Dylan on film. Hodgers argues that there is a particular kind of “Dylan effect” that hovers around such films as Dont Look Back, Renaldo and Clara and even the more conventional Masked and Anonymous. Hodgers shows that all of Dylan’s films explore the relationship between cinematic reality and some version of the “real” or non-cinematic world. Put differently, if handsome Cary Grant is never merely handsome, neither is Bob Dylan, on film, ever merely Bob Dylan (or not Bob Dylan). And the contrast between filmed Dylan and the Dylan who by his very presence shapes the film, Hodgers shows, is an important feature that links all of Dylan’s films together. It’s an impressive and productive thesis that lends Hodgers’ book weight and intellectual cogency.

Hodgers pursues this feature of Dylan’s history through an extended opening meditation on the question of the author or auteur in cinema. There is of course a sizable body of writing about the extent to which directors of films are their “authors,” and about the history of the auteur film, which emerged out of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hodgers begins by distinguishing between filmic vehicles which repurpose Dylan’s earlier music for some type of “re-creation” or “re-authoring” (xi), such as Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There or Martin Scorcese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, on the one hand, and films such as Dont Look Back or Renaldo and Clara, where the emphasis is on the more or less simultaneous emergence of a figure on screen and the creation of new musical performances. It is these latter films that interest Hodgers, and one of the goals of the book is to argue that there is a kind of dramatic and thematic consistency across a body of films that otherwise might seem to be quite diverse in genre and tone.

Hodgers devotes much of his analysis to Dylan’s two 1960s films, Dont Look Back and Eat the Document. Both cover Dylan’s tours of the UK during the time of his shift away from folk music to some sort of more impressionistic, often electric, music. Dylan’s status as counter-cultural hero, in his fancy clothes, wild hair and affected stage mannerisms is captured in these cinema-vérité productions, one by D.A. Pennebaker, and one worked up collaboratively by Dylan and Howard Alk (with, it would seem, some residual assistance from Pennebaker). Hodgers stresses the tension between the claims of cinema-vérité, to put us inside the action, watching real people in real time, and the avant-gardism of Pennebaker’s narrative technique, which insists on rapid cuts, lack of context, and an insistence on the presence of the camera as part of the action. This, asserts Hodgers, is one of the reasons Dylan called the film “dishonest” in an interview. And, indeed, the film somewhat shockingly avoids uncut takes of single songs, choosing rather to break them up and generally to film Dylan only from the front. Both Dylan and Pennebaker were involved in putting the film together, however, and the multiplicity of voices generates a kind of confusion that makes the thematic arguments we might expect from a documentary difficult to discern. Though the film offers an “interpretation” of events, it does so not through narration or thematic material, but through “organization, editing, and arrangement” (22).

I would note, in addition, that it was certainly influenced by the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, yet whereas that film had the advantage of offering four protagonists, joking and playing, here we have a single focus. This gives the film a curiously argumentative dimension, as if, in order to create social interest, Pennebaker and Dylan had to focus on scenes in which people are yelling at each other or trading insults. Dylan yells at people, reporters yell at Dylan, fans yell at Dylan and each other, and so on. Yet at the same time, Dont Look Back establishes a problem that will characterize much of Dylan’s work – the problem of figuring out how much of what we see is a film of Bob Dylan, and how much is a film by Bob Dylan – influenced by his preferences, input, and suggestions.

For Hodgers, the problems visible in Dont Look Back are at least partially resolved in the hard-to-find Pennebaker work Something Is Happening, and then in the still officially unreleased  Eat the Document. Dylan put Eat the Document together with help from Howard Alk and Pennebaker out of footage from his 1966 tour with The Hawks, who later became The Band. Here, the “surrealism” of the approach frees the film from the structures of chronology. Eat the Document’s disavowal of meaning or logic might be seen as a rebuke of Dont Look Back. Hodgers shows how Eat the Document works dialectically, setting up contrasts between images and scenes and using images to comment on lines in performance. Alk also records in color and ventures on stage, among the musicians, in a way that provides a more powerful cinematic experience.

Hodgers also uses his close analysis of these early films to set up a series of thematic oppositions that, he avers, are consistent across Dylan’s work. There is often a “double” who stands over against the protagonist (for example, Donovan in Dont Look Back), often a plot involving Dylan’s character and some mysterious or dangerous woman, often a tension between the heroic performer and “management” (corporate or, in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, legal), and usually the presence of some journalistic figure introduced to raise questions about the integrity of performances. Hodgers traces these thematic elements across Dylan’s film work, adding as well a longer list of more abstract oppositions (youth-age, innocence-experience) of the kind we might expect in the work of a pop star.

Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid provides a greater challenge for Hodger’s analysis, since Dylan didn’t make the movie, and only had a small role as a minor character. However, Hodgers’s analysis of the film does a good job of looping it into Dylan’s camp by stressing the ways in which it is a film that, like much of Dylan’s songwriting, draws obsessively on clichés and tropes from earlier art works: “All in all, Pat Garrett as a whole is deeply concerned with story, memory, and reminiscence. Into this intertextual milieu, Dylan brings abundant references from his own output” (75). And Hodgers goes on to detail the ways in which Dylan’s music intervenes in certain moments of the plot, adding resonance to what is happening visually.

The centerpiece for any analysis of this kind would certainly have to be Dylan’s 1977 self-directed film Renaldo and Clara. The film is long, a bit boring, and was a commercial and critical failure. However, Hodgers makes a strong case for the creativity of Dylan’s approach, linking it back to two major inspirations, Shoot the Piano Player and Children of Paradise (both in different ways important documents in the emergence of the French auteur theory of cinema). Yet the film is also deeply influenced by a documentary tradition, which it both uses and upends, as we see multiple scenes where it is difficult to discern whether we are watching Dylan, or some version of Dylan playing another character. This confusion is highlighted, Hodgers shows, by the careful use of music, which fades in and out as a commentary on the action. Hodgers’ careful account of the film, supplemented by his work in the Dylan archive on early versions, is an impressive contribution to our knowledge of the movie. It made me want to watch it again.

More challenging for Hodgers are Dylan’s two Hollywood films, 1987’s Hearts of Fire and 2003’s Masked and Anonymous. Hearts of Fire is pretty bad, and Hodgers makes no attempt to defend the film. However, he does point out that Dylan’s presence twists some of the representations. “Part of the film’s interest … lies in the fact that Dylan plays himself with a veneer of fiction” (144). Hodgers points out that Dylan “nudged” the script to correspond to his own cadences as a way of bringing his character closer to how he wanted to be seen. Or, one could add, to what he could do, given his limited acting chops.

Hodgers is on happier ground with Masked and Anonymous, where he traces the interactions between Dylan, who partly wrote the scenario, and director Larry Charles. He points out that the film draws heavily on references to Dylan’s career, evoking songs and earlier moments, using musical performance in an effective way. Hodgers argues that the film might be seen in a kind of dialogue with Dylan’s deeply citational album “Love and Theft” which came out around the time of filming. He points to the fact that Dylan was deeply involved in the early work on the film, before fading out, as he often seems to do in collaborations.

Bob Dylan on Film is a learned and insightful guide to an important feature of Dylan’s career. By focusing on the histories of the various productions, Hodgers shows a rarely glimpsed aspect of Dylan’s persona. It is a book that will appeal to students of cinema as well as to fans of Dylan’s music, and it illuminates both areas of activity. Hodgers has wonderful insights into how Dylan’s presence shapes (or, we might say, distorts) the cinematic enterprise. Whereas some other musical figures might just show up on the set, hit their marks, and strum their chords, Dylan’s restlessness makes films about him into hybrid productions, never sure of their own status. In this way, we might say, the cinematic record of Dylan’s career parallels much of his songwriting. It bends genres, redraws boundaries, and opens up new avenues for reflection.

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Review of Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God

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Jeffrey Edward Green. Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. 368 pp. 

Reviewed by Barry J. Faulk, Florida State University.

 

Jeffrey Edward Green’s new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, is a learned, carefully reasoned, and extensively researched study of Dylan’s relationship to the figure of the prophet; it is sure to interest readers who already regard the singer to be something more than an entertainer. However, Green, a political philosopher, also wants to persuade readers (and listeners) unmoved by Dylan’s songs, and skeptical of the claims that enthusiastic fans often make about the singer, that his life and work have had a transformative impact on contemporary thought as well as on contemporary life.

Green points to the “brilliance, poignancy, fecundity, uncanniness, arrestingness, and beauty” of Dylan’s “transmission through words” as perhaps the most compelling reason to bestow the “prophet” label on the singer (3). He takes great care to place the singer’s life and work in the context of earlier prophetic traditions, most notably the Hebrew prophets, who claimed to relay a divine message about redemption and justice to an errant people, and the principled civil disobedience advocated by Mahatmas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. That said, Green’s book is built on the premise that Dylan represents a crucial difference in kind from these earlier prophetic leaders. Green’s Dylan is a prophet of “diremption” and thus metaphorically a “prophet without God,” as the subtitle claims. Unlike earlier prophets who claimed direct access to higher truths and who were identified by the singular message they proclaimed, Bob Dylan is a postmodern prophet who inspires us to reflect on the structures of meaning-making. Dylan’s prophetic power lies in the unique ability of his words to illuminate the gaps between the various ideals–of faith, social justice, personal liberation – that we aspire to actualize. A prophet of diremption may speak on behalf of freedom and justice, but, as Green remarks, will “continually [insist], tragically, on the divergences and conflicts between these ideals”; such a prophet testifies to the absence of any court of appeals that might help us adjudicate the contest between incommensurate values (vii). Prophets of diremption speak for a hidden God, not a revealed one, and testify to God’s absence in the world, even as they urge us to recognize the true and enact the good. As Green puts it, “Dylan makes the very conflicts between the grounds of normative authority ethically meaningful. He discloses the conflicts between incommensurate values of normative authority so that normative authority is no longer a stable unity or a foundation without cracks or fissures” (34). To recall the words of another prophet, Green’s Dylan comes not to bring peace, but a sword. And as Green also reminds us, the singer’s vehement rejection of the prophet’s role at crucial points in his career keeps faith with the venerable precedent set by the Hebrew prophets themselves, such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Amos (12-13). 

Green approaches the subject of Dylan and prophecy from the perspective of a political philosopher: besides situating the artist’s life and work within the broader history of Western theological and philosophical thought, he wishes to examine what Dylan’s popular audience might reveal to us about the persistence of belief in ideas about the good, the true, and the beautiful in modern secular democracies. Given their divergent starting points, there is an interesting convergence between Green’s thesis and music writer Ian MacDonald’s account of Bob Dylan’s post-Newport transformation into a distinctly modern prophet, committed to “inoculate the world with disillusionment” by means of amplified sound: a role that, as MacDonald notes, Dylan “applied himself to … with perverse relish and, as audience resistance persisted, an increasing militance” (The People’s Music 32). In this view, Dylan remains a man with a mission even as he rejected a leadership role in the folk music revival of the early 1960s. The message may have changed, the volume had gotten louder, but behind it all the prophetic stance and the presumption on the part of both the artist and audience that the singer’s words reflected a higher wisdom and a more penetrating view of the nature of reality persists. That MacDonald builds his observation on a phase by bohemian writer Henry Miller suggests that what Green describes as Dylan’s “prophetic” stance may be grounded in the history of art as much as theology, specifically in the notion of the artist-as-outsider that the singer might have learned from modernist literature.    

In three chapters that demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the by-now voluminous scholarly literature analyzing and explicating Bob Dylan’s life and music, and referencing a wide range of political philosophers from Niccolò Machiavelli to Hans Morgenthau – with insightful readings of the key concepts of Max Weber, William James, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas offered along the way – Green draws our attention to the rich commentary that Dylan has provided on his own ethical struggles at different stages of his career. For Green, the singer’s extensive discourse on these internal conflicts constitutes his prophetic message. In Part I, “A Rebel Rebelling against the Rebellion,” Green traces the history of Dylan’s participation in the 1960s folk music revival and the shock waves created by the artist’s very public disavowal of his popular audience. Dylan’s music as well as his fateful career choices during these years challenged a cherished myth of political democracy, especially prominent in the Cold War era, that the ideals of individual liberty and communal belonging are easily reconciled. Dramatized in songs like “My Back Pages” and enacted on stage during his 1966 concert tours with the Band, Dylan both articulated and embodied the conflict experienced by a generation that sought to simultaneously achieve personal fulfillment and enact revolutionary change. Greil Marcus’s description of Dylan’s Basement Tape recordings as “deserter’s songs” could reasonably be applied to the whole of the singer’s musical output after 1963, until the release of the Christian-inspired Slow Train Coming recording in 1979. Although the music styles may vary, most of the songs Dylan writes during this period locate happiness and self-fulfillment in moments of profound introspection or in personal relationships. As Green eloquently observes, the Prophetic Dylan of the 1960s bears witness “not to the resolution of competing ethical duties in a better-organized future world, but to the permanent moral chaos of the present, in which individuals such as himself will routinely turn their backs on causes they otherwise recognize as just out of a competing commitment to their own freedom” (39). 

Dylan’s conversion in the late 1970s initiated another ethical struggle, this time with the “self-reliant individuality” that was previously the hallmark of the singer’s work and career (37). In Part II, “Never Could Learn to Drink that Blood, and Call It Wine,” Green persuasively argues that Dylan’s prophetic status represents a point of continuity amid change, and he challenges us to take a broader view of this dramatic turning point in Dylan’s life and career. Green’s analysis of Dylan’s prophetic stance on religion provocatively includes not only the uncompromising declarations of faith in songs from the Slow Train Coming and Saved recordings, but the more muted, delicate Christian testimony of “Every Grain of Sand” from 1981’s Shot of Love, as well as Infidels (1983) and Empire Burlesque (1985), recordings from the singer’s putative “post-conversion” period, once again writing songs on non-religious topics. For Green, all these recordings represent different steps taken on the same path in a longer, more enduring faith journey.  

Viewed as a totality, Green claims that Dylan’s different modalities of faith represent a new manner of being religious in a secular age, more appropriate to a prophet of diremption.  Green draws on the theories of postsecular democracy advanced by the social philosophers Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas to interpret the significance of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. The postsecular theory advanced by Taylor and Habermas asserts that, since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, governance in modern liberal democracies has evolved beyond hostility to religious belief to a more comprehensive view that treats, as Green puts it, “both religion and non-religion as standpoints of equal integrity, which each of us might adopt at any time” (xvi). While Taylor and Habermas advocate the postsecular ideal, Green regards Dylan to be “perhaps the greatest representative of a postsecular mentality”: its prophetic embodiment, in other words. As Green demonstrates in a detailed survey of Dylan’s post-conversion interviews and in thoughtful close readings of song lyrics from the era, the singer clearly aimed his late 70s/early 80s musical ministry at a popular audience that he presumed was non- or anti-religious. Yet at the same time, Dylan’s new gospel songs were rarely explicit declarations of faith. As Green establishes in his readings of “Covenant Woman” and “Precious Angel,” Dylan’s preferred mode of gospel song paid homage to his mentors, to those who inspired him by possessing a faith that he regarded to be far stronger than his own. Other Dylan songs from this period (“Property of Jesus,” “Watered Down Love,” “Slow Train Coming”) are preoccupied with defending believers against the taunts of non-believers rather than with advancing religious doctrine, or indeed any specific claim about religion. Green interprets Dylan’s post-1980s recordings as an effort to build a musical bridge among believers and non-believers, and he makes a bold assertion about the singer’s success in this regard: “Dylan, almost uniquely in popular culture, has demonstrated for non-religious people the integrity, dignity, and plausibility of religiosity” (ix).

In Part III of Prophet Without God, “Strengthen the Things that Remain,” Green analyzes Dylan’s “prophetic pessimism,” his belief that “the political world will never become the site of secular salvation,” which, as Green documents, seems as informed by the singer’s careful reading of Thucydides, Carl von Clausewitz, and various historical accounts of the American Civil War, as by the singer’s religious convictions (253). Here, Green traces a by now familiar pattern, where the artist first inhabits an intellectual tradition and then rubs it against the grain. As Green demonstrates with copious textual examples, modern political realists such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, and more recently Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger often place great faith in a fantasy image of the Strong Leader, unafraid to commit any crime to maintain order and stability, and unconsciously bring to the fore the idealism they sought to eliminate from their positivist political science. Green first situates Dylan within a long-standing tradition of political realists who take it for granted that human institutions are imperfect, since they are built and operated by flawed humans. Then, referencing song lyrics from throughout Dylan’s writing career, as well as an extensive range of contemporary interviews where Dylan has been uncharacteristically effusive about American politics and his reading of classic history texts, Green makes a compelling case that Dylan significantly alters the discourse of political realism by addressing his message not to “the Prince,” or an elite, but “to a real constituency–ordinary, non-specially empowered individuals – [who are] typically overlooked by canonical political realists with their focus on leadership” (254). As Green details in an extended close reading of “Man of Peace,” Dylan’s prophetic stance on politics focuses on practical matters of conduct: on how ordinary people can attain a clear-eyed view of political realities and still work to “strengthen the things that remain” (“When You Going to Wake Up”). 

One of Green’s stated aims in writing the book is to illuminate the character of a people who would regard Bob Dylan to be a prophet: yet one can’t help but notice a disconnect between Dylan’s prophetic messaging as described by Green and the lived experience of the singer’s popular audience, and doubtless of Dylan himself. The hope that a mutual respect and tolerance can still bind together those who hold opposing opinions in matters of faith or politics seems a very weak revenant in “Trump 2.0” America. The polarized discourse of social media seems light years away from the ideals of mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers that Green claims are at the heart of Dylan’s prophetic message on religion. Digital algorithms leave little room for the idealized notions of dialogue and mutuality articulated by theorists of the public sphere. Social media is about profits, not prophets; its algorithms are meant to keep us engaged online, regardless of the content of our messaging. Trolling is not a “bug” of online life, it’s a deliberate part of its functionality.  

Still, as Green memorably puts it, prophetic testimony always presumes “the permanent moral chaos of the present moment”: it presupposes this chaos (or diremption), even as the prophet exhorts us to act differently, and deliberately. In that sense, Dylan’s exhortation to strengthen the things that remain may prove to be the artist’s timeliest message, and Green has done us a considerable service in elucidating and contextualizing the nature of Dylan’s prophetic communications.

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Review of Teaching Bob Dylan

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Barry J. Faulk and Brady Harrison, editors.  Teaching Bob Dylan.  NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, xiii + 268 pp.

Reviewed by D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University

 

I’m writing this review just after seeing A Complete Unknown, the biopic starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s formative years in the Greenwich Village folk scene. I’m wary of reading reviews prior to seeing films, partly because of spoilers and partly because I want to reduce the chance of external bias as I sit down with my popcorn, but in this case I had surveyed some critics because the movie was so hyped. The ones I read ran the gamut, from pans to raves. Now that I’ve seen it, I’ll go back to them to deepen and sharpen my own responses, and maybe to see something I didn’t fully grasp in the moment: in other words, to learn something.

I’ll keep my movie review to myself because my job here is to review an important new book, Teaching Bob Dylan[1], but the film provides useful context for thinking about the topic of teaching Dylan as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, more than fifty years after young Bobby’s debut. I saw the movie with my elder son, a twenty-something who likes Dylan and who loves movies. We talked through our first impressions on the ride home, and he had some questions that I could answer (which album was “It Ain’t Me, Babe” on?) and others that I couldn’t (who was his Black lover with the British accent in that one brief scene…or was she invented for the film)? I had questions that he could answer, too, like where have I seen the actresses who played Suze (called Sylvie in the film upon Dylan’s insistence) and Joan? Facts are checkable, but the discussion became truly interesting when we talked about the film’s artistic choices and how they affected us as two representatives of the multigenerational audience. We agreed that the title A Complete Unknown was appropriate because you don’t feel like you know Dylan any better by the end of the film than you did at the beginning. It’s a matter of debate whether that’s because he’s unknowable even to himself or because he deliberately cultivated mystique as a shield against the fame he both courted and rejected. Whether we’re looking at Dylan’s performances, his lyrics, or his life, he can be regarded as a fascinating and complex classroom text.

The never-ending tension between what can be known and what must be interpreted is part of what makes higher education a joyous pursuit. Once my son and I dealt with the movie’s factual inaccuracies – (son, the infamous Judas exchange didn’t happen at Newport) – we were able to get to the topics that really engage the mind. This, too, is the tension that consumes anyone who has designed a course or course unit on Dylan, and who would thus benefit from a book like Teaching Bob Dylan.

Part of what explains the existence of the journal you’re currently reading is that Dylan has produced so much art for so long that those who think they know him well will always have new contextual directions to take, or connections to make. And those who are just discovering him have a lot of catching up to do. The editors of Teaching Bob Dylan acknowledge this fact in a single-word subtitle: “Multitudes.” This word rightly signals that the book cannot hope to contain Dylan’s multitudes, but we should always be aware that they exist. There are many ways we can approach Dylan in the classroom, the word acknowledges, but no book nor any fourteen-week course of study will ever cover them all. Parallel to what we do with our students in any semester, the book merely introduces the multitudinous Dylan as a classroom subject and invites us to continue the pursuit as we are able. To return once more to the film’s title, “unknown” is a given, but “complete” is impossible.  Dylan’s multitudes are fragments.

I asked a few questions as I started to read Teaching Bob Dylan, questions that I think would be useful for you, dear reader, as you decide if it’s a book you want to add to your library. You’ve got an ever-increasing number of books about Bob to choose from, as well as the substantial content of this journal and, of course, articles in the popular press.  My questions are: how useful is the book to instructors or would-be instructors? Are the contributors dedicated and innovative teachers? Could the book also be useful to Dylan scholars who are not necessarily interested in teaching a new course or changing the way they teach a current course? Is the volume well written and carefully edited? And finally, and most crucially, does the volume inspire?

Specialized books about pedagogy have a limited audience. That’s a neutral observation, but I want to acknowledge from the get-go that this book is not designed for everyone. I would even argue that it’s not a book for all teachers as I saw very little in these pages that would appeal to our valued colleagues who teach high school. The orientation is toward higher education, even specifically toward undergraduate education. Again, that’s a neutral statement for the benefit of Dylan Review readers who teach secondary school or graduate courses and who might come looking for tips and tricks.

Given that set of caveats, for those of us who teach courses or units on Dylan to undergraduates, Teaching Bob Dylan is a valuable resource. For starters, the book features a wide variety of contexts. I teach a course on Dylan and the Beat Generation, and I was gratified to read two separate and superb essays on that same topic as well as other subjects I might have anticipated (i.e. approaches involving the “old, weird America” and the social revolutions of the 1960s). No book of this type would be complete without those contexts, and they’re covered intelligently and thoroughly. What I didn’t expect were other frames of reference that expanded my way of thinking. I never would have considered teaching Dylan’s gospel/Christian phase before I read Lauren Onkey’s “Teaching the Gospel,” but after reading her clear and persuasive essay, I can’t imagine why I would have sidestepped it. Robert Hurd’s “Romances with Durango: Teaching Dylan’s Encounter with Mexican Culture” also blew my mind because it’s not an obvious approach, but it’s a highly relevant one. As soon as I read each of these essays, I wanted to register for my colleagues’ classes. That’s good teaching! I was also drawn to the section on “Dylan Beyond the Songs.” Essays by Graley Herren (“Teaching Chronicles”) and Leigh H. Edwards (“Bob Dylan and Documentary Film”) made me want to include more of that content in my course. Like many instructors, I use excerpts from Chronicles and clips from a handful of documentaries, but Herren and Edwards provide valuable genre-based readings of these sources rather than treating them as mere framing devices for the songs.

In addition to the introduction, twelve essays, and afterword that comprise the volume, there are also two appendices, one consisting of syllabi provided by the contributors and one consisting of course materials. These appendices take up roughly one-fifth of the entire volume. At first, I thought this was a little excessive, but upon reflection I feel it was a wise decision because it keeps the volume’s focus squarely on pedagogy (more on that later), and it is a treasure trove of possible materials for those who are eager for fresh ideas to revitalize our teaching. Plus, it’s always valuable to see what choices other instructors have made, not only in terms of selection and organization, but in their presentation of material to students. In offering these documents, our colleagues are generously inviting us to steal ideas and lessons, and we should thank them.

It’s evident that all the contributors to this volume are innovative, creative, thoughtful, and dedicated instructors. I applaud the editors for finding contributors whose experience covers the full range of the higher education landscape, from community colleges to Ivy League institutions. The variety of viewpoints speaks again to the “multitudes” of the subtitle. Not every approach will work for every set of students or every institutional setting, so the variety is necessary. There is also variety in the levels of engagement or granularity of detail. We encounter some sophisticated theory (such as “the cognitive-science theory of ‘conceptual blending’” [35] in an essay by Michael Booth) as well as some screenshots of group exercises an instructor worked on with students in class (a map of the Texas-Mexico border and a timeline in an essay by Robert Hurd [150]). Finally, there are significant differences in organization. In addition to the chronological approach many of us take when organizing a course, we see examples of instructors who creatively break that approach, such as Gayle Wald’s nimble description of her course “The World of Bob Dylan” which (as the title indicates) moves around quite freely, or Robert Reginio’s willingness to shuttle between early rock and roll and hip-hop as a way of reframing Dylan for a new generation.

I’m compelled to gush a little more here about the innovation I saw in these pages because I don’t think faculty are rewarded enough for this dimension of our work except (occasionally) by our students. The thought we put into organizing and structuring our classes is often invisible labor. Also, a really good syllabus requires creative thinking and risk-taking despite institutional pressures to make all syllabi boring, quasi-legal documents. I was struck by Graley Herren’s description of “vocation” at his institution. He reports that this concept must be introduced in a first-year seminar such as the one he teaches on Dylan, and that his institution conceives of it in a specific way, “as the intersection in each person’s life where three roads meet: (1) what you love; (2) what you’re good at; and (3) what others need from you” (167). Most instructors would not automatically reach for Dylan given that mandate, but Herren – a creative thinker – makes his case in a most convincing way. By the end of the essay, he interrupts his own analysis to say, “I’m only noticing this now, so I’m eager to get back into the classroom and try out this idea with my next group of FYS students” (174). Clearly this love of the subject – love being one of the three roads that intersect at vocation – is at play here, and it’s the beating heart of this volume in general. As Richard F. Thomas puts it in his moving afterword, “Most [authors of the Classics] are interesting and important, but I don’t feel for them the love I feel for Virgil, Horace, Tacitus – or Dylan – so I simply don’t teach them” (193). This is not to say love need not be critical – this book is not hagiography, and the portrait of Dylan that emerges is definitely “warts and all” – but the contributors’ passion for their subject is evident and infectious.

The question of whether this book is only for instructors is a little vexed. In their introduction (I assume co-authored by the editors, but it’s not explicit) Faulk and Harrison play with an inherent pun in the volume’s title: as instructors we teach courses on Dylan, but the title indicates that Dylan is himself a teacher, and he sometimes expresses “a teacherly frustration with unruly, uncaring students” (7) which might include not only pesky interviewers, but, well, us. By opening up this possibility, the editors suggest that academics – even ones who would claim to be Dylanologists – want to learn from Dylan, which leads us down the road to interpretation as opposed to pure pedagogy. At the end of the book’s “Acknowledgments,” the editors admit, “We’re all wondering what Bob Dylan would think of a book about teaching ‘Bob Dylan’” (xiii). That’s natural. But the volume takes as a given, and consistently reminds readers, that we could never get a straight answer from him: that’s his schtick. That means we’re in the realm of interpretation, which means the volume must spend some time trying to figure out its evasive subject rather than just presenting ways to present him in the classroom. The placing of “Bob Dylan” in quotation marks in the above quotation is a coy acknowledgement that the subject is about as easy to hold as a handful of rain. To return to my point about viewing the movie with my son, there are things we can solidly know but many more things we must argue for, based on the mess of contradictions and slippery evidence that has constituted Dylan’s career.

Even seasoned instructors can’t get away from interpretation, in other words, or the critical impulse; as the editors argue, “if Dylan had never existed, it might have been necessary for rock critics to invent him” (8). Note: not college instructors, but critics, but all of us who teach higher ed are both critics and teachers. Moreover, we get to know our subject better when we teach it, and the insights we arrive at in the classroom often supersede the ones we bring to the classroom. (Raise your hand if you ever assigned a book to students because you were hoping to understand it better, then to write about it). The volume is ostensibly about pedagogy, but some of the essays – you’ll know them when you encounter them, which I hope you do – shade more to the scholarly article side with the practical pedagogy largely saved for the appendices. That’s totally fine, except that I’m concerned that scholars might overlook this volume because they assume it is only designed as a teaching resource. It contains many gem-like insights for critics who do not necessarily teach Dylan to undergrads. In that sense, it may have even broader appeal than the title would indicate. Scholars who never teach Dylan will also benefit from it.

Readers might seek out individual essays in this collection based on their approach to the subject, but the collection also holds together as a coherent volume. I’ve edited a few essay collections and it’s a simple fact that the writing within them will never be uniform. We all have different voices and styles and different relationships with our readers. Editors who aim for uniformity face frustration. That said, all the essays in the collection are strong and clearly written, and they hold together nicely. The organization of the volume, including the pages in the appendices, makes sense to me, although I might have suggested fewer subsections representing broader categories. Five sections for twelve essays seems a bit many, and the one called “Love and Theft” is more abstract and less descriptive than the others. I’m picking nits here: the volume reflects a steady editorial hand but not an overly heavy one, and typos and redundancies are minimal.

What I really hoped for when I picked up this volume was to be inspired, and it certainly delivered on that level. I finished the volume not only with new ideas for my Dylan and the Beats course based on the superb essays by S.E. Gontarski and Paul Haney, but also with a ton of inspiration to develop a host of new courses. As Faulk and Harrison say, “Dylan is not having a cultural moment quite like, say, Taylor Swift,” but he is in the midst of “a number of very good years” beginning with the Nobel Prize for Literature (3). When that award was announced in 2016, the whole world (including its recipient) seemed a bit taken aback, if not shocked. Enough time has passed to try to figure out what it means, not only for Dylan, but for cultural production more generally. Under the guidance of a smart book like Teaching Bob Dylan, and with the help of the younger generation who might register for any number of Dylan-themed courses, I think we’ll figure it out.

 

[1] As a contributor to this collection, Dylan Review editor Paul Haney recused himself from any involvement in the procuring and editing of this review.

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Review of The 1974 Live Recordings

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Bob Dylan and The Band. “The 1974 Live Recordings.” Columbia Records, 2024. CD.

Reviewed by Annie Burkhart, University of Northern Colorado

 

“Locating The Band in The 1974 Live Recordings”          

Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aint far behind, the laughter is fading away…

—Bob Dylan, 1974, Planet Waves back cover

 

On January 3, 1974, 18,500 rock ‘n’ roll converts watched in awe as six men who had betrayed them eight years prior scrambled onto the Chicago Stadium stage. Never has ovation on top of ovation been so bizarrely repaid; without a word or even a gesture of acknowledgement, Bob Dylan and The Band broke into a number that no one recognized. Once Robbie Robertson teased the arena with a twangy false start on guitar, this electric ensemble delivered three-and-a-half minutes of rollicking roots rock, refusing to deliver “Hero Blues” as it was originally recorded. There would be no mistake about it. As in 1966, these behemoths of blues rock still answered to no one. 

What transpired over the next six weeks, especially on a musical level, was aggressive, subversive, and defiant. These genre-defying musical giants would not be denied as they were, insisting on defining themselves not by but against their past selves – while also making no promises about who they’d be next time. Across forty shows in twenty-one cities on a tour that might have easily been dismissed as a nostalgia act, The Band and Bob Dylan played career-defining music at critical junctures for both acts. As of 2024, a compellingly curated collection of Tour ’74 has been made (theoretically) available to the public in the form of Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 Live Recordings.

Listening to the boxset, fans will hear loud and clear that The Band were holding themselves to an incredibly high standard in 1974, a year often overlooked completely in discussions of the group’s legacy. When Band and Bob fans heard from me last, I was situating The Band’s attitudes about their own legacy in 1974, and I, in essence, concluded – with the knowledge of how they sounded on both Before the Flood (1974) and a bootleg or two – that this tour marked the beginning of the end – a sentiment echoed by rock columnist Elizabeth Nelson in her 1974 Live Recordings liner notes. After listening to all 29 hours of this boxset, however, it’s clear that there’s more to the story. While The Band might have relished this opportunity to retreat into Bob Dylan’s shadow as backing musicians, the magic they created on this tour extended their tenure as performers, rather than marking its imminent decline. You don’t make fifty cumulative hours of music this good, this consistently masterful, in the space of six weeks if you’ve got one foot out the door. The 1974 Live Recordings, for The Band as well as Bob Dylan, show us that while the “good ole days” are indeed gone forever, the “new ones” are going to be a trip.

It’s for all of these reasons that The 1974 Live Recordings has supplanted Before the Flood as the definitive artifact of Tour ’74. While many fairly regard 1974 as a year of transition for Dylan and a period of uncertainty for The Band, they were making revolutionary music on this tour that allowed them – not critics, and not fans – to define their legacies. Nelson’s liner notes remind us that “[t]he audience had gotten personal on the ’66 tour . . . And this was the receipt.” This boxset chronicles how one of the most cohesive, innovative, and self-aware bands in history cooked up fire and technical precision night after night as one of the most polarizing and influential artist of the prior decade stood center stage figuring out the future of music. As MOJO Magazine observed of Dylan in their October 2024 review of the Recordings, he was “gathering the sheaves of his past and setting them ablaze with old friends” (67). The Tour ’74 bonfire rages in this boxset. 

Their gutsy and impenitent performance of “Hero Blues” (a number that would be axed from the set fewer than two days later) drives home its lyrics in a way that Dylan’s acoustic number had not. These six musicians attack every measure and every beat with a painstaking accuracy that has rather a violence to it. A period of unadulterated joy for fans of The Band hits around the 1:30 mark, and the group starts doing what they do best: breaking it all the way down. Robertson’s wailing lead guitar slowly crescendos at 1:33, rising to the top as Bob yells to no one (yet everyone) “you need a different kind’a man, babe!” after which all but Bob and Levon Helm go quiet for a measure. Helm keeps driving home that backbeat while elegantly hitting a snare-bass flam and Bob announces who’s replacing everyone’s folk hero: “NAY-POH-lee-uhn BOH-nee-parte!” The bridge breakdown sees The Band performing as soundly and tightly as they have at any point in their career. Robertson and Garth Hudson trade and weave together soaring organ and lead guitar solos as Richard Manuel deftly drifts between lead and rhythm keyboard, hitting the backbeats one moment and the off-beats the next with a simple but confident artistry that’s impressive for this point in his career. And when Rick Danko’s bassline ascends to the top of the mix just before the two-minute mark, even my dog starts paying attention. We’d be hard-pressed to find more gutsy bravado in any juke joint in America than we hear in these first three and a half minutes of Tour ’74.

Candidly, I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of Dylan’s live performance history to discuss all 431 tracks of this collection. Instead, I’ll briefly touch on the elephant in the room: that The 1974 Live Recordings was, above all else, a Sony copyright collection. As Sony doesn’t own the rights to any of The Band’s music, not a single recording of an original Band number made it into the boxset. That’s an omission to the tune of 400 more tracks and thus approximately twenty-four more hours of music. Whatever Dylan partisans may say, The Band fans do need to hear all twenty-six performances of “The Shape I’m In.” While The Band shone brightest on this tour when they were, perhaps counterintuitively, not caught in the spotlight, their sets are not an insignificant part of any tour stop. As we flesh out our complete portrait of Tour ’74 with bits and pieces from the archives, we need to remember The Band.

Few of the acclaimed music critics who dropped in on Tour ’74 entered the venue with fair, informed assumptions about The Band’s role on what was principally thought of as a Dylan tour. Even Ralph J. Gleason, whose review of the Oakland shows initially celebrates The Band as having “never played better in person or on record” (86), ends up ultimately misrepresenting what this tour meant to Danko, Helm, Hudson, Manuel, and Robertson in what reads like a backhanded compliment. He opines, “The Band itself has done something only truly great musicians, secure in the knowledge of their own strengths, can do. They have sublimated [sic] themselves to their fellow artist” (89). Though I applaud his flattery in a general sense, I think he misses the point: that The Band needed this chance to stand in Dylan’s shadow, this opportunity to make music in a way that complements their sensibilities both professionally and personally.      

The Tour ’74 stop that leaves this Band fan howling at the moon is the January 15th show in Largo, Maryland. The touch of master engineer Rob Frabroni – invited onto Starship One with the rest of the crew by Bob Dylan himself – turned Disc 9 of this boxset to gold. MOJO Magazine’s review admires how Frabroni “helped Dylan and The Band sound pretty mean” by maximizing their mix of the “constantly acerbic voice, the proto-punk wallop, the squealing guitars and psychedelic keyboards.” The best mix of this boxset is, by default, likely to be a Band fan’s favorite.

While it’s hard to find a bad performance on this disc, the first full-group set at the Capital Center is something special. This was only the group’s second test of beginning and ending a set with the same tune. The number they chose was, as Robertson describes it, a “ripping” version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” (Testimony 428). The Band and Dylan effortlessly recapture their Blonde on Blonde-era energy for this performance. Pair this with Bob’s vituperative shout-singing and the rhythm section’s “tenterhooks urgency that verged on rage” (Nelson), and it becomes the anthem of Tour ’74. As Danko plucks out a sometimes frantic staccato on electric bass, Helm drives this “hectic freight train” number along with deceptively intricate ride cymbal work and a snare pop that hits the tiniest fraction ahead of every beat. 

The Band musically manifests the urgency of Dylan’s song about parting ways. On one level, Dylan is singing about parting ways with the audience as they leave the arena after the encore. More deeply, he is singing about the audience parting ways with their idea of who Bob Dylan is. Robertson notes to Fong-Torres in a 1974 interview, “I don’t remember him ever delivering what they believe he delivered, or what they think he’s going to deliver [this time] . . . people have a fictitious past in mind about him” (24). By 1974, Bob and The Band had earned the privilege of revising their respective legacies. With Dylan’s lone troubadour days behind him, The Band were there to set expectations. As British documentary filmmaker Mick Gold notes of The Band just after the conclusion of Tour ’74 that they are “the only group who could warm up the crowd for Abraham Lincoln … [T]hey sang about communities tied together by traditions of loyalty and deference.” While I find that rock writers focus on The Band’s personal humility a bit too enthusiastically in the mid seventies, “loyalty and deference” were certainly chief among their noblest qualities. The Band facilitate Bob’s identity migration, just as they always have – they take a load off Bobby as he decides where to take music next.

If it wasn’t already clear that Tour ’74 was charting new territory for the group, the January 15 performance of “Lay Lady Lay” eliminates any shadow of a doubt. It’s sultry; it’s salacious;  no listener is safe. All eyes and ears are on them before the number even starts, as Dylan gives tens of thousands a jump scare by saying a complete sentence (other than “we’ll be right back”) for the first time in twelve days of touring: “Thank you; it’s great to be back in D.C.” Robbie and Bob create a spicy back-and-forth between vocals and lead guitar. Both are feeling powerful and self-assured. Clearly, anyone who jumped on the recent “Bob Dylan is not sexy” train has never heard this performance. As Garth Hudson and the rhythm section issue standard-yet-tight-as-ever backbeats and flourishes, a good time is clearly had by all, and performers and spectators begin to feel at ease, if a tad overexcited.

If “Lay Lady Lay” is a moment of sexual delight, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is the morning after. The thrill is brief, and now it’s time to blow this border town. The band settles on something unexpected here – they slow down. Coming down from their “Lay Lady Lay” high, they take their time and devote over six minutes to this number alone. Author and Dylan devotee Paul Prescott drew up a to-die-for infographic for Dylan obsessives:

 

Every Tour ’74 performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in ascending order of duration and notes on modifications.

 

Needless to say, If Prescott sees Dr. Annie, she’ll tell him “thanks a lot.” The January 15 tour stop is only the second time the group plays “Tom Thumb” in full and the only time they’d be this measured in tempo. After a barreling 94 bpm at The Spectrum in Philly on January 7 (another disc of unusually good sound quality), this is an interesting development. What’s notable is that every review I’ve read about this tour notes that the group speeds up from show to show, and slowing  this number down to one of the most plodding of its kind to close out the first third of the tour is rather remarkable. It’s as if the wish fulfillment of “Lay Lady Lay” gives them permission to relax. Robertson’s opening lick could be mistaken for rock-reggae, and when Bob sings “howling at the moon,” Robbie howls back on lead guitar without missing a beat. However, this number ultimately belongs to our boys on the keys. In my mind’s eye, I can see Hudson’s spider fingers moving between consoles while Manuel complements his trills and ditties with his signature shoulder shimmy. Behind the colorful organ and piano stands, as always, the tight but funky support of Helm and Danko, driving this carefully timed number home. Dreams realized in the previous song give the musicians a moment to linger in Juarez before high-tailing it home.

Even as Tour ’74 in the mind of most fans serves as a weigh station between more memorable milestones of these artists’ careers, these roots-rock royalty are making sure we know who they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Their updated, straight-ahead interpretation of “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” clues us into the musicians’ interior lives. Finding a sound reminiscent of “Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever),” a highlight of Rock of Ages-era Band sets, helps this number go down easy. “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” never get old, as we get an ever-energetic Danko at his vocal best – thin, shouty, and unrestrained—in each chorus. To boot, there are few joys more profound than hearing Richard Manuel on drums, and we get that on “Ballad of Hollis Brown” – a real treat for any fan who adores The Band at their funkiest, which is more often than not The Band at their best.

We must bear in mind, however, that these men were playing a minimum of one show (28 songs) per day, most days over the course of six weeks, so anyone looking for career-defining solos from Danko, Manuel, and Helm are bound to be disappointed. After two years of almost no live gigs, Tour ’74 demanded a lot of the group’s co-lead vocalists – a reality (sadly) spotlighted in Before the Flood. However, for the typically unassuming members of The Band, notoriously bashful about their celebrity, it’s easy to mistake the necessity of slowing down with bowing out and giving up. If we take anything from The 1974 Live Recordings, it should be that The Band did neither. Gold notes in the April 1974 edition of Let It Rock that their 

 

lack of new material might seem predictable after the anxiety of unanswered questions in Cahoots, but I don’t feel their performances can be dismissed as a copout or a lack of nerve. Just as their early work contraindicated widely held views about rock being the music of radical dissent and continual innovation, their last two albums have subverted the idea that rock depends on constant production of significant responses to the present … What The Band expressed … was a faith in rock as a living tradition that can be invoked as well as added to. (5)

 

This is one of the most astute observations I’ve seen about The Band in the mid-seventies, but I think we do everyone involved an injustice to say that what The Band did in 1974 wasn’t “significant.” It is significant because it’s a “response to the present” that demonstrates an attention to their personal needs as well as the public’s complicated expectations of Bob Dylan. We can’t say The Band sublimated themselves to Dylan on this tour. None of these six men saw himself as any more or less valuable than the others, and that’s why this experiment worked. But The Band did something much more remarkable. They had the courage to stand still.

And why would they want anything more? They had created something beautiful and enduring. Indeed, by 1970, The Band had successfully reenlivened music addressing fin de siècle America to lionize the working class (laborers of color included). Gold captures their singular charm, noting that The Band’s songs “went further than Dylan’s by going beyond metaphor and actually embodying the experiences they were about … Where Dylan used the form and language of country music to mark out some firm ground after the amoral fragmentation of the electric albums, The Band actually enshrined the people and places they’d traveled through” (5). They didn’t need to take it further; there was nowhere else to go. To say, then, that The Band were unremarkable after 1970 because they were deliberate about touring and measured in their output is to fundamentally misunderstand them; they had been like that since the beginning when they backed Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, then retreated to Big Pink. They never craved attention; they never chased acclaim – but they didn’t rest on their laurels, either. In 1974, The Band were, quite simply, exactly where they needed to be.

For what it’s worth, I’m not the only one who feels this way. In some glowing Tour ’74 commentary, American historian Nat Hentoff gives The Band their flowers, as they were by his estimation, “far more stimulating than [Dylan]” (Knockin’ 116). While it needn’t be a competition, and I don’t intend to make it one, every recognition of this still-rockin’ group who made timeless music with Dylan in a Woodstock basement counts for a lot. In fact, the best remark I’ve turned up while writing this review is from someone whose name I may never know, in a thread about The 1974 Live Recordings on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums:

 

Hearing these as just Dylan shows sharpens the focus. It’s funny, because it’s made me appreciate The Band much more for their instrumental ability. Most commentary on this thread has been about Dylan, how the setlist changed, how his vocal delivery developed. What I’m hearing are his call and response bits with Robbie, the timely Danko interjections, Manuel’s bluesy barrelhouse piano, Garth’s arsenal of sounds, and Levon’s backwoods Keith Moon fills.

 

For me, this is what heaven looks like – conversations in which we give The Band their due ad infinitum. This is exactly the reaction I had hoped to read from fans drawn to The Band through The 1974 Live Recording, fearless remarks that locate The Band, steady and enduring, in moments when we’re apt to lose them.

 

In loving memory of Eric Garth Hudson, maestro of mana, 1937–2025.

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Review of A Complete Unknown

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A Complete Unknown. Directed by James Mangold, Searchlight Pictures, 2024.

Reviewed by Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College Dublin

 

If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.[1]

Robbie Williams

 

A Complete Unknown is a deft piece of propaganda about Bob Dylan, with some vivid recreations of his songs by diligent craftspeople. It achieves its modest aims of approximating Dylan’s story and conveying it in a competent, accessible fashion, and does so in an entertaining and carefully calibrated way. Would one like something more insightful and creative? Absolutely.

The film traces Dylan’s career from his arrival in New York until the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, with a lot of elisions, contractions, and embellishments along the way. How one responds to these alterations depends on their tolerance for deviations from reality and whether these creative liberties succeed in capturing the story’s essence, revealing deep truths about the performer, or simply delivering an entertaining two-hour experience. On these levels, I feel it was a qualified success in two categories and a failure in one.

 

Entertainment Value

On the level of pure entertainment, the film worked for me – and apparently for the large-ish crowd in attendance on the opening weekend in my local cinema. The laugh lines landed, such as Dylan’s crack about Baez’s songwriting (I won’t spoil it here). I remember feeling momentarily excited to walk in Dylan’s shoes, to see a recreation of that corner of New York at that particular time. The coffee shops and supper clubs, the look of the streets – these were fun and interesting sojourns into historical ethnography. While I can’t vouch for their accuracy, the verisimilitude was impressive. The film’s depiction of the hospital where Woody Guthrie stayed – desolate and purgatorial – stood out, and given how faithfully other elements were recreated, I suspect it was accurate. It’s fun to watch the actors navigate their real-life counterparts’ affectations. Timothée Chalamet is never less than watchable and credible. Certain scenes are poignant; not least of all, those with Scoot McNairy’s Guthrie, where we’re exposed not only to the tragedy of Huntington’s disease but also feel for an  prodigious talent cruelly rendered inert, confined to being a spectator venerated by participants. And the film is moving in other ways. Edward Norton gives the most affecting performance. Seeger’s reaction to his dreams becoming a reality, but not because of him, is sad and sympathetic. The most haunting shot of the film for me was Seeger clearing away chairs after Newport. Whether it’s real or not, it captures the divide between stars and ordinary people who are famous. The menial tasks he voluntarily performs contrast strikingly with Dylan’s actions, who, in this film, is above everyday altruism.

 

Fidelity to Dylan’s Story

The film’s attempts to capture Dylan’s story – or at least one version of it – within a fairly narrow time frame,  just about works. While it dramatizes some public events proficiently, it struggles to move beyond that, or even intimate that it wants to. This is the hardest pill to swallow: it’s a kind of fantasy. It’s not miles away from Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), albeit it’s not working within the documentary format, and is slyer in its various duplicities because it so accurately and obsessively works to get the accoutrements right.

The film’s fastidiousness in recreating the world its characters inhabit is implicated in the unease I feel about its fictionality. On one hand, the dedication to getting the physics of the film right—the microphones, the jeans, the settings – is admirable. The other side of me distrusts and questions all the meticulousness because the film has overcompensated in this area for deficiencies elsewhere. It obsessively recreates up to a point, such as with the physical space the characters occupy, but is on much less sure footing in recreating other aspects of the characters’ lives and how they interact with one another. The fact is, I don’t believe much of it, whether or not any of us can ever truly know whether certain events happened the way the film suggests (what were Dylan and Suze Rotolo like as a couple behind closed doors? Or for that matter, Baez, beyond what both women shared publicly?). Certain other instances are openly, verifiably counterfactual – the break-up scene with “Sylvie” (Elle Fanning) at Newport, and the argument with Baez (Monica Barbaro) on stage. All these scrupulous recreations of costumes, locations, and props are sleights of hand, aimed at distracting from some (very) fanciful digressions from reality. At its worst (for instance, the breakup at the ferry), it’s hokum: easy, basic, unsubtle, and designed to telegraph narrative developments in the most transparent, unequivocal, unambiguous, and heavy-handed fashion possible.

This unfortunately drags the film into territory well-trodden by other biopics, not just musical ones. Obsessive recreations of physical spaces are used to serve cliched soap opera tropes – shopworn scenes of strife between romantic couples seem to take priority over everything else. These scenes are not only of questionable validity, but often fail to capture complexity even within that narrow focus. Dylan’s personal life, despite the extensive screentime devoted to it, is not depicted with the nuance it actually possessed. This is partly due to Sara’s absence (a shared trait with Rolling Thunder Revue and No Direction Home), likely omitted for privacy reasons or due to divorce settlement terms. Regardless, even this aspect of his life is oversimplified, streamlined into melodrama that obscures the richer, more dramatic reality. Often doubling down on the simplifications, many of the scenes, as written, manage to flatline on account of sheer heavy-handedness. Trusting nothing to chance, the filmmakers serve up blunt dialogue with a large dollop of symbolism (they just had to include the fence in the breakup scene, didn’t they?). It doesn’t matter that such overstatement is cliché enough to be mocked in music biopic parodies (“the ‘60s are an important and exciting time!”).[2] The filmmakers still seem to believe it’s more compelling than the other facets of Dylan’s life that influenced his music. Yet there are no shortage of fascinating influences on Dylan’s development. Blink and you’ll miss Van Ronk. Izzy Young is nowhere to be found (though a stand-in for the Folklore Center appears), nor is Victor Maymudes; Eve and Mac McKenzie are similarly absent … the list goes on. The point isn’t to fact-check the film, but to illustrate that omitting so much weave from the Village tapestry has a way of distorting how Dylan became who he was over the time period covered by the film. The Village in A Complete Unknown is depicted as something to transcend – almost like an adversary, a Devouring Mother. However, that’s an overly simplistic view and undermines the audience’s understanding of the Village music scene and the path to artistic and professional ascension at the time. Never mind how Dylan himself eventually saw it – Rolling Thunder literature poignantly reveals how much Dylan tried to recreate that very Village in the mid-70s. As a result, too many gradations are missing – both regarding the protagonists and the broader Village ecosystem. Even though the film doggedly tries to convey as rich a sense of place as possible, it’s done to shore up rather corny prevarications and a significantly simplified account of events.

Another byproduct of this anal retentiveness is the intimation of hard graft behind the scenes – the sense of studious dedication and reverence, but not joy. The film has done its homework, in the worst sense of the term. Boxes ticked, chores done, t’s crossed, i’s dotted – we feel the labour behind the film, the years of effort, all of which have been hammered into us by the PR. Dylan’s music is joyous, in the moment, and delightfully cavalier at times (who cares if a musician made a mistake or Dylan fluffed a lyric?). That sensibility is not to be found here – just veneration, the same nagging fanboyishness that suffocates many comic book films and resurrections of older IPs. It feels like toil – arduous, painstaking even – all of which comes at the expense of spark.

The problem here is that real life as mediated to us in other media told us something more interesting and nuanced. A telling comparison is Dont Look Back (1967), which portrays Baez’s marginalisation in a subtle, drawn-out manner rather than through a crude onstage confrontation. That documentary shows her sad exit through a hotel door, all but unnoticed except by Pennebaker’s camera. In contrast, A Complete Unknown presents an assertive Joan Baez rejecting Dylan – another fabrication. Films, of course, must condense and dramatize events, but here, it lapses into the flaws of other biopics; it makes up conflicts and distorts the behaviour of real-life individuals in the process, leaving us, ironically, with less effective drama.

And the film does lack real drama in the form of suspense. There’s never a sense of tension that Dylan is being pulled in two directions – no feeling that history might go awry. It feels rote. It presents what happened as if it was inevitable. There’s no flicker of doubt, no pull of the metaverse, nothing that would call into question whether things always had to happen the way they did. In other words, it doesn’t make us feel present in the moment when the future was uncertain. We never forget what happens, and never suspend our knowledge of how the story ends. Compare this with No Direction Home (2005), which, with great skill, managed to introduce a frisson of uncertainty – it’s exciting, in a way this film isn’t. In the scene with Seeger’s teaspoon analogy, did Dylan ever look remotely like he would back out of going electric at Newport? There is conflict in the sense that the two characters have contrasting beliefs, but little inner conflict among either party (although Seeger’s character does evolve more than that of Dylan’s), which has a way of flattening them out as people, but also diluting the suspense we might feel by witnessing 3D individuals having to think about their choices and figure things out in the present. (One recalls several expert scenes in Tarantino’s films, where characters pause to really think about their circumstances and choices.) Uncertainty – the lack of detours, the fact that Guthrie liked his singing more than his writing, that Dylan mocked Cash initially, his trajectory as a songwriter for Leeds and then Witmark – it’s not here; just Dylan’s manifest destiny to be the person James Mangold and Jay Cocks (and, it has to be said, Bob Dylan), portray him as being.

Relatedly, I’m not sure the story-as-told is as strong as Mangold et al. thought. The events are dramatic, but the Dylan of the film (not the real-life Dylan) isn’t an especially easy figure to identify or side with, and as a result, the conflict is robbed of some of its urgency. It’s not always 100 per cent clear what Dylan wants or why, beyond a contrarian desire not to be what others want him to be. It’s a touch negative, as if there was nothing positive to his actions. He seems to not especially enjoy music or its performance. Chalamet’s Dylan is grumpier than what real life suggested, like a mix of the front covers of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) and Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The likes of the Halloween concert Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 6) aren’t to be found. The protagonist is a sort of amalgamation of Dylans: a summation of Dylan, assembled from multiple eras, and perhaps a vague cultural memory of how he was at the time. It’s not easy to know what Dylan’s thinking, which is par for the course, but Chalamet’s Dylan is obtuse at times, gnomic and uncommunicative in a way that seems off versus Dont Look Back, which is near this film chronologically. Again though, we’re reminded that we’re witnessing a fantasy. The deep well of empathy that it’s possible to feel for Dylan never quite emerges, and the film’s various conflicts suffer as a result from a lack of a strong point of identification.

The inconsistent fidelity to the real people again conspires to rob the film of dramatic heft. It’s normal and inevitable that critics have critiqued the various participants’ portrayals: Suze/Sylvie, Baez, Grossman, Cash … it hardly matters in some way; they’re reasonable simulacrums, low res and streamlined, like much else in the film. (Grossman, especially, has lost his real-life capacity to illicit discomfort.) Within these confines, however, the actors work hard. Chalamet mimics Dylan well – or at least some instantiations of him: the way he lowers his head and glowers out from underneath his eyebrows when he sings, the way he seems to put his sunglasses on with both hands … it’s a not-insignificant achievement that he’s not inadvertently silly (cf. Ben Whishaw and Christian Bale in 2007’s I’m Not There). I’m not sure I ever fully embraced him, however. It’s an impossible task in some ways, as with all major public figures one knows reasonably well from documentaries and interviews. One always watches and judges how well the impression aligns with their memory of the person. The more familiar we are with the real person’s body language, the harder it is to sink into the performance and see a character rather than an impression. In that way, it might have been helpful to have known Dylan less – the performance itself might have distracted less (Dylan neophytes obviously won’t be bothered by this). However, the first time we hear Chalamet sing in the film with “Song to Woody,” he certainly convinced me that he had done his homework.

 

The Question of Truth

How much should one care about the film’s correspondence to reality? There seems to be an Overton window: complete distortions will be rejected, but some make-believe is tolerated if it serves an “emotional truth.” But does A Complete Unknown get at something deeper about Dylan?

Emotional or spiritual truth is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Praising the film for being emotionally true often just means that it aligns with the viewer’s pre-formed impression of Dylan, or at least doesn’t move the needle too much. By this metric, the filmmakers succeeded – they printed the legend. But much is lost in the process. If the film is “spiritually true,” it has sacrificed an awful lot to get there.

Regardless of one’s tolerance for falsehoods, the key question is whether those falsehoods were worth it. For all the cutting and pasting, I don’t think the filmmakers access the spiritual or emotional truth they are striving for. I don’t think, for instance, that there’s a sequence here as good as the “I Want You” sequence in Haynes’s I’m Not There. Unlike that exciting montage, A Complete Unknown doesn’t seem to be able to tap into the thrill of striking out on one’s own, of the cocktail of sex, poetry, motorbikes, and young love, although all are present, duller and flatter, in A Complete Unknown.

The film does, in places, pull one into a vicarious sense of Dylan’s achievement. I did feel a spark of schadenfreude when Dylan performed “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport – a giddiness at giving philistines that most thrilling middle finger in music history (albeit transplanted from Manchester), but that feeling was somewhat tempered by the fact that the film’s Newport audience members are simple and somewhat shallow antagonists (or enough of them are anyway – Mangold does show some happy converts). In the aftermath of the film’s festival, they dance to his music like it’s “Louie Louie.” It’s edifying to see people won over by the power of his electric material, as it is to see small-mindedness and holier-than-thou attitudes attacked, but when those attitudes belong to a cartoonish, generalised audience, one feels the spiritual truth is too disconnected from the actual truth. The Judas moment is here, for instance, conflating and blurring two very different crowds in the whole electric saga. In Tulsa’s Dylan archive, the vox pops featuring the audiences reacting to the ‘66 gigs are remarkable for how articulate, varied, and revealing their responses are. It’s easy to remember the freaks and obsessives (“he’s making a pile out of it!”),[3] but there were (are?) a lot of normies out there with rational, understandable reasons for demurring at various facets of Dylan’s evolution. You wouldn’t know that from A Complete Unknown. They are Pavlov’s dogs, vulgar as they come (“it’s Bob fucking Dylan!”). It’s all part and parcel with how the film sets up the conflict between Dylan-as-rebel and the gatekeepers of folk music, as well as narrow-minded acolytes and fans. Again, the simplifications of events and contracted timeline comprise the film’s emotional and spiritual truth.

 

Creative Choices

Part of me is disappointed that this is where Dylan and film has gone. We get a conventional Hollywood narrative, working within a restricted bandwidth, with unobtrusive editing, dialogue, and a loose Oedipal trajectory that aims to work primarily on the emotions. Still, my issue isn’t so much the choice of the classic Hollywood cinema paradigm for the telling of the story; it’s more so that the film seems to lack much creative vision for the subject matter, and ultimately doesn’t have all that much interesting to say about it or persuade the audience of beyond what’s been established in multiple other media about Dylan: that he didn’t like to be fenced in artistically, was something of a lyrical savant, and was not always an especially pleasant or considerate person, especially if he found you trite, prying, or square.

Compare Todd Haynes’ thesis. This is no judgement on the quality of either film – just an observation that one takes a firmer stance than the other. In I’m Not There, the trajectory of a number of the Dylans – one thematic thread that unifies them – is the idea that Dylan fears, for want of a better term, the idea of being found out: specifically, the idea that he be exposed as somehow ordinary, or that his story – specifically, his control over his own story – be somehow taken away from him by either being known too well publicly, by getting too close to others, or by being sniffed out by nosy busybodies looking to dig up dirt on him or otherwise uncover and embarrass him. This affects the Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude (Cate Blanchett), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Billy (Richard Gere) versions of the character (Woody is a runaway from a juvenile corrections center, Jude is a middle-class suburbanite, Robbie is boorish beneath the movie star veneer, and Billy is a wanted man). How disconcerting would it be to have one’s self-delusion or self-presentation suddenly punctured, especially when the carefully crafted persona is so compelling? Haynes doesn’t go much further than this riff on the theme of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but it’s a provocative perspective on Dylan that he might actually be hurt, wounded, or embarrassed by being revealed as banal or false, or might consider himself less-than without all the invention and role-playing – i.e., that he would respond as a human being would to being seen as an imposter. Compare how a similar idea plays out in A Complete Unknown. Baez calls Dylan out on his pretence, but he’s utterly unmoved, despite being put on the spot. One might invoke Renaldo and Clara (1978) as a rejoinder, where Baez teases Dylan and he’s visibly on the defensive. It’s a human moment for both of them, but that’s not what A Complete Unknown wants; it wants an inscrutable hero – dickish, but utterly sure of himself and without anything underneath. There’s no fear of being found out or exposed; he seeks to be a sort of freak because plain people don’t hold an audience’s attention. Once again, I’m Not There provides more fallibility. Look at Robbie on the motorbike – more accurate, and more vulnerable. Look now at the pro speeding around the Village in A Complete Unknown.

It’s the kind of film that I imagine satisfies the conservative, profit-oriented, Oscar-hungry impulse in the filmmakers’ hearts: something like Walk the Line (2005) or Elvis (2022), a film that shows up at 9pm on terrestrial TV after a few months that most of the family can watch. It’s a job I’m Not There didn’t attempt, and it’s filling a hole in Dylan’s filmography, that of the conventional biopic aimed at mass consumption and designed to present a palatable, sanded-down version of the artist in question and a commensurate simplification of his role in history, with enough romances and bust-ups to keep sceptical or distracted viewers engaged. Its wheelhouse is an easily digestible cinematographic vernacular, designed to go unnoticed, with no hint of warring forces or transformative impulses within the film itself.

 

Conclusion

Speaking of that recent Robbie Williams biopic, I return to his quotation used as this review’s epigraph: “If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.” For better or worse, A Complete Unknown ultimately achieved what it aspired to be: a reminder. Underlying Williams’s comment, more importantly, is that need for content, which A Complete Unknown, I’m afraid, feels like to me at times. That it introduced young people to Dylan’s music and drove up his Spotify streams[4] is a positive outcome for anyone who believes his work is valuable and that it should be as widely known as possible. I appreciate why people might praise the film for doing these things, but I wish the film could stand better on its own rather than as a means to an end. A viral TikTok video or strategically placed song in the likes of Stranger Things (2016–) might have achieved something similar. What we got was, again, propaganda, because it’s a form of promotion in the service of an ideology: Dylan-as-enigma, Dylan-as-genius, Dylan-as-lightning rod, Dylan-as-sexy-revolutionary, packaged as part of a simple worldview depicting the individual artist battling against narrower minds and the inequities of a censorial, backwards looking folk world. If it was art, it wouldn’t be so deferential, so eager to please, so in thrall to its central figure. It’s compliant, which is probably the greatest stain on its artistic aspirations. That being said, it’s clear the film worked for some fans and enticed some new ones into the fold. If it succeeds as a gateway drug for the real Dylan, that says something about the film’s quality and its ability to effectively translate and dramatize a world, a series of conflicts, and a group of personalities in a way that resonates with present-day audiences. If it’s somewhat dumbed down and disingenuous, it’s no different than most musical biopics, and perhaps everyone’s sin is no one’s sin. Watch it if you haven’t. I’m going to see it a second time.

 

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob, dir. Eat the Document. 1972.

Dylan, Bob, dir. Renaldo and Clara. Circuit Films, 1978.

Dylan, Bob. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia – 512351 2, 2003, compact disc. Originally released in 1965.

Dylan, Bob. The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall. Columbia – 88697732912, 2010, 2 compact discs. Originally released in 2004.

Dylan, Bob. The Times They Are A-Changin’. Columbia – COL 519892 2, 2005, compact disc. Originally released in 1964.

Gracey, Michael, dir. Better Man. Hollywood: Paramount, 2024.

Haynes, Todd, dir. I’m Not There. 2007; Hollywood: Paramount, 2008. DVD.

Kasdan, Jake, dir. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. New York: Sony, 2007. DVD.

Luhrmann, Baz, dir. Elvis. 2022; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 2022. Blu-ray Disc,1080p HD.

Mangold, James, dir. A Complete Unknown. Los Angeles: Searchlight, 2024.

Mangold, James, dir. Walk the Line. 2005; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2006. DVD.

Pennebaker, D. A., dir. Dont Look Back. 1967; New York: Criterion, 2016. Blu-ray Disc, 1080p HD.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 2 discs. Hollywood: Paramount, 2005. DVD.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix. 2019.

Steiner, Robert. ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’. Variety, 28 January 2025. https://variety.com/vip/bob-dylan-biopic-streaming-increase-1236287468/.

The Duffer Brothers, creators. Stranger Things. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2016–.

The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics.” Aired 31 December 2024, on BBC. Video clip. https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.

 

[1] The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics,” aired 31 December 2024, on BBC, video clip, https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.

[2] As spoken in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), here: https://youtu.be/ukq-Zc7nGw8?si=Gtxo-Tmj9Gkztxh6.

[3] From Eat the Document (1972), https://youtu.be/MGylr0S-yZ0?si=YYNNMLR6WEG-cwEv&t=1851.

[4] Steiner, ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’.

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Review of Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan

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Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: Interpretation as Transformation

REVIEW BY Nora Bonner

 

Inside the auditorium at the Chevalier Theater in Medford, Massachusetts, a crowd anticipates Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Houselights loop across a gray ceiling and make the place feel like a temple. As these lights dim, a ring of industrial lights rises faintly on stage behind an empty microphone in the center of two musicians – an acoustic guitar player on the left and harmonica player on the right – who will accompany Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall for the acoustic portion. This is our first clue that the show we’ll hear tonight is not an exact replica of the 1966 concert, as Dylan accompanied himself solo for this portion of his show. The lights change and Marshall clacks across the stage in the highest of heels. A long tie hangs over the corset beneath her pant suit, all in black, including her plastered down pixie cut. She looks amazing, but also very nervous.

 

Regardless, her look invites us to consider these Dylan reinterpretations alongside concepts of gender. The Royal Albert Hall Concert, which we recognize from volume four of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, includes “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman,” songs that will inevitably transform in context and meaning once paired with Marshall’s fierce and smooth female voice. She has a reputation as a “gifted interpreter of songs,” to borrow a phrase from Laura Tenschert, host of the Definitely Dylan podcast. As she welcomes Marshall on a November 2023 episode, Tenschert cites the singer’s version of “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” as an example of impressive reinterpretation, which fans of both Dylan and Marshall might recognize from the I’m Not There soundtrack. Before the interview, Tenschert also reminds us that the concert at Royal Albert Hall exists as a key myth in Dylan’s career, the one where a disgruntled fan shouts “Judas!” at Dylan for going electric. The Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan tour, based on the 1966 Royal Albert Hall recording, is therefore an interpretation of this transformation myth.

 

As a myth, Dylan’s concert condenses his prolific output from 1965-1966 into one night, two years which also mark his transformation from folk kid to rock god. But when it comes to putting together a mythology, for Dylan or for anyone else, facts hardly matter. That way, we can excuse the fact that the aforementioned “Judas!” incident actually occurred in Manchester, not London. Clinton Heylin’s 2016 Judas! offers a thorough account of that night and the events leading up to it, including the infamous Newport show when Dylan had already struck his FolkFest fanbase with an electric bolt the previous year. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dylan’s 1966 tour is his decision to continue playing acoustic sets. Another musician might let the transformation happen behind the scenes and let the fans figure it out. They’d bust up a folk appearance, release Bringing It All Back Home, and go full electric for the tour. Dylan, on the contrary, performed this transformation night after night in front of a live audience.

 

The mythological performance at Royal Albert Hall, later released in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, is legendary because it represents the product of what had been refined during the two years Dylan yielded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. What had been refined is the transformation itself, demonstrated by the show’s two sets: solo acoustic, then full band electric. It’s the same myth Pennebaker retold in his Dont Look Back documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour: a myth that shows the process of transformation, how not just Dylan, but perhaps American music itself evolved into rock ‘n’ roll. The UK tour might be understood then as the next chapter in an Alan Lomax study – how Bob Dylan brought Woody Guthrie’s and Lead Belly’s porch blues ballads to Greenwich Village, where he turned them into rock ‘n’ roll hits. It’s a myth Dylan – whether intentionally or by accident – presented for British audiences, as if to give them a musicology lesson on where the Beatles’ music came from.

 

So why Cat Power?


Tenschert attempts to answer this question when she points out that Marshall’s career, like Dylan’s, “has also been a constant evolution of moods and styles” (2:58), as evidenced in the singer’s prolific output of eleven studio albums since 1994, the year she first opened for Liz Fair and signed with Matador Records that same night. Her earliest records Dear Sir (1995) and Myra Lee (1996), fuse punk’s fast power chords with blues progressions. What Would the Community Think (1996) opens with electric arpeggios accented by a tinkling glockenspiel as she sings, “In this hole we have fixed we get further and further from the world,” before she launches into a much grungier track, “Good Clean Fun.” Ten years later, she released what might be her most well-known song, “The Greatest,” which is the title track on an album with a hot pink cover and glitzy gold letters. That song features a prominent jazz piano and syncopated drum riffs over haunting strings.

 

Marshall’s repertoire also includes three cover albums, which include a masterfully stripped down version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Her cover of John Philip Baptiste’s 1959 hit, “Sea of Love,” ended up on the soundtrack to the 2007 film, Juno. Her latest album is a live recording of the “Royal Albert Hall Concert,” which she, unlike Dylan’s misnamed release, actually performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Tenschert reports that, after attending this performance in November 2023, Marshall’s “voice breathed her own spirit into the songs while effortlessly capturing the essence of Dylan’s 1966 concert.” After listening to Cat Power’s live recording of this same concert, it’s hard to disagree. Her smoky voice swirls around Dylan’s lyrics, offering a dynamic lens forged from life experiences through which we can understand these songs in new ways. At 52, Marshall has weathered nearly three more decades of experience – personal and professional – than Dylan had when he originally performed the show at 24. These differences count toward layers of interpretation to draw from when covering Dylan’s music.

 

Marshall’s not one to change the gender in any of the lyrics, something that might have been more noticeable twenty years ago, but this simple decision unlocks a corridor of new meanings. Her version of the set’s opening, “She Belongs to Me,” comes across like a mantra or pep talk instead of a (male) singer celebrating his lover. And yet, perhaps Marshall’s first noticeable detour from the songs’ original context is that she’s not playing any instruments. She’s just singing, which makes her appear vulnerable in front of a microphone, without the safety of a guitar for a breastplate and harmonica headgear for a helmet. We can’t help fixating on what she’s doing with her hands, and for this part of the concert, she directs most of her gestures to the sound engineer to fix the levels.

 

Fans may recognize the set’s next song by its original context, as a friendly jab to John Lennon, who named Dylan as an inspiration for “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan’s “Fourth Time Around” echoes some of Lennon’s tune and subject matter. On the 1966 live record, Dylan delivers it as though he’s anxious to get through the number and, frankly, the whole first half of the show. The result is a slightly rushed, accusatory diatribe, at times taunting. Tonight, Marshall slows this taunt to a bless your-heart, condescendingly Southern pace as she concludes, “I never asked for your crutch, now don’t ask for mine.”

 

Perhaps what elevates Marshall’s performance over others’ attempts at Dylan covers is that she is not afraid to speak some lines. Reminiscent of Dylan’s spoken phrases, these feel a tad more deliberate than the ones she sings. Her acoustic set versions are generally much slower and more contemplative. And while she navigates the sound-balance adjustments that interrupt “Visions of Johanna,” these too feel deliberate. She wails silkily through these “visions” in what comes off as a plea to rid herself from the distractions, which at this point could be the sound problems as much as the lyrics’ memories of a woman she’s trying to forget.

 

If the show started with sound-level problems, we’ve forgotten them by the time Marshall gets to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Her aching wails flood the room as she croons, “the sky too is folding under you,” from what could be the perspective of a parent ousting a child, or from this same mother forging boundaries to protect from the toxic person she’s addressing when she sings, “strike another match, go start anew.” Marshall’s ability to evoke these perspectives widens the songs’ range of interpretations, each sung with different versions of intensity.

 

Throughout the first set, Marshall’s best moments occur when she pulls back, beckoning us to lean closer if we want to experience her level of intimacy. For instance, in her interview with Tenschert, Marshall describes harrowing scenes of growing up in the rough parts of Atlanta. In a 2006 interview for New York Magazine, Marshall divulges dropping out of high school during her senior year. These experiences give her the authority to pull off a version of “Desolation Row” that rejects what’s “intellectual,” like debates about T.S. Eliot against Ezra Pound, for the desolate experiences one must suffer to understand the origins of rock music. Her steady and direct delivery of the song’s many verses invites us to abandon the academy’s brightly lit halls and follow her to the lowdown alleyways where we’ll find the authentic sounds at the music’s roots. At the song’s conclusion, Marshall rejects this litany of allusions when she sings: “Right now I can’t read too good / Don’t send me no more letters no / Not unless you mail them / from Desolation Row.” If you want to be in her crowd, you’re going to have to prove you’ve been through it, too.

 

Having gotten through the song with no sound interruptions, Marshall’s fierce voice approaches the rest of the set with a newfound confidence, beginning with “Just Like a Woman.” Hers is a salty retort as she lingers tauntingly on notes to accentuate the first verse’s rhymes: “Everybody knows baby’s got new clothes, but lately I’ve seen her ribbons and her bows,” before concluding the phrase with a spoken, “have fallen from her curls.”

 

She concludes the acoustic set with a convincing performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Marshall names as one of her favorites to cover, if not the most difficult. She describes the song to Variety magazine’s Jem Aswad as “a sort of fuzzy memory of childhood, where you were free in your imagination. But it also is the hardest song and most emotional song for me to sing because it is a testament to having faith in a fucked-up world.” Tonight’s version comes off like a hazy lullaby begging for another hit, of drugs or artistic inspiration.

 

The transition between sets happens with little fanfare, as the additional musicians take to the instruments already onstage, in the shadows behind the first set’s trio of Marshall, her guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, and Aaron Embry, her harmonica player. The lights brighten and, as if responding to the previous song’s demands, the full band injects the audience with “Tell Me Momma,” the concert’s first electric number.

 

If Dylan’s real-time transition delivered us from folk music’s intimacy to rock ‘n’ roll’s sound large enough to fill arenas, Marshall’s version transports us from an intimate jazz lounge in New York to what now feels like a full-blown crowded New Orleans jamboree. Compared to Dylan, who stays more or less at one high energetic frequency throughout his second set preserved on Bootleg Series Volume 4, Marshall plays around more with levels, drawing in a bit during some of the numbers, including “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “One Too Many Mornings.” Dylan’s 1966 London fans would have recognized the latter as a song which draws heavily on traditional British balladeering, now repurposed for demonstrating the power of rock ‘n’ roll, while Marshall’s tamer version offers a reprieve before she breaks into what may be her best song of the night: “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Marshall’s cover is so atmospherically transporting, we might start to think that Dylan wrote the song especially for her.

 

Nearing the end of the show, she pulls off “Ballad of a Thin Man” in another standout performance, taking full advantage of her wide ranging register, especially when she slides from note to note singing, “How does it feel to be such a freak?” She’s having a good time, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hear the cover’s potential as the opening on a soundtrack to another gritty HBO series. By the time she sashays into her “Like a Rolling Stone” finale, most of the audience is on their feet, some dancing in the aisles – a phenomenon that prompts Marshall to acknowledge her niece is one of these dancers and she “doesn’t get out much.” If the performance started in what felt like a sacred jazz temple, it’s ending with a dance party in somebody’s backyard revival tent.

 

In bringing us Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall sets, Marshall retells the story of a musician who accepts his responsibility to morph alongside his talent, trying new things, always on his own terms. In fact, the company that produced Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back is named after Janus, the Roman god of transformation. The documentary presents Dylan’s transformation via his performances, perhaps even more so by way of the backstage conversations he doesn’t want to have about his decision to transform the music. The most famous of these might be a scene that takes place near the end of the film, when Dylan skewers a journalist from Time about his magazine’s readership. Although for many this conversation signifies Dylan at his pettiest – evidence of his immaturity – we might also acknowledge the conversation as his breaking point, frustrated with the public’s resistance to his transformation.

 

Either way, Dylan offers a memorable critique of establishment journalism when he says, “They have no ideas in Time magazine, there’s just these facts.” For our interpretation of tonight’s Cat Power concert, Dylan is clearly more interested in “ideas,” which we might name as the residue of careful storytelling, because it is from ideas, not simple facts, that one extracts a “truth.” Put another way, truths are more than simple facts; they are ideas left behind not just by “what happens,” but “how” and, more importantly, “why.” These are the “ideas” Dylan’s criticizing the journalist for leaving out in his writing. By choosing to call her tour after the misnamed concert venue, Marshall invites us to pay attention to more creative choices, raising such questions about the songs as “versions.” How will she choose to sing these songs? Which truths will her versions highlight? The answer to all these questions is simple: hers.

 

These are her versions made up of her choices for pacing, how she sings a line, and which words she’ll choose to emphasize. Each choice reminds us that song cover is in itself an act of transformation. The overall effect is a concert that leaves us with the sense that there are far more meanings to uncover in these songs and that each of these meanings is unique to the experiences and talents of the performer. In this sense, she invites us to transform and be transformed, one Dylan cover at a time.

 

Works Cited

Aswad, Jem. “Cat Power Talks Her ‘Sings Bob Dylan’ Album, Her History With His Music, and

Meeting the Man Himself.” Variety Magazine. 21 Feb 2024.

Heylin, Clinton. Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall: A Historical Overview of the

Big Boo. Route, 31 Oct 2016.

Pennebaker, D. A., Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Donovan. Dont Look Back Director-approved

two-DVD special edition., The Criterion Collection, 2015.

Power, Cat. Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Domino

Recordings, 4 Nov 2024.

Tenschert, Laura. “She’s an Artist, She Don’t Look Back”: A Conversation With Cat Power.

Definitely Dylan Podcast. http://www.definitelydylan.com. 11 Nov 2023.

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On the Road Again: Bob Dylan plays the Outlaw Music Festival

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On the Road Again: Bob Dylan plays the Outlaw Music Festival

REVIEW BY Bob Russell

 

On July 2nd, 2024, Bob Dylan performed at Mansfield, Massachusetts’ Xfinity Center, still referred to by its original name Great Woods by many who attended concerts there in the 1980s and 1990s. It is one of the big-barn amphitheaters popular for major national summer tours in the United States. The event was Willie Nelson’s 2024 Outlaw Music Festival, a traveling package tour crossing much of the country over the summer, with Nelson as the planned headliner, though illness prevented his appearance at several dates, including Mansfield. Despite Dylan’s frequent touring in the last few decades, fans have eagerly awaited this Outlaw tour as an opportunity to see another new twist in his travels on the road.

 

From November 2021 to April 2024, Bob Dylan performed approximately 200 concerts on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, named after the stunning 2020 album. The shows involved performing first eight, then nine, of the ten album tracks, omitting only the epic “Murder Most Foul.” Fans always hoped for this last track, which was somewhat impractical in a live setting due to its almost seventeen-minute length and spare accompaniment. The concert setlists remained relatively static during the tour, but Dylan’s performances were intense and focused, showing off the new album tracks with just a small selection of other songs, not at all a greatest hits kind of event.

 

Despite the newness of the material and the audacity of presenting such a limited set of songs, critics and fans received the tour extremely well, generally viewing it as a career- capping triumph. As the tour progressed, several surprise songs popped up as occasional setlist additions, notably respectful and faithful renditions of Grateful Dead classics such as “Truckin’” and “Stella Blue,” no doubt baffling some more Dylan-centric listeners. As magnificent as the Rough and Rowdy music could be at its best, the alarming prospect loomed that the majority of Dylan’s classic oeuvre would never be heard again (an inevitability at some point, but not one easily accepted).

 

Rampant speculation followed the announcement of the Outlaw Music Festival in early 2024. Was the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour over? Would the sets be short, as often experienced at European festivals? Who would be in the band?

 

The Outlaw Music Festival has a changing list of performers. In Mansfield, the lineup was (in order of performance) Celisse, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson’s band (without the ailing Willie). Celisse (Henderson) is a dynamic vocalist and guitarist performing as part of a three-person power trio, heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix. She won over the early-arriving crowd with her personality and flair, along with an emotional moment when she confessed that she was in a dream come true. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss played a stunning long set, heavy on moody rock (with some Led Zeppelin hits), and short on the bluegrass that made Alison’s reputation. The once-unthinkable pairing worked magnificently, backed by a stellar band, including guitar whiz J. D. McPherson and bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan. It is a very successful match. (I feel bad though for some of my fellow traditional bluegrass fans who may have bought tickets based on the name Alison Krauss, only to be horrified by a style of music which would have Father of Bluegrass Bill Monroe spinning in his grave. However, the open-minded fans would have been delighted.) Following Bob Dylan’s set, Willie’s son Lukas led the Nelson band through a set of Willie’s classics. Lukas has the guitar chops and the voice of his father, making him a fine substitute for Willie.

 

Bob Dylan took the Mansfield stage shortly after the sun went down. With a light-colored shirt unzipped halfway down, he looked jauntily comfortable and ready for the summer heat.

 

A few things stood out throughout the show. First, after shaking up the setlist from the Rough and Rowdy Ways norm, after the first two nights of the tour Dylan had firmly established the lineup of songs. Possibly the “Cold, Cold Heart” or “Long and Wasted Years” from the first night would eventually return (or even the “Sweet Home Chicago” rumored to have been sound-checked one night), but for the present, perhaps the unchanging setlist was returning.

 

Second, the band has changed for the Outlaw tour. Drummer Jerry Pentecost was replaced by the veteran Jim Keltner, whose history playing with Dylan is long and distinguished. Keltner is a solid, safe choice for timekeeper, though Pentecost (and Charley Drayton before him) had done sterling work on the previous Rough and Rowdy tour. More significantly, long-time multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron is no longer in the group, after being in the band since 2005 on pedal steel, mandolin, and violin. Just as Bucky Baxter had in the 1990s, Herron added variety and color to the band’s sound and dynamics. Though sometimes not fully noticed, Donnie Herron’s contributions were significant in Dylan’s live sound for almost twenty years. The lack of it in the new band is noticeable.

 

Third, the Outlaw Music Tour has visited venues far different from the intimate theaters so favored by Dylan for the previous four years. Willie’s Outlaw troupe attracts an audience much broader and wider than Dylan’s usual following. In Mansfield, I was surrounded by devotees of Led Zeppelin, hardcore bluegrass aficionados, and longtime Willie/traditional country fans among the 20,000 or so other attendees. Given Willie’s age (91 at the time of Mansfield) and instability, some would have seen this as perhaps their final opportunity to see him in concert. The upshot is that listeners during Dylan’s performance were not all following closely and reacting breathlessly to every slight lyric change or vocal inflection. The Outlaw crowd was not a typical Dylan crowd. It would be more difficult to wow them or even to keep them interested for seventy minutes. Does Bob realize this? Does he care? Does he alter his approach for this audience?

 

It raises a question in the mind of an astute concert reviewer: Is the quality of a show determined solely by the activity on the stage? How should audience reaction be factored into the evaluation, if at all? The perhaps sad reality is that a fair percentage of the fans in attendance at the Outlaw tour were totally uninterested in hearing Dylan’s set and proceeded to talk inanely throughout, during both soft and loud passages. This in turn greatly annoyed the engaged fans and negatively impacted the quality of their experience. The more rabid Dylan fans were left a-longing for the comfort and intimacy of an Orpheum or Beacon Theatre.

 

Beginning in 1978, my own Dylan tour history spans more than 170 shows. What multitudes I have seen and listened to in that time! That first 1978 show in St. Louis (its “Mr. Tambourine Man” discussed in Paul Williams’ Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: 1974-1986 The Middle Years) was the “big band” alimony tour, with all new arrangements and the largest band Dylan would ever tour with. My experience that night was drastically different from any that I would experience in the coming years. After three years of intense exposure to Bob Dylan albums, in 1978, I was finally seeing the legend in person.

 

Over the coming years and many dozen more shows, there were ups, downs, and in-betweens. Among them were wonderful shows with surprise setlists in the 90s; some fairly pedestrian shows with rough, uninspired vocals around 2005; and sometimes, the truly magical. Among these: Patti Smith joining Bob for the first ever duet on “Dark Eyes” in Boston in 1995; the one and only live appearance of “10,000 Men” in Kingston, Rhode Island in 2001; on the third night of a 1994 Boston run (the first concert of many for my then 9-year-old son), an unexpected final encore of “Two Soldiers”; Jorma Kaukonen, Warren Haynes, and Phil Lesh all joining in on a 1999 encore. There were events close to home, others seen while driving across big sections of the United States, and a few in Europe. There were nights I was all alone, nights I shared with an international set of fans and friends, and many nights with a very close friend, a man that I shared dozens of tours with and who added to the wonder and enjoyment of my journey.

 

Did I gain any real insight from these concerts? The main thing I take away from these years of following the tours is to take each night as it comes and to be open to the possibilities. There is enjoyment and delight to be taken from the nights where Dylan is at the peak of his performance art, but also from those times where all is not perfect; where there are sound issues, where the singer is not happy with the band, where lyrical mistakes are made. This is because we are seeing live art being made, with all the potential for triumph or disaster. It is like watching any live event, whether a play, sports event, or ballet. We see human beings displaying their art and we are amazed by the potential and the reality of the attempt. I never take that idea lightly.

 

On the Rough and Rowdy tour, Bob Dylan opened each night with the ironic line, “What’s the matter with me? I don’t have much to say,” then proceeded to say multitudes in the following hour and a half. On the Outlaw Tour, on July 2, 2024 in Mansfield, Massachusetts, Dylan begins with “Highway 61 Revisited.” Interestingly enough, Dylan omitted the line “kill me a son” this night, whether intentionally or not. This song has been somewhat problematic in recent times. The loud, fast, noisy rendition we hear, while potentially exciting, is a challenge for Bob’s voice. With the “Sinatra” albums and tours, Bob found a volume and pace where his voice was comfortable, and the results were stunning. Perhaps the vocal cords themselves had healed somehow after years of rough going, but the material was perfect for these late-career concerts. The trend continued with Rough and Rowdy Ways. The album did not go into the troublesome vocal territory, rather lent itself to beautiful songs such as “Mother of Muses” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You.” In Mansfield, Dylan’s vocal delivery was solid, though a few words skipped or slurred. Musically, the guitars of Bob Britt and Doug Lancio rocked out in a way little experienced in recent tours.

 

In Mansfield, the initial sound quality, as often happens, was not totally set. Dylan was clearly unhappy through the second half of the first song, and had comments at the end for ever-faithful bassist Tony Garnier. The instrumental audio was fine, guitar-based fast rock, but the vocal was a bit low on the starter. Also, the large crowd did not have the enthusiasm this song richly deserves, a bad sign with several slow ballads to follow.

 

“Shooting Star” was in the second spot, a good changeup after the initial rocker. The beautiful intense ballad from Oh Mercy was a success, in terms of arrangement and delivery. The poignant verses and dramatic bridge were greatly enhanced by Dylan’s now excellent piano playing. Gone are the days of roller rink organ or tinny piano. Bob’s baby grand piano is now the lead instrument much of the time, and shines in that role. He clearly has been woodshedding (maybe at the Crossroads). Dylan also employed harmonica here for the initial time of the night, with three more to follow. Only one frustration here. This is clearly an instance where Donnie Herron’s absence is a great loss. The steel guitar in a 2013 rendition, for example, added a sweet counterpoint to the piano and other guitars. For a Willie Nelson-centric audience, perhaps unfamiliar with Oh Mercy, the reception was tepid, especially in the middle to high reaches of the arena.

 

“Love Sick” followed. This take on the Time Out of Mind track was, on the face of it, well executed. From my location the vocal lacked sufficient volume. Further, the chattering audience, bane of modern concert going, seemed bored by the slow (yet dramatic) pace.

 

A cover next, “Little Queenie.” Here we go. What a song for a festival audience! “Little Queenie” is, of course, a joyous Chuck Berry original, notably done by the Rolling Stones in 1969 for the Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out! live album, and here conjuring the (virtual) memories we have of a teenage Dylan bopping out Little Richard songs. Dylan was enjoying this one. The music featured Bob Britt on the trademark Chuck Berry intro riff, and the band rocked to the essential rock ’n’ roll driving rhythm that Berry invented. One could imagine Dylan and the Cruzados rocking this on the glorious 1984 Letterman episode. The Willie Nelson crowd loved this rocker, and so did I. For those who have not seen a Dylan tour in 10-15 years, Bob’s voice and piano playing must be a revelation. Bob on keyboards now makes sense, and his voice can show the power and emotion that have moved so many in the past.

 

The show then moved into a slow section, temporarily losing much of the audience. “Mr. Blue,” a DeWayne Blackwell song notably covered by the Fleetwoods, was unfamiliar to the audience, and the volume of talk increased. The song rendition itself was exquisite, recalling the best of the “Sinatra” cover era. “Early Roman Kings” as a lyric is quite fascinating, especially with the proper background on the text. As a stalwart of pre-Rough and Rowdy times, it had become a drag on the setlist (I know, some will disagree), and it was no better here. “Can’t Wait” was enjoyable and recalled the late 1990s when the Time Out of Mind album was featured and displayed the power and depth of that career revival.

 

“Under the Red Sky” came next, its lilting melody and nursery rhyme lyrics working together to revive some of the enervated audience. That song has been unjustly knocked for its simplicity, but shone here, and would make a welcome mainstay of future sets. Treasures like this from Dylan’s songbook are a joy to hear again. “Things Have Changed” also brought back memories, in this case from a long stretch when this was a powerful concert opener. It retains that power and Dylan’s current piano prowess and vocal approach just enhance it. If I had one specific request for Bob’s touring structure, it would be to turn up the sound (as he would for Neil Young!). The vocals and the musical chops of this crack band need to be heard. See the Plant/Krauss band for how to create volume and dynamics to unleash the full potential of an excellent performance.

 

Two more covers followed, both played with intensity and passion. “Stella Blue,” a Grateful Dead ballad now familiar to those hearing recent concert recordings, was a faithful rendition of a song that Dylan’s friend Jerry Garcia once did so impressively. It was a moving moment, but again one largely lost on this audience (except for a lone fan in the lower seats, who seemed to be having a moment of religious ecstasy; security staff spoke with him mid-song). Again, we have the dichotomy: a strong performance unrecognized by more than half the audience, at least in my area. Dylan and his band performed “Six Days On the Road,” the Dave Dudley country classic, with gusto. Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitars and Dylan on piano gave a rollicking run through, though Bob fussed a bit and had instructions for bass player Tony Garnier early. One could imagine a stunning cover collection of tracks like this one and “Little Queenie,” showing the rock ‘n’ roll chops of this band.

 

“Soon After Midnight,” from the album Tempest, has one of Dylan’s loveliest melodies, which Dylan delivered flawlessly before a trio of classics from the 60s and 70s stirred the crowd. “Ballad of a Thin Man” was strong and accusatory as it was the mid-60s, “Simple Twist of Fate” featured Willie Nelson’s harmonica master Mickey Raphael, and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” kept the Rough and Rowdy tour arrangement: slow intro verses, rocking middle section, and dramatic, strutting ending. With no encore, the changeover to Willie’s stage began.

 

The audience had seen a fine show, though many did not know it. Dylan, per usual, made no concessions in terms of setlist, talking with the audience, introductions, or anything else. For those paying attention, the wonder and joy were there, and the prospect of future tours seemed very bright indeed, especially if they can play it loud.

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Review of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances

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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).

 

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