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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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REVIEW OF “An Evening with the Bob Dylan Center”

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“An Evening with the Bob Dylan Center,” Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY. 30 August 2023.

REVIEW BY Rebecca Slaman 

 

The question of Dylan’s legacy burns in the minds of many Dylan scholars. With the wealth of art he’s created in various media, the question is not if his work will be preserved but if anyone will care. Getting people interested in Dylan is one of the goals of the Bob Dylan Center. As a physical institution, it attracts not only Dylan fans on a pilgrimage, but people who might happen to be in the area looking for something to do.

 

Being in Tulsa limits this reach. Sensibly, the Center has done some touring of its own. In August, I attended “An Evening with the Bob Dylan Center,” part of the 2023 “Sounds of Summer” series at Jacob Burns Film Center. The event screened footage from the Archives, followed by a conversation with Steven Jenkins, Director of the Bob Dylan Center, and Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) Board President Janet Maslin. During the presentation, I recognized some of the footage from the BDC, such as a demonstration of film restoration. It was only after that I realized all of it was all the exact footage that is shown on a loop in the Center. Luckily, I got a lot more out of this experience than solely getting to see the footage. Looking at the crowd around me, I wondered how the event would be received by those who weren’t as fanatical. In a dark room with no distractions, it was a communal, immersive experience. For that hour, there was nothing to do except think about Bob Dylan. Though there’s nothing I would rather do, I believe the event won over even casual Dylan listeners.

 

The screening consisted of the following: rare footage from Dylan’s first film soundtrack, for 1961’s Autopsy on Operation Abolition; a performance of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” from the 1963 TV special Folk Songs and More Folk Songs; the full “Maggie’s Farm” from Newport ‘65; “Baby Let me Follow You Down” from the 1966 UK tour; “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” with Joan Baez from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue; “Blowin’ In the Wind” from the 1981 Shot of Love Tour, complete with gospel backing vocalists; “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” from 1986, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backing Dylan; “Ring Them Bells” at The Supper Club in 1993; “Train of Love” from a tribute to Johnny Cash in 1999; “Cold Irons Bound” from 2003’s Masked and Anonymous; “Once Upon a Time” at Tony Bennett’s birthday in 2016; and finally, a glimpse into the Bob Dylan Center Archive’s film restoration project with before-and-after footage of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from 1966.

 

Footage of Dylan’s performances, projected in a theater, is absolutely ethereal. Scholars have somewhat neglected the performance aspect of Bob Dylan’s art, which is understandable; capturing an artist’s presence in words is extraordinarily difficult. It also hasn’t been necessary. So far, scholarship has only existed in a time when a baseline knowledge of Dylan is a given, and seeing him live has been somewhat accessible. Recordings of his performances are even more so. Though only a select number of people can experience Dylan live, we’re lucky to have a wealth of performances on video. Because many people are currently working to preserve this art, the only thing left to do is get the public to care.

 

This is what the Bob Dylan Center is ostensibly trying to do in order to establish Dylan’s legacy and, in doing so, to justify the Center’s existence beyond his lifetime. People have to care enough about Dylan to visit the Center themselves. Once they do, the work is already done. Film screenings provide an excellent method for the Bob Dylan Center to introduce the artist to this new audience. Footage of Dylan is absolutely captivating. The camera loves him, just as live audiences do. The films are most impactful when Dylan is singing directly to a camera, rather than wide concert footage where he’s performing to the room. Like theater, concert performance is ephemeral and locked in time. It takes quality cinematography to capture the energy of those moments.

 

The selection of clips made for a holistic view of Dylan’s career. I found myself concentrating on how Dylan’s energy translated to the screen at each phase. Save for the first clip about Dylan’s film soundtrack contribution, there was no commentary or guide. There were only cards in between clips letting us know what was next, which worked perfectly; each clip spoke for itself and allowed us to draw our own conclusions. There were times Dylan pulled back from the spotlight, such as when accompanied by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Other footage is completely arresting, such as the performance of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” from the 1963 TV special Folk Songs and More Folk Songs. The image is so tight on Dylan, and the sound of his early, raw voice is immediate and clear. The film’s style had Dylan making direct eye contact with the camera. It is staggering how well the footage preserves the performance Dylan gave sixty years ago. It’s like a beam of energy being projected through time.

 

Dylan’s early screen presence was raw and impressive, especially for such a young performer. Following Newport ‘65, Dylan’s fatigue is palpable. Audiences’ negative response to Dylan outside of concerts is not seen, but Dylan wears its effect in performance. Even before the boos, that early fan base would have been a lot to deal with. I recognized my own emotional reaction to him, which was overwhelming. I could see that force, even a loving one, being scary to Dylan. In the footage of the UK ‘66 tour, as soon as he finishes singing at the microphone, he steps back to face the band. His eyes stay averted from the crowd. Though we see him through the camera, his energy is not directed outward. He remains in his head, not gracing us with his full power. Not that I blame him.

 

The onscreen presence follows in this way after Rolling Thunder. The manic energy of the 1976 footage would wake the dead. But as he retreats from the spotlight, the distance between the audience and the performer grows wider. As someone who was not alive in the 80s, I found this footage valuable in teaching me why some concertgoers were disappointed at this point in his career. The clips show Dylan surrounding himself with more and more people. Was it to create a specific sound in concert or to draw attention away from himself? Either way, Dylan’s desire to be in a band comes through clearly.

 

In the 90s, the venues became more intimate, eventually arriving at that zoomed-in camera for “Cold Irons Bound.” When Dylan reclaims the spotlight, he is freer and more comfortable. His leg seemed to have a mind of its own at the Johnny Cash Tribute; the JBFC audience laughed as it danced around the mic stand.

 

What I appreciated the most was how the arrangement of clips exhibited different Bobs over time, and how the audience saw the same smile and stance through the eras. Through grainy, washed out video, and monochrome, he’s been performing. As culture and technology changed, he’s changed too. But he’s still Bob.

 

Thinking back to the footage in Tulsa, I remember being equally affected. But as I was there for the World of Bob Dylan conference, and had limited time (stay open through the conference next time, BDC!), I didn’t stay for the whole hour loop. Many of the clips are widely available on YouTube, such as that “Cold Irons Bound” scene from Masked and Anonymous. It made me think the clips were all things I’d seen before. In advertising this event, the Center promised to showcase “previously unseen footage,” which I took at their word. I was ready to move mountains to see it. And though I had already seen it, the theatrical experience allowed me to watch without distractions.

 

Despite being sold out for weeks ahead of time, there were plenty of empty seats. As a cinema house manager by day, I have an inkling about how these things go. Erudite high rollers who have endless money to throw around will buy tickets and not care enough to show up. During seating, the audience was pretty subdued. In situations like this one, it blows my mind that so many regular people are interested in Dylan. Let me rephrase: It’s hard for me to understand anyone having a casual interest in Dylan, such that you’ll go to an event like this without being a total fanatic. A more provocative thought I had was whether the Pleasantville boomers’ politics actually align with Dylan’s early songs. I had to wonder what brought them in. A nostalgia trip? The desire to connect with the past? I suppose Dylan can be interesting to people who aren’t as into his music as they are a time he represents. 

 

In the discussion afterward, a disconnect arose between the speakers’ tones. Janet Maslin spoke freely and personally, while Steven Jenkins gave very brief, PR-approved answers. Maslin mentioned being at the Rolling Thunder tour and feeling a personal connection to the footage. Jenkins spoke in quotes from press releases. The most memorable and surprising part of the discussion involved legacy. After a safe series of questions about the Center, Maslin brought up the inevitable: Dylan’s death. She phrased it as “the day Dylan appears on page one of The New York Times.” She asked Jenkins if they had a protocol for when that happens. The question made me squirm. It’s unpleasant to talk about, but even more so, I correctly predicted that he was not going to divulge that kind of information. It seemed like asking the Secret Service what the assassination protocol is. Like, you know there’s an answer, but you have to know that you will never know as a civilian. The response he gave actually gagged me a bit. He said that he expects that the Center will be a place to accept any wayward mourners who want to be “close” to Bob.

 

Personally, it won’t be top of my mind to go to Tulsa when that happens. I’d more likely go to Greenwich Village, and to suggest otherwise sounded to me like twisted, wishful thinking on the Center’s part. Clearly, the brand hopes to be associated as Bob’s keeper. If I were answering the question, I would give a more personal statement rather than hawk for the Center. The passive distance Jenkins had with the crowd struck me as very businesslike and antithetical to the personal nature of Dylan fandom.

 

I think the Bob Dylan Center is doing a great job of sharing Dylan’s art with people who might not know him, but I doubt they’ll win over all die-hard fans. The exclusivity of the Archives creates a sense of gatekeeping, and the way they marketed this event wasn’t entirely transparent to us.

 

Following the discussion, there was a reception with food and alcohol. Standing around chatting, I was reminded of how few Dylan fans are online. This is probably what skews my idea of a “casual” Dylan fan; only the crazy ones like me have several social media accounts dedicated to him. During the introduction, Janet Maslin gave a shoutout to HarryHew (that’s Dylan Review contributor Harrison Hewitt for those not on Twitter/X), and I whooped in recognition, representing this contingent.

 

At the end of the evening, there was a surprising amount of schmoozing. While I was reeling from the experience, there wasn’t much discussion about the event. I first saw this kind of thing at the Dylan Retrospectrum in Florida, as the event was put on by rich art people. I felt similarly out of place here, with several people I’d never met before vampirically clinging to me and eventually shoving me at a disinterested Steven Jenkins. Frankly, it was weird. I’d much rather be fanning out with my online friends than rubbing elbows and gossiping about people I don’t know, and how many degrees they are from Dylan’s estate.

 

While being in the physical space of the theater made for a wonderful experience, the baggage that comes with events like this makes me long for a more diverse crowd to share it with. The trek I made to Pleasantville and the lengths I went to get tickets are not accessible to all. I’d love for the Bob Dylan Center to organize events in New York City in the future. If they won’t, they’ll go their way and I’ll go mine.

/by
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REVIEW OF Rough and Rowdy Ways, The Autumn Tour

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Report from the Rough and Rowdy Road: The Autumn Tour

BY Anne Margaret Daniel, New School 

 

I like life on the road. It’s a lot easier than civilian life . . .
You kind of feel like you’re in a motorcycle gang.
—Leonard Cohen

 

Starting my autumn 2023 Rough and Rowdy Ways tour diary for the Dylan Review thinking about Canada’s own laureate, I hummed “Famous Blue Raincoat” to myself as I flew to Toronto on a sunny day. Whether due to global warming or the last lingering fingers of summer, it was glorious in mid-October on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. The Thursday of the first show was downright Aegean, and as I roamed the town and got some new freckles, I hoped Dylan and the band had a little time to do so, too. Everything felt relaxed and, as the man now sings, doggone beautiful, until I got out of a car next to Massey Hall, right next to the phalanx of sleek brown and tan buses parked there. Then the carnival feeling kicked in.

 

The Songs

Why does Dylan start these shows with “Watching the River Flow,” many critics have wondered. Well, it’s when Dylan started rocking again, in 1971, down on Greene Street in Soho with Leon Russell at the helm. There are a lot of good memories in that song. And he seems to get a kick out of starting every show by asking “Whassa matter with me?” “Watching The River Flow” gets you ready for what he’s done with the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs, still new and already getting Dylan’s protean treatment in performance. His lyrical changes are significant, here. He doesn’t sit contentedly, and he has a true love who likes older men. He sees somebody who doesn’t really care – and, later, someone who’s too sad to cry. No one wants to stop and read a book any more.

 

In most of the shows I saw, Dylan plays a long instrumental intro, the cascading keyboards setting the tone for an evening showcasing his piano playing. It’s long been baffling to me that Dylan doesn’t get much credit for his keyboards. People howl with rapturous anticipation every time he even looks at a guitar, but don’t have enough to say about the ripply, jazzy, riff-laden, barrelhouse-rolling, harpsichord-sharp, and brand-new arrangements he’s been playing every night on this tour. In the descending progressions, particularly, Dylan sounds as if he’s channeling J.S. Bach by way of Dave Brubeck. From classical through Romantic to jazz and blues, he loves keyboards a lot, and that love is really showing right now. 

 

The second song in the setlist, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I Go Mine)” is an even more golden oldie. Don’t expect to hear what you hear on Blonde On Blonde. What he does to the title line is notable: he holds the “you go your way” extra-long, and then, after a significant pause, adds, “and I go mine.” The song’s become a swirling, fast-paced, portentoussounding statement, with Dylan’s constant study of, and perfection in, phrasing at the fore. The long instrumental after “you know you could be wrong,” dueling gentle guitars, makes you listen more closely to the words coming up, and they’re not entirely what you anticipate, the song’s next lines ending “you know that’s not where you belong.” Gone is the pleading, resigned “I just can’t do what I done before / I just can’t beg you anymore.” Instead, Dylan skips to “Sometimes it gets so hard to care / It can’t be this way everywhere” – and sings it twice. J.P. Pentecost’s drums hold the pace with Dylan’s piano, which absolutely shines here, particularly in a sassy glissando punctuating the line “You say my kisses are not like his.”

 

Now Dylan starts the songs from his latest album with the one most touted as autobiographical – though one could speculate that about many, many Dylan songs, if one wanted to. “I Contain Multitudes” is long, slow, and quiet, the words coming in a stream of consciousness, or, rather, self-consciousness, self-awareness. Dylan referred to it as “trance writing” in his first interview after the record was released, with Douglas Brinkley for the New York Times. The touring arrangement offers Dylan’s voice to be heard quite clearly. I don’t know if he fights blood feuds, but Dylan does fuss with his hair, and always has, in concert: it’s a happy moment, when he sings that line even as he runs his fingers through his curls, and flicks the hair at the back of his collar, between songs. Though these are new songs, words are already changed. Ballinalee is gone, replaced by the less interesting “just as close as can be.” On the “fo’ large knives” and “get up off mah knee” Dylan sounds awfully Southern, and it suits him. The jingle-jangle piano at the end is a beautiful closure.

 

“False Prophet” bats cleanup, with its unmistakable bluesy march-step beginning (as joepass first noted on Expecting Rain in early May 2020, taken from Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s 1954 “If Loving Is Believing”) and guitars in a brotherly wrangle. Sometimes Dylan jumps in early on the words, and sometimes hangs back before beginning a verse, keeping you on your toes. That insistent “I ain’t no false prophet,” coupled with what, rather than ain’t, the singer is – the enemy of treason, strife, the unlived meaningless life; first among equals and second to none – make for a brash celebration of a performance, with Dylan often rising to his feet and standing at the piano for this one. “Whattaya lookin’ at? There’s nothin’ to see,” he challenges us, as we all stare at him. The piano and instrumental after this verse, and the “You don’t know me, darlin’” verse, are brief but searing, always garnering a cheer. When Dylan sings the lines “I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest” and “Hello stranger – hello and goodbye,” he grins at us as if he means it.

 

“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is one of the most popular songs in the set, and has been popular since 1971, when Levon Helm sang it and The Band debuted it on Cahoots. After performing it live regularly, Dylan gave this song a rest in the early 2000s, but it’s come back now with a happy permanence. In 2020, Dylan told Douglas Brinkley that the song had grown on him, and these days he’s palpably having fun with the new words and new arrangement. Call it a masterpiece? Only the artist gets to call it that; and only the artist can make those changes to The Original. The meta character of the song appeals to its maker; as Dylan said of it, “I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable.”

 

A duo of the darkest Rough and Rowdy Ways songs are up next: “Black Rider” and “My Own Version of You.” The audience shushes for “Black Rider,” a quiet and ominous song akin to the menacing ones on Tempest (2012), particularly “Pay In Blood” and “Scarlet Town.” It starts out cautionary and becomes harsher: the calm warning of “Let all [of] your earthly thoughts be a prayer” gives way to “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” It sounds like he’s singing to every politician who should have stopped running years ago: “you been on the job too long.” In “My Own Version of You,” who’s the me, who’s the you? The light, sprightly one-two-three-four arrangement jars against the grim words, like the way Warren Zevon’s background singers with their ooo-ahhs do in the lyrically horrifying “Excitable Boy.” Dylan lingers over “you know exactly what I mean,” enjoying making us complicit. Some of the directives, often with slight lyrical changes, seem to make himself the “you”: “I’m gonna make ya’ play the piano like Leon Russell, like Liberace, St. John the Apostle.” “I’ll see you, baby, on Judgment Day.” “I can see the history of the whole human race / It’s right there – graven on your face.” Remember, Frankenstein is the doctor, and not the “Monster,” in Mary Shelley’s original book – but today the word has become applicable to both.

 

“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (1967) and “To Be Alone With You” (1969) bracket “Crossing the Rubicon” in a strange mix of ancient and modern. The older songs are nothing like their former selves; not like an iconic face trammeled by botox, though, but happily and snappily rejuvenated, sly, knowing, and fun. The first is no longer the sassy but goofy carpe diem petition of Dylan’s younger and more vulnerable years. He’s coming for you and you can’t say no – as if you’d even think of saying no. “Shut the light / Shut ‘em tight / Tonight’s gonna last all night / I’ll be, be your baby tonight.” The slow piano and vocal start burns away into a boom boom-chicka-chicka-boom danceable romp of instrumentals, including Bob’s boogie-woogie piano pounding away. The “mockingbird” verse he repeats, and then surges into a stripteasy ba-dum ending. Similarly, “To Be Alone With You” is very little like its mellow Nashville Skyline iteration. Now it has a more visceral zing: “I know you’re alive / And I am too / My one desire / Is to be alone with you.” There’s a neoclassical fixation on the place, more than the person: to be alone with you under a star-spangled sky, in a castle high or an ivory tower. No more being in the night time with the one you love; the l word is gone, and we’ll just “hold each other tight.” If you don’t want to do that, tough.

 

I wish the night was here

Make me scream and shout

I’d fall into your arms

I’d let it allllll (yelps of approval here) hang out

I’ll hound you to death

That’s just what I’ll do

I won’t sleep a wink

Till I’m alone with you

 

The “moving from place to place / Stepping out into the dark night” feels like a touring musician talking. And yes indeed, Dylan’s eyes are still blue, bright clear piercing blue, harebell bluebell blue, with the darkest irises suffering no fools. This one’s a crowd pleaser.

 

Though “Crossing the Rubicon” is a new song, and the last from Rough and Rowdy Ways to be performed live (apart from “Murder Most Foul,” still undebuted), Dylan has already changed its words. “I got up early so I could release the Goddess of the Dawn,” he sang at the Beacon, making its start quite different. In the setlist placement, Eos has said yes to kicking off her shoes and bringing that bottle over here, and is now slipping off to get those rosy fingers busy in the skies after Bob being her baby tonight. This spooky Caesar-esque march toward Rome is a showstopper, obliging you to listen to every word. The verses are punctuated by a dazzling, sliding piano.

 

It can be hard to hear the words of the all-American epic “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” since fans choose to shout out their undying love for Dylan during this contemplative song in which his voice is the principal instrument. Alas, the boondocks and flatlands are gone, and the sands are now silver instead of shifting, but the pirate radio station out of Luxembourg and Budapest – I always plug in Radio Caroline – remains, its signal strong. Dylan’s vamping on “Feel the sunlight on your skin” and “the healing virtues of the wind” is lovely. There are lines he sings straight at us, eyes intent on the audience, watching: “I’d like to help ya’ but I can’t”; “Some people say, I oughta try a little tenderness”; and “I don’t love nobody – gimme a kiss.” The instrumental sigh on “paradise divine” and “horizon line” heralds the fivefold amen in the last notes of the conclusion. 

 

“Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” are the hardest songs to hear in the formal seated venues on this tour, since you want to leave your seat and leap around. The heavyweight champion and socialite with her pearls are no more, in the slow first verse of “Gotta Serve Somebody”: “You might be in Las Vegas, havin’ lots of fun / You might be in the bushes, holdin’ a smokin’ gun.” When the guitars and drums bite into the song, it takes off, and the audiences in most places stood and romped, even while trying to hear the new verses (chiefly lyrics written for the song’s version in Dylan’s Mondo Scripto show at London’s Halcyon Gallery in 2018):

 

You may be in a honky tonk, in a nursin’ home,

Searchin’ through the rubble with a fine toothed comb

They may call ya Peter, they may call ya Paul,

Might even have a name, they call ya’ nothin’ at all

Maybe you’re a mystic and they call you Mister Soul

You might be on the wagon, you might be on a roll,

Or you may be on the highway, headin’ for the coast

Or maybe you’re hallucinating, and ya’ think you’ve seen a ghost

 

The piano takes over in this one when Dylan isn’t singing, filling in for the space left by his vocals the way he used to let a harmonica do.

 

No accident that “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is next. Dylan’s up there on stage serving us all, every night, in a conscious decision. This setlist goes like the chapters in a book. Fans and critics alike have always yearned for, and read much into, Dylan’s allegedly autobiographical songs over the decades, and this one fills many needs. The rhyme of “San Antone / alone” always makes me smile; the line “I hope the gods go easy on me” always makes everyone sigh. 

 

The next spot is the flex spot. Dylan began some of his shows with a local artist or song. He also saved what was usually the fourteenth space for a cover. Many people grumble about Dylan’s setlists these days, since he performs the same songs, in the same order, over and over again. I remember the days when people grumbled that they never knew what he was going to play, and would get more irritated if he didn’t do “Like A Rolling Stone” that night. The wonderful thing about a consistent setlist, about hearing the same songs by the same musicians night after night, is that you get to enjoy the patterns and arrangements and lyrical changes, the shades of differences intentional and accidental. A nice thing about opera or classical music programs in repertory is the ability to see them more than once if you like; critics rave about emphases and nuance, and people often buy tickets for more than one show. You see Dylan smile at a sweet fall of notes, or when he’s amused himself with a line like “Key West is the gateway key / to innocence and purity.” You see him frown when something sounds wrong, a phrase is too fast or too slow: believe me, the next night, whatever it was, it’s fixed. So I like the repetitions, which run like variations on a theme to me. There’s no doubt, though, that an audience perks up after the last melting phrases of “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” trail away. What’s next? No one knows. Dylan and the band did a generous selection of covers this time around. In some venues, they performed only Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “That Old Black Magic.” But sometimes they also, or instead, did numbers from Grateful Dead songs by Robert Hunter like “Stella Blue,” “Brokedown Palace,” and “Truckin’” to Merle Haggard’s “Footlights,” John Mellencamp’s “Longest Days,” Chuck Berry’s “Nadine” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and, in Montreal, Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me To The End of Love.”

 

The 2023 setlist concluded with the prophetic “Mother of Muses,” the roof-raising “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” and the elegiac “Every Grain of Sand.” The mother of the nine muses is also the goddess of memory, herself the daughter of Mother Earth. When an artist commands Mnemosyne to sing for him, he’s got a lot of nerve. However, after a chronicling of human adventures and personal heroes, it sounds as if the singer is ready to settle down at last. Dylan might have chosen Clio, historian that he is. He might have asked for Erato. But why settle for one of the younger sisters when you could ask for Calliope, the elegant firstborn, muse of epic poetry and eloquent speech, of Homer, Virgil, and Dante? The coda of the final verses is stunning, from “I’ve outlived my life by far” to the petition “unleash your wrath / Things I can’t see – they’re blockin’ my path” to the most Dylanic of couplets:

 

Got a mind to ramble – got a mind to roam,

I’m travelin’ light and I’m slow comin’ home

 

Jimmy Reed of Dunleith, Mississippi and his wife Mary Lee collaborated on the song “Down In Virginia” back in 1958. Dylan pays rollicking tribute  to the old bluesman even as he’s bidding us adieu with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” a song that boasts and brags the best rhymes on Rough and Rowdy Ways. The down and dirty “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and good luck / I can’t play the record ‘cause my needle got stuck” and “I’ll break open your grapes I’ll suck out the juice / I need you like my head needs a noose” (this to the “transparent woman in a transparent dress”) always elicit yowls and happy catcalls. At the two concerts Dylan played in Virginia, the audience belted out the last line loudly along with him as he grinned.

 

“Every Grain of Sand” (1980) is the benediction with which Dylan closes every show. After an eight-year hiatus, he brought this spiritual song back into his setlists in 2021, and has retained it consistently since. The lyrical changes are few but key, like “the balance of the reality of man” becoming “the perfect finished plan.” “Sometimes I look, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me,” he sings, and glances toward the top of his piano, where a series of harmonicas lie. Would we get the harp on “Every Grain of Sand”? Not every time, but when we did, it dazzled. Dylan was saying good night and God bless, not in words, but still using his breath, mediated through metal and wood.

 

The Shows

“Well, these songs are not easy songs to play, but this band does a good job, don’t you think?”

—Dylan’s intro to his band introductions

 

Toronto

Thanks to whoever is choosing the towns and venues for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. The cities are all special and well worth visiting, and the concert halls are magnificent old Gilded Age and Art Deco palaces, or sleek new beauties, sharing one characteristic: superb acoustics. Lucky me, that Massey Hall was where my autumn leg began.

 

People arrived very early for the two Dylan shows in Toronto, delighted to have scored a hard-to-get ticket to a legendary concert hall; eager to walk by the buses next to the venue and take photos before having to surrender their phones to the Yondr staff; enjoying the bright warm weather. The excitement in the air was visible in smiles, audible in musings – “Do you think he’s going to do ‘Sundown’ or ‘Early Morning Rain’ for Gord?” – and olfactible in the smell of weed. I went to the box office for a paper ticket, and then looked down the streets for a place to eat. The happy signage for the Senator Restaurant, with the date 1929, appealed. Two men in their 30s sat at the bar next to me. They were attending the show in honor of one man’s father, a Dylan fan who had passed away last year. We shared stories and photographs, and raised a glass to the memory of our dads.

 

Massey Hall opened in 1894, a gift to Toronto from an agricultural equipment manufacturing family. Artists from Enrico Caruso to Dizzy Gillespie to Igor Stravinsky to a young Bob Dylan and local heroes the Band (who were booed during the electric portion of their set in 1965) have performed there; Gordon Lightfoot began his popular annual shows there – he played Massey Hall over 170 times – in 1967. Lightfoot died in May 2023, and before the show many of us made our way upstairs to the exhibition in the House of Gord in his honor: his first guitar, the copyright registration page for “If You Could Read My Mind.”

 

Both nights, I sat in the Roman-emperor seats: front row, center of the balcony. Elvis Costello and Diana Krall were just below and to the left, in the orchestra, for both shows. They were gracious to the many people coming up to them to shake hands, and everyone kept laughing as people wanted to take selfies with them, and then remembered they couldn’t. Phones and recording devices were banned, but as Beethoven stormed out of the sound system at 8:05 precisely – it’s like a ballplayer’s batting music as he walks to the plate, that beginning of the 9th Symphony, priming the pump for Bob and the band – plenty of Apple watches were being activated to record an hour and forty-so minute “Voice Memo.”

 

The band accompanying Dylan are his bassist of many decades, Tony Garnier; Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitars; Donnie Herron on lap steel, mandolin, and violin; and Jerry Pentecost on drums. Pentecost is new this year, and it is intriguing to think that perhaps he was hired because of how much Dylan likes saying “Pentecost” in his introductions – he drags out the religious word, with a lingering “cosssss” at the end, like a preacher. From the moment Pentecost begins to play, however, you know the reason he’s there is because he’s amazing. Like Levon Helm, he lays down a heartbeat that holds the songs together with a woven musical mesh. Garnier’s bass works hand in hand with the drums, these two low lines the vibrant, vital connectors of every song. Soaring above them are the twin guitars of Britt and Lancio, men who know each other’s styles intimately and whose instrumentals lie like wings on either side of Dylan’s piano playing. Herron is the Puck to Dylan’s Oberon, adding the grace notes and delicacy, skimming and flying around both Dylan’s keyboards and vocals in a way that never interrupts and only complements – and sometimes, as on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” compliments.

 

Dressed in dark suits, the men surround Dylan. The man’s in black himself, but with a difference – the sparkle of rhinestones on his cowboy clothes; a polka-dotted or striped or, in Roanoke, the most beautiful bright satiny green shirt – and a little white hat. When he wore the hat and when he took it off occasioned much comment, and a few memes. Almost no one noted when Britt or Lancio wore a hat, whether an Irish newsboy cloth cap or something more elaborate, or the fact that Garnier always wears a black hat with a brim. There’s something Beckettian about the hats on stage, something reminiscent of Lucky putting on his thinking cap so he can deliver his tremendous rush of words, and also the playful weirdness of Vladimir, Estragon, and Lucky all juggling hats. The formality of them is nice, too. When Dylan was a boy all men wore hats, for both work and play.

 

These are not easy songs to perform, individually, and spectacularly not when they’re all grouped together in just under two hours on a stage. And, needless to say, not when the man who composed them is your bandleader. The joker is wild, and he’s right there in front of you, turning around to look at you from the vantage point of his baby grand piano, usually – these days – with a genial approving smile. Beware the stinkeye, though.

 

At Massey Hall, Dylan was relaxed and happy both nights, smiling often. When they nailed a song, as in the case of “False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon,” or “Gotta Serve Somebody,” there were grins all around. The lighting was dark on stage, as usual, and in the house, it’s twilight, making it easy for Dylan to look over the top of the piano, and his songbook spread out there, and see all of us.

 

A delicious, gentle “Stella Blue” was the cover song on Thursday night, and even those who had hoped for “Evangeline” or “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” were content. Friday, Dylan went for “Brokedown Palace,” somehow wrenching as he sang the slow lyrics of a river bringing him home, of resting by the waterside where he can “listen to the river sing sweet songs / to rock my soul.” He seemed delighted by the clear anticipation, and reception, of “Every Grain of Sand,” so much so that on one night he reached for his harmonica evidently too late, let go of it, and just kept playing the piano instead. Both nights, he lingered over his curtain call, though moved quickly thereafter for his bus on Friday, heading straight to Montreal. How I wish I’d gone. My friend Sue and her daughter Chelsea did; my friend Harry did not. He and I might never get over missing “Dance Me To the End of Love” (though I’m comforted that by sheer luck and youthful ability to travel I heard Dylan sing “Hallelujah” in both Montreal and Los Angeles during the summer of 1988)

 

Schenectady

On the night before Halloween, we drove up the Hudson to Schenectady to meet friends for supper before the show. Judy was born and raised there, and suggested we go to Ferrari’s on Congress Street, an old style Italian family restaurant in a residential neighborhood. We left laden with unfinished eggplant parmigiana and ziti for the road, and drove the short distance to Proctors Theater. One of the first people I saw there was Sue, safely arrived from Canada, under the marquee.

 

Proctors was built by “the Dean of Vaudeville,” Frederick Freeman Proctor, in 1926. What a palace it was then, and still is now, despite years of neglect in the 1970s and significant renovation and expansion since. Shining gold décor, ornate plasterwork, red velvet seats roomy enough to relax into, a splendid enormous Wurlitzer organ – and, backstage, performers’ dressing rooms with big private baths. The exhibition cases out front cover everything from Proctor’s career to the building of the theater and past events. I think Dylan would laugh at the idea of performing where once a flea circus commanded the stage.

 

The crowd was happily unruly, with us Hudson Valley Deadheads hoping for some Hunter / Garcia amidst the Rough and Rowdy. There was much dancing and vocal singing along, no mere mouthing the lyrics; props to everyone who knew the new words already, it seemed. “False Prophet” was a bump-and-grind showstopper, with Dylan leaning fiercely into the keys and working them over like the boxer he sometimes is. He’s very physical and vital on this tour, literally putting his back into it, sometimes tickling the ivories and sometimes pounding the keyboard, right foot in its cowboy boot keeping constant time. The reverb on “Black Rider,” with Dylan’s echoed voice repeating the words, was suitably Halloweenish; and the slow parts of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” showed off the singer’s absolute clarity and Sinatran, or perhaps Carusovian, phrasing.

 

An hour and twenty minutes into the set, Dylan and the band noodles briefly, teasing us, and gave way to an unmistakable drumbeat from Pentecost. Everyone began to dance to “Truckin’.” When this song swirled into global consciousness in 1970, the Dead were the quintessential American traveling band, and Dylan was still based in Woodstock, a 29-year-old dad with five children, recording folk-flavored music close to home. He’s making up for it now. Though he certainly messed with the words a bit (no cats are speaking of true love, and they’re not crying; sweet Jane has lost her marbles and is living on vitamin D), what he emphasized was superb. Hearing Bob invoke the doodah man, draw out that “what a long strange trip it’s been,” and state “I’d like to get some sleep before I travel / But if you got a warrant, I know you’re comin’ in” was for the ages. We twirled and shimmied and, at the end, whooped and hollered. Dylan smiled like someone who, once upon a time, wanted to join the Dead himself, though I watched his face as the applause went on and on. Was “Truckin’” too popular? Were we too jubilant? Alas, this was the last time he pulled it out of the magic hat in 2023.

 

The next twenty minutes were as tight and together as I’ve ever heard a Dylan band, and “Every Grain of Sand,” even sans harmonica, was elegant and hymnal. Our group became Dylan fans in different decades and for very disparate reasons, but we were all deeply pleased with the show, and happy to see friends from New York like Craig, who’d ventured upriver just for the show, outside the theater at the end. Town was sound asleep – scarcely a thing was open near Proctor’s on a Monday night. We walked around the back toward our cars, parked up the hill in an empty lot, and had to wait for the buses to pull out and past us. We waved, and kisses may have been blown.

 

Waterbury

“Waterbury is a fine city. Big clock city, the famous Waterbury clock. Sold a nice bill there,” says Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The drive to Waterbury from home went over wide rivers and through thinly settled hills, until I fetched up in the shadow of the clock tower, all 245 feet of it. The Roman numerals on the dial of its Seth Thomas clock are five feet high. As I parked my car next to the theater, they said it was six p.m. on the nose.

 

The aptly named Palace Theatre is a Jazz-Age Renaissance beauty. Italian-born sculptor Sylvester Z. Poli, who started out as a maker of waxwork figures in the 1870s and ended up a major theater impresario, hired George M. Cohan to open what was then called Poli’s Palace in 1922. In 1924, a hole had to be cut in the stage to accommodate Harry Houdini’s magic act. Bing Crosby, Pearl Bailey, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller and his orchestra, Tony Bennett, and Frank Sinatra all preceded Dylan and his band here, too.

 

Pentecost stood out this evening, from the first long instrumental intro to “Watching The River Flow.” Bob took his time before coming onstage, settling into the piano, and then opening his mouth, and Pentecost’s dexterity was the glue holding the song in place. That continued all night. Dylan’s voice, though, was the standout instrument. Somehow it was stronger than it had been two weeks before, even with the intervening gigs. He seemed amused, too, and shared that vibe with us in unanticipated ways. For example, on “I Contain Multitudes,” he let his fingers shimmer up and down the keys in a sassy glissando after the line “all the pretty maids.” When he sang “under that old black magic called … looooooo-ah-ve,” he sighed the last word in something like resignation, and laughed. 

 

On Veterans’ Day, November 11, 1975, a group of buses had rolled up to the Palace and disgorged a motley crew of performers. Appearing without fanfare or advance publicity as The Rolling Thunder Revue, they played for almost three hours that evening. As I broke for the car on November 11, 2023 and headed straight for the highway, Dylan’s buses were just ahead in the traffic queue. Was he thinking of that night almost fifty years ago, and how different “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was then? So many masterpieces since – and to come.

 

Brooklyn, night two

Sincerest thanks to Craig Danuloff, a longtime concertgoing pal and, among many other things, the founder of Dylan.FM. I was teaching my New School class on the late afternoon of Wednesday, November 15, and planning to fight my way from West 4th Street to deepest Brooklyn just in time for the show. Instead, Craig kindly swept up to the corner of 7th Avenue and West 11th Street to collect me right after class, and we drove to Brooklyn in alternatingly fair and foul traffic in swift time. We parked a block from Flatbush Avenue and the theater. Jamaican food for supper, dozens of friends under the marquee. Kings Theatre is bright and beautiful and big, an old picture palace that’s been home to generations of Brooklyn high school graduations since the 1920s. We wended our way along a snaky security line outside, stopped for a specially branded Rough and Rowdy drink at the concession stand, and sat up front with Laura, who came from London for the shows.

 

Bob himself stalked onto the stage festively dressed in black and white, and bounced through the first two numbers before searing us with “False Prophet.” Similarly, in “My Own Version of You” he upped the scariness, and lingered over lines like “mix ‘em up in a tank, get a RO-bot commando.” We stood for most of the rest of the show after this one. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” was an edgy shake-rattle-and-roller, and Dylan graced us with a minute of harmonica at the end of “Every Grain of Sand.” The Manhattanites in the gang were an hour and a half, at least, from bed, and we scarpered after a few hugs and smiles, knowing we’d see everyone the next night at the Beacon. 

 

New York City

Broadway Bob. If there was one show that had to be seen, this was the one. The security line around the Beacon was awful, poorly managed and moving very slowly with all the bagging of phones. We were there for the end of “Watching the River Flow,” but were sad to miss the shard of “New York State of Mind.” I’d been hoping for a full-throttle “New York, New York,” to be honest, but that would have been such a moment it would have stopped the show, perhaps permanently, before it began.

 

Dylan has home-field advantage at the Beacon, as do many performers I love and have loved: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Government Mule, and most of all The Allman Brothers. Dylan has done some long and immensely well-received stands there over the years; we might even call them residencies, but he can’t be contained by that word since he’s not resident anywhere. He was completely at ease on a stage he knew well, standing for most of his songs and looking as if he was pushing back against the piano, so energetic was his playing. He also did a lot of roaming about – back toward Garnier, occasionally toward Britt, and into center stage, with that light catlike step of his, to rest a hand on his hip and survey the scene. Bernett, who can walk to the theater, was there. So were Marielle from England, Petra from Belgium, Sean from New Jersey, Kelly from California, friends from around the world. We had gotten dressed up. The audience shone with sequins, cowboy-stripe trousers, every tour t shirt from every Dylan decade, Rolling Thunder hats, even a few folks in black tie. As he gazed down on us and we smiled, clapped, and waved, roles had reversed. We were the show, filling the Colosseum, and he was the emperor, standing between the two great golden guards with their spears, giving us, thanks be, a cheery thumbs up of approval.

 

The show sounded good, almost too intense – a bit like listening to a sharp CD sound instead of vinyl. Perhaps this is the fault of the much touted Sphere Immersive Sound, in which, according to the Beacon website, “audio beams from the left, right and center speaker arrays reach every seat in the house[.]” Particular standouts were “False Prophet,” “Mother of Muses” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” The latter was sped up, as if Dylan was eager to get out into the city night. He flipped the “butcher’s hook” and “guitar behind my head” verses, but he played that piano like ringing a bell. “Well thank you. We like playin’ here,” he said at the end. An extra-long harmonica sally was Dylan’s last word. He jigged a bit from foot to foot at the curtain call, still in motion, a restless farewell. 

 

Newark, night one

As fitting as it is to have a backdrop of bare black walls and instrument cases for this tour, it’s also a pleasure when, instead of having things go dark and the band, then Dylan come out on stage, a big fancy curtain goes up to find everyone arrayed in place like men in a play. The Prudential Hall of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark is a glimmering newer space with splendid acoustics, and the nicest security staff on the whole tour. The restaurant in the venue, Nico, is excellent; plenty of us showed up early and in time for a lovely meal before the show.

 

No, Dylan and the band didn’t play “Thunder Road,” or a Sinatra cover, or “Oh What a Night” to open the evening. They started slowly, not by rote but certainly without flash, with beautiful piano playing on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I Go Mine).” The show rose to another level on “False Prophet,” though, and stayed there. Dylan and Herron had a sweet musical conversation during “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” and a more rollicking one on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” “Key West” was the best I’d heard it, Dylan talking and singing directly in great voice, the instruments in complete sync with what he wanted, and not even close to obliterating a single word.

 

After a drawn-out “home” at the end of “Mother of Muses,” Dylan thanked us, and then, in now familiar words, commended the band for doing an “excellent” job playing songs not easy to play. “Don’t you agree? I know you do.” After introducing the band, accompanying himself on the piano, Dylan announced, “It’s nice to be back in the great state of New Jersey, home of the Boss, Joe Pesci, we know he comes from here, Queen Latifah, Frankie Valli, and of course ol’ Blue Eyes, he’s from someplace around here, [somebody] out there would say I’m from around here too.” The audience loudly claimed him as an honorary Jersey boy.

 

Richmond

Oh, to be home again, down in old Virginny. I was born and raised in Richmond, and returned there for Thanksgiving. Bob and the band obligingly followed me down on the postholiday Monday.

 

The Shriners’ Mosque was built on Monroe Park in downtown Richmond in 1927. Its minarets, domes and crescents, gorgeous murals, and other elaborate interior details still grace the building now known as the Altria Theater (though no local refers to it thus). The year my parents moved here as young newlyweds, they went to see Elvis at the Mosque on her birthday, June 30. Later, they’d hear everyone from Buddy Holly to Frank Sinatra to Bo Diddley to The Supremes. They first heard Bob Dylan live here, in 1966, and I heard him at the Mosque in the autumn of 1990, when he opened with a twangy instrumental minute of “Dixie.”

 

No such opening tonight, and no mentions of celebrated local singers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (yes, he sang as well as he danced), Aimee Mann, Tommy Edwards, or Yvonne Fair. What we got, though, was a gorgeous show from start to finish. Dylan and the band had just continued rising, from those first nights that I heard at Massey Hall. The couple next to me had traveled down from New Jersey, and had heard the Newark shows. Like me, they agreed that Richmond was better. The band practically had the giggles at times, they seemed so loose and happy. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Key West” were unimprovable. Herron’s playing increasingly stood out, not in a showy way – that’s never his style – but when the golden fiddlethread and swirl of steel mated so well with what Dylan was doing on the piano.

 

Listen to “Every Grain of Sand” from Richmond, if you can find it. The long harmonica stanza, or verse, at the close is the finest I heard on this leg of the tour.

 

Roanoke

Roanoke was bright and pretty on a cold and frosty morning when I arrived from Richmond, by way of Appomattox and an hour there reflecting on our nation’s history. It was nice to have a day and night off to explore. The hotel I’d chosen was a funky-looking place called The Liberty Trust, installed in an old downtown bank. A private dining room now occupies the vault, and spectacular smells waft out of the open kitchen through the common bar and reception area. “We’re a little busy,” apologized the lady at the desk as she helped me. “How come? It’s a Tuesday,” I said. She lowered her voice. “We have some musicians and their crew staying here. They’re really nice. They’re playing at the Berglund.” I nodded and smiled. “Take the other elevator,” she cautioned, as I headed up to my high floor. “We had a guest get stuck in it earlier. One of the musicians. A really tall fella who plays the guitar. He had to call the desk on his cellphone, and we got him out really fast. He was lovely about it.” Not wishing to follow Bob Britt in entrapment, I duly waited for and took the safer lift. It all felt very nineteenth-century and also magical to be in a room with vault-thick walls, scarred marble on the floors, and heavy copper doors.

 

Roanoke is called Star City for the neon star on top of Mill Mountain, which was installed in 1949 and has remained lit at night ever since. It was a tobacco-growing railroad town, still bisected now by the rows of Norfolk & Western tracks but with a nicely cosmopolitan downtown of many good restaurants, the Roanoke City Market, the Roanoke Co+op, The Taubman Museum of Art, the O. Winston Link Museum, and the Fret Mill Music Company. I stopped into Fret Mill to buy some guitar strings, and the proprietor said sadly that no, Dylan hadn’t been in. Several of his road crew members and techs had been, though. “One of them told me he travels with a hundred harmonicas.” As I roamed through Link’s breathtaking black-and-white photographs of steam trains rolling through the Virginia landscape, past drive-in theaters at night and ponds full of swimming children, I hoped that Dylan – who likes both photography and trains – had made this a stop on his day off, too.

 

What a joy upon arriving at the Berglund to find historian, tremendous Dylan authority, and Virginia neighbor James Adams, purveyor of Pretty Good Stuff (and formerly Bob Dylan Notes, on the site that used to be Twitter); and Niels-Hugo Blunch, the coolest economics professor at any Virginia institution of higher learning. The Berglund is a beautiful place at which I’ve heard Dylan before, easy alike to walk to from downtown and drive to from the interstate. We were all happily seated far in front, right under Bob’s piano.

 

Up went the curtain, and there they were, arrayed across the stage, with Bob resplendent in his black suit with rhinestone bands, and a dark green silk shirt, unbuttoned at the throat. No hat – he’d worn his white hat most of the night in Richmond, except when he shifted it to fuss with his hair – though it was on his piano in case he needed it. Harmonicas were to hand, too. The concert began more gently and quietly than any before. The band sounded almost as a small classical orchestra might, in the intimate setting of the Berglund with just over 2,000 seats, and not nearly all of them filled. Only on “False Prophet” did the grit begin to grind. It was a nice and noticeable balance, the edgier and louder, the contemplative and more melodic. “Mother of Muses,” in particular, shone, as did a tangled, repetitive, yet strangely wonderful “Gotta Serve Somebody” that evolved in twists and turns even as we listened. Roanoke itself did get some special praise, as the hometown (possibly: it’s more likely he was born in Norfolk) of Wayne Newton, who headed west to become Mr. Las Vegas. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” had the room up and dancing, and, as was the case in Richmond, “can’t ya hear me calling from down in Virgini-ahhhh” got a huge roar and long applause. “Every Grain of Sand” blessed us, once again, with the harmonica – talk about a shot of love.

 

*

 

Back in 2006, Leonard Cohen told NPR’s Terry Gross “it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register, you know, authentically his feelings, you know, because they really can be interpreted. So you have to get quite covert as you get older. Or you have to find some avuncular way, you know, of responding. But still, you just really are just – you’re wounded. You stagger. And you fall.”

 

May I make a contradictory statement from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour? Bob’s not wounded. He’s not staggering. He’s not falling. He’s playing the ever living hell out of the piano, leading his band with an iron fist and reveling in their musicianship, grinning a lot, keenly aware of the places in which he’s playing and apparently happy to be in both the towns and concert halls, and turning in fine shows for happy audiences night after night after night. Long may he wave. Long may he reign.

/by
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REVIEW OF About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan

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Stephen Daniel Arnoff. About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan. New York: Morgan James, 2022. 231 pp.

REVIEW BY Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

 

Scholars can sort studies of Bob Dylan’s relationship to religion into several piles. Some assume that Dylan is a significant religious figure within American culture. Such works – like Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004) – extract theological commentary from his lyrics and do so without regard for his religious biography. Other authors perceive a particular religious perspective in Dylan’s oeuvre and reconstruct that specific outlook from his broad canon. For example, Steven Heine’s Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, Zen Master? (2009) argues that Dylan’s songbook offers a coherent sectarian vision: to Heine, Dylan is a denominational voice cloaked in the distracting guise of a secular rock star. In partial contrast, Mike Marqusee’s Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (2005) characterizes Dylan as an unresolved religious actor who is best understood as a spiritual seeker. While readings like Ricks’s considering Dylan a significant religious figure provide extraordinary exegeses of Dylan’s work, most historians and rock critics have deferred to seeing Dylan as Marqusee does. As one scholar explained, “The conventional wisdom has long tagged Dylan as unknowable when it comes to music, politics and, especially, religion.”[1]

 

Unconventionally then, About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan offers an interpretation that shows what is religiously knowable from Dylan’s songs. As church attendance declines in the US, one assumption of Arnoff’s book is that Dylan’s songs offer people an alternative source of wisdom. Dylan’s lyrics, through Arnoff’s commentary, present an inspired account of how humans struggle with social life and supernatural questions. Through Dylan, Arnoff meditates on salvation, faith, death, memory, and America, among many other themes he discerns in Dylan’s catalog. These readings intend to “release power embedded in art” through interpretation (180). Arnoff’s special knack is pulling a classical voice – Virgil, say – together with Dylan’s to dramatize the depth of Dylan’s intertextual practice. Many readers of Dylan have identified his ranging citations of classical and modern sources. Arnoff suggests that, through his connection of such sources, Dylan equals them in wisdom and perception. Arnoff isn’t unearthing Dylan’s footnotes. Rather, he’s arguing Dylan belongs in the canon of great religious thinkers. Dylan constructs his “musical roadmap for the soul” from a series of riddles, “keeping his listeners asking more questions, transcending and producing and reproducing esoteric truths within the traditions upon which our culture is based” (215).

 

Religious scholars agree with Arnoff that popular music offers a porthole through which spiritual seekers discover “the possibilities of their own depths while also embracing something greater than themselves” (5). Popular culture, especially as expressed by fan investment, connects people who affirm song. “Popular music is about creating intimacy with the masses by sharing intimacy with the masses,” writes Arnoff (55, Arnoff’s italics). United by that listening, they establish community. One word for such community is religion.

 

This book is lively, written in an accessible, engaging style by a scholar who loves to spin a Dylan record and is also a deep humanist. One of the best attributes of About Man & God & Law is how its analytical voice sounds like that of a hype fan connecting the dots as they listen for the nine hundredth time to the same track, discovering as they do what is the big idea in the lyrical particulars. Arnoff’s fandom isn’t possessive but opening, showing in paragraph after paragraph how Dylan reflects the best ideas in thinkers as diverse as medieval Italian poet Dante and contemporary Belgian-American relationship expert Esther Perel. It isn’t that Dylan always takes directly from existing canonical thought, but that, as Arnoff shows, Dylan implicates himself as representative of the best thought history records. Strong evidence for Arnoff’s case is how Dylan’s canon integrates such a vast number of different “musical threads revealing patterns and dialogues” (180). In the Dylan musicology, a sense of devotional entanglement to precedent is a given: he was always trying to cite other genres in his songwriting, deploying tones and tempos that remind listeners of infrequently visited folkways and bygone bards. The resulting “classical symposium” offers a relentlessly intriguing set of images and ideas to reckon with and reconcile. “Bob Dylan is a scavenger, a collector of shards,” Arnoff observes, echoing many previous critical listeners (112). Arnoff shares this famous magpie attribute, bringing to this brisk volume a superabundance of connections to illuminate what he thinks Dylan argues as a preacher of God and life.

 

The question for this reader is whether Dylan possesses the “spiritual wisdom” Arnoff’s title enshrines. Sam Cooke reportedly said that, after Dylan, it didn’t matter how good a singer’s voice was. What mattered was believing that the voice singing told the truth (10). This suggests Dylan’s infamous nasal tone possessed alongside its apparent unloveliness a bracing frankness. Yet as Arnoff and other biographers repeatedly point out, Dylan prevaricated on his way to making the figure he thought would lead fans to believe his truth. “It was Dylan who concocted Dylan, inventing himself and his self-creation story in a mode familiar to students of religion and myth,” Arnoff writes (30). Dylan’s letters to a Minnesota friend reveal that he chose a new last name for himself because “having a name like Zimmerman attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention in show business” (88). From the beginning, Dylan sought to convey himself as a secular subject, a person without a particular religious attachment. He did this to render himself universal, someone to whom people of all religions could attach. 

 

I first heard of Stephen Arnoff when I read Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (2017). Marshall describes hearing Arnoff give a lecture representing early thought on this book. In that talk, Arnoff explained how, despite the variety of styles and masks Dylan tried, thinking about religion is the one consistent thing he did.[2] Arnoff is right that religion is a powerful palette for Dylan. It is grist for the empowerment of his individual authorship and not a communal form to which his voice ever subordinates. Arnoff says Dylan’s lyrics explain that “how we love, learn, and die are the essential acts of our being,” and he also suggests Dylan follows an “outlaw code” that “is completely sui generis” (112, 186). Can an outlaw be a moral teacher? “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake,” Arnoff quotes Joni Mitchell as saying. “Everything about Bob is a deception” (126). How can a person whose self-invention is so elaborate be a source for truth? How can someone who faked a lot of people out with his mythologizing offer “reverence and awe” or teach people about “living a meaningful life” (xvi)?

 

In a 2006 article in The Nation, Richard Goldstein observed that Dylan was “cruising toward sainthood” and his acclaim existed irrespective of the quality of the music.[3] Goldstein finds the admiration of Dylan’s fans a problem in the same way many critics of religion find devotedly religious believers worrisome. For those who seek to evade any indication of devotional excess – people who sociologist of religion Joseph Blankholm finds sometimes self-describe as secular – a surplus of belief diminishes rational sensibility. Throughout his career, Dylan’s fandom, the most avid of whom David Kinney describes in his 2015 book, The Dylanologists, have faced criticism because their cultic regard for Dylan seemed to diminish their ability to perceive his failings. Arnoff, meanwhile, is a Dylanologist who reflects the positive value of loving an author so much. Consider, for example, this passage:

The central figure in Bob Dylan’s body of work has always been a solitary seeker narrating a life-stroll through the United States of Pompeii. His songs are glimpses into a journey through gaps between what has been upended, what is otherwise frozen in time, and what needs to be explained. While Dylan’s role as an artist reflects the archetypal task of the poet as personified by the figure of Simonides, the memory system Dylan employs is not as rigid as that of his forebear, who captured in his mind only the images of the elite  faces around the table at a rich man’s feast.

 

This is one of many riffs where Arnoff elegantly seeks to capture the heart of Dylan’s practice. Arnoff reiterates how Dylan’s personal sovereignty mirrors that of the wandering minstrel whose weary witness of this world makes him a morally perceptive everyman. Dylan emerges from About Man & God & Law as an iconoclastic seeker whose “public dream of identity encourages more dreamers to dream their own selves” (32). The best teachers “ensure that you do” (83). Dylan is a great teacher because he cuts a type, the singer who writes their own songs, whose very occupation offered a form by which others can do as he did. Dylan’s lead inspired a whole host of singer-songwriters whose insights emerged by speaking from their solo stance. Arnoff exposes the wisdom a fan can find in the Dylan songbook, whether in the artistic model he sets or the sageness of his lyrics.

 

Arnoff doesn’t demonstrate that Dylan thinks such profundity is his purpose. As a part of the 2015 launch of Watson, a computer system developed by IBM, Dylan was told in a television commercial that spectral AI had metabolized all his songs and concluded: “Your major themes are that time passes and love fades.” “That sounds about right,” Dylan replied. We learn he did so “with a smile” (33). When Richard F. Thomas explored Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), he argued that one of the reasons Bob Dylan matters is the “ability to capture with compelling artistry the universal human emotion that comes with absence, and with memory of a place lost.”[4] To quote Dylan, “Everything passes, everything changes.” In Dylan’s songs the speaker often wishes things didn’t change, but remains unable to stop them from doing so. Dylan’s lyrics often invoke the memory of good love, but little hope for love. Arnoff says, “Love, then, is a holy mystery, which requires us to invite into our intimacies something greater than ourselves in order for us to feel and be something greater” (54). Though this is a true idea with which many can agree, I’m not sure it’s Dylan, as opposed to Arnoff, who is singing such truth into being.

 

“Dylan does not seek that kind of comfort,” Arnoff writes. “He doesn’t want to be swallowed up by anyone or anything. In a practical way, he simply keeps moving” (157). What Arnoff doesn’t resolve is how someone like Dylan, so resistant to getting lost in the mystery, or to giving himself over to something greater than himself, offers words of truth about love. Perhaps it isn’t that Dylan gives such wisdom. Maybe, instead, he inspires others to name it in their process of resolving the riddles Dylan tells.

 

[1] Christine McCarthy McMorris, “The Varieties of Dylan’s Religious Experience”, Religion in the News 14:2 (Fall 2012), 26.

[2] Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2017), 239-242.

[3] Quoted in Ian Bell, Time out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (New York: Pegasus, 2013), 486.

[4] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 191.

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REVIEW OF My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me

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Terri Thal, My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me, McNidder & Grace (2023), 272 pp.

REVIEW BY Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, University of Arkansas

 

We’re told “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but that’s where we start, it’s where meaning begins.

 

The one for Terri Thal’s My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me is telling. On it, we see three people walking down a Greenwich Village street. Their expressions reveal a semblance of naturalism, betraying different levels of bemusement. Smack center and in the foreground, head tilted down, with what might be the beginnings of a smirk: Bob Dylan. Behind him, and to the right, Dave Van Ronk looks like he is giggly or at the tail end of a good laugh. Behind them both and to the left Terri Thal looks to the side, maybe saying something, or at least conveying something to an absent other – in this case Suze Rotolo who has been cropped out of the original picture. After a quick look, the viewer might assume that the book is about the central figure displayed here – Dylan – certainly not Thal who seems to recede and blur.

 

I don’t know what inspired this choice of cover, but at least part of the logic must have been commercial: Dylan sells books. This logic must have also been behind the book’s title, which boasts his name prominently, even if he – unlike Van Ronk – is not really a central figure. By sharing title space with two men and through the marginalization of Thal’s image, the author appears somewhat diminished.

 

Crass commercialism aside, the cover also foreshadows a tension throughout the book. Although Thal self-assesses as an independent, tough woman it’s often hard to see her separate from her many attachments. This is clear from the start. Chapter 1 (“Where I Came From”) begins with a quote she attributes to John Wynn: “‘you were the first woman we knew who had balls’” (1). Wynn’s comments were, as Thal tells us, a testament to her singularity in the 50s and 60s folk scene: she was not an “object” as so many women were, “but a participant in a world of music, excitement, political passion, and fun.” This is a testament to an undoubtedly forceful personality and unrepentant individualism, but her story, which culminates with her arrival on the folk scene, is also a testament to the ways the strictures of patriarchy mitigate or partly subvert agency. In almost the same breath as her initial introduction, she explains that after meeting Van Ronk, she struggled to carve out her independence, having invested her “personal self into Dave’s career.” This was a core problem that, it would seem, she never completely overcame. Although she was at times the breadwinner, Thal’s career trajectory was initially tied to him – she got her start as his manager before she went on to manage other folk acts. Moreover, Van Ronk appears at various points as her protector. In a sexist village scene, it was helpful to have Van Ronk’s “tacit assumption that I should be included anywhere I wanted to be.” (93).

 

Of course, this is a memoir and as such the author expects the reader to care about her most. She starts with her earliest days in Brooklyn where she seems to have had a relatively stable, more-or-less loving household. However, she is forthright about tensions with her mother: she doesn’t remember receiving a maternal hug, or being told “I love you.” Moreover, Thal seems to have initially assimilated some of her mother’s pessimism. She recalls how her mother had never wanted to have a girl because “being a woman stinks.” She believed they always ended up being screwed (93). Thal reveals more than once how she herself did not want to be thought of as a woman, how, at first, her desire for being thought of as a man frayed relationships with other women, and even how, at least once, her will to reject feminine stereotypes ensured she would make a bad business decision. Although her publishing company, Obscure Music, held the copyright over some of Van Ronk’s music, she did not seek to collect royalties after they divorced because she wanted to establish her independence at all costs.

 

She might have achieved independence, but Thal’s book is about belonging. In her late teens she started to explore her identity by becoming immersed in social causes, first with her participation in the Young Socialist League and then with so many acronyms to come. In an interesting section, she reveals that she had been surveilled by the local police force and even the FBI. She tells of a day in 1957 when FBI officers stopped her, presumably to get information about other socialists. She was spooked by the fact that they knew information about her sister and her family and was scared when they threatened to tell her parents about her left-wing activities. In 1960, when she was part of the American Committee for the Fourth International (later the Workers League), her phone was tapped. There were further incidents such as this until the 1980s.

 

Despite challenges, Thal was not, and is not, deterred from activist movements. She has consistently believed in and has been insistent on various socialist ideologies, which revolved around a simple philosophy: “every man, woman, and child on this planet should have enough food, water, shelter, healthcare and basic amenities to live comfortably.” But these objectives were most fulfilling and most practical in complex social settings, in structured collectives. And thus the quasi-trauma of separation from the Trotskyist Workers League, which had become restrictive and singularly dogmatic: “Without an organization, even though I still had the Marxist tool, I felt lonely and politically insecure” (162).

 

Much of Thal’s book unfolds relationally. Her story is as much about whom she knew as who she is. Perhaps most bizarrely, in a sort of appendix, she simply provides a list of people she knew in the ‘50s and ‘60s (189-194). Aside from this (long) list, we have other more narrative lists describing the kids she taught during a stint as a substitute teacher, neighborhood friends, and, of course, all those she hung out with during her years in the folk scene – clients, performers, and house guests.

 

The Village folk-scene comes off as tight knit. Pushing back against the Coen Brothers’ representation of the period in their Inside Llewyn Davis, Thal rejects the notion that the Village was unpleasant and cutthroat. “Both before and while there were places to work in New York, the folk music world was professionally and personally supportive” (86). There was an aura of respect among fellow-travelers manifest in clubs where performances were held in almost rapt silence (mostly) out of an unwritten code of etiquette and respect. The sites of these performances, especially the coffee houses “really were a community” (92).

 

How did women fit into this community? Thal insists that the folk scene was not infected with the grossest forms of misogyny – she says it was not a “sexist scene” (86). Elsewhere she says that there was no “discrimination” against women. At the same time, however, she notes how the few women who were part of that folk movement were thought of differently. For example, “there was sort of an assumption that there were factors distinguishing the female folk singers from one another in ways that were never considered for the men” (101). Unlike male performers, women (Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, Joan Baez) had to be pitted against each other, a dynamic that I wish Thal had described further.

 

Thal explains that, unlike what people might assume or believe, sexual exchanges were not the ways to climb up the ladder. Still, just beneath the surface there might have been a form of harassment (as we would call it today) that was part of the scene. She tells us that Carolyn Hester told her many stories about how other performers insistently propositioned her. She also speaks from personal experience about an encounter with Clarence Hood – a manager of The Gaslight – who had asked her “to have a sexual interlude.” Though she refused, he was insistent. She eventually ran away in horror, telling Van Ronk “the fucker tried to get me to go down on him” (96). She insists, though, that it was not a professional exchange, or that it did not imply a possibility of professional benefit; he was so forward “because he was drunk and he happened to be there and I was sexually appealing” (96).

 

There are moments where Thal reveals how segregated things could be. This is most obvious in the severe gender imbalance she mentions almost in passing. But in other, perhaps less profound ways, she describes a fair share of exclusive petulance. Thal recalls how she and Van Ronk would occasionally go to the American Youth Hostel to make some music, but looked snidely upon those outdoorsy, square dancing folks. Van Ronk called them “Wee people” (50). The East-West divide was also part of that culture as Thal recalls that Van Ronk hated the idea of California, “woo woo land,” though he eventually had to head there to make some cash. Funnily – though I don’t think this was the intent – Thal reveals that they didn’t restrict themselves to the Village, but she remembers that there was not much need to go to midtown or uptown Manhattan, a distance that apparently seemed like an excursion in those days. Less amusing is the fact that the folk scene was complicit in restructuring and, arguably, destroying a former way of life as clubs marginalized and even excised the Italian-American community that had once populated the Village.

 

Out of the many, Thal shines a (brief chapter-long) spotlight on Bob Dylan. Overall, he comes across as a creature both immured in and resistant to the culture he plopped into after his Minnesota years. He sought friendship from Van Ronk and Thal, but he never warmed to their political slant – though they tried. He was earnest in his musical interests, but sometimes seemed aloof.

 

Thal rehearses some well-known stories about Dylan that (to this reader) function as reminders that the folk world could be less than respectful and more cutthroat. There are, predictably, thefts: Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” for his first record and Paul Clayton’s (copyrighted) “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” for Dylan’s own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” In the same column of jerkish behaviors, Thal speculates about the Dylan-Ochs sometimes-nasty rivalry, which she concludes (following Van Ronk’s analysis) was “less about who was a better songwriter than about who was going to become rich and famous” (136).

 

In what is ultimately a splotchy set of reminiscences, perhaps the most interesting and compelling bit has to do with managing Dylan. She explains how hard it was – at the very start at least – for people to take Dylan seriously. When she went to Manny Rubin, owner of the Second Fret in Philadelphia, he asked “‘Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitation?’” (139). When she went to Club 47 in Cambridge, they said “‘He’s too freaky for a folk music audience’” (140). Thal scrambled and did get him gigs, sometimes to uninspiring results. But even amid relative failures, she oversaw a period during which Dylan honed his craft before being “discovered” by John Hammond of Columbia records.

 

Perhaps most important for the history books, during this hustling period, she was the one who recorded the famous Gaslight demo, which later became a coveted bootleg.

 

In the end, Thal avoids sentimentalities. Dylan, after his first record contract, told her he was going to be managed by Albert Grossman, something she had mixed feelings about, but supported. (Dylan had not told her that he had gotten a contract with Columbia at the time). She reflects on how Dylan increasingly lost touch with the Village gang, how some have accused him of being ungrateful. Thal disagrees. When someone moves from one job to another, colleagues seldom stay in touch. That’s just how it goes.

 

Ultimately, Dylan barely matters, what matters is Thal’s important place in the Village folk scene during its most vital phase. Still, her story seems underdone. Her descriptions of the times are surface-level, often in the form of, as mentioned before, lists or quick anecdotes. At some points the book feels like a resume of jobs completed. To be sure, there are moments of bracing honesty: her brief discussion of geriatric sex, for example, and her to-the-point assessment of various situations. But overall, I closed the book thinking that there was probably more to it.

 

This memoir is a valuable historical document. It is a first-hand account of Thal’s experiences at a pivotal moment in American history; it is, more broadly, a chronicle of a life well-lived. But historical documents need not conform to the highest ideals of their specific genres; all that matters is that they exist.

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REVIEW OF The Complete Budokan 1978

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Bob Dylan. The Complete Budokan 1978, Columbia Legacy, 2023.

REVIEW BY Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College 

 

“Someday I Will Be Back to Reclaim It”

Bob Dylan’s liner notes in both the 1978 and the 2023 releases of his concerts at Budokan set the tone for listeners. Dylan writes:

The more I think about it, the more I realize what I left behind in Japan – my soul, my music, and that sweet girl in the geisha house. I wonder does she remember me? If the people of Japan wish to know about me, they can hear this record – also they can hear my heart still beating in Kyoto at the Zen Rock Garden – Someday I will be back to reclaim it.[1]

Here, Dylan shows us that he can best be understood in this period through emotion. Of course, that seems reasonable considering the hook of his most iconic song asks us “How does it feel?” rather than what do you think?[2] His reference to a “sweet geisha” draws our attention to women who have made a lasting imprint but are lost to him. Both factor into Dylan’s desire to revisit and reclaim his early songs. Just as he did in 2021 on Shadow Kingdom, Dylan reimagined some of his earlier songs as a later-stage act of agency and renewal. Of the twenty-eight songs on the setlist, nineteen were first written and recorded before 1967. A decade later, Dylan launched his 1978 world tour as he moved forward through a confluence of personal and professional disappointments.

 

When released in Japan in November 1978, and subsequently worldwide in April 1979, Bob Dylan at Budokan stoked the ire of many critics and fans – purists who felt affronted by Dylan’s revamping of iconic songs from his catalog. At the time, the album stood in contrast to his previous live offerings. Dylan’s first live album, Before the Flood, recorded on tour with The Band and released in 1974, established the standard for subsequent releases. Paul Williams lauded it as “an excellent representation of the tour, given the time limits of an LP record.” [3] Two years later, the release of Hard Rain coincided with a televised concert of the same name. Despite some of its issues, according to Williams, “the selection and sequencing of songs is masterful. There’s a consistent mood in the performances, the lyric content of the nine songs seems almost consciously designed to tell a story.”[4] As his third live album in five years, the release of Bob Dylan at Budokan was disappointing based on the precedent Dylan had set. After the successes of the previous two albums, many critics and fans objected to the lackluster lounge act arrangements and the spectacle of the performance, including Dylan’s costuming. Williams observed, “This idea – Bob Dylan marketing himself like a Las Vegas crooner, packaged music and showmanship for the mentally middle-aged – is so repellant to the average Dylan fan that the critical and public backlash that resulted is not surprising, and one wonders at Dylan’s failure to anticipate it.”[5] To be sure, the 1978 release of Bob Dylan at Budokan did not represent the zenith of Dylan’s career as a performing artist, but it didn’t reflect its nadir, either. 

 

The Complete Budokan challenges the mediocre distinction of its predecessor. The arrangements, vocalizations, and overall performances have not changed or been altered in production. Instead, they are presented in the original setlist order. Forty-five years on, listening to the entirety of the concerts recorded on February 28 and March 1, 1978 helps reframe this pair of shows within the many shifts, renewals, and rebirths Dylan has undertaken throughout the arc of his career. In this case, hindsight provides a fresh interpretation. As Edna Gunderson writes in her liner notes, “Bob Dylan at Budokan could be considered a late bloomer. Polarizing in its time, the third live release in Dylan’s catalogue has undergone a sober reappraisal over the decades as consumers and critics grew to admire its adventurous arrangements and provocative performances.”[6] In short, the audience has finally caught up with Dylan to understand more comprehensively what he was working on and through during this tour. As a result, the power of Dylan’s performances in these shows is borne from his vulnerability. After the contentious dissolution of his marriage, the failure of Renaldo and Clara, and the deaths of Phil Ochs and Elvis, Dylan found himself at another crossroads. At times he seems detached, working to find his way through the arrangements, the lyrical changes, and the phrasing of the songs. At other times, he is wired in with clear phrasing and, based on the stage banter, energy, and commitment to the performance, having fun. Clearly, he is in transition, simultaneously defying expectations, deconstructing his myth, and working toward some artistic and, perhaps, personal path forward.

 

One of the main criticisms of Bob Dylan at Budokan is that the band struggled through the arrangements. Dylan was joined by Rolling Thunder Review veterans Rob Stoner, Dave Mansfield, and Steven Soles. Rounding out the crowded stage of musicians was Ian Wallace on drums, Alan Pasqua on keyboards, Steve Douglas on saxophone and flute, Billy Cross on guitar, Bobbye Hall on percussion, and the trio of backing vocalists Helena Springs, Jo Ann Harris, and Debi Dye. Together the band seems unable to find their stride and unsure of how to accompany Dylan, who is notoriously stingy in his direction. The newness of this ensemble leads to messiness on some of the tracks, as Dylan himself alluded to during the performance on February 28. In between “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Shall Be Released,” he thanked the audience for their applause and said, “It must sound better out there than it does up here.” The consensus among Dylan critics is that a recording from the later leg of the tour, like one of the European shows, would have better exemplified the band realizing their potential. That’s fair, but it wouldn’t have captured Dylan’s first trip to Japan, which was the original intent of the project. So, we sit here stranded with uneven tracks that at times sound like Dylan is backed by a high school marching band, and at others settle into a groove that show glimpses of the magic of the later tour dates.

 

Some aspects of the recordings, such as Dylan’s questionable introductions of the backup singers, did not age well. Our post-#MeToo era reconsiderations allow for an interpretation that highlights their underlying and contemporaneously unnoticed misogyny. It’s probable Dylan was being facetious, as his humor is often misunderstood or unrecognized. Undeniably, his jovial tone and the jokes he made about the other members of the orchestra suggest that he was attempting humor. Across the footlights, the audience’s perfectly timed laughter signals they understood this intent. However, when compared to the introductions of their male counterparts, the difference is remarkable. On February 28, Dylan presents two of the singers, Helena Springs and Debi Dye, as ghosts of past and future relationships, reducing them and their contributions to objectified love interests, mere relational identities, even if they’re in on the joke. Of accomplished percussionist Bobbye Hall, Dylan jokes they share the same hometown, though she is Detroit born. Singer Jo Ann Harris is the lone woman to elicit Dylan’s respect for her accomplishments and potential as an equal. That’s part of the problem. Unquestionably, the men are presented on equal footing, while only one of the women is. During the March 1 performance, the introductions are considerably shorter than those of the previous night. There is no joke about Bobbye Hall’s hometown and, rather than saying he met the backup singers at a “disc jockey convention,” he tells the audience he met these “beautiful ladies” when “[he] first heard [them] singing in a department store.” Again, he objectifies the women, focusing on their appearance and calling attention to their attractiveness, which further diminishes them as professionals. In contrast, on both nights, Dylan emphasizes the male musicians’ impressive resumés, invites them to highlight their skills in focused solos, and encourages additional audience applause. From a twenty-first century sensibility, the disparity is unmistakable, and Dylan’s humor is outdated. 

 

Other aspects of the shows provide depth to understand Dylan within this moment in time as an artist grappling with personal and professional failures. He is at a low point in his life and his career. Gunderson writes, “as disco stormed the charts and bands like the Sex Pistols and The Ramones blasted into the mainstream, rock titans of the 1960s were increasingly mocked as tedious, old, and out of touch.”[7] Bob Dylan at Budokan certainly gave punk rockers reason to aim their derision. Douglas’s intrusive saxophone on songs like “Oh, Sister,” the musical theater reggae version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and the cacophony of sound on songs like “Just Like a Woman” certainly invite those critiques. Gunderson continues that Dylan escaped their ridicule. Indeed, Dylan seems unassailable because he has historically been on the forefront of artistic trends, with everyone else racing to keep up. His resistance is his reluctance to capitulate to mainstream appetites. In the late 1960s, when Dylan’s contemporaries shifted toward psychedelic and heavily produced music, Dylan turned toward country in the pared-down minimalism of John Wesley Harding. The Budokan concerts reflect a similar reluctance. Rather than perform as a legacy act or a jukebox, affirming the audience’s expectations of him, he reclaimed his earlier songs through restructured arrangements that suit Dylan as a 36-year-old artist and man. The slower tempo of “I Want You” sounds like a lament for a lost love, perhaps a wife, rather than the exuberant desire at a relationship’s beginning. Similarly, Dylan’s phrasing and voice, including his harmonica playing, on “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” are delicate and vulnerable. The accelerated tempo suggests he is trying to rush through the song to avoid feeling it as deeply as the slower version allowed. Though most of these songs were written by a younger Dylan, he doesn’t perform them that way. Rather, he reinvigorates them and embodies them through the sensibility of an artist changed by age and time.

 

In mid-December, 1977, Dylan expressed a desire to get back on the road after the failure of Renaldo and Clara. He told Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott, “I have to get back to playing music, because, unless I do, I don’t really feel alive. … I have to play in front of people just to keep going.”[8] For Dylan, playing live music is regenerative and sustaining. At this pivotal point in his life, it seemed logical that he would return to the road for that purpose. This interview with Cott coincided with Dylan’s announcement of his upcoming tour, which would take him out of the United States for the first time in twelve years, and on his first ever trip to Japan. Heckel Sugano, an executive with Sony in Japan, understood the importance of this tour and focused his efforts on capturing it in a live recording. As he explains in his liner notes, the negotiations with Dylan’s people came together on February 19 with the dates for recording set for February 28 and March 1. After recording the shows was complete, Sugano and engineer Tom Suzuki began work on the album. Sugano concedes, “the most challenging aspect was selecting the songs” due to “the standard duration of a single side of an LP record” of twenty minutes.[9] The songs included on Bob Dylan at Budokan were curated from the two shows by Sugano and Suzuki who omitted many and arranged them in a way that attempted, but largely failed, to capture the essence of the complete performances. As a result, this limitation ultimately affected the composition of the album. Throughout the spring and summer, Sugano worked closely with Dylan to complete the project, showing him the final cut in June 1978. To date, the double-LP remains the only official live recording of Dylan’s 1978 world tour, an achievement of honor for Sugano and the team who worked on it. 

 

Nearly thirty years later, in 2006, when Sony Japan executive Tetsuya Shiroki inquired about the master tapes of the recorded Budokan shows, he learned they had been pristinely preserved and were kept at the Shizuoka factory’s master tape vault. From that point, he dedicated himself to commemorating Dylan’s first trip to Japan through the release of a collector’s edition box set of the complete performances. In his liner notes, Shiroki writes that he “reunited three key individuals involved in the 1978 concerts to help tell the story of The Complete Budokan 1978; Heckel Sugano, Product Manager at CBS Sony; Tomoo (Tom) Suzuki, the engineer who recorded and mix the music at Budokan on-site; and Terushia Tajima, the creative force behind the package design of the album.”[10] Assembling the original team members from Bob Dylan at Budokan ensured continuity and fidelity between the two projects. Together, they envisioned recreating Dylan’s February 28 and March 1 concerts at Budokan as a return to the ephemeral experience for those who attended the concerts, and as a glimpse of what the experience was like for those who did not. 

 

During the early stages of production, one of the tracks Shiroki and the team listened to was “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s opener for both shows that did not make the final cut of the original release. Including “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” on The Complete Budokan does more than restore the concerts’ full setlist in its proper order. The opening drum beat of the shows is reminiscent of the initial drum beat in “Like a Rolling Stone,” the shot that changed popular music in 1965. Aided by Al Kooper’s play on the B2 organ and Dylan’s backing band, the carnival of sound that followed that single strike of a snare drum announced Dylan’s departure from folk music. As an artist and a performer, Dylan had simply moved on. By 1978, Dylan had evolved several times in his career – from folk to rock and roll, to country, to roots music – each of which signaled a period of artistic growth.

 

The drum beat and the subsequent drum riff at the start of this arrangement of “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” have a similar effect. They also announced to concertgoers in 1978 and to listeners in 2023 a departure from what Dylan had previously done and who he had previously been as an artist and performer. Not only did the song serve as the show’s overture, what follows is an upbeat arrangement of one of Dylan’s iconic songs about human depravity, frailty, and apocalypse. This arrangement significantly alters the tone of the song. Each member of what Dylan refers to as his “orchestra” takes the lead, replacing Dylan’s vocal, eliminating the lyrics altogether. The dissonance between the music and the missing lyrics that the audience is certain to be familiar with signals a sense something new is about to unfold. Without lyrics or vocals, we are forced to focus on the arrangement as we grasp for a recognizable melody. Indeed, the absence of Dylan’s voice and words – two of his most powerful tools – is another signal that this experience will be something different. Here, Dylan is not standing at the ocean, though he may certainly be sinking. Instead, he has physically crossed an ocean to perform on this tour, but he is silent. Perhaps he doesn’t know his song well enough or cannot find the “right” voice to start singing. His vocal silence until the second song of the set signals the struggle he is working through on stage.

 

The audience first hears Dylan’s voice on “Repossession Blues” on the first night and “Love Her with a Feeling” on the second, both of which may point to Dylan reconciling his divorce. Playing these songs brings Dylan’s voice, but not his words, into the performance. In “Repossession Blues,” originally sung by Sun Records’ Billy Lee Riley, Dylan assumes the persona of a man who “ain’t got no money,” and tells us, “I’m gonna lose everything I own,” arguably a tongue-in-cheek reference to his recent costly divorce settlement. The sultry blues song, “Love Her with a Feeling” is a reminder that if you don’t love your woman while she’s yours, someone else will. Once again, this song choice can be read as an opaque reference to his marriage ending. These two songs establish the tone for many others in the set about lost love. The fourth song, Nashville Skyline’s “I Threw It All Away,” is both lament and confessional. Dylan’s phrasing reaches for something he can’t quite access. Further, Billy Cross’s lead guitar guides us through the song’s prelude to crescendo before crashing back to Dylan’s mournful lead vocal. “Going, Going, Gone” gets one of the most regrettable reworkings. The overblown and chaotic arrangement of Dylan’s 1974 song off Planet Waves loses its weight as a song of regret and loss. 

 

“Mr. Tambourine Man” stands out as one of the highlights in both nights’ shows. Even when the band’s play becomes murky, it is still largely a successful interpretation. It’s one of the songs in Dylan’s catalog perfectly suited for the stylistic revisions he performs on this tour. In its original version, “Mr. Tambourine Man” invites us into its wonderland through smoke rings of fantastical imagery. This up-tempo reimagining turns Dylan’s symbolist lyrics into a kaleidoscope of sound. Douglas’s flute and Pasqua’s keyboards provide the foundation for Dylan’s vocal, which positions him as the pied piper leading listeners through the fairy tale world of the song.

 

In this transitional period for Dylan, post-divorce and pre-conversion, a single word change in the lyrics shifts our perspective of the spectacle we are listening to or witnessing. In “Shelter from the Storm,” played fifth on February 28 and sixth on March 1, Dylan changed the lyric from “In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm” to “men who are fighting to be born.” It’s possible that, as Michael Gray put forth in his interview with Craig Danuloff, Dylan’s work in this period clearly presages his evangelical conversion as Dylan identifies with Christ in the song.[11] In search of salvation, he sees himself as someone who has been persecuted and sacrificed. More poignantly, the lyric change suggests that rather than being cold and competing for warmth, in the form of love, shelter, or salvation, he is “fighting to be born” against the ever-present threat of death. When taken into consideration with the lyric “He not being busy born is busy dying” from “It’s Alright, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding)” performed later in the set, we see that Dylan is, in fact, trying to be reborn artistically on stage. He’s doing so within the safety of a community of musicians, as he had done when he took the stage at Newport in July 1965, on tour with The Band, and with the Rolling Thunder Revue. However, mortality – through his brush with death in his motorcycle accident or through the deaths of his father, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Elvis – hangs in the balance with Dylan fighting for refuge or rebirth.

 

Another important connection is that Elvis Presley’s death in August 1977, six months before the start of the 1978 tour, weighed heavily on Dylan. It arguably did not have the effect of Woody Guthrie’s death in 1967, Jerry Garcia’s in 1995, or George Harrison’s in 2001, but Elvis’s death shocked Dylan into an accounting of his life. Dylan’s performances on this leg of the tour were initially interpreted as tributes to Elvis. To be sure, interviews Dylan gave in 1977 and throughout 1978 reveal its presence in his mind. When Elvis died, Dylan told Robert Shelton, “I went over my whole life. I went over my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week … If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today.”[12] Elvis’s formative influence on Dylan’s life and career is unmistakable. Further, he told Ron Rosenblum of Playboy that Elvis inspired him just as much as he did everyone else in the 1950s. As the first breakthrough rock star, Elvis provided the road map for the younger generation who followed him. His death meant there was no one to go before them as an aging rock and roller. But for Dylan, Elvis transcended this role. Not only was Elvis an idol for Dylan in his youth, at the time of Elvis’s death, he was also a peer as a cultural icon, an experience few artists shared. As the new figurehead for middle-aged musicians, Dylan undoubtedly felt the pressure of defining the path forward into the middle and late stages of their careers, if one even existed.

 

The theme of loss continues throughout the set as Dylan works to reclaim his voice. Throughout both shows, most of the songs are love songs or anti-love songs focused on or addressed to women. Here, Dylan’s liner note reference to the “sweet girl” he left behind at the Geisha house resonates through the women in the songs, many penned more than a decade earlier and based on women from his past. “Tomorrow is a Long Time” turns into a production with Douglas’s misplaced saxophone and the chorus of backing harmonies. Dylan’s lead vocal is the most compelling part of the performance. It comes through as a desperate ache for the woman in the song compared to the quiet longing of the original. Dylan’s melancholy tone and phrasing on “Girl from the North Country” express a deep yearning for the girl he left behind. A preview from 1978’s Street Legal, “Is Your Love in Vain” shows Dylan in a vulnerable moment, asking “do you understand my pain?” In this lyric, it’s empathetic, not rational, understanding Dylan seeks. These are songs he feels his way through, emotionally, vocally, and musically, asking listeners to do the same. 

 

The penultimate song in the set before the closer and encore, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” loses the driving urgency and acerbic critique of society’s moral failings. In exchange, the extravagant production with violin, saxophone, and backing vocals adds pageantry, evoking a collective celebration of human turpitude rather than a singularly voiced condemnation. Matching the crescendos and diminuendos of the musical arrangement, Dylan’s voice rises and falls, ebbs and crashes, to punctuate the end of each verse and the chorus. The audience feels Dylan’s struggle against internal and external threats as he assures the “Ma” figure, “It’s alright.” Dylan follows this affirmation with “Forever Young,” in a church choir performance that feels like a hymn or prayer.

 

The coda to both performances, “The Times They Are a-Changin’” serves as an apt conclusion to the shows. Superficially, it conjures nostalgia for Dylan’s 1960s folk identity. His lead vocal is reminiscent of this earlier version of himself. It would arguably leave the audience satisfied he hadn’t omitted it from this set. However, played in context of this setlist, in these performances, and at this point in his life, it signals that just like the times, he, too, is changing. The performance begins with a minimal accompaniment from the orchestra that crescendos at the line “better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone” with the background singers and saxophone joining in the chorus before returning to Dylan’s single voice to start the next verse. The lyrics, clearly articulated here, recall those absent from the “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” show’s opener, “I’ll stand at the ocean until I start sinking.” Additionally, the rise and fall of the music and his voice mirrors the similar pattern in the Budokan arrangement of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Sonically, both songs roll like waves, crashing and retreating as we gather ourselves while Dylan attempts the same. As a closer, it bookends the show with hope. Where Dylan started the show in silence, allowing the musicians on stage to play in place of his voice, he ended in community with them, carefully finding his way.

 

One of the highlights of this box set is its design. As soon as it was released, unboxing videos flooded social media. The anticipation and excitement provided a fraction of what fans feel before a Dylan concert, but the effect was profound. Cutting through the protective cellophane outer casing felt akin to cutting a ceremonial ribbon. The outer box, a laminated cardboard case, is reminiscent of the original LP with a medium shot of Dylan in profile on the front and a shot from behind Dylan on the back. Dylan’s distance in the front cover photo, contrasted with his close-up in profile on the cover of Bob Dylan at Budokan, reminds us of the forty-five-year distance between the tour and the complete performances’ release. The photo also depicts a complete Dylan rather than a fragment, signifying the difference between the two Budokan albums. 

 

What lies inside delighted fans through the unity of its vision. If the first step to recreating the audience’s experience was to present the full audio of the concerts, the components of the box set completed the task. Terushia Tajima’s artistic concept achieves Shiroki’s overarching vision of replicating the experience of Dylan’s 1978 tour. His delicate and thoughtful design of the box set’s packaging and its contents captures the scope of Dylan’s time in Japan through artwork, photographs, and reproduced ephemera. Traditional Japanese woodblock paintings of birds and landscapes throughout the booklets and on the CDs evoke Dylan’s appreciation for Japanese nature and remind us of his spiritual connection to the Kyoto Gardens. Photographs of Dylan and his band – from arrival at the airport, in performance, and throughout Japan – provided by Joel Bernstein, Hirosuke Katsuyama, and Koh Hasebe allow us to follow Dylan in staged and candid moments. The cover artwork for the liner notes book depicts stylized versions of iconic Japanese figures – Mt. Fuji, a camphor tree, and the bullet train – with a rendering of Dylan in the bottom right of the composition standing at the water’s edge. Visually, this takes us back to the instrumental “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall,” linking the visual elements with the concerts. The liner notes are complemented by a box of memorabilia, which maintains the theme with a lone camphor tree on its cover. It contains a collection of reproduced ephemera that Dylan fans who attended the concerts would immediately recognize or, for the obsessives among us, would have kept or collected. It is not intended for casual Dylan fans. Enclosed are two replica concert tickets, a tour program printed in Japanese with discography and photograph biography, tour photos, a tour poster, and advertisements. Also included is a replica of the 24 inch x 33 inch poster enclosed with the 1978 release. Lastly, there is a hardcover bifold encasing the four CDs or eight LPs that replicates the cover for the original two-LP set. The components work interdependently to achieve the complete Budokan experience.

 

Overall, The Complete Budokan is a complicated album because the performances were largely unrefined. Some of the arrangements are successful and find their groove. Others are less so and simply don’t, even after reconsideration. One of the strengths of this box set is having the complete performances in their proper setlist order. That allows listeners to recognize Dylan’s vulnerability as he reworks his songs and, by extension, himself as an artist through performance after the failures, deaths, and losses he’d recently experienced. In 1978, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, “The Seventies I see as a period of reconstruction after the Sixties, that’s all. That’s why people say: well, it’s boring, nothing’s really happening, and that’s because wounds are healing.”[13] Ultimately, The Complete Budokan heals old wounds for those of us returning to them and understanding them as a middle and transitional point in Dylan’s career. Listening to these tracks on repeat as I have done for weeks now, I’m left wondering, in the simplest terms, if it matters that the Budokan shows are messy. For me, messy Dylan is one of the most interesting Dylans. It humanizes him after the superhuman feats of quickly writing and recording Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde and then returning to that well for Blood on the Tracks. It shows us how artists fail and work to renew inspiration and, in Dylan’s case, continue to do so. 

 

[1] Dylan, Bob. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 4

[2] Special thanks to Jason Nodler for sharing the seeds of this idea in conversation.

[3] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 3.

[4] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 82.

[5] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 111.

[6] Gunderson, Edna. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 27.

[7] Gunderson, Edna. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 27.

[8] Cott, Jonathan. “Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone. January 26, 1978.” Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Warner Media, 2006. 192.

[9] Saguno, Heckel. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 12.

[10] Shiroki, Tetsuya. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 48.

[11] Danuloff, Craig. “The Street to Slow Train – Song and Dance Man Vol. 2 Ch. 1 with Michael Gray.” FM Dylan Podcast. Episode 19, November 24, 2023.

[12] Shelton, Robert. The Fiddler Now Upspoke. London. 451.

[13] Cott, Jonathan. “Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone. January 26, 1978.” Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Warner Media, 2006. 186.

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