Bob Dylan (8 page)

I had read a lot about Bob Dylan’s tour with the Band before it arrived at the Oakland Coliseum Arena February 11, just before the close-out in Los Angeles; on paper, I knew all about it. I knew precisely how the show was structured: Dylan & Band, Band, Dylan & Band, intermission, Dylan solo, Dylan & Band, “Like a Rolling Stone,” encore. With a few trivial variations, I knew what songs were to be played and in what order. I knew how the crowd would react and to what: they’d go wild for “Even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked”; a few jerks would yell “We Want Dylan” when the Band played. I knew well-timed lights would cue the audience response for “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that the song would be referred to as “an anthem” in the papers the next day; I knew that matches would be lit to solicit the encore. It seemed like a set-up. I was looking forward to giving Bob Dylan a standing ovation when he walked out, but I was damned if I was going to light any matches.

What the press did not prepare me for was the sound, the singing, the playing, and the impact. I wasn’t prepared to hear “Rainy Day Women” come store-porching off the stage as a big, brawling Chicago blues; for the black usher dancing down the steps of the hall, waving his flashlight and singing “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door”; for the delight I felt when Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko rushed a single mike for a chorus just like Paul and George in
A Hard Day’s Night.
I wasn’t prepared for one bit of what mattered about the show, and I doubt if anyone else was either.

Never—not in 1965 when they were the Hawks, not at their 1969 debut at Winterland, or at half a dozen other concerts—have I heard the Band play with the fire Dylan got from them this time around. I’ve seen reports that barely mentioned their presence, let alone the music they made, but between sets, or the next day, the Band was what people wanted to talk about first. Robbie’s guitar playing was unmatched—he drove through two shows with a pointed frenzy most of his performances only hint at—but the difference was the beat.

It was a massive, intensely syncopated THUMP that at first overwhelmed everything else. Everyone knows Levon Helm is a great drummer, but this time he played like a star. He was working right at the heart of rock ’n’ roll—sometimes Richard Manuel joined him on a second set of drums, and while it was fun to watch, musically I couldn’t tell the difference. It was the authority of Levon’s beat that let Dylan, Robbie, and Garth Hudson sing and play with a freedom that with any less of a foundation would have seemed merely personal; with Levon there it was still personal, and also shared, sympathetic, dependent—on stage, and out in front of it.

Nothing the Band did on their own touched what they did with Dylan. Against the Band’s comradeship he presents a physical image of utter self-reliance (though he cannot get where he wants to go without them and his new songs are about the poverty of going it alone); against their careful intelligence he pits genius, erratic and eager for rules to break (the Band at their worst have never been as embarrassing as Dylan at his, and at their best they write history while he makes it); against the Band’s pleasure in music (they smile, he frowns), Dylan sets a nervous fury, an impulse to drama.

There is a side to the Band that is uncertain and a bit scared of the crowd, a side that takes refuge in a sort of rational craftsmanship. It’s an emotional limit that only Garth Hudson always escapes, and it may be the source of both the spare elegance of Robbie’s best lines and of the precise, even constricted arrangements the Band uses on stage and on record. There’s also a side that is wild, mad, and chaotic, and it comes out, in
their
music, only in
snatches: an occasional guitar solo, Garth’s crazy piano on “The Weight,” on “Don’t Do It.”

But this is a side of the Band that Bob Dylan almost always breaks wide open. He takes the spotlight, and they are free to follow their hearts. They get a certain energy playing with him they don’t get from each other—and in any case they can’t handle his twisting vocals with neat arrangements. They have to set the beat, play for it and against it, even risk collapsing the song for the chance to touch the emotions of anyone who listens. They have to give Dylan the momentum he so obviously wants and play for themselves.

The music, then, was not neat, it was not orderly, it was not elegant. It was fierce: riding that beat, full of hard-won arrogance, love, and anger. At first the music hit in explosions, and then resolved itself into textures—Garth’s organ flowing delicately over a solo from Robbie that was pure anarchy while Dylan’s howls cut across both. Then, when you thought you had a grip on the music, that you’d heard what they had to say, they came back with something tougher—like “All Along the Watchtower.”

It was a jagged, growling blast; the Band reached roughly for the melody and Dylan shouted past it. They made the recorded version—likely the best thing Dylan has done since
Highway 61 Revisited
—seem tentative and weak, as if, down in Nashville in 1967, Dylan had hedged his bets. In fact, seven years later, he was raising the stakes.

As I write, I hear James and Carly singing “Ride with the tide, go with the flow,” and while I’m gratified the two of them are limiting their goals to their talents, such a credo strikes me as the very opposite of what Bob Dylan—or any artist—is all about. The music Dylan made with the Band was not easy to relate to. If, in the past, you had only seen the Band, a group that sometimes spends more time on the soundcheck than they do playing, you might have written the edges off their music by assuming they were just a bit rusty after so much time off the road. As for Dylan’s singing, it was a shock no simple excuse—he’s tired,
he’s
rusty, he’s aloof—could
contain. Some writers have spoken respectfully about Dylan’s experiments with melisma—that sounds classy, doesn’t it?—but melisma has to do with bending words, and Dylan was breaking them. He came down on the last word of every line with all he had, regardless, it seemed, of what they might have meant—like a gunfighter without a target, and Bob Dylan without a target is only shooting blanks. But he did have a target, or several: music; his songs; the audience; himself.

Music today—especially the polished, lifeless Elektra-Asylum folk rock that is aimed at the audience that came to hear Dylan—has a lot of well-defined, surface melody (in real rock ’n’ roll, the melody is inseparable from the rhythm and the beat). Such music substitutes professionalism for inspiration. Dylan wailed out his songs, attacking melody as if it were an obstacle, not a means, to feeling; in place of professionalism he offered a crude expressiveness, breaking through the limits of phrasing and technique. When he missed, he missed; when he scored, he drove his songs past themselves. Often he was aiming not his words, but himself—not as a persona, but as physical presence, as flesh and blood—at the audience, and instead of the messages and meanings of his songs there was something much more elemental: commitment and force.

If these shows were not to be merely a live greatest hits package, Dylan had to find a way to get an authentically new kind of life into the songs. This music doesn’t wear out any more than Robert Johnson, the Carter Family, or Little Richard, Dylan must feel, but proving it is another matter. Only when he could liberate the songs from his past and ours, yet without denying that past, could the songs continue to liberate the musicians and the audience. The music had to feel right to the singer, and come across to the crowd.

Dylan was shouting, chanting, partly, I’m sure, to be heard over the noise, but if that was all he cared about he could have turned down the amps. The noise was part of the shout. To simply present the songs in a marginally new way—difference in phrasing here,
change in emphasis there, transposed intros, altered tempos, they did all that—would, by itself, have seemed contrived, to the singer even more than to the audience. So in one sense, Dylan chose not to really sing the songs at all. It seemed to me that more than anything else Dylan was reaching for an equivalent, though nothing like a copy, of his original sound: something very rough, disturbing, disorienting, not easy to like. It didn’t always work. But the ambition was clear, and the songs that fit best with the hard chant, those with a beat strong enough to force Dylan to deal with the rhythm, grew as songs: “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Maggie’s Farm.” On the last two, Dylan was flat out the ultimate rock ’n’ roll singer; the Band was the final band. Any comparison between this combination and an earnest, talented group like the Allman Brothers Band—forget the lyrics—would be a joke. This was rock ’n’ roll at its limits.

Other numbers were less songs than incidents in a struggle rock ’n’ roll—or the blues, or country music—embodies but hardly contains: staying alive, keeping the faith, building and fighting for a life where humor, anger, and love are not only the means, but the ends. What hit me, so many times, was the strength of the man at the center of this struggle; I felt more alive being in the same room with such strength. This passed into the songs: they were stronger, as signs of life as well as comments on it. “He loves these songs as much as we do,” said the woman next to me.

When Dylan first walked out on stage with Hudson, Manuel, Danko, Robertson, and Helm, the applause died away even before they cut into “When You Go Your Way and I Go Mine.” (“No bull-shit,” that fast start said.) The crowd (and who can say who was in the crowd? I saw professors I’d had when I was a sophomore in college, students I’d taught when they were sophomores) seemed caught between reverence and celebration, between worship and caution.

It was only when Dylan came out alone that genuflection and nostalgia took over the night. If the response to Dylan’s first electric numbers had been uncertain, the applause for the Band’s first
familiar set loud and passionate, here the cheers dwarfed all that had come before and all that followed. Part of the crowd didn’t want to share their hero with backup musicians (not unless that was all they were, and it wasn’t); some people wanted to hear the words; a lot of people still hate rock ’n’ roll, especially the impolite version the Band was serving up. They wanted that old-time harmonica religion, and they cheered harmonica solos the way the rest of rock ’n’ roll America cheers drum solos. They wanted noble sentiments and enemies to hate; they wanted the ambiguity the last few years have enforced on life washed away, and Dylan, on his own, had such things to offer. Here he was submitting to the worst desires of his audience, and raising the most tired ghosts of his past. That’s all it seemed like—most of the acoustic numbers had none of the aggressive novelty, really a new sense of time, that was so striking in the electric sets. It’s not a matter of genre: “Wedding Song” sounds as if it could have come from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
but that doesn’t make it a throwback.

Here was “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” even more lifeless and impersonal in 1974 than in 1964; “The Gates of Eden,” which was ridiculous in 1965 and still is; and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

The title of that last song implies that the singer wants to reach out to a friendless woman, but the song is morally closed exactly where “George Jackson” is morally open, and a true attempt at friendship. I think Dylan would recognize, today, that Hattie Carroll’s death was more important than William Zantzinger’s six-month sentence. But while I thought how much better it would have been for Dylan to have sung “George Jackson,” and tried to understand why that song seems both more modest and more important than “Hattie Carroll,” I got a sense of why it would have been wrong for Dylan to sing the newer song. It had to do, as in so much of what’s at the heart of Dylan’s recent songs, with privacy. Jackson was a human being to Dylan—a man, not a principle—and while the record Dylan made when Jackson was killed expressed that, there is a way in which singing the song in front of
16,000 people would have been a shameful invasion of the privacy even dead men deserve: a man’s right not to be made into a symbol. Hattie Carroll was a symbol, and she remains a symbol, as if she was never alive. She didn’t die so Dylan could sing about her, and so we could applaud our own rejection of her killer’s punishment, but that’s all the song can do for her. Well, much of the crowd cheered and even stood up for morality, for justice, for better times, for when the world was black and white. It’s said that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense after listening to “Mr. Tambourine Man” over and over, but this night, likely in the same town, perhaps only a few miles from the place where Bob Dylan was playing, you could have found the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst—if you knew where to look.

The songs that hit had new meanings—as events. With barely an exception they seemed to be sent out to every member of the audience, to roll out and change us and then bounce back to change the way we saw the singer on the stage. “When You Go Your Way and I Go Mine” was presented as Dylan’s declaration of independence, and we cheered it as such (again, it was exhilarating to hear someone make so strong a statement), but the performance had room for us, too. “Ballad of a Thin Man”—I used to see Dylan sing that song, and I knew who Mr. Jones was: everyone who wasn’t cool enough to buy a ticket to a Bob Dylan concert, the folkies who booed, the
others.
This night I had no doubt at all that I was Mr. Jones, that the image did not have to stretch to take in those around me, that Dylan meant much of the rage and contempt of the song for himself. Here the new style made it home—Dylan screaming “MISTER JO-
HONES!
” and flipping Jerry Lee Lewis riffs off his piano—and if the song condemned anyone, it wasn’t those who didn’t know, but those who wouldn’t learn. When he sang “Wedding Song,” it seemed not merely a tribute to his wife (if that’s all it is, why bother to sing to anyone else?), but a challenge to live with the kind of extremes that must be communicated with words like “blood,” “sacrifice,” “knife,” and “kill.” Even with the
context of Dylan’s private life, the song seemed less a victory to claim than a goal to reach for, and that mood was perhaps at the heart of the show. When I borrowed binoculars and looked at Dylan’s face, it was clear that his work is not easy for him to do, and the intensity in his face was staggering.