Bob Dylan hammers shiny new shapes from vintage gold
By Tom Moon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
seacoastonline.com
PHILADELPHIA - Moments before Bob Dylan walked onstage at different venues on three successive nights last week, an anonymous announcer served up an overview of the bard’s career. Through the sometimes deafening applause, you could pick up such phrases as "substance abuse" and "found God," and "who was written off as a has-been in the late ‘80s."
The idea, evidently, was to acquaint newcomers to the Church of Bob with his unprecedented reach, the myriad ways his music has informed and commented upon and threaded through American life during more than four trippy decades.
Then the band would start up, and every night the same thing happened: Time flattened.
No matter how old the song was, or how many times Dylan had done it, what you heard was music coalescing in the present, alive with possibility and never far from the threat of derailment.
The classic songs - "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right" at Monday’s show, the "If Not For You" that hushed the hall on Tuesday, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" Wednesday, the nightly "Like a Rolling Stone" encore - were not rendered as classics. They were just raw material, intended to be ripped apart and reassembled, ripe for renewal.
Songs many knew by heart were not played by rote. The vocal melodies and the basic rhythms became rough guides, with all hands, particularly the time-mangling guitarist Freddy Koella, seeking ways to make them speak to some aspect of the present. Dylan sang the line "Why don’t you break my heart one more time just for good luck," from "Summer Days," and each time it took on its own idiosyncratic energy. On Tuesday he was vindictive, but the next night, he sounded almost forlorn, lost in a totally different type of woman trouble.
This isn’t a new development. It’s possible to hear Dylan toying, albeit more gingerly, with his melodies way back on Halloween night in 1964, in the solo Philharmonic Hall concert that was released last week as "The Bootleg Series Vol. 6." And it’s even more evident on the 1994 MTV "Unplugged" concert, just out on DVD, the performance many cite as a catalyst in his now decade-long resurgence.
I was in the room for one of those thrilling "Unplugged" performances. What was evident then, and inescapable now, is how dedicated he is to making his songbook a living entity. What became even clearer, after the Dylan immersion available to concertgoers this week, was how closely his approach mirrors that of the great legends, such as bluesman Muddy Waters, who made listeners believe he found new delights in "Hoochie Coochie Man" nightly.
Dylan has the same interpretive-curiosity gene. But when he steps up to the keyboard (!) to perform, he faces an even greater challenge: Because so many in his audience affix his songs to a particular era and ideology, he has to shake the material free of its historical associations, the topical ‘60s-documentary baggage.
His 2004 reading of "Masters of War" was full of disbelief and menace, and it spoke with equal resonance to Iraq or Vietnam. He made lots of songs matter all over again, sometimes through new arrangements or with a quirky vocal twist. His "The Times They Are A-Changin"’ became a surreal lament about how the hyperspeed assault of information has left us grasping always for more and understanding less.
It says something that a song born out of such a specific cultural milieu can morph, signifying new shades of meaning decades later. The vast majority of classic rock doesn’t do this. You hear Eric Clapton playing "Layla" live, and it’s the same majestic journey he took way back when. You hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sing "Carry On," and they’re survivors frozen in time, stuck with a remaindered idealism so out of date it’s quaint.
Dylan is something else - because of his dedication to live performance, every night has the potential to be a completely different experience. Catch him often enough, and you stop wanting that definitive version of "Like a Rolling Stone." You stop caring what songs this tireless, 62-year-old road warrior chooses at all. You’re happy just to ride along as he barrels through the suffocating nostalgia impulse, destination unknown, chasing down some crazy expression even he, after so many laps around these tracks, has never heard before. |
