The last time I saw Bob Dylan perform was the last time anyone did—at the Beacon Theatre in December of 2019. The apocalyptically-themed setlist’s highlight was Can’t Wait, Dylan selling the lyric of “It’s a-mighty funny…[very long pause]…the end of time has a-just begun” with all the showmanship of the wrestler Gorgeous George, the dandy heel who in the mid-1950s looked straight at Bob in the Hibbing Veterans Memorial Building with a wink that said, “You’re making it come alive.”

Philip K. Dick believed the Roman Empire never ended; I feel similarly about Dylan’s gospel period. He never stopped preaching the word of God. He decided to couch it in rougher and rowdier language: extreme violence and sexual innuendo as the sugar that makes the soteriological-eschatological medicine go down. Since 1989’s Oh Mercy, those with ears to hear knew the End Times preacher hadn’t vacated the pulpit, while secular audiences appreciated a carnival barker conjuring religious claptrap as but one facet of the The Old, Weird America.

Exemplary of these smutty homilies, the literal profane alternating lyric by lyric with the literal sacred, play Narrow Way from 2012’s Tempest.

I got a heavy-stacked woman
With a smile on her face
And she has crowned my soul with grace.

While wry double entendres such as “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye, good luck/I can’t play the record ’cause my needle got stuck” abound on Rough and Rowdy Ways, something more is happening here. Front and centre is the depth of Dylan’s intimate connection to “the immortal spirit,” conveyed through both the direct language of religious experience and a Bloomean gnosis that perceives the divine in the works of Shakespeare, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, or in Bob Dylan’s case: in Freddy Krueger and Stevie Knicks.

Play Harold Bloom’s Omens of Millenium as analogy to the contemporary American gnosis Bob Dylan evokes on his new album:

How are we to understand the continuities, frequently apparent and sometimes real, between Gnosis and the everyday? Do people, in the shadow of the Millennium, confront archetypal images that somehow have an independent existence, or do they re-enact (and literalize) sacred patterns now reduced to fashions? Do they copy one another or turn within to copy something that is already themselves, the best and oldest elements in their selves?

My Own Version of You has been predominantly reviewed as black-humoured Frankenstein schtick. On first blush it does have a murder ballad-y tenor such as Man in the Long Black Coat or Ain’t Talkin’, but then come the lyrics:

You got the right spirit/you can feel it you can hear it/ you got what they call the immortal spirit/you can feel it all night/you can feel it in the morn/it creeps in your body the day you are born

Play Cross the Rubicon:

I feel the Holy Spirit inside and see the light that freedom gives/I believe it’s within the reach of every man who lives

Play the 150 – 210 CE Arab gnostic Monoimus:

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and say, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.’ Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate…If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.

Asked to define his spiritual position Bob Dylan once remarked, “I believe in Hank Williams singing I Saw the Light. I’ve seen the light too.” In this 70-minute double album he presents a Homeric playlist of that light incarnated as motion picture, musician, and military general. Play Mother of Muses.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott
And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and they went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day

The gravity of this particular Odyssey is unnerving, as though Bob Dylan isn’t wholly-certain posterity will remember The Rolling Stones and Indiana Jones and Anne Frank if he doesn’t write down their names. It’s equally inspiring, as St. James Infirmary and John Lee Hooker and It Happened One Night are established as everyday “sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate,” as everyday sources of knowing. This back catalog wades the waters of the sociological sacred and profane. Play Émile Durkheim:

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.

Bob Dylan preached of that Old Rugged Cross “all through the summers and into January,” and continues to. He’s not saying you can’t hear and feel the immortal spirit in religious tradition. He still believes “old time religion” can be just what we need. Nothing bothers him about “a straightforward puritanical tone” and “thump[ing] on the bible and proclaim[ing] the creed.” Yet with Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan follows Emerson away from the pews, “I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air.” The listener is invited to emerge from the profane time of a Covid epidemic and looming societal collapse to know Nat King Cole, know the Nature Boy. Know That Old Devil Moon and Memphis in June. Know Twilight Time as the spark of the divine: something we whistle, something someone wrote, something from within.

Nearly 70 years after encountering Gorgeous George, Dylan continues to make it come alive as he proselytizes that “Love Me or Leave Me by the great Bud Powell” can be our church. Jelly Roll Morton can be our church. Perhaps a bit of a stretch, even Don Henley can be our church. Houdini and all the heights of human ingenuity can be our church. Brando and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd make evident that movies are no secular religion; movies are the light that creaturely freedom gives. The blues “crept in [our body] the day we [were] born.” Beethoven’s sonatas are within the reach of every man who lives.

Amidst these “nymphs of the forest,” amidst all this “honor and faith” Dylan concludes his masterpiece with a 17-minute reminder that “the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun,” meaning throughout the “long strange trip of the naked ape” man will “pile on the pain” from which “only dead men are free.” Yet the predominant message remains optimistic of salvation. He reminds us that, “It’s darkest before the dawn.” He reminds us to walk the Narrow Way, to “be gentle brother, be gentle and pray.”

This weekend I attended the World of Bob Dylan Symposium to celebrate the opening of the Bob Dylan archives at the University of Tulsa. High points included Krystal S. Reyes’ earnest account of how the death of her husband taught her What Bob Dylan Can Teach Us About Grief and Loss, Steven Thwaits fighting back tears while recounting his interpersonal experiences at late-period Dylan concerts, and Len Cazaly’s interpretation of Bob Dylan, Modern Day Psalmist.

There were low points of course. Wonks gonna wonk after all. A few had the temerity to drone sentences direct from their papers such as, “Bob Dylan, born in Hibbing, Minnesota in…” as if all assembled did not know that Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing, Minnesota in…

I debated whether or not to write about the conference. It’s not that the display of Bob Dylan’s 1965 Newport leather jacket wasn’t neat. Or that an assemblage of like-minded Dylan fiends was not cause for celebration. My lack of enthusiasm stemmed from my own anti-academic hang-ups. Not being one myself, lacking the discipline to bore down on say An Exploration of Dylan’s Postmodern/Posthuman Educational Philosophies, or even knowing the man possessed such philosophies, I often oscillate between envy and resentment of academic stature. On the envy side of the coin: many, if not most, of these borer-downers got to the heart of some previously-unconsidered idea about Bob Dylan. Resentment-wise: a younger man, an “MA candidate,” as if all we lowly baccalaureate holders aren’t but a few dollars removed from becoming that, spoke at length of his ‘methodologies’ while showing us spreadsheets that detailed data he must have known didn’t particularly matter, but which data was his easiest entree into the Official Bob Dylan Scholars club.

On the second day however, I visited the Philbrook Museum to see an exhibit of Larry Clark’s famed Tulsa series.

I had seen the photo book before, and soon realized the actual prints didn’t hold any particular value over the reproductions. What affected me instead was a photographic exhibit by the former skateboarder and Scientologist, Kevin Smith muse, and My Name is Earl star Jason Lee.

“I like to move and roam and anticipate what lay ahead. And I’m especially inspired by rural America and what lay behind,” Lee wrote on his website. “This other life; the quiet and what remains. These empty places that somehow have that unique cinematic quality to them.”

Lee’s light-saturated photos of the rural ordinary reminded me of something obvious that mid-western fly-over country evokes so consistently—that the past is going away. As Bob Dylan told Bill Flanagan in 2017, “From 1970 till now, there’s been about 50 years, seems more like 50 million […] That was a wall of time that separates the old from the new and a lot can get lost in this kind of time.” Lost is the look of BP gas station tiles laid in 1941. Lost are the bathroom heat lamps in a hundred year old hotel, burning through a few million gigawatts just for the hell of it. Lost are the sun-cracked vinyl interiors of abandoned Impalas. Born, too late it so often seems, in 1983, even I can remember the orange upholstery on the couches of great-aunts born in 1912.

Indulgent, I concede. We all know there’s a time to be born and a time to die and that much must change in the interim. Roger McGuinn wrote those words and on Saturday evening, McGuinn himself sang for a rapt audience of conference attendees. He opened with “My Back Pages”. Older then; younger than that now. Truth was that McGuinn, even in excellent condition for a 76-year-old veteran of the music industry, did seem older now. McGuinn’s tired voice, the same pure instrument that invoked folk music into 1965’s popular consciousness, would occasionally waver, and when it did, I saw a room full of men with their darn hearts a-bleedin’.

And these visions of something beyond nostalgia, beyond the wistful; and these visages of naked pining from men and women who’d cared so much about Bob Dylan in the 1960s that half a century later here they were still trying to figure it all out—they made it all seem too cruel, because like the cinematic quality of the BP tiles, like that other life of our great aunts with their orange couches, Bob Dylan is going to go away too.

So it’s gratefully, maybe desperately, that all the post-humanists, all the Derridaeans, and even all the aspirant spreadsheet wonks look to the Dylan archives to ensure the sun will always shine on Bob Dylan’s fifty million recordings, his epicene leather jackets, his errata of time-encrusted compass blades; we all look to the archives hoping the sun will continue shinin’ through the trees on all that wild genius Bob Dylan has hurled against that desolate wall of time.

 

The following details are mandated by the Guild of Ignorant, Regional, and Irrelevant Music Reviewers:

• Bob Dylan did not speak to the audience.
• On these occasions, he did not wear a hat.
• His band did wear hats.
• Except for Tony Garnier and Donnie Herron, who did not wear hats.
• Nobel Prize!
• Songs from the 60s, unrecognizable.
• Sinatra songs sound like Sinatra isn’t even singing them!
• Turns out, Frank Sinatra is dead.

Note 1: I hereby wave my guildmember’s right to regurgitate my one-of-a-kind revisionist take on the gospel songs of Trouble No More.

Note 2: This review focuses primarily on the Nov. 12 show, but relies on impressions drawn from both Nov. 11 and 12.

Note 3: Low-end turns of phrase punning on Bob Dylan lyrics do adhere to guild standards.

*

These shows represented my 13^th and 14^th Dylan concerts. While this failed to impress some of the more seasoned Dylan fans drinking at the Waterford Inn prior to the show, bear in mind I didn’t start seeing Bob Dylan until 2006. The “upsinging” years. Soon after came the “instrument of torture” era.  While surely not as difficult as the alcoholic slogs of 1991, the loud and monotonous shows were better suited to some ZZ Top cover band than the greatest living songwriter.

Between 2006 and 2013 there’d usually be one or two songs of merit. For a while I hung my hat on Gonna Change My Way of Thinking because a lyric or two had changed. Yelling “No!” after the line “You think I’m over the hill” in Spirit on the Water was always a personal point of pride for me. Sometimes there’d be a poignant Workingman Blues #2 or Nettie Moore. Often the second song would be the lone surprise in the set, and so some casual salutation of If You See Her Say Hello would serve as the lone justification for my trip to stupid Syracuse, New York or stupid Rochester, Michigan. No offense to these towns; they are stupid only insofar as they are stupid places to vacation for any reason unrelated to Bob Dylan enthusiasm.

Seeing consecutive Dylan concerts in those early years would have been hard to fathom. The thrill came from being around other true believers, and from being in proximity to the man himself. Truth was, I was often bored during the shows.  No matter how spirited a reading of Shake Shake Mama was delivered, I had no qualms about acquiring much needed libations in the longest of beer lines.

But, happily, things have changed. I first noticed that something was happening at Toronto’s Sony Centre in 2014. He closed that set with Stay with Me. It was the first of the Tin Pan Alley standards I’d heard live. He was vulnerable, his voice was cracked but not broken, and as all the standards now do, it suited the best remaining aspect of Bob’s voice: his lower register. While each subsequent tour has benefitted from the tonal breakup of these standards, each one serves a specific thematic purpose: Stay with Me is a paean to fans whose enthusiasm had been stretched thin over the previous decade of sub-mediocrity.

Guess it’s true, I’m not good at a one-night stand
But I still need love ’cause I’m just a man
These nights never seem to go to plan
I don’t want you to leave, will you hold my hand?

Stay with Me.

The show begins with a little medley described on most bootlegs as Guitar Riffs? Somehow it sounds like several Bob Dylan songs but is actually none of them. Or maybe it is. There are over 600 of the damned things. Ultimately it’s goal is to get asses in seats. It also calls to mind the heyday of the NET when Larry Campbell and company would engage in a five-six song acoustic set.

The man walks to his piano and Things Have Changed is barked out in a fashion not much better than any of 2010’s bark-outs, but one bark out is good. One bark out is kind of cool. Then the casuals and lifelongs alike are satisfied by an It Ain’t Me Babe that features more melodic notes than were divulged in entire calendar years previous. His ‘voice of the 60’s counterculture’ contractual obligations are met with a Highway 61 that’s treated like Freebird, or in terms of NET Freebird’s, Silvio. The big, loud song of the night.  

At the Nov. 12 show, this led to dancing from not just the obsessives in the front rows, but nearly the entire theatre: millennials, the middle-aged, and seniors were swaying, head-banging, or doing hip-replacement-friendly versions of The Twist.

There’s no rhyme or reason as to why the Sunday crowd was so much more energized. Certainly Saturday’s gang was considerably deeper into their 24oz cups. Perhaps, and this is just a theory I’ve been working on, perhaps alcohol is a depressant that more often than not inhibits one’s ability to experience joy. I digress.

Bob Dylan, it turns out, likes to see people dancing and having a good time. And while no, he will not remark, “Hey, great dancing fellows!” just as he will not remark upon the local baseball nine or any ongoing gubernatorial elections, what he will do is give it his all to try and maintain that energy.

Why Try to Change Me Now sees a confident (even pompous, were it any other musical personage) strut to the mic. He commands the stage like an arthritic James Brown for a moment or two, selling the song with his droll mannerisms before a note is sung. His leg is cocked in a motionless version of the duck walk that justified several years’-worth of concerts for me. He holds the mic at an angle like Elvis. And then he sings the song with every ounce of emotion in his 76-year-old lungs. Though the song was not written by Dylan but Joseph McCarthy (1885 to 1943), the words must be written on Bob’s soul. Or more likely it’s simply easier to put some emotion into a song you haven’t sung several thousand times.

Summer Days is the first of the dramatically-improved songs on this leg of the NET. So often the soggiest of the loves/thefts, it now has a bouncy tempo invigorated by Donny Herron’s down-home fiddling. This quicker tempo also showcases another of Dylan’s still-extant vocal gifts: his excellent phrasing. All while he plunks away at the grand piano to his own internal rhythm.

This sets up a pattern for the next few songs. Melancholy Mood sees more strutting and emoting. Honest with Me is the best of the new arrangements, and sees sardonic deliveries of lines like

You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price

As ExpectingRain.com user Smoke pointed out, the song borrows the guitar riff from The Beach Boys’ Dance Dance Dance.

Once Upon a Time sees more central-stage crooning. It’s a sin to just lump it in with the previous torch songs however. Each of these vocal deliveries would have been a goddamn event just a couple years ago. And again, each one is delivered totally fresh because the palate has been cleansed by the jumpin’ and jivin’ on songs like Summer Days and Honest with Me.

If the slightly speedier Tryin’ to Get to Heaven works least among the new arrangements, it’s not without poignancy to hear Bob Dylan, still grinding away at the NET, either for himself, or for us, singing, “I been all around the world, boys.”

After the first night I determined the following two songs would constitute my bathroom/libations break. The human kidneys pay heed to no man or musical bard. Pay in Blood would have constituted the highlight of many post-2012 concerts I attended, simply because I like the song. Now it just harkens back to the more destitute days in the swamp, and it can be missed.

Even if I didn’t require the bathroom or the beer line I’d probably just go admire the $40 t-shirts at the merch stand during Tangled Up in Blue. I always skip it on bootlegs. It seems almost perverse that Bob dusts it off every night. Rarely is it performed with any enthusiasm. I believe it’s the most-played song on the NET by a country pie or two; the song obviously means something to Dylan, so I can’t understand why he doesn’t give it a rest and bring it back with a little more meaning for everyone involved. Oh well, why try to change him now?

September of My Years holds particular resonance not just for another excellent delivery, but also for lyrics like

As a man who has always had the wandering ways
I keep looking back to yesterdays
‘Til a long-forgotten love appears
And I find that I’m sighing softly as I near
September, the warm September of my years

Early Roman Kings and the tour debut of Scarlet Town will ever remain swamp creatures to me. But if I strain to hear them devoid of the context of all those forgettable 2013 renditions, I can see how they add layers to the set as a whole.

The audience is then treated, or in some cases, subjected to, eight minutes of Desolation Row. I understand how important this is to people seeing Bob Dylan for the first time ever, or for the first time in decades. And yet it’s a lot of lyrics to get through, and Dylan struggles to do it prolonged justice night after night. Too often the song sinks into a sing-songy pattern, and what flourishes are meant to brighten the chorus aren’t quite sufficient.

Thunder on the Mountain is the most fun of the new arrangements. Among the most played of his post-millennial compositions, Bob has changed his way of thinking about Alicia Keys and his army of “tough sons of bitches,” having borrowed the guitar riff from from the Beach Boys’ Shut Down, Part 2.

Love Sick is delivered in a serviceable fashion that, again, would have been a strong point of any 2012 show. Now it is reduced by all the previous high water marks. It calls to mind a piece of novelistic advice I read somewhere: that a writer can judge the strength of her novel based on the quality of what she’s willing to cut from it.

The band leaves the stage for an encore break that fools nobody. Or maybe it fools a few. Or maybe those few people are just ready to leave for whatever reasons. Maybe they’d expected 4.25 x 6’ images of the hanging, postmarked ‘66. At this juncture it is my time to shine. I wait for someone in the first couple rows to leave and I appropriate their seat. The gamble is that by this time of night security is disinterested in tackling and tasing anybody.

In any case, it’s worth the electroreceptive risk to get close as possible to Dylan even for these couple songs. There he stands, light come shining through that inimitable Jew fro. I see him drink from a cup of coffee, thinking and breathing, human and hunched. It’s Based Bob Dylan. And here’s where the early seat evacuator is missing out, because it is that ’66 Dylan. He may sound and look different. The human body does completely regenerate itself every seven years. But it’s the same man.

The audience becomes one big collective Bob Dylan appreciation society for Blowin’ in the Wind and Ballad of a Thin Man. It is my custom to point directly at Bob Dylan while yelling words to the effect of “Thank you Bob,” “Alright Bob,” or “We love you, Bob.” While this may prove unsettling to the long-suffering Bob Dylan, it gives me some meagre sense of connection. Older attendees nearby close their eyes, perhaps considering where they’d been when they first heard those singular lines of philosophical inquiry…How many roads…

At the conclusion of Thin Man, Dylan and his band take centre stage for a bow. And on the 12th the fans are given a little gesture from Bob, kind of like, “Applause? Why no, but if you must, I insist that you applaud only your own selves.” And while so slight a gesture won’t register for the ‘didn’t talk to the audience’ Music Critic at HatFancier.com or wherever, it’s a substantive gesture. It means the audience helped give Bob the energy needed to deliver a standout performance in a lifetime of performances, that we, by funding leg after leg of the NET through patience as much as our pocketbooks, have allowed Bob Dylan to be where he belongs: still on the road, heading for another joint.

Mike Sauve has written for The National Post, McSweeney’s, Variety, and many other publications. Novels include The Wraith of Skrellman, The Apocalypse of Lloyd and the forthcoming I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore. He’s currently working on a book about the Bob Dylan film Masked and Anonymous.

Before discussing how Bob Dylan sounded at the Beacon Theater this past week, let’s talk about how does it feel to see Bob Dylan in New York City in 2018.

And before I can describe how does it feel, I need to put my own capacity for feeling into context. I live immoderately and immodestly. I subject captive audiences in Uber pools to long bouts of pressured speech about my enthusiasm for Proust. I tip service providers, at best, erratically. At a hotel bar after the concert I shouted pseudo-intellectual opinions concerning the concept of nonlinear causality at a neuroscientist for 45 minutes. I then boasted to the beautiful English girl whom we were all trying in vain not to love (the one who looked like Rita Hayworth and laughed so sonorously that a train would cry) how I was in fact smarter than the neuroscientist, but then the neuroscientist was standing right beside her, and the neuroscientist just looked as though he felt deeply sorry for me. All of this is to say that, overtly, I do not always present as the most empathic individual. Less charitable parties might even remark that I bare a troubling resemblance of affect to the fictional Patrick Bateman of American Psycho notoriety. But let me tell you what happened at the Beacon on Saturday night. During Simple Twist of Fate, the young woman sitting beside me, a stranger, started to cry. I had but a moment to think, “Ahh quixotic youth!” and then Dylan broke into one of those harmonica solos in which he channels every fibre of his being, what is sometimes called Pure Dylan, and then I too started to cry. I’m not talking a single tear running down my cheek. I’m talking about gasping for breath and snot running into my mouth, all while concerned and embarrassed New York men in the vicinity were palming me their drink napkins in lieu of Kleenex. Just as I would regain my composure, the girl would lose hers again, and that would set me off, and this continued well into the next song. In one of those perfect moments of synchronicity  borne of a life of intemperate Bob Dylan enthusiasm that song was one of Dylan’s late-period comic masterpieces, Cry a While.

And nor was I the only grown-ass man on the fringes of the night, fighting back tears that I couldn’t control. I met a man of high spirits who I took to calling “late-period Orson Welles,” after he’d made it clear that ball-busting was not just acceptable but required. This bro-iest of bros admitted gleefully that he’d been, “Crying like a little bitch,” throughout the entire Friday performance. And of course in a classic New York swerve even this stereotypical Irish bastard turned out to be a playwright of serious renown.

The three of us and countless others were moved this way because Bob Dylan has become Great Again. Of course you can argue that Bob Dylan Never Stopped Being Great. As a wool-dyed Dylan apologist I have made this very claim, repeatedly. But right now—he is singing. Singing. Singing as only Dylan can. Remember that old bootleg, Nobody Sings Dylan. The part that’s left out is “…like Dylan.” The joke is that it doesn’t need to be said.

I credit his turnabout to the latest trilogy of cover albums. The two early 90’s albums of Americana covers led to the creative resurgence that birthed Time Out of Mind through to Modern Times, but also, depending on your interpretation, a five- to ten-year run of shows that were often total barn-burners. Now the Sinatra-inspired albums have reminded Dylan how to croon. The addition of these tin pan alley standards had improved his shows immeasurably in recent years. No longer did it feel like a monotonous ZZ Top cover band fronted by a rapping, shouting, and disengaged Tom Waits. There was a new sonic variety, but also a performative one. He would leave the organ to duck-walk and preen centre stage.  Since Bob Dylan is among the funniest people in the world, the reintroduction of his comic sensibilities into the shows cannot be understated. Even better, it occurred to Bob that he didn’t need the standards anymore. He could preen and croon on songs like When I Paint My Masterpiece and even Like A Rolling Stone.

Casual Dylan fans are often shocked when I tell them I’ve been to eighteen shows. Doesn’t get you a lot of cred in New York City, however. 300+ was the highest total I heard. A guy in his mid-30s (hereafter referred to as The Great Man) like myself had been to 90. (He was the partner of the Rita Hayworth woman, incidentally. It was out of respect for his greatness that we were all doin’ our best to deny her Hayworthian effects upon our collective sensorium.) But for the less hardcore fans, it’s important that Like a Rolling Stone be performed in a memorable way. Maybe some of them are assholes singing along to show they know the words to one of the most iconic songs of all time. But those assholes must have cared deeply about Bob Dylan at one point. So they deserve something substantive in the LARS slot, as we assholes of a more elitist ilk call it.

Did I mention that I like to drone on about Proust? What makes Proust so rewarding is that you have to work for it. Pages and pages and pages are concerned with the trivial minutiae of French society and how Monsieur du Charlus eats his soup or some shit. But it’s these long stretches of inanity that imbue the beautiful passages with their power. So all those 2009 shows when Bob plunked away at his stupid circus organ (or Instrument of Torture) have given this resurgence its depth of meaning. That ominous Ballad of a Thin Man that was too often the lone high point of that darker era is gone from the set list, but each and every person capable of truly caring knows that Something is Happening Here. Bob Dylan is back motherfuckers. He’s like a fighting rooster again. Increasingly, he even kind of looks like one. So let’s get 27 drinks at The Dublin House. Let’s weep openly and fall into each other’s arms.

And when Clinton Heylin is one day replaced by the writer who can appreciate the contemporary Bob Dylan experience, I will read of these Beacon shows in her books knowing that I bore witness to my time period’s northeastern leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, or this epoch’s Judas Concert that wasn’t really at the Royal Albert Hall. When I consider my brief interaction with the history of Bob Dylan, I will think of the Irish playwright pounding me on my already-compromised kidneys. I will think of the feats of strength that The Great Man and I engaged in, just moments after meeting ourselves, to provide a physical run-off for our spiritual cups that had runneth over. Out of respect for The Great Man I will try not to think of any individual smiles that may have evoked the highway blues from any 1940s screen siren-resemblant persons lest I become too inappropriately reverential. I will however think of weeping beside my seatmate and understanding the exact depths of emotion she was experiencing, which was one of the more profound experiences of my life.

I’ve yelled this into your ear long enough. It’s time that I should be Bringing It All Back Home Again. Have you heard the Good News? It’s that Bob Dylan, who both the religious scholar Seth Rogoyov and I believe is a genuine prophet of God, is Back in the New York Groove. And nothing compares to seeing Bob Dylan in the town that birthed Bob Dylan. The Great Man said that as a Brit, he understood Visions of Johanna in a new way once he was able to walk the streets of Greenwich Village and set his eyes on that crummy little hotel over Washington Square. The Great Man and I speculated on what Bob Dylan would be like if he didn’t make it to New York at the exact time period he did. But not possible isn’t it? As Bob Dylan has said, he was ready for New York.

Did I mention that, in addition to Proust, I like to yell about nonlinear causality? It’s the idea that an effect needn’t follow a cause, meaning the future might be capable of influencing the past. You can imagine how much this proposition must have annoyed the neuroscientist: but humour me. Maybe all those real tears cried at this miraculous run of 2018 shows were part of what brought Bob Dylan to New York in 1961. Though The Great Man and I wouldn’t be born for another twenty years, nor the tearful girl in the abutting seat for another thirty, maybe he was coming for us.

*

The following details are mandated by the Guild of Ignorant, Regional, and Irrelevant Music Reviewers:

• Bob Dylan did not speak to the audience.
• On these occasions, he did not wear a hat.
• His band did wear hats.
• Except for Tony Garnier and Donnie Herron, who did not wear hats.
• Nobel Prize!
• Songs from the 60s, unrecognizable.
• Sinatra songs sound like Sinatra isn’t even singing them!
• Turns out, Frank Sinatra is dead.

Note 1: I hereby wave my guildmember’s right to regurgitate my one-of-a-kind revisionist take on the gospel songs of Trouble No More.

Note 2: This review focuses primarily on the Nov. 12 show, but relies on impressions drawn from both Nov. 11 and 12.

Note 3: Low-end turns of phrase punning on Bob Dylan lyrics do adhere to guild standards.

*

These shows represented my 13^th and 14^th Dylan concerts. While this failed to impress some of the more seasoned Dylan fans drinking at the Waterford Inn prior to the show, bear in mind I didn’t start seeing Bob Dylan until 2006. The “upsinging” years. Soon after came the “instrument of torture” era.  While surely not as difficult as the alcoholic slogs of 1991, the loud and monotonous shows were better suited to some ZZ Top cover band than the greatest living songwriter.

Between 2006 and 2013 there’d usually be one or two songs of merit. For a while I hung my hat on Gonna Change My Way of Thinking because a lyric or two had changed. Yelling “No!” after the line “You think I’m over the hill” in Spirit on the Water was always a personal point of pride for me. Sometimes there’d be a poignant Workingman Blues #2 or Nettie Moore. Often the second song would be the lone surprise in the set, and so some casual salutation of If You See Her Say Hello would serve as the lone justification for my trip to stupid Syracuse, New York or stupid Rochester, Michigan. No offense to these towns; they are stupid only insofar as they are stupid places to vacation for any reason unrelated to Bob Dylan enthusiasm.

Seeing consecutive Dylan concerts in those early years would have been hard to fathom. The thrill came from being around other true believers, and from being in proximity to the man himself. Truth was, I was often bored during the shows.  No matter how spirited a reading of Shake Shake Mama was delivered, I had no qualms about acquiring much needed libations in the longest of beer lines.

But, happily, things have changed. I first noticed that something was happening at Toronto’s Sony Centre in 2014. He closed that set with Stay with Me. It was the first of the Tin Pan Alley standards I’d heard live. He was vulnerable, his voice was cracked but not broken, and as all the standards now do, it suited the best remaining aspect of Bob’s voice: his lower register. While each subsequent tour has benefitted from the tonal breakup of these standards, each one serves a specific thematic purpose: Stay with Me is a paean to fans whose enthusiasm had been stretched thin over the previous decade of sub-mediocrity.

Guess it’s true, I’m not good at a one-night stand
But I still need love ’cause I’m just a man
These nights never seem to go to plan
I don’t want you to leave, will you hold my hand?

Stay with Me.

The show begins with a little medley described on most bootlegs as Guitar Riffs? Somehow it sounds like several Bob Dylan songs but is actually none of them. Or maybe it is. There are over 600 of the damned things. Ultimately it’s goal is to get asses in seats. It also calls to mind the heyday of the NET when Larry Campbell and company would engage in a five-six song acoustic set.

The man walks to his piano and Things Have Changed is barked out in a fashion not much better than any of 2010’s bark-outs, but one bark out is good. One bark out is kind of cool. Then the casuals and lifelongs alike are satisfied by an It Ain’t Me Babe that features more melodic notes than were divulged in entire calendar years previous. His ‘voice of the 60’s counterculture’ contractual obligations are met with a Highway 61 that’s treated like Freebird, or in terms of NET Freebird’s, Silvio. The big, loud song of the night.  

At the Nov. 12 show, this led to dancing from not just the obsessives in the front rows, but nearly the entire theatre: millennials, the middle-aged, and seniors were swaying, head-banging, or doing hip-replacement-friendly versions of The Twist.

There’s no rhyme or reason as to why the Sunday crowd was so much more energized. Certainly Saturday’s gang was considerably deeper into their 24oz cups. Perhaps, and this is just a theory I’ve been working on, perhaps alcohol is a depressant that more often than not inhibits one’s ability to experience joy. I digress.

Bob Dylan, it turns out, likes to see people dancing and having a good time. And while no, he will not remark, “Hey, great dancing fellows!” just as he will not remark upon the local baseball nine or any ongoing gubernatorial elections, what he will do is give it his all to try and maintain that energy.

Why Try to Change Me Now sees a confident (even pompous, were it any other musical personage) strut to the mic. He commands the stage like an arthritic James Brown for a moment or two, selling the song with his droll mannerisms before a note is sung. His leg is cocked in a motionless version of the duck walk that justified several years’-worth of concerts for me. He holds the mic at an angle like Elvis. And then he sings the song with every ounce of emotion in his 76-year-old lungs. Though the song was not written by Dylan but Joseph McCarthy (1885 to 1943), the words must be written on Bob’s soul. Or more likely it’s simply easier to put some emotion into a song you haven’t sung several thousand times.

Summer Days is the first of the dramatically-improved songs on this leg of the NET. So often the soggiest of the loves/thefts, it now has a bouncy tempo invigorated by Donny Herron’s down-home fiddling. This quicker tempo also showcases another of Dylan’s still-extant vocal gifts: his excellent phrasing. All while he plunks away at the grand piano to his own internal rhythm.

This sets up a pattern for the next few songs. Melancholy Mood sees more strutting and emoting. Honest with Me is the best of the new arrangements, and sees sardonic deliveries of lines like

You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price

As ExpectingRain.com user Smoke pointed out, the song borrows the guitar riff from The Beach Boys’ Dance Dance Dance.

Once Upon a Time sees more central-stage crooning. It’s a sin to just lump it in with the previous torch songs however. Each of these vocal deliveries would have been a goddamn event just a couple years ago. And again, each one is delivered totally fresh because the palate has been cleansed by the jumpin’ and jivin’ on songs like Summer Days and Honest with Me.

If the slightly speedier Tryin’ to Get to Heaven works least among the new arrangements, it’s not without poignancy to hear Bob Dylan, still grinding away at the NET, either for himself, or for us, singing, “I been all around the world, boys.”

After the first night I determined the following two songs would constitute my bathroom/libations break. The human kidneys pay heed to no man or musical bard. Pay in Blood would have constituted the highlight of many post-2012 concerts I attended, simply because I like the song. Now it just harkens back to the more destitute days in the swamp, and it can be missed.

Even if I didn’t require the bathroom or the beer line I’d probably just go admire the $40 t-shirts at the merch stand during Tangled Up in Blue. I always skip it on bootlegs. It seems almost perverse that Bob dusts it off every night. Rarely is it performed with any enthusiasm. I believe it’s the most-played song on the NET by a country pie or two; the song obviously means something to Dylan, so I can’t understand why he doesn’t give it a rest and bring it back with a little more meaning for everyone involved. Oh well, why try to change him now?

September of My Years holds particular resonance not just for another excellent delivery, but also for lyrics like

As a man who has always had the wandering ways
I keep looking back to yesterdays
‘Til a long-forgotten love appears
And I find that I’m sighing softly as I near
September, the warm September of my years

Early Roman Kings and the tour debut of Scarlet Town will ever remain swamp creatures to me. But if I strain to hear them devoid of the context of all those forgettable 2013 renditions, I can see how they add layers to the set as a whole.

The audience is then treated, or in some cases, subjected to, eight minutes of Desolation Row. I understand how important this is to people seeing Bob Dylan for the first time ever, or for the first time in decades. And yet it’s a lot of lyrics to get through, and Dylan struggles to do it prolonged justice night after night. Too often the song sinks into a sing-songy pattern, and what flourishes are meant to brighten the chorus aren’t quite sufficient.

Thunder on the Mountain is the most fun of the new arrangements. Among the most played of his post-millennial compositions, Bob has changed his way of thinking about Alicia Keys and his army of “tough sons of bitches,” having borrowed the guitar riff from from the Beach Boys’ Shut Down, Part 2.

Love Sick is delivered in a serviceable fashion that, again, would have been a strong point of any 2012 show. Now it is reduced by all the previous high water marks. It calls to mind a piece of novelistic advice I read somewhere: that a writer can judge the strength of her novel based on the quality of what she’s willing to cut from it.

The band leaves the stage for an encore break that fools nobody. Or maybe it fools a few. Or maybe those few people are just ready to leave for whatever reasons. Maybe they’d expected 4.25 x 6’ images of the hanging, postmarked ‘66. At this juncture it is my time to shine. I wait for someone in the first couple rows to leave and I appropriate their seat. The gamble is that by this time of night security is disinterested in tackling and tasing anybody.

In any case, it’s worth the electroreceptive risk to get close as possible to Dylan even for these couple songs. There he stands, light come shining through that inimitable Jew fro. I see him drink from a cup of coffee, thinking and breathing, human and hunched. It’s Based Bob Dylan. And here’s where the early seat evacuator is missing out, because it is that ’66 Dylan. He may sound and look different. The human body does completely regenerate itself every seven years. But it’s the same man.

The audience becomes one big collective Bob Dylan appreciation society for Blowin’ in the Wind and Ballad of a Thin Man. It is my custom to point directly at Bob Dylan while yelling words to the effect of “Thank you Bob,” “Alright Bob,” or “We love you, Bob.” While this may prove unsettling to the long-suffering Bob Dylan, it gives me some meagre sense of connection. Older attendees nearby close their eyes, perhaps considering where they’d been when they first heard those singular lines of philosophical inquiry…How many roads…

At the conclusion of Thin Man, Dylan and his band take centre stage for a bow. And on the 12th the fans are given a little gesture from Bob, kind of like, “Applause? Why no, but if you must, I insist that you applaud only your own selves.” And while so slight a gesture won’t register for the ‘didn’t talk to the audience’ Music Critic at HatFancier.com or wherever, it’s a substantive gesture. It means the audience helped give Bob the energy needed to deliver a standout performance in a lifetime of performances, that we, by funding leg after leg of the NET through patience as much as our pocketbooks, have allowed Bob Dylan to be where he belongs: still on the road, heading for another joint.

Mike Sauve has written for The National Post, McSweeney’s, Variety, and many other publications. Novels include The Wraith of Skrellman, The Apocalypse of Lloyd and the forthcoming I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore. He’s currently working on a book about the Bob Dylan film Masked and Anonymous.

Adrian DeVuono might be the funniest and most intelligent person to come from my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie. Unless that’s astronaut Roberta Bondar, who can be seen at the Thunder Bay Yuk Yuks this Friday through Sunday.  DeVuono is rumoured to have delivered his dissertation while sporting a foam #1 finger. When he goes to a Sault Ste. Marie fine-dining establishment like Wacky Wings he says things like, “I’ll have a large grapefruit juice,” and when the waitress says, “We don’t have grapefruit juice,” he says, “I’ll just have a small.”  He is, to the increasing disdain of his peers, a world traveler.  Above all, he is a Bob Dylan fan.

Mike Sauve:  Every time we talk there seems to be at least one “Wiggle Wiggle” reference or discussion of some abysmal Dylan song or 80s album.  Why do you think bad Bob Dylan music is so much funnier than bad music in general?  I guess one obvious reason is that he’s made so much good music.

Adrian DeVuono:  I think Dylan’s bad music is especially hilarious because, unlike other, lesser artists who simply make bad decisions and carry them out with obnoxious sincerity, Dylan always sounds like he can’t remember who made a decision regarding a song’s lyric or production element, or why that decision was made, even as he’s meandering helplessly through it. That quality, which they called “mystical” in the sixties, in the later years is just a kind of shellshocked confusion. On these awful recordings he sounds like a heavily-medicated Marx Brother or, better yet, Chance the Gardener from “Being There.” He’s completely lost. He just utters these bizarrely cryptic lines (“Wiggle Wiggle ’till you vomit fire”), sounding as if he’s in constant danger of slipping back into the fog of a dental anesthesia while an amateur band herded from the local casino  blissfully and vacantly hammers away at a vaguely “bluesy” chord progression. Listen to “Brownsville Girl”: while Bob is unspooling eleven exhausting minutes of a plot summary of a Western he thinks he remembers seeing, a group of Gladys Knight impersonators starts shrieking out inappropriate responses like a gospel choir moaning in exaggerated sexual distress. It’s almost as if, with every inappropriate “mmmm-hmmmm” and “whrrraaaaoooogh,” Dylan gets startled to the point of distraction (“What the hell was that?”) and loses his place in the story. It’s very funny to hear Dylan so lost, confused, and kind of apathetic, especially after something like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

MS:  While we’re talking humour, one of my favourite things about Bob Dylan is that even if he hadn’t written so many important songs, so many beautiful songs, so many groundbreaking songs, he’d still be adored as one of the great humorists.  In the early 60s he was often compared to Charlie Chaplin, and even in recent years his dancing has been downright hilarious.  Can you discuss Dylan as humorist?

AD:   Dylan’s humour has so many sides, so many modes of expression. Sometimes he’s silly (“The Basement Tapes”) and sometimes he’s giddy (“I Want You”); sometimes its scathing social satire (“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”), sometimes it’s derisive put-downs (“Positively 4th Street”) and sometimes it’s theatre of the absurd (Bob Dylan’s Dream). Dylan’s best songs, however, are convulsive and cubist in structure. Here, humour is used as one more prop in Dylan’s bag of lyrical tricks. Even at his most topical, Bob understood how tears of rage, tears of sadness, and tears of laughter are indistinguishable. Listen closely to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,” especially the last verse, and you’ll hear how he constructs it as an elaborate, difficult joke. William Zanzinger’s six-month sentence, within the construction of that song, is played as a cruel prank, a horrible joke — but a joke nonetheless. The way he builds up to that last line, with mawkish, sarcastic rhymes and perfectly-timed delays, shows that he’s arriving at a punchline. Elsewhere, the image of “guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children” comes off as no less absurd than any of the brilliantly arranged comic set-pieces in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” Within the absurdist, cubist universe of his lyrics, no image is stable enough to be confined to a single mode of expression. There’s a current of sneering, derisive, impudent, impish, downright goofy laughter on those early masterpieces. No one comes away without being riffed on. I think he picked this up from Allen Ginsberg who would read “Howl” to college audiences and would have them all howling with laughter. Everyone got mocked. I’m glad Bob rediscovered this skill on his recent albums and I think that’s why they’re so much better than the stuff that preceded them. When he excavated the surrealist side of Americana (particularly on “Love and Theft” and “The Tempest”), he seemed to find rejuvenation from wearing that mischievous mask again. It’s amazing to hear him, in a growling voice, stacking these complex, multifaceted comic images that fuse Mark Twain’s riverboat ribaldry and Guillaume Apollinaire’s cubist verse until he’s rehearsing this hilarious and horrifying apocalyptic vaudeville. It’s open mic night with Stagger Lee! Howlin’ Wolf doing his impression of Benny Goodman! There’s still plenty of laughter for, and at, this brutal world he seems to be saying on his most recent recordings. That’ll be his legacy as a humorist.

MS:  As an academic what do you think of the surge of Bob Dylan studies, Bob Dylan wings being built at all the major institutions, etc.?

AD:  I know it’s inevitable, but it is unsettling all the same. I just hope that students don’t forget what made him so dangerous, what made him such a threat to the very establishments they’ll be publishing papers for and pursuing tenure within, in the first place. I hope, also, they appreciate the irony of studying a poet who railed against these places which sell “roadmaps for the soul.” I take comfort, however, in the fact that his recordings – especially the live ones from 1966 and 1975 – are so volatile, so threatening, so aggressively defiant, that they’ll retain their unsettling power for decades to come.

MS:  Every year there’s some buzz that Dylan should receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, then some grey-bearded defenders of Literature harrumph their way into the conversation and say it should go to someone experimenting with aphonetic clicking sounds as text.  You think he should get it?

AD:  No, I don’t think he should get it. To explain why, I’ll paraphrase a terrific argument I read once, though I can’t for the life of me remember where. The author of that piece argued, quite rightly, that Dylan, though deserving of the award, doesn’t need it and we don’t need Dylan to receive it. No one will discover Dylan because of the award; he has all the recognition he needs and requires to transmit his art. He was in a Victoria’s Secret commercial with Adriana Lima, for God’s sake. No one needs a Nobel after that. His genius has been acknowledged worldwide. But there are other brilliant and deserving writers, who are reading their novels or poems to rooms of maybe twenty or thirty people (while Dylan continues playing incomprehensible versions of “Blowing in the Wind” to basketball arena-sized crowds), who do need the Nobel – which immediately guarantees financial stability and a wider audience – in order to continue creating. Yes, the Nobel committee makes indisputably pretentious selections but, for every poet exploring aphonetic clicking, there’s a Jose Saramago or a Kenzaburo Oe whose books start appearing on bookshelves, in deserving translations, outside of their homeland. I’d rather see the attention and cash go to Peter Nadas or Adonis, just for the sake of discovery, rather than pinning one more gold medal on the chest of the man who gave the world “Down in the Groove.”

MS:  Tarantula is not a very good novel, but it does have some funny moments.  From a literary perspective, what do you think of just reading Dylan songs on the page.

AD:  I have trouble with it. The music belonging to those words is too deeply set in my memory for the lyrics themselves to take on any independent rhythm or meaning. I wonder if you can even divorce the two like that. I mean, it’d be like reading a poem in translation – there would always be an element missing. It would be an interesting experiment though: give, say, “Visions of Johanna” to a scholar who has never heard the song and ask for an analysis.

MS:  Do you ever mishear Dylan until you read the lyrics?  For years I thought “Yonder stands your orphan with his gun” was “He understands your orphaned with his gun”, which, to the credit of my subconscious, may be a better line.

AD:  There was a long period of time when, if asked, I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that I recognized more than ten words in “Jokerman” as belonging to the English language. Everyone who has ever wanted to do a bad Dylan impersonation at a party for easy laughs should start here.

MS:  I think you understand that for a serious fan, to see Dylan in recent years is to really hope to hear one or two perfect songs.  I remember you were ecstatic to have heard “Nettie Moore” in 2006, and some other song when you were in Italy, can you talk about that moment when you realize he’s playing the song you came to hear?

AD:  When I saw Dylan in Viareggio, I remember that I had half an hour to get my ass over to the station to catch the last train back to Florence. I decided to stay, as I hadn’t really heard anything memorable up to that point. I was rewarded with an absolutely mesmerizing version of “Not Dark Yet” where Dylan sang the line “sometimes I don’t know why / I should even care” in a soft Dean Martin croon, where he adopted the attitude of what, in Italian, we call a menefreghista – someone who simply doesn’t give a fuck. Suddenly, the song shed the bottomless despair of the studio version and took on this resigned, accepting, satisfied sadness. For six minutes I watched Dylan inhabit the ghost of Roberto Murolo as he transformed “Not Dark Yet” into one of those unbearably light Neapolitan canzone of sweet Mediterranean melancholy. It was a perfect fusion of sound and place. Dylan as early Roman king. I slept in the train station that night on a bench. I have no regrets.

MS:  Top Five Dylan songs the casual listener has never heard?

AD:  To Ramona

One Too Many Mornings (Live 1966)

Romance in Durango

Red River Shore

Highwater (for Charley Patton)

MS:      Favourite Dylan album?

AD:      Blonde on Blonde.