DYLAN & THE DEAD
On the personal-appearance front, Dylan’s performance has been a bit more mixed. After the cacophonous roar of the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1976—a tour that produced an underrated movie and some great bootlegs—Dylan hit the road in 1978 with a set of rigid new arrangements for his songs. On this outing, known as the Budokan tour after the live album recorded at Tokyo’s Budokan Stadium, Dylan dressed in jumpsuits and sequins and was backed up by something akin to a Las Vegas show band; he opened each show with a jaunty instrumental version of “My Back Pages” (the mournful song from Another Side of Bob Dylan with the chorus that goes, “But I was so much older then . . .”). This was a weird and unsettling tour. I remember one show as a stilted minuet, another as transcendent—though I must confess that for the latter I was well dosed with Quaaludes.
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Next came two tours to support Dylan’s trio of religious records—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. On the first tour, Dylan sang songs from the first of these albums, relieved only by other religious songs. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a room with a whiny, has-been singer knocking off compositions like “God Gave Names to All the Animals” without a trace of irony, but it’s not much fun. (I did it four or five times; it’s when I lost my sense of humor about Dylan.) The show varied hardly at all from night to night; reports of boos and protests from the tour’s initial two-week stand in San Francisco were exaggerated, but neither were there cheers, save from creepy bands of fundamentalists who came out of the woodwork to encourage their latest convert. A year or so later, Dylan went out again, presenting a gentler show (under pressure, it was said, from tour promoter Bill Graham). Gospel still dominated the proceedings—particularly fire-and-brimstone stuff like “In the Garden,” from Saved—but occasionally, grudgingly, movingly, Dylan would sink into something luminous, like “Girl From the North Country.”
Two of the seven cuts are from Dylan’s first Christian album: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which became an unlikely Top 40 single and gave Dylan his first (and only) Grammy, and “Slow Train.” Two others are Dylan warhorses, each appearing twice before on live albums alone: “All Along the Watchtower” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” (Including studio recordings, “Knockin’” has appeared four times previously, “Watchtower” five.) Besides these, there are three interesting selections: “I Want You,” a percolating gem from Blonde on Blonde; “Queen Jane Approximately,” a forgotten song from Highway 61 Revisited (“Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”); and “Joey,” a long ballad about the life and death of gangster Joey Gallo.
“Joey” is next. This song, from Desire, hadn’t been heard since the Rolling Thunder tour before Dylan brought it out for this placid version with the Dead and then for a fabulous, rocked-out version with G.E. Smith and the boys last year. It’s a problematic piece of work: the best that can be said for it is that Dylan, having dealt with the mythos of the outlaw rudimentarily on the Pat Garrett soundtrack, wanted to try his hand at modern-day balladeering, leaving us to grapple with the moral difficulties of glorifying criminals. Joey Gallo sounds like a creep from the lyrics, their blatant rationalizing notwithstanding. A lot of the song’s dulling literalness comes, one supposes, from the collaboration of Jacques Levy, a Broadway director and lyricist whom Dylan met through Roger McGuinn. (Levy cowrote the lovely “Chestnut Mare.”) “Joey” was Levy’s idea, it is said, and together the two labored, coming up with lines like:
Anyway, the Dead, who contribute some credible backup vocals, pick up the tempo a bit here and manage to bring the song in in under ten minutes. Dylan bleats like he means it and stumbles lyrically only once or twice.
