Bob Dylan is playing mostly covers these days. Unlike most rock performers, when he goes out on tour he rarely does more than one or two songs off his latest album (or three or four most recent albums). What he does instead is choose–with varying degrees of creativity from tour to tour and night to night–from a vast catalog of a generation’s classics, some 350 to 400 songs in all. They are his songs, of course, but the great majority of the interesting ones were written by someone else a long time ago.
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Last year, suddenly, all of this changed with an extraordinary tour that teamed Dylan with a stripped-down, three-piece band led by Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith. That tour began in northern California; I was able to see several of its early shows, and I felt I was watching Bob Dylan reclaim his past. Each night opened with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the exquisite, mocking, almost mythopoeic rendition of subculture paranoia that begins, “Johnny’s in the basement mixin’ up the medicine.” And Dylan didn’t whine it–he declaimed it, he yelled it. And almost every song that followed had a special spin, a special frisson: “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a song that, like “Homesick,” Dylan had rarely, if ever, played live; “Gates of Eden” done in a full rock workout; “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a keening plaint from the first album; the forgotten “Watching the River Flow,” from Greatest Hits, Vol. II; a live-wire version of “Joey,” a song that hadn’t been heard since the Rolling Thunder tour of 1975.
To me, that tour represented Dylan coming to terms with his past: he accepted that his new records and new songs were now secondary, and that those who still came to see him came not just to hear “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but also to catch just a whiff of the power and knowledge and truth that Dylan once exuded. These are confines, true; but within them there is more than enough room to move, particularly if Dylan takes the opportunity to plan out his shows, rethink his oeuvre, and do his best to once again speak through his songs. This year, like last, he is presenting a show that is certainly the equal of anything he’s done since that legendary Rolling Thunder Revue.
What set that second show apart–what sets this tour apart–is a thoroughgoing commitment to rock and roll. Dylan and Smith play charging, throaty Stratocasters for most of the show. The sound is stripped to the bones; where for most of his electric career Dylan has played with five- to ten-piece backing bands, the tour now is cozy and intimate. Last year Dylan eschewed even a harmonica; this year it appears frequently, and as he’s grown comfortable playing with Smith, his guitar playing has gained confidence as well. The small ensemble–one is tempted to call it “The Bob Dylan Combo”–has a friendly, ragged feel, with few practiced beginnings or endings. Rather Dylan holds a chord, strumming it aimlessly, as G.E. looks anxiously on to see what song he’s about to break into.
Dylan remains hard to like. It’s hard to forget about all the dreck he’s sloughed off on us these past ten years, and harder still–because those original images from 20 years ago were so strong–to swallow the way his opinions and outlook have changed. I was reminded of this during “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” the highlight of the acoustic set he played at Poplar Creek. It’s one of Dylan’s two or three most powerful songs, a rant of unequaled proportions and a “truth attack,” in Robert Shelton’s phrase, on a scale of “Like a Rolling Stone.” (Someone once wrote that “It’s Alright Ma” “is to capitalism what Darkness at Noon is to communism.”) The song (from the acoustic side of Bringing It All Back Home) was originally all the more powerful for the carefully articulated restraint with which Dylan sang it; a few years later, during his 1974 tour with the Band, it became the highlight of the show (and the live album, Before the Flood) in a scabrous and unrestrained solo spot. Dylan’s version at Poplar was the restrained one, sung carefully (except for a few blown lines). As he sang, I was thinking about the last couplet of the song: “And if my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Those were scary words in 1965, and scary today as well, as crazos run the world into the 21st century. Then I realized why we don’t feel the same kinship with Bob Dylan. Me, I’ve got some dangerous thought-dreams myself these days, and if I had to go to the guillotine, Bob Dylan–who shills for Israel, supports a crackdown on sexuality, bashes unions, and sucks up to wacko fundamentalists–would be one of the executioners.
