The Song Of A Poet

Bob Dylan’s performance art often proves the old maxim that familiarity breeds contempt.

A set list that contains ‘Desolation Row’, ‘It’s All Right, Ma’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is likely to be greeted with an indifferent shrug by die-hard fans. However, a set list containing ‘Black Crow Blues’, ‘Peggy Day’, ‘Emotionally Yours’, ‘Billy’ and ‘Alberta’ would probably have the same fans scrambling for mp3s of the performances.

Of course, the novelty of the new wears off very quickly as well. ‘Jokerman’ in 1994, ‘Down in the Flood’ in 1995 and ‘If Dogs Run Free’ and ‘Country Pie’ in 2000 were all quickly consigned to the ‘same old, same old’ basket, as far as many fans were concerned. Perhaps ‘Romance in Durango’ would have suffered the same fate if Dylan had stuck with it a bit longer in 2003.

Sometimes the contempt is on Dylan’s part. You don’t have to look too far to find performances of him practically yawning his way through some of his greatest songs.

The problem with all this is that we can sometimes forget just how good the songs are. If Dylan is capable of turning previously dismissed song into sudden gems on the concert stage, he is equally capable of turning masterpieces into performance wreckages.

One masterpiece that has had a lively life on the road is ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ (referred to in the rest of this article as ‘Hard Rain’). This song has recently returned to prominence after Scorsese’s No Direction Home (where it features both in the documentary and the accompanying CD) and the Starbucks release of Live At The Gaslight 1962.

The song has been a fairly regular participant in most concert tours. Some performances have been sublime. In other performances, Dylan has sung the song as if his own tongue ‘were all broken’. It’s very difficult to point people to the power of the lyrics when all they can hear in the concert hall is a half-hearted Dylan wolfing and gargling and upsinging and mumbling his weary way through the barely remembered words.

Before going on to look at some memorable performances of the song, it is worth going back to the source. Try to forget all the live performances and listen to the version on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Note how carefully Dylan sings each line, sounding as old and confident as a cantankerous Old Testament prophet.

Carefully read the lyrics. Focus on the individual lines that catch your attention and then look at how they combine into such a powerful cumulative effect. See how the lyrics become as persistent as the hard rain they evoke.

2001 – Sky Full Of Fire, Rain Pourin' Down

So, I was in a semi-divorced state from the tour after finishing Razor’s Edge (first edition). I was concentrating on another book and on the studio albums. However, despite being somewhat distracted – and feeling a bit of a distance from the tour might be a good thing anyway after focussing on it for so long – the continuing technological advances and penetration of the internet made keeping up to date and receiving recent recordings easier than ever. In fact, you’d have had to work hard not to keep up to date in 2001. What a complete turnaround from twenty years earlier.

The same band that ended 2000 kicked off the new year with thirteen dates in Japan. A new balance of electric and acoustic songs was settled on after the first three dates. Dylan now opened with four acoustic, followed by four electric songs, then three more electric before a set format of encores with a mixture of four electric and three acoustic songs. The term acoustic had become somewhat meaningless by now, the old solo acoustic Dylan was long gone. String based band or semi-band backing had taken over and electric instruments were now heard in what we still – for convenience’s sake – refer to as the ‘acoustic’ slots. The openers were all cover songs as they would be throughout the year.

Naturally, I kept in touch with the general developments and especially the oddities (such as one-offs of ‘Chimes of Freedom’ and ‘In The Garden’) as the tour followed on through Australia and on to the US. The N.E.T. craving for novelty will never leave any of us I guess. I noted, too, that – in my limited experience – by the US spring tour Dylan was in stronger voice and the shows were more upbeat.

Perhaps this was only due to the shows I heard. More likely, I suspect, it was due to the thrill he got from being awarded an Oscar for ‘Things Have Changed’. Having already won the Golden Globe award in January for this nearly ever-present live song, the 25th of March ceremony found Dylan in a Sydney TV studio performing the song to be broadcast at the awards ceremony. It was fun to see, especially as it allowed the hard-working touring band exposure to such a vast audience.

By the US spring tour, the format had changed to three acoustic and three electric songs followed by three acoustic and three electric again and then the encores. In the 14 shows 62 songs were played, indeed the three US tours of the year featured an impressive variation of song selection; particularly as the last leg of the year found the set list radically altered due to Dylan heavily featuring songs from his new album, “Love And Theft”. However, I run ahead of myself.

Before then there was the summer tour of Europe. As we knew by then that Dylan had recorded a new album there were excited thoughts of previews of the new songs. Had I known then how brilliant the songs in question were, I suspect the anticipation would have been too much to bear.

As it happens, we didn’t hear the pre-release tapes of the new album until the tour was over, and the sane view that there was no way Dylan would play any of these songs prevailed. Dylan’s interview comments made clear that he was paranoid (justifiably, it has to be admitted) about bootleggers putting the new songs out before his record company.

How tragic, though, that inspirational new works were kept under wraps. How strange that must be for the artist – bursting to share his new visions but being forced to trot out the same old things instead.

So, summer was not in the end an auspicious time for my own 2001 N.E.T live experience. Still there was, as ever, much of interest. On the 28th of June in Langesund, Norway, the opening song was ‘Humming Bird’. This debut song was, in 1958, the biggest hit for Johnny and Jack. The teenage Dylan would have heard this duo playing the song whilst in Minnesota. In 2001 the near sixty-year-old Dylan had taken another musical track of theirs (‘Uncle John’s Bongos’) as the backing of the opening song to “Love And Theft”, ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. Not that we knew that then, nor that the “Love And Theft” title’s quotation marks were to mean so much. With the benefit of hindsight, Johnny and Jack were much in Bob Dylan’s mind that May and June.

May had also seen Dylan’s sixtieth birthday and the newspapers and magazines went to town again like they had for his fiftieth; one was left worried for the Amazon forest as career retrospective after career retrospective appeared and, naturally, all this proved good advertising for the upcoming dates.

There were only to be two UK dates that summer, but they seemed so appealing; Stirling Castle, with all the background of Scottish history adding glamour to the location, and Liverpool, home of the Beatles, with so much musical history intertwined with Dylan. This was the heartland of the UK; real people, real humour, real love of music, both traditional and popular.

In Liverpool for the ‘Summer Pops’ festival at the home of the Beatles, eighteen of Dylan’s twenty-one songs were from the 1960s. The first thing somebody said to me at the end of the show was: ‘I didn’t come here to hear a Sixties show’. Ah well, it’s very hard to please everyone all the time, it might be worth imagining the enforced absence of “Love And Theft” material may have contributed to this. Dylan was wearing a polka dot cravat, bringing back memories of his shirt when he ‘went electric’ in 1965 and the heyday of that holy triumvirate of Beatles, Stones and Dylan.