The Game Is The Same, It’s Just Up On Another Level

…The only explanation for the concert at Shepherds Bush on 23rd November 2003 was that Dylan wanted to reward the serious fans, and play for the sort of people he well knew would be in the audience. The whole European tour of 2003 had seen a very rigid set list and a narrow pool of occasional alternative songs. Every night the same pattern was followed, through both arenas and smaller concerts such as those in Hamburg, but not at the final three London shows, which he played as if they were a mini-tour of their own, a stand.

He knew that the vast majority of people at Shepherds Bush that night would have seen him live countless times before. He also knew that they would have seen shows on this tour already. So the logical thing for Dylan to do would be to play the same old show that had been played every other night, using the same old voice, with the same old band. Mr anti-fans at it again. But not this time. Dylan knew all that, and decided to pull out a very special show indeed at the Shepherds Bush Empire.

The most special thing about it was the miraculous return of Dylan’s voice. Gone was the ‘sing-song’ and mostly gone was the dreaded ‘wolfman’, and in their place was Dylan with the perfect voice for this time of his career, full of range, power and flair. The mid-range, so vital to Dylan in his career, and so nearly fatal when it vanished, was back.

The next miraculous thing was the set list. Gone were all the staples of the tour. Gone were the reworkings, electric- or acoustic-style, of the likes of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, ‘Girl from the North Country’ and ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. In fact, there were no acoustic or even close to acoustic songs at all. Gone were ‘Honest With Me’ and ‘Summer Days’ and ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and ‘Cat’s in the Well’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Things Have Changed’. All had vanished, and in their place were songs plucked from 1965 onwards, a dazzling array of songs not played for a long time, or rare choices from recent years.

He unveiled ‘Dear Landlord’, ‘Quinn the Eskimo’, ‘Million Miles’, ‘Down Along the Cove’, ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, ‘Under the Red Sky’, ‘Tombstone Blues’, ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’, ‘Silvio’ and ‘Tough Mama’. Wonderful song after wonderful song (and ‘Silvio’ too), all sung with passion and conviction, and backed by a band reborn. The crowd reaction was tangibly thrilling and visibly moved and lifted Dylan, and he rewarded them with one golden gem no one could have expected. When the magisterial opening chords to ‘Jokerman’ echoed around the Empire, the reaction was amazing…

‘Beauty May Only Turn To Rust’

‘Dylan can’t sing.’ 90% of the Western population ‘That boy’s got a voice. Maybe he won’t make it with his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it.’ Woody Guthrie

   


 
It’s a pleasure to be able to begin an article about Bob Dylan with one of the most widespread clichés about him: that he can’t sing. No matter what standard response one has whenever the topic arises (‘Well, then Picasso can’t paint either’, ‘Since so many people like him, there must be something there to like’, ‘To each his own; if you don’t like him, it’s your problem’, etc.) there is something about the question that goes beyond the urge to defend. That is what this article is about: where the question stems from and in what it consists, and it will bring us back to classical Antiquity, through medieval and Renaissance aesthetics, and up to a modern interpretation of Dylan’s song-making, against this background.

What does it mean, ‘Dylan can’t sing’? What does it mean to sing? Not just to utter sounds; singing belongs to the sphere of music, and although we all ‘know’ what music is, it is still useful to remind ourselves of what we mean by it. A fairly wide definition, which covers everything from Gregorian Chant to John Cage, goes: Music is organised sound, or slightly more precise: Music is sound organised according to some generally accepted system of criteria for production and reception of such sounds, or shorter: Music is aestheticised sound. There are books to be written about this; at the moment it may suffice to say that to most people aesthetics has something to do with beauty, and to most people who disapprove of Dylan’s vocal capacities, this is the reason: he can’t sing beautifully, and no matter how many other criteria for singing he fulfills - a certain vocal dexterity, a sense of rhythm and harmony, etc. - all this doesn’t help: Dylan can’t sing.

Thus, it would seem that for a broader appreciation of Dylan, a more thoroughgoing study of beauty would be useful - his concept of beauty, and ours, we who judge him. This is at the heart of the question of what it means to be able to sing, and the reason why the verdict may differ is that there is no one concept of beauty…

'it then must be time for you to rest
& learn new songs:'  
'Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’

The first two verses of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ enact the first two elements of Kipling’s dictum; they are about ‘drift and wait.’

There’s a strong sense of termination about these verses - all that numbness and blindness and weariness situate the singer at a place where his personal effort, coming to naught, has reached its limits. Alone in the city streets at dawn, disburdened of the night’s delusions, but also adrift, without direction, the singer can do little more than stand still. An old way of being has come to an end; the singer awaits the new. Weary, he’s also paradoxically awake in a way that his previous condition, as citizen of an empire that vanishes at first light, didn’t allow. He’s in a state of passive receptivity, the ideal state, according to Kipling, to attend to one’s Daemon.

The chorus repeats its plea: ‘you play; I’ll follow,’ and the second verse elaborates the terms of the contract: ‘I’m ready to go anywhere… I promise to go under it’ in exchange for the promise to ‘take me on a trip… cast your dancing spell my way…’

Having exhausted his personal reserves, the singer offers himself to an energy that transcends the personal, the same energy that appears in the dream of fire from ‘Tarantula:’ ‘… i could not feel any guilt about just standing there singing for as i said i was picked up & moved there not by my own free will but rather by some unbelievable force -’ (p. 107). Rilke called this energy ‘angels;’ the Greeks divinized it, named it a Goddess, a supernatural faculty that transports the poet and his audience.

It’s the ‘magic swirlin’ ship’ of verse two that promises to extricate the singer from the grid-like city streets, ‘too dead for dreaming,’ and relocate him to a foreign land, or at least the open sea. The imagery of urban bondage (played off against the sky and sea of the third and fourth verses) addresses constraints that afflict the singer and keep him from ‘dancing,’ from following the liberated swell of the motions of his own consciousness.

Those constraints, identified and slowly cast off by Dylan over the course of 1964, pertained to ideals of art and politics, enshrined as tenets of the folk revival, that may have once inspired him, but had come to have a dampening effect on his linguistic and musical imagination. In a sense, he was being constrained by his own songs, the terms of his own art, up to and including his third album. To re-imagine himself as something other than a song-writer working under the auspices of The Traditional, laboring in fields that had been well-tilled by countless hands before his own, he needed a different model of the artist, one he could use as a springboard to a new conception of self.