Following the first three weeks in which we enjoyed the essential, love & relationship songs, protest, storytelling and topical writing, our fourth instalment is where things start to go a little deeper. It is also the aspect of the Bob Dylan career that provokes continued debate to this day for, from the very beginning, he has been a live performer like no other. As anyone involved in a creative endeavour will tell you, the author can rarely look at or listen to a work on completion for fear they will see something they can improve on or want to change. Dylan appears to have tackled this issue head-on from the outset, forever treating live performances as a creative process rather than a recreative one. For him to keep a song alive and continue to sing it with conviction he has to perpetually explore it, treat it as a work that remains on the path of becoming rather than arrived. He has always intrinsically understood that the moments an idea blooms, the seconds in which a feeling or burning rage are first captured, are the purest, the closest to the essence of that emotion. And so, in order to maximise the potential for realising these golden moments in concert, he has always kept himself and everyone accompanying him on their toes, free from over-rehearsed monotony and alert to wherever the music may take them in that zone.
It sounds thrilling when you put it like that doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the reality has proven to be rather more hit and miss. Too many people over the years have come away from a Dylan concert complaining that he was two minutes into a song before they recognised it; that he refuses to speak to the audience; that the silence can give the impression that he does not care about his paying customers. Yet in the exact same room while all these grumbles amass, there are serious Dylan scholars celebrating jubilantly in the front rows because their man has just played a deep cut off of ‘New Morning’ for the first time in eight years. These two extreme reactions are there to be found at almost every Dylan concert, for he has rarely (with the odd exception such as the Gospel tours and the 1978 shows where arrangements were so elaborate and slick that many fans cannot tolerate the associated ‘At Budokan’ live album) brought a slick, readily mapped out show to his audience.
My own live experience with Bob is hardly extensive but has been rather fortunate for I can honestly say I have not seen a bad show. Regrettably neither have I seen him in anything approaching an intimate venue but at least I have seen a couple of genuinely great performances. My first Dylan show was headlining the Fleadh Festival in 1993; this was certainly the least thrilling, unaware as I was of the requirement to keep an open mind with your expectations. There were a couple of acoustic folk standards in the style of his current albums which were lost a little in the vast Finsbury Park summer night sky and a heaving festival crowd. But my most vivid memory is Van Morrison joining Bob for a rendition of ‘One Irish Rover’. As the tune reached a climax Van attempted to walk backwards and exit the stage in classic, air-punching, soulful climax fashion but his guitar lead became stuck plunging the moment into farce. Van stayed rooted to the spot and nervous-looking stage crew scurried around to unplug him and facilitate the completion of his dramatic exit. Predictably only one of the two artists cracked up with laughter at this mishap and it was not Van!
As my Dylan appreciation grew, I gradually picked up live recordings through the 1990s and from then on was better prepared with what to expect at a “Columbia Records Recording Artist Bob Dylan” show. I got to know terms like “up-singing”, used by followers to describe an infuriating tendency he had of delivering a line on a torturous single note before taking a little upwards skip at the end. He would then stretch the song to breaking point by repeating the tick ad-nauseum. At times like these, it is wholly understandable that an audience would wish for him to just drop this perpetual searching and respect the songs original form. I also learned that he had, pretty much from the start of the ‘Never Ending Tour’ around 1988, stopped talking to the audience beyond an occasional scraping of “thaanksseveryybody” mumbled into the microphone in barely comprehensible Zimmy-speak. But the upside to getting on board with Dylan’s motives was that at pretty much every show, you could be sure to hear something new, a new cover version or a radical on-the-money re-imagining of a deep cut that would light up your night.
I feel I did indeed strike gold when I saw Bob at Wembley in late 2000 and again at the London Arena in 2002, both shows were unforgettable highlights of my concert attending life. At Wembley he was on a roll, opening with a rocking version of ‘Duncan And Brady’, swinging his legs like the song and dance man he always claimed to be. Speaking to a friend a couple of days later I was told “I hear Bob Dylan thanked England for being American allies in the war at that gig the other night, it was in the paper”. “Did he?” I replied, I had not spotted that. Thinking back though, I realised that he did indeed mutter something indecipherable into the microphone about Winston Churchill at one point but there you go, the music was so strong I had completely missed that particular moment. Two years later, with the ‘Love And Theft’ era band, he was undoubtedly clicking with his fellow musicians in a way that I had never seen before, truly on another level. The band were a rolling, tumbling thrill packed delight and Dylan was clearly thriving within the kaleidoscopic 20th-century rhythm and blues rolling ball he had driven for a few years by now. The three electric guitar rock-out on ‘All Along The Watchtower’ that night was simply mesmerising.
Then in 2005, I shot up to Birmingham NEC with a long time Dylan veteran friend of mine, someone who had Bob placed on a pedestal in the seventies but had dropped away around the time of the Christian records and never returned, despite my repeated insistence that he would be pleasantly surprised if he gave Bob another chance. But as good as that gig was for me, accompanied by someone who was not hearing the Dylan he needed from the man onstage, it was a slog. At one point my friend leaned over and said, “you just want him to strap on an acoustic guitar and launch into ‘Simple Twist Of Fate’ don’t you?”, which would have been fine of course, but I was satisfied with what I was being served. Then, following a rollicking ‘Summer Days’, the feedback in my right ear was a frustrated “you could have warned me we were coming to see the f%*king Stray Cats”. I think we left before the end of the encore that night, so my last Dylan live experience ended on a bit of a flat note, but I still console myself with the memory of the two shows I saw prior to that, which I treasure.
Putting together an appreciation of Bob Dylan live highlights from across his entire career, it does strike me how lucky we are that so many shows were recorded to a high standard of audio. There only seems to be a few notable holes in the archive, such as the UK Earls Court shows from 1978. Many still rave about these gigs but apparently are not known to exist in any quality recordings. Still, we do have so many historic landmark shows on tape. There is a mouth-watering abundance of that famous 1966 acoustic / electric tour, including the dramatic Manchester Free Trade Hall “Judas” moment. I do have a modicum of sympathy for the folk crowd who were so angered by those shows in the mid-sixties, I think what is overlooked is that huge sections of the UK audience were a couple of years behind with the Dylan catalogue, they were still treating the folk protest albums as the current releases so you can kind of understand how those shows presented them with a jarring culture shock. Do not forget that the US crowd were booing too in 1965 and again, that first appearance with electric accompaniment at the Newport Folk Festival is all available to enjoy on both tape and film. That fact alone is incredible.
Diving further into the comprehensive concert material now legitimately available as part of the catalogue, so many thrills and amazing moments jump out at you. From the early days, you realise how inevitable it was that Dylan would be considered a prophet when you hear him preface ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ at Carnegie Hall in October 1963 by stating “something’s going to happen”. This was a month before the assassination of JFK. And for those who despair of him bending songs beyond recognition, maybe there is something to be savoured in early performances of ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and ‘Gates Of Eden’; the author of the songs is playing to audiences probably hearing them for the first time and he absolutely caresses the words to ensure they are understood, a real treat. If progressions and re-workings are your desire, then ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ can be heard from the early eighties with completely new verses and the Gospel band tours reveal a tight unit capable of taking that material to exciting places.
Most fascinating of all is that this is not a complete story. The recent years where Dylan has dived wholesale into the American songbook and completely re-imagined his own role as a live vocalist are not yet documented by official releases. And then there are thirty years or more of the Never-Ending Tour which surely has the potential for a series of full-show archive releases, it being a project based upon fluid evolution and song exploration, there is an awful lot of stuff to get stuck into there going forward. But for now, let us delight in a journey across the concert career of Bob Dylan that has been documented so far. Thanks to his commitment to keeping his songs alive and evolving, it is a side to the catalogue that remains every bit as vital as those classic studio albums.