Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan

by Kirk Woodward 

[My friend, and prolific guest-blogger on Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward is about as big a fan of singer-songwriter—and Nobel Laureate—Bob Dylan as he is of the Beatles (see his last post, “‘Now and Then,’” posted on 8 December 2023).  Since Kirk’s also my go-to guy for almost anything musical, it’s just right that he should appear on this blog again—and launch 2024 for me—with a Dylan retrospective, “Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan.”

[“Keeping Up” is founded on Kirk’s analysis of Dylan’s November concert at New York City’s Beacon Theater.  He’ll tell you about that below.  I want to remind ROTters that Kirk has several previous posts on this blog about or featuring Bob Dylan.  (Some of them are referenced in “Keeping Up.”)

[Here’s a list of Kirk’s past posts concerning Dylan: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion,” 23 April 2018; “Bob Dylan Dance Party,” 17 December 2019.  The singer-songwriter also gets attention in a number of other posts (“The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October 2011; “Leonard Cohen,” 2 February 2013; “Writing As You Like It,” 5 September 2017), plus passing mentions in still others, most notably in “‘Now and Then.’”]

I didn’t go to Bob Dylan’s concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on November 16, 2023. I’ve seen Dylan a number of times beginning in 1965, and I’ve written about him several times for this blog [see list of Dylan posts above], but I didn’t feel like making the trip into New York, and to be honest, it can be a lot of work listening to a Dylan concert – more about that in a moment. So I stayed home.

However, a video of the concert is available, well produced by the podcast dylan.FM. The audio (there’s no video) is a pretty good reproduction of what Dylan concerts at the Beacon that I’ve attended [see Kirk’s “Bob and Ringo” and “Bob Dylan Dance Party”] sound like, and judging from the recording I missed an excellent concert.

Dylan (b. 1941) needs no justification at this stage in his life. He is unarguably the preeminent living songwriter in Western music, and he has a Nobel Prize in Literature (2016) to prove it. He has recorded forty studio albums to date, every one of them worth a listen and many of them magnificent.

He has a place in history by virtue of his association with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and his “anti-war” songs of the same period. There is no way to measure how many times he has been written about and quoted in college classrooms, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and even judicial opinions.

His recent years – as of this writing he is 82 – have been particularly productive. During the Covid epidemic, in 2020, he released the album Rough and Rowdy Ways, a striking collection of deeply poetic, often almost-spoken songs with hushed instrumental backgrounds, stylistically different from what he had recorded before. Half a year later he sold his entire songwriting catalog for an unannounced figure unquestionably amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Half a year after that, he made a streaming video called Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan featuring thirteen of his songs, subsequently released as his 40^th studio album Shadow Kingdom (2023), about which I will have more to say.

He released a book called The Philosophy of Modern Song in 2022 that contains 66 idiosyncratic essays on a wide range of compositions and was well received. Columbia, his recording company, has continued to issue important “bootleg” collections of his unreleased material, now up to seventeen volumes including two released in the period discussed here [see “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion” (Rick On Theater: Mr. Dylan Gets Religion) for an explanation of these albums].

Notably, Dylan continues to perform with a sterling band at a rate of something like a hundred concerts a year, a heavy schedule for any entertainer and particularly for one who’s been eligible for Social Security for the last 17 years. He is by no means a back number; his concerts frequently sell out, they are avidly attended by fans, and – perhaps most notably – no one who attends one of his concerts knows exactly what they are going to hear.

There’s little chance that any entertainer’s performance would be exactly the same twice. Minor differences would creep in. The concerts of Paul McCartney (b. 1942), for example, appear to be standardized from one show to the next, yet I recently read that one of the members of his touring band says the group has to be continually alert, since McCartney may throw in a change of some sort at any time.  [In addition to this discussion of Dylan’s drive constantly to change his song delivery, see also “Bob and Ringo.”]

The same is true of Dylan, only more so. With Dylan, the likelihood that changes will occur from show to show is one of the main interests in his performances. “Change,” in fact, seems to be his watchword. In his valedictory song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1965). Dylan sings

            Strike another match, go start anew

and that could practically be his motto as far as his public life is concerned. (Another song from around the same period, written in 1964, is titled “Restless Farewell.”) Dylan seems always to have wanted to keep moving, keep advancing, keep growing, keep exploring.

What such impulses might mean for concerts is problematic. For every person who’s said to me, “I like the way Dylan sounds now,” I could name a half dozen who have said, “I wish he’d sing the songs the way he wrote them.” This he resolutely refuses to do. He changes tempos, harmonies, melodies; sometimes he seems to do away with melodies altogether. He already sang the song “the old way;” now he’d like to do something new with it.

It seems likely that in a general sense our interest in what we hear is conservative: we like to listen to the same music over and over. Symphony orchestras, for example, regularly program standard pieces, and may face empty seats if they schedule too many contemporary compositions. I have no problem listening to my Beatles recordings endlessly, and I have little interest in other people’s versions of the same songs – unless I’ve heard them enough that I add them to my rotation, so to speak.

Some musicians are content to sing and play the same songs in the same ways – or relatively so – through their entire careers. I saw Bing Crosby (1903-1977) in concert in New York City in the 1970s and he sang “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin (1888-1989) the same way he had sung it in the film Holiday Inn in 1942.

Other musicians chafe against such restrictions. The singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer (b. 1928), for example, has said that he recorded his songs so he wouldn’t have to sing the same songs in the same way all the time; knowing that people could play his records, he couldn’t imagine why they would want him to sing the same songs to them in person.

Then there’s Dylan, who absolutely refuses to sing his songs the way he used to, going so far as to change his entire vocal style over the years. The quality of his voice is still somewhat the same as it was in earlier days, but huskier, with less care (sometimes) about diction, and, as I said, with radically different musical approaches to his earlier recorded material.

If the whole point were that Dylan wanted to sing his songs differently, there wouldn’t be much reason to care; the whole thing would be an academic exercise. Dylan, though, is one of the great interpreters of songs. He wants to bring out as much meaning in them as he can, and he keeps working on it.

At least, that is the impression he gives today. ’Twas not always so. There were periods, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, where he seemed not to care about his material at all, singing it more or less by rote. His concerts were a matter of desperation for many of his fans.

Dylan doesn’t miss much, as is clear in his valuable autobiography Chronicles: Volume One (2004), a vivid account of several moments of importance to him in his life. About the year 1987 he writes:

The public had been fed a steady diet of my complete recordings on disc for years, but my live performances never seemed to capture the inner spirit of the songs – had failed to put the spin on them. The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. . . . I’d been following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know it.

Dylan was not the only one who noticed that his concerts were problematic. I never saw him in those desert years, but I talked with people who did, and they were living on hope more than expectation that he might offer something worthwhile in a concert. “You know Bob,” they’d say, “sometimes he’s on and sometimes he’s not.”

In Chronicles (pages 156-162 of the first edition) Dylan describes how he found and latched on to a new approach to singing, one, he says, “based on an odd- instead of an even-numbered system.” I would like to explain here what he means, but I can’t, because I don’t understand it – my fault, undoubtedly, but there it is.

It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes. . . . The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on different patterns and the syncopation of a piece. Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players. . . . With any type of imagination you can hit notes at intervals and between backbeats, creating counterpoint lines and then you sing off of it. [Italics mine.]

I see the words but not what they mean. He adds, optimistically, “There’s no mystery to it and it’s not a technical trick.” I believe him, I just have no idea what he’s talking about, possibly because my own ideas of music are too conventional, possibly because he’s the only one who understands what he’s saying. At any rate I have found no one who explicates the musical system Dylan describes in Chronicles.

I exaggerate a bit. I do often hear “triplets” in his singing – three note clusters that disrupt the expected rhythmic pattern of a song, most of which are written in four, not three, beats per measure. The effect is to derail the melody (which he may not be singing anyway). One may find this disruption stimulating; one may find it irritating. In any case, it does seem to give Dylan a great deal of freedom as he sings.

To make things even more interesting – or challenging – Dylan is, as I have said before, a performance artist [see Kirk’s post “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist”], and he plays a long game. He will give a particular kind of performance over a range of hundreds of concerts, but occasionally he will change the focus and challenge everyone else to catch up.

For example, in his earliest days he accompanied himself on guitar, first acoustic, then electric; famously, he first worked solo, then with a rock band. More recently he dropped the guitar entirely and performed behind an upright piano. Now he sits at an electric baby grand piano facing the audience, downstage left center – but at a Farm Aid concert, playing a smashing three song set with the Heartbreakers, also this year, he played electric guitar exclusively.

For several years he played a radically different setlist every show, and fans delighted in discovering what treasures he would pull out of his vast songbook on a given night. Currently he is playing the same setlist every night – except that he has recently begun most concerts with a song related to the city where he is performing. At the Beacon it was Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” Another town, another song.

A feature of this year’s Beacon concert, which a number of fans commented on, was that Dylan was clearly rearranging approaches to songs within the concert, conferring with the instrumentalists several times during the show. The result, as heard on the recording of the concert, is energetic and loose.

Dylan is singing, literally singing, more these days, apparently an after-effect from his immersion a few years ago in songs sung by Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), in recent concerts represented by the song “That Old Black Magic” (1942, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer).

His voice has cleared up too, when he wants it to, and the effects of both can be heard in the Beacon concert on the song “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You” from the Rough and Rowdy Ways album. “We’re beginning to get it together now,” Dylan says after that song, and he deserves the satisfaction he shows.

In other words, it’s a good time to be a Dylan fan, a feeling strengthened for me when my friend Nick mentioned there was a Dylan album I hadn’t heard – the soundtrack of Shadow Kingdom. In it Dylan takes a huge risk, because many of the thirteen songs are widely familiar, like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “Forever Young” (1973).

One gets on board with Dylan’s current way of singing or one doesn’t. For me, on a first listen I was cautious; on a second, convinced; on a third, enthusiastic. It seems to me – I’m by no means the only person to feel this way – that Dylan is one of the most expressive singers ever recorded. He is a master of nuance. He can be this because he’s not tied to anything – he can try any approach he wants, and he does.

As I listened to Shadow Kingdom I realized more clearly than I had before that “approach” is the word – that he takes an angle, an attitude, toward each song and follows it where it leads. My favorite example on the album is “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (1967) from the spare and brilliant John Wesley Harding album of the same year.

Taking off from the line “Bring that bottle over here,” Dylan sings the song as though pleasantly high. At the Beacon, singing the same song with a slow introduction that leads to a fast finish, he sings the first part as though he really were smashed.

In general, Dylan is a portraitist, as well as a master of imagery and observation, but in order to really take in what he’s doing, one has to listen, and, of course, what one hears has to be worth listening to. I have been convinced for a long time that Dylan is worth the trouble. “Old men should be explorers,” T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote. Hats off to an artist who won’t stand still.

[Above, Kirk states, "'Change,' in fact, seems to be [Dylan’s] watchword."  When I read that, I immediately thought, "The Times They Are a-Changin’,” after all!  The song, released in March 1965, is all about change, and Kirk confirmed, “He meant it even more than we knew then.”  That made me think of the circumstances of my first hearing a Dylan song.

[I recounted that incident in my afterword to Kirk’s “Bob Dylan Dance Party” (17 December 2019):

My introduction to "Dylan" goes back a pretty long way.  (Both Kirk and I are older than Rock ’n’ Roll.)  I put the singer-songwriter’s name in quotation marks like that because it wasn’t actually the man himself, but someone who sang one of his songs, which I’d never heard before.

I don’t remember a lot of the details (like I said, I’m older than R ’n’ R), but it must have been sometime in 1965, probably the summer.  My folks had moved to Bad Godesberg, the home of our embassy to Germany, by that time (my dad had been transferred to the embassy from another post in the spring) and the event took place in someone’s embassy-compound apartment.  

I don’t remember whose apartment it was or why we gathered there.  I assume whoever the embassy staffer was, she or he had a teenaged son or daughter (I don’t know why, but for some reason I remember a girl) who’d invited a bunch of other embassy brats like me to the home for an evening—there was a small crowd of us, all teens and maybe some college-aged kids as well. 

I remember sitting around in the living room, listening to a guy sing as he accompanied himself on guitar.  What I recall as the last song was “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” the Dylan song that wasn’t released until the previous year and hadn’t gotten to Europe yet—or, at least, not to my ears.  As I remember the impromptu rock concert, none of us had heard the song—or, I imagine, anything like it.

I don’t remember who the singer was—for all I know, he became a famous folk-rocker (or maybe he already was and I just didn’t know him).  I assume he wasn’t an official State Department sponsee because, if he had been, my dad would have been his host because Dad was the Cultural Attaché; it would have been his gig!  

I may have known Dylan’s name by then, or I may not yet.  I just don’t remember.  After my brother and I moved to Germany in 1963, I only went back to the States once, in the spring of ’64 to visit colleges (and the New York World’s Fair with my grandmother!), and American culture didn’t get to Europe in those days until after a gap of maybe six months or longer.  (My American schoolmates in Switzerland mobbed my brother and me when we got there because we’d been “home” more recently than most of them and we knew the songs and dances that had been current when we left that summer!  We were the cultural heralds, so to speak.)  

So this was my first impression of “Dylan”—by proxy, but nonetheless striking.  Not as avid as Kirk’s, perhaps, but I went on to become a fan, too.

[What I didn’t say in this recollection is that I was very taken with “The Times They Are a-Changin’”; I think all the kids in the gathering were.  I don’t remember if the singer sang other Dylan songs or any other songs in that vein—folk rock or protest songs.  This was new to us, living 3,000 miles off America’s shores, often for years by this time.  (I was 18 in the summer of 1965; I came to Germany to live when I was 16 and until the previous spring, my family lived in a provincial German city, not an embassy residence compound.  See “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.)

[I suppose none of us had heard music like this yet.  At our ages, it was exciting and new.  Clearly, just the fact I remember as much of this experience as I have after almost 60 years suggests that I was affected.]