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.]

"Unopened": 'Scratch'

 

[Adam Langer’s examination of Scratch (for “Old Scratch,” a nickname for the Devil), is number four in the Times’ “Unopened” series.  It was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 4 November 2020. The web version of the article, posted on 3 November, had the same headline as the print version.

[Once again, let me suggest that readers who are just finding this series go back and read the first three articles of the Times’ “Unopened,” posted on 26 February and 1 and 4 March.  Though the articles aren’t linked except by the theme of failed Broadway attempts, reading all five reports does show the breadth of the causes of the failures.  It’s a sad lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.]

“BOB DYLAN’S FIRST MUSICAL HAD A DEVIL OF A TIME”
by Adam Langer

The task: write songs for Archibald MacLeish’s adaptation of a classic New England morality tale. What audiences saw (briefly): A play without music.

It sounded like a fine idea at the time — pair two poetic giants of different generations and get them to collaborate on reinventing an American classic.

The year was 1969. The producer Stuart Ostrow [b. 1932] and the director Peter Hunt [1938-2020] already had a hit show on Broadway with “1776.” Now they were setting their sights on “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Stephen Vincent Benét’s [1898-1943] classic 1936 story about Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil, has second thoughts, and enlists the orator and statesman Daniel Webster [1782-1852] to argue his case before a jury composed of American villains. The tale had been adapted into a 1939 opera and a 1941 movie, but never a musical.

Archibald MacLeish [1892-1982], the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of the Tony Award-winning play “J.B.,” which reimagined the Book of Job, would write the book. The composer and lyricist would be Bob Dylan [b. 1941] — decades before he proffered his songbook to Twyla Tharp [dancer and choreographer, b. 1941] for 2006’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and to Conor McPherson [Irish dramatist, b. 1971] for “Girl From the North Country.” (That show’s Broadway run was interrupted by the pandemic.)

“Stuart had this idea that we would get the oldest poet of note and the youngest poet of note to work together,” Hunt recalled in a conversation earlier this year, before he died at 81 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

“I thought coupling the Republic’s poet laureate and America’s balladeer was a unique invitation to young and old audiences,” Ostrow added in a recent email.

“Scratch” took its title from the name the devil calls himself in Benét’s story. MacLeish offered a deeply-considered meditation on the nature of good and evil, obliquely asking whether the ideals upon which America was founded could endure in the time of Richard Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States, 1969-74] and Vietnam.

The show would be the “opposite of a musical,” MacLeish wrote to Ostrow in papers now held by the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library; “it would be a “ballad play,” featuring an actor in modern dress who would sing songs and serve as conduit between the audience and the action onstage.

As for what this 20th century troubadour would sing, well, that was Dylan’s job.

MacLeish proposed some song titles — among them, “Red Hands,” “Lower World,” “New Morning,” and “Father of Night,” and Dylan, who’d wearied of the limelight and was trying on new personas, started writing on spec.

The poet effused over Dylan’s initial contributions. “Those songs of yours have been haunting me — and exciting me,” he wrote to Dylan. “‘New Morning’ marries the opening as though they’d been intended for each other.”

But Dylan and MacLeish were separated not only by age but by background, style, temperament, and sensibility. MacLeish divided his time between his western Massachusetts home and a private club in Antigua, and was the product of boarding schools and Ivy League universities. Dylan, a more instinctive, less deliberative artist, was the Minnesota-born son of a Jewish appliance store owner, and was, as he averred on “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his latest album, “born on the wrong side of the railroad track, like [Alan] Ginsberg [Beat poet, 1926-97], [Gregory] Corso [Beat poet, 1930-2001] and [Jack] Kerouac [Beat novelist and writer, 1922-69].”

A disagreement over lyrics to “Father of Night” epitomized the difference between the two visions. Dylan’s song was full of oppositions (“Father of day, Father of night/Father of black, father of white”). MacLeish liked the melody but thought the song should comment more exclusively on the nature of evil; he suggested alternative lyrics: “Father of night, father of dread/Father of cold in the void overhead/Father of serpent under the stone/Father of fear in the dark alone.”

As relayed in Dylan’s fanciful 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” a meeting between the septuagenarian MacLeish and the 20-something Dylan — with the elder poet discoursing on Sappho, Socrates, Dante and John Donne — reads like deleted dialogue from the scene in “Trading Places,” when Eddie Murphy’s [actor and comedian, b. 1961] street-smart con man finds himself improbably welcomed into the home of blue-blooded Dan Aykroyd [Canadian actor, comedian, and musician, b. 1952].

Inevitably, the creative process on “Scratch” devolved; the story of how that happened differs depending on who’s telling it.

“I backed out of the production,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes to “Biograph,” his 1985 collection of outtakes, bootlegs, and previously-released material. “It was nothing really, kind of like a misunderstanding I supposed.”

Then later, in “Chronicles”: “I knew that I couldn’t have anything to add to the message of [MacLeish’s] play. He didn’t need my help anyway.”

In his 2005 memoir “Present at the Creation: Leaping in the Dark and Going Against the Grain,” Ostrow, a quadruple Tony winner whose Broadway career spanned four decades, takes issue with Dylan’s version of events, to say the least. He presents the future Nobel Laureate [Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016] as a monosyllabic dolt and poseur who froze in the presence of a true man of American letters and spent his time at MacLeish’s home pounding brandy, then conking out.

“The only impression the celebrated folk singer had made was a nasty ring from his brandy snifter on the MacLeish’s 1785 cherry table,” Ostrow wrote.

Despite his early enthusiasm, MacLeish soured on Dylan’s contributions. “Dylan proved incapable of writing new songs,” he wrote in a 1970 letter.

In an email, Ostrow put it more bluntly: “Dylan could not collaborate.”

Perhaps. But, seeing as Dylan had just released “Nashville Skyline,” which featured a duet with Johnny Cash, and, two years earlier, had worked with the Band on recordings that would become known as “The Basement Tapes,” the truth seems more specific: Dylan could collaborate when he felt like it, just not with Archibald MacLeish.

Ostrow and MacLeish considered presenting “Scratch” with songs that Dylan had already recorded, but when the show opened at Broadway’s St. James Theater on May 6, 1971, it did so as a straight play, starring Patrick Magee [Irish actor, 1922-82] as Daniel Webster, Will Geer [American actor, 1902-78] as Scratch, and Will Mackenzie [American actor, b. 1938] as Jabez Stone.

Without the balancing voice of a contemporary songwriter, it registered as pompous and outdated, characterized by what The New York Times critic Walter Kerr [1913-96] called “echoes of a vanishing style.”

“It has a vacuum where its art should be,” wrote his fellow critic, Clive Barnes [1927-2008].

The actress Joanne Nail [b. 1947], who made her Broadway debut in “Scratch,” believes that MacLeish was “too married to his words,” which landed with audiences better out of town.

“We had played previews in Boston and people loved it there because it was about their area of the country, their history,” she explained recently. “But when we came to New York, Will MacKenzie and I thought it might be too long, and some of the dialogue was not going to fly. So, we went to Peter Hunt and told him, but Archibald didn’t want to change anything.”

The show closed two days later.

“It was conceived as a musical, ergo it failed,” Ostrow said simply, by email.

As for Dylan, months earlier, he had released “New Morning,” a collection of a dozen new songs [1970], including the title track and his version of “Father of Night.” It was, Greil Marcus [music journalist, b. 1945] wrote in the Times, “his best album in years.”

[Benét’s short story was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 24 October 1936.  The operatic adaptation by Benét and composer Douglas Stuart Moore, which they labeled a “folk-opera,” premièred by the American Lyric Theatre at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District on 18 May 1939.  The music was conducted by Fritz Reiner and the one-act opera was staged by John Houseman. 

[The presentation, which was paired with the one-act musical The Filling Station written by Virgil Thomson, ran for six performances, closing on 26 May.  Lansing Hatfield sang Daniel Webster, George Rasely was Mr. Scratch, and John Gurney sang Jabez Stone.

[Originally entitled All That Money Can Buy, the film version of Benét’s story, directed by William Dieterle from a screenplay by Dan Totheroh, was released (in New York City) by RKO Radio Pictures on 16 October 1941.  Edward Arnold played Daniel Webster, Walter Huston was Mr. Scratch, and James Craig was Jabez Stone. 

[Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country, with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, started previews at the Belasco Theatre on 7 February 2020 and opened on 5 March before the theaters shut down because of the pandemic.  The musical was first produced on 8 July 2017 by London’s Old Vic (formally, the Royal Victoria Hall); it’s U.S. première was on 11 September 2018 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Newman Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.

[Directed by Peter H. Hunt, Scratch started previews at the St. James Theatre on 28 April 1971 and opened on 6 May.  It closed on 8 May after eight previews and four regular performances.  The Boston try-out had previews at the Colonial Theatre from 3 to 6 April 1971 and opened on 7 April; it ran through 24 April.

[Next in “Unopened” (10 March): “Patti LuPone’s first-act ballad became a standard, but the show it came from never did.”]

Bob Dylan Dance Party

by Kirk Woodward

[I imagine by now that most readers of Rick On Theater know that my friend Kirk Woodward is my go-to guest blogger for anything musical.  Most ROTters also probably know that Kirk’s a longtime and staunch fan of Bob Dylan.  Those two factoids should explain why this post exists on this blog.  Plus the fact that he went to a Dylan concert, the Never Ending Tour at the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theatre from 23 November to 6 December, a few days before Thanksgiving.

[I post Kirk’s reports and discussions of music—there have been quite a few on ROT since I started it almost 11 years ago—because, one, I could never cover musical subjects on my own; I’m entirely ignorant about music.  Two, I always learn something from his writing about the subject.  He not only understands music as an art form, but her knows the performers and their musicianship so he can talk about how they did whatever he heard. 

[That’s what he’s done here, vis à vis Bob Dylan.  Trust me: you’ll gain something from reading his account of the Dylan experience.]

I would go to more concerts if they were as good as the Bob Dylan concert I attended on Tuesday, November 26, 2019, at the Beacon Theater, toward the beginning of a two week residency by Dylan at that theater.

“Good,” not perfect. From where I sat – far back in the upper balcony – Dylan’s vocals were often overwhelmed by the volume of sound from his band. I realize that so many rock concerts do this same thing – that artists whose words are central to their performances often can’t be understood because the overall sound is too loud, and because the lower tones – drums, bass guitar – seem to be the sound operator’s favorites.

Booming sound hardly helps one understand the lyrics sung by Dylan, who is no model of understandability to start with. One gets used to that, though, and I found my ears adjusted – somewhat – as the concert went on. For all I know, the sound was clearer downstairs anyway; I couldn’t say.

In compensation for any trouble understanding his words, Dylan was in terrific voice. His years of recording and singing in concert songs associated with Frank Sinatra seem to be over, but the residue is a clearer voice and much more connection between singer and audience.

For several years Dylan sounded like he had ravaged his vocal chords (smoking? drinking?), and many of us assumed we would be hearing mostly growls from him for the rest of his concert and recording career. As usual, he fooled us. He does that sort of thing. Last year and this, he sings, firmly and securely; his phrasing is excellent, and he seems able to get just about any vocal effect he wants.

Part of the fun of attending multiple Dylan concerts is noticing what has changed from previous ones. His tight, muscular band is usually more or less consistent (Charlie Sexton on guitar, Tony Garnier on bass, Donnie Heron on steel guitar and violin), but Bob Britt, on rhythm guitar, is new this tour, and Matt Chamberlin on drums is a major addition, with a sure, clean style and sturdy support for Dylan’s vocals.

Other novelties and oddities from the concert:

On stage behind the band were three mannequins, two female and one male, in evening dress, and on several locations on stage were white busts of a woman I couldn’t identify from my distance from the stage.

Dylan played a spinet piano instead of a grand.

Only one band member (the bass player) wore a hat.

Last concert, a friend of mine expressed the fervent wish that Dylan would play just one song the way he did it on the record. At this concert he did, substantially, on “Highway 61,” and close enough on “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

Instrumentally, there was more emphasis than before on the violin, which accompanied Dylan on five songs to great effect.

When he left the piano and sang (and sometimes played harmonica, fine as usual) at center stage, he usually backed up until he was surrounded by the musicians, and sang facing “stage right,” as though someone were in the wings of the stage. I gather he’s been doing that this tour. There’s always something.

Dylan played electric guitar twice during the concert. I have not seen him touch a guitar in years; piano has been his instrument, and he’s gotten secure with it. I haven’t read or heard anything authoritative about why he largely abandoned the guitar; anyway, it’s back in limited use. I’ve never thought Dylan was much of an electric guitar player, but at the Beacon he sounded at least adequate, if maybe a bit tentative.

In a band where the musicians seldom have much opportunity to shine individually, Charlie Sexton was applauded for a strenuous guitar solo, and Matt Chamberlain had a drum solo! Really! I was there!

And Dylan introduced the band! It’s been a while since I saw him do that. He sounded cheerful and enthusiastic as he introduced each member. Surprise! One can go to concerts for years and not hear him speak, as opposed to sing, a word.

Those are the sorts of things that fascinate Dylan fans.

Basically, the concert’s song list could be divided into two kinds of songs, affecting ballads, and rockers. Among the former, the highlights for me were “Lenny Bruce,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and “Girl From the North Country,” all sung from the piano with reduced accompaniment by the band. Dylan sang those three songs simply and effectively, and the audience seemed to feel those were among the most satisfying moments of the show; I certainly did.

On several other numbers, though, the band just wailed. It was quite a sight to see Dylan standing at the piano, pounding it for all the world like Jerry Lee Lewis – one halfway expected him to lift his leg and start banging the piano with his foot.

On one number, with a traditional rock ‘n’ roll arrangement, Charlie Sexton actually played the melody of the old Moonglows song “Sincerely” (1954, written by Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed) as the instrumental break.

Dylan, of course, has always been securely connected to the past where music is concerned. It is universally recognized that his knowledge of popular music of all kinds, particularly what’s called “American roots music,” is encyclopedic. I have always felt that he saw his task as one of bringing the values of more obscure folk music and poetry onto the “big stage.”

He continues to make that happen; he’s been doing it a long time. Before the concert I talked with a man who heard him sing in 1961. It was at a folk music club in Greenwich Village, and a very young Bob Dylan sang a couple of songs during an “open mike” evening. He was just warming up.

[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.]

Mr. Dylan Gets Religion

by Kirk Woodward

[This will be Kirk’s fourth post on Bob Dylan, of whom, ROTters will know, he’s a big fan (see “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; and “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017).  That makes Dylan Kirk’s second-most frequent subject on Rick On Theater after the Beatles (six posts, including again “Bob and Ringo,” which does double duty).  (I count posts on Shaw as three, though one of those is a five-part series.)  “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion,” however, covers a different aspect of the folk-rocker’s work from his musicality.

[Another part of Kirk’s background and focus, equal in strength and influence—perhaps even greater—to his interest in theater and music, is his faith.  Kirk, as he affirms below, is an active Christian.  Dylan was born into a Jewish family, but in the late 1970s, after a profound spiritual experience, he became a “born-again” Christian, a conversion that’s reflected in his songs.  It is at this phenomenon at which Kirk looks in “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion.”  (According to various biographical notes, the artist returned to Judaism, even flirting with orthodoxy, after three years.)  It’s certainly a part of Dylan’s musical life about which I was unfamiliar, and I imagine many ROT-readers will find it at least a little surprising, even in the complex career of Bob Dylan.]

Years ago, while I was a college student, I did the most daring thing I’d ever done up to that point: I went to a record store in town and asked for a copy of an album known as The White Wonder, by Bob Dylan. What was daring about this transaction was that the album was a bootleg – an unauthorized recorded compilation of a number of songs written and sung by Dylan.

Bootlegs are so common now that it’s hard to believe anyone was ever as skittish about buying one as I was then. I imagined the Record Industry Police descending on me, I suppose, and in fact the record industry has pursued a number of cases of bootlegging, using batteries of lawyers. However, no one pursued me for my illicit purchase.

A few recording artists endorse bootlegging, notably the Grateful Dead, who encouraged their fans to record their concerts and circulate the recordings. Bob Dylan very definitely has not encouraged bootlegging. He has been remarkably protective of his copyrights. All the same, a great deal of unauthorized Dylan material is available.

Columbia Records (now Columbia/Legacy), Dylan’s record company, took an audacious step to control the amount of unauthorized Dylan material that’s circulating. Starting in 1991, it began what it calls the “Bootleg Series” of outtakes, concert records, and miscellaneous items Dylan has created, but not officially released, in the course of his career.

Thirteen volumes of this series have been released to date, comprising into the hundreds of CDs, with more presumably on the way. Each volume covers a different period or aspect of Dylan’s career, and much of the material is invaluable. The fecundity of Dylan’s writing is simply staggering.

The latest bootleg series volume, Trouble No More 1979-1981, released on November 3, 2017, is of particular interest, because it represents what’s often referred to as Dylan’s “Christian” period. Dylan, born (in 1941) to a Jewish family and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, had a sort of “born again” or “conversion” experience in late 1979-early 1980.

He released three albums during this period: Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981). The single release “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Vocal, came from this time. The songs on the first two albums all specifically relate to Dylan’s current religious beliefs; those on Shot of Love have a somewhat wider focus.

This period of Dylan’s career was, needless to say, controversial. He did some “preaching” to audiences during his concerts. He made no secret of his strong beliefs. He gained some audience and lost some. By the end of 1981 he was playing more not specifically religious songs, a trend that soon dominated.

My own experience with Dylan’s “Christian period” amounted to this: I heard about it; my sister loaned me the first album of the period, Slow Train; I listened to it, found it harsh and unappealing, returned it to my sister, and didn’t listen to any new Dylan albums again until the early 1990s.

What a difference almost four decades make! The Trouble No More collection is – pardon a probably inevitable Biblical reference – a revelation. In order to describe why I think so, let me present some comments I’ve either heard or made myself about the music of this period, and give my new opinions on them.

I’ve already mentioned my own initial opinion that the albums sounded harsh. There’s something to this opinion. There’s a great deal more in the songs about God’s judgment than about God’s mercy – an approach that one often sees in new converts to a faith, who can be highly critical of what they themselves had only recently believed.

However, in the recordings on Trouble No More this harshness, if real, is leavened – there’s that Biblical vocabulary again – by Dylan’s exuberance and his humor, not to mention by his art. Sometimes he is charming, as in the children’s song “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” Sometimes he is droll, as in the rollicking, previously released “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell (For Anybody).” Often it’s the flow of the lyrics, with their mix of the highfalutin’ and the conversational, that provides relief:

You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody…

Some reacted to Dylan’s “Christian” songs in surprise that he was suddenly so involved in religion, but that in itself shouldn’t have been surprising – his songs have always had strong religious tendencies, sometimes explicit, as in much of the album John Wesley Harding (1967). The song “All Along the Watchtower” on that album, the one Dylan has played most in concerts (2257 times to date), conjures up Old Testament imagery:

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too

But the album also contains a splendid summary of Christian theology in the song “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”:

The moral of this story,

The moral of this song,

Is simply that one should never be

Where one does not belong.

So if you see your neighbor carrying something,

Help him with his load,

And don’t go mistaking Paradise

For that home across the road.

Dylan’s songs have always had a sense of right and wrong, of sin and righteousness, of darkness and light. In other words, they often exhibit a religious sensibility, the surprise in the 1979-1981 period being that that sensibility is made explicit. The same may be said for the theme in many Dylan songs of an approaching judgment. This sense is strong in early songs, like “When the Ship Comes In” (1964):

Oh, the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
Like the stillness in the wind
Before the hurricane begins
The hour that the ship comes in

That vision is apocalyptic, and not at all out of keeping in tone with Dylan’s “Christian” period.

I remember reading a review around 1980 suggesting that Dylan embraced Christianity as a way of reinvigorating his creative processes. I doubt that, both because his “conversion” is clearly genuine – I defy anyone to listen to these recordings and doubt it – but also because he leaps into the new subject matter with such energy and skill that it’s hard to imagine he was having any problems to start with.

I’m talking here primarily about the numerous concert recordings included in the release. In concert he betters the three studio albums in every case that I’m aware of. In the concerts he sings as well as he ever has. A friend of mine said once that he thought Dylan was the greatest rock and roll singer, and these concert recordings justify that remark. He sings with abandon.

He also sings with a double dose both of determination and of discipline. Notoriously, as a live performer Dylan is capable of giving his supporting musicians fits, as he changes set lists, song words, and arrangements with abandon.

These recordings, however, are musically focused, crisp, and tight. Dylan still experiments with musical styles, tempos, and textures, not to mention words, as he has throughout his career. But there is no feeling here that his changes are arbitrary. He explores restlessly. That’s a theme of his entire body of work. But the work in Trouble No More has focus.

I’d always heard that people were furious at Dylan’s new direction, but on the concert recordings we hear crowds whistling and applauding. There are other surprises, too. Dylan notoriously almost always says little or nothing to his audiences. In these recordings he is practically friendly, introducing the band several times, thanking people for coming and hoping they’ll come again the next night, and at one point saying something like "I heard a request from somebody in the crowd. Was that for 'Solid Rock'?" – a question that would be unthinkable through most of his career.

Speaking of Dylan’s band, it is crackerjack. Dylan has said that "nobody listens to my music for the solos," but many of the solos from these recordings are outstanding, particularly those of the lead guitarist, Fred Tackett (b. 1945). There is also impeccable work from the drummer, Jim Keltner (b. 1942), once the intermediary who got me Ringo Starr's autograph!

Dylan is also accompanied on these recordings by a group of gospel singers (first three, then increasing in number). I have heard people refer to this feature as a sign of laziness on Dylan’s part. Not on these recordings – the backup singers work hard but they don't work any harder than Dylan does. The effect is blistering.

The songs on the new release – many not available on recordings before – are outstanding, unless one rejects them simply because their subject is religion. In a sense, that’s not their subject, because Dylan’s interests are always wider than one category. He looks, with a skeptical eye, at human behavior (particularly his own) in every sphere of life, a vision that gives his lyrics wide scope.

One of the fascinating features of Trouble No More is liner notes by Penn Jillette (b. 1955), the magician and, in his own words, a “lifelong atheist.” Jillette describes his early feelings about the albums from Dylan’s “Christian” period – pretty much the same as mine, although he’s an atheist and I’m a Christian – and his different response to these recordings – also pretty much the same as mine. His notes are well worth reading for an insight into what art can offer beyond its immediate subject matter.

So what happened to Dylan’s Christian fervor? Maybe nothing – who knows? I have no idea what goes on in Dylan’s mind, and that’s fine. His published comments are ambiguous. He has never wanted to be a “thought leader” – he has always wanted people to think for themselves. As noted above, he eventually returned to playing songs in concert that he’s written over the last fifty-five years or so.

However, he still plays songs from the “Christian” period now and then. He participated in the album Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan (2008), singing his “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” with Mavis Staples (b. 1939). [Mavis Staples is a rhythm and blues and gospel singer, actress, and civil rights activist and a member of her family’s singing group The Staple Singers.  She was nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award for her duet with Dylan on “Gonna Change.”]  He has performed “Gotta Serve Somebody” in concert as recently as 2011.

Besides, which Dylan songs are “religious” and which aren’t? Like his contemporary Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), Dylan fills his songs with religious imagery – and with imagery of many other kinds. Perhaps we need a wider definition of “religious.” Listening to Trouble No More can help.

Bob and Ringo

by Kirk Woodward

[Following shortly on “Frankie,” his report on a recent Frankie Valli concert appearance (posted on 16 November), my friend Kirk Woodward is back on Rick On Theater with a new post on a couple of rock ’n’ roll oldies.  This time it’s folk-rock icon Bob Dylan and former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.  As regular ROTters will know, Kirk is a long-time fan of both Dylan and the Beatles; he’s previously written on both for this blog: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” posted on 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; “The Beatles And Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary,” 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; and “Now, Live, The Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016.  As I’ve frequently said of Kirk’s contributions to ROT, his accounts of these musical experiences are informed both by his personal responses and his background and knowledge of music and performance.  I am beyond delighted to share Kirk’s thoughts with ROTters and I know you will find edifying notions here.  ~Rick]

Since I recently wrote on this blog about a sterling Frankie Valli concert I saw in November 2017, I may as well report on two other shows I saw in the same month, both involving older performers, although neither are as old as Valli, who is 83 (he was born in 1934). Both are close, though – Bob Dylan is 76 (born in 1941), and Ringo Starr is 77 (born in 1940). Both are known quantities, first making their musical marks in the early 1960s. Both remain remarkable performers today.

Of the two, Bob Dylan is the more mercurial. On the one hand, he is an established figure in the world of music, to the point where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. On the other hand, he remains unpredictable, as demonstrated by his response to receiving the Nobel Prize: he remained invisible for days, finally released a statement saying the award left him “speechless,” did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award, and delivered his acceptance speech, which the prize rules require in order to receive the cash award, two months after the deadline, in the form of a recorded speech accompanied by music.

His Nobel experience may be taken as a model for nearly everything he does. It is not just that he does not meet expectations; he scorns them, defies them, dares the rest of the world to follow him through any amount of curious behavior.

For some of us who saw one of his five concerts at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan during the week of November 13-17, 2017, the biggest example of Dylan’s unpredictable behavior, among many possible choices, involves his voice.

Beginning around the time of the release of his celebrated album Time Out of Mind (1997), and intensifying by the time the album Modern Times (2006) was released, Dylan’s voice noticeably thickened, contracted in range, and took on a gravelly sound.

Many, including me, assumed that the years had taken their toll on his vocal equipment, and we did our best to enjoy what was worthwhile in Dylan’s new sound. I don’t regard purity of tone as the only standard for a singer.

Years ago I heard the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer (1900-1984) at a period when she literally had lost the ability to sing – she could only speak the lyrics of her songs. (I have read that her singing voice later somewhat returned.) I remember her  renditions of songs as among the best I have ever heard, with versions of “Send In the Clowns” and “Being Green” that stick with me to this day – and at that time she couldn’t sing a note.

So I accepted Dylan’s hoarse later voice, and was stunned at the recent Beacon concert to hear him not only sing, but sing as tunefully and clearly as he has in decades, and with greater range – occasionally singing relatively high notes in an easy semi-falsetto.

What in the world? How did he clear up his sound so well? Will he keep singing this way? One never knows with Dylan, but there’s the possibility that his rugged voice of recent years was another of the many constructs out of which he has built his public persona.

Many “stars,” it appears, seem to have a mysterious ability to shape their environments. There is a tape of a Dick Cavett TV interview with the actress Katherine Hepburn (1907-2003), who Cavett says at the beginning of the tape had been uncertain whether she wanted to be on the show at all.

Cavett asked the staff to begin taping as soon as Hepburn arrived in the studio. What we see on the tape is Hepburn immediately taking charge of the show, ordering the cameras into different locations, moving furniture around, and generally dominating the whole scene without concern for who is “in charge.” She was.

Along the same lines, I talked once with a man who had encountered Dylan on a New York street and spoke to him briefly. The man told me that as people began to notice that Bob Dylan was right there among them, and a crowd began to gather, Dylan somehow maneuvered his position so that the man was a shield between the other people and Dylan. Then, he said, he looked around and Dylan had disappeared.

That story, which I have no reason to doubt, is consistent with everything we know about Dylan’s performing life. He “shapes the environment” of both his music and his personality as the public experiences it. (I have no idea what he is like in private life.)

The issue is not what he is communicating – I am not at all doubting the genuineness of his interests and his love for his art – but how he presents it. He so seldom does the expected that some have referred to him as “perverse.”

There is another way to look at what Dylan does, of course, and that is to see him as someone who wants his audience to pay attention – to be alert, to participate in what he’s doing, to share with him the experience of encountering the world the way he sees it. To accomplish this, perhaps, he specializes in doing the unexpected, or, to put it another way, to doing what he wants instead of what people want him to do.

In his remarkable autobiography Chronicles Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004), Dylan drops hints that he consciously engineers his persona. For example,  he writes, “If you didn’t have some kind of trick, you’d come off with an invisible presence, which wasn’t good.” He’s specifically talking about what he learned from watching the singer Richie Havens, but the comment certainly seems to have larger implications.

In Chronicles (a book well worth anyone’s time to read) Dylan also talks about his exposure to the famous off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (which opened in 1954, and then returned in 1955 for 2,707 performances), with music by Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), translated by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964).

Dylan devotes five pages of his book to the effect the work had on him, especially the song “Pirate Jenny.” It is tempting to link Dylan with Brecht’s famous theories about drama as an instrument for shaking an audience out of its usual expectations and making it think (often referred to in English, somewhat inaccurately, as the “alienation effect”). Dylan’s many personae and his varied approaches to his music certainly seem to call Brecht’s approach to mind.

Dylan is notorious, in particular, for recasting his songs into rhythms, melody lines, and even harmonies, that barely resemble those of the original recordings. My friend at the Beacon concert said, “I wish that he’d sing just one line of “Blowing In the Wind” the way he wrote it! That’s all I want – just one line!”

I understand that request, but I think I also understand that Dylan seems to be saying, “Why should I sing a song in the way it sounded on its recording? I’ve already done that!” Another friend of mine feels that Dylan shows disrespect for his own songs. I see that situation in exactly the opposite way – it seems to me that Dylan respects his songs so much that he believes they can exist in many forms different from their original style. That approach is also part of the folk song tradition that (among other traditions) has influenced his writing.

In any case, the effect is to make a Dylan admirer approach each of his concerts wondering what kind of Dylan we’ll get this time – in other words, an alert, interested audience, an active rather than a passive audience.

Having said all that, as a matter of fact there may be a simpler reason that Dylan is singing better than we’ve heard him in a long time: in the last few years he has released three albums of music from what is often called “the great American songbook,” “standards” of popular music, many of them most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra (whom Dylan knew slightly, and greatly admired).

When you hear Dylan sing these songs (for example, at the Beacon, “Once Upon and Time” and “Autumn Leaves,” among others), you certainly know it’s Bob Dylan singing them; but he sings the songs simply and with feeling. He sings them. Perhaps that activity has spilled over into the way he performs his own songs.

In any case, the concert I saw was a huge success, with one high point followed by another. In recent years Dylan has completely stopped playing the guitar, and at the Beacon he didn’t play the harmonica either. Instead he either sang the standards while holding a microphone stand like Sinatra or Elvis might have done, or he sang from the piano, often standing up while playing, pounding on it like Jerry Lee Lewis. When he first started playing piano in his concerts, his playing was unobtrusive and tentative. Now it’s boisterous – a vigorous lead instrument.

Dylan, of course, caused a huge musical upheaval in the 1960s: he opened a new world of lyric writing by showing that words to songs could be personal to an individual,  a window into a specific person’s mind. (He was helped in this by the fact that he is in many ways not just a lyricist but a poet, a fact that his Nobel Prize surely acknowledges.) Everyone who has written popular music since then, including the Beatles, rappers, and everyone else, has benefited from the revolution he caused.

Revolutions don’t come along that often, so Dylan has replaced revolution with revelation. Each appearance is a revelation of what a singer/instrumentalist/songwriter can accomplish, and a look at the possibilities of the human spirit as well – a spirit that may well at times be cranky, individualistic, even, well, perverse.

Ringo Starr also participated in a revolution, the revolution that happened musically, culturally, and perhaps even politically as the Beatles – hugely influenced by Dylan – transformed popular music, in some ways taking Dylan’s insights and presenting them in a more accessible way than Dylan has.

Since 1989, Ringo, long past his Beatle days, and his All-Starr Band have toured widely, with Ringo showcasing a changing series of outstanding musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, and recently of the 1980s. The round-robin format of his shows gives each musician a chance to be showcased, and allows all of them to stretch out musically.

The current band has been together for five years, and includes singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren, keyboardist Gregg Rolie (from the bands Santana and Journey), guitarist Steve Lukather (from Toto), bassist Richard Page (from Mr. Mister), woodwind player Warren Ham (from Bloodrock and Kansas) and drummer Gregg Bissonette, plus of course Ringo, also on drums. 

I saw the last show of their 2017 tour at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey. It is not revolutionary, but it is definitely a revelation of how well a rock group can work together. The members seem to genuinely enjoy playing together (and I have heard anecdotally as well that that is so). 

Ringo continues to be a splendid host on stage, relaxed and funny, singing well, drumming (as I read someone say) impeccably, and reminding us of some points we ought to remember: that older folks can accomplish great things; that music can inspire, excite, stimulate, enliven; and that happiness is not only worthwhile but sometimes achievable. Perhaps those things are revolutionary after all.