The good news: I can now say I’ve seen Bob Dylan.
The bad news: To say that, I had to actually HEAR him. The closest comparison I can make is that he sounded like a serial killer. He had down the guttural growls and the wheezy moans – all he needed was a few horcruxes and he’d be a dead ringer for Lord Voldemort.
Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan has proven that demonic presence is not always a bad thing. His Pumpkins’ show last May was one of the five best concerts I’ve ever been to. The key difference is that Corgan’s music is supposed to be menacing. When your most famous lyric is “despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,” it makes sense for the audience to be uneasy. Corgan’s performance was consistent with this identity: he pounded through creepy, nine-minute guitar riffs, he enveloped the stage in dark neon, he barely said anything to the audience, etc. The point is you would expect Smashing Pumpkins to be villains, and they were.
The problem with the Dylan concert was that Dylan is not a villain. A renegade, a rebel, sure, but not a blood-sucking villain. Yet that’s exactly how he came off during the show. He never faced or acknowledged the audience, he spit out every verse with maximum phlegm, and he assembled a band that was destined to fail. I cannot see why, other than self-sabotage, someone would assemble such a band. They started with somber folk music, then abruptly shifted to square dance. And all the while, Dylan kept up that same wheezy moan. It was enough to make you seasick.
I could take such discordant sounds if they were meant to be amusing, like Dylan’s recent “Must Be Santa.” He clearly meant for that song to be ironic. Christmas should involve time with family and thoughtful presents – not drunken, nauseous polka. Moreover, Dylan seemed to intend most of his holiday album to be a joke. Why else, Chris Erickson asks, would a Jewish homeless man with tuberculosis sing about Christmas?
The problem is, the vast majority of his work is not a joke – it is subtle, sophisticated, and even, in its own way, well sung. The way he inflects the “now” in “My Back Pages,” the “hey” in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the four different “hard”s in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” are all first-rate. His lyrics also connect with various stages of my life: “Hurricane” with my dad in high school, “Like a Rolling Stone” with my quiz buds in England, and “Blowin in the Wind” with Evan, Kyle, Kinslow, Pierre, and Texas in New Orleans.
To hear all of that tarnished in one night, it was sad. I’m sure I’ll eventually start listening to him again, but for now, in my mind, he is a complete unknown…
Grade: F
What brought me back to Dylan after the concert -- Friday Night Lights:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw572hRD1diCOVhwem5xdW9vLU0/view?usp=sharing
The times they are a-changin from Tony Fox on Vimeo.
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