Dylan concert reviews

July 2, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

It was a night of biblical proportions at Tanglewood, a concert by Bob Dylan that was a revelation, following a set by Mavis Staples that was a revival. The revelation is that some 55 years into his career, by remaining true and not wavering from his original vision, Bob Dylan was able to belt out a genre-skimming array of 20 songs, imbuing each one of them with just the right degree of scorn or glee, humor or haughtiness, bile, blasphemy, or belligerence.

Dylan’s constancy was demonstrated by She Belongs To Me, the second song tonight, which he also performed the first time I saw him, on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Tonight’s set started with Things Have Changed, his trophy-winning song from 2000, which was performed with more ardor and vehemence than an opening number usually gets, as if he’d been singing along backstage to old girlfriend Maris Staples!

Bob Dylan sings the Great American Songbook

Tonight’s setlist also demonstrated that Mr. Dylan’s perusal of the Great American Songbook is no passing fancy; besides doing five songs from the 2 new “Sinatra” albums, Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, he also sang How Deep is the Ocean and I Could Have Told You, brand new entries on Bob Dylan’s setlist. While it’s hard to imagine that his own lyrics have overlooked any nuance of emotion or condition of life, nontheless he seems all fired up to be singing this material, making a fresh wind blow through Tin Pan Alley.

Those seven songs were distributed evenly among his own, five of which hail from Tempest, which took the world by storm upon release in 2012, when Dylan-wags reminded us that The Tempest is the name of Shakespeare’s last play. Turns out not to mark the end of the line for the bard of Hibbing, at all! Tempest is a great album, and tonight Bob Dylan delivered five songs from it with a high degree of fidelity to the recorded versions: Pay in Blood, Duquesne Whistle, Early Roman Kings, Scarlet Town, Long and Wasted Years.

Duquesne Whistle gets your attention

Duquesne Whistle, in the 7tyh spot tonight but 1st on the album, reminds me of Like A Rolling Stone, the opening number on Highway 61 Revisted. Whereas the latter shocks the listener with the loud crack of a snare drum right up front, Duquesne Whistle lollygags for more than half a minute before slapping you awake. Bob Dylan is an artist who doesn’t put much effort into promotion, but every now and then he takes the measure of our attention.

And tonight, he even addressed the audience, after the first 9 songs, telling us the band would be leaving the stage but would return in a few minutes. For years, he spoke only to introduce the band and maybe say thank you at the end of the set and before the encore, but hadn’t even been doing that much talking lately. This encore alone was worth the price of admission: Blowin’ in the Wind, with Dylan’s vocals and piano assiduously accented by violin, and a rollicking reading given to Love Sick, off the immense 1997 album Time Out of Mind.

Mavis Staples rouses the audience

Mavis Staples had the audience in the palm of her hand by the time her opening set wound up, and on their feet, singing along and testifying! She doesn’t share Dylan’s reticence, rather is as chatty as your sister, eager to tell you what’s been happening. We couldn’t sit still during her set, which left us revived with the fervor of the Sixties. Her band is awesome and they mix up an intoxicating blend of gospel, soul, funk, blues, and rock ‘ roll.

– Bob Dylan first performed in the Berkshires on August 17, 1963 as Joan Baez’s unannounced guest at the Boy’s Club in Pittsfield, one of three Berkshire Music Barn concerts that were held in Pittsfield that year to accommodate a larger audience than the Music Barn’s Lenox facility could. (The others were Al Hirt and Ray Charles.) It came in the midst of a crucial time in the parturition of Bob Dylan, cultural icon.

Bob Dylan spring and summer 1963

• May 27 – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (his second album) released, containing such masterpieces as:
  • “Blowin in the Wind,”
  • “Girl of the North Country,”
  • “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright,”
  • “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall;”
• July 6 – Dylan performed at a Civil Rights Rally in Greenwood, MS (the movie “Don’t Look Back” includes his performance that day of “Only a Pawn in their Game”);
• July 24, 25, 26 – he performed five times at the Newport Folk Festival;
• first week of August – New York to begin recording The Time’s They Are A-Changing
• August 28, 1963 – he sang 3 songs at the March on Washington, two with Joan Baez.

Joan Baez introduces Bob Dylan at Pittsfield Boy’s Club, August 14, 1963

Berkshire Music Barn 1963 program; compliments of Billy Weigand[/caption]After writing that the capacity crowd received more than the price of their admission entitled them to when Baez brought on “folk singer and composer Bob Dylan, the hottest young man in the business…” Berkshire Eagle entertainment editor Milton R. Bass went on to write a succinct critique of Dylan’s performance that includes a sentence deserving of a place in the canon of Dylanology.

“His voice is not a pretty one, his guitar playing is just plain old banging away, but there is an intensity about him, a dedication, that forces one’s attention where it belongs.” Milton R. Bass, Berkshire Eagle

The songs Dylan sang that night were “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Blowin in the Wind,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall.” Baez had earlier sung “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright” and “With God on Our Side.” It would be a dozen years before Bob Dylan would return to the Berkshires, again unannounced, again with Joan Baez, but this time with the Rolling Thunder Revue, which descended upon Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket.

– With his highly anticipated return to the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan presented his audience not with a musical masterpiece nor any acknowledgment that this was a special gig, but rather the silly sight of himself wearing a wig that could have been styled by ex-congressman Jim Traficant.

Was this an indication that Mr. Dylan has a new cause to champion, having found something redeeming about Traficant unseen by the public and the press? Or was it just a goof to see how much palaver the wig (and fake beard) will generate in the media and elsewhere, his Newport ’65 performance having established the gold standard for much ado about nothing much?

The setlist itself was a highlight, including “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Desolation Row,” “Positively 4th Street,” and “The Wicked Messenger;” plus two of the five songs he played here in 1965, “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Anyone looking for special significance could sift through those lyrics, playful, querulous, and redolent as they are, cut and paste a bit, and posit “Dylan’s nod to Newport.”

The Newport ’65 story percolated along through the decades without Dylan’s input, got a big boost after the recent death of Alan Lomax, and culminated Saturday on the op-ed page of the New York Times with a piece by festival founder George Wein. Our 2 cents worth: If Mr. Lomax and Pete Seeger had been more polite and composed that day, we probably would have been spared the hysterical story that wouldn’t die.

So unless there’s some significance to the applied hair, for Dylan it was just another gig on his “never-ending tour,” rather than his triumphal return to the Newport Folk Festival.

Indeed, his seemed to be an extra-festival set, as before he came onstage the Apple and Eve Newport Fok Festival backdrop was removed and the press area near the stage was evacuated.

Today’s was a typically generous 2 hour show of 19 songs, the second gig after a 12 week touring hiatus, which left an overall impression of being under-rehearsed. It lacked the seamless brilliance of last November’s tour finale in Boston, which was a masterpiece.

That his setlists are built around songs written decades ago is testament to the fact that what Dylan created then is as fresh and welcome today as a sea breeze. But over the past several years, he has displayed a genius for performance, adding to his own incomparable song catalogue the works of other artists, blending the old and the new, his songs and others,’ cool costumes, crazy choreography, grimaces and grins, to present concerts that amount to fresh pieces of art.

Today, however, there were only artful segments, such as the electric, rollicking “Summer Days,” which followed the acoustic “Mr. Tambourine Man.” On the latter, Dylan’s delivery seemed narrational, which may have seemed apt to him as his audience at that moment actually was “…Silhouetted by the sea” and if not exactly “…circled by the circus sands,” then surely circled by the carnival tents of falafel and t-shirt vendors.

After a swig of water and strapping on his Stratocaster, Dylan then cut loose on a searing rendition of “Summer Days,” nodding his head and looking quizzically at his flanking guitar mates, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell. This is an infectiously swinging tune, with a wild pastiche of lyrics, including an excerpt from The Great Gatsby, “She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.””

Bob Dylan has never seemed interested in repeating the past; and it doesn’t seem likely there’ll be a repeat of all the Newport ’65 malarkey in the wake of Dylan Newport ’02. One thing for certain about it: there were no boos, but there were plenty of fruit juice.

Setlist (thanks to Bill Pagel at BobLinks):

1. Roving Gambler (acoustic)
2. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (acoustic) (Larry on cittern)
3. Desolation Row (acoustic)
4. Mama, You Been On My Mind (acoustic) (Bob on harp)
5. Down In The Flood
6. Positively 4th Street
7. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Larry on slide guitar)
8. Cry A While (Larry on slide guitar)
9. Girl Of The North Country (acoustic) (Bob on harp)
10. Tangled Up In Blue (acoustic) (Bob on harp)
11. Mr. Tambourine Man (acoustic)
12. Summer Days (Tony on standup bass)
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Larry on pedal steel)
14. The Wicked Messenger (Bob on harp)
15. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

(encore)
16. Not Fade Away
17. Like A Rolling Stone
18. Blowin’ In The Wind (acoustic)
19. All Along The Watchtower

the now-obsolete Trafficant reference

From Representative Traficant’s final speech in the House of Representatives. Shortly after this speech, the House voted 420 to 1 to expel Traficant. Congressional Record, 24 July 2002, pages H5385–H5392.

“Am I different? Yeah. Have I changed my pants? No. Deep down my colleagues know they want to wear wider bottoms; they are just not secure enough to do it. I do wear skinny ties. Yeah, wide ties make me look heavier than I am and I am heavy enough.

Do I do my hair with a weed whacker? I admit.” ^ return top.

As of 9 Aug. 2022 – this show is available on Youtube:

Nov. 24, 2001 concert review by Dave Read – Decked out in a sparkling white suit, 10 weeks after 9/11, Bob Dylan took the stage of Boston’s Fleet Center at 8:15 on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, bounding up to the mic on the balls of his feet, and laid into Hank Williams’ Wait For the light to Shine, beginning a 2½ hour concert that closed the first “Love and Theft” leg of his never-ending tour.

Including six songs from the already-gold “Love and Theft” mixed in with “standards” that are older than many of the 14,000+ in attendance, it was a memorable performance – displaying many facets of Dylan’s genius: poet, composer, guitar slinger, talent scout, vocalist, and nimble-footed knee-waggler.

The opener had a playful feel to it and was followed by It Ain’t Me, Babe, begun a capella and then laid against the quiet sound of acoustic guitars and bass with rhythmic highlights from drummer David Kemper’s brushwork. Dylan delivered the verses without much variation, saving his emphasis for the refrains.

Coming to the end of the lyric, he fairly barked out a “babe” full of derision, but then repeated the last lines in a melodious fashion, tip-toed backwards to get his harmonica and light-footed it back to the mic where he delivered a coda almost on bended knee.

Next, on A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, the band provided an expansive musical meadow, flowered by Larry Campbell’s bouzouki, for Dylan to romp through giving voice to this lyric that is remarkable for so many reasons, not the least of which is that he wrote it when he was barely out of his teens.

The replies to “Oh, where have you been…?, Oh, what did you see…?, Oh, what did you hear…?, Oh, who did you meet…?,” were variously recited, chanted, and intoned. The song’s final question, “Oh, what’ll you do now…?” was answered in exhortation, Dylan adding a syllable-full of angst at the end – “yea-as, it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

Another cover song, the plaintive Searching for a Soldier’s Grave, featuring vocal harmonies and Campbell’s mandolin playing, was followed by the first song from “Love and Theft,” Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, a hugely fun rollicking tune jammed full of little aural treats.

The band was back-lighted on this number and the lighting played a role on the next tune, too, helping to show that the essence of Just Like a Woman, which has no trouble standing alone on the printed page as an integral work of art, lays in just a few simple notes, which convey effortlessly all the bittersweet emotion that is spelled out in the lyric.

Focusing on the dozen or so notes of the jaunty, descending melodic hook (which follows “…But you break just like a little girl” on the original recording) – the stage lights went down while Dylan repeated the melody a few times, then back up for another run through, now augmented by Campbell’s pedal steel guitar.

It was on this number, too, that Dylan threw all his dance moves into the performance. Almost always facing the audience, he’d move up to and away from the mic, using little hopping steps on the balls of his feet – like he didn’t want his footsteps to be heard. Was he being furtive? Coming like a thief in the night?

Having the new Lonesome Day Blues follow that newly-revealed old chestnut was felicitous; it is straight forward and all-of-a-piece, driven by a hypnotic rhythm overlaid with some nifty guitar-slinging. The sound is very heavy and the lyric, which appears to be linear, contains this perplexing juxtaposition:

“Well, I’m forty miles from the mill I’m dropping it into overdrive,
I’m forty miles from the mill I’m dropping it into overdrive,
Set my dial on the radio I wish my mother was still alive.

I seen ya loverman coming, coming across the barren fields,
I see ya loverman coming, coming across the barren fields,
He’s not a gentleman at all, he’s rotten to the core, he’s a coward and he steals.”

Also new, Highwater (for Charley Patton) came next, begun with Dylan racing through the opening lines before the band joined in, led by Campbell on banjo. The music built up and around the lyric, which is full of direct references and a variety of allusions. The performance had something of a tribal feeling to it, and the ad hoc Fleet Center tribe responded with big hand-thunder.

Next, it was back into acoustic mode for Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, another gem mined decades ago, back during the Kennedy administration, three years before Bobby Orr became the darling of all Bostonians, and two years before the folk mafia wigged-out down the highway at the Newport Folk Festival. (review of Bob Dylan at Newport, August 3, 2002)

Appearing like a youngster on stage tonight, like he’s having way more fun than anybody else in town, just how could Dylan have been so old so long ago that he knew so well how to handle heartbreak? Or did he just know how to write about it – writing a prescription and dosing himself with each performance?

To expand the medicinal metaphor, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, offers physical therapy too, by way of finger-picking, and Dylan, Campbell, and Charlie Sexton all cut loose for quite a display of acoustic wizardry, continuing to pluck away for a couple minutes after the song’s closing lines.

Next was John Brown from the MTV Unplugged record, with Campbell on bouzouki again, followed by a spirited acoustic Tangled Up in Blue, with royal red lights flooding the arena, then two more new songs, the jook-joint feeling Summer Days with Tony Garnier spinning his upright bass and then the lugubrious Sugar Baby. And before the set-ending Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, they played a southern-rock styled The Wicked Messenger, which Dylan wrapped up with a little harmonica riff.

Like a Rolling Stone came after Things Have Changed, and tonight’s performance was another sweet-hot rocker that flowed freely, dis-encumbered of the barnacles of a thousand trips. That party piece was followed by the psalm, Forever Young, tonight given a transcendent reading with beautiful vocal harmonies, and then the new Honest With Me, featuring Campbell’s slide guitar licks, a song that would’ve fit nicely on the 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Then, after a disguised introduction, Blowin’ in the Wind got a spirited playing with the band adding vocal harmonies on the refrain. Dylan and his band plugged in again for All Along the Watchtower, invoking the spirit of Jimi Hendrix with plenty of stellar guitar riffs and runs. Roy Orbison was brought to mind too, when Dylan mimiced his Pretty Woman growl on the penultimate line “Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl…”

Before the stage went dark again, Dylan held his guitar up in front of his face and bowed slightly. A moment later, over the din in the dark arena, we heard the band humming the chorus of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, followed soon by the cleanly enunciated: “Mama, take this badge off of me/ I can’t use it anymore./It’s gettin’ dark, too dark for me to see/I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.”

And so, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2001, good ole’ Bob Dylan came to the Hub of the universe, acting like he’d copped more than just a moniker from >Dylan Thomas, who wrote this Note to his “Collected Poems”:

“These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”

1. Wait For The Light To Shine (acoustic) (Larry on mandolin) (song by Fred Rose)
2. It Ain’t Me, Babe (acoustic) (Bob on harp)
3. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (acoustic) (Larry on bouzouki)
4. Searching For A Soldier’s Grave (acoustic) (Larry on mandolin)
(song by Johnnie Wright, Jim Anglin and Jack Anglin)
5. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
6. Just Like A Woman (Larry on pedal steel)
7. Lonesome Day Blues
8. High Water (For Charley Patton) (Larry on banjo)
9. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (acoustic)
10. John Brown (acoustic) (Larry on bouzouki)
11. Tangled Up In Blue (acoustic)
12. Summer Days (Tony on standup bass)
13. Sugar Baby (Tony on standup bass)
14. The Wicked Messenger (Bob on harp)
15. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Larry on steel guitar)

(encore)
16. Things Have Changed
17. Like A Rolling Stone
18. Forever Young (acoustic)
19. Honest With Me (Larry on slide guitar)
20. Blowin’ In The Wind (acoustic)
21. All Along The Watchtower
22. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (acoustic)

Setlist courtesy of Bill Pagel at BobLinks.com.