In re: Bob Dylan

The Lonesome Cohort of Bob Dylan

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By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 2023 – It is the job of literature to produce a fabric broad and deep enough to hold a people together. It must provide the flag a nation’s people rally around, with or without saluting. To keep from sticking out like sore thumbs, the best writers only borrow enough from their elders and ancestors so that they blend in, yet remain fresh and distinct voices.

If Philip Nolan is The Man Without a Country, then perhaps America’s principle man of letters, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, is a man without a generation? That would be because he was born a member of the last cohort to escape the naming-clutch of the consumer economy, which didn’t exist when he was born in May 1941, seven months before America was lured back into the wars of the old world.

If born a mere five years later, he’d have been branded a Baby Boomer, a term useful to people and companies with something to sell. The consumer economy was dreamt up to succeed the manufacturing economy that had sprung to the old world’s rescue twice in the span of 25 years.

Even an obscure reference such as Philip Nolan has relevance in an article on Bob Dylan, because there’s no aspect of the American story that he hasn’t woven into the tapestry of his own mythography.

Confederate poet Henry Timrod became the most famous advocate of slavery’s Lost Cause when Dylan quoted him in his song When the Deal Goes Down, on Modern Times (2006). For all we know, it was Timrod who had inspired Philip Nolan to enlist in Aaron Burr’s treasonous conspiracy?

But we digress – the question is whether Bob Dylan is a man without a generation? As soon as I write that, I wonder if I may have gotten off on the wrong foot? Given his “never-ending tour,” maybe the Thomas More story, A Man for All Seasons, would’ve been more apt?

No, that couldn’t work, because there are only four seasons, and it would be senseless to imagine Dylan as being divisible by four. What may make sense, however, is a literary mashup, such as declaring him to be “The Man for All Generations.”

Embarked as he is today on tour in support of Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, Bob Dylan has attracted paying customers from every generation named by the great American marketing machine. Now it makes sense.

Being pre-generational, Bob Dylan makes music that appeals to people of any and all generations!

And, as he told us in his memoir-adjacent book, Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2004), not only is he not a Baby Boomer, but it was the avant-garde of that cohort who impelled him to buy a rifle so he could protect his family from their rude and rowdy ways.

Perhaps you can see, now, how absurd is the label stamped on him by the popular media, and repeated by succeeding generations of the laziest writers in history – pop culture journalists. Bob Dylan is no more the spokesman for the Baby Boomers than he is for GenZ, iGen, or Centennials.

As he has been telling us since, at least, the 1965 San Francisco press conference, Bob Dylan is a song and dance man (more song than dance). He writes songs, then creates musical settings for them, then sells them. There is nothing easy about it, but it is that simple.

The Sophistry of Modern Bob

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One can only imagine what Elvis Costello thinks about having his career critiqued by the most taciturn and most discriminating critic in the history of pop music, Bob Dylan. It would be of minimal concern if done via zine, vlog, or even newspaper, but Dylan’s take on his fellow showman appears in a big, fat, almost coffee-table-size book, The Philosophy of Modern Song.*

By burying his judgments in the silent tomb of a book, Mr. Dylan preserves them from being devoured by the odious thief, AI, which ingests every word spoken within range of a microphone hidden by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the other cannibals of pop culture.

Sure, his words eventually will be scraped by the machine and mangled into a million abuses, but, a thousand years from now, they’ll remain on the printed page precisely the way they appear today.

This being about Bob Dylan, we know better than to expect it to be simply a case of him deciding to single-out for praise his colleague’s big hit Pump It Up. Instead, the other shoe drops almost immediately – “At the point of Pump It Up, he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much.”

Springsteen, who he? Oh yeah, Bruce Springsteen is the ultimate “next Bob Dylan!” So, why drag him into a little toast to Elvis Costello? Because that would give the thinking public something to contemplate – that vanishing cohort of people who’d rather think than swallow whole whatever mass media is produced for our consumption.

For Springsteen fans, this must sting, because none of the other 65 songs in the book is a Springsteen composition. Ouch! Just think about that – a sixtysix song survey of modern American song and it excludes the very popular hero of Asbury Park. Oh my.

“Don’t cry for me,” whispers Bruce, “I got me two Grammies for every one Bob Dylan has!”

Anyway, as if to demonstrate how like the hoi polloi he has become, there is an uncredited co-author for the piece on Costello’s song. The first section betrays the strong odor of AI authorship – it is a steaming cup of word soup, with cliche croutons tossed in for umami.

Then, following a spacious caesura, the second part sounds original and makes fresh observations – it very well may be written by Bob, but, even after 50+ years of applied Dylanology, I can’t be certain it is!

*The Philosophy of Modern Song is as much about philosophy as the first Bob Dylan book, Tarantula, is about arachnids.

Dave Read

Bob Dylan and the tyranny of prize

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The moment, in 2016, when I saw a picture of the Nobel Prize committee chairperson, I had an idea of why Bob Dylan had been chosen for the Literature award. I imagined her as she would have been in college after hearing Just Like a Woman for the first time, and feeling as if Bob Dylan wrote it and sings it for her alone.

Sara Danius, of the Swedish Academy, names Bob Dylan winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, October 13, 2016.

More than once have I taken a date to a Bob Dylan concert, and each time I felt that if he had beckoned her, from the stage, or afterwards from the bus, I’d have gone home alone. And I like to think I’d be okay with that – because there is a woman (or two) with the same gravitational pull on me!

Since Bob Dylan and his songs occupy much of the space capital ‘p’ poetry would if market forces hadn’t replaced it with Creative Writing, the committee knew there’d be precious little blowback if it gave the literary world’s most esteemed diadem to an alien, to someone outside the world of literature – to the self-proclaimed song and dance man!

Springsteen 20 – Dylan 10

OR – maybe this is a case of noble Nobellians balancing the folly of the recording industry, which is in charge of pop culture’s royal family, where Beyonce is head of household. There, you’ll glance past dozens of names before reaching Bob Dylan, whose 10 prizes are half as many as Bruce Springsteen’s, the guy once known as “the next Bob Dylan.”

As luck would have it, when Dylan’s award was announced, Donald Hall (1928-2018), former poet laureate of the United States, was my friend and correspondent. We had been discussing the importance of music to his work when I asked what he thought about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature.

“Curiously, when I read Bob Dylan on the page the words make no sound! Poetry sound is utterly different from music. When he sings them, I reckon that they make a good noise! They are song literature but on the page they have no sex at all. Compare Thomas Hardy and “During Wind and Rain.” Hardy has four stanzas, each of them tells us that people have fun together as families but then they get old and die. Four times. And it is fairly erotic. Oral sex. Phil Roth should have won the Nobel, and now he never will.”

Prizes, such as the one connected to the dynamite fortune, say as much about the grantor as they do about the lucky winner. Saudi Arabia suddenly gives rich prizes to golfers, just to get people off their back for dismembering journalists.

In 1958, the literature Nobel was given to Boris “Dr. Zhivago” Pasternak – even though the Russian author, already on Stalin’s shitlist, wanted no part of the prize and all the noise it would make. But, since the brand new C.I.A. was eager to rub Uncle Joe’s nose in it, Pasternak was awarded the prize – and suffered for it the rest of his life.

You know who would’ve been a dyn-o-mite recipient of the 1958 Nobel in Literature? The man who wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists,” whose praise Bob Dylan sings on his first record album.

Dave Read

The British Invasion

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Weeks before Great Britain sends
Beatles toward the Liberty statue,

JFK, martyr/son of her ancient foe,
benames the place they’ll land,
(*not Gold, not Normandy).

Before CBS anoints the uniformed four –
or masses an audience of kids (too young for tits),

They expel Bob Dylan, the native son
who would say John Birch has come
to scare US out of our wits.

The spoonful of sugar that helps the
medicine go down, Bubblegum Pop

Keeps Folk ‘n Blues close to home –
in the sticks, and seedy parts of town,
where Jazz and Poems rise to the top.

Dave Read

* The British landed at Gold Beach, Normandy, on D-Day.

American Leviathans

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“Oh! time was, as when the sunrise nobly spurred me…” Captain Ahab, chapter 37.
“New Morning,” Bob Dylan, LP #12

By Dave Read – One hundred ten years after Moby-Dick broke the surface of the inchoate, if not placid, American scene, another leviathan broke the surface of American somnambulance, making waves near the port of New York, which have yet to crest, five dozen years later.

Of all the literary links and/or melding metaphors available for an epistle addressed to Bob Dylan’s audience, Herman Melville/Moby-Dick seems suitable because Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is loaded with 78 sentences about Moby-Dick, a new world record!

Also, because the public transformed Dylan into a veritable white whale, a thing great enough to support generations of barnacles right across the pecuniary spectrum, but especially in the book business and in the academy.

Not only that, but Bob Dylan channeled Herman Melville during an impromptu tête à tête with his erstwhile muse, Joan Baez. The exchange was recorded because it took place in the midst of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and is included in the movie based on it by Martin Scorsese.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca's Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo. — Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo.

Dylan and his traveling circus enjoy a rare day off in the Berkshire woods, between a double-header the previous day in Springfield and a show the next day in Vermont. They have the run of Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket, which happens to be a favorite haunt of Arlo Guthrie, who lives nearby and who had been invited to join the troupe for the Springfield shows.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab is nearly blissed out – “as the morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh.”

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT’S tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”

The decidedly unschooled Bob Dylan also is near bliss, a decade and a half since he weighed the anchor of his mind in the shallow harbor of Hibbing, Minnesota, now early in the most storied tour in the annals of American popular music.

I attended the Springfield shows, and about twenty years later, I became friends with a guy who had been both neighbor and friend of Mama Frasca.** Not only did he attend the all-day party, but he was with Mama Frasca when Arlo called to make arrangements for the party.

Apparently, the name of Joan Baez came up during the conversation, because as my friend tells the story, when Mama Frasca hung up the phone, she was overcome with joy, “Joan Baez is coming, Joan Baez is coming.” So profound was Mama’s affection for the counter-culture chanteuse that, when she arrived decked-out in dungaree, Mama whisked her upstairs and gave her a pretty white dress to put on.

With the party in full-swing throughout the lodge and environs, Dylan and Baez have a moment alone together at the bar. The former lovers chide each other on their recent marriages:

“It really displeases me that you ran off and got married.”

“You got married first and didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, but I married the woman I loved.”

“Yeah, that’s true – and I married the man I thought I loved.”

“See, that’s what thought has to do with it – thought will fuck you up!”

“You’re right, I agree with that.

“It’s heart, it’s not head.”

It is unlikely that Mr. Dylan, in the hemisemidemiquaver that precedes his reply, scanned memory for a stored phrase to use. There is a chance, however, that Revue poet Alan Ginsberg happened to be on Chapter 135 at that moment, as he recited from Moby-Dick all day, delighted to be within a dozen miles of Melville’s Arrowhead home, where the book was written.

My thesis is that great minds think alike – and not infrequently they think about the very nature of thought. For artists such as Melville and Dylan, it’s never enough to become masters of their craft; every sunrise illuminates a new horizon, and new horizons exert a force on them that we ordinary sailors are lucky just to read about.

Dave Read

* Wikipedia page on Like A Rolling Stone, with reference to Kooper; there are many renditions of the story worth searching out on the Internet.

** Interview about the Rolling Thunder Revue party at Mama Frasca’s

The Dylan-Baez dialogue is on Youtube – as if the poem needs facts!

OK

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take us all to tulsa

Linked poems kill ignorance.

How ’bout that kid
from the Iron Range,
now wranglin’ us down
to where Woody was born –

to the tearful place
Alabama Creek were made
to call home by errant rulers,
by men crooked as the river.

Bright light shines on Black Wall Street –
bookstores, music shops, juke joints
abound, the town’s never had it so good!
God bless the Song and Dance man’s big stash.

Dave Read

News item.
It was announced in March 2016 that Bob Dylan sold his “archive” to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa. Included are some 6,000 manuscripts, recordings, and ephemera that will be open to academic research, while casual Dylan fans also will be served by the project.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Indifference, of Bob Dylan’s Significance

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…I drove down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell…
– William Stafford, from Across Kansas

So long as he rides the wave of American music
as it rises in the Delta, in the Piedmont, in the Panhandle,

So long as he raises the questions that bubble beneath
the surface wherever shell-shocked citizens collect,

Bob Dylan songs ring true, so long as they comport
with Common Sense, Bob Dylan songs ring a bell.

But, when he finds red stripes in the American flag*
and sets out to alert his beleaguered sisters and brothers

That unseen actors wreak havoc, Bossman says no,
that song must go, but you can stay Bob Dylan, you can stay, just

So long as you play in the space laid aside for Minstrels and Rogues,
for Beatles and Jesters, where the Song ‘n Dance man rules the roost.

Dave Read

*CBS revoked its invitation for Bob Dylan to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in May, 1963, because Dylan wanted to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Thus allowed to gestate in the shadows, the John Birch Society morphed into today’s Republican Party. Remember kids, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” The network ran a piece on the Birchers some months later, remember? Of course not, but you wouldn’t have been able to get Dylan’s song out of your head.

While Bob Dylan disclaims use of the Welsh poet’s name, we cop gladly to lifting this Dylan Thomas title: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Across Kansas

My family slept those level miles
but like a bell rung deep till dawn
I drove down an aisle of sound,
nothing real but in the bell,
past the town where I was born.

Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more; what the light
struck told a self, every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate –

My state still dark, my dream to long to tell.

By Appointment of His Royal Bobness

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Article updated June 18, 2020 by Dave Read

Team Dylan controls access to Bob Dylan the same way access to the Angels is wholly mediated by the Chief Commander, Dylan’s nickname for God, as he revealed to Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes in 2004, when CBS got The Interview for the release of Dylan’s book Chronicles, Volume One.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan album released June 19, 2020.

For the Juneteenth* release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, which seems bound to raise as much of a ruckus as Chronicles did, TV historian Douglas Brinkley and the Old Grey Lady** herself got The Interview, published June 12, under the headline of the millennium: Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind.

Bob Dylan likely created Bob Dylan to buffer family from the trials and tribulations of number one son, who fled to the City, to see Woody, and to see what else is afoot. Having lifted all the records he could get his hands on at the University of Minnesota, Dylan’s January 1961 trip to NYC was as much a record-raiding party as it was a Woody Guthrie pilgrimage.

With Jackie still unpacking in Washington, DC, NYC’s Washington Square Park and environs was the domain of Dave Van Ronk, who had mastered his craft in MacDougal St. cabarets and basements, along with a multitude of singers, songwriters, blues belters, Clancy brothers, folkies, poets, lefties, comics, and the odd ne’er do well.

Van Ronk helped the unwashed phenomenon settle into life in New York; his wife Terri Thal managed Dylan until he was ready to turn pro, in 1962, when he signed with Albert Grossman. To imagine Bob Dylan without the serendipity of Grossman’s role, before the forms had been pried from the concrete plinth of an eight decade career, is too much to ask!

Born the same year Dylan bolted college, Professor Brinkley was invited into Dylan’s enterprise some time ago, and already has plunged into the Bob Dylan archive, which the University of Tulsa bought for $15 fifteen million in the waning days of the Obama Administration.

After Dylan dropped Murder Most Foul on the sore, masked, head of the world in April, the breezy Brinkley tells us his relationship with Dylan is such that he’s comfortable reaching out to him, which led to their cellular chinwag, a.k.a. The Interview.

Included on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Murder Most Foul is a seventeen minute song about the JFK assassination. Brinkley asks Dylan if he wrote the song “as a nostalgic eulogy for a long-lost time?”

That is the second-stupidest question Dylan has ever fielded, right behind the one asking how it feels to be spokesman for a generation. It makes me imagine Brinkley ask Picasso, “what is the square root of Cubism?”

Will he redeem himself by asking his friend who he thinks shot JFK? Of course not. Do I care about anything else some professor has to say about this or any other Dylan album. Fuck no, school’s over.

*A Trump rally was scheduled for Juneteenth in Tulsa; Love and Theft was scheduled for release on 9/11. (Trump goes the “exclusive interview” route, too.)

** New York Times, until Johnny couldn’t read anymore.

Dylan before market forces…

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Article updated July 2, 2020 by Dave Read

Whithin two years of arriving in New York, Bob Dylan was making works of aural impressionism, for which there was no market. By the time money caught up with aural impressionism, it was long gone, like a turkey through the corn, ready to rock out loud, fucking loud.

These songs are so complete, so whole, they leave nothing out nor bear any dross, I remain stunned that the general public and their chief taste-makers kept dunning Dylan for moving along, for growing. Why would he loiter after completion of a project?

Norwegian Bachelor Asshole

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Garrisons are both born and made –
one houses straight shooters whose works
may excite the poets; the other is unarmed,
dangerous, and shoots blank, vapid verse.

Dave Read

Garrison Keillor takes a stab at poetry:

“Now and then people ask me why we didn’t have Dylan on the show,” the former host of “Prairie Home Companion” writes in “Living With Limericks,” which was published last week. “Because I don’t care to be associated with him, that’s why.”

“I think that ‘My Back Pages’ is one of the worst songs ever written,” he continues. “I could name others. It’s no wonder he took a pseudonym, so as to avoid bringing shame on the Zimmerman family.”

There is a songwriter named Bob
Who makes some people’s hearts throb
They find a thrill in
Listening to Dylan
And for me it’s more like a job.
Copied from the Star Tribune.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture

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780 Holmes Road Revisited,* or, Where’s the Art, Bob?

Article updated Dec. 16, 2020 by Dave Read.

I totally stand by this, except that I also think that Mr. Dylan’s work merits the highest order of blue ribbon from the world’s top prize givers – the Swedes may be best. But, despite oodles of meritorious literary content, his work belongs in the music category, not the literature one.

Also, if indeed he was slippery in his Melville comments, he gets a pass, a big fat one, for channeling Captain Ahab in dialogue with Joan Baez, at the Dream Away Lodge, right here in the Berkshires in an episode included in the recent Martin Scorsese mashup. Melville’s Ahab declaims that “to think’s audacity…” – while Dylan admonishes Baez, “…thinking fucks you up.”

June 27, 2017 – Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has been an exponent of the “folk process,” wherein an artist appropriates an extant song, modifies it to the degree that now there are two songs, which may appear to be siblings, but not identical twins.

Blowin’ in the Wind is an example, adapted from the African-American spiritual No More Auction Block; no one would confuse the two, nor would anyone deny that the new song has it’s own merit.

Whether or not one improves the other or amounts to a meritorious extension of the other, is irrelevant – upon composition of the new work, a new discussion begins.

But Dylan also has simply appropriated the folk process product of others when it suited him, such as on his first album, when he recorded Dave Van Ronk’s adaptation of the traditional folk song House of the Rising Sun, depriving his mentor Van Ronk the full benefit of his own artful work.

Dave Van Ronk was a big man, got over it, and eventually was delighted to point out that Dylan eventually stopped performing the House of the Rising Sun after Eric Burdon and The Animals had a big hit with it, for fear of being dissed for ripping them off!

Now there’s news that Bob Dylan has taken the “folk process” to a whole new level, of particular interest to us in the Berkshires, because he’s playing fast and loose with Moby-Dick. In order to fulfil his obligation to the Swedish Academy, which blew the world’s mind last year when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, he delivered a lecture on June 4, just 2 days before the $923,000 cash part of the prize would have turned to dust.

In it, he said Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey “have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school…” and he wanted to tell us about them. Regardless of precisely when Bob Dylan attended “grammar school,” it’s clear he’s referencing a long-ago time, and so we wouldn’t begrudge him a little “googling” in preparing his remarks.

But, especially with a million bucks at stake, one would expect a little more “folk process” than what Mr. Dylan delivered. If you google “Moby-Dick,” the website SparkNotes appears – and if you read the Moby Dick section of Dylan’s lecture, you’ll see enough of SparkNotes to earn a grammar school kid a failing grade for plagiarism.

As reported by Andrea Pitzer in Slate:

“Across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as “Ahab’s lust for vengeance” in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all.”

I’ll bet there are a thousand MFA candidates in writing programs across America, and not a few tenured professors too, who would pay good money for a chance to help Bob Dylan edit his shopping list! Why, then, wouldn’t he reach out for help on a $923,000 speech – at least enough help that would merit a passing grade in grammar school?

*780 Holmes Road is the Pittsfield, MA address of Arrowhead, where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick; Bob Dylan’s most famous album is called “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Bob Dylan plays the Berkshires

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Article updated Dec. 22, 2018; written by Dave Conlin Read

Bob Dylan’s Tanglewood show, July 2, 2016, was the seventh time he has performed in the Berkshires, but only the fifth time he has headlined a concert here. His surprise appearance as guest of Joan Baez at her Aug. 17, 1963 concert in Pittsfield, when he sang Only a Pawn in Their Game, Blowin in the Wind, and A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall, came in the midst of an epic summer – following July appearances at a pivotal Civil Rights Rally in Greenwood, MS and the Newport Folk Festival and just before the March on Washington. Local reporter Milton R. Bass wrote: “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.”

Rolling Thunder Revue Berkshires respite

Rolling Thunder Revue at Springfield, MA Nov. 6, 1975 handbill.

Dylan’s second Berkshires’ visit was November 7, 1975, during the first wave of the Rolling Thunder Revue. After playing two shows the day before in Springfield, he brought the troupe to Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge for an all-day party and sing-along in Becket. Catching back-to-back episodes of the Rolling Thunder Revue is about as lucky as any Dylan fan can get, and listening to Vol. 5: Live 1975 of the Bootleg Series practically brings it all back home again!

Dylan at Tanglewood

When Dylan headlined his first concert in the Berkshires, at Tanglewood, July 4, 1991, the most familiar image of him was from the Grammys a few months earlier when he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award, without a word of thanks to anyone, but with characteristically cryptic remarks about defilement and redemption, after performing an accelerated version of Masters of War, at a time when the country was drunk on the patriotic glory of the Gulf War. According to the Tanglewood electrician working the show that night, Dylan was quite belligerent, threatening to blow the show off if his demands for a total backstage blackout weren’t met. My friend told me that it nearly came to fisticuffs!

The second Tanglewood show Aug. 4, 1997, came on the heels of Dylan’s bout with histoplasmosis, a respiratory infection that nearly took him out. Opening the show was BR5-49, whose multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, who has been a member of Dylan’s band since 2005, when Larry Campbell departed. He performed an abbreviated set of 13 songs, including an excellent reading of Tangled Up in Blue, plus the rarely-performed This Wheel’s On Fire, co-written with Rick Danko, but without All Along the Watchtower, which had been on nearly every setlist since 1992.

Dylan’s ball park shows in Pittsfield

Then came the two ballpark/variety shows: June 23, 2005 and Aug. 26, 2006 at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield. With the estimable Willie Nelson on the undercard in 2005, Dylan went deep into his own songbook to perform a set that included 9 songs from 1967 and earlier. Mr. Dylan is expected to go deep into the songbook again at Tanglewood, but not his own, rather the Great American Songbook, including numbers Frank Sinatra may have done at Tanglewood in 1994.

Desolation Row is first among perhaps a score of favorite Dylan songs, from Highway 61 Revisited, which was released when I was sixteen. It was the highlight of the 2006 show, as I wrote at the time: “The arrangement of Desolation Row was simply spectacular – it was a sound ballet. There was luscious acoustic work between Garnier and Freeman, laying down swinging, jazzy lines and then doubling them. Geroge Recile was all over his drum kit, making thunder and great brassy noise. And Herron pinned down every phrase of Dylan’s with hot rivets of electric mandolin; a wicked cool effect.”