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Remembering Dave Van Ronk

Article updated June 26, 2018 by Dave Read

Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 Coen Brothers movie based on Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, inspired me to tell the story of a few encounters with Van Ronk over the course of almost 25 years. We met at the Rusty Nail Saloon, Sunderland, MA twice in the mid and late 1970s and then did an interview before a concert at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY in 1999.

I had been turned on to Van Ronk my first week at college in 1967, when an upperclassman told me that I looked like him. I hadn’t heard of Van Ronk, so I borrowed his copy of Gambler’s Blues, and loved it right off the bat. Before long I added Gambler’s Blues and Dave Van Ronk Sings the Blues to my record collection, which already held 5 or 6 Bob Dylan LPs.

I wasn’t aware of the relationship between Dylan and Van Ronk until I read Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto several years later. In it, Scaduto reports that Dylan recorded Van Ronk’s version of House of the Risin’ Sun without asking permission. Even to a Dylan freak, that seemed pretty rude. In the fall of 1975, both of them made appearances in my neck of the woods – Van Ronk played a mid-week show at the Rusty Nail Saloon in Suderland, MA and Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue played back-to-back shows in Springfield.

Beside Dave Van Ronk at the Rusty Nail Saloon

The latter was announced about one week in advance and the rumors were that Dylan’s musical cronies were showing up and playing. Van Ronk’s concert was a couple days before and so when I arrived and saw him sitting alone at the bar, I was excited to say hello and ask if he’d be appearing with Dylan later that week.

He had a glass of whiskey in front of him and was holding his guitar in his lap, slowly moving his palm along it, as if he were warming it up. I said hello, told him I was a big fan, and asked about the Dylan shows. His reply, made in a polite and not unfriendly manner, was that he didn’t want to talk about Dylan. Oops, I thought, and left Van Ronk alone with his pre-concert routine.

I thoroughly enjoyed the show, surprised that he was so entertaining, with a dimension of personality that I hadn’t noticed listening to the records. But I couldn’t help myself later, seeing him getting ready to leave the club; after saying great show, nice to meet you, I asked him to verify Scaduto’s House of the Risin’ Sun report. Dave stopped in his tracks, stared into the vacuum of my eyes, and said, “I told you I do not want to discuss that man.”

Besides feeling like an idiot, and not a litle rude myself, that was all the verification I needed. I attended both Rolling Thunder Revue shows in Springfirld, but didn’t get a chance to run the story by Dylan.

Meeting Dave Van Ronk again

The second meeting occurred 3 or 4 years later, by which time I had made the acquaintance of young woman who became an ardent fan, even though she bore no resemblance to Dave Van Ronk, none whatsoever. Since she also was a guitar player, her esteem may have been more genuine than mine, a mere doppelganger. We got to the club early and saw Van Ronk by himself at the far end of the bar, just the same as before. Instead of approaching with a head full of ideas, this time I was content to introduce my friend to Dave, and tell him that she was a guitar player too. He seemed genuinely charmed and within a few minutes, the three of us were sharing a booth close to the stage.

My recollection of the ensuing three hours is a little fuzzy, except that it was about as much fun as you could have, newfound friends, talking and laughing over round after round of whiskey. He did 3 or 4 sets and eventually the show had the feel of a conversataion between him and her. He ended with a charming dedication to her, but I cannot recall if it was Teddy Bear’s Picnic or Chicken is Nice?

During the 1980s, I saw him again at various clubs in the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. Those shows were before full houses and neither the opportunity nor the inclination to approach Van Ronk presented itself again. He did seem to be aging poorly, though.

Dave Van Ronk concert and interview

By the late 1990s, I’m writing a music column in a local newspaper and running a website, which credentials were enough to get me into a concert that he would be giving at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY. We did a telephone interview from his Greenwich Village apartment the day before. (Interview with Dave Van Ronk.)

Dave Van Ronk listening to Garth Hudson in Albany, NY I brought a tape recorder and a camera to the concert, but didn’t get much use out of either. The camera jammed up so I only got a couple eerie double exposures, and I left the tape recorder alone because I didn’t want to be intrusive. Instead, I scribbled notes furiously in the dim light as Dave gave a brilliant 2+ hour concert, which could’ve doubled as a lecture on the history of music in America. And Garth Hudson was in the house, to do a few songs by himself and to accompany Dave on accordian on a few others.

Dave was hale and hearty, appearing way better than he had in the 80s. It’s none of my business, but maybe he’d quit drinking? That was the last time I saw Dave Van Ronk. The sadness of his untimely death in 2002, however, is assuaged by several factors:

He was at the top of his game late in life;
He’d received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP);
He got props from Dylan in Chronicles, Vol. 1;

Also of consolation is the fact that his posthumous CD, “Dave Van Ronk…and the tin pan bended and the story ended,” seems like a replica of the concert he gave at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse. Here’s hoping that Inside LLewyn Davis turns out to be deserving of it’s association with the story of Dave Van Ronk, whose influence extends far beyond the tenure and jurisdiction of the Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Dave Van Ronk @ Amazon.com

Bob Dylan appears with Joan Baez at Boy’s Club Pittsfield, MA

May 11, 2016, 2013 article by Dave Read

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

1963 Berkshire Music barn concert program

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.

Bob Dylan show Mullins Center Nov. 19, 2010

Nov. 19, 2010 concert review by Dave Read

Attending an episode of the Bob Dylan Show is like pulling your car over to the curb in the midst of an ordinary errand late in the afternoon of a drab day because you noticed something on the horizon and thought, Wow! that needs a closer look.

Because life is an accumulation of errands, and even when we’re on foot, or in flight, we spend our days inside cars that are the suit of clothes we wear, the style of slang we speak, the slate of politicians we let seduce us.

The Bob Dylan Show on the Friday before Thanksgiving, that maddening American holiday, at UMASS, Amherst, that architectural wasteland, was a most worthwhile detour.

The only comment we have for the management is: please make an effort to book the show into auditoria in every case instead of gymnasia, because it is all about the music, after all, and a big cement gym sucks as a venue for music, an observation the tunes themselves ratify by living an extra second up in the dusty distant rafters where they sound like an Edvard Munch painting looks.

All the more reason to be grateful for the gene that allows one to cultivate the appreciation of so ethereal a shape-shifting headliner as Bob Dylan, who pulls over to the side of the road way more often than you or I do.

This show demonstrated that the best of his songs can be boiled down to reveal a mere handful of notes – song cores that are both augur and auger; they have a dynamism that drills deeper to reveal more handwriting on the wall of your soul.

For all I know, being bereft of all musical ability, except for desktop drumming, this is no secret. Regardless, tonight I got the feeling that it might’ve been on the agenda, that Mr. Dylan and his crackerjack outfit set out to demonstrate just how simple, and joyful, his songs can be. Maybe they went out of their way tonight to reveal the simple dancing skeletons bedecked in a wondrous wardrobe of Mardi Gras costumes?

The sixteen performed tonight were a companionable mix with a range of ages that would be present at a typical Thanksgiving dinner: there were grandparents, adults, college kids, little kids, and babies.

And how ’bout them babies! Some born full-blown, like toddler Jolene, b. 2009 and already anchoring the #1 encore slot. It will be fun to watch her grow, to doff gowns and don guises, to cast her dancing spell my way.

Speaking of which, so too was Bob Dylan, born so much older than any of us. Witness the Witmark Demos, just released as volume 9 in the Bootleg series, 47 songs he recorded before turning 24, including one from tonight’s setlist.

If Dylan had got struck dumb in Tin Pan Alley way back then, today we’d still be marvelling at tunes like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Thank God he didn’t, because tonight we got a sparkling rendition of it. Whereas he’s always been varying the vocal styling, now he’s added a whole suite of gestures, as if he’s been studying the young Al Martino.

The show started slow, chugging away from the station with an especially raspy singing of Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, a prosaic bit of testimony. He emerged from the between song blackout center stage but slightly askance to perform Shooting Star, another prayerful piece that he punctuated with a piercing harmonica coda.

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, a lyrical masterpiece, was next, introduced by Dylan on guitar. Would love to have heard it again an hour later, because the band hadn’t started coloring outside the lines yet. Spirit on the Water, which at its best reminds you of roller rinks and polka dancing, was also too restrained, unlike the next one, Rollin’ And Tumblin,’ from which point the show soared.

It featured Charlie Sexton’s stinging slide guitar, which seemed to limber his colleagues, and George Recile’s drumming, a force of nature that he can tame to modulated mayhem. The show was on. It will be remembered as the one where Mr. Dylan revealed a new facet of the song-and-dance man, appearing like the vocal soloist of your community orchestra, who has been coached to emote.

Besides near archival-quality renditions of Tangled Up In Blue, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, Hard Rain, and Ballad of a Thin Man, the takeaway from this show was that the man who for decades has been lambasted for virtually ignoring the audience, now veritably pantomimes his songs!

It is not likely that he’s ever again going to be shooting the breeze with the audience, as we saw during the Rolling Thunder Revue down the road at Springfield, but it was fun to see this new wrinkle, another glint from a passing star.

It is too early to write his epitaph, but a good idea nonetheless to urge all the youngsters to catch the Bob Dylan Show while there’s still time for a glimpse of his ever-emerging refulgence.

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue party at Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge

Sept. 1998 interview by Dave Read

On November 7, 1975, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue spent the day at the Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA. They had played two shows the day before at the Springfield Civic Center, with special guest and Berkshire county resident Arlo Guthrie, who turned Dylan on to his friend Mama Frasca’s lodge. (See related: Interview with Arlo Guthrie)

This interview is the account of a friend of Mama Frasca’s who asked us to refer to him as “A.I.I.” (Anonymous Indigeneous Individual). It was conducted by Dave Conlin Read in Lenox, MA in 1998 and was excerpted in Q magazine’s special edition Maximum Bob.

D.C.R.: How did you come to be involved with Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge?

A.I.I.: Just a Berkshire hillbilly, I was living up there on Becket mountain, and I used to visit the Lodge. It was my social milieu. And I used to help Mama Frasca; she was basically illiterate, and I used to write alot of postcards for her. I’d be sitting with her in the afternoon or evening and she’d tell me what she wanted to tell her friends. We were just good pals, myself and Mama.

(Sample photos from the party: Rolling Thunder: Photographs by Ken Regan. )

D.C.R.: You were invited to the Rolling Thunder Revue party?

A.I.I.: Yes, I was up there when there was a phone call and Mama got very excited. She kept saying, “Joan Baez is coming, Joan Baez is coming.” She didn’t say much about Bob Dylan. So, I was invited to the party the next day. I went up there early in the day, around noontime. A couple of guys from Shenandoah came up there shortly. Arlo Guthrie came up in his Ford pickup, I think it was a ’51 Ford – faded green pickup, maybe it was gray. I remember watching the hawks circling with one of the guys from Shenandoah, on the front steps of the Dreamaway.

And then, after a while, various people started arriving. I remember Dylan coming up in a Winnabago. He had a little sign in one of the side windows, it said “Kemp Fish Co.” I remember the cinematographers coming up in a big red Cadillac convertible. Then I was inside having a beer at the bar, and I guess Bob was having a brandy and talking with Mama. I remember introducing Bob to my friend Bob, saying “Bob, meet Bob”.

When Joan Baez got there, Mama swooped her right upstairs. Joan came in in dungarees, all denim. She went upstairs like that – she came down in a white dress with a white pearl necklass. She went right into the music room and Mama took her over to the big square piano. I think she sang – what’s that song – with a wretch like me? – she sang “Amazing Grace.”

Alot of people started crowding into the music room, and the photographers, the cinematographers, started taking alot of shots of Joan and Mama at the piano. Mama was coming out with these mountain-oracle words-of-wisdom and wit and everybody was sucking it up. Because that was about what she was – she was the Oracle.

Earlier, I remember Dylan leaning over the bar to listen to her – to one thing that she said to Dylan, and he was just hanging on every word she said. She had this big thing about love – “With love you’re like the egg – without love, you’re like the hollow egg, without yolk, all white”. Something like that, she had a way of saying things, you had to be there to hear her.

She was quite a character. She had a little guitar, it was painted lime-green, and she used to like to play when she sat in front of the fireplace. She used to call everybody children or sonny – she’d make you feel like you were a child and she was the adult.

They served the standard dinner – salad, chicken, spaghetti, and Mama’s famous hot potatoes, and coffee and Anisette after. Ginsberg was walkin around with Moby Dick, reading it, reading Moby Dick as he was walking around, because he knew of Melville’s stay in the Berkshires, writing Moby Dick in Pittsfield. And then Dylan was going in and out the window, of the freshly-painted north side of the Dreamaway.

D.C.R.: How did you know it was freshly-painted?

A.I.I.: Because my friend was painting it, who I had introduced to Bob – “Bob, this is Bob”, because Bob lived there. He was the caretaker of the place – the bartender, the dishwasher, and everything else. So the next day Bob, the other Bob, made a little sign that said, “Bob Dylan’s footprints”, with an arrow going to the window where he had been climbing in and out – to get away; to get a breath of fresh air from the packed place.

D.C.R.: How many times did Bob go in and out of the window?

A.I.I.: It was just a little prank – he may have done it only once. But I remeber we had the footprints, and they were there for a while, until it got painted again. I remember singing “Be bop a lula” at the piano – Arlo playing the piano.

Singing that song with Bob and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the whole crew there. We all did a good rendition of “Be bop a lula.” I remember Joan seemed like a very genuine, sincere individual, interested in the people at large there – the natives. She just seemed genuinely friendly – just a regular person.

D.C.R.: Did Bob take the initiative with any of the music, did he take the lead?

A.I.I.: Not to my recollection. He was belting out the “Be bop a lula” lyrics, I was right there beside him, singing – he was getting into that. His wife was there, Sara, and she and Ginsberg seemed to be talking quite a bit, I don’t know how much weight that had. And Ronee Blakely was there. I had a nice conversation with her, down by the fish pond, feeding the catfish. They used to eat bread out of your hand. It was kind of like feeding piranas, because they’d all come to the surface as soon as you’d throw a little piece of bread in there – they would swarm around. That was another little gig that Mama had there for people – “Oh go down and feed the fish, here take some bread and feed the fish.”

D.C.R.: How did the party break up?

A.I.I.: I didn’t stay into the night time, I kind of drifted away, went home. I left before Bob and the crew. It was like a poetic moment – a happening – it was living poetry, very memorable.

D.C.R.: How did Mama feel about the party afterwards?

A.I.I.: Well Mama loved all kinds of people, but for some reason, she had a real affinity with Joan Baez. She really loved Joan Baez’ voice, essentially. She thought she had a wonderful, beautiful voice, and that it was a gift. So she was just very, very happy to be Joan Baez’ hostess that day.

Arlo Guthrie interviewed Nov. 1998 at The Guthrie Center

November 16, 1998 interview by Dave Read

Arlo Guthrie first came to the Berkshires in the late ’50s to attend the former Indian Hill camp in Strockbridge, where his mother was the dance teacher. His Berkshire roots were further established while he was a student at The Stockbridge School and he became involved with the Berkshire Folk Music Society, then headed by the late Hank Grover, David’s father.

Guthrie recently bought the Kresge Building on North St. in Pittsfield. Besides moving Rising Son Records there, he is looking into the possibility of developing an entertainment center. We visited with Arlo on November 16, 1998 at The Guthrie Center, in the former Episcopal church that his friend Alice Brock used to live in, and where much of Alice’s Restaurant was filmed.

Arlo Guthrie interview with Dave Conlin Read at the Guthrie Center, Nov. 1998.

“I’ve been trying to get something going in downtown Pittsfield for 25 years. I was interested in the old Palace Theater, or even the Capitol before they turned it into the Senior Center. None of that ever panned out because nobody had a clue as to the value of live entertainment.”

Relating the results of a recent study, commissioned by the city of Pittsfield, that stresses how important providing live entertainment is to the revitalization of downtown, Guthrie continued,

“We want to see if we can be a part of that process. We bought the building and we’re hoping that we can make a go of it. I want to develop a nightclub facility, maybe with a little food, but not a big-time restaurant. What I really know is not the restaurant business, it’s the nightclub/theater business.”

After talking about the various “cultural centers” and “tourist destinations” of Berkshires, Arlo continued,

“I see no reason why Pittsfield can’t become a part of all that, even add something to it and tie together all the different crowds. This is a beautiful part of the world, every part of it. We’ve been let down by the major industries. The only big industry that keeps growing is our cultural industry, so I’m anxious to see if we can all benefit from that.”

The legacy of The Music Inn figures prominently in Guthrie’s motivation to extend his commitment to the Berkshires. His father Woody played the very first show there and Arlo played the last, exactly 25 years to the day later.

“The thing we do in Pittsfield will be the closest that we can get to re-doing the kind of music that we had at The Music Inn. It’ll be a big enough club to bring in some of the same kinds of people – maybe the same people. With the help of the City of Pittsfield, I think we can make that happen. We also want a place for young people to go; we’re thinking of establishing a kind of folklore center there.”

“It’s not something I have to do business-wise; I’ve got enough going on to keep me busy for a long time. However, one of the things I’d like to do is spend less time on the road. I’m on the road ten months a year, and I miss the Berkshires. I love it here and I think that we have an obligation to try and retain the best part of who we are for future generations.”

Where did the name “Arlo” come from?

“When my mom was growing up, there was a series of children’s books, called “Arlo Books”, about a little Swiss kid named ‘Arlo’. They were in all the primary schools on the East coast, and she drew a picture for a class project of this kid. And my mom was one of these packrats who saved everything – every ticket stub of every place she had ever been to. She was incredibly organized.

“While she was pregnant with me, walking down the beach one day with my dad, she suddenly realized that the picture she had drawn of this kid ‘Arlo’, in the fifth or sixth grade, looked exactly like my father. He was wearing the same clothes, the same kind of striped shirt, walking on the same kind of beach. And so she went back and found this old picture, and sure enough, she had drawn my dad.

“So they decided that that was an auspicious sign, and that they were going to name me after the kid. But they didn’t know if I would go for a name as awkward as that, so they gave me the middle name ‘Davy’. So I was named after Davy Crockett. She figured he was a popular figure, sort of a rugged, mountain guy, and if I didn’t like the name ‘Arlo’ – which, she wasn’t sure what that was gonna do to me – that I could always call myself ‘Davy’. So I was named ‘Arlo Davy Guthrie.’

Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge

“I had been going to the Dream Away for years, I knew Mama Frasca real well – she was a terriffic, wonderful, crazy, wild woman. I really loved her and used to bring the kids up to her place every weekend. I actually did some recording with her at the old Shaggy Dog studio in Stockbridge. We did a great record there – all these great songs with this old gal. She made a single, and one song was called something like, “God and Mama”.

“So after we did the Rolling Thunder Revue in Springfield (November 6, 1975), I tought it would be fun to take everybody up there. We came up with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Bobby Neuwirth and Ramblin Jack Elliott. They just loved it there; we were fooling around with Mama Frasca, and it became a part of the film, “Renaldo And Clara”. (For details of the party: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue party at Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge.)

Bob Dylan concert review – Wahconah Park, Pittsfield, MA June 23, 2005

June 23, 2005 concert review by Dave Read

The setlist for Bob Dylan’s June 23 concert in Pittsfield’s worn green wooden Wahconah Park (built in 1919) was old, with 9 songs from 1967 and earlier, and the playing was more jazz blues than blues rock, reflecting the presence of newcomers Denny Freeman (guitar) and Donny Herron (steel guitars, banjo, fiddle, mandolin), who joined Dylan’s band in March 2005.

Together with lead guitarist Stu Kimball (joined June 2004), their leads and solos, rooted in a raft of genres, provided apt accompaniment to Mr. Dylan, whose singing was strong and varied, whose keyboard playing was high in the mix, and whose center stage harmonica solos included some that made him resemble a wooing suitor.

Knowing Bob Dylan’s lyrics is not a requirement to enjoying his shows, but it’ll give you a leg up. The best way to learn them is to listen to the albums. You’re not going to learn them at the shows, where they take on an extra-literal dimension, with Dylan often treating lines of lyric as if they were strings on a guitar.

A big, broad rendition of “Drifter’s Escape” (John Wesley Harding ’67) that gave everybody in the band time to get limber was the opener, followed by “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which had the band laying low while Dylan sang, intoned, and crooned the beatnik-crazy lyric all the way down to the penultimate stanza,

“Now all the authorities
They just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms
Into leaving his post
And picking up Angel who
Just arrived here from the coast
Who looked so fine at first
But left looking just like a ghost”

after which Herron let loose a wailing steel guitar riff that sent the band off on a rollicking ride that Dylan finally whistled to a stop with a center stage bended-knee harmonica coda.

That was the first of three songs from Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965) and the next on this setlist comes from Bringing It All Back Home (April, 1965), a rendition of “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” that was worth the price of admission all by itself. While the band took their stellar turns weaving the melody and waxing the groove, Dylan kept his focus square on the audience, leaning over the keyboard to deliver the song that contains the line that always gets a loud response, “But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have/To stand naked.”

Bass player and musical director Tony Garnier and drummer George Recile underpin the whole operation with masterly playing, adding accents, embellishment, and punctuation in all the right spots. Garnier, a fellow Minnisotan, has been on Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour since its second year, 1989; Recile, from New Orleans, has been Dylan’s drummer since 2001 (which frequently, but not tonight, requires being the object of Dylan’s silly dumb-drummer jokes).

An interesting bit of business at the Pittsfield concert was Garnier reaching up and slapping one of Recile’s cymbals, to signal the start of “Chimes of Freedom,” from the 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan, which, in a multi-layered acoustic rendition, was one of the show’s most affecting numbers.

What a piece of writing that song is! From the opening lines,

“Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing…

to the closing verse,

“Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse.”

The first of 2 encores came from that album, too, “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Dylan opening and closing it on harmonica. The Turtles had a huge hit with it in 1965, and the genius of Dylan the composer can be glimpsed by scanning the range of artists who have covered the song: Hugo Montenegro, Nancy Sinatra, Flatt & Scruggs, Sebastian Cabot, Glenn Campbell, The Mike Curb Congregation, Duane Eddy, and Johnny Cash, to name just a few!

The only song that didn’t seem to work this night was the set-closing “Summer Days,” (Love and Theft ’01) which sounded earnest but fatigued. The other 2 songs from Highway 61 Revisited were the title song, given a thundering reading an hour into the show and “Like A Rolling Stone,” the grand finale, the song so grand it has its own biography! (Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, by Griel Marcus)

June 23, 2005 setlist: All song lyrics available on: bobdylan.com.

1. Drifter’s Escape (John Wesley Harding ’67)
2. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Highway 61 Revisited ’65)
3. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (Bringing It All Back Home ’65)
4. Moonlight (Love and Theft ’01)
5. Down Along The Cove (John Wesley Harding ’67)
6. Girl Of The North Country (acoustic) (The Freewheelin Bob Dylan ’63)
7. High Water (For Charley Patton) (Love and Theft ’01)
8. Every Grain Of Sand (ShotOfLove ’81)
9. Highway 61 Revisited (Highway 61 Revisited ’65)
10. Blind Willie McTell (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 ’91(recorded ’83))
11. Chimes Of Freedom (Another Side of Bob Dylan ’64)
12. Summer Days (Love and Theft ’01)
(encore)
13. It Ain’t Me, Babe (Another Side of Bob Dylan ’64)
14. Like A Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited ’65)