Never Ending Bob Dylan

By Howard Fishman

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/

November 3, 2017

When I was seventeen, I became a Bob Dylan zealot. This was 1988. I’d gotten hooked by “Blood on the Tracks,” one of the twelve CDs that I’d received for a penny from Columbia House. (Did we really send in the penny with the coupon? I think maybe we did.) After wearing that album out, I undertook a meticulous survey of Dylan’s discography.

Eager to share my passion, and frustrated by attempts to interest my peers (many of whom were busy worshipping the Grateful Dead and who considered Dylan a has-been), I turned to the one person whom I could rely upon to take me seriously: my brother Adam. Three years my junior, Adam had long since become accustomed to having an obsessive for a sibling. When we were a bit younger, I had forced him and his friends to enroll in what I called the West Hartford School of Comic Books, administering written quizzes and tests that covered such vital topics as who inked Jack Kirby’s pencils on early issues of “The Fantastic Four” (Joe Sinnott), or what color was the original Hulk (gray). I had since moved on from comic books, to “m*a*s*h” reruns, to Cat Stevens. It was now time to indoctrinate Adam in the world of Bob Dylan.

I turned on my stereo. “Listen to this,” I told my brother, and put on “Maggie’s Farm” from “Bringing It All Back Home.” A “greatest hit,” the song is not really that great—not by Dylan standards, anyhow. Over a fairly pedestrian backbeat, a series of verses catalogues the various people, and their eccentricities, on a farm where the narrator has been employed. He announces that he won’t work for Maggie’s mother any longer, nor her father, nor her brother. The reason, we ultimately learn, is that he’s bored. (Maggie herself appears only briefly, forcing him to scrub the floor; this, he judges, is “a shame.”)

My brother seemed receptive, if not overly impressed; Dylan’s music sounded pretty good. He didn’t know that he was being set up for a series of punchlines. I then put on the version of “Maggie’s Farm” from 1978’s “At Budokan” album. Built around a nasty electric-guitar riff, the glammy arrangement has a big, theatrical sound. Where the original had projected an attitude of hip, wry nonchalance, this version felt frenetic, frenzied, even nightmarish. Strings, horns, and full-throated backup singers were all featured, as was a repeated key modulation that kept tilting the song on its ear. Halfway through the track, my brother looked at me quizzically. “Wait a minute,” he said, “is this the same song? Is this Bob Dylan?” Sagely, I nodded.

“Maggie’s Farm” from Dylan’s tight, tough 1974 tour with the Band*, was next, the singer’s vocals here a holler, all machismo and swagger. Allowing the music to speak for itself, without introduction, I then cued up the coup de grâce: the first track of “Hard Rain,” from 1976, a proto-punk version of “Maggie’s Farm” that can only be called perverse. If Dylan and the Band, buoyed by Levon Helm’s strutting, deep-in-the-pocket Southern groove, had sounded like American comfort food, a triumphant homecoming football team on a crisp Thanksgiving afternoon, the singer and his band on “Hard Rain” sound like a surly crew of mercenaries adrift at sea; exhausted, strung out, and hungry, they are so bored out of their wits that they’ve taken to drinking the ship’s supply of whale oil and throwing one another overboard for fun. (The entire album has this feeling; it may be one of the greatest and least appreciated live rock albums of all time.)

Now my brother was sold. “Everyone will tell you that Dylan is nothing more than a great lyricist,” I told him, but Dylan the performer, the constantly changing interpreter of his own work, was the thing no one seemed to pay attention to, worthy of study and exploration. I’d read that Dylan was about to embark on a new tour that summer, with a new, unknown band, and I told Adam that my plan was to borrow the family station wagon and follow the tour. My brother looked at me with a mixture of admiration and solemnity; he knew this wouldn’t be easy, and he also knew I would find a way to make it happen.

Somehow, I did. My parents granted me the use of the car for two weeks. I laid down the backseat, threw a sleeping bag in there, packed a bag and my guitar, and away I went to follow Bob Dylan. It was impossible to know then that I was about to witness the rollout of what has since come to be known as Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour,” a run of shows that has now included close to three thousand concerts over five continents, and is about to celebrate its third consecutive decade.

My high-school peers weren’t alone in their hatred of Dylan. It may be fair to say that, in 1988, Bob Dylan had reached the nadir of his commercial and artistic relevance. His religious conversion (now exhaustively documented in “Trouble No More: 1979-1981,” released today); a series of overproduced, stale-sounding albums; his disastrous set at the finale of “Live Aid;” and bloated stadium tours with big rock acts that seemed to find Dylan struggling to connect with audiences and with himself, all contributed to the sense that he was simply washed up—that he might not have anything left. That wasn’t what I saw in the summer of 1988. When I caught up with the Never Ending Tour on its first Northeast dates that July, at small outdoor stages, at state fairs, and amusement parks from Virginia to Maine, I saw a man go out every night who seemed to be fighting for his life. He was barking out lyrics with startling, almost volatile conviction, and revisiting and reworking material from across the entirety of his already mammoth back catalogue. I saw urgency, I saw humor, I saw risk and passion; I saw beauty achieved in a way that was ugly, alternative, outside. I saw a hero.

There was nothing polished about these shows. Most were general admission, in open fields, which meant that I could get there early to insure a spot right up against the stage (I was often the first, and sometimes only, person in line when the gates opened). Through the course of each show (which changed radically from night to night), I was privy to the interplay between Dylan and his trio of sidemen. It often veered into high drama, as Dylan confounded his band with spontaneous new arrangements and musical flights of fancy. Any song might begin with lurching imbalance, like a plane taking off in high wind. Turbulence was common; Dylan would strike a guitar chord that had no place in the song being performed. I would see terror flash in the band’s eyes, their mouths slightly agape as they tried to guess where the music was headed next. Often, it seemed as though Dylan himself didn’t know, and he seemed to draw energy from this. He was playing without a net, and they were expected to follow. Changes in tempo might occur mid-song, complete stylistic shifts were de rigueur. If Dylan wasn’t satisfied with how things were going, he might end a song abruptly, driving it straight into the ground.

There were moments of great beauty, usually during the short set of acoustic duets that served as the centerpiece of each concert. Dylan had left his trademark harmonica behind for this tour, and had seemingly found new, boundless inspiration in the two-guitar format. It allowed him to explore long, instrumental interludes between verses, building and weaving ecstatic washes of sound on his big Gibson. By abandoning the chord progression of any given song, he could open it up to a kind of free-form exploration of inversions and reharmonizations of the melody. In addition to his own songs, these acoustic sets often included one-offs of traditional songs—ancient folk ballads that Dylan appeared to be teaching his guitarist on the spot: “Barbara Allen,” “The Waggoner’s Lad,” “When First Unto This Country,” always invested with a surfeit of emotion.

All of this was thrilling. Dylan’s commitment to spontaneity, his courting of musical danger, was authentic and audacious. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit that the stage could sometimes be plummeted into total darkness in the middle of a song, the lighting technicians not knowing when it was starting or ending. Each night, I watched as Dylan fell on his sword. It was a nightly lesson in bravery, in risk, in what it meant to be a performing artist. It wasn’t really from show to show that the quality of the music varied but tune to tune. Dylan was gloriously untethered to anything but the imperative to find something true in the moment of each song. And if he didn’t succeed, he would destroy it before our very eyes.

An early highlight of the new eight-disk set, “Trouble No More: 1979-1981,” is the January 6, 1980, live version of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” Those with only a passing familiarity with Dylan as a live artist might ask incredulously, as my brother did thirty years ago, “Is this Bob Dylan?” The track sounds like an invitation to a private ritual in some hidden, dark wood. Under a midnight sky with no moon or stars, a group circles a visionary prophet—maybe he is Asa Hawks, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.” They dance by candlelight, whispering a strangely childish ditty, telling secrets to one another. It’s like the soundtrack to a horror movie, tension grinding toward some twisted denouement.

Also included on “Trouble No More” are two starkly different versions of “Caribbean Wind,” the lyrics like some lost Spalding Gray monologue, all mania and neurosis, the narrator searching for his Perfect Moment. On the rehearsal version, from September 23, 1980, backed (and countrified) by Ben Keith’s pedal-steel guitar, Dylan is the anonymous singer at a bamboo rum shack on a sultry, tropical night; he’s there with his band to play for the margarita-and-daiquiri crowd. You’re not really paying any attention until you realize that you are, that there’s something peculiar going on with this guy, something significant—something that could have a profound impact on your life. Or it could just be the booze. You come back the next night, hoping to hear him again, only to be told by the manager that he’d only been passing through, a last-minute fill-in for their Jimmy Buffett tribute band. No one there can even remember the guy’s name.

I’ve seen Dylan at least once a year since 1988. I’m forty-seven now, the same age he was when he began this tour. He seemed old to me then; it’s astonishing to see him now, still at it, his star long since risen again. The tour itself has undergone stylistic changes and shifts in personnel. It’s a quintet these days, not a trio, accompanying him, and Dylan hasn’t played much guitar in years—he either stands at a microphone, downstage center, or else sits at a baby-grand piano, pounding out crazy rhythms and melodic motifs. His Never Ending Tour will end, eventually (unless the world ends first, another matter), but there are no outward signs that this will happen anytime soon. He’s currently on a twenty-eight-date swing across the country that will culminate right here, in New York City, with five nights at the Beacon Theatre.

Imagine Ernest Hemingway giving a reading of “A Farewell to Arms” in a thick Cajun accent, or in the manner of a speed-talking auctioneer. What if Eugene O’Neill had gone on tour performing a one-man version of his five-hour opus, “Strange Interlude”? (The actor David Greenspan is actually doing this right now in New York; I haven’t seen it yet.) Think of attending an Alice Munro reading, and having her devote half the program to her renderings of the stories of Shirley Jackson. Watching Dylan perform is a weird experience. It’s just weird. No other performer does or has done what Dylan continues to do night after night. There is no context to put him in. He is his own category.

Dylan’s is the art of possibility. The scope of his imagination and his brazen willingness to experiment is as enthralling as any results he achieves. Over the course of more than a half century, and over thirty years (and counting) of constant touring, he has exercised his right to publicly tweak, improve, develop, deconstruct, and—when deemed necessary—utterly raze his own creations. He brandishes this license with complete authority. Dylan can do anything he wants with his songs, and he knows it. They belong to him, they are his to do with what he will. He’s always been outside of our comfort zone, and he shows no signs of changing.

I last saw Dylan in concert in June. My brother was with me. Having read that Dylan had recently been devoting half his show to covering standards from the American Songbook (as featured on his most recent studio album, “Triplicate”), we brought, for the first time, our mom, who never could quite figure out why I felt it was necessary to see him in concert more than two dozen times during the first eighteen months of the Never Ending Tour. As the lights dimmed, I wondered, as I always do, who will he be this time? And then, as he ambled onstage in the shadows, there came the requisite shock of recognition—that wild visage coming into view, feral, unwilling (or unable) to be tamed—and along with it, the only possible answer to my question: that’s Bob Dylan.