Bobcat Nation:
Memoirs of a Young
Bob Dylan Fan
by Adam Selzer
Contents:
CHAPTER ONE:
By Way of Introduction
CHAPTER TWO:
A Brief Dylan Bio
CHAPTER THREE:
I Was a Teenage Bobcat
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Old, Weird America
Dalton and Atlanta GA, 2001
CHAPTER FIVE
Love, Theft, and Those Dutch Sailors' Eyes
Nashville 2001
CHAPTER SIX
Adam and Mike's Excellent Adventure
Newport Folk Festival 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN
Risking Your Life for the Rail
The Atlanta Lightning Storm, 2003
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cowboys and Hippies
Dylan and the Dead 2003 tour
CHAPTER NINE
We Can All Be Famous
For Fifteen People
Chicago and Atlanta, 2004
DYLAN REVIEWS
2005-Present
Chapter Five:
Love, Theft and Those Ducth Sailors' Eyes
It was just a few weeks after the Music Midtown show that Dylan celebrated his 60th birthday. On that day, it was announced that Dylan had spent the last two weeks in a recording session, working on a new album. That album turned out to be Love and Theft, an album that would have sounded like a logical next step at nearly any point in his career.
As the lyrics from the album began leaking onto the internet, it was clear that most of the songs were built from spare parts; namely, a lot of the lyrics were borrowed from other literature. "Summer Days" had quotes from The Great Gatsby (and much of it and "Mississippi," the song that preceded it, seemed similar to The Great Gatsby in terms of plot). "Lonesome Day Blues" contained a lot of lines that seemed to come from a paragraph in the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn. Elsewhere on the album, there were lines from old folk and blues songs, lines from Virgil, and a handful of individual lines that came from obscure passages in an obscure Japanese book called Confessions of a Yakuza. This method of songwriting – building songs out of parts – was not new. Most songwriters do it, actually. Dylan had long built songs out of older traditional songs and passages from scripture. In the eighties, his songs tended to quote a lot of movies.
The songs, however, were greater than the sum of their parts, and garnered great critical reviews. The news of the album might have brought even more media attention except for that fact that it happened to be released on September 11th, 2001.
For the next couple of weeks, most of the things people wrote about the album were connecting it to September 11th. A few people had become positively obsessed with some of the "cryptic" lines in the album. Lines like "I'm gonna teach peace to the conquered, I'm gonna tame the proud," "gonna baptize you with fire so you can sin no more, establishing my rule through civil war," and, my personal favorite, "Sky full of fire, pain is pouring down / there's nothing you can sell me so I'll see you around."
Looking back at them now, it seems an odd reaction to think that they had anything to do with a terrorist attack its aftermath; you have to remember that, in the weeks after the attack, people tended to look at everything through the lens of September 11th.
Naturally, this extended to Dylan. I would never, at any time, claim that Dylan is a prophet, but I have no doubt that, years from now, that's how many people will look at him. They'll dig through the weirder lines looking for "predictions" of the events of the day, and they'll probably be just about as successful as the people who spent the days after 9/11 digging through the works of Nostradamus (whose best find turned out to be a hoax, written a few years earlier to show how easy it is to make a weird quatrain seem like a prediction).
There's certainly an extent to which Dylan is seen as a prophet already; in writing about the supposed connection between 9/11 and Love and Theft, at least one newspaper actually went so far as to suggest that Dylan may have known about the attack ahead of time and should be investigated. I'm not making this up.
When the dust settled, what we had left was a great album. Maybe not as great as its predecessor, Time Out Of Mind, but nearly everyone agreed that together they were the best two consecutive Dylan albums since Blood on the Tracks and Desire had come out in the mid ‘70's.
The importance of this release to me is hard to describe; having only been a Dylan fan since 1995, this was only the second time that I'd been able to anticipate a new Dylan album. The songs on this album were mine just as much as they were anyone else's; no one could look at me and sneer "how do you know this song?" I wouldn't have to reply "I hang out down at the nursing home for old rock fans who grew up to be dumb pricks like you" in regards to them. Though I never had the nerve to respond like that in the first place, of course.
Before the album was even released, the tour to promote it had been announced. It wasn't coming to Atlanta, but I wasn't about that stop me from seeing one of the shows. I'd simply forget that I was only making about seven grand a year working at Starbucks, make the trip to Nashville, and devil take the hindmost.
**
Two weeks before the Dylan show in Nashville, I rented Robert Altman's Nashville! A terrific movie, it portrayed Nashville as a city that, slick though it was, seemed to need a new coat of paint. I hadn't been through Tennessee in a long time, but that was more or less how I remembered it. Pretty state, but filthy beyond all reason. Every time someone from my old home state of Iowa drives to Georgia to visit, they invariably comment that Tennessee is a rather dirty state.
But man, oh man, when those leaves change color, that state can be gorgeous.
Early November, 2001, was a great time to see a Dylan concert. I know, I say that every time I see him. This time, it was because he was touring to promote Love and Theft, a terrific new record, instead of just touring for the sake of touring, which had been the case at every other show I'd seen. And the new Rolling Stone had just come out with him on the cover. And it was rumored that the tour was being recorded for a possible live album. He wasn't coming too close to Atlanta this time around, but I figured that it would be well worth the drive to Nashville. I hadn't been out of Georgia in a few months, after all.
The tickets went on sale a good few months before the show, and sat in my top dresser drawer for quite a while. Every now and then, I'd take ‘em out and just stare at them.
I spent most of my time working down at the Starbucks…one day, a man came in to order a latte while "Things Have Changed" was playing over the PA.
"Man," he said to no one in particular, "this guy still can't sing!"
The man apparently didn't realize that, with a touch of a button, I could make his latte decaffeinated, and he'd never know until he fell asleep in his cubicle.
So there.
Meanwhile, my own new album, Storm Shadow, was finally finished. After I set it up to be sold online at an online dealer , I went to look at my name under the "new arrivals" list. I was shocked and delighted to see, two names above mine, Scarlet Rivera. The Desire and Rolling Thunder Revue violinist! I felt like the coolest kid in town.
When the Love and Theft tour finally started, a month before the Nashville show, the setlists were great. 4-5 songs off the new record per night, with "Visions of Johanna" coming up fairly regularly, and lots of other surprises in between. I took to counting the number of times he played "Visions" and "Mississippi" and "High Water," the three songs I most wanted to hear, and trying to figure out the odds that I'd see any of them in Nashville. Then I'd lie in bed, trying to do math in my head, finally telling myself "man, I've gotta stop trying to second-guess Bob!" But I couldn't do it.
When the issue of Rolling Stone with Dylan on the cover came out, it took awhile for it to reach the Atlanta area, for some reason. People on rec.music.dylan had been picking it up for days when I found it. One day (Halloween), I went to five grocery stores, five bookstores, three record stores, one guitar store, one newsstand, and four gas stations looking for a copy. But it was no use. You expect that sort of thing in Gwinnett County.
The issue finally hit Atlanta the very next day, though, with Bob looking as cool as he's ever looked on the cover.
The interview itself was classic Bob, with Dylan saying quasi-mystical sounding things that certainly made sense to him, but seemed, to me, to be up on some other level. It all seems to fit together, and it all seems to make sense, in some sort of Kabbalistic mathematical sort of way, but one can't shake the feeling that Bob knows/hears a lot of things that the rest of us don't. Most of the time, the things he's saying are very coherent, very reasonable, even normal-sounding. Then, with one turn of phrase, he'll tie it all into something else, making a connection most of us never would have thought to make, and may not make sense to most of us (though it clearly makes perfect sense to Bob.). In regards to the events of September 11th, he said "At the moment, the rational mind's way of thinking wouldn't really explain what's happened. You need something else, with a capital E, to explain it." (thinking of that line, please go to http://bobdylan.com/songs and read the words to "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," a poem from 1963.)
I was going to the Nashville show with David and Debbie Seltzer, a great couple of people who were regular customers at the coffee place, and who just happen to share my last name. They're both great people, very intelligent, great senses of humor. David had last seen Bob in Chicago on the 1974 tour with the band; Debbie had never seen him. I think that, between the two of them, they've probably seen just about every major artist in the history of rock music.
David, Debbie and I met up at the coffee shop at 10 on the morning of the show, and drove off to an Atlanta garage to pick up Debbie's car. David and I spent that portion of the trip discussing our shared fondness for South Park and Chicago-style hot dogs.
After picking up the car, we loaded up the CD changer and set off on our merry way towards Nashville. David and I sat in the front, talking Dylan and literature, while Debbie sat in back, reading. First up on the CD block was Love and Theft, naturally. We played "Mississippi" three or four times in a row, discussing my theories that it was all tied into a Great Gatsby theme that was more obvious in the next track, "Summer Days," a track which got us into a discussion about Brian Setzer and the Stray Cats.
There's a bit of a problem (if you wanna call it a problem) that David and I have: whenever we see each other, we get to talking. And we can go on for a long time. The only time we really saw each other was when he came into the coffee shop, during which time I was usually working. It's hard to have a long discussion when you're trying to work, though I'm always willing to give it the old college try.
Take, for example, the following: when there was a long line at the coffee shop, I liked to jump up on the counter to give the customers waiting in line a discussion topic. No one ever actually discussed the topics I gave out, but it kept me amused, anyway. Once, when there was a long line which included David, I shouted out "All right, folks! Ichabod Crane: Tragicomic victim, or a gold-digging jerk who got what he deserved? Discuss! And we'll be with you in a few minutes!" David shouted back something about the answer being dependant on the state of Washington Irving's mental health, marking the only time I ever actually got a response to one of my discussion topics. In the car, we discussed his response a bit, and how it related to the question of whether critics should separate artists from their art. Should we just assume that every song Dylan writes is a reflection of what sort of person he is? Should we think about Dylan's life at all when trying to figure out what a given song is "about?" There's no answer, of course, but it makes for some great discussion.
The album was just ending as we stopped for lunch at a Cracker Barrel in Tinklescent, GA. I don't think that's really the name of the town, but it's as good a guess as any. I suppose it could also be Fartford. Cracker Barrel, a down-home-country-kitsch restaurant, seemed like an appropriate place, since it tries, in it's décor, to evoke the same sort of era as a lot of the "Love and Theft" songs, particularly "Floater."
Inside, there was a "general store" in which one could buy cheap guitars with Roy Rogers on them, amusing country trinkets, and postcards featuring the town power plant. In the restaurant, we were seated near some old ads for "Adams Black Jack Chewing Gum" (their lack of an apostrophe, not mine).
Across from the Cracker Barrel was a large sign for a restaurant called Crosston Pruett's Barbecue and Catfish. Yep. Really. You no longer need to stay awake at night waiting and hoping - barbecue and catfish are together at last. That's the charm of small town Georgia - you never know what kind of bizarre things you can find, if you look hard enough. Take, for example, the town of Carrollton, which I described in part one. It has waterslide in the middle of the cemetery, and even now that I no longer live there, I still occasionally make the trip out there just to show people the waterslide. The old part of the town of Cumming has a German Restaurant called "Le Café." The town of Monticello has a large, colorful ad for a product called "Bearlax" painted on the side of one of the buildings in the town square. It's guaranteed to "Stop Constipation!" I'm not making this up. And I could go on, if I felt like it. Back in the car, the next album in the changer was the recent Springsteen live album. Springsteen is to David as Dylan is to me, and we'd discussed Sprintsteen while I was supposed to be working on quite a few occasions. Springsteen is sort of the next in line after Dylan in a certain parade in which Dylan comes after Woody Guthrie, I think, even though Springsteen ended up doing far more songs that were similar to the sort of things Woody Guthrie would have written, had he lived through Vietnam and the Reagan era.
By this time, we were well past the metro Atlanta area and into the lower part of the Appalachian Mountains, taking mostly the same route that my friends and I had taken to see Dylan in Dalton six months earlier. Most of the landmarks were the same; the misspelled signs for peanuts, the mascot of Mohawk Carpet who was clearly supposed to be a Native American kid, but had extremely white skin. One thing, however, was different. This time, it was autumn. The leaves had changed to shades of red, orange, and brown, which made the scenery about a hundred times nicer to look at. North Georgia seemed like a dump on the way to Dalton, but seemed quite nice (broken down shacks along the road and all) with the leaves in their new-for-fall colors.
When the leaves fall in Georgia, you really can see all of the broken down shacks along the side of the road, the kind that are so old that the wood has turned a sickly gray color, and the planks are peeling off the foundation. You see them in just about every state, but there seems to be an awful lot in Georgia. Staring at them as we passed, it occurred to me that they probably weren't always broken down and gray; they were probably neat and brown at one point. But, hard though I try, I can't imagine them looking that way. It's as though they've been sitting there beside the road, all worn out and ancient-looking, since about the beginning of time. One road sign that I missed on the way to Dalton, but caught this time, was a small sign pointing the way to the "Weinman Mineral Museum." Think about it: Does something called a "mineral museum" sound as though it could possibly be anything but boring? Then again, Dave's Down To Earth Rock Shop in Evanston, Illinois is a fascinating place, so the problem may just lie in lazy marketing. I'll go to a Down To Earth Rock Shop, but a Mineral Museum? I'll just keep driving, thank you. I'm sure it's a lovely place, maybe even an interesting one. But it could certainly use a new name.
At length, we crossed into Tennessee. By now, we were really in the mountains. Most of the trees by the side of the road were still green (I think they plant a few rows of evergreen trees along the highways all over the south so you can't see the trailer parks from the road), but up above us, the trees in the mountains were gorgeously decorated with all sorts of colors that seemed to positively glow. If you've never seen the mountains in autumn, there's no way to describe it. I understand that New England is even better, and I believe it, but I can't imagine it. Much of Tennessee is, as I've mentioned, a noticeably dirty state. But, in autumn, it's beautiful. On this trip, I saw much less dirt than I expected. Much. The first city you see in Tennessee is Chattanooga. At this time, I'd like to call the reader's attention to an amusing little detail: if you read "Chattanooga" backwards, it sounds like "A Goon Attack." Joe (the guy with whom I drove to the Dalton show) pointed that out to me.
Outside of Chattanooga, getting onto Highway 24, we got caught in some traffic, but couldn't have asked for a better place to get stuck. On one side of the road was a mountain - a large wall of rock, topped with miles of red trees. On the other side was the amazingly blue Chattanooga River, which was glowing in the sun. A great view on both sides. Of course, the second we got onto the Highway, the view changed a bit, as we began to see the extent to which the otherwise lovely scenery was dotted by enormous signs for fireworks stores. Fireworks stores, some of which are open 24 hours, are everywhere along the highway in Tennessee, which makes me wonder exactly what it is that Tennesseeans DO in their spare time. Why do so many of the fireworks stores need to be open 24 hours? I can see the conversations now:
Davy Crocket: Boy, killin' that barr really got me worked up. It's 3 am, and I can't sleep at all tonight. .
Johnny Cash: Same here. Y'know what would really help?
Davy: What?
Johnny: Waking the neighbors by blowing things up. Shame that I'm out of explosives.
Davy: Yeah….wait! I know! The fireworks store is open all night! We're saved!
Johnny: Is it? Which one? There are an awful lot of them.
Davy: The one up on the mountaintop, near where I was born. Let's go!
The towns along the highway got to be pretty monotonous - every town had one big Wal-Mart, a Waffle House, and a few other chains and trailers, all visible from the highway that runs through the middle. After a while, David suggested that we'd entered some parallel universe, in which we were just going around in circles through the same one town over and over. We discussed, for a moment, the notion that Wal-Mart has become the new Town Square in many places. I'd discussed that one before, but never the notion that Wal-Mart could be the gateway to a parallel universe I guess it wouldn't surprise me much.
Meanwhile, in between the towns and fireworks stores was a lot of breathtaking scenery, and some of it reminded me of my contention a few pages back that environment can affect the way music sounds to the listener. By this time, the Springsteen record had ended, and we were listening to Dylan's Bootleg Series Volume 2. The original studio version of "Mama You've Been On My Mind" came on, and it had never sounded better to me (with the exception of the time I saw Bob play it in Dalton). Maybe it's because the scenery outside of the car was exactly the scene in which I always picture the speaker in the song…out in the middle of nowhere, walking down the highway, walking through the leaves falling from the trees, with the sun shining down, starting to set. I played that version in my car in Georgia on the way to work a lot, but it never sounded as powerful as it did on the way to Nashville. I suppose that most things sound better in the mountains then they do in the retail wasteland.
It occurred to me that, though I'd driven through the city about six years earlier, I had no idea what the Nashville skyline looked like. I expected something like the back cover of Dylan's album of that name, but what I got was, in the midst of all the red mountains, a city that looked like a towering robot. Lots of shiny buildings, all bunched up together. It was very modern-looking.
To my great surprise, Nashville was nothing like I'd pictured/remembered it (at least, not the small area I saw on this trip). Maybe we were just in the extra-artsy district or something, but there were lots of charming old buildings, a lot of off-beat, non-chain restaurants, and, joy of joys, it was all set up on an easy-to-follow grid system. The polar opposite of Atlanta. David and I both noticed, with mouths watering, a late-night chili restaurant. There's nothing in the world like a late night chili restaurant, and we just don't have anything like that in Atlanta. I decided right away that I liked Nashville, after all. We picked up some coffee, then walked over to the arena, where a line had already formed outside the door. The doors wouldn't even open for another two hours, and the line to get in was halfway down the block! We wouldn't be getting front row, obviously, but we'd be close up, anyway. Now, to me, rule number one of concerts and lines is to make friends with the people near you. Right away, I tipped my hat and said "good afternoon" to the people behind us and in front of us. It took a few minutes, but pretty soon David, Debbie and I were in a terrific conversation with the people in front of us.
Early in the conversation, I casually mentioned that I run the "How Long Has It Been Since Dylan Played…" page.
"Did you say you run that?" said the guy in front of me.
"Yep," I said.
"I go there regularly!" said the guy. I swelled with pride, knowing that SOMEONE goes to that page. Turned out that the guy was William Robertson, whose name I recognized from rec.music.dylan. It's always a blast to meet people from the newsgroup, so that we can talk, face to face, about all of the other people on it. We talked a bit about our shared disdain (read: jealousy) towards the people who are somehow able to afford to go to pretty much every single show, all over the world. Trust fundees, we presumed. At least they're finding a good use for that trust fund, I guess.
William characterized r.m.d. as full of a bunch of junk, but, in the middle, some tremendous, insightful stuff. I'd have to agree. Actually, there's a lot less crap than you see on most usenet newsgroups. William's son was also present, attending his third Dylan show. "I just started listening to music about two years ago," he said. "Before that, I was listening to crap." That's very good, I think, considering that he was only thirteen. At that age, I was just starting to listen to crap. I didn't really start to get into good music until later. A major topic of conversation was, as can be expected, what songs we hoped to hear in the show that night. David and I both wanted to hear "Mississippi," and I, personally, was hoping for "Visions of Johanna." As I told all of the people standing in line, actually, seeing Bob Dylan play "Visions of Johanna" was my lifelong goal.
In the course of talking about other concerts we've seen, David (who, as I mentioned, has probably seen every major band in the history of rock) happened to ask William if he'd ever seen any shows at Madison Square Garden.
"Just one," said William. "The Night of the Hurricane."
"You saw Night of the Hurricane?" I practically shouted. "The last night of the Rolling Thunder Revue?" High on my list of shows I would have liked to go back in timeand see are the shows from the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan's 1975 tour, which I consider to be, musically, among the high-points of Dylan's career.
"It's the only time I ever scalped a ticket, and we got front row," he said.
"You were in the front row at Night of the Hurricane?" I was as jealous as I've ever been of anyone. I couldn't believe that he'd taken so long to mention that he'd been to that show. If I'd been in the front row of that, or any other, Rolling Thunder show, I'd be telling people that before I got around to telling them my name. (and if, like Larry "Ratso" Sloman, I'd been the proverbial fly on the wall all through the Rolling Thunder tour, I'd just present my butt for people to kiss when I first met them.) (but I wasn't, so don't worry.)
Meanwhile, David had been to Dylan's show in Chicago 1974, the opener of his first tour in eight years. So I was standing right next to two people who had been at a couple of the more historic Dylan concerts. Maybe tonight would be another one, I thought.
The doors opened at 6:30, and we went in. If there had been rows, we would have been about eight rows back, just a bit to the right of center. We all noticed, with great interest, that there were a couple of microphones on the sides of the stage pointing at the audience - a pretty strong indication that the show was being recorded.
We all milled about, chattering with whomever was nearby, for the next hour and a half, before, finally, the light went out and the by-now-familiar smell of Nag Champa incense filled the air. This was it….the band, Bob included, walked onstage to get their instruments, and the show began.
First up was an old folk song, "Humming Bird," a great little train song which gave Larry and Charlie the opportunity to show off their prowess as backup singers. Though this would typically be described as an acoustic song, Larry was playing an electric guitar part which sounded a lot like a banjo line. The first song is typically the warm-up for the group and the crew; the sound in the auditorium got noticeably better during the song. Bob was dressed up in a spiffy knee-length black coat, with a few black embroidered designs on the sleeves and near the bottom. Under that he had a white shirt and red thing that was midway between a neckerchief and bow tie. With his moustache, he looked like a riverboat gambler whose name happened to be Dracula. Behind him, the band was dressed up in matching silver suits not too far removed from the outfits the Beatles wore on the Ed Sullivan show.
Now, make no mistake, this was going to be a Love and Theft show, at least in the main set. That started to become apparent when the next song, "It Ain't Me Babe," suddenly sounded as though it would fit in well on the new record. Throughout the night, all of the songs would be played in such a way that, subtly, they were drawn into the weird little world of Love and Theft. No song played would have sounded very out of place if it had just been written. It's a great compliment to the Love and Theft songs that they can stand up so well with all of the classic old songs. It was a gorgeous, slowed down arrangement of "It Ain't Me Babe," with Bob playing with the phrasing as only he can do. Whereas the original version of the song is a bit of a taunt, this was more of a "letting her down gently" arrangement, explaining the situation to the girl, after thinking that she'd known it all along. You could almost hear a condescending, "well-obviously!" laugh in the way that Bob sang the chorus, "but it ain't ME, babe!" Quite the contrast to the Tom Waits-growl heard on Love and Theft, however, Bob's voice was crystal clear and silky smooth. Not quite the honey voice of Nashville Skyline, but very clear just the same. The rough, throaty feel that permeates Love and Theft only showed up on a few occasions in the chorus of "It Ain't Me Babe," but, somehow, it still sounded like it would have worked on Love and Theft, maybe nearby "Po' Boy" or after "Sugar Baby."
Between verses, the guitar work was incredible. "Boy," I thought, "Larry's really going to town!" Then, to my surprise, I looked up to see that it was Bob taking the solo! Normally, Bob is known for taking solos composed of three or four notes (not bad solos, just fairly simplistic ones), but tonight he was all over the fretboard with his solo work, playing better than most people present probably thought he could play in the first place. It's popular, even among Dylan fans, to say that Bob's solos are lousy, but I don't buy that. I think they fit the songs well, and besides, you can't measure how good a solo is by how many notes it uses. After a few solos, Bob turned back towards the drum riser, grabbed a harmonica, and began to play a harp solo that danced around the melody of the song for quite a while, finally building up to a crescendo before breaking into the melody. The harp solo seemed to last nearly as long as the song itself, and, when it hit the melody, the crowd cheered so hard you could hardly hear the band. Clearly, we were in for a good night.
Now, what you get when you see a concert is, among other things, the privilege of witnessing the creation of a work of art. Each individual performance of a song is a creation of a unique piece of art (which will be preserved by posterity by bootleggers), and each concert is a work of art itself. What we at that show were watching was a creation of one version of a Love and Theft concert. Thanks to the tapers, people will have the opportunity to examine and enjoy that work of art for a long time to come. But those of us in attendance had the opportunity to witness that work of art as it was being created. I, for one, felt honored to be alive at the right time to have that opportunity.
I had hoped to hear "It's All Right Ma" next, but, well, some things must be saved for next time. The third song was "Desolation Row," just as it had been at the last few shows that I saw. This time, it didn't turn into a guitar rock song until the first four verses had been sung. Listening to Dylan is like wine tasting. Play a recording of a song for one of the aficionados, and they'll describe the performance in detail, and, most of the time, name the vintage. It'd be tough to pick an exact vintage on this performance of "Desolation Row;" it could have been from any of a few years, since the arrangement hadn't changed much in a while.
In terms of lyrical delivery, however, Dylan seems to sing the song a different way every time. I'll hear one version and he'll sound a like a sportscaster doing a play by play, then hear another and he'll sound like a tour guide, or maybe that guy who stands in the corner at a party, whispering gossip about all of the guests into your ear. In Nashville, it sounded to me as though Bob was playing the role of a guy sitting at his window, watching a day on Desolation Row that he's been seeing over and over again for days. Sort of like in the movie Groundhog Day, in which a man is forced to live the same day in a small town over and over. There are no surprises left in the day for the singer in the song tonight; you can almost hear a bit of dialogue:
BOB: (looking out window): And here'll be Romeo in five, four, three, two,
one…
ENTER ROMEO
ROMEO (moaning): You belong to me, I believe.
BOB: Sigh. Now someone'll say he's in the wrong room….
SOMEONE: You're in the wrong room, my friend....
As I listen to the tape later, I still hear all of this, but I now also hear that he's
fascinated by what's going on. Something tells me that he's dying to know what's going on at the feast for which the characters are preparing, to which he's not invited. What goes on at the feast that make the agents and superhuman crew have to come in?
It continued in more or less this way until the last verse, the verse about "receiving your letter yesterday." Finally, something new happened yesterday! The day had been the same as every other day, except, wonder of wonders, a letter arrives. But the letter is about something as mundane as a doorknob breaking. You can almost hear the disappointment in his voice. That's how I heard it, anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
This song, also, seemed to fit in with a Love and Theft theme; the song isn't that far removed from "High Water." If "High Water" is the hard rain a-falling, one could argue (indeed, it's been argued many times), that "Desolation Row" is a portrayal of life after the rain has finally let up. After finishing the final verse, during the guitar outro, Dylan started to dance. Normally, his dancing is based mainly on moving his left knee back and forth. In Nashville, however, he was swiveling his hips all around, moving just about like Elvis. I'm not making this up. Bob Dylan was dancing like Elvis, during "Desolation Row," and looking as though he was enjoying himself.
The next song was the old bluegrass song "This World Can't Stand Long." The basic structure for this tour has been for Bob to open with an old folk song, then play another as the fourth song. "This World Can't Stand Long," about the world being destroyed for being "too full of hate," was a fun, slightly disturbing song when I'd seen it at Music Midtown six months before. In the world after September 11th, however, it was downright chilling. Mysteriously optimistic, but still downright chilling. And it sounded terrific, as usual. When you listen to it, it really does manage to sound like a cheery, optimistic song. I guess that, if you were a Shaker, the idea of the world being unable to stand much longer would be considered optimism. So I think I'll file "This World Can't Stand Long" as a Shaker hymn.
Well, it had been a great opening acoustic set, but there hadn't exactly been any surprises. Only one song I hadn't heard performed a couple of times, and it was an old folk song. But strap yourselves in, things should start to get interesting right about now. Bob and the band got out the electric guitars and proceeded play ten straight songs that I had never heard them play before.
Ten in a row!
First up in the electric set was the first Love and Theft song of the evening, "Lonesome Day Blues," the Huck-Finn-Sings-the-Blues song. It got off to a seriously mean guitar-based start, and Dylan threw himself into the vocal delivery, turning the phrasing around just a little bit, and forgetting a bit of the words at one point, a little reminder that he's human after all.
The vocal delivery picked up a bit more about two-thirds of the way through the song, especially at the line "rotten to the core," which was spit out with a vengeance, followed by the "wind was whispering" verse, and some more super-mean guitar work, and a greatly shouted delivery of "spare the defeated/speak to the crowd" line. The way that he sang "I'm gonna taaaaaaaaaammmmme the proud!" brought out all sorts of cheers from the crowd, many of whom probably connected it to current military campaigns.
Larry took his spot at the steel guitar for the next song, "I Threw it All Away," the lone "Nashville Skyline" track of the night, and one which, like the others, could have been on "Love and Theft," somewhere near "Moonlight." Looking at this song as a sort of sequel to "Moonlight" produces a funny result, escpecially if you're the sort who thinks that "Moonlight" is about luring a girl out into the moonlight alone to kill her.
I hadn't heard this arrangement of "I Threw It All Away" before, but it was another gorgeous arrangement, especially with the steel guitar. Very laid back, no more similar to the Rolling Thunder versions than "It Ain't Me Babe" had been to it's own Rolling Thunder incarnation. It wasn't so much a scream of anguish as a soft lament; the words of a man all worn out at the end of the preceding Sad and Lonesome Day.
I spent a few seconds at the end of the song talking to people around me, then looked up to see that Larry had gotten up from the steel guitar and was sporting a banjo. A banjo! I'd used my binoculars to check the instrument cases for a banjo, but hadn't seen one. But most of us in the crowd knew what it meant - we were getting "High Water." "High Water!"
There was a rush of electricity in the crowd as Larry started to play the opening riff, with Bob and Charlie trading electric licks. The banjo part faded into the mix during the song, turning the song from a bluegrass song influenced by rock (as it is on the album) into a rock song with a bluegrass influence. I was reminded a bit of European New Jazz, which plays regular jazz over a few sampled techno rhythms; this was a rock song played over what was, basically, a sampled bluegrass lick. American New Rock! The banjo laid the foundation of the song, with more help from David Kemper on the drums than it had on the album, and the electric guitars positively jumped up and down on that foundation. This sound wasn't quite rock and wasn't quite bluegrass; like the Rolling Thunder shows, it sounded old, somehow, but this was something NEW. A whole new sound that sounded as just as fresh as the dew and as old as the dirt.
Vocally, Bob took some great opportunities on this song, latching onto a new rhythm that bounced along with the banjo and drum parts. I was surprised, really, by how many subtle ways he found to rework the song from the original version, rocking it up a good deal musically, but falling more into the bluegrass roots of the song vocally. Meanwhile, as Bob played with the vocals, Charlie played with the guitar, adding scary lead fills over the banjo part, until, at the end, the banjo came back up in the mix, with the electric guitar Phew. That song was quite a workout. It was more apocalyptic than the record at some points, less so at others.
Next up was the third-ever performance of "Floater." There was no fiddle here, Charlie played the fiddle part on electric guitar. It was neat to hear this song with a solo partway through.
It was somehow unusual to hear this song after "High Water," rather than before it. "Floater" seems to be occupying the same general territory as "High Water," only a few towns over, where it isn't raining yet. Not every town gets flooded at the same time (or hasn't since the days of Noah.) Dylan seemed to get a real kick out of the lyrics on this one. Get the recording, and listen to how he sings "I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes…I had them once, though, I suppose." It's almost like Bob's playing a comedian, trying to find the humor in lines that aren't exactly funny, per se, though it's a funny song. He played the "shove off" exchange between Romeo and Juliet wonderfully. While I missed the fiddle musically, the vocally delivery here was much more interesting than the album version.
Then it was back to the acoustic set, and, after a long intro, Bob launched into a nine-minute version of "One Too Many Mornings." To say that this version was lovely would be to understate the matter. Lovely guitar work, with Larry back on the steel guitar. The 1999-2001 band really played together well, and nowhere was this more apparent than on this song. For his part, Bob really seemed to relish the vocals here, stretching out the word "mind" so long you almost expected it to spring back like a rubber band. But it didn't, it turned out to be more like the trail of a comet than a rubber band. And then there's the way he sang "it's a restless hungry feeling that don't mean no one no good," and the way the line "we're both one too many mornings…" sounded like extending a hand to someone, offering to be on their side, if only for awhile, to get through that restless hungry feeling.
The crowd took notice of this one; on the recording, one can hear one person saying "that was gorgeous" as the song ended, and another shouting "beautiful!"
"One Too Many Mornings" is one of those songs that has had a billion different arrangements over the years. There was the original, solo version, and the hard rock, desperate 1966 version. There were a lot of great versions on the Rolling Thunder Review, the desperate-but-learned-to-live-with-it rendition that you can hear on the "Hard Rain" LP (with a whole new verse), or the rehearsal version from about that time with Dylan playing piano and Scarlet adding violin; Dylan singing the way he does on "One More Cup of Coffee." Yep. That's an awful lot of versions. But this was the prettiest, guaranteed. It was desperate-but-learned-to-see-the-beauty-of-desperation. On every other show this tour, "Masters of War" had been played in the second acoustic portions of the show. However, after "Mornings," Bob and Tony huddled at the back of the stage, before launching into slow version of "John Brown," which came as quite a surprise to me. At the show, it seemed as though the song never quite found it's rhythm, but it sounds great to me on the recording, especially Larry's work on the bouzouki. It's got that majestic, Spirit of ‘76 sort of feel to it (similar, in that way, to "Mississippi," which ties this song, too, into "Love and Theft.") It's a worthy replacement for "Masters of War," though, while "Masters of War" is not so much an anti-war song as an anti-military industrial complex song, "John Brown" seems, to me, to be just plain anti-war. Or maybe it's anti-thinking-too-much-when-you're-a-soldier. Or maybe it's a more symbolic version of the same theme as "Masters of War," with John Brown as the soldiers and his overly enthusiastic mother as the masters of war.
Now, for the last few years, on the rare occasion that "John Brown" has come up, it's been followed (every night except for a few recent shows) by "Visions of Johanna." I don't know why; they have very little to do with one another, lyrically. Personally, I suspect that the reason is mathematical. In the aforementioned Rolling Stone interview, Dylan says that, in 1964, Lonnie Johnson taught him a mathematical way of playing music that would get into people's soul - and they wouldn't be able to avoid it, because it was mathematical. Now, I'm no mathematician (David is, but I'm not about to send him on a wild goose chase over this), but that's my theory: "John Brown" tends to precede "Visions" because of some sort of mathematical thing that maybe no one other than Dylan and Lonnie Johnson understand. I thought about this a bit as Bob played "John Brown," but tried to keep it out of my mind. After all, the two weren't being played together as often those days, and, anyway, this was a "Love and Theft" set. I didn't think that the oh-so-urban-and-artsy "Visions" would fit in too well with the theme.
There was another conference at the back of the stage, then launched into a long intro that I couldn't quite place; the guitar work was absolutely a thing of beauty, a sound that reminded me of drops of water falling into a pond… Then came the first line: "Ain't it just like the night…."
"Visions of Johanna!"
I was standing not much more than 20 feet from Bob Dylan and he was playing a gorgeous version of "Visions of Johanna!" Some jerk a few rows over decided that it would a good idea to sing along as loudly, and as out-of-tune, as he could. "Shut up!" I shouted. "Bob is singing!" I was determined to do what ever it took to get the guy to knock it off. He stopped right way, thank goodness. "Visions of Johanna" is not the time for fighting.
I stood there in shock and ecstasy as Bob played with the vocals on the line about "The Country Music Station plays soft," and cheered loudly as he sang the chorus line. Listening to the guitar work, I was stunned. He had, indeed, managed to make the song sound as though it, too, would seem perfect on Love and Theft (I'd put it right after "High Water.")
We were all getting to witness the creation of a new version of "Visions of Johanna." I was almost breathless with excitement. Verse two came and Bob sang what may be the greatest line he's ever written: "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face." I cheered again.
Now, I knew that one of the next two verses, either the "little boy lost" verse or the "inside the museums" verse, would probably be dropped, as has been the standard in recent renditions. To my great delight, he chose to sing the "museums" verse, which I think is the greatest verse written about modern art to date. At the end, he dropped the line about "jewels and binoculars," replacing it with the "how can I explain" ending from the "little boy lost" verse, which, though I wouldn't have guessed that it would, worked very well. How DO you explain modern art?
"You got your wish, buddy!" said David, as the verse faded into an instrumental break. "You can die now, huh?"
"Yep," I said. "Might as well."
Debbie laughed. "Oh, don't do that," she said. "You never know what his next album will sound like!"
"Yeah, I guess I can wait," I said. Hey, I hadn't heard him play "It's All Right, Ma" or "Mississippi" yet. I'll just try to stay busy being born.
Now, one of the many reasons I'd hoped that he'd play "Visions" was that it would give me a chance to write about the song in my review. It's long been thought of as a drug song, but I don't see that at all. Personally, I think it's a song about art. The scene is set by setting the speaker in a little New York loft, listening to the radio, possibly looking at a book of paintings, while two lovers are entwined in the background. There are a few theories as to the identity of Johanna; Joan Baez seems to think that it's about her, as did my ex-girlfriend and other sufferers of Joanosis.
Personally, I subscribe to the notion that it's Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent Van Gogh's sister-in-law, who worked tirelessly after his death to make his work as well known as it is today. There's other evidence that Dylan was into Van Gogh at around the time he wrote "Visions of Johanna;" a few months later, in a hotel room in Denver, he recorded a song usually referred to as "Positively Van Gogh." In 1976, he played a song about Van Gogh most nights on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder tour. And, if you ever want to see exactly what it looks like when the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of ones face, look at some of Van Gogh's later portraits. (try "Portrait of Camille Roulin," "Augustine Roulin (la berceuse)," "Marguriete Gachet at the Piano,"…heck, just about any of the portraits painted from 1888-1890.)
Something that I suggest everyone interested in Dylan try is to gather as many versions of "Visions of Johanna" as they can (I suggest the two outtake recordings, the album version, a live one from 1966 (I prefer the Sheffield version), the Rolling Thunder recording from 75, and a few from the nineties), put them all on one tape, and play it late at night while looking at a book of Van Gogh prints, paying particular attention to the later works. Just make sure you get a book with high quality prints; no print is nearly as good as the original, but a bad print can wreck the whole experience. But it's an experience everyone ought to try. If you give it a shot and enjoy it, drop me a line. I'd like to know how this goes for other people. The most obviously art-based verse in the song is the "museums" verse, which chronicles the transition of art from classical to modern. Inside the museusm, infinity (religious art) goes up on trial, having gotten old after awhile. Even Mona Lisa is weary (with the highway blues). The second part of the verse mentions primitive wallflowers and jelly faced women, which are clearly images from modern art. Then the one with the moustache (Du Champ's "LHOOQ," which is a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache), remarks that she can't find her knees (because that's where the frame cuts her off.) Art has become aware of itself.
Okay, okay, so maybe I'm overanalyzing again.
So what?
All right, so I've veered a bit off topic here, talking more about the song than the performance. It was a beautiful rendition of the song; it lasted nearly ten minutes which felt like an instant. Another fine candidate for a live album.
"Thank you, Bob!" I shouted, knowing full well that he couldn't hear me. Next up, it was back to the electric instruments for "Summer Days," that Great Gatsby swing piece. The band could have passed for the Stray Cats, and Bob threw himself so heartily into singing the lyrics that it seemed as though the music was doing all it could to keep up. So many great lines (a few of which were reworked slightly - now she's taking his hand instead of holding it), and such a lot of great guitar work. This song rocked more than a song probably ought to be allowed to rock. Larry and Charlie were visibly having a blast playing this one, trading licks furiously. It would be a fun song for jamming, though a jam in the middle might slow the song down, but there was more jamming than there is on the recorded version. The song went on for nearly six minutes; much longer than the album, even though Bob was singing the lyrics much faster, throwing in extra words here and there, as though he was just challenging himself to get in more words in less time. The extra jamming didn't slow things down at all.
As the song ended, the stage was flooded in blue light, with a moving white pattern that suggested a flowing river. As Larry played a familiar guitar part, David shouted "That's it!" and turned to me grinning, and we all knew that, as I had suspected, we would be getting "Mississippi." It wasn't long ago - right before the Dalton show six months prior to the Nashville show, that my friend Joe and I were discussing what songs we'd most like to hear in Dalton, and I said "you know what would be the coolest thing? If he played ‘Mississippi,' the Time Out of Mind outtake that Sheryl Crow recorded!" But that seemed, at the time, like a serious pipe dream. But here I was, watching Bob play it.
Bob really sang the hell out of "Mississippi." It was interesting to hear him singing the song in the clear voice he'd been using most of the show rather than in the gruff voice of the album version, which David compared to Tom Waits. Oddly, I couldn't picture Tom singing the album version, but, having heard it with Dylan's clear voice, I can actually hear Tom doing it as a piano based number. Rumor has it, actually, that Dylan asked Waits to tour with him recently, but Waits declined, saying that he doesn't like to play large venues. It's a shame, really. But I don't even want to contemplate the lengths to which I'd go to see Dylan and Waits at the same show.
There are a lot of great vocal opportunities in "Mississippi," and, in Nashville, Bob took all of them. Musically, it was pretty close to the album version, perhaps a little bit faster. Bob stuck with the lyrics (maybe he changed it from "Say anything you want to, I've heard it all" to "now I've heard it all," I'm not certain).
And there lay the magic of live Dylan. He'd taken a song that was a masterpiece to begin with, and, in performance, improved on it. That made five songs from Love and Theft. Assuming that Bob would play "Honest With Me" in the encores, that would make six for the show - a record for the tour!
Then came that evil guitar riff that opens up "Wicked Messenger," and a hard-rocking version it was. This arrangement didn't go out of it's way to sound like a "Love and Theft" song, but it would have fit in right beside "Honest With Me," I think.
Bob really put a lot of theatrics into singing this one, also, half-whispering, half-shouting a lot words. Larry and Charlie really cut loose playing fast guitar parts here. It was really evident here what a crack rock act this band really is, jamming like crazy when the time was right, playing it light when Bob was singing. Towards the end, it even started to get downright funky. Right in the middle of the funkiness, Bob grabbed for the harp and played a short, but, well, wicked solo. The closing song of the set was "Blonde on Blonde"'s answer to "Cry Awhile," "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat," which, musically, almost felt like "Wicked Messenger Part II." This ended the run of 10 straight songs I'd never heard live before.
In the middle of "LSPBH," the music quieted down a bit and Bob said "Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to introduce my band!" The crowd cheered, knowing what a great band it was. "Best band in the land!" he shouted, for emphasis. It was obvious that Bob was insanely proud of his band, as well he should be. The song ended and the band got into the "Formation," standing still and staring. Well, most of them were standing still. Bob seemed to have a hard time standing still for more than a few seconds. The first encore of the evening was "Things Have Changed," in a slow, spooky arrangement almost similar to the arrangement of "Love Sick" that's been coming up now and then. Everyone was looking all over the stage for the Oscar, a replica of which was set up on the amps during the Spring and Summer shows, but it wasn't in evidence this night. But no matter; this was the best rendition of "Things Have Changed" that I've heard yet, no question about it. Dylan leaned into the vocals, emphasizing the last syllable of each line - "I'm locked in TIGHT…I'm out of RANGE…I used to CARE!"
Next up came "Like a Rolling Stone," which wasn't quite as tight a performance as Dalton. In Dalton, he was playing the manic soothsayer, listing the woman's sins with vigor, then asking (and truly wondering), how it feels. In Nashville, he was playing the same role, only more sedate. The woman being addressed in the song might be getting manic ("how did you know??!!!"), but Bob is reading off the sins as though he's checking them off on a checklist, as though he's done it to several other people today, and wants to make sure that he has all of the facts straight…then, the one question that isn't on the list, "How does it feel?" He sang that line with a bit of sympathy, a bit of amusement, and more than a bit of curiosity. All these years of asking, and he still didn't know how it felt!
Someone jumped up onstage out of the crowd during the back-of-the-stage conference after "Like a Rolling Stone." To security's credit, they jumped the guy and had him down and off stage so fast that you would have missed the whole thing if you'd looked down to make sure your minidisc deck was still recording. Bob, having his back turned for the conference, probably didn't even know that it had happened.
"I Shall Be Released" was next, another song I'd never heard live. It was a slow, acoustic arrangement, with Larry and Charlie singing great backup on the chorus, not quite in the same tune as Bob. It was hearing a recording of this song last year that I realized that not only were Larry and Charlie quite possibly the best guitarists Dylan has ever employed, they also may well be the best backing singers. In the car on the way, David and I had listened to the Bootleg Series version of the song, and he commented that, at times, it reminded him of the Kabbalistic Seven Stages of the Heart, the process of rising up into the light. And how the "east and west" thing related to the passage of our ancestors from Europe/Asia to America. He then said that he might be overanalyzing, but I, for one, am always up for overanalyzing Dylan. "Honest With Me" was a bit heavier than the album with the two-beat riff (the one played twice after each line) played a little lower on the scale (which changed the color of the song from yellow to maroon, if that makes any sense.) Personally, I always do a little dance when I hear this song, one which any idiot with a working arm can do. When the guitar hits the first beat of the riff, thrust your arm forward, and pull back during the second beat. The overall motion should look as though you're starting a lawnmower to the tune of the guitar riff. My father thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.
"Blowin' in the Wind." ended the first encore set, in the backup vocal based arrangement that's been played at most shows lately. David and I have discussed this song at some length in the past. It's popular, among folk-song enthusiasts, to bash this song, saying that it's just a laundry list of questions with no real answer. David, however, describes as "a set of nine questions which can only be answered with another question - ‘why does the lion eat the lamb?'" And, after the events of a couple of months before, it seemed especially poignant in Nashville. It's a set of nine questions, but they were relevant when the song was written, they were relevant 100 years before the song was written, and they were entirely relevant on November 3rd, 2001. Bob and the band went through the three verses and choruses in about three minutes (Bob putting extra emphasis on the word "died,") before launching into the guitar solos. Some of the guitar work (Charlie's, I believe), was reminiscent of the opening part of "Mississippi," giving off that "round and round, here we go again" feeling that works sp well for the song.
And that was the first set encore set. But we all had a feeling that Bob would be back for more.
After a very short break, Bob and the band came back for "All Along the Watchtower." And it wasn't just any "All Along the Watchtower," this just happened to be the best version "Watchtower" I have ever heard, either on record or in concert. This was a version that kicked your ass, stomped on your head, jumped on your back, rolled you over, and helped you up, smiling in all it's countenance before socking you one last time. And I loved it. Much more than I normally love it when I get the shit kicked out of me.
In the Spring version, Larry was playing steel guitar, making it sound like spooky horror rock. In Nashville, Larry just went for his guitar, and he and Charlie gave it a funky backbeat, topped off with some searing licks. This wasn't just rock. This, make no mistake, was Heavy Metal. Bob was even moving his head back and forth in a move that could almost be described as headbanging. I'm not kidding. For my part, I raised my right hand in the "devil sign" seen at every metal concert and proceeded to bang my head for all I was worth. My friend Seth had been right all those years before; Dylan was the great-godfather of heavy metal.
Bob was clearly enjoying the new arrangement, moving around and grinning for all he was worth, and singing the lines with vigor. Then, the time came for the song to end, and, well, it didn't. Bob came back up to the microphone and, to my great surprise, began to sing the first verse again! It was as though the song was going so well that Bob just didn't want to end it.
The re-singing of the first verse only went to the line "any of it is worth," which closed the song with power. The last line was shouted out in fragments, with a riff to follow.
"Any!" (pause)
"OF IT" (pause)
And, then…
"is wooorrrrrth…" dragged out slowly while the band faded the song. "Worth" wasn't sung as you'd normally expect, it was dragged out and stretched and bent, and, all of a sudden, on that one word, Bob was singing in that "hebraic cantillation" that Allen Ginsberg said Bob was using on "One More Cup of Coffee."
Awesome.
Paul Williams wrote a review of the song when it first came out, talking about the song being set up "like a Moebius strip," like the middle could be the beginning, etc, and the whole thing is just on a loop. Dylan later said that that was just about right. If you ever wondered how it would sound on a loop, this would give you a pretty clear idea. As Bob again left the stage, everyone in the crowd looked around at one another, surprised at how hard that song had managed to rock. This was, mind you, the most commonly played song in Dylan's repertoire, having been performed well over a thousand times in all sorts of arrangements. Many of us in the crowd had heard most of the arrangements, hundreds of performances of the song. And this one, after all that, knocked us out. There were several people saying "wow!"
Bob came back for one more, making a total of twenty-two songs - an awfully generous helping of Dylan.
As most of us predicted, the last encore was the terrific arrangement of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," with Larry and Charlie "oooh"ing and singing along on the next-to-last line of each verse, just to add emphasis. It was everything the original album version tried to be, and, well, more. There was that extra verse, and the adding of "just like so many times before" onto the end of each chorus. And Dylan singing with much more passion than on the album version. Or on just about any other version that I've heard, now that I mention it. Two and half hours of singing, and the voice was still pretty clear. A little more gruff than it had been on "It Ain't Me Babe," but still clear.
The second verse was especially hard-hitting…"mama put my guns into the ground." "Into," no just "in," adding an extra syllable, which gave the line even more punch (I've said before that Dylan fans learn fast to appreciate the subtle).
Now, in light of recent events, this song (and anything else that could be interpreted as political) had an added punch that evening in Nashville, and it was then that I noticed that this is a song not about dying, but a song about surviving. It's all in that one line in the chorus: "Just like so many times before." He's been down this far, this close to gone, so many times before….and, obviously, he got through it before. He's a survivor. I started thinking of the speech he made at the Grammies in 1991, how his father said "it's possible to become so defiled that your mother and father will abandon you….but God will believe in your ability to change yourself around."(I'm paraphrasing a bit here). Also, in life, situations can, and, often, will, get so bad that you feel as though it's all over. But you can get up, wipe the blood up out of your eyes, and keep going.
The band stood together for one more formation, then began to walk off the stage. Dylan was the last to disappear, and for one second, it was just him up on that stage, no guitar in front of him, no musician sharing the stage. Just Bob, staring back at us.
And then he was gone.
We all waited to see if there'd be an extra encore, but it wasn't to be. The house lights came up, and we all began to leave. Personally, I was still in a bit of haze. What a show!
We bumped into William and his son on the way out, and discussed how incredible the show had been, particularly mentioning "Watchtower." Everyone was still in shock over how great "Watchtower" had been, and a lot of people were mentioning the beauty of "One Too Many Mornings," and the power of "High Water." William mentioned that he thought it was the best show he'd seen - and, remember, this is the guy who saw the last night of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
I hadn't decided whether or not to get one of the "limited edition" posters which listed the venue and date, but decided that I'd better, as it would save me the trouble of getting one on ebay later, which I'd surely decide to do. Giving decaf coffees to people who complain about Dylan's singing pays just about well enough that I could afford a poster and a Love and Theft t-shirt.
To David's and my dismay, the late-night chili restaurant turned out to be closed on weekends, so there'd be no chili for us that night. Instead, we headed back for the car and began the long drive back to Atlanta. Midway back, we stopped at a White Castle to eat, which was really quite a novelty, since I'd never even seen one of those in the South before. It wasn't exactly great food, but bad food has a charm all it's own. We got back into Atlanta at about a quarter-til-five, I picked up my car from the coffee shop parking lot, and drove the half-hour home. I was dead tired - but not so tired that I didn't check rec.music.dylan before I went to bed.
This was certainly the best Dylan concert I'd seen, though Dalton wasn't far behind. The setlist was to die for, the band was tighter than ever, and Dylan was putting more into singing than I remember from any other show. The way he sang "worth" at the very end of "Watchtower…" Man! Most people didn't even think he could still DO that kind of singing! At home, later on, I'm able to listen to the recordings of the show, separating the music itself from the thrill of watching Dylan sing, and the music sounds even better. It gets better with each listen. It also gives me a chance to dig further into my instinct to thing that the whole first set is a sort of "Love and Theft" based concept set, and the theory still works for me. So does my nutty notion that all of the songs in the set tie into some story thread in the album.
Hey, people in The Great Gatsby went to war, just like John Brown.
Well, didn't they?
(All right, so one theory that might not have been strengthened by this essay is the Adam Selzer-Is-Not-Some-Crackpot-With-A-Few-Screws-Loose theory, but, well, you can't have everything.)
I'd never really felt that there was a "plot" or "theme" in the other shows I've seen, but I certainly got that idea in Nashville. All the songs just worked together that well.
So that was show #9 for me.
2001 was not generally thought of as a great year for Dylan concerts by fans; Dylan's singing wasn't as strong as it had been in 1999 or 2000, and the band wasn't quite as tight, for the most part. But no one had a bad word to say about Nashville.
I had tickets for another show just a couple of weeks later.