Andrew Muir’s book, Razor’s Edge, follows the Never Ending Tour from 1988 to 1999. Muir gives informed overviews, as well as detailed personal accounts of shows flung far about the globe. He describes a show in 1994, in Hiroshima, where Bob played the first acoustic version of Masters of War since 1963. I regret I’ve never heard a recording of this performance. For all those people who complain that Bob Dylan doesn’t “communicate” enough to the audience, I invite you to consider what the hell you mean by communicate: the simple fact of this choice is a message more intimate and provocative than any speech the man could give from a stage. Muir writes:
Here he was in Hiroshima, an American in the first Japanese city obliterated when the U.S. dropped The Bomb, singing out against the terrible sufferings of the innocent in war. I have rarely been as moved. How strange that such a blunt, unforgiving, adolescent piece should achieve that effect. Or rather how strange it would have been in almost any other location (109).
The strangeness is key. It would seem an obvious, benevolent gesture of solidarity to sing an anti-war song in Hiroshima. But Masters of War is not an anti-war song, it is not a song begging for peace or even advocating peace. It is adolescent and blunt as it indicts the elders, the Masters, who use young people as playing pieces in their wars while they remain safe, their power reinforced by the destruction of innocents who may be manipulated to believe that their sacrifices are for the general good, but who will be sacrificed regardless. The singer is himself brutal, he doesn’t appeal to ethics, but to vengefulness and a righteous morality. He would set these Masters of War outside the embrace of the lord of forgiveness, Christ himself. He fantasizes gloating over their deaths. He accuses them of manufacturing such terror in their pawns, that young people will choose not to bring children into a world so treacherous. These are not mature philosophies that offer a vision of a peaceful utopia. They are the violent rages of youth against its own exploitation.
He sang this in a pointed gesture of historical significance–the first acoustic performance since the song’s earliest life–to an audience that might have contained survivors of the bomb, and that almost certainly contained the children and perhaps grandchildren of the survivors, and relatives or descendants of those who did not survive. Bob Dylan writes in Chronicles about what it is to be a child of Pearl Harbor, the cusp event of the 20th century. He offered the song’s pitiless judgement, its fantasy of revenge, to people whose country suffered the worst single moment of destruction in history at the hands of the singer’s country, and who lost the war as well as a military presence in the world. The Japan he sang to has been rebuilt, secure, at peace. And still, the song is not a healing thing, it does not offer unity and reconciliation. It admits different kinds of violence, and different ways the human heart darkens against others. Muir was absolutely right to find it “strange” that he was moved by this performance, which reminds us that war destroys the spirit. Dylan offered them a quiet and personal rendition of the song, and their responses are their own business.
If this performance were *timeless* or if it *erased boundaries between nations* it did so with a strong cold truthful reminder of the corruptibility of spirit that characterizes war. It seems outside history because of its time and place and the identities of the singer and the audience, not despite these factors.
In 1994 Bob Dylan also performed at The Great Music Experience in Japan, in the city of Nara. There is excellent film footage of this. The first time I watched it, I see Bob Dylan looking small and preoccupied, standing at the center of a very large stage dwarfed absurdly by an entire orchestra behind him. His guitar seems a pointless prop. A friend tells me, “He’s going to do Hard Rain.” I can’t imagine the surreal catalog and the heroic journey holding up to a schmaltzy wall of violins and cellos. I prepared myself to be undone by Bob Dylan’s embarrassment. The strings start up, Bob starts strumming and singing, and after the incongruity of the first line or so, all bets are off. A New Voice is born, is what happens. Inside the lush sound of the orchestra, his voice seems to grow, to become sonically larger. Not louder, but more expansive. The vocals are not foreground and the orchestra is not background, and the orchestra does not complement the vocals–instead, his voice becomes capacious enough to hold the orchestra within his song.
Hard Rain was not composed on the occasion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as I mentioned elsewhere in this blog. It has still often been heard as a ballad for the anxious spirit of the atomic age, a boy’s journey through world that has become shards of horror and of hope because of the threat of perfectly feasible destruction. And here it is being sung by its composer, who lived to see the threat carried out and the world scarred over but still intact. And he’s joined by musicians who are the beneficiaries of extreme cases of sacrifice, destruction, and renovation. The whole thing could be a We Are The World bit of kitsch, and it is not. It’s not, in part because of the strange and suggestive world of the song’s lyrics, in part because all the performers do their jobs with professional skill and focus that can’t easily be sentimentalized, and in part because Bob Dylan found a new voice equal to a setting–both the stage at Nara and the thousands of unseen watchers enjoying the video footage–that would have seemed preposterous at the level of science fiction when he first performed the song in the tiny hole of the Gaslight, for an audience of people who almost all knew each other.
Bob Dylan performing Hard Rain in Nara, and Bob Dylan performing Masters of War in Hiroshima, can only be thought about, and felt, as a coming-together of so many stories that took decades to develop: political, biographical, technological, economic. It is puerile and sentimental to ascribe some quality of *transcendence* and *timelessness* to the songs themselves. It is foolish to find a *closure* to anything at all in seeing and hearing Bob Dylan perform these songs in Japan. It is Philistine to reduce these events to signs of a homogenized global culture that doesn’t recognize the traditional boundaries of time and space. Better to stick with Andrew Muir’s “strangeness.” The peculiar availability of these songs to new settings, the peculiar adaptability of Dylan’s performing self to new settings, our capacity for emotions that are not familiar and not comfortable–all these real-world factors can combine to provoke us to ask “What is it I just saw and heard?” Why are we so grateful for these moments?
Here is a photo of the Mihama Nuclear Reactor in Japan and there has to be a story that brings the Japanese people from Hiroshima to Mihama that is not a shallow story of healing and victory, but a story in which time passes and things change, and some people felt some of these moments of change with special clarity and wonder.
He’s a wanderer in Spirit on the Water: he travels by land, through a new morning after the sleepless night, it’s the dawn of the day, and yet he doesn’t sound exhausted by his journey. There’s the stop-time inside his mind, the thoughts of this woman, he can’t stay away from this inner life of love’s trials–it doesn’t sound like she’s a sure thing, since he wonders why she can’t treat him right and he threatens to throw his love away into the sea of he can’t have her. And always the delicious playfulness of the phrasing, the rising lilts (“If I can’t have youuu..”) In Ain’t Talkin’, he doesn’t have to tell us how arduous and rough his road is, and when he tells us he’s “trampling through mud” in Spirit on the Water, we don’t hear an ordeal, we hear a cavalier attitude in the pursuit of this love.
Bosch’s one world of delights and torments and fantasies seems just right for the one world of Ain’t Talkin’ and Spirit on the Water. One world in which love, pain, ancient certainties tested and longed for, can appear as a landscape of grim depthless anguish, or a landscape of humor, light, and play. And the palette for each landscape is sound.
He cavorts around the microphone like a little savage, complete with feathers and greasepaint, his eyes are dazed and dazzling, and he bites off the words and spits them out. I can hypnotize you, and you’ll never catch me, you’ll never tame me is what this performance tells us. In 2005, I heard him do this song once in New Jersey, and once very far from New Jersey, in Glasgow, Scotland. ”I’m not the one you want, babe, I will only let you down,” he set each word down separately in its own growl, each word was final, each word seemed to be an announcement of its own.
The vocals came from someplace dark, as if to say You’ll never get what’s hidden, you’ll never even know if there’s really anything there but you’ll feel every word. 
Here’s a photo from the website of the small hotel chain that owns the hotel I stayed at when I visited Glasgow in 2005. A person could certainly write one of those familiar migration stories beginning with my great grandparents’ Glasgow tale of persecution, exile, tolerance, opportunity, endurance, and then leading to my Glasgow tale of assimilation, security, freedom, leisure, affluence. 
Air travel is standardized and the distance covered is invisible to the traveler.We are used to instantaneous anonymous community. We demand unmediated, unmonitored instantaneous transmission of information. We have to deal every day with unmediated and unmonitored appropriation and manipulation of information and of other people’s words. These conditions appear uncontrollable and inexorable, and they are in fact the products and services, or byproducts, of a corporate oligarchy that continues to absorb or destroy smaller commercial entities and erase boundaries and differences through economic control. This is a catalog of the truisms which characterize the Now I understand we occupy. 
Where is Bob Dylan in all this? Bob’s everywhere! Here he is in Sweden, Spain, and Brixton, all in 2005, the same year I saw him in Glasgow. Or maybe these photos are Sweden, Milan, and Nashville, I’m not sure–three other places he performed in 2005. In Glasgow, he opened with Maggie’s Farm, as he did in Bologna one week earlier, a fact I mention only because on the bootleg recording of the Glasgow show, right before the show begins, a man close to the taper calls out “TWEEDLEDEE!” in what I hear as a thick brogue but Mathew West would hear unaccented. If this man had been at the show in Bologna he could have heard Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Maybe he was at the Bologna show, or maybe he’d already downloaded it, been blown away by that night’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and wanted it live for himself. In Glasgow, Bob did give us a Sugar Baby in which the delivery seemed to be exactly one-tenth of a heartbeat longer than my ears expected to hear each phrase, thus creating this wonderful tension throughout the song. One of those performances in which I know what it means to hang on every word. And of course when he sung “some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff,” a companionable, hearty, appreciative roar went up. I also recommend this show for a ne plus ultra Just Like A Woman: Bob paused between each line of the refrain, and this Glasgow crowd gave him back a thundering “JUST LIKE A WOMAN” each time, and he let us sing “I just don’t fit,” and then he actually purred back to us into the microphone “That’s right.” Some concerts are lovefests, this was one of them, and perhaps my great-grandparents could not have hoped nor dreamed of thousands of people showering honest love all over an erstwhile Jewish man on a stage a mile or two from their strange new street. And he did the forbidding/enticing It Ain’t Me Babe at this show, too.
Dylan has said “The songs are the star of the show, not me” (Hilburn interview, 2004), and in 2006 he said of the songs on Modern Times, that “when I was singing them, they seemed to have an ancient presence” (Lethem, Rolling Stone, 2006). Dylan could almost have you believe that the perfection of this global cultural machine was ideally timed to satisfy his desire to bring the peculiar timelessness of his songs to an audience that would hear them as timeless, and not as historical. Dylan himself has said right out that he expected people to attend early NET shows who wanted a revival of the history Dylan’s come to represent, and they would not find what they wanted, and they would not return. But younger people, people who don’t or can’t identify with this history, would be his repeat audience. They are the ones who would take advantage of this speeded-up and seemingly borderless world to experience as often as possible this “ongoing environment”; they would become fluent in the combination of routine and surprise that characterizes the Neverending Tour.
But I want to end this post with a glance at the people who continue to be “shocked–shocked!” when Bob Dylan appears in a lingerie or SUV commercial, or when Bob Dylan allows Pepsi to use Forever Young to sell soda, and I think the latest is another ad with Times They Are A-Changin’ ? I can’t keep these straight. To these people I say: if you have bought Bob Dylan CDs from a retail establishment, and if you have purchased tickets to a Bob Dylan concert through any source, and if you watched No Direction Home on television, maybe even saw I’m Not There in a movie theater or rented it through NetFlix–you and Bob are already enmeshed in the one world of commerce and advertising and intellectual property and filthy lucre. How exactly are these offended people telling the difference between the moneylenders in the temple and the good people in the temple who just happen to be exchanging cash? Why is a 6-figure recording contract a higher moral ground than a Cadillac commercial? What do you think it takes to mount a 2 hour rock concert–honor, love, and benevolence? How clean do you need this man’s hands to be for the sanctity of your own conscience? I suggest listening to your own favorite version of It Ain’t Me Babe.
It’s no surprise to me that Ron Rosenbaum would be drawn to Bob Dylan. Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, and The Shakespeare Wars interviewed Bob for Playboy in 1970, and has referred to him several times in his current blog, for starters. After reading his books on Hitler and Shakespeare, I see where Bob Dylan fits into a peculiar sequence: a life in which the relation between effects and mortal facts seems so disproportionate as to create an aura of mystery that demands a sensible narrative. Now I’ll be accused of deranged or careless hyperbole: the paragon of evil, the ultra-touchstone of western culture, and a singer-songwriter with an uncharacteristically long career, all together. But there is a quality of extremity to the actions and productions of some lives, and in the imaginations of their contemporaries and those that follow them, the extremity fashions the individuals into symbols, myths, and places of violently contested meaning. While researching my dissertation on the Holocaust, I came to find Franz Stangl, Rudolph Hoess, and Heinrich Himmler much more terrifying men than I found Hitler, but that is because I saw them as three natural men making choices in their knowable lives, none of the three was already implanted in me as the inexplicable symbol of the conditions they governed. Certainly theater companies, actors, scholars, will argue about the most authentic or effective way to stage and perform Ibsen’s plays, but the piety and passion that goes into the quest to identify Shakespeare the man and identify the gospel versions of his plays is a one-of-a-kind argument in culture. Rosenbaum’s books tell stories about the drive to explain extremity, without competing for an explanation. 
I have a bookcase full of books about Bob Dylan. In one of them, you can find a capsule summary of nearly every documented action of Bob Dylan’s life and history from 1902 to 1995. In another one, you can read a chapter titled “Is Bob Dylan Also Among The Prophets?” In another one, you can read detailed descriptions of ordinary people’s accidental and fleeting interactions with Bob Dylan: what he said, what he wore, the expressions on his face, how tall or not he appeared. It is not hard to find evidence that this life is already fashioned in popular and critical imaginations as a kind of extremity.
Here’s the thing with stories: it just is a fact that when you come into a story midway, you’re at a loss. In a story, events cause other events, and you need to follow the pathways of meanings according to a sequence. The great bloviating world of postmodern *thought* has plenty to say about false narrative and let’s just not invite them to this party. Because our party is going on full swing without them, if indeed one became a serious Bob Dylan fan anytime in the last, oh, 30 years. Marshall is spot on about the unique achievement of the NET–unlike other long-lived stars, Bob Dylan has created a new audience for himself in the latter chapters of his story, an audience that does not understand that they shouldn’t get the story because they started it late. There are those among us who became interested in Bob Dylan through hearing Blood on the Tracks, or Time Out Of Mind, or–and I testify these people exist–Self-Portrait. These albums become keystones in these fans’ own relationship with Bob Dylan, and each of these relationships should have its own chronology. If a person is turned on in a big way to Dylan when Planet Waves came out, or after being dragged to a show in 2007 with a friend who couldn’t give away an extra ticket, then for both of these people hearing Highway 61 Revisited will be a chapter in a story about Dylan and his audience that can’t be captured by the historical narrative.
I’ve heard Bob Dylan perform what I’d call irreverent versions of Desolation Row on 175th Street in Manhattan, and at 211 Stockwell Road in London. In my own small way, I’ve become part of what Marshall calls the “NET cocoon,” and it’s the way that time and space are oddly collapsed in this cocoon that’s what I have to address next.
