Here is a link to sharp piece written by Andy Moore for a site based in Madison, WI, called The Isthmus: http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=26410. In it, Moore briefly enters the Twilight Zone of Bob Dylan’s private/public world. Dylan and his band rehearsed for several days at the Barrymore Theater in Madison, before launching the summer tour in Milwaukee. The staff of the Barrymore were sworn–and we do mean legally sworn–to NORAD-level secrecy, and Dylan originally wanted the building evacuated of all staff, but relented to the Barrymore’s request to be allowed to carry on their business in the office. The secret rehearsals were amplified and, one nice night, the theater’s doors somehow secretly opened, and people eating at a diner across the street enjoyed the perfectly audible sounds of a free top-secret Bob Dylan rehearsal.
Moore does witty justice to the strange mixture of insolence, cojones, professional discipline, irreality, and image-making that only Bob Dylan can pour into three days in Madison, Wisconsin.
Just a few weeks later, I attended Bob Dylan’s concert in Bethel Woods, NY. As a non-driver, this treat entailed a 3 hour bus ride from Manhattan to a lovely scenic spot high above any human settlement, a 5 hour wait for Bob Dylan to take the stage. High points of the energetic show for me were another glorious tragic Forgetful Heart, a strong Workingman’s Blues, and a lively Tweedledum/dee. Then followed an hour’s wait in the bus as the parking lot emptied, the ride back to Manhattan, the manifold charms of the MTA at 3 AM, and the final arrival home in Brooklyn at 4 AM Sunday.
When I listen to Real Live, I hear a terrific guitarist in the act of figuring out how to integrate his gifts into the peculiar demands and energies of performing with Bob Dylan. Mick Taylor’s gorgeous streams of note-bending solos sometimes upstage Bob Dylan’s vocals. Sometimes Taylor comes in too soon. Sometimes I can actually hear him pause, expecting Dylan to resume singing, then Dylan lets the moment go longer than Taylor’s timing, and a little edgy pause, a moment of vertigo, happens in the music onstage. These awkwardnesses are surely awkward. And because we’re listening to two great performers, the arguable ill-matching can also give a tension and life to these performances that would be absent with weak performers. For me, it all works in I and I, and partly because Dylan wrote the song with the voice he’s singing it with on this recording, so his phrasing here has a particular strength and confidence and the trade-offs between the vocals and Taylor’s solos are thrilling and not clumsy.
Then there is the Tangled Up in Blue on Real Live, where Dylan takes us through the song like a wormhole, you hold on for dear life, I think I know this song and now it’s exactly in the moment of shattering but never coming apart, the scans and rhymes impossibly holding together, the song impossibly depositing you in an alternate universe that is still Tangled Up in Blue. And I wonder whether night after night of singing alongside Mick Taylor’s guitar playing, the tortuous and insistent solos–could that kind of musical improvisation have influenced Dylan’s verbal improvisations, so that somehow this relation between music and words answers for one small part of the outrageous inventiveness of that Tangled Up in Blue?
Of course one of the reasons Bob Dylan’s 1984 appearance on the David Letterman show is galvanizing, hilarious, and addictive is because of his audacious playfulness with the time constraints of live television. In Jokerman, he turns his back to the audience, dithers about for a harmonica, steps off the raised portion of the stage, abandons The Plugz to a trial by fire they do indeed pass–this is all nerve-wracking even for the viewer, and marvelously exposes the nonsense of “live” television.
Well, these were the thoughts I had when I read Alan Light’s piece in the Cambridge Companion on Bob Dylan the performer, and Martin Jacobi’s piece on collaboration. Both are solid overviews, largely chronological, that offer a catalogue of Dylan’s stage lives, and the musicians and writers Dylan has worked with, covered, ben influenced by, plundered from. The issue of whether or not we dignify the plundering, and how we dignify the plundering once we’ve decided to dignify it, is de rigueur in *serious* Dylan studies, and Jacobi takes it on briefly and cogently in his conclusion, making fashionable references to performance studies. This is what we want from a quasi-academic survey of the influences and collaborations of a serious popular artist: a skeletal but accurate catalogue that the whole range of his work merits attention, a nod to the idea that Bob Dylan’s plundering matters more than someone less serious, and the nod ennobled by fluency in sophisticated critical theory.
Light surveys the performing career in the metier of a smart, knowledgeable music critic: there is a certain immediate, contingent value to a live music performance. Dylan and the Dead is “abysmal.” “Whatever one thinks of the content” of the gospel material,”there is no question that Dylan and his tight little band were making some glorious music.” Farm Aid was a “tough and rocking” performance. This is what we want from a smart music reviewer, thumbs ups and thumbs downs, respectful fluency in the vernacular of popular music, a comprehensive overview of an important career.
But if some of the members of the high culture board of admissions seem to be at a stage in Bob Dylan’s career where they want to admit him to the club–examine and locate him as a central culture-making figure–does the fact of his performing career get in the way? Do we just not have a language that suits the special synthesis of composition and performance that’s just intrinsic to what Dylan does? A language for the way different musicians may have created different aural environments that impacted the timbre and phrasing of Dylan’s voice, and even the lyrics he composes? What about his manipulation of his appearance, his distinctive consciousness of being 0n-camera as opposed to being on stage? What about the idea of a performer’s relationship with his audience? What about the evolution of Dylan the musician? In the context of this kind of criticism, is it enough to say that Real Live is mediocre and Dylan and the Dead is abysmal? Why not examine the role and influence of other musicians on these performances, the state of Dylan’s own musicianship in these tours, if indeed they are stations in a career that merits the attention given the most significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life?
I know I’m just shadowboxing here. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is not an adversary, in one way it’s just a bunch more voices about Bob Dylan and ion another way it is not. It’s a signal publication in the effort to yank this man into the inner circle of significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life. My boredom and frustration with so much of this signal publication comes from the fact that I’m not witnessing the messy birth pangs of a new kind of critical writing that does justice to the ways Bob Dylan plays with–tortures–categories: performance/composition, image/identity, authenticity, publicity. So much else to say…. Let’s try to make the language to say it, and let people in 2249 talk about significant contributors to cultural and intellectual……….
Bob Levinson’s skills as facilitator were tested this Tuesday, when the guests in our class turned out to be Mr. Alan Light, music critic and journalist, and Mr. Pat Guadagno, musical musician. Bob Levinson had to conduct the two-hour session between erudite overviews of Bob Dylan’s career, and ardent performances of Bob Dylan’s songs by Mr Guadagno as well as the class’s own Toby Fagenson, whose 12-string guitar first impressed everyone in the room as a show-and-tell object, and then was put to good use. And indeed Bob Levinson made the whole evening move smoothly, and made certain that both guests enjoyed adequate air-time to do justice to their particular Bob Dylan skill set.
Alan Light–whose essay providing an overview of Bob Dylan’s performing history can be found in the Cambridge Companion to BD–began the evening with a great rush of feeling in response to his participation in different memorial events following Michael Jackson’s death. He seemed sincerely impressed and unnerved by the emotional theatrics, their scope and intensity, that he’d witnessed this past week, and also sincerely impressed with the deftness of the hastily assembled public memorial show. Light could not help reviewing for us the inarguable significance of Jackson’s contributions to American music and culture. We are a decorous and warm bunch in room 280 at the 92nd St Y, and we listened with respect. I would have enjoyed seeing the We Are The World video on the large TV we have in the room, but there was no time for that and maybe it’s insufficiently respectful of me to have wanted to see the shots of Bob peering with great fascination at the music sheet in his hand while he sings his bit, as though this man has discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. 
After paying our respects, we more or less gently segued to Bob Dylan via comments regarding stardom and public reception. Light reminded us of the astonishing speed of Bob’s rising star in the early 60s. That things were happening literally “in a matter of months.” From the Gaslight to Carnegie Hall. From singing Barbara Allen to writing Hard Rain. The astonishingly intrinsic differences in the young man at the three consecutive Newports. It can be a strange kind of startling refreshment to be offered for contemplation facts one already is familiar with. 
Bob Levinson asked Alan Light for his impressions of Together Through Life. He “likes it a lot.” He addressed the criticisms of the album as unoriginal and not rich with the ambitious portent of some of the songs on Modern Times (which Light does not enjoy as much as TTL). Light argued that it’s a mistake to “fault him for setting a different target and hitting that target.” It’s not “visionary,” and “you can’t force that every time.” Hear, hear, I say. Light also calls TTL a “sound record” as opposed to a “words record.” MT is a words record. We all wanted to pursue this distinction: what else is a “sound” record? Predictably, Light identified the thin wild youknowwhat, and the Lanoisian works. I wonder myself about this distinction. One can hardly call Oh Mercy not a words record, but of course the sound remains in one’s mind as a singular flavor, a color. Maybe we can test the sound records with the synesthesia method, by asking whether they do create a color and flavor of their own. A quick run through in my own head tells me that Another Side and John Wesley Harding would be sound records in this way. The recently remastered New Morning would also qualify: the remaster unveils Bob’s strong piano playing throughout, which was not so audible on the previous CD, and which does create a luscious tone binding the songs together. 
Pat Guadagno gave us ardent and tuneful renditions of Visions of Johanna and Sweetheart Like You.
Pat gave us ardent and tuneful renditions of Romance in Durango and I Want You. I may not be getting the order right here, I apologize for that. He is a wonderful guitarist and accompanies himself with beautiful verve. 
Alan Light gave us a thoroughly depressing history lesson about the superannuation of print media. He was a founding editor of the magazines Vibe and Trax and it is his professional opinion that the print magazine and the journal as forms of media cannot survive against the immediacy of the Internet. He talked about finding ways to write both substantively and electronically. We all have our fingers crossed with you, Mr Light. 
Alan Light played for us a recording he brought of Rosanne Cash singing a perfectly lovely version of Girl From the North Country. Apparently Johnny Cash once gave his daughter a list of the 100 greatest country songs and now she is recording a number of them on an album called “The List.” This reminded me of her exciting rendition of License to Kill which I had the pleasure of seeing her do at the 2006 Lincoln Center tribute. All of which made me think about what a cover version of a song is. Sometimes it’s like a photograph of someone you love. Sometimes it’s like a captivating discussion of the song. Sometimes it’s a love letter to the song. Sometimes it’s an x-ray of the song. Barb Junger’s versions of Bob Dylan songs are love letters to the songs. Jim James’ version of Goin to Acapulco is like an x-ray of the song. I have a very short list of covers of Bob Dylan songs that satisfy any of these categories. Very short, like a micron long. If you haven’t heard The Roots’ Masters of War, that is in a category of its own. 
Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.
Temptation’s flame is very angry indeed. I yield to it, and I get to name it Satan, and the partner of my sin, she’s the very demon itself, but I know good from evil–and god I tell you, it hurt to lose her and it hurt to destroy her, but I did what I had to do. I swear, and I suffer–I still have a soul, don’t I? 
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name. That gun is still smoking, and they still won’t leave me alone. Miss X, one X or another, these sweet dispositions, these honey traps, they’re wily, I can’t outguess them. I fall like prey, I can’t be blamed.
That Miss X–oh god, what this new pony can do! And look at her! Make me chaste…but not yet.
The morals of despair. I’m lost, and I can’t know I’m Lost unless I can still suffer for not being Found. That new pony, she belongs to a trickster god, a god that throws your prayers in your face, a god of magic, a god of bodies without spirits. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference. …But not yet. 
I’ve been slowly picking my way through The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. I placed it near the bottom of my To Read pile after coming across this interview with Kevin Dettmar, editor of the volume, on SouthCoastToday.com, March 28, 2009:
I
Now, having your own Cambridge Companion should mean that you’ve passed the infinity trial, it shouldn’t be the trial itself. But the publishers’ desire not to assign the volume to a “die-hard fan” shows some anxiety about the subject at hand: maybe the jury is still out on Bob Dylan’s infinity trial, and we need to keep fans and all their uncritical excesses out of the courtroom. But Dettmar might not be exactly what CUP originally had in mind. He uses awkward incompatible tones in the introduction, which betray…something. His opening paragraph quotes Clinton Heylin on Dylan’s “oeuvre” being “the most important canon in rock music,” then Dettmar suggests “Dylan’s is the most important canon in all of twentieth century popular music.” But he goes on to write that Heylin’s statement implies that “Dylan has long since passed into the Academy, making a Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan a logical addition to this distinguished series.” It is unlikely that the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, or Kant, felt any urge to declare the logic of that volume’s addition to the series. 
Not a significant poet, but a first-order literary artist. I do have sympathy for Dettmar, he is sincerely trying to name Something that will justify a Cambridge Companion, but also do justice to the Specialness of the Something. 
To be continued. I am still sifting through the individual pieces in the book. 
Here are Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and the Hubble telescope. They let us see things we couldn’t see without the devices, and then we fret over what it is to make visible something that in the natural order of things would remain hidden. These things are exactly what Freud had in mind when he sighed over our poor species’ efforts to become “prosthetic gods,” and what Bob Dylan may have been sighing over when he claims we invented our doom. Of course, the man with the wooden leg really can get across the room on his own, that’s the thing about prosthetics. I think about what I was able to see with my own eyes on Wednesday night when Bob Dylan performed Forgetful Heart for a public audience for the first time.
I’m in seat 5 in the 7th row of the Marcus Amphitheater at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. Seats 5, 6, and 7 of the 6th row are occupied by three tall and high-spirited men who are enjoying each other’s company very much.They’re standing up, and I’m standing too, to try to see past them to the stage. To my right is a woman sitting down, head lowered, sending and reading text messages. Behind me are rows of chairs, behind them is a steeply sloping lawn filled with people. There’s a roof over us in the more expensive seats; if it rains, the people on the lawn will get wet. In the aisle to my right are burly men in red shirts, the security staff, who push into aisles and step over seats, grim and aggressive and intimidating, and make people like me stop standing on their chairs, and other people stop taking photos. Dozens of photos are available on the internet right this minute. 
And here I am in row 7 seat 5, ahead of me are 6 rows of people plus the security space plus the appr. 4 foot height of the stage, and maybe 8 feet back from the edge of the stage, Bob Dylan has stalked from his keyboard to the microphone stand in front of George Recile’s drums. He has nothing but his harmonica. Through everything around me that wants my attention, I can hear the guitar notes that begin Forgetful Heart.
Don’t these goddamned people know that the person in row 7, seat 5, is deeply and truly PRESENT AND LISTENING, and just about everyone else is not? Don’t these goddamned people know that right in front of them is the World Premiere of Something Magnificent? Myself, I sat on a plane on a runway at Newark Airport for 3 and 1/2 hours in a rainstorm waiting to take off and fly to Milwaukee JUST FOR THIS. Will you goddamned people shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down?
We decode set lists when he’s on tour, and use those lists to decide whether a show is same-old-same-old, whether he’s pulled out something of particular value to a hardcore fan. We puff our cigars and wonder if Stu will be gone, if Bob will play guitar. 
We know if it was a Good show, a Great show, or neither. Some of us yearn for Larry Campbell, some are tired of Cat’s in the Well. We yawn when the row in front of us is shouting “HOW DOES IT FEEL?” Other people are in the way, or sympatico, or irrelevant.
It’s not the set list. It’s not what I know, and the fact that I know more than most people in the venue with me, and it’s not how all this quantity of what I know imputes value to whatever Bob Dylan decides to do that night. You have got to be a transparent eyeball that takes in the man in front of you who talks all during Forgetful Heart. So next time you get the chance to see him perform, take in everything, and remember that this is what a concert is. 
And think about this too: it’s a common and fraternal activity, this decoding and tallying. But while all this tallying and decoding is going on, Bob Dylan is performing yet another set list consisting of yet more shifts in tone and texture, somewhere else he’s giving the crowd a pile-driving Highway 61 Revisited and then lulling them with This Dream of You. Somewhere else he’s being generous with his energy and his ability to communicate entirely different and potent emotional worlds as rapidly as some of us wish he’d toss off those hats we’re not so crazy about. How hard is it to see his touring schedule as an embarrassment of riches?
I also want to add what a great pleasure it was to see Stu back in front, and taking lead prominently and deliciously—he nearly made me love Honest With Me. 
