A while ago, I came across some photos I’d never seen before, of the Slow Train sessions. Dylan and the other musicians relaxing in the studio. Lots of smiles, easy postures, those awful synthetic knits men wore in the late 70s. The images of Dylan are absolutely shocking. He’s dressed neatly in jeans and a dark shirt, a large and unsubtle silver cross round his neck. Next to Fred Tackett or Jim Keltner or Tim Drummond, all thin and bearded, Dylan looks like the younger brother happy to be allowed to join in. Now, there is no reason why a man whose veins run with evangelical fire can’t be well-groomed and sociable. That’s not why the photos are shocking. But it is impossible to believe that from this affable, elfin man come the sounds of despair, isolation, fervor, prophetic arrogance, seduction, and wit, which are the voices of the album.
The disconnect between a voice and its person is not news, although in Dylan’s case we’re reminded so often of this disconnect that we can take it if for granted. At the moment, we talk about his sounding clear or strong in a particular show, and we can also talk about this small and deceptively frail man putting words into the air that feel like boulders he’s summoning from beneath his feet. But back to 1979, and the Special Case of Dylan’s voice.
One of my very favorite pieces of Bob Dylan flotsam that have washed up into my possession is a tiny book I can hold in the palm of my hand. It’s published by Hanuman Books, whose mission statement is summed up nicely on the website Printed Matter, Inc.: “The highly saturated colors and gold printing of the books’ covers and their pocket-size format is inspired by Indian prayer books and by the tradition of Asian miniatures.” My book has a garish pink cover with the title in gold lettering, and a most incongruous color photo of Bob Dylan. Incongruous because the photo is one of Daniel Kramer’s portraits from early 64, the striped boatneck shirt, the pretty face–the Young Artist–and the book is called Bob Dylan. Saved: The Gospel Speeches. The book collects Dylan’s spoken addresses from the Gospel Tours, beginning in November 1978 and ending in May 1980, 62 pieces of text in all.
The photo is incongruous not just because the chronology is wrong, but because the speaker of these speeches cannot be thought of as “younger than that now.” The speaker of these speeches is frighteningly not-young, indeed, frighteningly not-of-numbered-years. He himself seems to know this, as in a speech in Buffalo on 4/30/80, he warns the audience of Satan and says “I didn’t know a lot of these things 40 years ago either,” and I do believe he’s not being careless with the arithmetic of his own life. He knows he’s 38 when he says this, but he feels a memory that exceeds his biography.
I like to read this little book, I find myself engrossed in it often, and I am grateful to Clinton Heylin who is credited with compiling it for recognizing that having all these speeches together in one package is not just historically significant, but a remarkable reading experience. Although I am not a Christian, I want to know why I find the songs of the gospel tours persuasive, intimate, seductive, and beautiful, and the speeches between the songs bewitching, distancing—they are somehow false and disheartening and hypnotic, when the songs are close and entrancing and stirring. The different effects matter very much to me, because the content is not different. In both speeches and songs of this period, Dylan is consistent: I have been changed in the way people are changed when they come to know the message of Jesus’s life and death, and come to accept the realities of Satan, End Times and Judgement Day, being born again. The divide between redemption and lostness may be crossed by one narrow bridge. Where he is and where I am is exactly the same in Precious Angel and Solid Rock as it is in every word he speaks to the audience from the stage. But the voices are different.
The voice of the speeches runs like a soft river. I’d say he murmurs but murmuring doesn’t capture the clarity and the mild rise and fall of these sentences about the desperate time and the Devil’s plan and Satan getting ready to wield his masterpiece (a favorite line of mine). The voice he finds for this work is not the speaking voice he uses to introduce the band members to the audience. The keys of the world were given to someone called Lucifer. If you have heard recordings of these concerts, then you can *hear* the peculiar confiding and familiar tone. He speaks quickly and comfortably, and to denigrate this work as rambling fire and brimstone nonsense is a miscalculation. A long speech he gave at the Warfield on 11/26/79 is at least a demonstration of the quickness of Dylan’s thought and his skill at composing thought into cadenced language. He talks about himself, even referring to The Times They Are A-Changin’, which could have been seriously unnerving to people in the audience who had every reason to assume they would never hear Bob Dylan sing that song again. He relates an anecdote from the gospels in which he has to recite snatches of dialogue, he offers a simplistic and alarming description of God’s vengefulness, he deals with a heckler–or perhaps a sympathizer?– who plays into his hands by shouting ”everybody must get stoned.” He doesn’t hesitate or stumble over words, he pairs long and short sentences with an orator’s deftness. His theology is suffocating, exclusive, and visionary, as it is in the songs. All uttered smooth as a rhapsody.
The songs are not smooth as a rhapsody. Here the voice reaches, jumps,growls, risks all its breath on one “wilderness.” The voice opens and cracks and lets in the light of doubt and fear and desire. Just about any I Believe In You, When He Returns, or Saving Grace from 1979 is a mosaic of sounds, meek and hard like an oak, that wake up the listener from one syllable to the next–not the lulling susurration of the speeches. In the voice of the songs is the broken and the holy (I know there are Leonard fans out there…) where any human can share the human sounds of losing and finding oneself, awe, submission, anguished crisis. In the songs, then, perhaps, is the voice of tzimtzum. There are no cracks, no places for light to get in, in the voice of the speeches.
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. 
In April 2005, I never heard of any Neverending Tour, it seemed a fairy tale miracle when I passed the Beacon Theater on Broadway and 74th Street and saw Bob Dylan’s name on the marquee, just 2 or 3 short weeks after reading Chronicles and finding my brain recalibrated. As I’ve said elsewhere, I had nothing but time and money on my hands, so when I quiveringly sat down at my computer and quiveringly ordered tickets from StubHub for the show on Friday, April 29, for a gaspingly great sum, all the quivering was from nervous anticipation and not the expense. But there were five concerts in this series at the Beacon in April. I have a cousin who is an entertainment lawyer and two emails later, I found myself in a room at the Riga Hotel, handing over a fax and my ID to a woman at a card table set up in the hotel room, and leaving with an 8th row ticket to the Thursday night, April 28th show. I still have no idea what happened. 
In those few weeks before the concerts, I bought Hwy 61, Bringing it All Back Home, Blood on the Tracks, and Blonde and Blonde, I read Robert Shelton and Clinton Heylin, I bought Dont Look Back. I managed to fit in listening to 2 or 3 albums, often 2x each, reading 40 or 50 pages, and watching DLB once or twice every day. Although now I would lead a newbie directly to Tell Tale Signs, and Oh Mercy, and John Wesley Harding, and Paul Williams, I had no human mentors, and I went the canonical route. Holding that ticket in my hand, in my urgent naivete, the thought of seeing Bob Dylan live produced a state of freakish anticipation in me: WHAT WOULD HE LOOK LIKE. WHAT WOULD THIS BE LIKE. Since he is, well, no longer the creature from Dont Look Back. It is not easy not to be captivated by that creature, always in graceful bowlegged motion, his rudeness irresistible to me (as of course it was not to many people), his face withstanding the most invasive close-ups. 
And what if nobody goes? What if I am forced to feel sorry for this man so soon after discovering him? WHAT IF I AM TOO LATE?
On line for the restroom, I saw a woman who was not young, and who had shaved her head and tattooed it in different colors. People intimidated me, they weren’t the usual bland cheerful gaggle at a rock concert. Back to my seat for Merle Haggard. I found that I was sitting next to a couple and their children. They were all attractive and affluent looking. The couple seemed excited to see Bob Dylan, and they had an enormous pair of birdwatching binoculars which they generously offered to share with me when The Time Came. Now I was a little disappointed, I have to say: it felt now as though I was in store for something like the Radio City Christmas Show. Meanwhile, Merle Haggard was energetic and entertaining. When he was done, I made another trip to the restroom–good god! Look at all these people! The hallways were now mobbed, people loud and juiced up. Why are they all out here? There was now something edgy and sharp to the atmosphere of the Beacon.
I hear the voice say “Columbia recording artist” and I think, oh how awful! His record company makes him play this before his concerts! I feel angry and defensive.
And there he is, hunched over a small keyboard. It’s easy for me to find and feel my first impressions: Cold. Fierce. Present. He looks up briefly from the keyboard, and from where I am sitting, row 8, no binoculars, I can see his eyes, ice blue. I don’t feel welcome, or delighted, but I feel that a cold wind has blown all my anticipation away for good. 
I didn’t know these songs. And I could see the words and I could feel the work of singing them.I listened, and listened, and he sang, and he sang. There was such Thereness to his voice, which I described at the time as being dry and alive like the desert. There was an astounding moment when he walked to a stand and picked up a harmonica, and I saw the same bouncing shuffle, the same set of the shoulders, the same long fingers, that I’d memorized from Dont Look Back. It’s the same person, somehow. And then he did the song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. I’d heard of the song, but never heard a recording of it before this.
I got it right away: the young boy to whom the world is fragmented, surreal, inexplicably grotesque, inexplicably threatening, inexplicably inviting. His father, to whom the world is known and ordered, wants to hear his son’s adventures, I could hear the father envying and intimidated by the boy’s freedom. But no boy is singing this song, a man who should take the father’s role is singing the boy’s life. Fathers, sons, images obscurely gruesome–bleeding hammers, things dripping, why am I finding a ladder covered in water frightening? The dry, clear, insistent voice lays out every vision for me to see. Hamlet’s father. Hamlet’s father’s ghost, that’s what this is. “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.”
What I felt was a fear unleavened by awe. This was no operatic sweep of feeling, something I had developed a taste for before I started listening to Bob Dylan. I had been a Wagner aficionado, and I’d learned the sensuous thrill of dark passions evoked in torrents of voice and music, but this was different. I was not intoxicated, I was frightened. When the singer told me he’d been to a place where “black is the color and none is the number,” I knew for certain that he’d been there, he’d been to a void and he was demanding I see it for myself. This was not pleasant. It was not even the vertigo of the sublime, which I’d studied and had some understanding of. It was just a man insisting I share his nightmare. 
I’m going back out, he sang. There seemed a low surge from the people around me in the theater. “I’ll reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it” and right there for me it was all saved, he was going to put himself on that mountain so we wouldn’t have to live his nightmare any longer, and as soon as this absurd, romantic wave of relief rolled through me, the theater erupted–people, men, shouting and calling–they heard and felt what I did? It wasn’t only me? I felt we were all rescued in some way together. You can, in fact, hear this for yourself on a recording of this concert. You can hear the insistence and clarity of Dylan’s voice, and you can hear the eruption of shared feeling in the last verse. 
But I am too late, aren’t I. I’m too late despite the fact that Bobby Dylan himself got the dates wrong, and claimed he wrote Hard Rain in the first flush of Cuban Missile Crisis anxiety, when he played the song to a sizable audience a month before the missiles were sighted (see Marqusee, page 60). I’m too late for the apocalyptic imagery of the song to do a more authentic kind of moral and emotional work: to articulate fears of nuclear destruction or social disintegration, to articulate collective fears that the agents of destruction and disintegration are politicians separated by chasms of conscience and awareness from the people really *hearing* this song. I knew real fear and I knew real community through the performance of the song, but weren’t these feelings Romantic, based on fantasies of timeless Art and transcendent experience? Apres my fear and my collectivity, I would go out into a nice spring night on the Upper West Side, and make my way home bearing the intensity of my experience as a lantern inside me, illuminating new truths about how emotion can be transmitted, what makes a voice beautiful, what makes age potent, what makes language meaningful. The man in rags panhandling in Verdi Square– his plight was no more distressing to me than it ever was. The woman working the 72nd St token booth at midnight–I did not stop to think more deeply about the persistent racial division of labor in my world. Mike Marqusee writes with great eloquence and energy about the hunger Bob Dylan both aroused and satisfied for young people in the early 1960s who were awakening into political awareness, creative experiments, new ways of feeling, and a runaway urgency to right wrongs. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was of this vitality. Wasn’t my experience selfish, inert, inauthentic, compared to what I would have experienced at the song’s original moment?
Bob Dylan’s career is providing an unprecedented opportunity in the history of art: at every stage of this artist’s career, you will find the same man, singing and re-singing the same songs, writing and rewriting songs, and you will find other people engaging with this one man and his doings, and claiming inspiration and transformation through this engagement, dismissing or reviving his *relevance*, discovering or discarding personal connections with his doings. There is no equivalent anywhere to this documentation of the career, and the response to the career, of any other major artist. This is my pedantic and long-winded way of saying that I’m not going to answer my question above, about whether my experience of Hard Rain in 2005 was less than someone’s experience of it in 1963. But the question itself is part of my experience of the song. And in the year 2505, when someone else encounters this song, and sees and feels something new and strong as a result, they will have a vocabulary for their experience that I can’t possibly foresee.
