Bob Dylan
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It is also a key element of rock ideology. In chapter 4, I discussed the emergence of rock culture as a form of mass culture critique that emerged from within mass culture. One element of this critique was an emphasis upon live performance, which was partly inherited from the beliefs and assumptions of the folk revival.* Whereas music may once have been the art least amenable to commodification, the invention of recording fundamentally changed the situation. From the folk perspective, the record creates an unwelcome mediation between performer and listener (worse, a commercial mediation) which prohibits direct communication between them. As Eisenberg suggests, ‘when I buy a record, the musician is eclipsed by the disk. And I am eclipsed by my money.’11 The assumption is that only the performance by a singer within physical proximity of his listeners enables an ‘honest’ performance (there are additional potential layers to this; only performances that do not rely on electrical amplification enable communication; performances where the crowds are too large prohibit direct communication; shows that rely on special effects and video screens prevent a relationship between performer and audience; and so on). I say ‘honest’ because part of the assumption is that any mediation resulting from the media industries will entail some kind of deception, will enable the performer to pretend to be something she is not.
Within this way of thinking, it is the mechanical nature of the recorded experience that is denigrated and the human relationship of the live performance that is venerated. The very idea of ‘live music’ only emerges once recorded music becomes the dominant form of music: ‘live’ as a concept is predicated upon a recorded other.12 The valorisation of live music can be seen as part of folk culture’s mass culture critique. The recorded song never changes, is never affected by its social setting or by the mood of the listener. It sounds exactly the same every time it is played, a clear manifestation of the process of standardisation. The listener knows exactly what to expect every time it is played. The live performance, by contrast, is unique. Its uniqueness is guaranteed because it is played by a living being who, by humanity’s very nature, will always produce idiosyncrasies in performance. The uniqueness of a performance is aided by the relationship between performer and audience: in a performance unmediated by external factors (amplification, stardom . . . ), the audience’s response to the performance will generate its own dynamics to which the performer will intuitively respond. And the audience is assumed to be a collective, a group of people who share more than this physical space in common; their shared space, their shared relationship to this music, is taken to reflect a shared social experience, a shared outlook. The record, by contrast, like the novel, offers a mode of individualised reception.
For much of rock culture, therefore, authenticity was located in the live concert. It was in live performance that the relationship between singer and performer was most direct; where the audience could express their collective experience; where, stripped of the supports of the recording industry, the performer had to prove that they could really sing, really play, really move an audience; where the collective effervescence of the event generated a unique excitement that affected that night’s performance so that no two shows were ever exactly alike. Like rock culture itself, this ideology held sway at least until the 1980s. As rock culture declined during the eighties, however, so too did ‘live culture’. New artists, such as Depeche Mode, New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, made records based on digital technology specifically intended not to be performed live. New music cultures emerged – notably hip hop and rave – that depended upon records rather than live musicians to provide the soundtrack for an evening’s entertainment. There was a marked decrease in the number of traditional rock venues. The ideology of the rock gig ‘no longer appeal[ed] to the broad base of the population that it once did and [was] no longer economical in many of the circumstances it once was’.13 Those rock acts still touring in the eighties did so less frequently and increasingly had to rely on spectacular effects (lights, video screens, fireworks) to fill up one end of a large arena and match their audience’s expectations generated not just by a recording consciousness, but by an MTV consciousness as well – concerts not only had to sound like they did on record but look like they did on video.14
Dylan’s position by the end of the mid-eighties was, therefore, severely limited by the structure of his stardom and by the structure of the music industry more generally. Having his star-image dominated by his released albums caused problems as he was generally alienated from the record-making process. He considered himself a live performer at a time when live performance was diminishing in importance and/or descending into spectacle. While he had worked the stadium and arena circuits in 1984 and 1986, Dylan ultimately was not able to follow the same kind of path that other sixties acts like The Stones would follow. Aside from 1974 and 1978, he has never been a big enough draw to consistently fill large halls; and he has never been the kind of performer able to compete with the spectacular effects necessary to entertain in larger spaces. In 1986, Q magazine suggested that it was ‘undignified’ for Dylan to play a venue the size of Madison Square Garden as his style did not suit the larger-than-life MTV consciousness.
RESHAPING DYLAN’S AUDIENCE
The issues discussed so far in this and the last chapter caused a crisis in the relationship between Dylan and his audience. It seems that Dylan came to resent his audience, believing that they were coming to shows merely because he was a famous name rather than to engage with the nuances of live performance (what he would later refer to as the ‘right reasons’ for attending). This is something he had complained about even during the 1970s. In 1978, he commented bitterly on his 1974 tour:
when I went back on the road I was more famous than I was when I’d gotten off the road. I was incredibly more famous. And I had a lot of people who were coming who weren’t my true fans, I was just another famous name. These people didn’t understand what I had done to get there, they just thought I was a famous name and I’d written songs Jimi Hendrix was singing. (Craig McGregor interview)
In the same year, he told Ray Coleman that his audience ‘tend[ed] to come . . . not so much [for] the music, more the side-show’, and when interviewer Philippe Adler suggested that Dylan would have been ‘intoxicated’ by the audience adulation, Dylan retorted:
No [I wasn’t], because I didn’t think it was for me. It was an ovation for someone or something else.
Dylan thus became suspicious of his live audience, considering them to be attending his shows purely because he was a famous name or because he symbolised the sixties; for nostalgic reasons rather than to engage with the music. My argument is that the commencement of the NET can be regarded as a calculated attempt to break out of this particular trap. Whether or not Dylan had these things in mind as explicitly as I discuss them, it seems clear that the NET had two complementary, though distinct, purposes. Firstly, it was to create an audience that did not attend shows purely for nostalgic reasons. Secondly, it had to create an audience whose impression of his music was not dominated by his released records. Dylan conflates the two issues when commenting on the success of the NET in 1997:
I like those people who come to see me now. They’re not aware of my early days, but I’m glad of that. It lifts that burden of responsibility, of having to play everything exactly like it was on some certain record. (Jon Pareles interview)
The opening up of this new way to perform was prompted by Dylan’s collaboration with The Grateful Dead in 1987. Dylan and The Dead played six stadium shows as co-headliners during the summer. In rehearsing for them, Dylan seemingly reached his lowest point, being completely alienated from his own songs. Dylan credits Jerry Garcia as being the driving force behind reconnecting with them:
He’d say, ‘Come on, man, you know, this is the way it goes, let’s play it, it goes like this.’ And I’d say, ‘Man, he’s right, you know? How’s he gettin’ there and I can’t get there?’ And I had to go through lot of red tape in my mind to get back there. (David
Gates interview, 1997)
A comment such as this, and similar statements made in other interviews, emphasises the relationship between Dylan and his songs. The NET is often considered from a textual perspective – what repeated performances mean for notions of the text of a particular song, for example, or how Dylan radically alters songs in performance. What enabled any such reconnection was not some kind of mystical realignment with the aesthetic content of the songs, however, but a reconfiguration of the relationship between Dylan and his audience. In other words, what made the difference was a reorientation of Dylan’s stardom.
This reorientation is made possible because of the structure of the NET. Its key principle is rather simple – Dylan plays an awful lot of shows. Rather than engaging upon tours periodically, Dylan plays shows continually: touring for a couple of months, followed by a couple of months’ break, then back on the road for a couple of months, and so on. Dylan employs his band members and pays them a retainer so that he has first call on their services. This means that Dylan does not have the problems of starting a tour up every couple of years, finding a new band and rehearsing them. The band are available whenever Dylan wants to play shows.
The principle is simple (many artists have musicians on a retainer) but the effect is extraordinary. To gain a sense of the scale of the NET, we need to compare it to Dylan’s earlier career. His emergence within the folk revival and his embeddedness within rock authenticity means that Dylan has always been considered as a touring musician. You would therefore expect him to have played a lot of shows. Prior to the NET, his major tours and the number of concerts played in each of these years is listed below.
Tour year
1966 1974 1975 1976 1978 1979 1980 1981 1984 1986 1987
Concerts
41 40 31 24 114 26 72 54 27 60 36
This is a total of 525 shows in 22 years, an average of 34.5 shows a year once Dylan returned to the stage in 1974. The NET began in 1988 and, at the time of writing, its last completed year was 2006. The annual concert totals for these years, in chronological order, is: 71, 93, 99, 101, 92, 80, 104, 116, 86, 94, 110, 119, 112, 106, 107, 98, 111, 113 and 97. This totals a staggering 1,909 shows, an average of almost exactly 100 shows per year.* The number of shows played results in frequent and repeated appearances in the same place: rather than turning up in a town every five years or so, the NET rolls up pretty much every year. For example, before the NET, Dylan played in the UK at mostly three-year intervals (1966, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1987) whereas since the start of the NET, Dylan has performed in the UK in every year between 1989 and 2006 except three (1992, 1994 and 1999).
The structure of the NET has given rise to a new type of audience. Firstly, it has diminished the number of fans attending a Dylan show for nostalgic reasons, or because he is a ‘legend’ that represents an idealised moment:
A lot of the shows over the years was people coming out of curiosity and their curiosity wasn’t fulfilled. They weren’t transported back to the ’60s. Lightning didn’t strike. The shows didn’t make sense for them, and they didn’t make sense for me. That had to stop, and it took a long time to stop it. A lot of people were coming out to see The Legend, and I was trying to just get on stage and play music. (Robert Hilburn interview, 1992)
It is the sheer quantity of shows, and the frequency of Dylan’s appearance, that helps to lessen the ‘legend-hunter’ fans. They make a Dylan concert less of an event and therefore diminish the number of people coming to see Dylan merely as an icon or legend that represents the sixties or their imagined youth. To run a rather crude statistical illustration, playing a show in a town annually rather than every three years is likely to diminish the number of legend-hunters. This type of fan may be likely to still attend a show every few years but they will almost certainly not attend the show every time Dylan is in town: the novelty soon fades, the need to relive or recreate a particular moment is not sufficient motivation to annually buy rather expensive concert tickets. This is not to say that there are no ‘tourists’ attending NET shows. There clearly are some at each show, attending because ‘Dylan’ is a name that is important, but the proportion of them has declined as the NET has continued.* One upshot of this was that the NET’s audience was, in its early years at least, much smaller than Dylan’s previous audience. In contrast to the 10,000+ capacity arenas he played in 1986, the NET concentrated on smaller venues (2,000–5,000 capacity) as his audience contracted.
This audience is distinctive, however, for, in place of the legend-hunting type of fan, a new kind of audience has developed for the NET:
I’ve found a different audience. I’m not good at reading how old people are, but my audience seems to be livelier than they were 10 years ago. They react immediately to what I do, and they don’t come with a lot of preconceived ideas about who they would like me to be, or who they think I am. Whereas a few years ago they couldn’t react quickly. . . . I was still kind of bogged down with a certain crowd of people. . . . But that’s changed. We seem to be attracting a new audience. Not just those who know me as some kind of figurehead from another age or a symbol for a generational thing. I don’t really have to deal with that any more. (Murray Englehart interview, 1999)
Part of this new audience is old fans who have happily followed Dylan’s new direction on the NET. However, a significant portion of Dylan’s new audience is considerably younger. The number of 15–25-year-olds at current Dylan concerts is certainly notable. Part of this is clearly demographic – Dylan is now outliving some of his original fans – but it is also interesting how Dylan has been able to draw in a new generation of fans in a way that most older performers haven’t. In my experience, concerts by The Stones, or even later acts like Elvis Costello or U2 have far fewer young fans attending. Reasons for this are unclear but it seems at least in part the result of a deliberate strategy by Dylan: many of his shows on the NET are in college towns or university campuses, while playing at Woodstock 2 and on MTV ‘Unplugged’ in 1994 suggest calculated attempts to reach out to a new audience.
I need to make explicit here that I am not suggesting that all of Dylan’s old fans have deserted him to be replaced by a wholly youthful crowd. When I talk of Dylan’s ‘new’ audience, I am referring to those who engage with the logic of the NET. There are clearly many fans who followed Dylan in the past and continue to do so today – there are also new ‘older’ fans, who may not have been that interested in Dylan beforehand but have been drawn into the NET. I have no desire to create a simple binary divide between older and younger fans. At the same time, however, it is important to recognise that the relative youth of Dylan’s audience greatly affects how his audience interprets him. Younger members of Dylan’s audience (and by this I mean anyone under about thirty-five, though it becomes more acute the younger the fan) conceptualise Dylan differently from older fans who were aware of Dylan in the sixties and seventies. This is partly because of what Dylan has achieved on the NET, but it is also a simple historical fact that the sixties, and Bob Dylan’s role in them, mean very different things now than they did in the past. I teach students today for whom 1995 is musical history, let alone the 1960s. The 1960s is as real to them as the Second World War – they may know some people who lived through those times, but conceptualising what it was like to live through them is virtually impossible. This is different even to how people growing up in the 1980s were able to approach Dylan. In the 1980s, the sixties were still recent history, and children of the 1980s imbibed their parents’ still fresh experiences. For young people joining the NET in the last few years, the sixties was their grandparents’ generation. It is impossible that Dylan should mean the same thing to someone who grew up in the sixties as he would to someone for whom World Gone Wrong was before their time. I am not suggesting that all young fans are devoted to the logic of the NET, nor that there is no legend-hunting involved when young people see a Dylan show. Of course there is some. Of course some young people go to see Dylan because he is a sixties icon, and they o
wn Greatest Hits and At Budokan and want to connect with the past. But even for these people, it is impossible that Dylan could mean the same thing now as he did to his earlier audiences. This younger audience carries less canonical baggage with them when they see a Dylan show, they are ‘fans who see him less as a superstar or personal savior than as a gifted artist’ (Hilburn, 1992).
Carrying less canonical baggage means that it is easier for Dylan’s younger audience to accept Dylan as a performer rather than a songwriter. Anyone under the age of nineteen was not born when the NET began. Anyone under the age of about, say, thirty-five would not have had any significant awareness of music before the start of the NET. To these people, Dylan is a performer. His utterances and his actions tell you that he is a performer. They may know that Dylan wrote a lot of great songs in the past, and they may place great value on the fact that he wrote these songs but, in the world they have grown up in, Bob Dylan is a touring performer, a relentless troubadour. The man on stage is completely different to the mediatised image of the man who wrote the songs (there is more on this in the next chapter).