by Lee Marshall
This historical distance, this awareness and acceptance of Dylan as a performer, makes it easier for younger NET fans to escape recording consciousness. Dylan’s contemporary voice is key here. It is so distinctive, and so thoroughly tied to his modern star-image, that there is a radical rupture between the earlier and later versions of the song. The voice and the contemporary arrangement of songs like ‘Masters Of War’, or ‘Positively Fourth Street’, make them entirely different songs, with different meanings, from the old recorded versions. The distinction between the old and new versions is so stark that it is almost impossible for the performance to ‘stand for’ an experience of the sixties recordings for those who were not there. The performance can only represent the experience of now, of the Bob Dylan of the NET.
The main way that Dylan promotes the decline in recording consciousness of his new audience is through encouraging attendance at multiple shows. It is here that The Dead’s influence on Dylan is most marked, as they were famous for having a travelling army of fans (Deadheads) who would follow the band from town to town to see shows, sometimes for years on end. Dylan always had some fans who saw multiple shows when he performed in town, but it was certainly fewer than The Dead’s, and his audience had less of the ‘travelling around’ mentality. It seems clear that Dylan recognised the possibilities generated by this kind of relationship between the band and its audience and that the NET was an attempt to establish an audience that saw multiple shows and followed the tour from place to place.*
The NET encourages multiple attendance mainly through its variety, and a clear effect of Dylan’s work with The Dead was his willingness to engage with more obscure aspects of his back catalogue. At the first show of the NET, on 7 June 1988, Dylan opened the set with a performance of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. He had never played this on stage before. He followed it up with another live debut – ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. He also played ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, an old folk tune from his first album, and another traditional song ‘The Lakes of Pontchartrain’, that is not on any Bob Dylan album. Neither of these had appeared at any previous Bob Dylan concert. He also gave a live debut to ‘Driftin’ Too Far From Shore’, a song from his 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded, the first ever non-acoustic performance of ‘Gates Of Eden’ and performed ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ for the first time since 1965. On the second night of the tour, two days later, Dylan repeated only two songs from the previous performance – the opener and the closer (‘Maggie’s Farm’). He played ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ from his first album, the traditional song ‘Two Soldiers’, ‘Had a Dream About You Baby’ from 1988’s Down In The Groove and ‘The Man In Me’ for the first time since 1978. By the fourth show of the tour, Dylan had performed 40 different songs; by the fifteenth, 62.
This pattern of playing a wide range of songs on tour has continued throughout the NET. In 1990, the 93 shows yielded 134 different songs; the 112 shows of 2000 provided 126 unique songs, while the 113 shows in 2005 produced 110 different songs. This variety can be contrasted to Dylan’s earlier tours: on his comeback tour with The Band in 1974, Dylan played 40 shows. These produced 45 different songs. The 1978 world tour of 114 shows produced just 64 different songs.* Some songs, of course, do get played more than others. Dylan has not abandoned the songs that made him famous and this has resulted in criticism from some quarters that his shows are still dominated by his sixties material.15 A close examination of the NET, however, reveals some interesting issues. Firstly, there is less reliance on material from the halcyon days than may be expected (in 1997, for example, only 41 per cent of NET songs were written between 1961 and 1966, while the same period accounted for only 37 per cent of songs in 2002 – it has never risen above 50 per cent). Secondly, Dylan now plays a wider range of songs from that particular period than in the past. To say he plays ‘sixties songs’ actually provides little information about what those songs may be. If people go to a Dylan show hoping that he’ll play his sixties classics, I’m pretty sure they’re not expecting ‘Country Pie’ from 1969’s Nashville Skyline (104 performances in 2000). The songs Dylan plays are not necessarily his most famous. For example, in 1996 (86 shows), only 4 songs were played more than 40 times that year. One of these was a cover song (The Dead’s ‘Alabama Getaway’), one was an eighties song (‘Silvio’) and only two were what could be considered ‘classics’ (‘All Along The Watchtower’ and ‘Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35’). Sometimes songs do stay in the set for the long haul (‘All Along The Watchtower’ was played at 482 consecutive shows between 14 May 1992 and 3 August 1997; ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ was played at virtually every show in 1998, 1999 and 2000; currently ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ are perennial encores) but a notable feature of the NET is the way in which the expected hits are rationed.*
A quick, highly subjective, case study: in November 2005, I saw Dylan play 5 consecutive shows at the Brixton Academy in London. Over these 5 nights, I heard 50 different songs. Of these 50, 18 were what I would call ‘greatest hits’ material. Some greatest hits received multiple airings: ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ were played for every encore, while ‘Maggie’s Farm’ was the first vocal on 4 nights (the other songs played 4 times were the classic ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and 2 songs from 2001 – ‘Summer Days’ and ‘Honest With Me’). Of the remaining 32 songs, 13 were more obscure 1960s–1970s material and 16 songs were from 1980–2003. I heard the live debut of ‘Million Dollar Bash’ (from 1967’s The Basement Tapes) and ‘Waiting For You’ (a 2003 song released on a movie soundtrack). These were accompanied by 3 cover versions: Dylan opened 4 of these shows with a short instrumental cover of Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’, played a version of Fats Domino’s ‘Blue Monday’, and twice played The Clash’s ‘London Calling’.*
The variety in the setlists is one reason that people attend more than one show (if you only went to the first night at Brixton, you’d have missed ‘London Calling’!) but not the only reason. It is actually the entire structure of the NET that encourages multiple attendance. How does the NET work? I think it is best summarised as the creation of an ongoing environment which enables the performer to reach inspired moments in performance.16 The NET is about creating a particular structure in which Dylan can create. This is partly facilitated by a talented band who are comfortable with the way Dylan plays but it is mainly fulfilled by a relationship of trust between performer and audience. If a performer believes that they can trust their audience then they are more likely to take chances and produce something interesting. The audience therefore needs to understand, be versed in, the logic of the NET.
PERFORMANCE AND THE QUESTION OF TEXTS
Fans of the NET do not attend multiple shows because the performances are consistently magnificent. As Scobie says, ‘no one plays a hundred masterpieces a year’,17 but the aim of the NET is to create an environment in which special moments can occur, when certain songs, even just certain phrases ‘take off’ and produce something new which revitalises the song being performed. Individual moments: little phrases; Dylan picking up on a particular lyrical riff and pushing it to see how far it will go; a line in a song sung in a way that inverts the meaning of the song; an extended harmonica solo; these things happen at most Dylan concerts. More substantial moments: a particular run of two or three or four songs together that seem to meld into one spectacular moment and stop time; a show where Dylan just seems switched on from the word go and produces moment after moment in the same show; these things happen at some Bob Dylan concerts and, as you never know which one, you attend several to increase your chances.
I don’t think this logic is recognised by those outside of the NET cocoon. Other than obsessiveness, the general explanation for why fans attend multiple shows is that every night Dylan continually rewrites and restructures his songs. A colourful example of this idea comes from Adrian Deevoy who, in a reviewing Dylan’s 1993 Hammersmith residency in Q magazine, describes
; [p]eople coming to watch Dylan savagely revise some of their favourite songs. It’s a unique thing. You won’t hear anyone else doing it. . . . no-one sets about their back catalogue quite like Dylan. He gets inside the melodies, inverts them, corrupts them, deconstructs and reassembles them. They may have started life as clean-cut sober tunes but tonight they’re going home with someone else’s trousers on their heads and lipstick on their thighs.
This is not how the NET works, however. Dylan has explained that what actually makes the NET distinctive is the consistent structure of the songs:
If you’re going to ask me what’s the difference between now and when I used to play in the Seventies, Eighties and even back in the Sixties, [back then] the songs weren’t arranged. The arrangement is the architecture of the song. And that’s why our performances are so effective these days, because measure for measure we don’t stray from the actual structure of the song. And once the architecture is in place, a song can be done in an endless amount of ways. (Murray Englehart interview, 1999)
The idea that Dylan routinely transforms songs on stage is ‘a myth, probably perpetuated by newcomers who couldn’t guess what he was singing until the song was almost over’.18 The fact of their unrecognisability to outsiders, however, does imply the diminution of the NET audience’s recording consciousness. It is certainly true that old songs sound little like their recorded versions. The Never Ending Tour has clearly attempted to reposition Dylan as a performer, escaping the tyranny of recording, living for the moment, existing only in front of a live audience. One notable aspect of Dylan’s emphasis upon performing has been the emergence of a new form of Dylan criticism that emphasises the ‘performerliness’ of Dylan’s work, both expounding upon the NET and re-evaluating his earlier work. The most significant writer in this area is Paul Williams, who has produced three volumes discussing the performed nature of Dylan’s work, as well as a collection of earlier articles.19 Since he first wrote about Dylan in the sixties, Williams has always emphasised the per-formative element of Dylan’s work. For example, discussing ‘She’s Your Lover Now’, he writes: ‘Dylan is a passionate vocalizer of felt truth, tongue connected directly to the heart, mind following not leading. The rhythm and the performance structure come first, and the language fills in the spaces . . . His songs entertain our intellects but their source is visceral – mind follows feeling.’20 His approach coincides with the NET, however, because the first volume of his book series about Dylan’s work, Performing Artist, was published in 1990 and his method has provided a foundation for many fans’ own accounts of the experience of the NET. Williams too has written much on the NET. Describing a 1999 performance of ‘Visions Of Johanna’, he writes: ‘What makes this eight-minute performance so remarkable is its expressiveness, its artistry, its structure, its musicality, its freshness, its vision. . . . This is not a repeat of a work of art created back in 1966. It is unmistakably a great work of art created at the time of performance. Something new and original and thrilling.’21
This approach has been strongly criticised by Michael Gray, who has described Williams’ work as ‘air-headed apologism’.22 Gray, by contrast, concentrates on Dylan as a songwriter (actually, a lyricist) rather than a performer and therefore categorises Dylan’s later career as one of artistic decline: ‘in performance, the Bob Dylan of the 1990s may be continuing to revise or re-write the texts of the mid-1960s and 1970s; but wasn’t it the Bob Dylan of back then who did most of the work?’23 This type of approach indicates the difficulties of repositioning the meaning of a star-image in the way that Dylan has attempted. No matter what he does as an individual, remnants of his old image, how the public itself creates the meaning of ‘Bob Dylan’, remain. We can see similar processes occur during Dylan’s retreat from celebrity in the late sixties. In this instance, Dylan’s star-image as the supreme songwriter structures expectations and reception of any new work or change in direction. Thus any emphasis on performing is interpreted as an absence of songwriting (for example, Heylin states that Dylan ‘has increasingly sought to pursue this aspect of his artistry [performing] – the lesser talent – at the expense of his greater genius [songwriting]’).24 Dylan acknowledged this problem in 1997:
People identify me with the songs I write. They don’t identify me on what I can do with a song that’s already been written. I feel that that’s just an area that I’ve never really been able to expound upon because I don’t record that much. People expect me to record songs of mine that I’ve written. So that’s my particular dilemma. (London press conference, 1997)
The ‘new audience’ that Dylan has worked hard to create is one that acknowledges that Dylan wrote a lot of songs in the past and, while he writes sporadically in the present, is now mainly occupied with engaging live audiences. It is an audience that sees the value of performing in its own right rather than in terms of some absent other.
Dylan’s work in reconfiguring and re-performing many of his old songs links with developments in postmodern literary theory that question the notion of a finished text and subvert ideas of originality and authorship. Stephen Scobie’s work Alias Bob Dylan Revisited synthesises an emphasis upon Dylan as a performer with many of the insights of postmodern literary theory (Scobie is perhaps the only literary analyst of Dylan who pays more than lip service to the idea of performance). ‘Dylan’, Scobie argues, ‘never regards a song as unalterably finished’ and will instead reconfigure songs, drop or reorder verses, rewrite small phrases.25 Scobie concludes that ‘the text of a Dylan song is not any one of these [performances] exclusively but rather their sum’.26 Gray criticises the idea that Dylan is continually rewriting the text as ‘the main cliché of Dylanology in the 1980s and 1990s’. He suggests that ‘it seems rather too convenient for the Bob Dylan who has writer’s block, or has lost his way’.27
Gray’s critique of the idea of an open-ended text returns us to the earlier discussions about recording consciousness. Consider the following critique of a NET performance:
He always cuts out verses from long songs these days. There is no reason for this, beyond the sheer shrugging-off of the task of the full performance. There you are, say, at the concert in Montreal in May 1990; Dylan launches into ‘Desolation Row’, which is fresh – having been performed only five times in the previous two decades; and he misses out five verses. How can this not disappoint? Such shortchanging of the audience, such short-changing of his own work, is in essence another expression of self-contempt.28
Gray’s view that Dylan ‘misses out’ five verses depends upon a fixed idea of the work to which the performer is expected to adhere. Like the process/product idea discussed earlier, it has a longer history than merely Dylan. Written notation developed to ensure the perfect reproduction of sacred rituals and, in some cultures, incorrect reproduction could prove fatal for the performer; Eisenberg recounts a description of one indigenous culture where ‘old men used to stand by with bows and arrows and shoot at every dancer who made a mistake’.29 A similar sanctification of the text has occurred within modern culture. Lawrence Levine offers a fascinating analysis of how Shakespeare’s work became sanctified in America, explaining how Shakespeare’s plays were initially performed with little regard to the ‘original text’ – unpopular sections were dropped, new jokes added, individual scenes performed as part of wider burlesques.30 Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the idea emerged that plays should be performed exactly as Shakespeare had written them. Indeed, in 1879, a member of the audience fired two shots at actor William Booth for ‘taking liberties with the text’.31 Luckily, Michael Gray lives in a time which frowns upon such extreme expressions of displeasure.
An emphasis upon the sanctity of a text is founded upon a set of values that prioritises written culture over oral culture. The invention of recording, however, added a new means of preserving an original text. Whereas in the past, fidelity to an idealised script or written score was deemed sacrosanct, in popular music it is the recording that is considered
the ideal work. In Gray’s approach, any performance is only interpreted within the context of what he refers to as the ‘original Dylan recording’. Whether in written or recorded instance, however, the assumption is that the original text is worthy of respect. In referring to a short-changing of the work itself, Gray accuses Dylan of treating his own work disrespectfully. I don’t think this is true; it seems to me that Dylan is incredibly respectful of his (and others’) songs. As with Dylan’s comments about museums and paintings in the previous chapter, however, that respect is manifested by not treating them as too precious to touch (Gray’s criticisms echo earlier ones from the folk community who considered Dylan too irreverent with traditional material). The shift away from ‘respecting’ the text is another element of postmodern theorising, and I will return to it below.
Despite Gray’s critique, Scobie’s approach and Williams’ more impressionistic discussions resonate with the effects of the NET and with the experience of many of the NET’s followers. When Gray rhetorically asks ‘how can this not disappoint?’ he fundamentally misunderstands the ethos of the NET and, I think, misjudges the experiences of Dylan’s new audience. The chief effect of attending multiple shows is a reconfiguration of how one hears a text, facilitating what I might as well call a ‘NET consciousness’ in place of a recording consciousness. Hearing multiple shows, and thus many performances of the same song results in a saturation of listening that intensifies the experience of listening, expanding our experience of the present moment to the point where it takes over the awareness of alternative moments. In the moment of performance, in the act of listening, NET consciousness undermines any awareness of alternative versions of the text. If ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ has two verses tonight, or three, then that’s what ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is tonight – you hear the performance in front of you and not absent others. This is especially true with attendance at multiple shows – attending five consecutive nights relieves the pressure that this one has to be ‘the night’ and therefore opens up one’s ears to the intensity of the now. This is something called ‘moment time’ that I will discuss in the next chapter and one of its effects is that it de-prioritises the ‘original’ recorded version.* When I hear the officially released version of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, say, or ‘Señor’, I hear them as a fresh performance, contextualised within the experience of hearing many other performances. I do not hear them as the performance, even though in many cases they were the performances I first heard. I know the words and the sound of all of Bob Dylan’s released records. They are embedded in my consciousness perhaps more deeply than anything else. When I am at a show, however, I am engaged with the performance in front of me, at that moment, to the point where I couldn’t actually tell you what verses he ‘misses out’. Other fans have told me the same thing. Again, this fits with a general postmodern aesthetic; what we need to concentrate on is the immediate, visceral, sensual experience of the cultural work rather than any intellectual rationalisation of its meaning or content. How does experiencing the performance affect you? Right from the start of his career, Dylan has made repeated comments that the most important thing is the affective element of music. In 1965, he said that ‘the point is not understanding what I write but feeling it’ (Frances Taylor interview), while in 1997 he stated:
