Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  “A certain kind of drama,” and “the feeling of a Shakespearean drama.” As before, Dylan goes back to Shakespeare, giving a foretaste of the Nobel acceptance speech he would deliver at the end of the following year, with which this book will close: “like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters.”

  “I WAS THINKING IN TRIADS”

  In 2010, Clinton Heylin introduced his chapter on the songs that would come out on Modern Times with a perceptive observation:

  In days of yore, Dylan had been something of a master when it came to producing trilogies of albums that served as the building blocks for a greater whole—witness the three acoustic albums he recorded between 1962 and 1964, the great electric trio of 1965–66, that (anti-)romantic trio he completed between November 1973 and July 1975, and the so-called religious trilogy released in the years 1979–81. The album he recorded in February 2006 proved to be the last volume of a trilogy of albums all hewn from the same pre-rock era of influences.

  When Tempest came out in 2012, the trilogy seemed more easily to consist of that album and its two predecessors, Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006), with Time Out of Mind (1997) serving as the transitional comeback album. And Dylan continued with trilogies. In 2016, Dylan was working on the three-disc, thirty-song Triplicate, each of its sides more or less thirty-two minutes long. The songs could have fit on a double album, even though Dylan claimed for the thirty-two minutes “that’s about the limit to the number of minutes on a long-playing record where the sounds most powerful.” The real reason may have been somewhat different, more to do with formal expectations, with associations and connections to other triads in the old traditions in which he works. Flanagan also asked whether the title Triplicate brings to mind Frank Sinatra’s trilogy of 1980, Past Present Future. “Yeah, in some ways, the idea of it,” Dylan replied, adding, “I was thinking in triads anyway, like Aeschylus, The Oresteia, the three linked Greek plays. I envisioned something like that.” I myself had wondered about a connection to Dante, whose trilogy, The Divine Comedy, has similar triadic perfection: Inferno 34 cantos long—Canto 1 is introductory, Purgatory and Paradise 33 cantos each, for a total of 100. That is also the tally of the satellite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour triad, with 100 episodes also across a triad of years from May 3, 2006, to April 15, 2009. But Dylan’s mind indeed seems to have been more on drama, perhaps, as he says, on Aeschylus, but also on Shakespeare.

  Why was Dylan thinking in triads in late 2016? I suggest it was because he was shaping his concerts of this period as dramatic trilogies, as he has more or less said, with the songs of the cover albums participating in the drama and movement of very specifically selected songs from his own arsenal. Starting in the fall of 2016, he limited his repertoire to the three great, or classic, periods of his musical career, all the songs, starting in Phoenix on October 16, right after the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, coming from (a) 1963–66, (b) 1975, Blood on the Tracks, or (c) the post-1997 period, when the gift was given back with Time Out of Mind. These shows themselves also have a triadic essence, roughly three sections of six or seven songs. For the first section in every concert of the fall tour, the second and third songs were “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from 1963 and “Highway 61 Revisited” from 1965. This section has also featured a further triad in positions 5, 6, and 7: two songs from the recent “cover” albums, “Full Moon and Empty Arms” and “Melancholy Mood,” in all twenty-six fall 2016 concerts framing and contrasting with the ominous, driving “Pay in Blood.” That pattern continued in 2017, with new American standards stepping up to surround “Pay in Blood.” “Desolation Row,” also from 1965, was positioned later, the fifteenth song. At Clearwater, it featured Dylan sitting at the piano and turning to the audience as his facial expression seemed to act out the various masked characters in the song, itself a drama in its own right, whose faces, as the last verse puts it, Dylan had to rearrange as he gives “them all another name.” The middle section of the triad was anchored by two songs from Blood on the Tracks, the middle classic period “Tangled Up in Blue” in tenth place and “Simple Twist of Fate” in the twelfth. “High Water Rising (For Charley Patton)” from 2001 and “Early Roman Kings” keep up the tempo and drive of this middle section, in which none of the American standards disrupted the focus on the run of six original Dylan songs, all with rich and complex poetic stories and visual imagery. In contrast, the third and final section as the evening draws to a close is characterized by a more melancholic mood, starting with the world-weary songs “Soon After Midnight” and “Long and Wasted Years,” from the 2012 album Tempest, pinnacle of the long third classic period. Those two songs were joined by three from the American songbook, “I Could Have Told You,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “Autumn Leaves,” totally at home and a fitting close to the main concert, with Dylan’s voice clear and beautiful: “But I miss you most of all / My darling / When autumn leaves / Start to fall.” This has nothing to do with Frank Sinatra, everything to do with the drama of the concert.

  The performance at Clearwater was representative of all the fall shows, and the pattern continued in the spring and summer tours of 2017, though with “Tangled Up in Blue” the only representative of the seventies, as in some of the concerts from the previous fall. Here is the pattern, this specifically from Clearwater:

  1. “Things Have Changed” (The Essential Bob Dylan, 2000)

  2. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

  3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

  4. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ ” (Together Through Life, 2009)

  5. “Full Moon and Empty Arms” (Shadows in the Night,2015)

  6. “Pay in Blood” (Tempest, 2012)

  7. “Melancholy Mood” (Fallen Angels, 2016)

  8. “Duquesne Whistle” (Tempest, 2012)

  9. “Love Sick” (Time Out of Mind, 1997)

  10. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)

  11. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” (“Love and Theft,” 2001)

  12. “Simple Twist of Fate” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)

  13. “Early Roman Kings” (Tempest, 2012)

  14. “I Could Have Told You” (Triplicate, Disc 1: ’Til The Sun Goes Down, 2017)

  15. “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

  16. “Soon After Midnight” (Tempest, 2012)

  17. “All or Nothing at All” (Fallen Angels, 2016)

  18. “Long and Wasted Years” (Tempest, 2012)

  19. “Autumn Leaves” (Shadows in the Night, 2015)

  ENCORE

  20. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1962)

  21. “Stay With Me” (Shadows in the Night, 2015)

  The setlist for the shows in the fall of 2016 were highly distinctive, on paper, and as experienced in concert. What I heard in Clearwater on November 19 was completely new, completely different from what I had heard in the summer. Through ordering and repetition, what Dylan and his band were playing night after night were songs that added up to something that went beyond the sum of the parts, that had a certain narrative quality, told a connected story. That sum of the parts has a life of its own, in a sense is a life of Dylan, but also a life that his songs have constructed in the minds of those who have followed him and lived through his songs. He has, with the help of these songs and the support they lend to his own songbook, created a dramatic story of great beauty and power.

  Then in June 2017 a funny thing happened, or rather two funny things. Dylan started the summer tour on June 13 with a three-night stand at the beautiful, renovated Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. After a diversion to the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware, the regular performances resumed in Wallingford, Connecticut, and points north in New England, New York, and Canada. With the—as always—kind help of the Bob Dy
lan office, to which I had sent a manuscript of this book on June 6, I had secured tickets for the second night in Port Chester on June 14, and in Providence, Rhode Island, a week later. I was looking forward to versions of the triadic setlist, but for my two shows and the three shows in between—but none before or after for the last year—the triad evaporated. “Tangled Up in Blue” was nowhere to be heard, taking with it any trace of the seventies, leaving only the first and last elements of the triad. “Tangled” came back at the next concert in Kingston, New York, and stayed for the remainder of the tour through the month of July, so restoring the triad.

  As if by way of compensation, something else happened, starting with that same second Port Chester show. After the perennial opener “Things Have Changed,” much to the delight of the crowd Dylan strapped on his guitar for a beautiful version of “To Ramona,” one of the two mid-sixties songs that had anchored what was supposed in my mind to be first triad. “He didn’t do that last night,” said the man sitting next to me, who had earlier informed me “I’m Bob’s lawyer.” “That’s right,” I replied, “he’s only picked it up once since October 13, the night of the Nobel announcement.” That was pretty much when the triple structure of the concerts began, Dylan that night playing guitar for one song, “Simple Twist of Fate.” I felt lucky to have experienced the sight and sound of the occasion eight months later in Port Chester. What I didn’t know at the time was that we were witnessing a new performance triad, as Dylan again took up the guitar at the next two regular shows, for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and then again for “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” so bringing back one of the many great songs on which the curtain had closed in those two nights in Rome in 2013. I don’t know what all of this means. As Dylan would say, “you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.”

  CURTAIN OPENING AND CLOSING

  The Clearwater show began with “Things Have Changed,” invariably the opener of the last four years, since April 5, 2013, in Buffalo, the first show of that year, the year in which performance setlists were radically restricted, with only twenty-six songs appearing five times or more in that year’s eighty-five concerts, half the total number of songs played the previous year. The Oscar the song won for best original song in the movie Wonder Boys—or perhaps a facsimile of it—tours with Dylan and sits on top of the amplifier by his piano. Director Curtis Hanson said of the sound track, “Every song reflects the movie’s themes of searching for past promise, future success and a sense of purpose.” Much of the lyric quality of “Things Have Changed” is quite surreal: doing the jitterbug rag and dressing in drag; falling in love with the first woman he meets, putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street; having Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy jumping in the lake. But much is quite clear and seems to capture what is happening in his music, including that surreal songwriting:

  Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too

  Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.

  And then the close of the refrain, “I used to care, but things have changed,” a phrase like so many in Dylan that stays relevant whatever the particular change his art is putting in play. In that sense the song is like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which came back as a closing song in the 2017 concerts, its refrain a challenge, once upon a time to folkies, now to new critics of the things that have changed, particularly the integration of songs from the American Songbook: “Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?”

  “Stay With Me” closed the Clearwater concert. I had heard that in Boston and was half-hoping for the wistful and beautiful “Why Try to Change Me Now?” my favorite from Shadows in the Night, the title recalling that of the opener. That song was written by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy in 1952, and was covered by Sinatra in 1959 and Fiona Apple in 2009. This circle game defines, gives a frame to what comes in between. Things have always changed for Dylan, from the “Times” of his 1963 album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, through what has happened at various phases of his life.

  The things that have changed with his recent song list include creating a life in song, its dramatic qualities marking it as a self-contained performance, with a beginning, middle, and end, darkness onstage between the songs—or scenes—and no words other than the songs—just like a play. In the 2015 AARP interview, Dylan had Shakespeare on his mind, and at one point aligned plays and songs in ways that look ahead to the process he was working on with his concerts. Asked if he wished he had written some of the standards that were to become part of the drama of his concerts, he went off topic:

  I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It’s like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else somebody has a great version.

  Perhaps not so off-topic. Songs, concerts, and plays finally come together.

  DYLAN AND HIS FANS

  I’ve got nothin’ but affection for those who’ve sailed with me

  —Bob Dylan, “Mississippi”

  Bob Dylan may not say anything to his audience, but he is curious about who’s out there; he’s taking it all in. “What are you seeing from the stage?” Robert Love asked him:

  Definitely not a sea of conformity. People I cannot categorize easily. I see a guy dressed up in a suit and tie next to a guy in blue jeans. I see another guy in a sport coat next to another guy wearing a T-shirt. I see a woman sometimes in evening gowns, and I see punk-looking girls. I can see there’s a difference in character, and it has nothing to do with age. I went to an Elton John show; there must have been at least three generations of people there. But they were all the same. Even the little kids. They looked just like their grandparents. It was strange.

  There is something about being in a Dylan audience. The Clearwater crowd was on the older side, given the location, though there was a good mix of ages and there I even talked to a family with all three generations present, and it was true, they didn’t look the same! The Boston crowd was pretty varied, quite a bit younger on average, baby boomers to millennials, and kids coming along for the ride.

  The variety in Dylan’s audience has more to do with the complexities of his long career, perhaps also his fame, though fewer seem go to a Bob Dylan concert to say they are going to a Bob Dylan concert. Until recently that could be a cause of serious distraction, with people reading their devices and texting, or talking during the songs. It was good to find a no-phones rule in Clearwater, also no coming back into the hall during a song. Again, that’s what happens when you go to Shakespeare or the opera, another sign of what’s going on with Dylan’s concerts.

  Particular phases and changes have brought in new followers, just as they have driven out others—and not just in the 1960s and ’70s. It is true that if you liked country music, Nashville Skyline created a new appeal and attracted a different crowd from what went before, but Dylan wasn’t touring in the years after that album came out, and I don’t think people were really listening to that record as having much to do with country. The Christian period attracted some for the message, but that particular group would have been drifting away by Shot of Love, long gone by the time Infidels in 1983 seemed to renounce the solely Christian songs of 1979, explicit, unambiguous songs like “When He Returns,” which Dylan abruptly stopped playing in November 1981. I have a friend who became a fan through the accident of playing Under the Red Sky to her small children when it came out in 1990. Why not? “Wiggle Wiggle,” “Handy, Dandy,” even “Under the Red Sky” work as well as anything for that purpose. Over my forty years of teaching I’ve encountered students who came on board at various stages, for the new music they discover on their own or the old music of their parents—or grandparents who have long since stopped going to concerts but are still playing and listening to some songs.

  The Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on the Boston waterfront is a pretty upscale place for a concert, a far cry from the minor-league baseball parks of a
few years ago. As I do some of the time, I went on my own, and spoke to various people before the show. I ended up sitting next to a movie director from Los Angeles, who later sent me a bootleg version of “Highlands.” In Clearwater there was a young woman singing and playing acoustic guitar in the outside bar area of Ruth Eckerd Hall. There I struck up a conversation with a couple named John and Sue, who had retired down there. “I’m one of the lucky ones who could,” said John, who was originally from Danbury, Connecticut. Dylan had been there a year or two before. “How do you like the old standards?” I asked. Sue’s response pretty much got it: “I don’t mind what he sings. I’ll listen to it whatever it is.” In the show itself I was next to a young man from Croatia. It was his first show, but he knew the songs pretty well and was clearly enjoying it. He was with a German friend, who was more seasoned and had come over for Dylan and Neil Young at the Desert Trip the month before. If you follow the reviews on expectingrain.com, you see a lot of people planning vacations around Dylan. A year or two ago I met an Australian woman who was going to a number of shows while seeing something of the country, not a bad idea for a vacation. A number, like John and Sue in Clearwater, are locals. They just go when Dylan is in town, or close enough. I’ll generally get to two or three a year myself.

  Then there are some who just stay with the tour, all the way, day after day, show after show. I’ve met a few and have to say some of them remind me of the chess players I’ve seen in Harvard Square, playing chess all day long, decade after decade. You wonder how Dylan feels about those ones. For such a fan Dylan has become the Siren of the Odyssey: “no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father’s face.” And yet, there’s a bit of that in many of us. We all flirt with it, just as Odysseus did. Ask my wife and children. And it goes in both directions. Dylan seems to need his fans as much as they need him—as he said, “it’s the only place where I’m happy.”