Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Loss and misfortune from long ago and from right now also recur. On “Lonesome Day Blues,” the singer sets his radio dial and drops his car (or truck) into overdrive, when out of nowhere he sings, “I wish my mother was still alive.” (Dylan’s mother, Beatty, died a few months before he recorded “Love and Theft.”) Sometimes, the past just seems too much, as in “Honest with Me”: “These memories I got, they could strangle a man.” And sometimes, it’s just sad and poignant—as if the singer is talking with one of the unhappy liaisons he sang about in the 1960s. “So many things we never will undo,” he sings in “Mississippi,” “I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too.” But as ever with Dylan, there are streaks of hope amid the darkest melancholy, and also something new, a sense of calm, absolution, fondness, even gratitude, now that he is well past the middle of the journey. (Again from “Mississippi”: “But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free / I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.”) And besides, although summer days are gone, the best may well be yet to come. “Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow / Things should start to get interesting right about now.”

  There is a mellowness of acceptance mingled with anticipation to these words and melodies that is reminiscent of the older Charles Aznavour as well as Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Just as there is a richness to the musical and literary references in “Love and Theft” that was only foreshadowed in “Tombstone Blues,” with its glimpses of Ma Rainey and Beethoven. And just as there is a wise gravity to Dylan’s silk-cut voice and to his diction, phrasing, and timing, not captured on previous studio albums. (He had been listening to Sinatra, and maybe Caruso, and Allen Ginsberg, and surely Bing Crosby, as well as to the old singers whose songs he recorded anew in 1992 and 1993.) He had mastered so much more, including his own performing style, or at least his recorded performing style. Listen to the breakneck opening lines of “Cry a While”—“didn’t havta’ wanna’ havta’ deal with”—then the sudden bluesy downshift; or the killer long line about repeating the past in “Summer Days”; the pause in Juliet’s reply to Romeo in “Floater (Too Much to Ask)”; the “High Water” judge’s creepy, “Either one, I don’t care,” the last word dropping and landing with a thud like one of the song’s lead-balloon coffins.

  And with his expert timing, better than ever, Dylan shuffles space and time like a man dealing stud poker. One moment it’s 1935, high atop some Manhattan hotel, then it’s 1966 in Paris or 2000 in West Lafayette, Indiana, or this coming November in Terre Haute, then it’s 1927, and we’re in Mississippi and the water’s deeper as it comes, then we’re thrown back into biblical time, entire epochs melting away, except that we’re rolling across the flats in a Cadillac, or maybe it’s a Ford Mustang, and that girl tosses off her underwear, high water everywhere. Then it’s September 11, 2001, eerily the date this album was released, and we’re inside a dive on lower Broadway, and, horribly beyond description, things are blasted and breaking up out there, nothing’s standing there, “it’s baaaaad out there / High water everywhere.” It’s always right now, too, on “Love and Theft.”

  Dylan, remember, had already been out there a very long time. He spent time with the Reverend Gary Davis, and Robert Johnson’s rival Son House, and Dock Boggs, and Clarence Ashley, and all those fellows; he played for Woody Guthrie, and played for and with Victoria Spivey; Buddy Holly looked right at him at the Duluth Armory less than three days before Holly plane-crashed to his death; there isn’t an inch of American song that he cannot call his own. He steals what he loves and loves what he steals.

  In August 2002—coming up on a year after the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks and release of “Love and Theft”—Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival for the first time since he played his famous electric set in 1965, and I drove up to hear him. Much of the talk I heard from other concertgoers had to do with the 1965 appearance and the controversy it caused—yet Dylan was not simply returning to a scene of artistic notoriety.

  Dylan first appeared at the folk festival in late July 1963. Peter, Paul, and Mary had hit it big with their recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but they deferred to the new prodigy of the folk revival. Dylan closed his evening concert finale by bringing to the stage Joan Baez, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers (including the later-to-be-famous Bernice Johnson), and Peter, Paul, and Mary, to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and then, joined by Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel, Dylan and his friends, in a hand-clasping formation, ended the entire festival with “We Shall Overcome.” The scene, as reproduced in countless photographs, is an icon of the protests of the early 1960s, when Bob Dylan’s music helped to fortify the civil-rights movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation.

  The finale of the Newport Folk Festival on July 28, 1963. (photo credit 9.5)

  Dylan was featured in 1963, though, not only as a singer and songwriter but also as the author of an epistolary prose poem that was printed in the festival’s program. “For Dave Glover,” composed in the dropped-consonant vernacular Dylan favored at the time, was a catching-up letter to a Minneapolis friend—part reminiscence, part apology (for what, Dylan never said), and part complaint about the false labels and dogmatic authenticity of the folk-song purists. The writer couldn’t sing “Barbara Allen” or “John Johanna” anymore, he declared; he must sing “Seven Curses” and “Don’t Think Twice,” befitting the “COMPLICATED CIRCLE” of his own time, so different from Woody Guthrie’s 1930s. But neither did Dylan renounce those older songs, because without them the new ones that he could sing would not exist. Music not busy being born is busy dying, and the writer had to wager on himself and sing for himself and for his friends and his day; yet neither would he disown the heritage that folk-song purists also wanted to preserve:

  An I got nothin but homage an holy thinkin for the ol songs and stories

  But now there’s me an you

  Two years later, back at Newport in 1965, Dylan would pay his notorious homage to the old song “Down on Penny’s Farm” by changing Penny’s name to Maggie, plugging it all in to a primitive sound system, and describing wholly new arcs of complication that nobody, not Pete Seeger, not Joan Baez, and maybe not even Dylan himself, fully understood. Portents, though, of that explosive emotional paradox of old and new—of the collision between holy thinking and Bob Dylan’s irrepressible eye—had turned up in Newport in 1963, in “For Dave Glover.” And the complicated circles returned to Newport, like a little whirlwind, when Dylan returned to Newport, almost forty years later.

  Some notes on Bob Dylan, the 2002 Newport Folk Festival, and the modern folk process:

  In advance of the 2002 festival, the New York Times (among others) wondered if Dylan would hit the stage the same way he did in 1965, playing electric, and maybe even playing “Maggie’s Farm.” Although Dylan did, of course, play rock and roll during his set, he did not play “Maggie’s Farm,” and sticking to his concert format, at the time, he opened with an acoustic number, “The Roving Gambler.” Not everybody in the audience recognized the song, but by playing it, Dylan made a point.

  In September 1963, shortly after “For Dave Glover” appeared at Newport, Glover, better known to blues fans as the harmonica wizard Tony “Little Sun” Glover, traveled to New York to make his second album of blues, rags, and hollers with his fellow Minneapolis musicians “Spider” John Koerner and Dave “Snaker” Ray. Among the songs they recorded was Koerner’s one-man, rap-prefaced version of “Duncan and Brady,” the old St. Louis song about a pair of gamblers, which had become a folk-revival standard, recorded earlier by Dave Van Ronk. Koerner would repeat his fractured version of the song (described aptly by Dave Ray as “hyper Zen”) at the same Newport Folk Festival where Dylan played “Maggie’s Farm.”6 Koerner, Ray, and Glover would continue to team up, in various combinations, over the next thirty-five years. In 1986, with Glover assisting on harp, Koerner released a solo album that included another gambler song, “The Roving Gambler,” descen
ded from an ancient English tune.

  “The Roving Gambler” had been a favorite in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown folk-song circles since the late 1950s. (An eighteen-year-old Bob Dylan sang a version into a tape recorder at his friend Karen Wallace’s apartment in May 1960.) It was first recorded commercially, as far as anyone knows, in 1930, by a popular cowboy singer, Carson Robison. Woody Guthrie’s sidekick Cisco Houston also sang it, as did the Stanley Brothers, as did, years later, Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, Frankie Laine, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the actor Robert Mitchum, and Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie, among dozens of others. Alan Lomax included a transcription of “The Roving Gambler” in his definitive 1960 collection, The Folk Songs of North America. And by then the song was enjoying another sort of revival in the American mass market. Tennessee Ernie Ford, of “Sixteen Tons” fame, hit the middle of the pop charts with his “Roving Gambler” in 1956. Two years later, the rock-and-rolling Everly Brothers included a slow, reflective version on an acoustic album of old standards called Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. And in early 1961, the commercially successful mainstream folk performers the Brothers Four, second in popularity only to the Kingston Trio, released a new album with yet another version of “The Roving Gambler,” this one arranged by the group’s bass player, Bob Flick.*

  The song appeared in many places and in many guises. In 1957, Andy Griffith starred in the Budd Schulberg–Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd, playing Lonesome Rhodes, a convicted hobo and country singer who, thanks to a shrewd handler and his own frightening manipulative genius, becomes a nationwide TV celebrity and reactionary demagogue—a forerunner of Rush Limbaugh and the fictional Bob Roberts in the movie of the same name. Bob Dylan saw A Face in the Crowd in the Village in 1962 and, reportedly, was more shaken by it than by any film he’d seen since Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One. At a crucial moment in the film, Griffith’s character realizes he’s going to make it to the big time in New York—and he starts singing an exuberant and menacing version of “The Roving Gambler.”

  On August 24, 1997, a friend took me to hear Bob Dylan—who had cheated death weeks earlier and was now on the verge of releasing Time Out of Mind—play a concert at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia. (I later also obtained an unusually crisp bootleg recording of the show.) The songs included “The Roving Gambler,” which Dylan and his new band had added to their set list a few months earlier. (They would eventually alternate it with “Duncan and Brady.”) Three songs later, after “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan introduced his band and acknowledged the presence in the audience of one of the men “who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music,” Alan Lomax. (At Newport, in 1965, Lomax along with Pete Seeger led the old guard that objected to the blasts of white-boy electricity, including Dylan’s. Now all seemed forgiven.) Then, with a mischievous audible chuckle, Dylan and the band kicked into a roaring “Highway 61 Revisited,” a consummate Dylan rocker of the kind that had so enraged Lomax in 1965. “This kind of music,” indeed—except that “Highway 61” includes the following verse, with ominous undertones of both ancient folk music and A Face in the Crowd:

  Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored

  He was tryin’ to create a next world war

  He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor

  He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before

  But yes I think it can be very easily done

  We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun

  And have it on Highway 61.

  On July 19, 2002, two weeks before what the press would soon be hyping as Bob Dylan’s triumphant return to Newport, Alan Lomax died. But something of his spirit, and that of the recently dead Dave Van Ronk, and also those of Tennessee Ernie Ford, Don and Phil Everly, Robert Mitchum, and Lonesome Rhodes all appeared when Dylan, wearing a cowboy hat, a fake beard, and a wig that made it seem, from five rows back, as if he’d sprouted enormous flowing Orthodox Jewish earlocks, opened his set with the Brothers Four’s arrangement of “The Roving Gambler.”

  Newport had changed mightily in forty years. Once an admixture of Gilded Age mansions and wharf-side stripper bars, the place was now tourist-friendly, its waterfront crowded with up- and middle-scale bars and eateries, fake-scrimshaw curio shops, and the inevitable Marriott. It was no longer Newport; it was “Scenic Newport,” the direction signs said, which told you how hard the developers had pushed.

  The folk festival was different too, although I knew about the early festivals only from records, books, and films. In 1963, the main concerts took place in town at Freebody Park, while the workshops sprawled out over the grounds of the Newport Casino (no gambling, but an old-line lawn-tennis club) and St. Michael’s School, near the park. The crowds were huge (reaching upwards of seventy thousand by the mid-1960s, which forced the promoters to move the event to a large field adjacent to the city); they were white, and young, and earnest; and many thousands of those who came, not just the performers, played some sort of musical instrument, and had brought along their guitars, and harmonicas, and Jew’s harps, and bongos. Back then, the folk festival was a place to jam and to learn new licks and to rub shoulders with other amateur musicians, as well as to hear the big- and not-so-big-time acts.

  The 2002 festival was much smaller—about fifteen thousand persons over two days—and, perched out at Fort Adams in Newport harbor, harder to get to, at least if you lined up to take one of the water taxis from town. About half of the crowd could have been at Newport forty years earlier. I counted only one family of blacks on the day I was there (that, by all accounts, was much the same). Apart from a trailer set up to hawk Gibson guitars and a booth displaying handmade dulcimers, there was not a single musical instrument in sight offstage. This was an event for listening, not for playing.

  A few prominent old-timers were in evidence. Near the front of the main stage, gray-haired David Gahr, one of the court photographers of the 1960s folk revival, waddled about, smiling, in an orange shirt and shorts, camera at the ready. Out among the craft booths, Dick Waterman, another well-known folkie and picture taker—and one of the re-discoverers of Son House, the Mississippi blues great—was selling his prints of young Dylan and Baez and folk festivals past. The really important thing, he was telling an interviewer, wouldn’t be so much what Dylan chose to sing as what he might choose to say to acknowledge his return.

  Mainly, there was Geoff Muldaur, in fine voice at a side-stage songwriters’ group session. Muldaur, who must have been around sixty, looked younger than that, and in his chinos and running shoes he could have been your friendly neighborhood chain-store pharmacist, until he tenderly wailed “Wild Ox Moan” and you realized that, more than ever, he is the real goods, and a beautifully deceptive slow-hand guitarist to boot. Way back when, Muldaur’s gifts were hidden a bit by the more outlandish Jim Kweskin, by the jug player Fritz Richmond, by the weird harmonica player and future cult leader Mel Lyman (not to mention Muldaur’s gorgeous then-wife, Maria), and by the raucous thump of the Kweskin Jug Band. The man was and is a natural-born blues singer.

  And at Newport, he also tended the flame. Apropos of something I’ve now forgotten, he told the little crowd packed beneath a tent that Dylan had once called him the female Carolyn Hester. “He did,” Muldaur said, when nobody responded, as if by emphasizing, he could explain to his audience who the formidable Carolyn Hester was and is, and why, therefore, Dylan’s long-forgotten (but not by Muldaur!) little put-down, calling him her feminine counterpart, was also amusing. He announced he would sing Mississippi John Hurt’s spelling song “Chicken,” then asked if anybody had heard of it, and a look of bemused perplexity crossed the face of the pleasant young performer seated beside him, Caroline Herring, herself Mississippi-born. “Back in 19-whatever, when Mississippi John Hurt was here, he’d just keep doing this little thing,” Muldaur said, then picked a moment on his guitar, “and we’d all collapse.” The line raised a little light laughter. Things had changed.

  There was more strong music on that first festiv
al day, including some snappy harmonizing by the Australian trio the Waifs and a set of Cajun zydeco by Rosie Ledet, backed by what looked like half of her extended family. Louise Taylor sang an earthy rendition of her song “Dangerous,” and Bob Hillman presented a funny New Yorker’s put-down of the all-American booboisie, bringing back a touch of the old post-McCarthyite feeling that, for a couple of days a year, Newport was a subversive place.

  But what wasn’t there stood out as much as what was. How strange, amid the renewed success of old-timey music thanks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? not to have had more of it. No Alison Krauss, let alone Ralph Stanley. Stranger still, no Handsome Family, no Anna Domino or Snakefarm (heck, Songs from My Funeral had been out three years already), nor any of the other hugely intelligent cracked balladeers who were remaking the folk and blues traditions in their own edgy, mordant way. Maybe they’d have been just too much, just too strange. Maybe Newport was still playing it more than a little on the safe side.

  In any case, a lot was left on the shoulders of the unsafe and unsound Bob Dylan. And he and his band turned in not the very best performance I’ve ever heard them play, a contrast to the previous night in Worcester, when they peeled more plaster off the peeling walls of a cavernous old vaudeville house turned concert arena. At Newport, some virus seemed to be running loose in the guitarist Charlie Sexton’s miking setup, which was distracting. The late-afternoon broiling open-air setting had the effect of diffusing the crowd’s appreciation, so that unlike the response blasts that arose in Worcester, it got to sounding almost silent between the songs.