Bob Dylan

Newport Folk Festival, 1964

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People get really upset when they go to see a band and they don’t get to hear the hits. Some of them get impatient and  start yelling out the titles, as if the band doesn’t know which songs are the popular ones. They fume if they don’t get the hits at all (I left a Bob Dylan concert once and heard someone in the parking lot complain that he had played only obscure material on a night that he had performed probably eight tracks from his greatest hits albums). Dylan certainly could provoke people this way.

Dylan’s setlists at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1964 were not aimed at pleasing the crowd. It’s wasn’t as bad as the next year, when he would show up with a band in tow, but it was a remarkably hit free show. I am a little confused about what exactly he played and when (I received a dvd of The Other Side of the Mirror yesterday, but am not going to watch it until next week, maybe it will straighten me out), but it is clear that most of what he performed for the crowd were new songs.

On the evening of July 26, for example, Bjorner.com has him playing three songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan (which was not yet recorded nor released), “With God on Our Side” (with Joan Baez), and “Mr. Tambourine Man” (which wouldn’t be released until Bringing It All Back Home in 1965). At other sessions during the festival he did another version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, also from Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Listening to the recordings, it is clear that the crowd is appreciative, but they don’t seem enraptured (it’s hard to tell how well the crowd sound was mic’ed though…). Dylan was in the process of not giving them what they wanted. All the biographies agree that the old line folk writers at the magazines were critical of his sets (too personal, not socially engaged, not traditional). Dylan simply advanced the break that was coming. Another Side of wouldn’t cause the inevitable rupture, but it signalled its inevitability and he gives them this material rather than his “voice of a generation” hits.

As for the recordings, a nice version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with Joan Baez, but an absolutely off-putting “All I Really Want To Do” where he yodels too much to open his set on the final evening. That yodelling has to go, because combined with his refusal to really give his audience what they would’ve expected, it was semi-fortuitous that they didn’t turn on him a year early.

Here he is playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” at an afternoon workshop. I love Pete Seeger sitting there in the background.

A Ruling From the Eight Year Old

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“This isn’t Bob Dylan,” said my son in the car on his way to swimming class.

“No,” I told him, “it’s Joan Baez. She was his girlfriend.”

“Only Bob Dylan. All year. You said.”

“Well,” I countered, “he’s playing the harmonica.”  We were listening to “Silver Dagger”, the lone Baez solo song on Bootleg Series 6: Live from the Philharmonic Hall.

“It only counts if Bob Dylan is singing.”

Sebastian is interested in the Dylan project even when he is flummoxed by it. Later on the same trip he complained that we’d already heard one of the songs and I told him that this was a live version.

“It all sounds the same. Same same same” he said.

“Then why did you complain about “Silver Dagger”?,” I asked.

“Not Dylan. Doesn’t count.”

He’s right, of course, a lot of it does sound the same. But a lot of it does sound different. Listening to the live performances is all about the tyranny of little differences.

Some of the material plays well on repeat, others not so much. On Bootleg Series 6 Baez and Dylan absolutely massacre “Mama, You Been On My Mind”. They are out of sync. They can’t agree on the lyrics. You can hear Dylan telling them to her mid-song. It’s a debacle, but a charming debacle. The audience finds it cute in its spontaneous genuineness. So did I the first time. Third time through I can’t listen any longer. Charming quickly becomes cloying and I thumb to the next track.

Good show generally. Nice to capture Baez and Dylan together on the downswing of their time together in the fall of 1964 (the rupture would come six months later in England).

“Same same same,” says Sebastian.

I can’t find any footage of the Philharmonic Hall show, so here’s Baez’s version of “Silver Dagger”, the first track on her first album.

Masters of War

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If I can skip ahead for a moment, I’ll note that I remember watching Bob Dylan sing “Masters of War” on the Grammy’s in the dying days of the first Gulf War in 1991. It must have been spring break, because I was at the home of my parents. They thought that the performance, to celebrate his lifetime achievement award, was awful – mumbling and incoherent. I remember thinking that it was great that he would use that stage to sing a thirty year old indictment of war profiteering at the moment in American history. I’ll listen to that performance again sometime around September and re-judge for myself.

In the mean time, here’s Dylan singing it in 1963 at Carnegie Hall:

“Masters of War”, the third song on Freewheelin’, is extremely different from “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It’s an angry, bitter protest song that pulls no punches whatsoever. While Dylan often sings it as a dirge with repetitive guitar strumming, it can also be sung as a howl. It’s unflinching.

I think that the one of the peaks of my early interest in Dylan came when I was in high school and the book Lyrics 1962-1985 was published. I still have this book – it has survived many purgings of my library at various times. I remember reading it in high school English classes, but also while on vacation with my family in Los Angeles (possibly where I bought it), and, in particular, reading those lyrics while driving up Highway 1. At sixteen, and listening increasingly to punk bands, I thought that this was a pretty great song. Today I find the song itself a bit repetitive and tiresome, even while I still admire the sentiments.

It’s interesting to note that Odetta’s version – which makes it both longer and slower – dropped the final verse, which is the most bitter part of the whole thing. When I was young I thought that she just didn’t get it, but now I’m starting to think she was on to something. It’s an angry, angry tune – the only question is how biting you want to make it.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

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Rebecca wants me to tell you that Joan Baez made Bob Dylan’s career. She may well even have a point. While it’s true that Dylan received incredible support from the folk acts of the early-1960s (Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary, many others) who recorded, performed and endorsed his songs and his skills, it was Baez that pushed him to the next level.

Baez broke onto the folk scene about three years earlier than Dylan, with her performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. By the time Dylan was playing coffee houses in New York, she was already a successful performer who could be found on television. Dylan writes in Chronicles that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her on television (who wouldn’t have?), and though the two met at a show in New York very early in his career, it wasn’t until 1963 that they became a couple and performed together frequently on stage.

They seem to have met at the Monterey Folk Festival, where they sang a duet, “With God on Our Side”, on May 18, 1963 (nine days before the release of Freewheelin’). For much of May and June, apparently, Dylan lived with Baez at her home in Carmel. All through August of that year Dylan appeared at Baez’s live concerts as a special guest, performing a half dozen songs, while about half of her set was comprised of things that he had written (Robert Shelton reports that he was actually paid more for his supporting role on her tour than she was – nice to know that outrageous gender pay disparities existed even in the progressive folk scene of the day). Shelton indicates that he wasn’t that well received at the early shows on the tour, but audience reactions grew better over time.

Certainly Baez put Dylan over as a star by performing so much of this music on her tour, but more than that, and this is Rebecca’s point, it was her voice that helped him. Baez is one of the very few people who can convincingly duet with Dylan, who has significant limitations as a singer. Basically, you need to work around Dylan – there doesn’t seem to be much chance that he is going to harmonize with you. At the March on Washington, for example, she fills in the gaps around his voice. Her contributions to the singing are always more musically nuanced, and the strength and clarity of her voice take the rough edges off his. While there was a strong “hillbilly” tendency in American folk that would allow the scenesters to appreciate solo Dylan, for the vast mainstream of American music fans, folk meant the clear tones of Baez and Seeger, not the regional twang of Dylan. By lending her voice to his, Baez made him more credible as a solo singer for the pop world at a time when he might otherwise have just become a songwriter.

I don’t have a great deal of Baez and Dylan singing together from 1963, which is too bad because what I do have is so great. Here’s the one that I think you should listen to, “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”, from Forest Hills Stadium (August 17, 1963). I had never heard this song before this week. I believe that Dylan wrote it, but am not exactly sure of it. His website seems to indicate it, and it also suggests that this is the only time he played it live. It’s a perfect example of Baez smoothing off Dylan’s rough edges and making him palatable. Plus it’s quite the foot stomper of a song – three chords and power right through. I’m going to learn it on my banjo!

The March on Washington

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Bob Dylan’s role in the March on Washington (August 28, 1963) was a minor one, though it profoundly shaped the way that he was understood as a singer-songwriter, and as “the voice of a generation”. Without Dylan, the March would still be remembered as one of the key moments in American postwar history for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and for the enormity of the crowd and the righteousness of their cause. Without the March, Dylan’s image would have been significantly different. Interestingly, however, Dylan only rarely played such politicized events after this one – it does not seem to be something that suited him.

The best that I can tell, the folk song portion of the event was the fourteenth thing on the schedule (King was sixteenth, so Dylan’s performance was near the end of the day). Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson both sang, and then Joan Baez, with whom Dylan had been touring during the summer, sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom”. The two of them sang “When the Ship Comes In” and Dylan did “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, which was an interesting choice insofar as the lyrics suggest that Byron de la Beckwith was not the main reason for the death of Medgar Evers. Dylan’s suggestion of a larger social cause – something that he stumbled while explaining to Studs Terkel in their interview – is an awkward fit for the event. Peter, Paul and Mary also played at the event (“If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”), as well as Odetta. The whole folk section of the day’s event ended with Len Chandler leading “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”, the song that was borrowed as the title for a remarkable PBS documentary about the civil rights movement.

Dylan, Baez, & Stookey In The Lincoln Memorial

Dylan’s place in the history of the event was a minor one, but it helped cement the relationship between the new folk scene and the civil rights movement. For some fans it helped lay the foundation for the sense of betrayal that they would feel as his music began to change by the middle of the next year.

There is a tremendous video on YouTube of the musical performances from that day, plus footage from the crowds. It’s well worth watching in its entirety. Dylan seems nervous in front of the crowd, while Baez is so confident as she strides in to provide harmonies. Do yourself a favour, watch the whole thing:

Studs Terkel and Bob Dylan

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Of all the early interviews that I’ve now listened to with Dylan the best by far was conducted by Studs Terkel. The interview aired on WFMT in Chicago, and was recorded on April 26, 1963, the day after Dylan performed at The Bear. The interview runs for just over an hour, and Dylan performs seven songs. About half the time is taken up by a discussion between the two men, and you can hear the “voice of his generation” rhetoric really beginning to take hold.

Terkel is a very good interviewer for Dylan. He is cognizant of all the things that Dylan is interested in, and more. When Dylan says that he is going to sing “Boots of Spanish Leather”, Terkel immediately assumes he means The Gypsy Davy, a folk song of great note. Dylan’s version borrows a bit from that – and he performs a version of The Gypsy Davy on some of the earlier tapes – but it is a different song. Still, Terkel’s instincts were right, and he is able to talk easily with Dylan about Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Probably the most interesting segment of the interview is when the two talk about the differences between the politics of the 1930s and the emerging politics of the 1960s, which Terkel identifies as a tendency towards group identification (in the 1930s) as opposed to individualism (in the 1960s), and which the younger Dylan sees as the difference between a politics that assumed a right or wrong, with me or against me logic, and one that sees the world as filled with greys. Dylan gets lost a bit on a tangent trying to present an argument about the root causes of evil, but the whole thing is quite revealing of where he might have been with his thinking at the time.

One thing that is striking about the interview is the off-handed way that it closes – Dylan suggests that he doesn’t really have an appropriate final song to sing, so Terkel says that they’ll just play something from his album (meaning Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ wouldn’t be released for another three weeks) and then Dylan remembers that maybe he should play “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It’s a kind of cute moment where the young man seems to think “Oh, wait, I have a single to promote!”.

The other thing that is remarkable about the interview, as with the earlier one conducted by Cynthia Gooding, is how enamoured Dylan’s interviewers are with him. Terkel can’t stop raving about his song-writing, and about how he seems to represent an entirely new way of looking at the world. At one point he reads from a letter that he’s received from an alienated, young man and asks for Dylan’s commentary on it. You can tell that Terkel thinks Dylan is an entirely new kind of being, and Dylan, at this point at least, is not averse to running with it.

This interview is all over the web. Here’s the whole thing on YouTube:

Folk Concert Etiquette

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The best thing that I have discovered on this project to date, by a wide margin, is Dylan’s concert at Town Hall on April 12, 1963. A remarkably high quality recording of a tremendously good show, I’ve listened to this one three days in a row. A two set show featuring two dozen songs, and one poetry recital, this deserves an official release in the US (most of it was released in Europe on Bob Dylan 50th Anniversary Collection: 1963, and some of it shows up on the Bootleg Series – including two songs in Scorsese’s No Direction Home).

That’s not what I keep noting though. What I keep noting is the way the audience expresses their love for young Mr. Dylan.

Most obviously, there is the explosive, deep, sustained appreciative applause. These people (Robert Shelton claims an attendance of 900 in a 1200 seat venue) are listening hard, and reacting harder. It is the first “big” Dylan show (and the first where he performed mostly his own songs), and the difference from the clubs (which often sounded as if there were ten people there) is noteworthy.

The second thing that I noticed is the rude fans. Men mostly (okay, men exclusively), their job is to tell Dylan how to do his job. They yell out the names of his older (and newer) songs, demanding them as if he were a jukebox or a trained monkey. At one point Dylan denies a request for Hard Rain, only to play it later (heading into the break – a great way to end the first set). Someone calls for it in the middle of Dylan doing his stage patter, clearly throwing him off (though he recovers beautifully, and wittily). At another time he does accede to a request for Prett Peggy-o. I’m pretty sure that this was politeness, since he’s not doing other traditional songs in his set. He also introduces it by asking somewhat incredulously “You really want to hear that?”.

Third, and most oddly, there are the fans who try to control the rude fans. The Town Hall show has an inordinate amount if shushing. People in the audience call out to Dylan and others (mostly women) quickly shush them. It seems at first to be a reaction to the rudeness but, more importantly, it seems to suggest a crowd that has a strong desire not to miss a single moment, a single aside, even the tuning of a guitar string.

Personally, I hate the song-callers at shows. The best response I’ve ever heard to one came from Billy Bragg, who, denying a request for something or other, said: “That’s easy for you, mate. You just have to remember the title. I have to remember the words, the chords, and the witty banter that introduces it. Which is another way of saying you’re out of luck”.

In a couple of years – at Newport, in Manchester – Dylan will get the rudest of song callers. But that would be getting ahead if myself.

The shushers on the other hand are my kind of people – I’m trying not to miss a moment either.

But here you go, song-caller, wherever you are, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall at the end of the first set:

A Word About Music Retailing

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When I decided to do this project I already had all of Dylan’s albums – either as MP3s, on CD, on vinyl, or, in many cases, all of the above. I also realized that I was going to be writing about things that Columbia hasn’t released, and to resolve some of my ethical guilt about that, I decided to give Bob Dylan and Columbia some more money, by buying the huge career-spanning all-the-CDs-in-one-box set that was released at the end of 2013.

Fine. Ordered it.

I just want to say that I still haven’t received it, that there’s no ship date for it yet, and that I have never seen it for sale. Over the past few weeks I’ve been in a number of malls, electronic stores, and other places that sell CDs and I have never ever seen a copy of this set.

Way to go CD sellers both online and brick and mortar!

By the way, I don’t even own a CD player any longer, except in my car. Yes, I am buying this set just for the liner notes (which are online already) and for the sheer karma of purchasing music that I’m blogging about but that I don’t actually need. And they won’t sell it to me!

Getting Started

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As with many things these days, the idea for this blog came indirectly from my son. Our new car syncs automatically to my phone, and will play its playlist via the power of bluetooth, displaying the track title, artist and album on the dashboard screen. My son read the name from the back seat and asked “Who’s Bob Die-lan?”

“It’s Dylan,” I told him.

“What happened to the Avett Brothers?” he asked, “I like the Avett Brothers!”

“Without Bob Dylan there would be no Avett Brothers,” I told him. “Just listen to this.”

“I want Kick Drum Heart,” he assured me, and began to pout.

What occurred to me was the fact that it had clearly been years since I’d listened to Dylan in any sustained way. The release of Another Self Portrait was what had started this whole conversation, but it had also made me realize how long it had been since I’d listened to any early-1970s Dylan recordings. Another Self Portrait made me think I should re-examine that era. That thought led me to think I should re-examine Dylan as a whole. Which led me here.

Last January I had dinner in Paris with my friend Fredrik, who told me he was spending 2013 listening to The Beatles. He had never particularly paid much attention to them, he told me, and so now he was going slowly through their history – the original mono recordings, remastered versions, alternate takes. Immersing himself in The Beatles. I thought I’d do the same with Bob Dylan.

Unlike Fredrik, I do have a past relationship with Dylan. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I was a serious fan, buying up his back catalogue on vinyl. I recall the Christmas that I got Biograph from my grandparents and listened for the first time to some of the alternate takes and rarities found on that collection. I remember a few years later buying the Zimmerman: Ten of Swords bootleg collection from a record store in Burlington that has long since disappeared. It was the most money I had ever spent on anything.

I’ve seen Dylan perform live about two dozen times in a number of cities, but I’ve been lax about seeing him lately. In the thirteen years I’ve lived in Calgary I’ve only gone to see him once. In a lot of ways I considered myself a former Dylan fan, and while I still listen to bands that are strongly influenced by him (like the aforementioned Avetts), I wasn’t the type of person who rushed out to buy his new releases straightaway.

This is the year that I’ve decided to come to terms with Bob Dylan. 2014 is the fifty-second anniversary of the release of his self-titled debut album in 1962, and I plan to listen to a year’s worth of Dylan recordings every week for the next fifty-two weeks – never skipping ahead. Each new year will begin on a Sunday (1962 on January 5; 1963 on January 12) and will last one week. I’ll be listening to the studio albums, to some bootlegs, and to some live concert bootlegs. And I’ll be writing about it here.

I don’t plan to research Dylan that much, though I have picked up a few books (Robert Shelton, Greil Marcus, Dylan’s own Chronicles) and hope to read them at the appropriate times. I’ve glanced at the Dylanology sites out there and they are, frankly, intimidating. I’m hoping to not go that far down the rabbit hole, although there is no predicting how this all might turn out.

Today, I began by listening to the earliest known Dylan tapes – The John Bucklen tapes made in 1958 while Dylan was in high school in Hibbing, Minnesota. I don’t have much to say about these – they’re muddy and brief, and the type of thing that maybe only a very true die-hard would listen to a second time. I’m not there yet.

Please feel free to join me on this voyage. I think it should be an interesting year.