Dylan Redux

We saw Dylan last night at Canandaigua. It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful venue, with the sun setting behind the stage; the light lingering in the evening sky for the first half of the concert; a chill in the August night. When Andy was here last weekend, we spoke about the recent movie “I’m not There”, and how Dylan, the songwriter and performer, appears to be his own artistic creation. Just as the autobiographical author creates a character, who purports to represent himself in the book, but who is not really the same thing as the author, and who then, in a sense, is a fictional character – Proust’s Marcel, for example - Dylan himself is a character in his own artistic body of work, that he continues to create almost fifty years after we first met him.

The voice is gone; it’s been going for some time now, but this was no Tony Bennett concert. Tangled Up in Blue seemed more a poetry reading – Dylan reciting the lyrics in a growl over a quiet musical arrangement. Or it’s All Right Ma, with the lyrics coming so fast, and the band so overpowering, that unfortunately it was often hard to follow, even though we’ve only heard the song a few thousand times in the forty-plus years since it was first recorded. Not surprisingly, the crowd shared the most love for songs from the epochal albums – Highway 61, and Memphis Blues. I was especially pleased to hear Love Minus Zero, perhaps one of Dylan’s most beautiful songs ever. But that was followed shortly by Masters of War, which becomes angrier and darker, if that’s even possible, as the years pass, and as Dylan’s arrangement becomes ever more ominous.

But that’s the amazing thing about Dylan – as he reinvents himself, he reinvents his music. In fact Memphis Blues changed midway during last night’s performance. After an instrumental break, the phrasing, and even the melody for the last few verses were entirely different, a sing-song arrangement which seemed oddly incongruent with the song’s lyrics. No matter. I’m also amazed at his ability to perform an incredible variety of songs, none of which is simple or formulaic. How does he even remember the lyrics to all this music? I wonder if Shakespeare late in life could recite Romeo and Juliet as if he’d just written it. And speaking of Shakespeare, on the way home from Canandaigua we listened to Tambourine Man, and I thought about how that song could never again be written; how we’ll never hear anyone write lyrics anything close to that. Its imagery, and especially its language, are largely lost to us now, as our common vocabulary has shrunk so. There are barely any writers left alive who could pen those lyrics, let alone songwriters. And as the years pass, our facility with the English language becomes so diminished that even our artistic expression is becoming hopelessly common and weak.

The show ended predictably, with the now anthemic Rolling Stone and Watchtower. I’d like to see him build up toward the apocalypse throughout the show, ending with Hard Rain, and Desolation Row, and then Watchtower; Dylan was always so good at foretelling the apocalypse. But then, would everyone feel so good as they walked to their cars? Would the evening really have been so satisfying? Dylan reminds me of the great jazz performers. Every time you see them, it’s new. Every performance is different. And age doesn’t diminish the artistic achievement. If he’s coming to a venue near you, go see him. Again and again.