Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Bob Dylan Sings From the Bob Dylan Songbook
Bob Dylan Sings From the Bob Dylan
Songbook
by Wayne Robins
“I was always a singer and nothing
more than that,” Bob Dylan’s character Jack Fate says at the end of “Masked and
Anonymous,” the 2003 film curiosity. Some saw that as a typical Dylan
misdirection, a purposeful distraction aimed at those obsessed with finding the
meaning of his songs.
But after watching Dylan, age 78,
concentrate on singing his way through many levels of his catalog on Sunday, 24
November, the second night of a 10 show run at New York’s Beacon Theater, the
takeaway is that singing was never more important to him, and that he never
sang better.
The recent five CD excursion (“Triplicate”
and two others) into Sinatra World suddenly made sense. The folk roots revisited
albums “Good As I Been to You” (1992) and “World Gone Wrong” (1993) helped
Dylan reboot his writing with “Time Out of Mind” (1997), his
best new material since the 1970s; the five discs of Tin Pan Alley tunes
retaught him how to properly control his voice. As Tim Riley wrote in the L.A.
Review of Books, Dylan steps back and “allows the mood to gather around him, and gently massages
these songs into a purr.” Dylan does that with his own material now. Those who
struggled with Dylan’s singing in some of the more forgettable concerts from
the early-2010s can relax, because Dylan has relaxed. I suspect he turned to
those songs from the not-weird-at-all old America to learn how the great
performers of those tunes— Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee—survived, even thrived, when time threw
harsh resonances challenging their once easy mastery.
There were no Tin Pan Alley songs at
the Beacon. Neither was it a “best-of” or “greatest hits.”
Up close, from the fifth row of the
theater (now I know how much it costs to avoid going through seeing a concert from
the back row twice: $195 a ticket), you got to watch Dylan’s little twists of
faith, his small grins, but mostly, you noticed his concentration on delivering
every familiar phrase, no matter how unfamiliar melody the melody. That’s the
way he’s been doing it since the early 1980s, when at a concert at the Stony
Brook University gymnasium people well-familiar with his catalog would gather
in circles, confer and try to reach out through the unsteady acoustics and
unfamiliar sounds to share slices of guessed-at lyrics, and patch together the
names of songs that bore little resemblance to the Dylan tunes they had known
for decades. It’s been that way almost ever since, with the exception of the
occasional stadium tour (with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dylan &
Grateful Dead), when Bob sounded bored anyway.
At the Beacon, Dylan neither
addressed the audience, nor introduced the songs, though he did introduce the
band. New drummer Matt Chamberlain has adapted seamlessly, Charlie Sexton
remains the front man among the multiple guitar heavy group, and Donnie Herron (violin,
fiddle, steel guitar) was a kind of one man orchestra. Herron’s sensitivity
elevated the elegiac “Lenny Bruce,” the little heard requiem for a martyr whose
mind out of time in the late 1950s and early 1960s seeded Dylan’s own personal
Manhattan Project. And those strings drove home the Doug Sahm-style waltz of “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
Stitching the selection of tunes from
mostly the middle of his deck, the songs each began after a short burst of
tuning and feedback. Then, maybe 10, 20, 30 seconds later, the audience would
applaud, recognizing the song being performed.
The encores, to be sure, were
familiar: “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which for a fraction of a second made me
self-conscious holding my my notebook and ink-based pencil in my hand, but I
saw no one naked, and did not need to ask “who is that man.” Dylan appeared to
especially enjoy the moment, appearing to take over on lead guitar against
Sexton’s rhythm. After a weird and wonderful “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It
Takes a Train to Cry,” the houselights took over.
Earlier, there was an “It Ain’t Me
Babe” that the Turtles might not recognize, and “Girl of the North Country”
that might make Johnny Cash think twice before realizing it was alright.
The much loved reference to Abraham’s
sacrifice of Isaac, somehow rendered as comedy, whizzed right by my ears at the
beginning of “Highway 61 Revisited,” with Dylan at Jerry Lee Lewis warp speed
at the piano. Dylan sometimes sat at the piano (showing only the crown of his
hair over the top, from our angle), and sometimes stood. “Thunder On the
Mountain” was also full-on rock-rootsy, with the narrator “thinkin’ about
Alicia Keys” and Bob banging the piano like Little Richard spotting Uncle John
with bald headed Sally.
If there was a defining moment, it
was “Pay in Blood,” with Dylan clutching the microphone and delivering each
syllable with the conviction of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” I’d never
thought of “Pay in Blood” as definitive, or even illustrious: It was more
middle of the deck stuff, like the Chicago blues appropriation of “Early Roman
Kings,” which was, by the way, blistering Sunday night. (Those songs were two
of three from 2013’s “Tempest”; only “Time Out of Mind” had more, four.) But
“Pay in Blood” was sung with more alertness, enthusiasm and sincerity than
almost anything else in the set. Dylan’s body language was rarely this
aggressive: Not quite Elvis karate moves, but similarly emphatic hand gestures.
The song begins: “Well I’m grinding
my life away steady and sure/Nothing more wretched than what I must endure,”
before getting really dark. (By the way, “Not Dark Yet”?
Magnificent.) But the refrain is: “I pay in blood, but not my own.” What does
it mean? It means there will never be a 78-year-old man who will ever rock
harder than Bob Dylan did whenever he wanted, or croon the slower tunes with more finesse. How
does it feel? Couldn’t tell you. There were three songs from “Highway 61
Revisited,” which was generous for the curious. “Like a Rolling Stone” was not
one of them, and I’m glad for that. You want nostalgia, you’ve got the record. At
this show, you got to watch Bob Dylan think about singing as he sang. All his
wrinkles seem new.
(c) Wayne Robins 2019
(c) Wayne Robins 2019
