"A Lover For Your Life And Nothing More"

I'm still on the Bob Dylan kick I began by purchasing Before the Flood and Street Legal. What's happened is that I've gone back and started listening to the Bootleg Series live shows, comparing them to Before the Flood, listening to how the audience reacts to Dylan and his music. And I have to say, what I'm hearing is interesting, to say the least.

First show--Live 1964. Dylan has just released Another Side of Bob Dylan, which received mixed reviews from his folky constituency, who feel just a bit betrayed by the lack of overt political messages and the emphasis on introspective lyrics. But Dylan is still their golden boy, and even when he's playing bizzare tunes like "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" from the as-yet unreleased Bringing It All Back Home at the show, folks are still supportive of and enamoured with Dylan. He's still their hero, their leader, their spokesman; but maybe he doesn't want to be those things.

Fast forward to 1966. Dylan's gone electric, releasing Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde to a flurry of protest, confussion, and general chaos. The division of the show mirrors the schizophrenic nature of Dylan and his audience at this point--the first half of the show, the all-acoustic section, receives much warmer (if still lukewarm) acceptance than the electric half (when the infamous audience member cries out "Judas!" right before Dylan and The Band break into a vicious version of "Like a Rolling Stone"). Even by the 1966 show, Dylan already shows a tendency to rework and reinterpret his work in new and jarring ways. The acoustic version of "Visions of Johanna" is dirge-like instead of the sultry late-night blues of the album version. The electric songs on the second disc--including reworkings of several older Dylan songs that were originally solo acoustic numbers--shocks the audience. Dylan actually prefaces "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met) " with a brief bit of the way the song originally went, saying, "That's how it the song used to go," and then breaking into a stomping, riotous electric version.

Most of Dylan's fans were angry about those reinterpretations in 1966. I'm sure some Dylan fans never forgave him for turning to rock and roll. Some, though, came to see him as the new Messiah in rock, a new prophet who would show them all the way...until his motorcycle accident not long after the tour for Blonde On Blonde. Dylan's next several albums were quiet, mellow affairs, including John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning. Dylan seemed to have lost the angry spark that drove his early work, and he wasn't touring to support these albums. He was even more introspective than he'd been on Another Side. Sales started to slip.

Then 1974 rolled around. Dylan reunited with the Band for the album Planet Waves, and they decided to go out on tour in support of the record. It's quite accurate to say that part of the reason behind the tour was nostalgia and the need to get both acts back into the good graces of their audiences. Listening to Before the Flood, though, tends to make one think Dylan perhaps resented that necessity, and that lent the galloping energy that drove his radical reinterpretations.

But this time, things were different than in 1966. Folks were right up along with Dylan, loved him for who and what he was, and accepted the reinterpretations willingly, if with more than a few scratched heads. Sure, the songs didn't sound like they used to, Dylan was changing things and reworking familiar pieces, but they had that energy, that spark that much of his work since Blonde on Blonde seemed to have lacked. Dylan even picked up his acoustic guitar for a brief acoustic set in the middle of each show. No one shouted "Judas."

Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975-76 seemed to follow the trend set by the 1974 tour, though there was a bit more liveliness, warmth, and humor to the Rolling Thunder. Dylan continued to radically rework songs--take the opener to Live 1975 for instance, a raucous and storming version of the mellow country tune "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You." Dylan also revealed new tunes again, relying heavily on material from the just-released Blood on the Tracks and the as-yet unreleased Desire. Folks were amazed by the energy of these new tunes, by the spirit and creativity and originality in them.

Dylan has spent much of his career defying his audience's expectations. Ever since Another Side, Dylan has done virtually everything he can to shed the role of cultural spokesman, to simply make the music he wants to make. Almost every album since that one could be seen as an effort to shed or punish his audience, to force them to leave their preconceptions about Dylan and about his music at the door. Sometimes this has made his audience angry, sometimes it has confused them, but it's always made for an interesting ride. Folks eventually catch on to Dylan's tricks, see what he's doing, see his point, and simply enjoy his music for what it is.

Even today, Dylan defies easy labelling. As the school paper noted back in September, when Dylan came to perform in Oklahoma City, you never know what Dylan you're going to get on a given night. It could be the classicist Dylan, who plays all the old songs you know. Or you might get the experimental Dylan, who plays songs you may not be familiar with. The paper went on to note that they hoped Dylan would be classicist in OKC (which he wasn't--Dylan stayed behind the piano all night, performing mostly songs from his most recent albums), and thus completely missed the point--Dylan will do what he wants. We're just along for the ride.

Looking at his most recent studio album, Love and Theft, you can see how Dylan still defies expectations. That record is a bizzare mix of rock, rockabilly, country, Appalacia balladry, bluegrass, blues, ballads, and anything else Dylan felt like tossing into the mix. It's an album that culminates everything Dylan has been over the past forty years, sounding both old-fashioned and completely new all at once. It's unlike any other Dylan album, unlike any other album by any other artist out there, and yet it fits perfectly into his canon. It fits Dylan. And the music is great--it's loose, it's warm, it's funny and sad and true, and it's comfortable. Dylan isn't the spokesman of the counter-culture anymore, he's not the protest folkies' darling anymore, but he's still a master storyteller and lyricist. His music is still great fun to listen to. And isn't that the whole point, really?

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me, Babe (Live)"