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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Dec 9, 2002 | 1) Announcement (Madison Square Garden, Nov. 11)
For years, the same voice has opened every show with the same phrase, squashing the name at the end into one word: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Columbia recording artist, BOBDYLAN!" Last Aug. 9, though, a piece appeared in the Buffalo News in anticipation of a Dylan date in Hamburg, N.Y. It led with a paragraph recapitulating Dylan's career. As print it was boilerplate -- but to hear that paragraph now, appropriated as Dylan's official new introduction, was pure media shock. It's the displacement that takes place when the conventions of one form are shoved into the conventions of another form: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. The voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!"
2) "Masters of War" (MSG, Nov. 11)
In 1991, with the Gulf War underway, Dylan stepped onto the stage at the Grammys telecast with his band. They were to play before Jack Nicholson presented Dylan with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The combo dove into a blithering, all-stops-out piece of rhythm, Dylan smearing every word into a single sound. It was "Masters of War," from 1963, Dylan's best, and most unforgiving, antiwar song -- but you couldn't necessarily tell. The song was buried in its performance, as if history were its true audience.
With a second Gulf War looming, there was no disguise when, seven songs into the first of two New York shows, Dylan gathered his small band into a half-circle for an acoustic, almost chamber-music version. Played very slowly, very deliberately, the performance made you understand just how good the song is. It wasn't a matter of relevance. You could imagine that if the last war on earth had occurred 39 years ago -- if the song had, by its very appearance, ended war -- the song would still speak, just as a 7,000-year-old god excavated in Jordan and recently installed in the Louvre is still speaking, reminding you of what you came from, of who you once were.
3) Cover: Elvis Costello's "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," 1977 (MSG, Nov. 11)
He didn't sing about the shoes; having apparently invested more wisely than the angels, he wore them.
4) CD: "The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Live 1975 -- The Rolling Thunder Revue" (Columbia)
Confusion in almost every vocal, a pound of sugar in almost every arrangement. Right, the famous "donned makeup in the '70s" period.
5) Paul Muldoon, "Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000," from "'Do You, Mr, Jones?' -- Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors," ed. Neil Corcoran (Chatto & Windus, U.K.)
Muldoon is a poet (author most recently of "Moy Sand and Gravel"), co-author of Warren Zevon's recent "My Ride's Here" and a professor at Princeton. Leading off this new essay collection with a new poem, Muldoon goes back to the show Dylan played at Princeton in 2000 -- which took place in Princeton's Dillon Gym. "'You know what, honey? We call that a homonym,'" the narrator of the poem says to the woman he's with as the concert starts. Then Dylan's only previous appearance at Princeton enters the poem -- in 1970, when Dylan was present not to play but to accept an honorary degree. "He wouldn't wear a hood,'" the narrator of the poem remembers. "'You know what, honey? We call that disquietude.'"
