How does it feel? How does it feel? To be without a home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone."
WASHINGTON
-- A close friend and I belted out those lyrics as we walked away from
our college graduation ceremony more than four decades ago and
jingle-jangled toward our own unknown futures.
Like so many of his songs from the '60s, Bob Dylan's classic Like a Rolling Stone
(1965), perfectly captured my generation's times and feelings. Dylan
was so much more than a musician. He was our poet laureate, an enigmatic
and iconoclastic figure who expressed our rebellion against
conventional society, our anxiety about our place in the world, the joy
and pain of our most intimate relationships.
Although I had seen
Dylan in concert only once in the 1960s, I have played his songs from
that era countless times in the ensuing years, and they still resonate
for me.
So when I decided to see him in concert again last week, I
was filled with excitement and anticipation about hearing him perform
dozens of his classic hits.
Had I remained a Dylan devotee who
continued to follow his career more closely, I would have known better.
Unlike so many of his musical contemporaries, he doesn't do
crowd-pleasing hits for nostalgic fans who want to relive their past.
Now
73, the Dylan I watched on stage for a little over two hours was not
the romanticized figure of my youth. He appeared in a cream-colored suit
and broad-rimmed Panama hat, and the stage lighting was so dim (either
to discourage video recordings or obscure his visage), that he appeared
to be almost a ghostly figure.
There was no interaction with the
audience. Accompanied by a strong backup band, he launched into his
19-song set with a voice that was still strong but that age had changed
from a nasal pitch to a gravelly throat. The majority of songs were
recent recordings from 2000 and later. I was unfamiliar with them, and
understanding the lyrics was a real challenge (not that he was ever easy
to understand). He played keyboard for some numbers, harmonica
interludes for others, but no longer plays the guitar, his signature
instrument. His movements on stage were few: tapping to the music or a
taking a couple of steps that resembled a jig.
Dylan threw in a few oldies, including Tangled Up in Blue (1975), and the anti-war anthem, Blowin' in the Wind
(1962). But his renditions were so different from the recordings I had
memorized, that I didn't recognize them until midway through the
familiar refrains. His songs are never static but constantly evolving.
At
first, I wasn't sure what to make of the concert. I was disappointed he
didn't perform his classics as he recorded them 40 or 50 years ago. At
the same time, I was intrigued that the man who never followed life's
conventions is still creating new music and poetry decades later as he
travels the world on what has become known as his "Never Ending Tour,"
now in its 27th year.
His newer songs still speak of the disadvantaged and oppressed (Workingman's Blues #2, 2006) and of bleak and foreboding times (Things Have Changed, 1999; Pay in Blood, 2012). His poetry is still bold and powerful.
I
came away with a new-found respect for Dylan. Instead of playing to the
audience's desires to hear his greatest hits as they were recorded ages
ago — as do most stars from decades past — he remains true to his art,
creating, evolving on his own terms. The audiences, which seem to span
several generations, are welcome to come along for the ride, so long as
they don't cozy up too close.
Aside from his amazing body of work for more than a half century, Bob Dylan remains, at least for me, a complete unknown.
COMMENTS