1992
Bob Dylan
with Bonnie Raitt
Entertainment Centre
March, 1992
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Bob Dylan has toured Australia four times in his thirty year career- which to his many admirers seems like slightly less often than Halley’s Comet. It is hardly surprising, then, if expectations run high. We have a complex and cumulative sense of his work. Many of us have grown up with Dylan and like few other performers his songs, attitude and style remain with us. Dylan is now part of our nostalgia but, unlike most golden oldies, he is also part of our present lives -as his many remarkable records attest.
Throughout his moody, mercurial career Dylan has resisted the mantle of prophet, spokesperson and ideologue. He ditched his public role almost as soon as he began- to the dismay of the Left in the folk scene, for whom he was a particular jewel. Instead, for three decades he has been cranky, unpredictable, contradictory, zionist, christian fundamentalist, sexist, crazy, drunk, disappointing and bored- as well as brilliant, witty, inexplicably imaginative, inspirational, wise and profoundly memorable. Bob Dylan, you might say, is the master of the mood swing.
When he toured in 1986 with Tom Petty, Dylan astonished the Memorial Drive crowd with his ease. Tanned and affable he chatted to the crowd, played driving electric music with the Heartbreakers and then produced several acoustic sets which few will forget – an extended version of Hard Rain that, in the quality of the vocal and beauty of his guitar playing, reclaimed the song, and a rendering of In the Garden magnificent enough to momentarily set aside all those vexed questions about his religious mania. That tour set a benchmark for Dylan in middle-age. No-one expected to see the skinny punk from Highway 61, just a bit of good honest here-and-now and some pride and regard for his own creative gifts.
Taking the stage at the Entertainment Centre after we’d just seen a very likeable, rock-steady sixty minutes from Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan looked like a man sick to death of being Bob Dylan. Maybe he should franchise a series of nervy young ectomorphs to do tribute shows of his greatest hits. At least they’d look like the Dylan on the T-Shirts at the merchandising counter and they could do those feel-good anthem sessions where everyone holds up their zippo lighters and sits quietly together for a bit of sixties heaven.
Instead, Dylan is on what he himself has called his Never Ending Tour. His biographer Clinton Heylin has warned us about this. It had been running two years even then. Now it’s reached the four year mark and what you find is certainly what you get. The most notable thing about Dylan and his funk-rock quartet is that the tempos they are a-changing, to a point well beyond parody. When I think about it- opening with Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) had a sense of augury about it. It took about two minutes to rattle that one off and before the band had finished their final chords Bob was off doing a 78rpm version of Oh Mercy’s Most of the Time. No studied pauses over lost love there- jeez, there’s a garage band version of All Along the Watchtower to get through. At least that one could take a good rock thumping, unlike Just Like A Woman, in doubletime with half-meaning and some Spike Jones steel guitar.
By now the audience was in some quandary. It was, after all, Him up the front there -although some weren’t even sure about that. The pub crowd were all standing up and the New Seekers people wanted to sit down on their forty-three dollars worth. Dylan may well have wondered if he was hearing a lot of requests for a song called Sit Down. Except that he hadn’t really been beamed down properly himself -oblivious to the audience and the task at hand. This was all too evident with the monumental hash he made of Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again). Mumbling into the microphone he and the band reduced Blonde on Blonde to mud on mud. In defence of the band – with Dylan’s approach to rehearsal they may well have had three milliseconds to arm themselves for that one. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight almost survived its careless delivery but Maggie’s Farm barely stopped for a gasp.
The contractual obligation concert continued. Switching to acoustic guitar, Dylan made sweeter business of She Belongs to Me, and two solos -traditional ballads of the kind Martin Carthy used to teach him back in 1963- tantalised us for a few minutes with something that had some presence and some point to it. Typically, the sit-down-in-front people, miffed at those still standing up, bellyached loudly through the few still moments in the whole night.
Dylan’s next task was to take eleven minutes of Desolation Row and scrunch it down to under three. It’s a ponderous piece and could use an edit but, with a thousand songs in his repertoire, why not choose something else -like Tangled Up and Blue ? Similarly the incomprehensible sunday-schooler God Sent the World (?) could have been improved on by almost anything on Saved or Shot of Love, let alone Slow Train Coming. I’ll Remember You, from Empire Burlesque, got desultory treatment but with a long string-band intro and an almost-samba rhythm he breathed new life into The Times They Are A-Changin’, which, almost uniquely, was given enough time, space and dignity to succeed. Highway Sixty One and Ballad of a Thin Man both got a lively rock drubbing with a fat bass and gutsy lead – perfectly fine if they’d been Johnny B Goode and Wild Thing. But you would never have known that these songs were ever weapons of satire or that they had anything to say about all those people tucking into hampers in the corporate boxes, that- as the line goes- something is happening here and you don’t know what it is…
A gibberish version of Rainy Day Woman served as the first encore and a denatured strum through Blowin In the Wind for the finale. The band, identities unknown thanks to the taciturn Dylan and the murk of the sound mix, played solid, acceptable rock and roll. If they got rid of their boffo lead singer they’d get a pub gig anywhere. It’s great that Bob Dylan doesn’t do a mortuary show and he wants to keep trying the new angles. But these ones were too oblique for anybody’s good and, when you wait for Halley’s Comet, you can’t help expecting a little more illumination than this.
03/15/9203/14/92