James Taylor
Festival Theatre

Bob Dylan
with Ani diFranco and the Waifs
Entertainment Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Perhaps no-one epitomises popular music at the beginning of the 1970s more than James Taylor. Along with Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon he was the prototype of the singer-songwriter, not a cult figure like Bob Dylan and the other folkies, but a confessional soloist the way John Lennon had become. By the end of the sixties no-one was supposed to sing other people’s songs, and songwriters were expected to sing their unvarnished own. Neil Diamond came up on stage, as, after taking singing lessons, did Jackson Browne and the Brill Building princess herself, Carole King.

From a talented, well-to-do Boston family James Taylor was a preppy, poetic, regressed young man. Good grief, he invited the comparison himself with his cowboy lullaby, Sweet Baby James. With handsome looks and a prodigious talent there was also more than a whiff of doom about him being both the first American to record for the Beatles’ Apple label and a heroin addict at the age of twenty.

His best songs had a wistful quality, melodic and airy, but they were, unsurprisingly, also tinged with danger. These epiphanies were provisional and regretful – none more so than Fire and Rain, his best known song, and among the finest elegies in recent American literature, set to one of pop’s most sublime tunes. Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you, he plaintively keens – and if ever a singer was also headed for the fast pony ride that took away Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley and a dozen others, it was James Taylor.

Which is why his presence on the touring circuit, particularly in the last five years or so, has been so gratifying. Anyone who has seen the DVD of his New York Beacon Theatre show from 1998 or the more recent Pull Over DVD of his 2001 US tour will know how revitalised Taylor is – and was likely to be for his current Australian shows. Promoting a new CD, October Road, one of his best in some time, his show at Festival Theatre is proof that he is not just in fine fettle, he is as fresh as he has ever been.

It is a long show – and it is all James Taylor. Fronting a five piece band including duet singer Arnold McCuller, Taylor , now bald and in his early fifties, in LL Bean cotton shirt and chinos, looks like a fitness conscious architect. Here is someone totally unpreoccupied with mystique, and relishing the freedom of it. He sings a cluster of songs including Copperline and October Road before warmly greeting an Adelaide audience already in an advanced state of rapture. Then, after a droll but very well-rehearsed intro, he sings Frozen Man, one of the most lilting and
lovely of his more recent compositions. Larry Golding provides a glacial synth fanfare before Taylor begins harmonising with his own trickling guitar line as he narrates the story of William James McPhee, a mariner buried in the northern ice and exhumed for medical examination a hundred years later.

For the times Taylor sings Slap Leather, a satiric song written, he notes meaningfully, for the previous Bush and the previous Gulf War. Also, before interval, he sings a spirited version of Ric Von Schmitt’s Mighty Storm with rip-snorting guitar from Michael Landau, and a lovely reading of Fire and Rain, splendidly paced and as achingly sad as it has ever sounded. The second half is also a mix of old and recent – On the 4th of July ,with a samba rhythm from longtime session drummer Steve Gadd and Carole King classics – Up on the Roof and, with fluttery funk bass from Jimmy Johnson and the rich tenor of Arnold McCuller, You’ve Got a Friend. Carolina on My Mind is sounding as good ever, Taylor’s voice as clear as a liberty bell, and if anything, stronger and more centred than his younger self.

For an encore his blues send-up Steamroller gets some over-serious hyperbole from the band, eager perhaps to get beyond the low-key groove. But that’s the key of James Taylor and that’s where he is at his absolute best. He finishes with a solo crooning of Sweet Baby James, perfectly pitched and beautifully phrased . After that, there is nowhere else for little dogies to go but home.

In stark contrast to the managed ambience of James Taylor’s carefully turned craftsmanship is the raggedy existential dice throw which is the latest visit from Bob Dylan and his Neverending touring band. The 2001 Adelaide show was a blinder – a wonderfully limber country string band playing at full-tilt. This time Bob gives us a shorter show with more wattage. It is a long evening though, with a likeable set from the ubiquitous Waifs, including their radio hit London Still and an intense turn from the introverted Ani diFranco which, much the way Patti Smith did with a Dylan show about five years back, rapidly divides the crowd between fans of her particular brand of here’s-a-page-from-my-journal music and those who long for a semblance of structure.

But, as she observes, if anyone made it possible to meander in music it is Bob Dylan. And out comes the sixty something roving gambler. Along with all the other tragics I have been following the set lists on Bill Pagel’s Bob Links – the most assiduous website devoted to the micro-reporting of Dylan performances- to see which of the canon was going to be fired this time round. And, as in earlier Australian shows the emphasis is on the recent album – beginning with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Dylan is wearing a black shirt with red braid piping accompanied by a gold neckscarf . He looks like a slightly unhinged Gene Autry or even Quentin Crisp in a cowboy moment, but what the hell – he’s in exceedingly good spirits, standing stage right at electric keyboard while the band, in grey Murph and the Magictones suits, set a cracking pace.

Bucky Baxter switches to pedal steel for I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, while Bob squawks on harp and growls amiably through one of his good-time tunes of old.
Highway 61 is revisited in a raucous rocking version – Bob back at piano, muttering out vocals so grainy they make Howling Wolf sound like Frank Sinatra. Tony Garnier and David Kemper on bass and drums produce an enormous sound. Tonight they could be auditioning for the Bad Seeds. I’ll Remember You is a surprise from Empire Burlesque followed by Things have Changed, one of Dylan’s less notable compositions, but an Oscar winner nonetheless. The opening bars for Cold Irons Bound are chaotic but, when that great riff beds in, Dylan,complete with jangly lead guitar, creates unchained melody.

The highlight of the show is a full band acoustic version of Masters of War which, along with It’s Alright Ma, is sung with such conviction and emphasis that we can have no doubt that forty years on, and in a time of dying, Dylan still stands by his words. Some songs are of love – Girl From the North Country and a skittish version of Lay Lady Lay – others are of theft like the Leon Redbone-ish Bye and Bye and Summer Days.

The band has played hard and loud, and guitarist Bill Burnette has filled the large shoes of Charlie Sexton. Bob has had a good night as Mr Piano. For encores, only two – a pleasing, if brisk, version of Forever Young and an incendiary All Along the Watchtower, with Hendrix feedback and a weather eye on wildcats in the distance. Bob Dylan is sixty two and a force of nature. He serenades us and he capers like the old bojangles he likes to think he is. But there is gravity and authority in his manner as well. Tonight he has sung Masters of War loudly and clear. You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks, I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

“Fire and Hard Rain” The Adelaide Review, No.234, March 2003, pp.23-4.