June 4, 2022
Re: Bob Dylan's Birthday, Some Memorable Dylan Performances, and the "Foggy Ruins of Time"
On May 24th, in what has become an annual tradition, I went with a couple of friends to the “Bob Dylan Birthday Bash,” a collaborative concert that features a host of Philadelphia-area musicians covering Dylan songs. It’s always good fun and, at times, educational. This year, for example, I learned that “I’d Have You Anytime,” the lead track on George Harrison’s classic 1970 album All Things Pass, was co-written by Dylan. I was aware that Dylan was a friend of and influence on Harrison, and I also knew that All Things Must Pass contains a Dylan cover (“If Not For You”). But somehow Dylan’s hand in the composition of “I’d Have You Anytime” had slipped past me. Hence, given my ongoing work on Bob Dylan and the Stages of Existence, which hopefully will be published later in 2022, I was able to spin my late night (on a Tuesday no less!) as research.
Anyway, over the course of the evening, my friends and I discussed the best Dylan shows we’d ever attended in person. Since the late 1990s, I’ve seen Dylan live several times. My first show was February 7, 1999 at Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama. It was really good; my lone complaint was its brevity. At that time, I had been spoiled by marathon performances by the likes of U2 (in Birmingham, Clemson, SC, and Atlanta) and by Dave Matthews Band (who seemed to play every other weekend at Oak Mountain Amphitheatre in Pelham, Alabama). That Dylan clocked in and out in 90 minutes caught me by surprise, but I was hooked all the same. Time Out of Mind (1997) remains one of my very favorite Dylan studio albums, along with Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and The Basement Tapes (1975).
My most recent Dylan show was on November 29, 2021 at The Met in Philadelphia. It, too, was fantastic. Dylan’s voice seems “smoother” than it did, say, in 2014 when I saw him at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Dylan is currently touring in support of his excellent 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, which, to my thinking, is his best studio LP since “Love and Theft” (2001). The success of Rough and Rowdy Ways, I think, is due to its combination of musical restraint and lyrical beauty:
But this leads to my top Dylan performance, which, for me, is inseparable from a time and a place. I got married in July 2000, and my wife and I moved to the Washington, D.C. area. My interest in Dylan was burgeoning at this time. I was diligently working my way through the entire Dylan corpus, and, to my pleasant surprise, my wife didn’t mind. She especially liked Nashville Skyline (1969), New Morning (1970), and the underrated Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). We were just 24 years old at the time—no kids, not even a pet. We lived in a duplex in the Eastport neighborhood of Annapolis, Maryland. The building, to put it nicely, had a lot of character. The downstairs neighbors owned a large and eerily tranquil iguana, and they would have “wrestling matches” (which is actually what they sounded like) that would wake us up at 3.00am or 4.00am. Meanwhile, the guy across the street was pit bull “trainer,” and, if I’m being honest, his dogs were friendly and well behaved. One can only hope. We didn’t have a washer or a dryer in our apartment, so on weekend afternoons we’d take our laundry to a place nearby. While waiting, we’d get a beer and a crab cake sandwich at Davis’ Pub around the corner. Good times.
Anyway, about a week before Thanksgiving in November 2000, I found out that Dylan was scheduled to play at Towson University, north of Baltimore. Winter came early that year. We drove up to Towson and waited in the cold for what seemed like hours. We finally got our tickets, entered the Towson Center, and fought our way to the left side of the stage—the equivalent of seven or eight rows back. Built in 1976, the Towson Center was small, almost like a high-school gym. Dylan came on pretty late. It was to be his final show of 2000—a year in which he performed almost every three days. As Dylan started “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” a haggard older guy in front of me yelled out “‘Jokerman’! ‘Jokerman’! We want ‘Jokerman’.” With irrepressible enthusiasm, he did so for the duration of the show.
Alas, Dylan didn’t play “Jokerman,” which I would’ve liked to hear as well. But it was an incredible show, also featuring guitarist Charley Sexton and multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell. Thankfully, some Good Samaritan (maybe the “Jokerman” guy?!) uploaded the entire performance to YouTube:
Listening to this show again, the song that really jumps out to me is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which Dylan and his band give an ebullient reading. I somehow remember it with particular vividness, right down to its idiosyncratic cadence. Famously, in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dylan sings of the “foggy ruins of time,” and, indeed, it’s true that I can never go back to that moment in time. Yet, in recounting the story, the memory is carried forward, reborn, and made present again. We’re fortunate, even blessed, when this occurs—a point attested by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantin Constantius in Repetition (Gjentagelsen, 1843). As Constantin argues, “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.” It is repetition, Constantin insists, that human beings really want, for repetition is not just to remember but, in fact, to get back.
June 4, 2022
Truly amazing that you can relate this epic dylan discography to soren! You love it and and live it.
Such an awesome memory. ❤️