I get into trouble and I hit the wall
Bob Dylan, “My Own Version of You”
No place to turn – no place at all
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?
Shortly after Bob Dylan barked out those couplets to the audience at Grand Rapids’ DeVos Performance Hall, he answered his rhetorical question with another recent tune: “I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon”. So it was no surprise that, on a night where the 82-year-old icon genially lorded it over his band and a capacity crowd, another historical JC crept into the setlist too . . .
But let’s rewind. Hitting the stage in a black sequined suit and white hat, Dylan planted himself behind a baby grand piano and promptly dispelled any expectations of a by-the-numbers night of bygone hits. The opener was recognizable as the 1970s deep track “Watching the River Flow” — but only just. Words were stretched out, scrunched together and slurred, melodies recast on the very edge of speech, the original flowing folk song juiced up by jumpin’ R&B from the backup quintet. To top it off, Dylan took all the solos — ranging from inspired rhythmic riffs to maddeningly repeated three-note licks (the kind you played in grade-school piano duets) that occasionally locked in with the band’s chords. The message was clear: “I’m doing whatever I want with these songs tonight. Keep up.”
To their credit, Dylan’s crew did just that, with style to spare. Whether on electric or stand-up bass, long-time musical director Tony Garnier’s pulse was always squarely in the pocket; guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio’s sturdy strumming kept the songs plowing forward, even when their boss pulled back on the melodies and rhythms. With the vehicle in motion, utility player Donnie Herron piled on the colorful trim — floating pedal steel guitar, countrified fiddle, sprightly mandolin. And drummer Jesse Pentecost, the newest band member, gave it all a kick in the pants, changing and chopping the grooves of every tune from Dylan’s latest album of new material, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Nothing was straight off the record: slow blues spread out into shuffles; crawling ballads shifted up a gear to more fluid tempos; the whimsical meditation “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” turned into film noir, darkening on a dime during an ominous, reharmonized refrain. If details got lost in the roar of the journey, it proved an exhilarating ride. (And Dylan was digging it — late in the set, he introduced the band members by name, which apparently only happens when he’s in a good mood.)
Dylan proved equally daring on a relatively obscure selection of vintage tunes, taking the reinventions of this year’s live-in-studio Shadow Kingdom even farther. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” careened from free-tempo intro to Little Richard stomper (complete with Jerry Lee Lewis piano glisses) to a hard-braked burlesque finale. “To Be Alone With You” got the full honky-tonk treatment, courtesy of Pentecost’s loping backbeat and Herron’s cry-in-your-beer filigree. Given the nature of the night, the biggest surprise wasn’t that Dylan’s fundamentalist calling card “Gotta Serve Somebody” cropped up as a rockabilly-flavored rhumba; it was that the only cover of the set, Chuck Berry’s “Nadine”, was played and sung absolutely straight (and garnered as much applause as anything else)!
Though I’ve gotta say the biggest kick for me was the relaxed finale: “Every Grain of Sand”, one of Dylan’s numerous farewells to whoever or whatever threatened to cramp his style over the decades. A final fruit of his evangelizing years, it proved a graceful closer for the evening, a benediction of sorts on the rapt audience, complete with Bob’s only harmonica solo of the night after the final lyrics:
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
At which point, Bob Dylan carefully hobbled to center stage, stood there bathed in applause, smiled, and — the very embodiment of Boomer noblesse oblige — took leave of the 2,000 mere mortals before him, off to future stops on his latest imperial progress.
— Rick Krueger
Setlist:
- Watching the River Flow
- Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
- I Contain Multitudes
- False Prophet
- When I Paint My Masterpiece
- Black Rider
- My Own Version of You
- I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
- Crossing the Rubicon
- To Be Alone with You
- Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
- Gotta Serve Somebody
- I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
- Nadine
- Mother of Muses
- Goodbye Jimmy Reed
- Every Grain of Sand
Bob Dylan is the rare artist who, at 75, retains the power, energy, and restlessness that distinguished his early work. As both a recording and performing artist, his electricity is unabated, and he continues to make vibrant contributions to the post-folk culture he virtually created. That he has achieved this is astounding; for those of us who have followed his career and know something of its roots and evolution, it is not surprising. He constantly recasts his song catalogue, the depth of which by 1965 (let alone 2016) was unrivaled in the rock/folk/singer-songwriter genre he invented, to match his current sound, and commands a fluidity of vision in his writing that sees beyond the trees and perhaps the forest as well. Witness “High Water,” a tribute to Charley Patton (whose “High Water Everywhere” is a stone cold delta blues barking, howling, classic), from 2001’s Love and Theft. This is a blues about love and the water that rises, that has picked up some oldtime, some drone, shaking and breaking and name-checking muscle cars and evolutionary philosophers. The thing is that it works because when Dylan sings “the cuckoo is a pretty bird” that’s a kind of referenced code that he’s hollering back to Patton. He’s writing a blank check to freely associate (find and listen to a version of “The Cuckoo” and you’ll get what I mean), to make the rhyme work and throw meaning to the wind and to the listener. Harder than it sounds because it’s about the sound, what music is, what makes its power inexplicable. To make that warble on the 5th day of July, and trace your absurd and beautiful melody: it takes courage and a resolution that comes at a price only Dylan, and maybe Patton, knows.
Progarchy 