Bob Dylan by Donald Brown

Author:Donald Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

“You Should Not Treat Me Like a Stranger”

The Rolling Thunder Revue marks an interesting interlude in Dylan’s performing career. No longer burdened with the “comeback” aura of the tour with The Band, Dylan had found collaborators willing to improvise with him, both onstage and on film, and to play in out-of-the-way locations and venues. The itinerary of the initial tour was not the usual huge arena affair, and the feeling, look, and sound of the show epitomized a looseness, a celebratory and relaxed panache only available in the seventies. This was rock akin to the life of the traveling minstrel, the troubadour with no direction home. Dylan wasn’t only “back in the rain,” he was back in the public eye very much on his own terms. Typically wearing a vest and a hat adorned with a flower and often performing with his face in greasepaint, Dylan walked a fine line between clown and poet, a space in which other performers and writers before him had dwelt. The shows owed something to Whitman, to Rimbaud, to the Beats, to carnival sideshows and vaudeville, and to roadhouse blues bands and rockabilly pickers from the heartland. In the midst of this somewhat chaotic atmosphere, Dylan reinvented some of his best known songs and put songs of his various romantic explorations—“Tangled Up in Blue,” “Just Like a Woman,” “O Sister,” “Sara”—in dialogue with one another. It was fitting, inasmuch as he was also making a tour film that was also an exploration of the myths of identity and the twin romances of The Road and The Woman.

The tour also gave stage time to his friends and accomplices, reintroducing a gallery of figures familiar from his heyday: Joan Baez—Dylan finally returned the favor of hosting his sometime lover, muse, and colleague as she had done for him in 1963–1964; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who could still evoke the influence of Guthrie so important to Dylan’s formative years; Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, who had helped popularize the folk-rock crossover that had been so important to Dylan’s breakthrough on pop radio; Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, Canadians who added songwriting credentials almost as illustrious as Dylan’s. Mitchell’s “Dreamland,” which McGuinn recorded on his album Cardiff Rose, is a wonderfully Dylanesque evocation of the tour.

The playing on the live recordings of the shows is at times sloppy, but the enthusiasm is obvious. Dylan attacks signature songs with a variety of effects: “It Ain’t Me Babe” veers between cool and warily mocking; “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is declaimed with a carnivalesque air; “Hattie Carroll” goes for the throat; “Just Like a Woman” is nakedly raw. The new songs, led by Scarlett Rivera’s lyrical and expressive violin, sit easily with the classics, and for nostalgia there’s Bob and Joan, the King and Queen of folk, after more than a decade, still cranking out “Blowin’ in the Wind,” though where they really connect are on covers of standards like “Never Let Me Go” and “The Water is Wide.” On recordings, what comes across best is the band’s responsiveness to its leader’s fitful inspirations.

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