Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

Author:Bob Dylan [Dylan, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-10-10T16:00:00+00:00


I rejoined Petty for what was to be the final run of a long, drawn-out tour and told Tom’s band that if they wanted to play anything, just tell me and we would do it. We started up in the Middle East on that run with two shows in Israel, one in Tel Aviv and one in Jerusalem, the next one in Switzerland and the next one in Italy. In these first four shows I sang eighty different songs, never repeating one, just to see if I could do it. It seemed easy. The angles I was using were unwieldy but highly effective. Because of this different formulaic approach to the vocal technique, my voice never got blown out and I could sing forever without fatigue.

Night after night it was like I was on cruise control. Regardless of all this, I was still planning to quit…retire from the scene. I hadn’t planned to take it any further, hadn’t talked myself out of that—I didn’t figure I had much of an audience anyway. Even on this tour, as big as the crowds were, Petty was drawing most of the people. Before the Petty shows I hadn’t been going on the road consistently anyway. It was tedious having to assemble and disassemble bands for a thirty- or forty-show run. It had become monotonous. My performances were an act, and the rituals were boring me. Even at the Petty shows I’d see the people in the crowd and they’d look like cutouts from a shooting gallery, there was no connection to them—just subjects at random. I was sick of it—sick of living in a mirage. It was time to break it off. The thought of retirement didn’t bother me at all. I’d shaken hands with the idea and had gotten comfortable with it. The only thing that had changed from then ’til now was that performing now wasn’t taking anything out of me. I was sailing along.

Then suddenly, one night in Locarno, Switzerland, at the Piazza Grande Locarno, it all fell apart. For an instant I fell into a black hole. The stage was outdoors and the wind was blowing gales, the kind of night that can blow everything away. I opened my mouth to sing and the air tightened up—vocal presence was extinguished and nothing came out. The techniques weren’t working. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had it down so well, yet it was just another trick. There’s no pleasure in getting caught in a situation like this. You can get a panic attack. You’re in front of thirty thousand people and they’re staring at you and nothing is coming out. Things can really get stupid. Figuring I had nothing to lose and not needing to take any precautions, I conjured up some different type of mechanism to jump-start the other techniques that weren’t working. I just did it automatically out of thin air, cast my own spell to drive out the devil. Instantly, it was like a thoroughbred had charged through the gates.



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