by Bell, Ian
Later, in his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would return to the memory of the burned-out relic of 1960s folk-rock – a term he had always despised – who found himself empty and wrecked in the middle of the ’80s. This erstwhile ‘troubadour’ – a word he had once found comical – was heading for cultural oblivion. Above all, as the book would record, he had nothing much left to say.
Only rarely does self-doubt go deeper. Nothing had remained of that old ’60s swagger, that instinctive certainty, the knowledge that one song would thread itself seamlessly to the next whenever he chose. More than Dylan’s confidence had disappeared by the end of 1987. A decade later, the remembered emotion sounded like nothing so much as the despair of a man who had gone blind by stages.
Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead had managed to coax Dylan back to a kind of life, for a while at least, but the respite had been no cure. As represented on the miserable Dylan & the Dead album, those half-dozen stadium appearances in July 1987 had demonstrated only that the foremost songwriter of his generation could get up on a stage, if needs must, and remember some of the words. The performances had been dire; rumours questioning the star’s physical condition had circulated. As often as not, great songs had been shorn of verses and meaning while the Dead treated their eternally faithful fans to the usual grimly predictable minor-league rock.
As he told the story to Gates, Dylan’s luck turned at last on a foggy, windy night while he peered at an audience spread across the damp cobblestones of the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Switzerland. He would return to the tale several times in subsequent interviews. Deep-dyed fans would meanwhile give the anecdote a pseudo-religious tint by talking, in all apparent seriousness, about an epiphany. Whatever happened, it mattered to Dylan the storyteller. Locarno became part of his personal mythology, the moment when the long withdrawing tide began to turn.
It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was me thinking it. I’m determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not. And all of a sudden everything just exploded. It exploded every which way. And I noticed that all the people out there – I was used to them looking at the girl singers, they were good-looking girls, you know? And like I say, I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But when that happened, nobody was looking at the girls any more. They were looking at the main mike. After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.
So it came to pass. Doubters might struggle to find much of a difference between minor bootlegs such as Locarno 1987 and snatched recordings of the following night’s show such as Paris, France. Only a minority in the Wembley Arena left the building at the tour’s end convinced that Dylan had redeemed himself. Connoisseurs of the numerous illicit Temples in Flames recordings can point to fine performances, here and there, both before and after the ‘epiphany’. It is also self-evidently the case that we only have Dylan’s word for this life-changing Locarno experience, this moment of understanding. He believed, in any case, that words of defiance and resolution had come unbidden into his head, as though from nowhere, and he believed in what they meant. As he knew better than most, faith is a powerful thing.
Recasting the story for the benefit of Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore at the end of 2001, Dylan said: ‘That night in Switzerland it all just came to me. All of a sudden I could sing anything. There might’ve been a time when I was going to quit or retire, but the next day it was like, “I can’t really retire now because I really haven’t done anything yet”, you know? I want to see where this will lead me, because now I can control it all. Before, I wasn’t controlling it. I was just being swept by the wind, this way or that way.’1
All that remained was to persuade disillusioned audiences to believe it too. A Bob Dylan who could still sing ‘anything’? Proof of the proposition would not be the work of moments. The 1980s had produced a mountain of lousy reviews for which amends were required. One of the decade’s many glib formulations was as applicable to Dylan as it was to any beleaguered politician: he had a credibility problem, a big one. Just ‘to go out and play these songs’ would not be enough.
Whatever took place in Switzerland, the alleged Locarno incident became a declaration of faith. It has been used since by fans to explain everything about Dylan the dedicated, even obsessive, public performer. The phenomenon known as the Never-Ending Tour, 2,480 concerts in 24 years as of the end of 2012, is always said to have begun in California on 7 June 1988, and is always explained by what happened to the artist in Switzerland. There remains the sense, nevertheless, that a few things are missing from the story.
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On paper, the 13-song Concord set list does not these days seem like anything out of the ordinary for a Dylan show. A little brief at 70 minutes, perhaps, certainly when compared with the concerts of ’66 and ’76, and with concerts since, but that’s of no account: with this artist, only quality is supposed to matter. Dylan opened with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and closed with ‘Maggie’s Farm’ for an encore. He gave the crowd ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, second to last. Along the way there was a fair enough résumé of his career, from the first album’s traditional ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ through ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ to ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ from Blood on the Tracks and God’s own ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. Most of the choices were not startling. The American Civil War ‘Irish’ ballad ‘Lakes of Ponchartrain’ – Creole would be a better description – made for an interesting preface to ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ in an acoustic sequence. It introduced, or rather reintroduced, traditional music to the concerts: thereafter one obscure piece or another would feature in the set. But the rest of the songs performed at Concord would have been familiar to anyone who knew anything about Dylan.
The first real surprise had come, in fact, when he took the stage. The girl singers, the star accompanists, the instrumental paraphernalia and the rest of the supporting cast were gone. Aside from an appearance by Neil Young – barely audible on the recording – it was just Dylan and three musicians. The intention, like the musical setting, was stark. For the first time in years, he was leaving himself with no place to hide.
He was meanwhile refusing to employ his famous harmonica while granting the first public performances to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. That was worth noting. But the important fact, faintly astonishing in 1988, was that Dylan was audibly performing as though he cared, as though his songs meant something once more. Whatever the excuses made for the Temple in Flames ‘scorched earth’ approach – and some of those are elaborate – this new demeanour amounted to an acknowledgement of how low he had sunk. Now he was a serious performer again.
It didn’t make for a flawless first show. Dylan’s rehabilitation had barely begun. Equally, Concord’s implicit manifesto was no guarantee that every performance would be unimpeachable in the years ahead: anything but. In Sacramento two nights later the tour’s next stop saw another half-empty amphitheatre and a set drastically curtailed for reasons only Dylan could explain. Press reviews were poor, in the main, perhaps because journalists had closed their minds instead of opening their eyes and ears. Nevertheless, Dylan still gave them a certain amount of ammunition, not least with his perverse decision to perform one fairly new song from Down in the Groove, the lamentable ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, amid the purest products of the songwriter’s art. Assembled for Hearts of Fire, that gutted turkey of a movie, and inserted between ‘Girl From the North Country’ and ‘Just Like a Woman’, a song that counted as close to the least in Dylan’s canon did no more than remind listeners of how good a writer he once had been.
It was a minor detail. The recording says that the crowd, though sparse, was enthusiastic. The Sacramento audience had reason. Dylan’s trio of musicians had begun to carve a little piece of legend for themselves. G.E. Smith, guitarist and bandleader from TV’s Saturday Night Live satire show, was intuitive, empathetic and su
re of himself. The artist had meanwhile found in Kenny Aaronson (bass) and Christopher Parker (drums) a rhythm section that would never let him down, no matter what might transpire. A lot could yet transpire, but Dylan had made his choices. What remained to be seen was their effect, if any, on his writing, the core of his art.
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Devotees of the tour-without-end don’t necessarily see things that way. They are avid, year upon year, for word of a new song being performed somewhere in the world, but their fascination with a cultural phenomenon has as much to do with the supposedly ever-changing manner of Dylan’s renditions as it has to do with a body of recorded work. For these believers, the public stage is the true locus of his art. The appearance of another Bob Dylan album is, in a strange way, secondary. Predictably, the artist doesn’t see things that way. He despises the idea that he is adrift, like some musical Ancient Mariner, on a never-ending voyage, but he also rejects the claim that he is forever rearranging his songs. In 2006, he said as much to the writer Jonathan Lethem.2
I’ve heard it said, you’ve probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. The arrangements don’t change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that’s all. You can’t change the arrangement night after night – it’s impossible.
Undaunted, some of his fans possess hundreds of bootleg concert recordings. In legend, a few have collections numbering in the thousands, of show after show after show. The inner circle of adherents think nothing of crossing America, Europe, or the ocean between to follow Dylan from place to place when he tours. They have seen the ‘nightly ritual’ dozens of times and have never tired of him, despite all his failures and provocations. At venues across the world this fraternity, by now old friends, will gather. Set lists from far-flung cities circulate among them, each one pored over for evidence of ‘revealing’ choices (or a veteran singer’s whims).
So in Brittany on 22 July 2012, he performed ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ for the first and only time in 86 shows that year? He did ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and ‘Under the Red Sky’ only once in the entire tour? Fascinating; tell me more. These days, internet databases, Dylan’s own not least, keep track of such important facts. Those for whom the statistical record is better than a hobby find nothing peculiar in the endless pursuit of details. They are less likely to remember that Dylan endured booing at Brittany’s Festival Vieilles Charrues in Carhaix from a section of the crowd apparently demanding more modern (or more intelligible) entertainment. Committed fans do not long discuss the fact that Tour 2012 – ‘Don’t You Dare Miss It’, as the poster said – went through some rough patches.
The art-in-progress failed to sell out at most stops along the way, even in the United States. In a few places, concerts were cancelled, apparently because of a lack of local interest. Media critics were meanwhile, it is fair to say, divided. Some things had not changed since 1988.
Of a performance at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent on 30 June 2012, the reviewer from London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Somehow between the magic of his fantastic songs, the liquid groove of his superb band, the mysterious charisma of the legend himself and the will of the crowd to enjoy the moment, something strange and truly spectacular happens, a thrilling performance that nobody, perhaps not even the man at its centre, can really explain.’ Elsewhere it was recorded that in Toronto that November, ‘The 71-year-old Dylan spent the bulk of [the show] seated behind a piano at stage right, barking, braying and hoarking [sic] unintelligible linguistic formations into the microphone and banging out ill-disciplined boogie-woogie licks on the keys.’3
At Concord in 1988 Dylan was making his stand, fending off retirement, and attempting to save his career. A quarter of a century on, even those who found his ruined voice ridiculous had given up asking why he refused to quit. Were his overheads so high and his record sales so low that he needed to keep going, night after night? Surely songwriting royalties, his songwriting royalties above all, would maintain him in comfort and style?
It seemed that the Dylan who had once been able to transform himself in an instant, to astonish with the speed of his changes, was chained to an idea. He could protest all he liked that his working habits were misrepresented. For the media, for his audience, he was the man on the never-ending tour.
His exasperated response has become familiar since he advised readers of the sleeve notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong album to avoid becoming ‘bewildered by the Never-Ending Tour chatter’. That particular tour had ended, he wrote, ‘in ’91 with the departure of guitarist G.E. Smith’. Since then, Dylan has treated interviewers to variations on the theme of ‘Playing is a job. My trade’ (to Sweden’s Aftonbladet in 1997), or to discourses on longevity in the performing arts. A typical example of the latter appeared in Rolling Stone in May 2009.4
You never heard about Oral Roberts and Billy Graham being on some Never Ending Preacher Tour. Does anybody ever call Henry Ford a Never Ending Car Builder? Is Rupert Murdoch a Never Ending Media Tycoon? What about Donald Trump? Does anybody say he has a Never Ending Quest to build buildings? Picasso painted well into his 90s. And Paul Newman raced cars in his 70s. Anybody ever say that Duke Ellington was on a Never Ending Bandstand Tour? But critics apply a different standard to me for some reason. But we’re living in an age of breaking everything down into simplistic terms, aren’t we? These days, people are lucky to have a job. Any job. So critics might be uncomfortable with me. Maybe they can’t figure it out. But nobody in my particular audience feels that way about what I do.
The intensity of this rebuttal suggested a man who was sick and tired of being buried under still another pile of legend. There was also a hint, however, of something like fear, fear of retirement, fear of the road’s end, fear of having to decide what else he might do with himself. He wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight.
Anybody with a trade can work as long as they want. A welder, a carpenter, an electrician. They don’t necessarily need to retire. People who have jobs on an assembly line, or are doing some kind of drudgery work, they might be thinking of retiring every day. Every man should learn a trade. It’s different than a job. My music wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early.
This otherwise unimpeachable defence overlooks the fact that the speaker had spent the best part of eight years (1966 to 1974) staying as far away from the public stage as possible. Even when he was performing in the years before and afterwards, the former ‘song and dance man’ did not talk about his work in terms of a trade or a vocation. And what did Dylan mean, exactly, by claiming that his music ‘wasn’t made to take me from one place to another so I can retire early’? It sounded as though he was lashed to the wheel, forbidden by the music itself to alter course. At the time of the interview he was 67, about to turn 68, and well beyond the usual age for early retirement.
He won’t allow the adjective ‘never-ending’ to be attached to his concert schedule and yet he describes his annual peregrinations as a task to which he is bound. He has millions of miles under his belt. After a quarter of a century a map of Dylan’s travels across the continents would probably resemble a chart of the planet’s prevailing winds and ceaseless tides. As 2013 began, plans were being laid for his return to Japan and Australia. For those who track Dylan in perpetual motion, the fun quiz game in the twenty-first century is to name a city he has not yet visited. For all that, the idea that he is forbidden from retiring by the demands of art is, at best, an appropriately poetic conceit.
He doesn’t have to do this. Sometimes he sounds as though he has neither a desire nor a taste for it, but he certainly has the wealth and the opportunities to allow him to take up any other pursuit he might fancy. Yet touring is what he does. More precisely, it seems that today, after everything, Bob Dylan only truly exists through and within public performances. He has been known to make a virtue of the fact. But when yet another inn
ocent dope of a journalist tells this Ancient Mariner that his voyage is unending, he recoils. Just when did Dylan shoot the albatross?
Neither did he label his touring schedule ‘never-ending’ nor once conspire in the elaborate accompanying mythology. That much is true. As Michael Gray has demonstrated in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), it was a helpful journalist for Q magazine who turned a question about tours into a printed statement by his subject.5 All that Dylan said in an interview on Rhode Island in October of 1989 was, ‘Oh, it’s all the same tour.’ From a single casual remark an edifice of speculation and theory has been constructed. Yet even while knowing full well that Dylan detests and rejects the adjective, journalists, authors and diehard fans still refuse to relinquish their Never-Ending Tour. Sometimes a legend is too good to waste.
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In 1988, the featured artist and his band picked up speed soon enough. Even as he struggled to sell records, Dylan began to acquire a new reputation as a concert performer. His choices from his vast catalogue of songs became more eclectic. For those who remembered Dylan the folk singer – and for plenty of those who did not – the traditional pieces performed with only Smith as an accompanist provided another source of fascination. Reviewing one show towards the end of the tour, Michael Gray would observe that ‘Dylan’s avid alignment with such material, for the first time in more than two decades, holds out tantalising possibilities as to where he might land next time he jumps’.6 In the meantime, shows grew longer, the critics warmer. At the end of July, Edna Gundersen of USA Today was writing of the tour as ‘the sleeper hit of the season’ and quoting Rolling Stone magazine’s welcome for the performer’s ‘extraordinary no-frills rock & roll’.7 At Berkeley, on the third night, Dylan enjoyed the first of several triumphs. Soon enough, the tour was being extended.
The emerging argument in the artist’s defence was that, with his vast stock of songs, record sales no longer really mattered. He began to make the point himself: he was a performer, first and foremost. His real work happened on stage. The recordings were sketches, at best, mere glimpses of the art attempted and frustrated in the alienating confines of the cursed recording studio. Only in performance could the songs be fully realised. Before July was out, Dylan was telling USA Today’s readers: