Dylan's options not used up

The 83 year old is playing a similar set every night, but it is surely his love of the material and not an end-of-the-road rut that yields such consistency. Thoughts from Davenport's Adler Theatre

At the start of the pandemic, I joined an online group that was reading 10 pages of War and Peace every morning, with the idea of getting through the book in the first few months of the lockdown. I kept up the habit, and I now have read a few dozen books from my "When am I ever going to get to this?" list — mainly doorstops, mostly fiction but some non-fiction, mostly classic but a few contemporary.

It has made me a better reader and a better cultural consumer. I understand references that I never did before. Alluding to Moby Dick? I get it. Making reference to the Count of Monte Cristo? I understand where you’re coming from.

What does all of this have to do with Bob Dylan's performance on Tuesday evening at the Adler Theatre in Davenport? Well, I think this practice also made me better able to appreciate Bob Dylan's songwriting, particularly his work in the last 20 years as he has created songs out of a patchwork of folk song references, lifted phrases, and oddball pop culture ephemera.

There are so many reviews of Bob Dylan shows out in the world, particularly the many shows he has played on the three-years-long-and-counting Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, that it seems pointless to offer another. Is this show appreciably different from the ones he played in Omaha and Sioux Falls just prior to this one, or from the show he'll play tonight in Peoria? Doubtful. But what I can do is offer some insights about what seeing Bob Dylan sparked in my brain, because a Bob Dylan show is a very different thing depending on who is listening.

I’m between big books in that morning ritual. I just wrapped up a wonderful history of Iowa¹, and I’m casting about for the next tome to pull from the stack. In the meantime, having just listened to a podcast interview with writer Lucy Sante, I have been meaning to find a collection of her work that I knew was somewhere on my shelves. Looking for something to read this morning, I spied the spine of Kill All Your Darlings, pulled it from the shelf, and started reading Greil Marcus‘s introduction. Because this is Marcus, it wasn’t more than a few paragraphs (three to be exact) before he mentioned Bob Dylan, specifically citing something Sante covers in the collection. I excitedly flipped forward in the book and found Sante's piece about Dylan's Chronicles. I started to peruse it, but I kept returning to the lines Marcus had quoted from it in his introduction. It seemed to unlock last night's show for me.

"Everything seemed possible then," Sante writes of how Bob Dylan, in his book Chronicles, Volume 1, situates himself early in his career, but Sante doesn't rest with the cliché, which is to say he doesn't insult either Dylan or his reader with it. He redeems the cliché, returns it to real speech, by making it speak: "Everything seemed possible then; no options had been used up and nothing had yet been sacrificed."

I sat with that thought for quite a while, thinking about how it related to the show I had seen the night before. With my phone sitting useless in a Yondr pouch in my pocket and nothing to write with at hand last night, I couldn’t follow my usual concert-going process of jotting notes. I simply experienced the show. I did come home and write a couple of paragraphs, but it was disappointingly rote when I sought revelation.

What struck me most in hindsight about Dylan's performance was that after a career of confounding and subverting expectations, he has settled into the typical arena rock stance of playing a consistent set from night to night, stopping only to mention the name of the town by way of individualizing the set. One wonders how satisfying it can be for an artist like Dylan to do this, let alone for his sidemen. Think of bassist Tony Garnier, who for decades has had to stay on his toes, watching the boss for a sign that things have changed. Now, he gets a nod from Dylan on a song or two to indicate that the leader is done noodling on the piano and they should wrap it up.

Circling back to Sante, I thought of this in a broader context. Have Dylan’s options been used up? Finally, after 60 years of performing, is he left with doing what everyone else does? I don't think so. I think it is clear, after three years of Dylan playing fairly static sets that always include nearly all of Rough and Rowdy Ways, that he is quite fond of these songs. The first time I saw Dylan in 2000, you would have been hard pressed to know what album he had released most recently, with only "Love Sick" drawn from the recent Time Out of Mind. Contrast this with Tuesday night, where he played nine songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways, skipping only "Murder Most Foul." Gone — for now — are the days when there seemed to be no correlation between Dylan the recording artist and Dylan the performer.

Yet he also played plenty to keep the more casual fan satisfied, weaving classics into the tapestry of newer songs. He started with a languid, piano-driven "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" that burst into a full rocker, setting a tone for the evening, with songs starting one way and ending another, the shift largely driven by whatever Dylan was playing.

Despite the current consistency of the setlist, Dylan still finds ways to confound his audience. Nearly every song was well into the first chorus before the cheers passed like a wave through the crowd as a telltale phrase sparked relieved recognition. Though I (eventually) recognized and enjoyed every song in the set, I did think more than once about the fact that the face value of my seat probably would’ve covered the tickets and dinner before the show for the other Dylan shows I have seen, so I understand people wanting an optimal experience and being a bit restless if that equates to knowing everything Dylan plays. Still, I can’t imagine being willing to spend that kind of money without having some idea of what to expect (even if that means knowing that you can't really know what to expect).

The opposite of this was the occasional moment where more learned members of the audience could flex, as with the woman near me who started clapping as he entered the final line of "Crossing the Rubicon" as if to let everyone know she was aware of exactly where we were in what is probably the least-known (and to these ears least successful) tune of the night.

There were plenty of successful songs, however. Of the Rough and Rowdy Ways material, "Black Rider" and "My Own Version of You" hit hardest for me, the live context opening up the tunes in a way that often eluded me when listening to the album, even if the arrangements were largely the same. In fact, the songs from this record hewed closely to their recorded arrangements for the most part, so it was the other material that was often most satisfying. "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Watching the River Flow" were rousing highlights, while the closing acoustic-based take of "Every Grain of Sand" was sublime.

Having seen Dylan twice previously, I can say this was his best vocal performance, and best instrumental performance. He stabbed at his guitar in 2000, and leaned on the organ in 2007. Here, he played wonderful piano that led and colored the songs, occasionally turning to pick up a guitar lying on the drum riser and contributing bluesy riffs and solos.

I first saw Dylan live when I was 29 and he was twice my age at 58. At the time he seemed old; I joked in my review of the show that his creative resurgence at that time might have been sparked by being ticked off when his AARP card arrived in the mail. Now, 25 years later and as someone who has angrily tossed his own card in the trash when it hit the mailbox, Dylan makes more sense to me than ever, and I'm glad for a chance to see him perform.

This was the best of my three live Dylan experiences — the best sound, the best performance, the best setlist — and if it's the last time I see him (something Dylan fans surely think every time they attend a show), it will leave me satisfied.

More than a few stray thoughts:

• When Dylan turned to pick up his guitar, the band was in a small circle facing one another. Sitting in the balcony seemed to be a strategic move, as Dylan was surely obscured much of the time by the piano for those on the main floor. He rose to his feet occasionally, flipping through pages in front of him, seeming in these moments to acknowledge that there was a crowd there to see him.

• It would’ve been interesting to know how many people were there because they watched "A Complete Unknown" and wanted to recapture some of that feeling or just check in with him before it’s too late. To that end, it would have been obvious to add "Like a Rolling Stone" to the set… which is surely why Dylan didn't do so.

• Hearing Dylan recite his macabre shopping list in the first few lines of "My Own Version of You" —

  All through the summers and into January
  I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
  Looking for the necessary body parts
  Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

  — made me think of the way he assembles his songs, particularly over the past 20 years or so, a phrase from here and an allusion from there and suddenly these pieces with varying levels of familiarity have become something new. Is he idealizing a lover or sharing the recipe?

• My worries about Dylan's voice were unfounded. He regained his voice during the Covid layoff, and despite having toured aggressively in the time since, he was as clear as he was on Rough and Rowdy Ways.

• As "When I Paint My Masterpiece" began, my friend turned to me and said, "Is this what I think it is?" "No," I replied, expecting he was hearing the bouncing hook to "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that Dylan has employed as backing for the tune on this tour. I was wrong; he was hearing "Puttin' on the Ritz."

• There was a small cheer during "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" when Dylan sang "Key West is the place to go, Down by the Gulf of Mexico." Apparently the woke resistance has reached Davenport.

• Anton Fig! A familiar sight behind the drums for anyone who watched this beret-sporting drummer in the band of David Letterman's "Late Night" for years. I would have loved to see Jim Keltner behind the kit, but Fig more than made the spot his own with inventive playing that drove the songs and added touches that sparked the performances.

BONUS 1: Ray Padgett’s wonderful “Flagging Down the Double E’s” Substack about the live Dylan experience has a great review that offers more context. I’m not one to follow every setlist or track down recordings of every show, so I had no idea how special it was for Dylan to have played guitar on four tunes last night. Read on for more context:

Last Night in Davenport (by Travis Vogan)

BONUS 2: In my old newspaper days, I was actually paid to go see my first Dylan concert and write about it, below, for paid subscribers, is the piece I wrote about that April 3, 2000, show at the Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids.