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Bob Dylan |
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Madison Square Garden
New York, NY
11.11.02 |
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review by Jesse Jarnow
Bob Dylan scholar Paul Williams was recently quoted as saying, "If Shakespeare was in your midst, putting on shows at the Globe Theatre, wouldn't you feel the need to be there?" And so, on the night of November 11th, a healthy crowd gathered at Madison Square Garden for the first of Dylan's two New York appearances on the current leg of his never-ending cross-continental ramble, with tickets running from $128 for the good seats down to a $38 admittance for the rafter-bound groundlings. Following introduction by way of a tongue-in-cheek summary of Dylan's career (including mentions of substance abuse, finding Jesus, and other adventures), Dylan and his band wandered out onto the arena stage, which was covered in a checkerboard pattern of gigantic black and white squares.
Dylan looked positively tiny as he stood behind a keyboard and launched the band into "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," the opening track off 2001's excellent Southern-gentlemen-on-the-skids record, Love And Theft. Taking a cocksure stance with legs spread, Dylan spent a bulk of the show behind the keyboard. It was an interesting change for Dylan (buy gear), whose stage persona for the past few years has been that of an intentionally rundown performer. He has careened from county fairs to arenas, treating sports stadiums such as Madison Square Garden not as smoke-machine blanketed canvases for rock spectacle but as the kinds of places where Ringling Brothers' circus has played for the past 60 years. Yet his take on the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" unmistakably rocked—more vital, perhaps, than any versions produced by its own authors of late. The song also fit in perfectly with the characters and songs populating Love And Theft, an album that seems to come from an implacable point in American history. Dylan's bandmates, the core of which have been playing together for over a decade, seemed almost as mysterious as their boss, emerging out of the wings like the ghostly baseball players in Field Of Dreams. They've also become a crack unit, functioning not entirely unlike the Grateful Dead in their pure and loose American flexibility.
Over the 20 song set, the band proved particularly adept at a mix of the swinging hot jazz found all over Love And Theft and Buddy Holly-style rave-ups on songs like "Honest With Me," "Bye And Bye," and "Summer Days," as well as on the fabled new interpretations of Dylan's songbook. Often times, the band's treatments of older numbers were so foreign to the original versions that it took a hard listen to the lyrics before it was possible to discern what they were—a fact complicated by Dylan's legendarily pinched voice. Despite the way they often came out, Dylan was trying, delivering articulate and passionate vocals. And, hell, it was great.
The show's setlist was a mixed-up tangle of odd and satisfying choices, with Dylan delving deep. Notably, the second number up was "Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread," written and recorded with The Band in Woodstock in 1967 and never played live before. The hopped-up socially conscious surrealism of "Tombstone Blues" (off Highway 61 Revisited) was a nice reach, as were Dylan's surprising covers. Besides "Brown Sugar," Dylan also played Don Henley's "The End of Innocence," a scraggily ironic take on Neil Young's "Old Man," and a reading of the ailing Warren Zevon's "Mutineer."
Finally, there were the Dylan tunes, songs that it felt Important to be Experiencing at a Bob Dylan Concert on Veterans' Day 2002, with America perched on the brink of another oil-lusting conflict with Iraq: "Masters Of War," "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carrol," "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," and an ominous version of "All Along The Watchtower." The songs were typically retooled to avoid sing-alongs, but that actually worked to their advantage. Faced with not being able join in, fans were theoretically forced to listen. They were never worked to a frenzy, and that was just fine. The point of Dylan's protests were rarely to set black and white dichotomies, and they still aren't.
"The hour is getting late," Dylan sang on "Watchtower." It was, and is. The houselights purred upwards, and the Garden emptied out into the uncertainty of a world once again not quite at war.
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