When Bob really meant it

Let me first say that my headline does not imply that in the thousands of concerts Bob Dylan has turned in since then - and continues to, at 85 years young - that he doesn’t mean what he sings.

Like he said on what is one of my favorite of his recent songs, “Goodbye, Jimmy Reed” - “I can’t sing a song I don’t understand.” But when you’ve had the kind of tumultuous career that he has and a life that seems to be as unsettled as any creative person you can think or even imagine, there are plenty of times when Bob, as many, many unsuspecting fans will attest, seems to mail it in.

I’ve seen him in concert ten times and that’s never been the case. Not even close. But I know many people who have gone to see him and been disappointed that he didn’t play his greatest hits. Or if he did, it was unrecognizable until the chorus. Or there was some other issue like him wearing a hoodie or not saying, “Hey folks, it’s great to be in Cleveland.”

He’s there. That’s what he thinks about wherever you are, most recently for me in Dothan, Alabama which is not a place where you would think someone like Bob Dylan would show up. But he did and played a great show, those skinny legs of his couldn’t stay still underneath the keyboard. He was having fun.

It’s a lot to listen to, a lot to handle, like Bob Dylan and The Hawks in 1966.

Since one of the greatest of all my bootlegs, the “Holy Grail” of bootlegs was him playing at the Royal Albert Hall - or so it said - I could not wait to hear the whole tour. BTW: The show turned out to be from the Manchester Free Trade Hall a few days before the Royal Albert Hall performance which ended the tour.

And Dylan and the Hawks, bone-tired by this point of many things, the backbreaking tour itself, the boos and chants and angry comments from the audience (Which Dylan, in a perverse way, sort of enjoyed) play as if their feet are on fire, rocking through a greatest hits (at the time) set list night after night after night.

From the films we’ve seen - and No, I do not understand why the usually wise and foresighted Columbia Records or Sony or whoever would make that call - has not issued a concert DVD - one side acoustic, one side electric - from this tour (and judging from what we saw in Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” they have the clips!) Bob was in a troubled, drug-addled state and perhaps, may have been sensitive of sharing that sort of thing with kids at home, the wife and all. On the other hand, “Eat The Document” opens with him snorting something off the top of a piano so he couldn’t have been that worried about it.

As for the shows themselves and the 36-CD set, I’ve listened to all of them. Partially for the third edition of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” which included a comment on every single CD, partially because Dylan is so INTO these performances that it’s almost as if he expects he won’t have a long life - which might have seemed a good bet at the time - and that everything he wanted to be remembered for was coming off those stages and coming off loud.

While the Manchester Trade Hall show does take the cake, performance-wise, many of the other shows are terrific, too and worth listening to. It’s hard-core Dylan, so brace yourself. Like he told Robbie at the time, they were “drilling these songs into people,” which is a good and accurate description of how it sounds and probably how it felt.

He’s off now until a show in Oslo, Norway on October 17 so it’s always fun to wonder what Bob Dylan does when he isn’t performing somewhere. Is he painting. Or writing one of those weird letters like Yogananda to Spade Cooley or Mark Twain to Rudolf Valentino. (My guess is getting AI to do it or some invaluable, nameless assistant. But with Bob, you never know.)

Or maybe he’s jotting down a few lines that occur to him and writing them down on sheets of hotel stationery so he can throw them into a box, like he did when filming “Masked And Anonymous” with Larry Charles, then letting Larry pick some of them out and try to figure out what in the hell Bob was thinking of when he wrote them.

People, including me, three editions into my own Bob Dylan excavation with a bunch more Substacks, including this one, ready for Volume Four, can’t get enough of trying to figure out the inscrutable Bob Dylan. Who has been ahead of the pack since he started and will stay there, I suspect, until, sadly, it will one day be all over.

We will never be fully able, I don’t think, to truly appreciate all that he accomplished in his remarkably long career. I recently read Robert Polito’s “After The Flood” and am not quite ready to write about it yet. I will, though, I promise.

In the meantime, if you haven’t listened to the 1966 tour or picked up that whopping 36-CD set - $129.99 from what I see online - to me, it’s well worth it. You’re hearing Bob on an assortment of stages, backed by the greatest group that would ever support him, when he really meant every word he sang. And it sounded it.

Author John Nogowski has written three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography” which is available now on Amazon or by order at your local bookstore. It includes every studio album, many bootlegs, commentary on his films, books, speeches, all sorts of Dylan stuff, including an annotated bibliography. This is a key because I read Britta Lee Shain’s “Seeing The Real You At Last” so you didn’t have to. You’re welcome.