Flak Magazine: Bob Dylan's Concert at Philharmonic Hall, 05.20.04

"Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!" sings Bob Dylan in "When I Paint My Masterpiece." That was 30-odd years ago and was meant ironically. These days, Dylan traffics in the land of Coca-Cola on occasion, with increasingly bizarre results. Witness Dylan guesting as himself on television's "Dharma & Greg"; Dharma (Jenna Elfman) tries out for a band, to show off her drum chops. Bandleader: Bob Dylan. After attempting a backbeat with designs on funkiness, Dharma informs Dylan, "That's kinda too funky for your style, eh?" Dylan gamely answers, "Not at all." Roll credits.

More recently, Dylan can be seen trolling moodily in a Victoria's Secret ad, pencil-thin moustache impeccably groomed. (Lewis Black, on "The Daily Show," complained that, thanks to Dylan, he can no longer masturbate to the V.S. catalogue.)

It might be unsettling to see a leading voice of 1960s counterculture hawking lingerie during a period of American history that can certainly be considered troubled. Dylan, however, either never craved the status or only accepted it as long as it was useful. "I've stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason to be written or a motive to be sung," Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1966. "Anyway, message songs, as everybody knows, are a drag. It's only college newspaper editors and single girls under 14 that could possibly have time for them... Whoever it is that listens to my songs owes me nothing. How could I possibly have any responsibility to any kind of thousands?"

Before such remarks, before he plugged in at Newport and nauseated Pete Seeger fans, before he was called Judas for going electric in England (an insult that can be heard quite clearly on Bootleg Series Volume Four, recorded in Manchester), Dylan was singing songs that he would derisively refer to as "arsenic music, or perhaps Phaedra music." Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall is an oft-bootlegged engagement now given a major-label release, and it finds Dylan at the tail end of his Guthrie period and about to dive headlong into his Rimbaud years, which are among his best. "My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing," he said. "The newer songs are about the same nothing — only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere. But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs are about."

Three of the newer songs — "Gates of Eden," "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," and "Mr. Tambourine Man" — were performed on this Halloween night, some time before they were released on album. Dylan may have perceived uneasiness with an audience who came to hear "The Times They Are A-Changin'"; after performing "Gates of Eden," he jokingly cautioned them against being scared of the song. "It's just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I'm masquerading."

Protest songs dot the set list, from "Who Killed Davey Moore?" to "Talkin' John Birch Society Paranoid Blues," "With God on Our Side" to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." These are terrific songs, cutting and smart, but nothing like the torrent of lyrics that is "It's All Right, Ma." The strength and limitation of the album is in its transience, its observance of an artist about to forego asking concertgoers who killed Davey Moore, why and what's the reason for, in favor of:

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

"I've never written any song that begins with the words 'I've gathered you here tonight...'" That's hardly a ringing endorsement of message music, and it's a fair assessment of today's crop of singer-songwriters, who have skipped their own Guthrie phases to find what Dylan described as "that thin, wild mercury sound." Today's solo musician is an insular being, and the voice of dissension in popular music seldom reaches past the completion of a rhymed couplet in a hip-hop track. (Rap, apologies to Chuck D, is no longer the CNN for black people. Ice-T once ended an album with, "Fuck Tipper Gore, Bush and his crippled bitch"; now he works for Dick Wolf.)

Dylan prefers working on his music in obscurity, or so he says, and yet solo artists necessarily draw their listeners into their interior world whether listeners like it or not. Consider three recent projects by David Dondero, Ron Fountenberry and Jason Crawford, all indie singer-songwriters with less than 10 albums between them, substantial chops and an impenetrability they haven't yet earned. Their The Transient, The Incredible Moses Leroy Become the Soft.Lightes (under the moniker the Incredible Moses Leroy), and How to Make Millions in Real Estate (as Grey Does Matter) respectively, are all projects of versatility and ambition. The artists each make their case as virtuosos in their field — Crawford in particular, who plays every instrument heard on his album.

The music is all quite good, but lacks a sense of event. Dylan was fortunate enough to build a name in the arena of the folk-protest movement, and his musical announcement "don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters" freed him. Not only were his later albums masterworks, they gained immeasurable in tension and scope by reacting against an earlier context. The latter three artists have worked credibly and diligently to unlock secrets in their music, but we know precious little about them to begin with, so the journey is, in a sense, too personal to be engaging. Individual effort to create something new is attractive, but without context, it leaves one wanting. (Not for nothing do Fountenberry and Crawford work under faux band names.)

Dondero, Fountenberry and Crawford needn't do a 180 and implore listeners to have fun tonight and wang chung tonight. But sometimes a specific and limiting point of view in music is an important thing to establish and then abandon. Thom Yorke speaks admiringly of Tom Waits' assertion that musicians ought to challenge themselves by setting down the instruments they know and understand and making music with instruments they've never played. Yorke and Radiohead were inspired by Waits, among other things, to depart from the guitar heavy-songs that made their name and insured their fan base, citing creative entropy. They continue, with each album, to develop and deepen their sound by radicalizing it. The impulse is admirable, even if some of their output (Kid A) leaves you cold.

Dylan needed "Blowin' in the Wind" to get to Blood on the Tracks. If Jason Crawford, for one, went to a coffee house and made a recording of a dozen new tracks, in front of a neutral audience, on topics such as the unfortunate high schooler in Prosser, Washington, for his own edification, who knows what the follow-up to Real Estate might sound like?

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)