Rachel and I went to see Bob Dylan perform last night at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va. We were unsure, even at the end, which of the six guys on stage was Dylan. We guessed, and guessed wrong. That was the degree of the fuck you, you fucking fucks that Bob Dylan leveled at his audience last night. It was magnificent.
Bob Dylan has been famously furious at his audiences ever since July 25, 1965 — exactly 61 years ago today — when he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival by purists who disapproved of his embracing the electric guitar.
To be fair, Rachel and I entered this venue last night as naifs — we had not read much about his current tour. We had not merely been unaware of what he was doing, we had deliberately avoided it. We both subscribe to Rachel’s Rules of Order, which exist in defiance of the general rules of enthusiasts of the performing arts. For example, we generally do not read advance reviews and do not even deign to accept the Playbill before watching a stage play, on the grounds that a work of art should surprise you, not arrive pre-chewed by critics who are expert enough to be experts but not talented enough to be onstage themselves.
I admit we were forewarned of the perils that lay ahead. We approached the venue on foot (Rachel’s ma and pa live within a few woodsy blocks of Wolf Trap) and encountered this grotesquerie in the parking lot, the only car we could see that was parked in an unauthorized spot:
Who the hell drives a Cybertruck to a Dylan concert? We prayed it was not Dylan.
As is his custom, Dylan and his band took the stage in silence and unannounced, and just started playing. There was not even a mic check. The very first piece was initially unrecognizable — in concert, Dylan dramatically changes the arrangements from the album versions because (I theorize) he despises applause when the audience recognizes a song and claps stupidly for familiarity, not quality. We eventually realized this was “Watching The River Flow.”
That’s when things got really hostile.
Wolf Trap has huge screens all over the arena so people seated far away can see what is going on on stage. We were high up, in the loge seats. For the two opening acts, the cameras danced from the lead performer to the band, with closeups and fadeaways and what have you. For Dylan’s set, the camera remained steady, implacably focused on the entire stage at such a remove, and in such darkness, that you got a better view of what was going on by squinting right at the performers, down there, 300 feet away. A sniper’s view, without a scope.
So. Hostility.
Dylan is 85. The audience was surprisingly young. It shocked us. I think I figured out the key to the demographics. A bearded Millennial in the row behind us bellowed, as a joke, “Hey, that’s not Timothee Chalamet, it’s someone else!” I think he was on to something.
The amazing thing was — who was the someone else? You could not see mouths move from our distance. We briefly considered that it might have been the sound man at his console, but in the end decided it was the lead guitarist, on the left, who also doubled on the doghouse bass, and who wore a stiff-brimmed Dylan hat. We left the arena after the show still thinking this, until we consulted the Web. It wasn’t. It was the schnook in the white hoodie in the center, playing the electric keyboard.
There had been no clues given. Neither Dylan nor any other band member had ever said hello, or or howyadoin’, or uttered even a single word that was not a lyric to a song.
Dylan’s choice of songs was eclectic, almost … random. His arrangements were weird. His voice was great — gravelly but rich. It was like gold-bearing alluvial gravel lying on the bedrock of the Klondike River in the Yukon. (I decided to get fancy-colorful there, in honor of Dylan, the greatest songwriter of modern times.)
His songs were magnificent. They were not chosen, or sung, randomly. Dylan was messing with our heads. I cannot prove this, but I would bet my house — if I owned a house — that the musical intro to “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (“Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble/ ancient footprints are everywhere….”) was for some playful reason an homage to “Istanbul/(Not Constantinople) by Jimmy Kennedy and most recently covered by They Might Be Giants.
He also played the angry, snarly, vicious It Ain’t Me, Babe, but sang it like a dippy pop tune. Rachel said, “He’s doing the Turtles cover.”
He also did something so weird it defies explanation. In his set, he included “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” which includes the lyric “You won’t amount to much, the people all said / Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head…”. One of his two opening acts was Jimmie Vaughan, whose key gimmick is playing a guitar behind his head.
Is Dylan mad at everyone???
During the concert, the following conversations occurred in our seats:
Me: Do we really not know which is Dylan?
Rachel: No way to know. He could be the guy sitting next to me.
Me: Wherever he is, he’s pissed. He’s not gonna be doing an encore.
Rachel: Right. But that means he’ll be doing an encore!
Me: You’re right! But it will be “Blowin’ in the Wind!”
Rachel: And he’ll do it straight. Like 1963.
He didn’t do an encore. Dylan’s final song was “I Shall be Released.” It was the first and only time in his 90-minute set — right at the end of the song — that we heard his signature harmonica wail, and knew for sure Dylan was there. Somewhere. Probably on stage.
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Thank you. Tomorrow, the Weekend Gene Pool, where you will be getting an unusual challenge.
Here’s your usual challenge for today:
I have nothing in particular against Bob Dylan, though he is No. 1 on my list of People Whose Songs would Sound Better if Somebody Else Sang Them.
"critics who are expert enough to be experts but not talented enough to be onstage themselves."
That's not fair. Criticism is a different field from performing. There is no more reason that a critic should be talented enough to perform than that a performer should be talented enough to write criticism.