Older than That Now: Bob Dylan at Campanelli Stadium

With his gaunt face, pencil mustache, and long black coat, Bob Dylan these days looks more like Vincent Price than the punk laureate of yore. He shuffled onstage last Sunday with a stripped-down band consisting of two guitars, one bass, one drums. Dylan did not once pick up a guitar during the set, did not take center stage save for a brief moment or two, but sat at the far left with a small electric keyboard and vocal mike. Apart from the song lyrics, the only phrase that came out of his mouth was a single thank you about halfway through, a brief introduction of the musicians at the end. Though Dylan has never exactly been a chatterbox onstage, his concerts have usually contained a few moments of offhand monologue, solipsistic though they may be. But on Sunday, virtually no remarks to the capacity crowd. No famously telling hecklers that they were liars--there were no hecklers. Dylan seemed completely disengaged from the audience. And from where I sat, much of the audience seemed fairly disengaged from him.

Not that he played a bad show. In many respects, he played a great show. From the start, the band rocked hard with a tight, fast version of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” a concert standby, but tonight cooking hotter than the similarly arranged but artier version with Robbie Robertson and Co. His backing musicians played off each other like a proverbial machine, though they lacked the distinctive personality of The Band or of the classic, era-defining sessions with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. As song followed hard upon song, Dylan barked his lyrics into the mike with impeccable timing. And if he delivered certain lines with what some fans call his “wolfie” voice, a horror-movie gnarliness that goes all too well with the current physiognomy, it still had personality to spare. How many times before have we heard him change his voice? The man has presented another side of himself with almost every album. We’ll get used to this one.

But the crowd at Campanelli wasn’t there to get used to much of anything. I’m not sure that most of them were there for Dylan at all, but rather for his co-headliner Willie Nelson, who played for over an hour before Dylan came on. Willie is an old pro at flattering his audience, and he gave at least some of them what they came for: from his down-home folksiness when he introduced the players (most of whom seemed to be family members), to tossing several hats to the people near the stage (and donning one fan’s Red Sox cap for a while, to predictable cheers), to the benignly pugnacious patriotism of songs like “Living in the Promised Land” or the Texas flag that unfurled behind him at the start of “Whiskey River.” (Dylan, in cryptic response, played his set backed by a flag of a stylized eye.) Nelson’s set was squarely aimed at the too-much-red-meat faction, like the middle-aged guy in work boots who stomped throughout the set, and it worked. When he finished his last encore, a number of his fans left the stadium without waiting for the rest. Even before the show, the chatter we heard was not about acts you might normally associate with Dylan, like rock's other great survivors the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, also touring this summer. These people wore straw cowboy hats and dropped names like George Straight and Clint Black. These were not rock fans. This was a country crowd, through and through.

Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe. I’ve usually felt more or less in my element at the shows I’ve attended. But from the moment Sadi and I arrived to stand on line outside the gate, I was hit by a kind of cognitive dissonance. Were these fat, gray, sloppy people my contemporaries? Is this what had become of my generation? (This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife.) Sure we’ve all gotten older. I no longer have the brown, wavy locks I had as a young man. Dylan is no longer the thirty-something visionary gesturing like a shaman during “Isis,” as I saw him do in 1975 at the New Haven Coliseum. This wasn’t New Haven, where Jim Morrison had his legendary arrest for indecent exposure. This was Brockton, a small South Shore Massachusetts town with little to say for itself. And the people around us looked like they had never heard of Jim Morrison, and only vaguely of Bob Dylan.

But it’s not about age, or class, or education. It’s about hope, something the people around us didn’t seem to have in abundance. These were not the idealistic, romance-addled kids who followed Dylan in his heyday, who grooved on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and who knew both what the Weathermen were and which way the wind blows, or so they thought. Those kids had at least the illusory promise of youth, a naïve faith to keep them angry and shouting and alive. These aren’t even the purists who booed Dylan when he first walked out with Strat in hand—it’s hard to imagine these people ever having that kind of passion. I don’t know what they were listening to back when Dylan sported a Jewfro, cigarette, and truckloads of attitude, but I’m sure it wasn’t “Desolation Row.” This crowd looks like it’s been weaned from the start on nothing but vaguely belligerent, unreflecting frustration. Their hopes and dreams are pinned to getting by on the day job, putting that addition on the pool shack, getting the alimony check on time. There was a palpable surliness in the air that Sunday evening—at life, at the comparatively few young people in the audience (looking as out of place in this crowd as their grandparents would have at Woodstock), at the world for not loving us enough and at ourselves for not being the invincible guardian angels we like to fancy. No wonder the guy with boots at the end of our row stomped hard enough during Willie Nelson’s set to make the bleachers vibrate: how often does he get to feel that understood, that validated?

During intermission, I overhear the sour-faced woman behind us, the one who hasn’t quit complaining all evening, reassure her teenage daughter, whose idea this concert clearly wasn’t, that she’ll recognize Dylan when he comes on, since she’s “heard his music in movies and TV commercials.” Later, when Dylan does come on, I wonder if the kid actually does recognize anything. Maybe she caught Wonder Boys and stayed through the closing credits for “Things Have Changed,” which he plays at Campanelli with energy and the appropriate snarl. Or maybe she identifies the voice from Victoria’s Secret ads. More likely, despite her mother’s patronizing reassurances, she doesn’t recognize anything at all. Maybe she isn’t even listening. It’s all right, ma, I’m only bored silly.

It doesn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that nearly half the set list was taken up by songs from 2001’s Love and Theft, an album I confess never having bonded with as viscerally or intellectually as I did with masterpieces like Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, or Blood on the Tracks (call me retro). I still liked and admired Dylan for being on that stage, rocking harder at age 63 than ever before. I loved holding Sadi close as he rasped his way through “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”—an apt reminder that Dylan, too, knows his way around country music. I was glad to hear the band play so loud. I was glad that the show didn’t bear out my prediction of Dylan singing duets on “Girl from the North Country” with Willie Nelson in place of Johnny Cash. I was glad to see a few people in the field dancing with their children during the jumping, jiving finale “Summer Days.”

But what I didn’t feel, and what made the performance at Campanelli Stadium ultimately seem a bit cursory, was the sense of conviction and engagement that shone through in earlier Dylan concerts. No matter how many times he used to rework his material, no matter how much he bent and twisted those verses from performance to performance, he still sounded like he believed in them. These were his words, and he had written them for a reason. When he sang “It’s Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” on Before the Flood, you know he meant every line, and you can hear how the audience responded. Part of it, I admit, is that I hadn’t seen Dylan live in quite some time, and it was difficult not to compare him now with back then. But I remember him performing “Gates of Eden” at Radio City in the late 1980s, nearly a quarter century after its debut on Bringing It All Back Home, investing it with more passion and vitality than on the original record.

Dylan remains a great performer and his material will always have the ability to strike to the heart. But the rock-solid layer of absolute conviction underlying his best work, from the earnest, now legendary ballads of the early years to the bemused pain of recent songs like “Not Dark Yet,” never quite made it onstage. He might be having fun with the tunes, he might venture out for a weird jiggy-dance during one of the solos, but the old urgency, the daring was hard to find. Dylan may continue to reinvent himself as he has done so many times before. He may climb back onto the charts after being left for dead, as he did in 1997 with Time Out of Mind, an album devoted precisely to the loss of love and youth. He might win Oscars and accolades. But never again, I suspect, will he capture the pulse, and the ear, of a generation the way he did with “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and so many others in the space of so few years. Never again will he take the stage, as he did at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, and just by his presence eclipse all of the suddenly minor deities—Harrison and Clapton included—who had been standing there.

Just hear what has happened to “Rainy Day Women,” no matter how good it sounded on Sunday night. What a liberating piece of chutzpah that was when he first recorded it, what an incredible fuck-you to everyone who thought they had him figured out. Who but Dylan would have started off an album in 1966 with an oom-pah band, especially on the heels of “Rolling Stone”? Who else would have reinvented the song a few years later into danceable blues rock, again keeping it one step ahead of the packagers and pundits? But these days, Dylan seems to accept that what was once a revolutionary musical statement has evolved into a frat-boy joke, a party tune, an amiable toe-tapper to get the audience warmed up.

We might say this is a shame. Just as we might call it a travesty that our own personal Rimbaud is all growed up and hawking lingerie. The eclipse of our shared generation, its ideals and illusions, is coming more surely than any Altamont could presage. However sweet the sound, the word being handed down from the makeshift stage at Campanelli field is that nothing, no matter how heady, is forever. Not fame, not genius, not love, not adoration, not records, not audiences, not dreams. But in the meantime, Dylan is still Dylan, and the sneering brass descent that opens Blonde on Blonde still echoes pretty loudly. This is what time has brought us to, and as sad as it might be in some respects, it is what it is and the best we can do is go along for the ride. It is a ride on which Dylan accompanies us, as he always has, making the changes, weathering the storms, giving us a voice—a magnificent wreck of a voice by now, but a voice nonetheless, and still his, and still ours. And as we go down in the flood, he will continue to rock and roll until he, and we, can’t anymore. And after that the songs will remain, for as long as someone is around to remember them. It might not be dark yet, he is telling us, though it sure as hell is getting there. But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Mark Polizzotti

first published on blogcritics.org

return to para_site home page>>>