Somethin' is Happenin', But You Don't Know What It Is...

So after a great deal of anticipation I went to the Dylan concert at Ernie Shore Field last Friday night. This was an extremely good experience, and much of the anxiety I have experienced in my life over my hometown and its shortcomings was quelled by this event, where several thousand members of my community came together and listened attentively to a variety of selections from Dylan’s forty-year-old song book. There was a great deal of good music played in many styles, rock-and-roll, country, blues, and jazz were all represented expertly by the four acts on the bill, but it was Dylan himself who carried the most gravitas, singing of biblical redemption and government indifference in the trademark scowling drawl of his later career. Politically and historically tuned-in personages could not help but draw correlations with current events in Dylan’s lyrics, and the band stood behind him like a mythical, musical supreme court, with grave faces of condemnation, and guitars used like amplified gavels sounding judgment on those who listened but could not hear. To some, Dylan may now represent self-parody, but this is only true if the parody includes endless reinvention which, if not always fresh, is remarkably inventive in its use of traditional forms. Columns and columns have been written about Dylan’s rearrangement of his own material, but, in essence, the songs remain similar to the original, with time signatures and phrasings being the only discernable discrepancy. He may do “Hard Rain” in ¾ but isn’t this just an example of Dylan demonstrating the organic evolution of the art through the artist? It’s still the same song with the same words. We don’t criticize Robert Frost when a new addition of his work comes out with a different book jacket. We’ve never had a poet/musician/recording artist before Dylan; no one knows how it’s supposed to be done, so Dylan is figuring it out. Just let the man work.
As for his stage presence, Dylan seemed like a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic prophet. He would jerk back from his little keyboard, give a quick sideways glance at the crowd and then lean into his microphone and sneer the next line. It was difficult to tell if he was grinning or wincing, but either way there was a medicine-show, southern-soothsayer quality to his expressions that indicated a playful masquerade was being perpetrated on the press and the masses. Hell, Dylan doesn’t give a shit if the press likes him or not, he has always shot them the finger and showed them up for phonies, and why?—they never were able to pigeon-hole him, and still aren’t, and many of them hate him for it, and he is still great for this.
The chump who writes for our local paper wrote a scathing review of the Dylan concert. In all honesty, his words made me less angry than very, very sad. The idea that hacks like this can pass uninformed and unenlightened judgment on Dylan—hacks who can so wrongly misinterpret, or downright ignore, Dylan’s message—means that there is a larger problem; we live in a society where the truth-tellers are attacked by arrogant and attention-seeking imbeciles whose ignorance is winning the battle for cultural excellence in our country. Dylan takes his own mythology and pokes fun at it, while using musical forms which he is doing anything but poking fun at, and provides an experience that, as it did in his early days, provides an amalgamation of the American ethos. Dylan is older, wiser and oh so very relevant.