The irony is this: For a man who spent the first three decades of his career assiduously cultivating personal mystique like normal folks maintain stamp collections, Bob Dylan has since put a lot of time and energy in a willful destruction of that mystique. The norm in the 60s, 70s and portions of the 80s: abrupt stylistic turnarounds, well-timed bouts of seclusion along with unexpected but equally well-timed reappearances, and savvy manipulation of the press, all feeding his fans’ capacity for idolatry and willingness to speculate on Everything Dylan. The norm since 1988: a ferocious level (in Dylan terms, at least) of touring, something like 100+ shows annually, with a stripped-down ensemble on what has become known as the Never Ending Tour (N.E.T.). The end result: By undercutting the axiomatic image of the superstar act who cultivates mystique by only coming out to play when there’s product to promote, Dylan has created even more mystique for himself.
In the wake of the N.E.T., even the most well-armed Dylan biographers have been reduced to playing the “O Brother, Where Art Bob?” game. Recent efforts such as Clinton Heylin’s detailed, analytical Behind The Shades Revisited and Howard Sounes’ more celebrity journalism-oriented Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, while both excellent, engaging accounts, are hardly definitive. By the time the books were in stores, Dylan had already laid down several additional chapters in the N.E.T. (One readily envisions authors secretly wishing Dylan would take a Cobain-style shotgun cocktail or one last ascent to the porcelain throne a la Elvis — the better with which to pen the proverbial tidy conclusion!) So as it turns out — more irony — the N.E.T. has been far more rewarding an experience for fans than scholars.
Which is where a recent Dylan book, a 9-CD boxed set, and you, gentle readers, come in.
As a British Dylan fan of some uncommon yet self-aware obsession, Andrew Muir has transformed his experiences publishing a now-defunct Dylan fanzine (Homer the slut) into the book Razor’s Edge: Bob Dylan & the Never Ending Tour (Helter Skelter Publishing). In part, it’s a personalized chronicle of one fan following the N.E.T. concert trail; Muir’s account of his ’93 face-to-face audience with Dylan will strike a chord in anyone who’s ever sweated buckets and babbled Swahili in the presence of an idol. The book also offers a refreshingly opinionated assessment of Dylan The Performing Artist. The key to Dylan’s conversion from a jaded Entertainer to our premiere Troubadour, Muir contends, can be located on a Locarno, Switzerland, stage on October 5, 1987. There, stepping to the microphone, Dylan had an epiphany, which he would later relate in a Newsweek interview: “It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it. I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not. And all of a sudden everything just exploded. And I noticed that all the people out there… were looking at the main mike. After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.”
Which is precisely what Dylan attacked with a vengeance a few months later. He never looked back. Muir recounts a ’91 interview in which Dylan advised LA Times critic Robert Hilburn, “You’re either a player or you’re not a player… If you just go out every three years or so, like I was doing for a while, that’s when you lose touch. If you are going to be a performer, you’ve got to give it your all.” Muir’s book proceeds to detail an impressive battery of statistics supporting Dylan’s avowal. Among them: 12 different lineup variations of the band performing 1,277 shows from 1988-2000 for a total of 20,516 songs, of which 419 were different selections (“All Along the Watchtower” gets the nod, at 878 concert airings, for most-played), culled from Dylan’s massive war chest as well as his extensive repertoire of covers.
Ah, covers. Dylan’s propensity to go to the wells of other artists is frequently remarked upon as one of his more fascinating, and revealing, traits. Writes Muir, “What Dylan has always known is that there is the strength in, what we might roughly refer to as ‘popular music’ to move men’s hearts, to shift mountains, to open up the better side of ourselves that we keep hidden away… All these covers transformed by Dylan’s interpretative powers year after year in the N.E.T. — somebody should gather them altogether and put them out as a multi-CD box set.”
Wish duly granted. Stepping up to the plate is bootleg label Scorpio, whose Genuine Never Ending Tour Covers Collection 1988-2000 box set comprises 9 CDs and 162 tracks — 138 unique tunes plus 24 significant variations — that represent every known cover song (save one) unearthed in the course of the N.E.T.
It’s a handsome set. The discs are all housed in mini-LP jackets and a hinged/embossed 6″x6″ box; a 28-page booklet outlines the tracks’ origins, while a second 72-page book includes song lyrics. Soundwise, there’s the expected bootleg range, from “acceptable” to “pristine,” but in all instances the compilers tapped the best available cassette, DAT or extant CD bootleg sources.
Matters of sonics and packaging aside, however, it’s the scope of the project that makes Genuine Covers a crucial artifact. (Previous looks at the N.E.T. have invariably focused on highlights from a particular leg; Doberman’s 1990 London/Paris Anthology and 1995 European Tour, both five-disc sets, Scorpio’s own Rock of Ages 5-CD anthology of the Spring ’00 US tour and Crystal Cat’s sprawling 15-volume/30-disc series covering every stop on the Fall ’00 Euro tour come to mind.) On the one hand, even the casual fan will be fascinated by, say, one-off readings of Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark,” The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” or Hendrix’s “Dolly Dagger.” But given Dylan’s unchallenged preeminence as an American songwriter, his public utterances and movements arguably carry greater weight than most celebrities, and one is left pondering what the man’s concert choices say about his muse as well as our collective musical heritage.
The nine CDs are sequenced thematically rather than chronologically. For example, Disc 6, “Crooning ‘Neath The Moon,” spotlights Dylan the balladeer, from “Moon River” to “I’m In The Mood For Love” to “Across The Borderline” (Ry Cooder). Disc 8, “Country Cousins,” is heavy on Johnny Cash and Hank Williams as well as Lefty Frizzell and Steve Earle. Disc 5, “Folk-Rot,” features traditional folk classics such as “Duncan and Brady,” “Jack A Roe” and “Pretty Peggy-O,” while Disc 3, “Rock of Ages,” finds Dylan revisiting his spiritual roots (long after his notorious dalliance with Christianity) via “Peace in the Valley,” “Somebody Touched Me” and “Man of Constant Sorrow.” And so forth. At 162 songs, there’s a lot to absorb. Perhaps that suggests a further subtext of the set: Dylan the roving schoolmaster, an in-person variation on the old Alan Lomax archivist model, performing nightly from his Americana lectern.
“Imagine you had lived in the early 17th century and could have made it to a public oration by John Donne, you’d go, wouldn’t you?” proposes Muir in his book, in an offhand yet keen summary of just why Dylan still matters. Writes Muir, continuing with his Donne parallel, “You might have hankered for an inspired author’s reading of ‘The Sun Rising’ or some other masterpiece… Yet you may have been offered a gloomy treatise based on ‘The First Anniversary’ instead. Then again you just might have got the best, most passionate exploration of Donne’s thoughts and emotions you could ever have imagined. You might also get an entirely new work of insight and imagination, fused from the experience of a life that had soured the earlier optimism and grand vision into a fatalism bolstered by dark cynicism, and yet still shot through with wit and insight.
“In either [Donne’s or Dylan’s] case, if you don’t take your chances and go and hear a master at work, it’s your loss.”
There you have it, folks. Dylan’s shows late last fall, routinely running over two hours, featured a healthy selection from the Grammy-nominated Love And Theft alongside choice Bob obscurities and a reasonable sprinkling of “hits” (“Watchtower,” “Rolling Stone” et al) and, of course, an unexpected cover here and there. By all accounts, his band — the current lineup of Tony Garnier, bass, David Kemper, drums, Larry Campbell, guitars, and Charlie Sexton, guitars, has been intact since mid-’99 — is his strongest ever, watching their leader intently lest they miss one of Dylan’s notorious key- or tempo-shifts, yet jamming together masterfully at the drop of 12-bar progression like seasoned blues or jazz veterans. But as for what precisely to expect from Dylan’s musical bag of tricks, well, not even Internet setlist compilers will lay odds on that.
Talk about mystique: Bob only knows.
Bob Dylan will perform Sunday, February 10, at Cricket Arena. *
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2002.
