Dylan: 'a real artist, a true poet.' The 'Judas' tour recalled, the man and his work acclaimed
January 17, 2025
Colin Randall writes: before Bill Taylor and I met and became friends as well as journalistic confreres, we were both fans of Bob Dylan. Had I caught the famed 1966 tour on which he 'went electric', I might have been disappointed, even shocked, though I quickly came to love the new sound.
Bill was instantly hooked. He described the occasion in Salut! Live's comprehensive series marking Dylan's 80th birthday. Now, to coincide with the UK release of A Complete Unknown (which he has already reviewed, having seen it on Christmas Eve in Toronto), he has revised his original piece ...
Looking more like Vincent Price than Vincent Price, the iceberg that is Bob Dylan is now closer to his 84th birthday than his 83 rd . No need to count on your fingers: he was born May 24, 1941.
Cool, hard, diamond-bright and, just as 90 per cent of an iceberg is underwater, what you see with Dylan has always been a good deal less than what you get. Plus, just as an iceberg’s lifespan is as much as 3,000 years, Dylan seems to go on forever.
Dylan and Baez, at a 1963 demo in Washington DC, by Rowland Scherman
His so-called Never-Ending Tour, an ongoing series of concert dates, began on June 7 1988. Even allowing for an inevitable pandemic hiatus, that’s monumental. Playing on average 100 gigs a year, he’s way past the 3,000 mark.
After a European leg that ended with a show in London last November, there were reports that the tour might finally be winding down. But there are also rumours that he’s merely stopped to catch his breath and will be playing at least a few dates in 2025.
Dylan was always fearless. Never reluctant to go out on a limb, never hesitant to shoot off at a tangent, never afraid to take everything that had worked so well for him, blow it up and start on a new path.
You can see him three nights in a row and it’s like seeing three different concerts – rarely the same set list twice and he’s apt to give a song such an unusual interpretation,you might wonder at first what it is.
I was in the audience at the Odeon Theatre, Newcastle, May 21, 1966, one the last stops on a world tour that sent Dylan in another direction, leaving in his wake alegion of traditionalists feeling betrayed, outraged, forsaken:
The first set was The Bob Dylan we knew and loved. And it’s worth reminding ourselves that he was always a good musician. Never just a three-chord strummer but a very decent guitarist and harmonica player with a voice, raw and idiosyncratic but tone-true.
For the second half he brought out the musicians who would become, officially, The Band and in more ways than one electrified us all. Folk-rock was upon us with a vengeance.
Some of the audience got up and left, a few of them going down to the front so Dylan could see them walking out. A lot of other people, my friend Barry and I included, were enthralled. We were seeing the future and we loved it. There was no going back from this.
It had been the same throughout the tour. “Judas!” one fan yelled at the Manchester concert.
“I don’t believe you,” Dylan retorted. “You’re a liar.” And then to the band, “Play it f—-ing loud.”
A far cry from the baby-faced troubadour who a few years earlier had been picking up whatever little club gigs he could find in Greenwich Village where, as he wryly recalled in Talkin’ New York on his first album, he “blowed my lungs out for a dollar a day”.
But even then Dylan was not working haphazardly. He was guarded, calculating, playing his cards close to his chest as he charted his next moves with a steely resolve.
My friend, film-maker Terence Macartney-Filgate, who was working in New York and knew Dylan in those early days, recalls him less than fondly as “sullen, uncommunicative, tiresome”.
(As an aside, D A Pennebaker made a wonderful documentary, Don’t Look Back, about Dylan in England, including a lovely sequence with Dylan trying to make sense of Alan Price’s Geordie accent. Pennebaker used a then very innovative, hand-h camera, fly-on-the-wall technique that he learned from Terry Filgate.)
I’ve seen Dylan perform a couple more times, most notably at Madison Square Garden in New York, December 8, 1975, at the climax of his Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
And I thought I might have seen him at Ontario’s Mariposa Folk Festival in 1986. Dave Van Ronk, one of Dylan’s early influences, was in the lineup and one of headliners was Joan Baez.
The organisers set up a press conference with her. The most pressing question was not about Baez and her music but whether Dylan was planning a “surprise” guest appearance. I felt sorry for her, trying to convince reporters that her denials were genuine.
They were. He didn’t.
From a massive body of work, including books, films and musical collaborations, it’s impossible to pick out a few classics.
Dylan has written a lot of classics. He’s also covered other people’s songs, showing his willingness to try pretty much anything and not be afraid to fail.
Like Samuel Johnson’s dog walking on its hind legs, “it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all”.
Then there’s his Clothes Line Saga, not so much a parody of Bobby Gentry’s Ode to Billy Joe as what Dylan reportedly regarded as a reply to Gentry’s dirge, full of the same sort of mundane imagery and non-sequiturs. A delightful piece of deadpan, gently mocking humour, it’s featured on the Basement Tapes album. But good luck finding it online.
Editor's note: we aim to please, Bill:
I haven’t touched on Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. What really is there to say other than to quote from the citation, “For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,”?
It was an award that wasn’t met with universal approbation. Hard to begrudge it, though. Not that he’d care if you did. Dylan keeps moving, building a reputation now as a painter. Again, to a mixed critical reception.
But I like what Jonathan Jones wrote in the Guardian: “He has a surprising amount in common with (David) Hockney. His art looks more serious with every exhibition… A real artist made these drawings and paintings. Their integrity is compelling. They demand to be looked at, for their awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of being alive. These are the pictures of a true poet.”
A real artist. A true poet. What else is there to say? Volumes. You could fill an encyclopaedia. One day, no doubt, someone will.
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Posted by: Colin Randall | January 17, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Glad you mentioned Clothes Line Saga, it's one of his lesser known gems, and a hoot! I just wanted to add, his latest release, 2020's Rough And Rowdy Ways, contains songs which compare favourably with anything he's done.
Posted by: John Clark | January 17, 2025 at 03:47 PM