Shelter from the Storm: Dylan Plays the Garden
by Tom Ceraulo

“I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.” - Bob Dylan, liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963.

We should have known all along that the time would come when Bob Dylan would eventually be able to “carry himself” with the grace and authenticity of an old master - when his voice would be grizzled enough, when he had lived enough years, traveled enough roads. We should never have doubted him - even through the uneven 1980s, when it sometimes didn’t seem that he CARED a whole lot, and when he routinely released mediocre albums after recording promising material (1983’s Infidels comes to mind).

Even if some did doubt him, there is no mistaking it now: a year into the new century and Bob Dylan has released one of the best albums of his career, a 57-minute masterpiece called Love and Theft - a record that hit stores on September 11th, one of world history’s darkest days, but also a record that feels strangely appropriate and comforting in uncertain times. (review of Love and Theft)

Dylan has also managed to continue the incessant touring that has become his life over the last decade, and that might be an even greater blessing than his brilliant new album. The 1990s saw the old master gain quite a bit of steam as a live performer; since his startling performance at the 1991 Grammy Awards, Dylan has delivered night after night, rediscovering his staggering song catalog along with his audience and nurturing an evolving band that clearly continues to inspire him as a singer. And he is a phenomenal singer when inspired, in spite what a lot of people might tell you - especially now, when his cigarettes-and-gin-ravaged voice has fully kicked in, and he sounds like the old rambling soul we always knew he was.

And Dylan was clearly inspired at his November 19 performance at Madison Square Garden - maybe two miles away from Ground Zero, more than two months after New York City came under attack. Yes, he made sure to tip his hat to the city he adopted as his home in his early 20's (“Nobody has to ask me how I feel about this town,” he declared, after telling the crowd he’d written or recorded most of the evening’s songs in Manhattan). But he wasn’t in town to give speeches or mourn about the devastation downtown. Dylan and his four bandmates - guitarists Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, former Jerry Garcia Band drummer David Kemper, and longtime bassist Tony Garnier - had come to the Garden to deliver another in a long series of exhilarating, barnstorming, life-affirming live performances.

At the heart of Dylan’s two-and-a-half-hour Garden concert, appropriately enough, were the new songs. The Love and Theft material provided the singer and his band with their most spirited performances of the night. Album-opener “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”, the first of the new songs to make an appearance in the set, pulsated and surprised as only a new composition can, with Campbell and Sexton brilliantly playing off of each other as Dylan explored the lyrics of a song that still retains a good degree of mystery for him as a live performer. The steamrolling “Honest With Me,” performed during the show’s epic encore, was delivered with an urgency that the Bob Dylan of the 1960s could have only dreamed of. And the joyous swing of “Summer Days” brought out a special glee in his voice as he howled out lines like, “Gonna break in the roof, set fire to the place as a parting gift."

The Love and Theft songs also reaffirm Dylan’s position as a reluctant prophet of his time, providing startlingly current observations on the mood of modern America. It is hard in this troubling time to ignore the relevance of the flood imagery in “High Water (for Charley Patton)”, for example - particularly in a city so recently rattled by disaster. Or to ignore a reference to the fragility of life: “Any minute of the day,” Dylan sang to the Garden crowd in “Sugar Baby”, “the bubble could burst.”

Dylan’s older songs also seemed chillingly appropriate at the Garden. The grisly war imagery of “John Brown”, in which a disfigured soldier returns home to his shocked mother, provided a sobering antidote to recent patriotic fervor. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” composed by Dylan almost four decades ago during the Cuban missile crisis, could not be more appropriate today; just as each line had been written to stand on its own almost 40 years ago, each line when delivered at the Garden resonated with its own distinct angle on these troubled American times. The far more recent “Things Have Changed” was a revelation, as well, with the singer ruminating on the Bible’s visions of Apocalypse and “expecting all hell to break loose” while conveying a larger theme of detachment and emptiness in modern life.

The final song of the night, a scorching rendition of the re-energized “All Along the Watchtower”, provided perhaps the most striking imagery of the evening. It seemed almost as if, after several years in which Dylan delivered the song’s lyrics in a rushed, uncomfortable manner on-stage, “Watchtower” had regained the ability to inspire him - perhaps because, as the song declares, “the hour” feels like it might actually be “getting late” for the world as we know it.

Dylan’s soulful, deceptively simple solos on harmonica and guitar provided a fantastic balance with his spirited vocals throughout the performance, and his band could not be a more perfect fit. Bassist Tony Garnier in particular is a joy to watch, smiling at the sight of his legendary bandleader while relentlessly providing the music’s foundation with drummer David Kemper. Larry Campbell added some tasteful mandolin, banjo, and pedal steel to various songs, and (along with Charlie Sexton) provided energized backing vocals on gospel and folk chestnuts like “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” and Fred Rose’s “Wait for the Light to Shine”, lending these covers a fitting old-time revival-house feel.

As his Madison Square Garden performance proved for the umpteenth time in recent years, Bob Dylan--who remains one of the the most vital forces in all of popular American music--has clearly become what he always wanted to be: the Genuine Article, an old, restless folk-blues master who can perform, at will, with earthshaking authority.

We need Bob Dylan now more than ever. Luckily for us, he is better now than he has ever been.


more on Bob Dylan at his official web site