This past Saturday I saw Bob Dylan in Big Flats, New York. He was playing the outdoor stage adjacent to the haunted house of Tagsylvania. The weather was perfect for a night concert. As the sun set beneath hills of the Southern Tier, the concert kicked off with “Watching the River Flow.” The band was in great form. Dylan opened with his rough singing voice, but as the night went on that voice became clearer, stronger, and more fitting. Bob’s singing, along with his keyboard, guitar, and harmonica work, didn’t always hit the “right” notes, but he got the songs right. Here’s the set list.
A typical knock against Dylan is his raggedy voice. Another is his haphazard performance style. We know he can play – we’ve heard it on the albums – but on stage he doesn’t always seem to care about technique. A further knock – and a significant one for those who name Bob as the Shakespeare of our day – is that his songs are not really that good – they are not literary – they don’t stand up as verse. I heard a pulitzer prize-winning poet once admit that Dylan was perhaps the best lyric writer of the rockers, but he hesitated to call him a poet.
Yet as I sat in the darkening New York evening, with the Big Dipper rising over the stage, I once again felt the touch of art. Singing with his 70-year-plus voice, Dylan breathed life into his songs – some half a century old (the encore was “Blowin’ in the Wind”). He wasn’t striving to duplicate the sound-studio, nor was he reaching for some new best version of old tunes, he was a time-tested ballad man, an old bluesman, working to connect with his audience.
I’m reading a lot of Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry right now. I’m thinking about content, style, and audiences. Wish I could get Dylan to come to campus so that my students could think about these issues through his twenty-first century lens.