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On the trail of the
Bobcat
(Filed: 13/04/2002)
How does it feel to follow Bob Dylan on tour?
While new fans rave, long-term critic Michael Gray is in
despair
THE omens are bad from the start. Take the Stockholm
subway to Globen, the stop for the arena, and you alight in a
postmodern estate, its housing towers and plazas apparently built
yesterday on some otherwise useless swamp. It is a first for me to
seek solace inside a shopping mall, yet here is comparative release,
in an atrium of metal walkways with vacuous pop extruding from tinny
speakers.
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Never-ending story: Bob Dylan in
concert |
Soon, bizarrely, Bob Dylan will come on stage just
one windswept plaza's walk away. Oh Bob, what are you doing here?
What am I?
Among the customers for trainers and cosmetics I
begin to see blokes with moustaches, wounded eyes and unclean skin,
sporting bellies and grubby jackets, walking in twos and threes. If
these men look like poachers, their women look like game old birds.
It takes little clairvoyance to know that these are the faithful
beginning to assemble. As a Sixties survivor of abdominal portliness
and no special sartorial finesse myself, these people depress
me.
They also depress Bob Dylan. This opening night of
his latest European tour last week saw the continuation of the
Never-Ending Tour he's been engaged upon for the past 13 years and
11 months. How does it feel for him, night after blurred night,
seeing these defeated faces staring up at him in glazed
agitation?
This year he's done something about it. When tickets
went on sale in Britain for next month's UK shows, the promoter
allocated priority seats to readers of the Dignity fanzine - but
Dylan demanded that the front few rows not be occupied by the same
people every night.
His fans are not all these bedraggled victim types,
eating fast food all over Europe as they follow him around. There
are at least three other kinds, starting with the wonderfully mad.
Famously, there used to be Lambchop, a man who would always somehow
manage not merely to be in the front row, but to be in the seat most
precisely aligned with Dylan's microphone. Only Bob himself mattered
to Lambchop: others might prefer some backing bands to others, but
Larry scorned this as a symptom of dilettantism: "Like going to a
great restaurant and caring about the lighting fixtures." In the
Nineties he became so prominent that more than once Dylan addressed
him by name from the London stage. No more: for health and financial
reasons, Lambchop has emigrated to India.
Then there are the supposedly normal ones: the
thirtysomething to sixtyish investment bankers and lawyers,
academics and accountants, social workers and teachers. Many of
these fly business-class to see Dylan in concert. Many more arrange
their annual holidays to fit in with what they guess the year's
touring schedule will be.
And then there are their children. And by now, even
their grandchildren.
Sometimes these groups blur together. I fall into
conversation with a family of three. The man, bearded and
leather-jacketed, looks after the Stockholm subway's carriages and
engineers. His wife, crop-haired and faded blonde, is a costumier
for the Royal Theatre Company. Their son, 16-year-old John, sports a
Blind Faith T-shirt and aims to become a carpenter.
These children have the heavy weight upon them of
sharing their parents' musical taste, and they know that in some
wider psychic space they are going to have to account for
themselves. John, born alongside Empire Burlesque in 1985, is coming
to see 60-year-old Bob Dylan. It's as if I'd begged my parents to
take me to hear Vera Lynn.
As we file into the stadium, the well-dressed,
sun-tanned and healthy vastly outnumber the tallow-faced - and the
proportion of teenagers Dylan is pulling in is no longer the eight
per cent it has been for many years. Now, I see that something not
far off 40 per cent of this audience is in its teens or early
twenties.
Inside the giant red womb of the hall, those behind
me include an 18-year-old whose last concert experience was seeing
UB40; his 17-year-old companion confesses she has never been to a
concert before. Another young woman has been listening to his
records for five years, but doesn't expect much tonight. "I think he
just comes here and goes away again: I think that's his attitude.
But we'll see." They promise to let me have their verdicts at the
end, and go back to the compulsive text-messaging of youth.
A thin 44-year-old comes along the row to see me, on
the hunch that I am, as he puts it himself, "a Bobcat". He whispers
that the first time he made love to a woman was to a Dylan track.
This is more information than I need.
Dylan and his band strike up with one of their
singalong old-timey warm-ups. Then he starts into The Times They Are
A-Changin' and buggers up the lyric immediately. Some of the
delivery is compelling, but he can never get through the title line
without failing to disguise the failings that have come upon him
recently.
Most of the time it seems to me that the real Bob
Dylan is largely missing and he's busier faking it than trying his
best. Where once he was so alive, communicating so much quick
creative intelligence so alertly and uniquely, now he snatches at
showbiz cliches from which he once recoiled: like repeating half a
line en route to the end of it - "Gave her my heart: gave her my
heart but she wanted my soul" - a device so crudely portentous it's
always been the preserve of the world's Vic Damones.
Until recently, if you were close enough to see,
Dylan's face was ceaselessly expressive of subtle emotion and savvy.
Now it seems reduced to a handful of clumsy, self-parodic grimaces.
Where his concerts were events, in which an artist of genius lived
in the dangerous moment, now he plays safe and seems to have no
reason to be there. Where he didn't care what the audience thought
because he had his own vision and was ahead of us, now he doesn't
care what the audience thinks because he thinks it's a gullible
rabble.
Most of the time. Some nights are thrillingly
different - in the intimacy of Portsmouth Guildhall in 2000, for
instance - but these are very rare now, and more usually the
breakthrough of sunlight is confined to one song, or one phrase,
before a shrivelling cynicism sets in again.
This is, depressingly, becoming the norm. It surely
has nothing to do with age and everything to do with sourness, an
exhaustion of his resources. No wonder he's given interviews in
which he's said that he dislikes the long-time fans almost as much
as he hates critics. He wants fresh meat: young people who don't
remember how incomparably better he once was.
I thought it would be different after Love and Theft,
his most recent album. This is a work of such excellence, a work so
alive and such fun, that I thought he'd be out there revelling in
it, re-galvanised and full of unpredictability and purpose.
Not so. He's so held in, a little wooden figure not
so much going through the motions as being conveyed along them like
an object on an assembly line.
At the end, everyone around me has loved it. The
young woman who expected little says it was "great". So do the
well-groomed, professional couples. Two 15-year-old girls outside
tell me it was "lovely". First hooked by the live 1966 CDs, they
didn't mind that his voice is different now, and adored Love and
Theft for its "great variety of styles".
It's so weird. Dylan has been riding high (to quote a
phrase) for quite a while now. Gone are the bad old days of the
Eighties and early Nineties, when he was a laughable old croakhead
pilloried as Mr Sixties Man while the Sixties, man, were being
blamed for every ill in the Western world. Ever since he suffered
his temporary heart disease, released 1997's Time Out of Mind and
started being pelted with Grammys, Oscars and lifetime achievement
awards, somehow he's been walking on Golden Pond. He's praised now
for not trying to look eternally youthful. (Don't mention the
airbrushed cover photos.) Somehow, too, Dylan's concerts are now
marvellous for their rawness and their refusal to treat the songs as
sacrosanct.
I've written and believed a fair amount of this stuff
myself down the years. And what a sufficiency of years they've been.
I first listened to a Dylan album in 1964, first saw him in concert
in 1966. God knows how many I've attended since. I have long
accepted that when you enter the Dylan world, you sign up for
life.
Naturally, I insisted on Dylan's greatness as an
artist all through the backlash decades, and spent most of the
Nineties writing a 900-page critical study of his extraordinary,
incomparable, massively influential body of work.
I'm not going to renounce all that now. But the Dylan
of the Globe Arena in Stockholm was painfully poor. Poor by the very
standards of imaginative integrity that Dylan himself threw out into
the world.
After the concert I have to email a report to
friends. All over Europe people are preparing to take in swathes of
Bob nights. Many, like me, approach the prospect with heavy hearts,
nowadays choosing their venues to allow some pleasant dining out on
warm, agreeable nights. (Unlike me, in other words, they are going
to see Dylan in Italy instead of Sweden.) We expect much less now,
and we get it. But we go anyway. And so does a newer generation of
converts.
Michael Gray is the author of 'Song and
Dance Man III - the art of Bob Dylan' (Continuum). Bob Dylan tours
the UK from May 4.
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