Review/Copyright © 1974, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
NEW YORK, Jan. 31, 1974—Well, mine eyes have seen the glory. Bob Dylan, the well-known singer and secret agent, just played his third and final concert at Madison Square Garden. And I saw him.
As this is written in the caverns beneath the Hudson River known as the PATH train tunnels, 20,000 others like me are agosh. After an onstage absence of eight years, Ole Blue Eyes is back. Rock music’s full-time mystery guest signed in, pleased, and stood in front of youth, en masse, as if he were among friends. (He was.)
It wasn’t a show, it was a Miracle on 33rd Street. Madison Square Garden, the Vatican of pop music, just turned into the Garden of Eden. Crawdaddy magazine should rush out an extra. This must have been what it was like to see Babe Ruth that day he called his home run shot.
I even brought along a notebook. I’d figured I was about to take on the Aurora Borealis in my life of rock concerts. But I took no notes. You can’t annotate charisma; you can only catch a rainbow glimpse and maybe afterwards comb its colors in the air.
I’d been waiting a long time to catch a glimpse of Bob Dylan. You might say I’ve been mentally knock, knock, knockin’ on Dylan’s door for years. Well, three or so hours ago, it opened.
You remember Bob Dylan. Or maybe you don’t. He’s the guy who came to Greenwich Village in 1961 and threw himself altogether into becoming “bigger than Presley.” He was either going to make it or go home on his shield. He wound up going home on the world’s shoulders.
Robert Allen Zimmerman drifted into the Village at age 19, so small and frail he looked as if the only thing he could beat without getting hurt would be a carpet. He put down, put on, put off, while he was being put up and put up with.
He also sang and played folk music. It was like Peter Pan disembarking at Never-Never-Land after he’d traded in his wings for a couple of harmonicas and a Gibson guitar.
He came from a mining town near the Canadian border called Hibbing, Minnesota. Although traveling light, Dylan brought with him a bundle of stories so imaginatively shaped they made Grimm’s Fairy Tales sound down-to-earth. He also took along an adopted accent as country-sharp as a brier patch, 138 pounds of sheer mesmerism, and a talent several leagues above average.
From there on, he didn’t run to fame. He high-jumped. By 1964, his flamboyantly secretive presence seemed to be blowin’ in every wind. Not since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) was the call for personal protest delivered as compellingly as on Bob Dylan’s album, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963).
He became rock music’s Kid Galahad—a kind of one-man Tournament of Champions. Put Berman, Antonioni, Godard, and Welles together, and they don’t dominate their field the way Bob Dylan has come to dominate his.
People discovered that the guy could do one thing better than any other figure in the history of pop music: write poetry. Never before had the words of popular songs been so exquisitely placed.
At a time when most pop lyrics were about as timeless as ice cubes, he fused his genuine feelings with his music, feelings that were as deep as his instrumental instincts were inventive.
His lyrics became a generation’s main objet d’art—the outpourings of the sort of mind that comes along once in a lifetime. They freed the heads of rock songwriters as if they formed some kind of Gettysburg Address in verse, with a beat. Realism replaced love in June under a moon shaped like a spoon.
Dylan thereby became rock music’s lyrical genius, the man with the golden mind that is one of our culture’s most valuable commodities. It just seemed to roll out of bed one morning with those great lyrics.
That is, “great” once you decoded them. His songs’ words often used to be so deliberately abstruse he should have put each word in its own safe deposit box as he wrote it. Then slugged each box RESTRICTED AREA.
You feel like the interceptor of the World War I Zimmerman Note every time your ear catches four or more words in a row. It’s as if he’s trying to fox your ears.
Even when you read the liner notes on a Dylan album cover, you feel as if you’re gazing at a top secret Pentagon paper pasted to special cardboard that will decompose in 10 seconds. And the few times you get the gist of what he’s saying in them, it stings—like being bitten on the mind by a baby tarantula.
It seemed as if the folk poet might have stung himself when he electrified his music in 1965. Arguments over the sanity of the move nearly raged to the Supreme Court.
Folk-music purists went around trading in their autographed Dylan programs for acoustic guitar strings. They predicted—in what must be the most mistargeted prognosis since Chicken Little passed the word the sky was falling—that he was stifling his talent.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, his uncharted fan club was taking over a sizeable slice of the planet. Now he’s rock’s first best, a guy who somehow stayed his own man in the process of exerting a deathless impact on a generation.
And critics who are able to restrain their enthusiasm when discussing the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley and the Who and the Grateful Dead set the superlatives flying like hailstones in a windstorm when their leads carry the word “Dylan.”
If you try to make personal contact, you stand more chance of reaching him with a Ouija board than you do with a telephone. By last count, 96 percent of the civilized world thought he was a rumor. The rest either thought he was a whispered secret, or just weren’t thinking.
He evades an immense faceless fandom so well, he makes Greta Garbo seem like an overanxious publicity hound, Howard Hughes like a pole-sitter with a megaphone. Compared to Bob Dylan, J.D. Salinger isn’t even shy.
Fact is, R.A. Zimmerman (alias “Alias) is an anonymous as a stray cat, as lofty as a Rocky Mountain snowman, as elusive as a back itch. That’s because Bob Zimmerman does not exist for most of us: he is withdrawn into the corporate image of Bob Dylan. And you have to pay about $4.50 an album to get a square look at either one of them.
His motorcycle accident in July, 1966, only rushed him into that ghostly breed of vanishing superstars he was destined to join anyway. He was officially pronounced dead that year more times than your phone line. Other reports had it that he was alive, loosely held together with Scotch tape.
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Ever since, he has been the phantom of the rock opera, a man who can disappear as easily from life as he did tonight from Madison Square Garden.
You’ve probably never seen him. Like I said, I hadn’t, either. So it wasn’t until this evening that I was sure he wasn’t a hallucination, or maybe the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. I couldn’t even sleep last night, I was so—what?—excited, agitated, intrigued?
Apprehensive I know I was. While I was hoping for the best, I was preparing for the worst. You see, Bob Dylan on a concert stage in 1974 may well be one of the most on-the-spot images in the world. For many of us who have outgrown Santa Claus and can’t yet fully appreciate Richard Nixon, Bob Dylan is an inspiring human symbol.
It’s a great expectation, and I realized it could be difficult for even Bob Dylan to live up to. So my pre-concert fear was that Dylan would make only one mistake all evening, but a major one: showing up.
For sheer drama, the whole scene might be slightly less exciting than taking a bath. Even the President of the United States might seem more fascinating.
Compared to Dylan’s fantastic “presence” in my mind, his physical presence might be about as spellbinding as invisible ink. I might realize I had seen more interesting weather reports tell me which way the wind blows.
There was a pleasant-enough wind blowing outside Madison Square Garden tonight. There was also more scalping going on in front of the place than in front of the movie cameras that filmed Custer’s Last Stand. The scalpers spoke in few words and with hand signals.
Inside, the crowd was clothed in layers of thick anticipation. To a man—and a woman—they were Dylanites—and they seemed to be feeling dynamite.
Finally, the lights went out, a spotlight beamed in on the stage entrance, out came Bob Dylan and his band, and the roar went up.
“What, no angel wings?” I said aloud to the roar.
The crowd screamed and cheered and clapped and whistled. The moment could have been no more dramatic had they shot him out of a cannon.
First prize to anybody there who can tell me what he was saying between the first song and the second (the one time all night he addressed us) is a tape of a tape of a tape of a tape of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott playing in East Orange, N.J. Second prize is an autographed A.J. Weberman poster. Third prize is East Orange, N.J.
Bob Dylan, of course, wasn’t a bit surprised. On the contrary, all this was routine. He expects the planet to wave.
Yet he has a kind of simple manner about him that a king might envy. I cracked up when at the end of his first set he got up from doing “Ballad of a Thin Man” at the piano, took two steps toward the audience, and bowed deeply from the waist.
Once he started playing his music—he opened with “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)”—the audience sat there wide-eyed, stunned. Dylan has a gift for making engrossing music and for twisting the pegs at the top of his guitar like some thin-man Minnesota Fats chalking his pool cue.
In his time—which is obviously still now—he could handle an audience like a kitten handles a ball of yarn. Rock needs people like Mr. D. to give it a dash of class now and then.
As for the band, it was fine, but tonight it was treated more his caddy than his band. To this audience, Dylan was all.
About 11:30 p.m., he got off that stage so quick after a second encore, you’d think he’d just remembered that his bicycle was illegally parked and he would get a ticket if he didn’t hurry up and finish.
I couldn’t exit quite so fast, of course, with so many people in attendance, and on the slow trek out of the Garden I started wondering why the man is doing these concerts.
There must be some reason he’s gallivanting from city to city. Bob Dylan has always been a gambler with an uncanny ability for timing his life’s work. Dylan had as much to do with Dylan making millions and history as nature did. He knows when to play his aces.
Maybe he was getting bored—life was becoming a full-time sleep walk. Maybe there was some income tax reason. Or maybe he’d sat in a closet for eight years so he could come out and convince the world that it belongs to him, rather than the opposite.
Then again, I suppose there’s no sense in my looking for a reason. I couldn’t afford to play poker with him, anyhow. For all his realness, he’s so powerful and other-worldly: King Learic.
Which is exactly the inherent paradox that has led many of those whom Dylan has affected to see him as every inch a leader—a role he has always shucked every inch of, claiming that he writes his songs for himself.
“It’s rough times,” Dylan says in the new Anthony Scaduto biography. “Everybody needs a father.”
Bob Dylan—the Father of Modern Times? The Modfather?
No, he may be an untouchable, but as a discovered tonight, he’s only human.
I mean, he is . . . isn’t he?
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CD: Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home. Sony, 2003.
Book: Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Wenner Books, 2006.
Websites: http://www.bobdylan.com
http://www.expectingrain.com http://www.bobdylanbiography.com
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