Bob Dylan is coming to Lowell, MA tomorrow for a concert. Excited yet?
Frankly, there’s a lot that excites me more than the prospect of seeing Dylan live in concert. As everyone knows, Dylan likes to mess with his music; he sings every line too fast, and he mangles the old melodies, and at the moments of high lyrical beauty, he doesn’t even bother to face the crowd. Dylan concerts are grotesqueries: they force his fans to recoil, and then to question the man and then themselves.
Yet the myth survives. After all, Dylan’s willingness to perpetually abandon his art — and thus, to abandon his fans — is his consummate move as an artist. Bob Dylan is the American’s American, our great artist of the frontier. He’s always pushing forward, and therefore always forcing his fans to wonder, as the distance between his music and our tastes expands: is it he or I who’s being left behind? When he chose to sings Guthrie songs with Ginsberg lyrics, or to go electric when his fans wanted folk, or to play country tunes during Watergate, it wasn’t misstep but prophesy. He was the West; we were wrong.
So what about now? I wonder. My fear is that Dylan’s extraordinary twenty-year non-stop touring season isn’t a service to his art, but is, rather, an extended goodbye to it. At first — so the theory goes — he wandered to discover; now he wanders to forget. This line from Jonathan Franzen’s epic on Bush Era America, Freedom, might have something to teach us about Dylan:
The great benefit of touring Nameless Lake to death—toward the end, [Richard Katz had] been able to entertain long trains of thought while performing, able to review the band’s finances and contemplate the scoring of new drugs and experience remorse about his latest interview without losing the beat or skipping a verse—had been the emptying of all meaning from the lyrics, the permanent severing of his songs from the state of sadness (for Molly, for Patty) in which he’d written them. He’d gone so far as to believe the touring had exhausted the sadness itself.
In short, if Dylan is indeed saying goodbye to his songs — “emptying the meaning” from the lyrics by exhausting them — I’m not sure I want to be there (once again) to see it happen. So I’m not going to the concert. He might be old, but I am not. I’m not ready to say goodbye to the music, not even close.
Photo source: RodneyOlsen.net