Bob Dylan @ Harry Grove Stadium

Bob Dylan
w/Jimmie Vaughan
Junior Brown
Elana James & The Continental Two
Aug. 19, 2006
Harry Grove Stadium, Frederick, Md.

I attended my first Bob Dylan concert in 17 years on Saturday night, letting go of a grudge that lasted from late adolescence well into adulthood.

The ban began on July 15, 1989, after a show at Seashore Performing Arts Center, a former minor league ballpark in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, that left me angry, confused and feeling betrayed. It was especially disappointing after seeing Dylan put on a great show at the same venue the previous summer.

The '89 show, despite nice surprises like "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "You're a Big Girl Now" in the setlist, just didn't measure up to my first live Dylan experience. As is his practice, Dylan rearranged the songs, sometimes rendering them unrecognizable. They certainly didn't sound like the tunes on his albums.

The departure was too much for me to take. I remained a loyal record buyer, but because my entertainment dollars were, as they are still, hard-earned and best stretched wisely, I stopped going to Dylan shows. I dug my heels in, frozen in that discontented moment, for 17 years.

That's a long time to hold a grudge, but sometimes it takes a while to sort out life on your own.
But bad Dylan shows are hardly breaking news. Even the hardcore fans will tell you that if he's on one night, he might be as far off the next. So why rehash my distasteful experience? In my defense, I offer two arguments: 1) Nearly half of my life is a long time to stay mad (I'm 36), so the story will take a little time to unfold; and 2) I maintain that Dylan was terrible on that night in '89, but I'm willing to admit that the falling-out was partly my fault, too. So ultimately the story is as much about me as it is about Dylan.

But first, the show. The night got off to a good start with Elana James and The Continental Two. Elana Fremerman, the former fiddler in jazz/western swing combo Hot Club of Cowtown and a recent alumnus of Dylan's touring band, took a new stage name and formed a new trio with Luke Hill (guitar) and Beau Sample (bass) after Hot Club's dissolution. Former Hot Club guitarist Whit Smith joined James & Co. for a short-but-spirited set that featured fleet-fingered instrumental work from all four on tunes such as "Cherokee Shuffle" and "Orange Blossom Special."

Instrumental prowess was a skill shared by second act Junior Brown, who combined Ernest Tubb vocal stylings with monster guitar chops in the vein of Telecaster masters James Burton, Don Rich and the late Danny Gatton. Appropriately, Brown delivered on the guit-steel, an instrument that as its name implies combines an electric guitar and a lap steel. Don't be fooled into thinking Brown is a novelty act, though. He can play the dickens out of both, and displayed his estimable abilities on tunes that ranged from honky-tonk to surf to slow-burning blues.

Speaking of the blues, the main warm-up act was Jimmie Vaughan, brother of the late, great Stevie Ray and a Texas blues luminary in his own right. But whereas SRV's style could be described as fiery, Jimmie's is cucumber-cool. He laid back and grooved, then unleashed tasty licks from his Fender Stratocaster. He turned up the heat a bit a bit on "Texas Flood," which was made famous by SRV, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson's "Motor Head Baby." Vaughan was joined by Lou Ann Barton, a revered singer from the Lone Star State, and together they got hands clapping and hips shaking with duets on "In the Middle of the Night" and "Boom-Bapa-Boom." One of the highlights of Vaughan's set was the playing of Bill Willis, who handled the bass lines and the organ lines from behind his Hammond B-3.

So went the undercard. It was time for the main event. As a sort of tale of the tape, here's a sampling of what Dylan has done since my Bob boycott began:

Survived a life-threatening heart infection.
Won an Academy Award for Best Song.
Released some of the best music of his career.
Wrote a best-selling memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One."

Here's a little of what I accomplished during that time:

Had my heart torn out by the first girl I ever thought I loved.
Left college and didn't return.
Backed into a journalism career.
Met and married the only girl I've ever truly loved.
Became a father.

As Dylan said, to Oscar-winning effect in 2000, "Things Have Changed."

They certainly had. So much so for me that when my music buddy Dalton told me about this show at the home of the Baltimore Orioles' Class A affiliate, the Frederick Keys, I started to think about softening my stance. I logged into ticketmaster.com at least five times on the first day of the presale, but wasn't ready to let it go yet. On the second day, I threw caution (and about 15 bucks in service charges) to the wind and bought my ticket. On paper, the boycott was over. Dylan and I would have our date with destiny, appropriately reunited at a minor-league ballpark � just like '89.

In some ways it was like I never left. Most of the songs had arrangements I hadn't heard. Maybe it's because I've become more open-minded, or maybe because I've been listening to more jazz lately. Or maybe it's because I've had my eyes opened to deconstruction and reconstruction of pop music by albums such as Wilco's "Summerteeth" and "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

But the more I think about it, the more I think it's the influence of my work. Being a sports editor is nothing like being Bob Dylan, except maybe that I mumble a lot; nobody cheers when I take my harmonica out of my pocket. Nonetheless, assembling a sports section has given me a new perspective on Dylan's choices. Each day, I (and my copy editors) must select stories, edit the copy for accuracy and proper grammar and present the news within page designs that are hopefully enticing to the readers. Some days you go home with a feeling of great satisfaction in a job well done. Some days you wish you could start over. If you're lucky, though, you survive the factory-belt grind and start each day anew, wanting to do a better job than the day before.

The point is, achieving greatness takes great effort. I heard noted sportswriter and author Leigh Montville say it best at a clinic, and I paraphrase: "If you go for the 'C,' the best you'll ever do is a 'C.' If you go for the 'A,' sometimes you'll get an 'F.' But it's the only way you'll ever get the 'A'."

As an 18-year-old, I was unwilling to allow Dylan an 'F' in pursuit of whatever his intended goal. I've been responsible for a lot of 'A's and a lot of 'F's since, and both have opened my eyes (and ears). On my best day, my work doesn't approach the artistry of Dylan's, but mine has helped me better understand his. Now I want to be there to hear the superlative performances, even if it means sitting through a couple of clunkers, too.

Dylan's band (Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball on guitars; Tony Garnier, bass; George Recile, drums; and BR549's Donnie Herron on steel) showed a willingness to pursue excellence. They were particularly strong on bubbling, bluesy arrangements of material from Dylan's last album, 2001's "Love and Theft," such as "Lonesome Day Blues," "Sugar Baby" and "Summer Days."

As expected, they helped restyle the classics, too. "Highway 61 Revisited" was a chugging, churning blues lent a foreboding air by front-lighting on the stage, which cast the band's tall shadows on the backdrop. The whole scene looked like something out of a haunted house, and made Dylan appear as though he was holding a flashlight under his chin; Uncle Bob scaring the kiddies with his spooky, Old Testament campfire stories.

"To Ramona," one of the night's nice surprises, was given a southwestern, cowboy-ballad flavor. It retained the original's sweetness, but sounded like a Marty Robbins cut from the '60s. "Girl From the North Country," changed in part because Dylan played keyboards rather than guitar for the entire show, also was handled tenderly and featured a graceful harmonica solo that sounded a bit like Little Stevie Wonder.

The slower, gentler ballads were pretty recognizable right away. Other old classics, such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Positively 4th Street" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," got a jazzier treatment. The band stated enough of the melody at the start to indicate the tune, then veered away from it. Sometimes they ventured far from the original. This is where I got frustrated in '89, and where I think a lot of newbies still get lost. If you don't know the words to these songs, you're going to be a while catching up. That's why hardcore fans seem more forgiving of the stylistic meandering. That's not to say that Dylanphiles are going to love all of the altered arrangements; they're just more forgiving of the ones they don't enjoy. But they undoubtedly have a better chance of enjoying themselves because they recognize the lyrics right away.

The reworking of the songs really seems to trip up newspaper critics as well. Most negative reviews of Dylan shows take the lazy tack that the songs are unrecognizable and the lyrics undecipherable. I've read that a lot, and you already know my past experience, but the vocals were generally strong on Saturday night. Dylan's voice always has been an acquired taste. Even diehards will acknowledge that he sometimes wheezes, sometimes mumbles or grumbles and often bends melodies to accommodate his range (or lack thereof). On the other hand, the guy is 65 years old. Johnny Cash wasn't a crooner, either, but that didn't stop him from having a prolific late career with the American Recordings. Perhaps his failing health, which kept him off the road, also kept him from becoming fodder for nitpicking hipsters.

Dylan has never much cared about the opinions of critics, in the press or the general population. That's very likely why he's been opening shows with "Maggie's Farm," a song that has put people on notice since Newport '65 that Dylan is marching to his own beat:
"I ain't' gonna work on Maggie's farm no more" ... but I am gonna plug in this electric guitar.
"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more" ... and if you don't like it, feel free to go fuck yourself.

More than forty years on, the lyrics still resonate:
"Well I wake up in the morning / Fold my hands and pray for rain / I got a head full of ideas / That are drivin' me insane" ... There is no art without artistry.
"Well I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them" ... Not gonna happen. There's a big 'I' in 'icon.'
"They sing while you slave and I just get bored / I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more" ... It's the Internet age. The word is out. Google me before you go to the show. Let the buyer beware.

If he flaunts his poetic license like a living legend, at least Dylan dresses the part. His stage attire � black western suit, chartreuse shirt and tie, black cowboy hat on Saturday night � is more than a costume, whatever his purpose for wearing it. Maybe he just likes the style, but it's also a striking visual reminder that he's part of a lineage of American music that includes Hank Williams, The Carter Family, John Lee Hooker and father of bluegrass Bill Monroe. Some of Dylan's arrangements, which can defy description, evoke Monroe's assertion that his mountain music was inhabited by the "ancient tones." Dylan's does too, at times, as his band projects a sound that could only have been pulled from the ether, sending forth a spooky, chilling tone that must be riding on the voices of long-dead blues singers, hep jazzmen, Dust Bowl balladeers and Depression-era string bands.

Nowhere was this sonic anomaly more apparent on Saturday than on the band's reworking of "Cold Irons Bound." The tune, which was released on 1997's "Time Out of Mind," already stood as proof positive that rearranging can make good music great. The new version of the song � which appears on 2003's "Masked and Anonymous" soundtrack and was recorded by the touring band that featured Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell on guitars � was so well-done as to render the earlier version nearly obsolete. I'd like another chance to hear Saturday night's further reworking, with more grind in the guitars and Herron's almost sinister steel underpinnings, just to make sure, but my first impression was that its almost otherworldly intensity made it the best version yet.

Observing from the audience, standing about 15 rows back from the stage, I started to notice more than the tweaked arrangements. Dylan still didn't talk much, something that I'm sure bothered me back in the day (and seems to bother those aforementioned newspaper reviewers still), but on this night it didn't seem like a big deal. He introduced the band during the encore, and acknowledged Vaughan after he sat in on a jump-bluesy "Summer Days." Despite the lack of banter, Dylan definitely looked like he was having fun. He was giving hand signals to the other musicians to extend and end tunes, and often was exchanging smiles with Herron. The presence of his Oscar on top of an amplifier might have indicated Dylan takes himself too seriously, but just as easily could mean that these days he's not taking himself seriously at all. At the end of the night, he stood at the footlights with the band and cocked his fingers like six-shooters, holding them playfully at shoulder level as he rocked from side to side, giving everybody a cornball reminder of who was the sheriff in town.

That folksy humor could go unnoticed by those who are just plain put off by an artist trying to reach new heights with reworked arrangements. Some of these songs, which are classics already, just might take on new significance. People can change, be they Bob Dylan or some guy in the audience who's having an epiphany. The only requirement is that the people around them be open to perceiving and allowing the change.

Saturday was a great night. I felt partly foolish for having stayed away for so long, but without that experience I might not have formed the same impressions. I've learned a lot in the meantime. Learning comes from living. Time and experience are the ultimate teachers. Love heals most wounds. It's more fun with friends (this means you, Dalton, Pat and Heather). And even if you've painted your masterpiece, there's no need to stop trying. Art is alive, but it takes a willingness to change on the part of the artist and the audience to keep it from becoming something only seen in stuffy museums.

So thanks, Bob, for making a wayward fan feel welcome. It's good to be back older, hopefully wiser and able to admit that the waters around me have grown. Failure is an option, but the risk is worth it when the reward is transcendence.

Setlist:
Maggie's Farm
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Lonesome Day Blues
Positively 4th Street
Stuck Inside of Moblie with the Memphis Blues Again
'Til I Fell in Love With You
To Ramona
Cold Irons Bound
Girl From the North Country
Highway 61 Revisited
Sugar Baby
Summer Days (w/Jimmie Vaughan)
Encore:
Like a Rolling Stone
All Along the Watchtower