It is a time of goodbyes from ’60s folk rock royalty. The “queen of folk”, Joan Baez, is four months into her Fare Thee Well world tour, with new dates just announced for 2019. Paul Simon finishes Homebound Bound – The Farewell Tour in his home state, New York, on September 23. Earlier this year, Neil Diamond, a frequent visitor to Australia, cancelled his 50th anniversary tour after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, ending his live performance career. It should also be noted that Elton John begins Farewell Yellow Brick Road four days before Simon's last show; promising 300 dates, to finish sometime in 2021, it is a goodbye tour so long you could forget you're saying goodbye.
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Then there’s Bob Dylan. One can’t imagine that when Bob Dylan decides to halt the 100-shows-a-year schedule he has followed for the past three decades, for one last round of dates, that the word “farewell” or a playful variation upon it, will be anywhere near the billing. He has rarely been sentimental as an artist, and he doesn’t conform.
Going back to 1963, with the release of his first album of original material, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan busted forms: Blowin In The Wind and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall recast the folk song with their divine lyrical gift. It is where the world heard of “a highway of diamonds with nobody on it” and, “guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children”, while Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Girl from the North Country are the invention of the modern love song. The former is still the best “Babe-I-gotta-go” number; every singer-songwriter of the ’60s and ’70s had to have a variation of it in their repertoire. The latter is an aching tale of distant love and erotic memory, released the same year the Beatles were singing “She loves you (yeah yeah yeah)”.
It has not only been in his songwriting and recordings that Dylan has challenged musical norms. It has also been on stage. Dylan views performing differently from most of his contemporaries. In the past it has even been a place of battle.
An audience comes to Dylan wary; he doesn’t treat the stage as a place of surrender and smiles to play note-for-note versions of his recorded work. That is not his way.
If this sounds disrespectful from Dylan, it’s not. In fact the opposite is true. Dylan regards the stage as a continuation of the dialogue he is having with his audience through his songs. And having always valued spontaneity in his art – from the quick flow of his writing and live-in-the-studio technique of recording – the concert experience, happening as it does in real time, is the perfect place for the mercurial artist and his fans to meet. Not all the reasons for this are due to personality type or musical vision; where Paul McCartney still sounds like 1965 or ’75, Dylan doesn’t. His voice now is an enigmatic raspy whisper – perfect for an ageing, noir detective chewing on the sour state of his soul in a frosted-glass, Los Angeles office – but not so good when you’re the lead singer of a rock band.
In Brisbane in March 2003, under a regulation light show, Dylan engaged in open combat with his back catalogue: his band, with a new guitarist in tow, were in every-man-for-himself mode. Like many that night, I vowed to stay away in the future.
You could be a Dylan fan at that time and not go to the concerts. His record company was releasing beautifully packaged, high-sonic-quality collections of (mostly) unreleased material through The Bootleg Series; his last album masterpiece, Time Out of Mind (1997), was still recent; and then he dropped volume one of his memoir, Chronicles. It was the kind of left-field, utterly audacious magic move that Dylan had studded through his career, but that in 2004, at the age of 63, he might have been thought incapable of executing. Here was a man, jealous of his privacy, dismissive of his starring role in the ‘60s, who had previously published no sustained works of narrative prose, writing a memoir that not only rethought the literary form by concentrating on only three brief periods of a life, but rhapsodising in detail his fairytale, pre-fame folk days in early ‘60s Greenwich Village.
It wasn’t too long after that when word filtered through that Dylan was worth seeing again.
Brisbane, August 2014. The stage was now a set; low-hanging industrial-sized lamps emitting an eerie yellowish light over the instruments before the band arrived. The wrestle with his ’60s and ’70s numbers was over; the night’s material drawn mostly from his recent albums, recorded with his on-stage band, who appeared comfortable and in control. Most importantly, the same set was being played night after night. Just as he had done on some of his most celebrated tours of the past.
The effect was to kill any stain of nostalgia that hung on the singer-songwriter. At 73, Dylan was a contemporary artist. The experience of seeing him in this form, engaged and focused, his voice mysteriously in better shape than on his last album, Tempest (2012), akin, one would imagine, to witnessing him at any time at his peak.
Over the years I have returned to Chronicles to reread treasured passages. A favourite is the affectionate description Dylan gives to an older folk singer, a mentor figure in early ’60s New York by the name of Dave Van Ronk. Dylan is more generous to Van Ronk than any other performer in the book, writing: “He was built like a lumberjack, drank hard, said little, and had his territory staked out – full forward, all cylinders working. David was the grand dragon.”
Van Ronk’s lack of mainstream success, Dylan rationalises away: “It just wasn’t where he pictured himself. He didn’t want to give up too much. No puppet strings on him ever.” Who does this sound like? The man with no puppet strings. Why, it’s the grand dragon himself. Long may he roam.