dylan says fuck you
This is an excerpt from The Gene Pool, a Substack by the journalist and humorist Gene Weingarten. You can read the full version on his site here.
Rachel and I went to see Bob Dylan perform [the other] night at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va. We were unsure, even at the end, which of the six guys on stage was Dylan. We guessed, and guessed wrong. That was the degree of the fuck you, you fucking fucks that Bob Dylan leveled at his audience last night. It was magnificent.
Bob Dylan has been famously furious at his audiences ever since July 25, 1965—61 years ago—when he was booed by purists at the Newport Folk Festival who disapproved of his embracing the electric guitar. ,,,
As is his custom, Dylan and his band took the stage in silence and unannounced, and just started playing. There was not even a mic check. The very first piece was initially unrecognizable—in concert, Dylan dramatically changes the arrangements from the album versions because (I theorize) he despises applause when the audience recognizes a song and claps stupidly for familiarity, not quality. We eventually realized this was “Watching The River Flow.”
That’s when things got really hostile.
Wolf Trap has multiple huge screens all over the arena so people seated far away can see what is going on on stage. We were high up, in the loge seats. For the two opening acts, the cameras danced from the lead performer to the band, with closeups and fadeaways and what have you. For Dylan’s set, the camera remained steady, implacably focused on the entire stage at such a remove, and in such darkness, that you got a better view of what was going on by squinting right at the performers, down there, 300 feet away. A sniper’s view, without a scope.
So. Hostility.
Dylan is 85. The audience was surprisingly young. It shocked us. I think I figured out the key to the demographics. A bearded Millennial in the row behind us bellowed, as a joke, “Hey, that’s not Timothee Chalamet, it’s someone else!” I think he was on to something.
The amazing thing was—who was the someone else? You could not see mouths move from our distance. We briefly considered that it might have been the sound man at his console, but in the end decided it was the lead guitarist, on the left, who also doubled on the doghouse bass, and who wore a stiff-brimmed Dylan hat. We left the arena after the show still thinking this, until we consulted the Web. It wasn’t. It was the schnook in the white hoodie in the center, playing the electric keyboard.
Dylan’s choice of songs was eclectic, almost … random. His arrangements were weird. His voice was great—gravelly but rich. It was like gold-bearing alluvial gravel lying on the bedrock of the Klondike River in the Yukon. (I decided to get fancy-colorful there, in honor of Dylan, the greatest songwriter of modern times.)
His songs were magnificent. They were not chosen, or sung, randomly. Dylan was messing with our heads. I cannot prove this, but I would bet my house —if I owned a house—that the musical intro to “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (“Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble/ ancient footprints are everywhere….”) was for some playful reason an homage to “Istanbul/(Not Constantinople) by Jimmy Kennedy and most recently covered by They Might Be Giants.
He also played the angry, snarly, vicious It Ain’t Me, Babe, but sang it like a dippy pop tune. …
He didn’t do an encore. Dylan’s final song was “I Shall be Released.” It was the first and only time in his 90-minute set—right at the end of the song — that we heard his signature harmonica wail, and knew for sure Dylan was there. Somewhere. Probably on stage.