Bob Dylan learning to lead a band
The Never Ending Tour (NET) has been a tour of moments. Even though I’ve written probably close to 100 reviews of NET shows, for me a good part of the NET was Bob Dylan learning how to lead a band for the first time.
When he went on tour in ‘64 and ‘65 backed by Levon and The Hawks, they were musicians who pretty much knew how to do it with the songs that they did, it didn’t work out that way first in the studio and then when he finally returned to the road in ’74 they were with him again and they pretty much did the same thing, the same approach.
The next band he had after that was kind of the opposite, the Rolling Thunder band, which was this rag-tag ensemble of musicians from all over. But they somehow made it work.
Later on, the gospel band, they were all pros and so they kind of knew what to do, so he didn’t really have to actually lead the band because he had great musicians backing him that knew what to do and Tim Drummond and Jim Keltner were key to that. There are few better rhythm teams than Jim Keltner and Tim Drummond. One of the most interesting things about Dylan's so-called gospel period is that it was his true return to rock 'n' roll.
Then he did that weird European tour in 1984 with all European musicians and you can’t say that’s one of his great bands, because he doesn’t like to rehearse, I mean he does rehearse but you know he’s like ‘however it gets played is how it happens’.
The next big tour after that was Tom Petty and that was another established band that was already happening. Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench are great musicians, but the Petty tour for the most part was one that looked great on paper, but not in execution. Whether this was due to Dylan (and there are some pretty funny stories from Petty about the rehearsals) or the Heartbreakers is hard to tell.
The Farm Aid appearance was terrific and when the tour was announced, I had high hopes, thinking well this could be the best band since The Band. It didn't turn out that way, it didn't come close. While there is the occasional good song or performance here and there, the four shows I saw on the ’86 tour were among the most boring, most un-heartfelt, least intense and most mechanical of any Dylan shows I've seen. But a lot of it has to do with the Heartbreakers as well and not just Dylan's eccentricities in rehearsing (never doing a song the way way twice etc.).
I've seen Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers several times over many years (with and without Dylan) and they are one of the least spontaneous of any band I've ever seen and their shows come across as pre-packaged. It's a strange thing because they are excellent musicians, their interviews show their heart is in the right place in terms of knowing about rock and roll, but it doesn't translate to the stage.
The Dead rehearsals were way better than the shows, and most importantly they reminded him of songs he’d written but forgotten. The downside of the Dead tour was leading to him thinking he was a lead guitarist, the beach ball atmosphere of Dead shows, but it was also sort of a strategic move on his part trying to attract and capitalize on the Dead audience.
When Dylan finally decided to drop the background singers and all that excess and go out with a little four-piece band, at first with G.E Smith, there was stuff to like and some interesting transitions happened like going right from Most of The Time into Watchtower. The acoustic stuff was great, but Smith plays pretty much the same thing on every song. He may know Pretty Peggy-O, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. I believe that was the only time it was just Bob with another guitar player with the exception of Bruce Langhorne on the Les Crane show.
The thing I dug about Robbie (and Bloomfield too) was Robbie would respond to the lyrics. I never got the feeling G.E was responding to the lyrics. Yeah he can play fast and is technically proficient, but he has zero taste, no sense of tone, plays the same fucking thing no matter what the song. When G.E left that was when Dylan really had to take charge and lead things for the first time. The only problem was he’d decided he was a lead guitar player (I have referred to it as search & destroy guitar playing), which he wasn’t, so it took a really long time for that stuff to gel.
The thing is Dylan was a great rhythm guitarist, especially on acoustic and did all kinds of neat stuff. The stuff he has happening on the bass back in '64-'65, he always has something going on the bass strings, and he set up his own cool rhythm like the great old blues players did, and playing with a band he's kind of lost that as Keith Richards has pointed out many times. It happens to a lot of people. Like John Lee Hooker should never play with a band. He's a thousand times spookier alone. So to me it gelled at certain points along the way, but it was never as great as it could have been.
When Larry Campbell finally came on board, (and I barely knew about him before that), I was like FINALLY, a real lead player, one who plays country on the country stuff and blues on the blues stuff. And what made him interesting and special was he could play a mess of instruments. The cool thing about the Campbell-Sexton-Recelli line-up which I think is the best line-up of any of the never-ending tour bands is that with Sexton on rhythm, it allows Larry Campbell (who I think is best Bob lead player since Robbie) to play stuff around Bob's solos and in a way enhance them.
One of the cool things Larry Campbell did was bring back Bob's finger-picking parts (well... not exactly, but not all that far either) on some of those old songs. Bob has been known to occasionally not use a flat-pick. His thing in concert is an energy thing and you can get that energy thing happening a lot easier with a flat-pick if that's the way you usually play. Now this isn't to say there aren't guitar players who finger-pick and get that same thing happening because there's plenty from Doc Watson to the (late) Rev. Gary Davis to John Hammond Jr., to name just a few.
I remember going to a show after Larry Campbell joined when Dylan toured with Van Morrison. Dylan opened the show but Van’s band was so much tighter and I thought to do this show he really needs The Band behind him because there was such a difference in the two bands and how tight they were and it wasn’t that Dylan’s band wasn’t tight, it just didn’t have the same force that Van’s band did.
So a large part of the Never Ending Tour - despite some of my reviews - was that it took him a really long time to really take charge of the band to get it to where he wanted, not that I always agreed with his moves and what he did with certain songs. The whole thing about having two really great guitar players there and he would take the solos, was just ridiculous, it wasn’t that he couldn’t play guitar, because he can, but he’s not a lead player. I call it search and destroy and when I do I like to stick a little copyright symbol next to it. Basically he had to learn how to lead a band and I don’t think he got there till ’99 or till Love And Theft.
Love And Theft stayed in my CD player for 6 months if not longer and I considered it in a lot of ways in a sense to be his most autobiographical record, like those lines in Honest With Me like he never wanted to go back to his hometown and his parents advice was still oozing out of his ears, I felt like that was really him. A lot of people were like ‘why is he doing Honest With Me again?” and I think he was doing it because of those lines.
I also don't view Love and Theft and Modern Times as a pair. I also don't think Dylan's written a truly great song, meaning from his heart and his gut since Love And Theft. The albums after Love and Theft he kind of stopped writing from deep within and one of the ways I know that is that even the songs on Love And Theft, as a performer myself I didn’t even really want to sing them – some of them were too hard to learn – and even if I did learn them they didn’t stay with me very long.
After that, there were times he was trying, but he really wasn’t getting there.
Workingman’s Blues on one level is a beautiful song but it doesn’t quite get where he wants it to go. And later I learned Pay in Blood and I did it once and had no desire to do it again.
Maybe if I went back and listened to those records again they’d hit me in a different way sometimes that happens, but, the one thing was he was definitely concentrating on the music aspect of things, from getting the band to be what he wanted it to do, of course it was always different in concert and you know the bands changed.
For a long time they were doing this thing where he’d play a riff on piano and Donnie Herron would be watching him intently, echo that riff and pass it on to the band and the band would riff on whatever that riff was for a while, but these days Donnie Herron is not watching him so intently anymore.
In 2018 it was taking sometimes known and more often obscure rock n roll riffs whether its forms of surf music, the beach boys or some old rockabilly guy and putting his songs to that.
It doesn’t always work, it’s fun in concert but it doesn’t always musically work and because in a lot of songs eventually he’d return to his original way of doing it – sort of. Like It Ain’t Me Babe, he’s done it in like a thousand arrangements.
Dylan went through periods, he went through a big bluegrass period - actually a Stanley brothers period more than any other bluegrass people and Johnny and Jack and people like that and then he started moving towards Western Swing, although he never completely got there. He sort of went in the opposite direction and all of that eventually led to the Sinatra stuff - although that wasn’t till ten years later.
It’s become apparent that what he’s really into is exploring American Music, but also that the cut and paste method has overtaken his writing, and how the great quotable lines are not necessarily great quotable Bob Dylan lines because he copped them from somewhere else.
Somewhere we learned from Tell Tale Signs that a lot of songs - and even more lines - he’d had for a long time and he was trying them out in various places until he found a home for them.
One of the most important things about the Bootleg Series is that it reveals in many ways the way Dylan writes, how once he finds a line he likes, he will try that line out in a bunch of places until it finally finds a home. And he never stopped doing that.
While Tempest showed some signs of getting away from cut and paste, there’s an uninviting nasty edge to many of the songs ultimately reaching the conclusion that Dylan hasn’t been able to (or maybe doesn’t want to) connect with that place deep within (in terms of his original songs) since Time Out Of Mind and some of the songs on Love And Theft.
Peter Stone Brown 2019
Fantastic. Thx.