Note: this is an excerpt from a very long Dylan piece I wrote from 2001-2004.
Based on the way the Spring 2003 tour was shaping up, I predicted well before the announcement that Bob would be playing at the Music Midtown fest in again. I almost groaned – trying to sit through another day of Music Midtown was a high price to pay for a Dylan show indeed. Worth it, of course, but still a high price.
Fortunately enough, the 2003 Music Midtown set was scheduled for Friday night, and the festival didn't open until evening on Friday, so I'd only have to hold my place for a few hours, sitting through two other bands, to see Bob.
I cut a class or two on the day of the show and drove to Atlanta that day, arriving about an hour before they opened the gates. When the gates opened, and I found my way to the right stage, I found my friend Sam, ever the overachiever, already staking out a spot along the rail.
"Heya, Sam," I shouted, walking up to spot next to him on the metal grate. He shook my hand and introduced me around to his friends, a couple of whom I'd met briefly at Newport.
There was some brief chatter about reminisces of Newport, largely for the benefit of the other fans who ha set up camp around the rail, whom we wanted to impress. "I think we were the only people from Georgia who made it to that show," said Sam, proudly. But most of the conversation revolved around what sort of show we were likely to see that night.
As I mentioned before, the structure of the shows changed a lot about a month after Newport. Bob had suddenly started playing piano for half of the show, and the arrangements of the songs was starting to change. After the fall 2002 tour, Charlie Sexton had left the band, presumably to go back to his solo career. He was replaced on a brief Australian tour in February by some guy who used to play with Fleetwood Mac, and, on the new tour, by a fellow named Freddie Koella.
Personally, I was most excited about getting to see Bob playing the piano onstage, something I'd never had the priveledge of seeing. Reports indicated that he was playing even less guitar than he had the previous fall, sometimes only picking one up for one or two songs in a show. Exactly why he'd decided to switch to piano wasn't clear; some said it was due to back problems, others theorized that he was just having fun on the piano. You never can tell with Bob.
But there was also a lot of talk about Freddie, the new guy in the band. Sam had heard that he looked like a regular guy, not like a rock star, someone else had heard that he was French, and wasn't entirely fluent in English. We'd all heard that his guitar style was sort of minimalistic, similar to Bob's solos, only, well, better. Unlike Bob, he was more capable of hitting all of the right notes, and coming up with jazzy bits. No one among us was entirely sure how to pronounce his last name, and were anxiously waiting for the band intro to find out.
I asked Sam if he was going to the show in Birmingham, Alabama that was coming up in two weeks. "I'm hoping to," he said. "But I may not get my wife to let me, because my son is getting married the next day. But I'm going to try!"
I could only imagine how livid his wife must have been at the very notion, but didn't say anything. I myself was going to try. Driving to Alabama was always a real trick for me, and Sam wasn't going to be able to offer a ride, as he was going to be leaving far earlier than I would be able to in order to insure a good spot on the rail.
The first band on the bill that night was Cracker, whom I remembered primarily as the group behind a couple of minor 90's hits. To my great surprise, they were a pleasure to see; the set was highlighted by a song called "It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself," possibly the best song ever written about the loss of a contract with Virgin Records, and, after asking they crowd if they thought war protestors were cool (they certainly didn't seem to), they played a song in which the bassist repeatedly claimed that her name was Peach Bush. They played it up so well as a sex joke that it wasn't until I tried to look up the song online, typing "I'm Peach Bush" into a search engine, that I realized what she was really saying.
About midway through their set, however, they commented on the dark clouds that were gathering over the outdoor festival. "Don't worry," they said. "We've been playing outdoor shows for ten years now. It's never rained on a Cracker show."
As you've obviously guessed, it started to drizzle a bit the minute Cracker walked offstage. By the time the next act, Sheryl Crow, came out, it was really starting to come down. Soon, there was a verifiable storm going on, complete with high winds and a bit of lightning.. Midway through the third or fourth song, we all noticed that the lights above the stage were swaying back and forth so violently that they were going from hanging directly above the stage directly above US. Wisely enough, when it looked as though it was clearly unsafe to remain onstage, Sheryl and the band took off, promising to be back soon.
It was at that moment that hell began to break loose. Lightning was starting to appear more and more frequently, and it was clear that we were in the middle of a verifiable thunderstorm. As Sheryl Crow and company walked offstage, a rotund security guard came up to take her place.
"We need everyone to leave the premises!" he shouted. "Please proceed to the nearest exit, and we'll continue when the storm is over."
Now, the crowd was having none of this. We'd held our places along the rail for too long to give them up just because of some scary weather. It was also obvious that he was having us hustled out more for insurance purposes than for safety reasons – there was no shelter to be found for quite a ways outside of the venue. The nearest train station was several blocks off, after all. Looking down at my ticket stub, I saw that it said "Rain or Shine" in plain letters, and, at the same time as several other people, began to shout "rain or shine!" at the security guy. Soon, we had a pretty good chant going.
"Rain or shine! Rain or shine!" we shouted.
"We need everyone to leave!" he pleaded.
"Rain or shine!" we continued.
Someone led us in a stirring rendition of "We Shall Overcome," and then a few choruses of Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm." The security fellow begged us to get out, but, like trees standing by the water, we would not be moved. A few stage hands raised their fists to support us, which was a great feeling. Eventually, the security guard gave up. We'd won.
I hate to say it like this, but the atmosphere of the crowd really picked up shortly after Sheryl Crow left the stage. What better way to warm up for a Bob Dylan concert than to protest something? Together, as a group, we'd taken on The Man and won. This left a great feeling of camaraderie among us all, and everyone seemed to feel like singing. After a Bob song or two, the crowd began to sing "Pour Some Sugar On Me," which was sort of appropriate, since Def Leppard was scheduled to play the next day. That led people to sing out a stream of other eighties metal hits. "Sweet Child O'Mine," and things like that that had very little do with either Bob or anyone else at the festival. But theese are the songs of my youth, my first exposure to popular music, and, such as they are, I love them dearly. Reader, I confess that I sang along. I stopped when they started to sing "Sweet Home Alabama," though. I have my limits.
Now, camaraderie or not, we were still left with the situation of standing around in heavy rain with thunder and lightening. My black hat was soaked, and blue dye had dripped out the back, covering my neck and shirt until I began to look like I was half-Smurf. And, for those of us in the front, there was the lingering feeling that standing on a metal grate in a field during a lightning storm was probably not the safest thing we'd ever tried. More than one person suggested, halfway seriously, that Bob should just be brought onstage to wave his hand, say a few words, and still the storm. If there was ever a performer who could do that, it would have to be Bob.
An hour passed, and there was no sign of anything clearing up. The time at which Bob was supposed to have taken the stage came and went.
"You know," I said, "I don't think this is happening, man. They're gonna cancel the show."
"Dammit, Selzer," said Sam, "I'm not going to listen to any of this negativity. When you get a bit older, you'll see that the best ways to be are watching Bob, waiting for Bob to come out, and having just seen Bob. If you can think of a better way to die than waiting for a front row spot at a Bob Dylan concert, I'd like to hear about it."
He had me there. We were risking life and limb for a front row spot at a show that might not even be happening. Truly, this was hardcore fandom.
After some time, the rain did let up, and Sheryl Crow came back onstage, bowing deeply to what remained of the crowd (most of the people further from the rail had given up and left by then), and played a couple more songs. Finally, at about the time his set was supposed to have ended, it was time for Bob to go on.
No one could say that we hadn't earned our front row spots!
Meanwhile, a girl about my age was standing behind me, saying she'd driven all the way from North Carolina. I tried to talk to her, but kept getting my toes stepped on by a be-mulleted man who appeared to be about twice her age, but was determined to hit on her anyway.
"I met Bob," he said. "In Topeka. I shook his hand, looked into his eyes, and saw that he'd lived many lifetimes."
This was probably not true, and the girl didn't seem any more impressed than I was. I felt that I should say something like "well, if your idea of living is to spend all night driving around the Dairy Queen with your mullet-bearing friends, I'm sure most people have lived more lifetimes than you," but I was too polite. Shortly before the show, the girl disappeared.
Finally, the lights on the stage came on, and Al Santos, the sound man, read the new introduction. For years, the intro to every show had been Al saying "Good evening, ladies and gentleman, please welcome Columbia recording artist, Bob Dylan!" But, sometime that fall, the intro had been changed to the one I described earlier as a parody of the video introductions many artists use to remind you you're about to see a rock legend. Bob's new intro read "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. The voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!" The paragraph was written up in a Hamburg, NY newspaper a few days after the Newport show. A version of the same thing tended to appear in the newspapers at every show Bob played, spouting the sort of "voice of the 60's" stuff that Dylan is well known to hate.
Bob came onstage to our great relief and started right into "To Be Alone With You," a song I hadn't heard live before. The stage set up was interesting; on the Fall tour, the piano had been set up stage center, now it was off to the side, apparently so Bob could be the band leader. Throughout the set, he was pointing at various band members, telling them when to take solos, and generally directing the arrangements.
The first song is usually muddy, and it was a little hard to hear the piano in the mix, but one thing had been clear ever since the tapes of the Fall tour had started to circulate (approximately a day into the fall tour): not worrying about the guitar had done wonders for Bob. When his musical duties revolved mainly around piano fills, he was free to concentrate fully on singing and hamonica playing. As a direct result of this, the singing was more expressive, and there was more emotion in the harmonica playing than there had been before.
The set really got going at the third song of the evening, "Highway 61 Revisited," which was slower and bluesier than earlier emotions, with Bob adding swampy piano to the arrangement, which worked very well.
This was also our first shot to see how Freddie Koella was on guitar. Freddie looked like a French butler who was trying his hard to be both entertaining and dignified at the same time while playing a salmon colored electric guitar – and he succeeded remarkably. He stood fairly still, keeping a poker face on at all times, while moving his strumming hand all up and down the neck of the guitar, doing silly little tricks and gestures as he played.
Without question, there was something in the sound of the band that was different than it had been before, and it wasn't just the added piano. Freddie's minimalistic, jazzy style had added a whole layer of smokey jazz into the sound of the band – and it was cool. I started liking Freddie right away. The fact that the stage was still wet, and covered with a bit of mist, only made it seem jazzier.
After "Highway 61," Bob had a brief conference with the band about which song to play, and it became apparent that it would be one that didn't come up much when, as Bob walked back to his place behind the piano, Tony (the bassist) was showing Freddie the chords changes. Apparently, this was a song Freddie hadn't even rehearsed. He was still showing him how it went as Bob played the intro on the keyboard. It was "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."
I nearly jumped out of my skin when I recognized the intro; it was one of my favorite songs, but hadn't come up live very often in recent years. I'd never seen it live. In fact, it hadn't been played live in nearly a year, since before he started playing piano, which meant that we were witnessing the first time Bob had ever played "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" live on piano. One of those little pieces of history that makes the frequent Bob concert goer's life worthwhile.
As an added bonus, the arrangement of the song was a killer. The song, which treads in the path of events described in Kerouac's "On the Road," was never a jazz song, but you got the idea that, wherever the song took place, there was jazz playing there. Most of the live arrangements of the song from the last several years sort of floundered, never quite finding their rhythm or melody. But this time, it had a tight, slow, driving arrangement with just a hint of smokey jazz behind it.
Before the last verse, Freddie, who hadn't played the song before, was granted a solo, and he absolutely nailed it. He played a slow, sad solo that echoed both the melody and mood of the song perfectly, absolutely the most perfect guitar solo I'd ever heard at a Dylan concert. Nothing too fancy or to indicate that he was just showing off how well he could play guitar – just note perfect. By the end of the song, I was Freddie's number one fan.
Bob put on his electric guitar for the next song, "Drifter's Escape," which wasn't nearly as focused as most of the rest of the set, but was still enjoyable, as Bob spent half the song standing back to back with Freddie, playing simultaneous leads and clearly enjoying himself. Obviously, Bob was as happy with Freddie's work as I was.
There was another brief conference with the band before Bob wandered back to the piano, and stood there for a moment, playing a little intro that sounded like a classical warmup. With his wild hair blowing in the still fierce winds, he almost looked like Beethoven behind the piano. His outfit, a long black coat with a white neckerchief-type thing, completed the mad composter look. I'd never seen him look so cool. Now, from what I've mentioned about Bob's general fashion sense, this doesn't say much, but take my word for it – he looked cool.
The song turned out to be "She Belongs To Me," another song he'd never played on piano before, and which I hadn't seen in a show since my first Bob show, back in 1995. Larry (Campbell, guitarist)'s pedal steel work kept it from sounding too jazzy, but Freddy's ever-nifty guitar work kept it from seeming too country, and Bob's piano solo, the first real piano solo he'd taken all night, gave it an interesting sort of jazz ballad feeling. Listening to the tape of the show now, I still can't figure out how to describe the arrangement. Freddie is sort of playing jazz, Bob is sort of playing classical, and Larry is sort of playing country. But it works, and Bob's harmonica solo at the end ties it all together.
While "Summer Days" had been a real raveup during Charlie Sexton's last days with the band, during this period "Honest With Me" was the raveup of the set. It rocked and it rolled, and hard. Midway through, as the band was taking various ripping guitar solos, Bob approached the center of the stage, and, to the horror of many people present, began to dance. Sort of. He'd move his arms into a weird position, hold them for a second, then move them into another weird position. He could have been described as the world's most clueless dancer trying to do the robot. It only lasted a moment, but, when Bob wandered back to his place behind the piano, it seemed like we'd just witnessed the most surreal moment in the history of dancing. I can argue until I'm blue in the face that Bob is a great singer, or a good guitar player or hamonica player. But no one would ever put forth the proposition that he was a great dancer.
"Summer Days" came next, no longer the raveup that it had been some months earlier, but with Freddie adding a bit of his already trademark smokey jazz into the piece. The song has always sounded like early rock ‘n' roll, Bill Haley style, but now it sounded even earlier, like from a period when rock was just starting to grow out of bebop.
The next two songs were the standard closers, "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower," and then it was done – only ten songs, less than an hour. The shortest Bob show in recent memory.
But I didn't feel cheated; I don't think anybody felt cheated. Especially among those of us who see show after show – this was something else. We'd seen a different show than normal – a couple of setlist surprises, and a different sound than what we'd seen before. With the exception of a couple of songs (such as "If Dogs Run Free,") there had never been so much jazz evident in a Dylan set. Maybe it had just come about since the show at the New Orleans Jazz Fest about a week earlier, on which a saxophonist had sat in for most of the set, instantly transforming "Can't Wait" in a jazz classic. Saxophones can make anything jazzy.
As Sam, Sam's friends, and I walked away, the general agreement was that the sound we were hearing in the band was probably transitional. Peter Stone Brown saw a few shows a week or so later and agreed that the band was changing, the arrangements were changing. We could be sure that what we saw at Bob shows a few months down the road would be very different from what we were used to. As you may have inferred, I was betting that the sound would get jazzier and jazzier. We all piled into Sam's car to head for the nearest Waffle House, and, on the way, listened to a recording of a show from a week or so earlier, and the sound appeared to have changed just since then.
Had this been longer, it might have turned out to be the coolest Dylan show I'd ever seen. And it was even better knowing that we'd had to fight The Man just to get a good spot.
My mind was made up. I was going to the Birmingham show.
*
I've said it before, and, if certain locals allow me to live long enough to do so, I'm likely to say it again: going to Alabama is a dangerous business. I knew this ahead of time, but the fact of the matter was driven home in February of 2003, when I drove to Mobile to visit a friend (yes, I do have friends there. Not everyone in the state is a hillbilly). On the way home, in the middle of nowhere, my car broke down.
This was not entirely a surprise. On the way to Mobile, I'd stopped in a town called Fort Deposit to use the restroom (which I thought was a hilarious thing to do), and the car had refused to start for about ten minutes. This time, however, an hour went by, and the car showed no sign of starting. With a heavy heart, I made the call for a wrecker.
When a tow-truck driver finally arrived, looking every-bit the stereotypical Alabaman, he informed me that there was nothing that could be done that day, since no one in town was open on Sundays. And, even if I waited until the next day, no one in town would look at my '88 Volvo station wagon, since it was a "for'n" car. And, even if they would, they wouldn't have the parts for it. He would have to tow me all the way to Montgomery.
So to Montgomery we went. Midway through, he turned to me and said, with a hint of pride in his his eyes, "You know, if it weren't for Alabama, there might not even be no NASCAR."
"It's nice to know you're contributing, I guess," I replied.
He then helped me drop off my car at a garage, then drove me to a Motel 6 (after feeling it necessary to warn me that it would probably be owned by Indians), and dropped me off. I spent my evening sitting in the motel, eating McDonalds and watching Simon and Garfunkel reunite for the Grammies.
After such a trip as this, it's hard to imagine that I'd be in much of a hurry to go back to Alabama for any reason just a few months later, but two weeks after the Music Midtown show, I was in my car, driving through rain so heavy that I nearly had to pull over. I had tried to get a ride with Sam, but I couldn't be in Atlanta until roughly 11 o'clock in the morning, which would get me into Birmingham around three o'clock. This was far too late for Sam.
The rain had stopped by the time I arrived in downtown Birmingham, but started again as soon as I got out of the car. And this was no little rain, not even a rain like I'd stood through in Atlanta. This was rain so hard I could hardly see the hand in front of my face. I stood in the lobby of the library for a while to stay out of it, but the library closed early that day, on account of the festival, which was taking up most of the downtown area.
I chatted with a couple of library workers who were also waiting out the rain, and mentioned that I wasn't entirely sure I'd parked legally.
"No problem," one said. "Everything is legal this weekend." The festival, apparently, had replaced all laws.
It turned out, of course, that I was on entirely the wrong side of town. But finding another place to park, given all of the closed roads, would be impossible, so, with a crude festival map in hand, I wandered the streets that were open, trying to find the right stage. I wandered around, occasionally finding small crowds of people gathered in front of small stages. I never would have found the right one if I hadn't recognized Sam and John, sitting comfortably along the rail at one of the stages. They were soaked already, and the rain wasn't finished. By the end of the night, we would all be pretty well drenched.
"So you made it," I said to Sam, knowing that the next day was his son's wedding. "Is your wife about to kill you?"
"No, I reminded her enough about it," he said. "She was kind of mad about the speech I wrote for the reception, though."
"Oh?" I asked.
"Yeah." He then recited part of it to me; it consisted largely of quoting Dylan's song "Forever Young." "She was a bit mad when I told her that was from Dylan."
Later in the course of the afternoon, I met a few people about my age from Ohio who were in the midst of a Dylan road trip, having seen a few shows already that week, sleeping in cornfields. They introduced themselves as Tristan, Amira and Bryan, which was sort of like being introduced to people named Athos, Porthos, and Bill. But they were awfully nice, and even hooked me up with an extra ticket.
After a great opening set by an Australian band called The Waifs, Dylan took the stage, ripping into a very nice version of "Maggie's Farm."
It was a better than average show, not as cool as the Atlanta show, but still good. Dylan played "Positively Fourth Street," which seemed appropriate, since the stage was set up on the intersection of 4th Street and 18th Avenue. Toward the end of the show, during the introductions, we got a little joke, as Bob introduced George by saying "George Receli's playing the drums tonight...he played them last night, too!" (for the record, the night before had, in reality, been an off-night).
To me, however, the real hero of the show was Freddy, once again, who played more of his signature bizarre, jazzy solos, breathing life into otherwise mundane arrangements of "Blind Willie McTell," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Honest With Me."
The show was also significant for the fact that it was only the second or third show on which Bob played only piano, never touching the guitar. By the end of the tour, he would have given up playing guitar onstage altogether. As of this writing, he's shown no sign of picking up the guitar since. (edit: it wasn't until 2007 that Bob began playing guitar regularly during shows again).
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