It’s 9pm on a Saturday night. To a festival crowd of approximately 50,000, Bob Dylan has finished singing Just Like A Woman with all the tunefulness of a hung-over machine gun. People are outraged.
The weekend hippies with picnic blankets and fold-out chairs, hoping to relive a few precious moments from their youth are already leaving. The younger crowd, mostly here to tick another legend off their “must see” list, are disinterested and heading towards the bar. A chant of “rubbish” is attempted but soon dissipates meekly.
It’s hardly “Judas!”, but for a heavily sanitized, non-corporate festival, it’s pretty visceral.
I don’t know what people were expecting. When asked to name their favourite Dylan songs, save a few exceptions, most would jump to something from his first seven albums. This is undoubtedly his most vital and exciting period: when fuelled by injustice and amphetamine Dylan seems unstoppable right up until the motorcycle accident thankfully slows him down.
Rock and roll this perfect appears only fleetingly. Look at the drug drained eyes in the performance footage on Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” documentary. This could not have lasted. I’m sorry if you missed it or were born too late but it is not to be repeated. Dylan’s first creative flourish belongs to a moment in time we can never recapture. Those songs (to borrow a phrase from the late Ian Macdonald) represent the “last gasp of the Western Soul”. As with the hopes and dreams of the sixties these songs were permanently resigned to the classification of relics following the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Unlike the greatest hits sets of Paul McCartney which evoke the open mouthed optimism of the sixties with near perfect renditions of Beatles’ classics, Dylan’s work from this time only highlights how our society has failed to change the world by first changing ourselves. Any attempt to recreate that moment merely cheapens the original impact of Dylan’s fantastic material.
You might complain that at Hop Farm, Dylan could have aired more of his well known numbers but imagine the scenario: a field of predominantly white middle class young professionals, out for their one big weekend of the summer stand beaming at the lone minstrel with an acoustic guitar. They are all swaying and singing “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind”. Now tell me you wouldn’t drop a bomb on the whole thing.
|
And so this is the alternative: Dylan plays through an exceptionally well selected set with a voice deeper than the Large Hadron Collider, chewing up and spitting out melodies with the same reckless abandon he used to hammer out lyrics on his typewriter with.
Granted it’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever seen: Dylan’s lack of crowd interaction and his insistence that there are no close-ups of him or the backing band on the big screens limit how emotionally involved you can get with the performance. Similarly, the constant reworking of material means for most of the set you’re trying to decipher what he is playing. Still, this is a victory against pointless nostalgia for a time most of the audience will never know.
Writing in 1966 for the Toronto Star, Margaret Steen observed “Dylan means the ultimate in far out: the untouchable, the incorruptible, the uncompromising”. At Hop Farm I realised that this is still the case. Thank God.
Bob Dylan played:
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Just Like A Woman
Honest With Me
Simple Twist Of Fate
High Water
Blind Willie McTell
Highway 61 Revisited
Workingman’s Blues #2
Thunder On The Mountain
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Like A Rolling Stone
Forever Young
|
