BOB DYLAN: DYLAN & THE DEAD (1989)
1) Slow Train; 2) I Want You;
3) Gotta Serve Somebody; 4) Queen Jane Approximately; 5) Joey; 6) All Along The
Watchtower; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door.
This album got such utterly vicious reviews
when it came out that it seems to have forever turned Bob off further live
albums — with the exception of Unplugged,
where he was not really in control of the situation, all subsequent stage
experience would have to be experienced in front of the stage, or in the form
of bootlegs that devoted fans would cherish anyway and critics would not take
note of, unless they were professional dylanologists using those for research.
I cannot say that this decision makes me
particularly sad, since listening and re-listening to Bob croak out his past
glories with the voice of someone who's spent fourty years too much in the
desert is indeed an occupation for the truly faithful (who can afford the time
and resources for a bootleg hunt). However, to stay on the objective side,
Bob's voice still had some ring to it in 1989, and the negative reaction to the
album was overplayed — no doubt, fueled way too much by the disappointing effects
of his concurrent studio albums. With at least two, or maybe four, or maybe
seven if you hated the Christian stuff, or maybe even eight if you also
despised Street Legal, consecutive
reputational flops, who would want to be positively attuned towards a live
album, even if that live album was announced as a collaboration with one of the
few bands everybody could expect to be a great match for Bob — the Grateful
Dead?
Actually, critics and fans alike could consider
themselves duped: where Before The Flood
was truly «Dylan and The Band», the setlist being proportionally divided
between the two, Dylan & The Dead
is really just Dylan being backed by the Dead. The Dead, of course, did play
their own set on that joint 1987 tour, and played it well enough for 1987 (the
year of their «comeback» with In The
Dark), but there were no plans to release a joint album, and a couple years
later somebody must have thought it a great idea to put out Dylan's part on
its own — surely being backed by the
Dead must be like promoting the Dylan songs to the next plane of existence?
But whoever had that idea, be it Bob himself or
some one-dimensional financial manager at Columbia, never realized one thing:
the Dead are not «Booker T & The MGs» — they are well worth it when they
play their own material, but they are
not at all guaranteed to instantaneously add a hundred points to the power of
any random song they are given to play. On their own albums, they often
struggle with covers, unless the covers in question are traditional folk or country
songs, and on Dylan & The Dead, they
have a hard enough time just keeping up with Bob's basic needs, let alone add
any serious creativity or wild energy. Jerry Garcia does add some nice, fluent
and expressive solos to ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, and the band harmonizes
well on key on the finale of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ (which they thankfully
do in a non-reggae arrangement), and the rhythm section never really falls
apart or anything, but that's about it.
Bob himself is still trying to sing from time
to time, and it would be wrong to flat-out accuse him of being uninspired or
somnambulant, particularly in
retrospect when he's been sounding like that (only hoarser) through more than twenty
years of the Never Ending Tour and doing fine. It is interesting that he is
not giving up on the Christian stuff: with such a short running length, two songs from Slow Train Coming might seem like overkill, but they are the two
best ones, and they are taken quite seriously, even if the repetitive codas to
both seem hopelessly overextended. It is noteworthy that he insists on having
ʽJoeyʼ in the set, as if provoking the critics (who had always seen the song
as the main flaw on Desire's
multi-tissue body).
It is
distressing that the once powerful, sneering, condescending aura of ʽQueen Jane
Approximatelyʼ has now turned into an old man's feeble whine, but it is also almost
perversely funny — here is this guy who just spent twenty years waiting for
Queen Jane to show up and finally see him, to the point of almost begging her now, but no dice. Looks
like the Queen still hasn't gotten sick of all this repetition, after all. And
who is more «tired of yourself and all of your creations» now, in the end —
Queen Jane or Robert Zimmerman? I cannot help but wonder if Bob himself felt
the presence of this unintentional self-irony in his performance.
That said, it would not be correct of me to
counteract critical opinion with a thumbs up, because there is certainly no way
Dylan & The Dead would be
anywhere close to the level of Bob's classic live output — or, for that
matter, any Bob Dylan live
performance, including the one I've been to personally, dating from before the
period when his voice first turned whiny, then wheezy, and then crackly like a
bunch of dry firewood. It is particularly unbearable to hear him pull his usual
vocal stunts with that voice — for instance, singing directly against the
melody on the chorus of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ; it takes superior
intellectual effort to understand that he is «experimenting» as usual, rather
than simply forgetting that somebody is playing in a certain key behind his
back, and why should we waste our
intellectual efforts on Dylan & The
Dead? It's just a late period live album, good enough for one listen. If
you have never been to a Dylan show and are considering whether or not to go,
give it a try — this is the closest official sound to a 21st century Dylan show
you can get, although his current backing bands are certainly better suited to
his needs than the Dead were in 1987 (but the voice now takes even more getting
used to).
Check "Dylan & The Dead" (CD) on Amazon
According to Phil Lesh's autobiography, Dylan actually wanted to join the Grateful Dead, but one of the band members vetoed his admission.
ReplyDeleteIdle speculation runs riot with what would have been had he been let in.
Someone really needs to write a novel using that premise!
ReplyDelete