Bob Dylan in the Berkshires

June 6, 2005 article by Dave Conlin Read

Bob Dylan has given only two concerts in the Berkshires, both at Tanglewood (July 4, 1991 and August 4, 1997), but he has played here four times (that we know of), the other two being a mini-set as Joan Baez's guest at the Pittsfield Boy's Club on August 14, 1963 and, on November 7, 1975 at Mama Frasca's Dream Away Lodge in Becket, when he played - in many senses of the word - all day long with the cast and crew of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The performance with Joan Baez at the Boy's Club came in the midst of a crucial time in the parturition of Bob Dylan, cultural icon:

'63 review: "His voice is not a pretty one..."

After writing that the capacity crowd received more than the price of their admission entitled them to when Baez brought on "folk singer and composer Bob Dylan, the hottest young man in the business..." Berkshire Eagle entertainment editor Milton R. Bass went on to write a succinct critique of Dylan's performance that includes a sentence deserving of a place in the canon of Dylanology.

"His voice is not a pretty one, his guitar playing is just plain old banging away, but there is an intensity about him, a dedication, that forces one's attention where it belongs."

The songs Dylan sang that night were "Only a Pawn in Their Game," "Blowin in the Wind," and "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall." Baez had earlier sung "Don't Think Twice, It's Allright" and "With God on Our Side."

Rolling Thunder Revue visits Becket

Dylan's 1975 Berkshires visit came between gigs in Springfield, MA and Burlington, VT. (We've heard that North Adams State College declined an invitation to host a Rolling Thunder show; could that be true?) Berkshireite Arlo Guthrie, who joined the Revue for the Springfield shows, told us in a 1998 interview how it came about:

"I had been going to the Dream Away for years, I knew Mama Frasca real well - she was a terriffic, wonderful, crazy, wild woman. I really loved her and used to bring the kids up to her place every weekend....

"So after we did the Rolling Thunder Revue in Springfield (November 6, 1975), I tought it would be fun to take everybody up there. We came up with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Bobby Neuwirth and Ramblin Jack Elliott. They just loved it there; we were fooling around with Mama Frasca, and it became a part of the film, "Renaldo And Clara."

"Live 1975" and Mama Frasca

On p. 36 of the booklet that comes with Bob Dylan Live 1975, there is a photograph of Baez, Dylan, Guthrie, and Ramblin Jack Elliott at the Dream Away bar, and on the album, Baez introduces her duet with Dylan on "Mama, You Been On My Mind," "We'd like to dedicate this song to a lady named Mama, who's sitting in the front row - Here's to you, Mama."

And, from the account of the Dream Away party told to us by a friend of Mama Frasca's, you can add "Be Bop a Lula" to the list of songs sung by Dylan in the Berkshires.

Tanglewood '91 and '97

The Tanglewood concerts of 1991 and 1997 were light years apart in Dylan's performance and demeanor. Although he was uncharacteristically chatty during the first one, which set a Tanglewood attendance record of 20,516, he raced through an 18 song set in a manner that got the gig listed on Dylan Pool in response to the request, "What was your worst Bob Dylan concert?"

The 1997 concert was just his second after recovering from a near-fatal heart infection. He was his usual laconic self, nattily-clad in a shiny blue western suit, and did an abbreviated set of 13 songs, notable for an especially fine rendition of "Tangled Up in Blue," and for the omission of "All Along the Watchtower," which Dylan had sung at every concert since 1992.

The opening act that night was BR5-49, whose multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron is now a member of Dylan's band.

The June 23 Wahconah Park concert will be Willie Nelson's second gig in the Berkshires; his first was Sept. 19, 1996, a brilliant 46 song performance in the courtyard at the just a-borning MASS MoCA in North Adams, produced by Mort Cooperman, an old Dylan hand from his days as proprietor of the Lone Star Cafe in NYC, as frequent a haunt of Dylan's as he's ever been known to have.