by Dave Conlin Read

"He plays some of his best-known songs, but often in contrarian, almost unrecognizable versions, as if to dampen their anthemic qualities." So writes Bill Wyman in the June 12, 2005 NY Times: Dylan Gives the People What He Wants (no, not that Bill Wyman, ex-Rolling Stone, some other Bill Wyman, a Rock Critic).

How out-of-the-loop can you get? Everybody knows that, for Mr. Dylan, it’s the performance that counts and for the price of admission to the Bob Dylan show, you get a one-of-a-kind experience (that frequently includes a Dylan version of somebody else’s song.)

When you buy his records, you get an artifact, and the concommitant opportunity to hear over and over how a particular performance sounded.

So, it makes sense to call what Mr. Dylan does in concert ‘versions’ only insofar as they relate to one another. For example, his song “Like a Rolling Stone:” the Columbia/Sony catalogue contains the Highway 61 Revisted studio version, five “live” versions, plus an “alternate” version, as well as John Mellencamp’s version from the 30th Anniversary Concert.

Which one is the contrarian version? Each, of course, is a different version and each, most likely, is contrary to anybody’s expectation.

Since Dylan performs so often (Wyman’s piece calls it 1,500 gigs since 1988), all but the total tyro knows that each concert is a little different from all the others, which makes them essentially the same in the sense that you can expect Dylan to give often thrilling, always different performances; the setlists vary from concert-to-concert, but always include many favored by even the casual fan.

To illustrate, most of the past couple hundred shows have ended with “Summer Days,” from Love and Theft (2001) and then included 2-3 encores, finishing with “All Along the Watchtower,” from John Wesly Harding,” (1967).

So, once upon a time, an artist paints a picture of yellow flowers in a blue vase. If his next painting depicts blue flowers in a yellow vase, does that become the contrarian version? And when he paints a red wheelbarrow beside white chickens, is he now painting to dampen the thematic qualities of the first two paintings. Such is the rat-in-a-maze way Wyman’s mind seems to operate.

But Bill Wyman is like an idiot spitting into the wind to suggest that Bob Dylan takes the stage as often as he does in order to “dampen” the “anthemic qualities” of his songs. What a dumb thing for anyone to say, and the Times is doubly dumb to publish it (unless there’s a Bill Wyman book in the works with some Times-related publishing house; then, it’s not dumb, just more tawrdy self-serving crap, like the Ed Bradley piece on 60 Minutes.)

Oh, wait, maybe Wyman does get it - “… Mr. Dylan seems to have developed an unparalleled commitment to sharing his art, but only on his own very specific terms.”

Well? It’s his art, on whose freaking terms would he share it? Don’t bother pondering that, because it, too, is wrong-headed. In performance, Mr. Dylan creates his art, for all present to take away and to keep forever. He doesn’t give it away, you gotta pay to get in - but once into it, he gives it everything he’s got. (Those fancy Western jackets hide huge sweat stains on his fancy shirts.)

The audience is essential to it, in fact - no audience, no art. So there sure is some sharing involved between Mr. Dylan and his audience - they share the same time and space for the duration of a concert, after which each goes on to his own time and space taking along separate peices of a shared experience. Getting off the track here, and into an ontological zone - which perhaps I’ll re-enter after closing this shout out to Mr. Wyman.