I'm taking my birthday day off today, so this will be my only post. Y'all keep the wheels of commerce running till I get back tomorrow.
Had a nice time last night at a trade show run by a little old Jewish man. That is to say, I sat through five hours of drizzling rain in order to hear an hour-and-a-half of music from the master at the Bob Dylan concert at Memorial Stadium. We found seats in a row right behind home plate, ordinarily a good spot at a baseball stadium, but a tent was erected there, so we had to lean slightly to the right all night to get a decent view of the stage. Right in front of us were three 20-something chickie babes who, first thing, lit up cigarettes in defiance of ALL THE RULES, which clearly state that smoking is allowed ONLY downstairs by the restrooms. They also TALKED on their CELL PHONES and chatted to each other INCESSANTLY. The show started at 6, but it was dark by the time Dylan took the stage, so, encouraged by the three bad examples, EVERYBODY AROUND us was smoking before long, I mean BRAZENLY, not even cupping the glowing ends in their hands to avoid detection. Who says we don't know how to engage in meaningful protest against the establishment in Fort Wayne?
But I digress.
In reading the account of the concert in the morning paper, I was amused to read the comments by the hard-core Dylan fans, you know the ones, who say he "spoke for a generation" and all that nonsense:
They endured because, in the words of local folk booker Brad Etter, Dylan is an “American spokesperson.”
“He's Robert Frost,” he said. “He's Carl Sandburg. He's everybody.”
“His position in American culture: there's no one better,” Kent Strock, sociology professor at the University of Saint Francis, said. “Baudelaire in the 19th century played a similar role. But (Paul) McCartney? A pile of (expletive). (John) Lennon had the spirit. But Dylan and Lou Reed are the only ones who can assess the situation and come up with something that says something.”
Just knew there had to be a sociology professor in there somewhere. Come on, guys, he's neither Robert Frost nor Baudelaire. These days, he's more like Ron Popeil hustling his gadgets on cable TV. But Dylan hauls his merchandise around in trailers, from one minor league ballpark to another. Bob Dylan is an icon, which means he is a business and doesn't have to do anything but be Bob Dylan to make money. He hasn't quite reached the status of Pablo Picasso, who reportedly paid for restaurant meals by making squiggles on napkins, but he is still a very marketable commodity. Did you see all that merchandise on the tables (right down from the restrooms, in front of which only a handful of LAW-ABIDING citizens were standing around smoking)? There were an astounding variety of Dylan T-shirts at $30 a pop (you can get a much better deal at bobdylan.com, by the way), and there were Cd's and posters and all kinds of memorabilia to stick on your shelves so you can prove to Aunt Rhoda 20 years from now that you were actually there in the presence of the master on that drizzly night in Fort Wayne. And they were so helpful in encouraging those of us determined to leave the concert with no tangible proof but our tickets. "Umbrellas" were on the list of items forbidden to be taken into the concert, which seemed a strange exclusion for an outdoor venue on a rainy night. Ah, but if we had umbrellas, we wouldn't have needed to buy those Bob Dylan ponchos for . . . well, you don't really want to know what THOSE cost.
To move the merchandise, you do need the presence of the icon, so after the appetizers -- three hours of music by three good warm-up acts -- Dylan came out and played, I think, 14 songs from the hundreds he has written. A few were extended jams, so the whole thing would have filled one double album; wouldn't want to overexpose the product. (You will have seen no footage of Dylan on TV or even still photos of him in the newspapers from the concert; that was not allowed). Of course, even if you play only a tiny fraction of your repertoire each night, that still ends up being having to play the same stuff hundreds or even thousands of times over a lifetime. That gets old -- can you imagine going to work, day after day, year after year, and doing the same old things in the same old way?
Oops. Sorry. You probably CAN imagine that. Anyway, a fascinating part of the concert experience was waiting to hear what new treatment he would give songs we had heard many times before. Some, like the straightforward "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," were immediately recognizable. Others, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," sounded like completely new songs. "Girl From the North Country" was ethereal and delicate, unlike anything I've heard from Dylan before. "All Along the Watchtower" was much more like Jimi Hendrix's version than Dylan's original -- hey, part of merchandising is recognizability. (And, in a smart move, that was the song for the obligatory "Hey, Bob, please, please, please, come out and do one more" encore, rather than the expected "Like a Rolling Stone," which occupied the penultimate position.)
Overall? Got my money's worth. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I had to be there, wouldn't have missed it for the world. They were selling postcards of the hanging and, though I didn't go for one of those, I have the tickets to prove I was in the presence of the master on a drizzly Tuesday night in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dylan never had a good voice, and these days he sounds like Kermit the frog with laryngitis. But his band really rocks -- most people forget what a good musician he actually is. And his play book, however few titles he plucks from it on a given night, is one of the most insightful journeys available through the last 40 years. I don't think I could count the pivotal moments in my life when there was a Bob Dylan song in the background somewhere. He never spoke for me, but he spoke to me.
I suspect that Bob Dylan the songwriter and musician and social commentator considers the traveling carnival of Bob Dylan the merchandiser with wry amusement, if not cynical disdain. And, as a fan, I don't mind being one of the exploited masses that get caught up in it. Music is a business, too, especially for someone at Dylan's level. We should judge it like any other business, not by how much money it makes the business owner, but what it creates of value for those who consume the product. Dylan will leave behind much more than he has taken.
And, hey, Bob, I bet you can find enough words to rhyme with "entrepreneur" to make a heck of a song.
