Lenox — The Eagles’ Don Henley says the secret to his success is the high tolerance for repetition that allows him to perform a song night after night, year after year, without getting completely sick of it. Bob Dylan isn’t like that. He craves new songs and quickly loses interest in the older ones. Would it kill him to play “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Positively 4th Street” one more time? No, but it’s not what he lives for. What Dylan lives for is fresh new music that’s vital to him in the moment. Music that’s relevant to his present-day interests, emotions, and musical tastes. Music he can perform with total conviction. That’s the kind of music Dylan performed at Tanglewood on Saturday, July 2nd, to a sold-out Shed, and that’s how fans who had hoped to celebrate various exhumed musical relics of the 1960s got to hear something far more satisfying than the sounds a well preserved hall-of-fame artifact might produce. Saturday’s crowd came face to face with a living, breathing, fully energized Bob Dylan.
Like countless other performing songwriters, Bob Dylan works up new songs when he gets tired of singing the old ones. Sometimes the new songs are original, but not always; he has a deep and longstanding respect for American Songbook tunes, so no one should have been (terribly) surprised when in 2015 Dylan released “Shadows in the Night,” an album full of timeless classics, all made famous by Frank Sinatra. The album could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t, mainly because Dylan’s vocal performances were uncharacteristically polished. Billboard reported, “He enunciates, sustains fraying notes and softens his Bob-ness just enough . . . smoother than many might expect.”
Of twenty songs on Saturday’s set list, seven were from “Shadows in the Night,” and, once again, Dylan’s vocal performances on these songs were coherent and compelling. But there was one more crucial ingredient that made everything fit together. More about that in a minute.
Dylan’s band was tight, brilliantly arranged, and well mixed.
The lineup:
Bob Dylan – Vocals, Piano, Harmonica
Tony Garnier – Bass, Double bass
Donnie Herron – Lap steel, Pedal steel, Banjo, Mandolin
Stu Kimball – Rhythm guitar
George Receli – Drums, Percussion
Charlie Sexton – Electric guitar
Easily the most distinctive instrument in Dylan’s band (after his own voice) is Donnie Herron’s lap steel guitar. It provided rich sonorities and just a whiff of Western Swing. On a few tunes it contributed to a harder rock sound more along the lines of Waddy Wachtel’s or Keith Richards’ slide guitar stylings. And the instrument was undeniably at home on all of the “Shadows in the Night” numbers. Thus, the lap steel guitar unified all the songs in Dylan’s set.
Dylan was comfortable onstage, relaxed, and obviously having serious fun. Something inexplicably affable about his body language conveyed an easy friendliness toward the audience that made up for his well-known habit of never uttering a spoken word from the stage. His vocal performances throughout the concert had all the urgency and vitality you’d expect of a 20-something Bob Dylan. After singing his heart out, there was nothing else he needed to say.
Opening with the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed,” the band quickly established a distinctive sonic mood that persisted all evening. The blend of instruments was immediately striking.
Folks hoping to hear Dylan’s older hits were no doubt pleased when the band launched into the second song of the evening, “She Belongs to Me.” An hour later, another old favorite came along, “Tangled Up In Blue.” The band was especially tight on this number, and Dylan’s singing had all the intensity and passion anyone could hope for. Stunning.
Another standout was “Duquesne Whistle,” a song of recent vintage (2012) that with older instrumentation could pass as one of Dylan’s 60s-era tunes. (Yes, this could be said of almost any Bob Dylan song about trains, and he’s written quite a few.
Audience expectations have changed considerably since Bob Dylan was booed off the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Long-time fans know they shouldn’t try to predict what he’ll do next, so they generally don’t. And, although they ached to hear even a few measures of “Like a Rolling Stone,” on Saturday, the Tanglewood crowd seemed to take everything in stride, including the scarcity of old hits. “Let Bob be Bob,” they might have been saying to one another. That’s exactly what they did, and for this they were well rewarded.
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Opening for any big name performer is risky, and at the beginning of this tour, Mavis Staples was apprehensive about how she’d be received by Dylan’s audiences. She needn’t have fretted, because she’s the perfect choice of acts to open a Bob Dylan concert. Her family’s legacy of civil rights activism is one reason. A bigger reason is that after a six-decade career, Mavis Staples remains one of the most respected and capable soul and gospel singers of all time. And, at age 77, her powers show no signs of waning: She sings her tail off with every bit of grit, verve, and vigor she had as an 11-year-old member of her family’s band, The Staple Singers.
The Staple Singers were leading voices in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and Bob Dylan’s music played a meaningful role in the group’s development (“They covered “Blowin in the Wind” in the mid-1960s.) They’re best known for their 1970s hits “Respect Yourself”, “I’ll Take You There”, “If You’re Ready (Come Go with Me)”, and “Let’s Do It Again.”
When Mavis Staples sings, angels rejoice. And when she shouts, it’s got to make James Brown feel very good indeed. Her voice is an absolutely massive force of nature, and she knows exactly how to use it.
The Tanglewood crowd received Mavis with much warmth and affection. You’d have thought they came just to hear her. In fact, a number of folks weren’t quite ready to see her leave the stage.
