On Getting Very Angry at Bob Dylan

Or Not

Last night, halfway between the Royal Albert Hall and South Kensington tube station, a very angry man started a conversation with me.

We were standing in a crowd of about twenty, listening to a very good busker cover Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’.

The busker was doing the song in pure post-early Bob style — more 1965 (Don’t Look Back) than 1963 (Newport Folk Festival).

His hair was a big brown halo, his jeans were skinny, and he blew harmonica even better than he played acoustic guitar and sang.

However, the busker had his own style. And I’d have picked him more for a member of The Waterboys around Fisherman’s Blues than a straight Dylan impersonator. He didn’t mimic the snarl. (Here’s a video, but from Wolverhampton.)

The very angry man leaned toward me and with feathery breath inquired, ‘Is this better than the gig you’ve just been to?’

Without meaning it, he’d just asked me the question I’d been thinking of all week — ever since seeing Dylan at Motorpoint Nottingham Arena last Friday.

Because the very same busker had been performing an after-show there, too. But to an ecstatic audience of perhaps three hundred, all singing along to every word, dancing, shouting requests, and loading his guitar case with five and ten pound notes.

It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to; and yet back inside the 10,000 seater stadium and ice rink, Dylan had been great, too. In a very different way.

‘Were you at the gig?’ I asked the angry man. Because it was possible he’d been in the Hoop & Toy, and had only just found out Dylan was playing the Albert Hall.

‘Yes,’ he said, angrily.

I thought the conversation might stop there. The busker did half another verse.

‘Did you recognise any of the songs?’ the man said.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Well, he started with “All Along the Watchtower.”’

‘Ah,’ he said, disappointed, ‘I was still in the toilet for that one.’

‘And he finished with “Every Grain of Sand”.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It was that.’

We listened a bit more. The busker finished, was scatteringly applauded, and began a note imperfect ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.

‘I don’t usually leave a gig angry,’ the man said. ‘But I couldn’t recognise any of the songs. I couldn’t hear the words. The woman next to me was eighty, and she couldn’t hear any of the words. Why does he do it?’

Another big question.

‘I think he does new arrangements,’ I said. ‘He’s bored with the old ones. The versions of songs off the new album [Rough and Rowdy Ways] were pretty faithful.’

The angry man looked at me, no less angry than before.

‘I’ve seen him twice,’ he said. ‘It was the same last time. I don’t usually get this angry after gigs. I don’t know why I’m berating you.’

He patted my arm and walked off.

I stayed for another couple of songs. Only ten people were there, then eight.

The busker’s first London gig wasn’t better than Dylan, but Nottingham had been another thing.

Dylan’s mode of touring nowadays — which must be mainly based on self-preservation — is to set up a low-lit studio environment on stage. He has a mini-grand piano to lean against if he needs to, which he seems to. He doesn’t really speak to the audience, except occasionally to introduce a band member. There’s no singing along from the stalls, because his delivery of even familiar individual lines (‘The wind began to howl’) is too unpredictable. Programmatically unpredictable. Instead, the concert becomes a collective exercise in paying close attention to the nuances of his voice, piano, harmonica and opaque demeanour. He is, after all, a genius, legend, star, etc.

At moments I thought, ‘This is a bit like being in a big room with Mozart.’

Perhaps the best unpicking of this structure is CP Lee’s Just Like the Night (1998), which goes into the change that happened with Dylan’s electrification. And why that transformation made someone (named) so furious that they called him ‘Judas!’

Dylan hadn’t just become loud and trippy and rock’n’roll. He’d risen above his audience and was now maintaining as much distance from the little people as Frank Sinatra or Maria Callas. That wasn’t what folk music was meant to be about.

Folk music was about the busker directly opposite the Nottingham Motorpoint Arena leading a joyous rapalong of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ with a bearded old man keeping perfect rhythm by banging his walking stick on the side of a large metal litter bin.

That felt like music. Something was present that was about generosity, the moment, us, song, silliness, passion, happenstance.

A car stopping at the lights nearby honked its horn, and it came in on time, and on the exact same note as the harmonica.

Something was among us that wasn’t us.

Which was the better gig?

I could say I’ll take both.

Or I could ask, Why can’t there be something in between?

It’s easy to laugh at the angry man. He joins a long and noble lineage of people Dylan-as-non-performer has made furious. There’s Pete Seeger — with our without an axe to cut Dylan’s power cables — at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. There are the disillusioned fans interviewed by D.A. Pennebaker and featured slagging Bob off in No Direction Home. (‘Bob Dylan was a bastard in the second half.’) There are the dozens who left Dylan’s Christian concerts feeling he was retrospectively undoing everything he’d achieved in the sixties. (‘Don’t follow leaders.’) Hundreds of thousands have booed.

But the angry man has a point.

He couldn’t hear the words. And he didn’t know what the songs were for any more.

What are songs for?