"My Captain's decorated, he's well schooled and he's skilled"
- Bob Dylan, 'Lonesome Day Blues'
In the ‘Caribbean Wind’ entry of his excellent ‘100 Favourite Bob Dylan Songs’ series (which, by the way, is now available in glorious pdf format), Sigismund Sludig raised an interesting question that I’ve been thinking about ever since: who was/is Bob Dylan’s Ben Keith? Ben Keith, of course, was the masterful pedal steel player/multi-instrumentalist who accompanied Neil Young between 1972 and Keith’s death in 2010. Neil has had many long-term collaborators over the years – Nils Lofgren, Nicolette Larson, even entire bands like Crazy Horse and Promise of the Real – but Ben Keith was clearly his guy. As he said in a 2011 interview:
“This guy is one of the great steel players of all time. Other steel players always refer to him; producers say “Can you play kind of like Ben Keith?”, and nobody can play like Ben Keith. So, I’m not gonna be doing any more of the songs that I’ve cut with Ben Keith …. not with anybody else. I’ll do them by myself, so that I can hear Ben in my head, but I won’t play them with anybody else. There won’t be anybody trying to play what he played.”
Has Bob Dylan ever had this kind of relationship with another musician? I would say that there are many who could have filled this role, and perhaps did for a time: Michael Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, Jim Keltner, Rob Stoner, Scarlet Rivera, Tim Drummond, Willie Smith, Benmont Tench, Mike Campbell, G.E. Smith, Bucky Baxter, Winston Watson, Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, Freddy Koella, Elana Fremerman. All of these musicians (and doubtless others I'm forgetting) were able to connect to Dylan on a level bordering on the telepathic, with Dylan channelling their energy into his performance. However, I would also argue that Dylan tended to stop short of allowing these players the kind of space and freedom that Neil Young afforded Ben Keith; on the rare occasion that he has, it has tended to be for a relatively short period of time before a) Bob broke up the band and moved onto something else b) the musician left the band, or c) the musician stayed in the band and gradually found him or herself playing an increasingly reduced role.
To my mind, the ultimate sideman is someone who the artist simply cannot do without, whose contribution to the artist's music cannot be replaced or replicated once that person is gone, and whose mere presence onstage or in the studio brings the artist reassurance and confidence. Frank Sinatra had Bill Miller; Chuck Berry had Johnnie Johnson; Ali Farka Toure had Oumar Toure. The leading candidate for this position in Bob Dylan’s music is, as far as I’m concerned, bass player Tony Garnier.
Tony joined Bob’s band in 1989, as a temporary replacement for an ailing Kenny Aaronson, and has stayed ever since. When guitarist G.E. Smith left the group in October 1990, Tony assumed the responsibilities of bandleader/musical director, meeting up with Bob on the day of the show to devise the evening’s setlist, and keeping track of keys, tempos and song endings. When things occasionally veered off course onstage – which was much more common during the ragged early years of the Never Ending Tour – it was Tony’s job to steady the ship. In 2010, Tony was the only member of Dylan’s band to accompany Bob to the White House to play for President Obama at 'A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.'
More important than all of that, however, is the fact that Tony is simply an incredible bass player. Checkout out his swinging, often jazzy work on Time Out of Mind, or his masterful double bass playing all the way through Dylan’s trio of Great American Songbook albums. He never draws attention to himself, but when you zero in on what he’s doing you realise its brilliant, all the time; the perfect foundation on which Dylan is able to build. Tony is the glue that holds it all together.
Whenever I think of what Tony Garnier means to the music of Bob Dylan, I am always reminded of an incident that occurred in Vienna in April 2019. Bob, losing his temper with a member of the audience who insisted on taking photographs despite a strict ‘no photos’ policy, stepped up to the microphone to admonish the offender. Having done so, he stepped backwards and tripped over one of the wedge monitors. Whose arms did he stumble safely into? You guessed it: Tony Garnier. A terrifying moment, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better visual metaphor for the Never Ending Tour than Bob stumbling and steadying himself on Tony Garnier. Later that year, Dylan would take to introducing his bass player as having "been with me longer than I've been with myself."
“This guy is one of the great steel players of all time. Other steel players always refer to him; producers say “Can you play kind of like Ben Keith?”, and nobody can play like Ben Keith. So, I’m not gonna be doing any more of the songs that I’ve cut with Ben Keith …. not with anybody else. I’ll do them by myself, so that I can hear Ben in my head, but I won’t play them with anybody else. There won’t be anybody trying to play what he played.”
Has Bob Dylan ever had this kind of relationship with another musician? I would say that there are many who could have filled this role, and perhaps did for a time: Michael Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson, Jim Keltner, Rob Stoner, Scarlet Rivera, Tim Drummond, Willie Smith, Benmont Tench, Mike Campbell, G.E. Smith, Bucky Baxter, Winston Watson, Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton, Freddy Koella, Elana Fremerman. All of these musicians (and doubtless others I'm forgetting) were able to connect to Dylan on a level bordering on the telepathic, with Dylan channelling their energy into his performance. However, I would also argue that Dylan tended to stop short of allowing these players the kind of space and freedom that Neil Young afforded Ben Keith; on the rare occasion that he has, it has tended to be for a relatively short period of time before a) Bob broke up the band and moved onto something else b) the musician left the band, or c) the musician stayed in the band and gradually found him or herself playing an increasingly reduced role.
To my mind, the ultimate sideman is someone who the artist simply cannot do without, whose contribution to the artist's music cannot be replaced or replicated once that person is gone, and whose mere presence onstage or in the studio brings the artist reassurance and confidence. Frank Sinatra had Bill Miller; Chuck Berry had Johnnie Johnson; Ali Farka Toure had Oumar Toure. The leading candidate for this position in Bob Dylan’s music is, as far as I’m concerned, bass player Tony Garnier.
Tony joined Bob’s band in 1989, as a temporary replacement for an ailing Kenny Aaronson, and has stayed ever since. When guitarist G.E. Smith left the group in October 1990, Tony assumed the responsibilities of bandleader/musical director, meeting up with Bob on the day of the show to devise the evening’s setlist, and keeping track of keys, tempos and song endings. When things occasionally veered off course onstage – which was much more common during the ragged early years of the Never Ending Tour – it was Tony’s job to steady the ship. In 2010, Tony was the only member of Dylan’s band to accompany Bob to the White House to play for President Obama at 'A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.'
More important than all of that, however, is the fact that Tony is simply an incredible bass player. Checkout out his swinging, often jazzy work on Time Out of Mind, or his masterful double bass playing all the way through Dylan’s trio of Great American Songbook albums. He never draws attention to himself, but when you zero in on what he’s doing you realise its brilliant, all the time; the perfect foundation on which Dylan is able to build. Tony is the glue that holds it all together.
Whenever I think of what Tony Garnier means to the music of Bob Dylan, I am always reminded of an incident that occurred in Vienna in April 2019. Bob, losing his temper with a member of the audience who insisted on taking photographs despite a strict ‘no photos’ policy, stepped up to the microphone to admonish the offender. Having done so, he stepped backwards and tripped over one of the wedge monitors. Whose arms did he stumble safely into? You guessed it: Tony Garnier. A terrifying moment, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better visual metaphor for the Never Ending Tour than Bob stumbling and steadying himself on Tony Garnier. Later that year, Dylan would take to introducing his bass player as having "been with me longer than I've been with myself."
As Andrew Muir, one of my favourite Dylan writers, said of Garnier in a 2013 interview, “there should be statues erected in honour of Tony”.
Thank you for leading off with that shout-out! I love that the question I posed has led to such a good post. You make a persuasive case for Tony Garnier being the one. And in a sense that makes perfect sense, since Dylan hasn't generally liked for his collaborators to stand out *too* much, and who "stands in," so to speak, better than Tony?
ReplyDeleteThanks Sigismund, and thank you for posing such an interesting question!
ReplyDeleteNice post. I have written some about Dylan myself. Mostly my thoughts on many of his songs. You can find them here.
ReplyDeletehttps://songsforthesoul2020.blogspot.com/
Thanks J.L., I'll have a read!
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