Is there an artist more restless than Bob Dylan? Probably not. The most compelling evidence of this is how he treats his songs onstage: as we’ve seen with ‘Key West’, to use the most recent example, a Dylan song is never finished. There is always a chance that it will be completely overhauled either lyrically or musically (sometimes both).
It's easy to forget that this process of reinvention often begins in the studio. As we’ve heard on various installments of the Bootleg Series, Dylan might experiment with entirely different melodies, alter keys and time signatures, and extensively rework the lyrics before choosing which version to release. Once the song makes it to the stage, the process continues: it’s common for Bob to stick very closely to the studio version of a song for early performances, only to gradually take it in other directions over time.
One of the 'song evolutions' I find most interesting is ‘Not Dark Yet’, the centerpiece of Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind. On the surface, it seems to have enjoyed an unusually stable history – the live arrangements were very faithful to the studio version for many years, until Bob unveiled a drastic rearrangement in the fall of 2019. However, the journey of this song has featured more twists and turns than might be apparent at first glance, going right back to its birth in Oxnard, Los Angeles, in late 1996.
In his 2011 book The Ballad of Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein quotes keyboardist Jim Dickinson talking about the genesis of the song:
“Dylan had started the sessions at Oxnard,” Dickinson recalled. “It was just a trio, the way Lanois wanted to do it, obviously.” Then some Columbia executives heard [an early version of] “Not Dark Yet” and got excited, smelling the money. “The management had heard over the phone a version from Oxnard with Dylan singing in a higher register, and this quick and spare guitar stuff that Lanois was playing, and it had stuck in somebody’s head.”
As Dickinson tells Epstein, this led to an uncomfortable situation – during the later sessions held at Criteria Studios in Miami – in which Lanois, at the behest of the executives, put pressure on Dylan to return to the earlier version of the song.
“We do the song and they keep changing keys,” Dickinson recalled. “Daniel said, ‘Bob, will you try it in another key?’ Nobody will say this thing about putting his voice up, right?” What the management really wanted was for Dylan to sing the song in a higher, brighter register. “So we did it in three or four different keys [….] And finally Dylan was just obviously pissed off.”
Dylan held his ground and got his way: the version of ‘Not Dark Yet’ that appears on Time Out of Mind is in the key of E, which is as low as you can get while remaining in standard guitar tuning. However, the question of which key to play the song in is one that continued far beyond the sessions for the album.
Engineer Mark Howard, who worked on Time Out of Mind, touched on Dylan’s relationship with keys during his 2008 interview in Uncut:
The way Bob works is, he kind of writes on a typewriter, so he has no idea where these songs lie, in what key they live in, what tempo – anything of that. Musically, there’s no chords written. So it’s like, he’ll say, “I got this song, and maybe this is how it goes,” and you try a couple of different versions of it in different keys, and he just finds where it sounds best, where it sounds best for his voice, where it’s comfortable. And that’s usually the open you end up going with.
When ‘Not Dark Yet’ made its live debut in Columbus, Georgia, on 30th October 1997, it was once again played in the key of E. However, the performance was a one-off, and the song was not played again that year. (Bob would sing it in this key just once more, when he performed it with Eric Clapton and his band at the 1999 Crossroads Festival.)
Not Dark Yet in the key of E
‘Not Dark Yet’ re-emerged in January 1998, now being played in the key of C, and was performed three times before disappearing once again. It turned up one more time that year, at a show in Berlin on 3rd June, where it was played for the only time in the key of D.
Not Dark Yet in the key of C
Not Dark Yet in the key of D
In 1999, ‘Not Dark Yet’ became a setlist regular for the first time (played 56 times that year), now in the key of G. Bob must have been fairly happy with this key, as he stuck with it all the way through to 2002, although by this point the song was once again being performed only sporadically.
Not Dark Yet in the key of G
‘Not Dark Yet’ sat out the whole of 2003, but reappeared in the spring of 2004. It was now being played in the key of C-sharp, where it would remain through 2005.
Not Dark Yet in the key of C-sharp
In 2006 Dylan shifted the key of ‘Not Dark Yet’ to G-flat, where it would remain for the next six years. I have a special fondness for the 2011 performances – despite the ravaged state of Dylan’s voice during this period, these versions have a sweeping, majestic quality that’s hard to resist.
Not Dark Yet in the key of G-flat
The various performances of ‘Not Dark Yet’ between 1997-2012 reveal how altering the key of a song can give it a noticeably different feel, even if the arrangement itself barely changes. You can see why Dylan would spend a lot of time trying to find the ‘right key’ for the song.
‘Not Dark Yet’ is yet to make an appearance on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour. The question I have is not ‘Will it be back?’, but ‘If it does come back, what key will it be in?’
"New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it" - Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One
Last month, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr Bob Dylan and his band play a show at the Saengar Theater in New Orleans. This was a big deal for me: the last Dylan show I saw was at Kilkenny, Ireland in the summer of 2019 – less than three years ago, but also a lifetime ago, before Everything Changed Forever. During the worst of the pandemic, I had remained hopeful of seeing Dylan in concert again, but also quietly acknowledged the possibility that this was not going to happen. If you’d told me in March 2020 that, precisely two years later, I would be sitting in a theatre in New Orleans (a place I’ve dreamed of visiting for a while) watching Bob Dylan perform nine out of ten songs from his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways – well, I think I would have spontaneously combusted.
However, thanks to the stars aligning a certain way, that’s exactly what happened (seeing Bob in New Orleans, not the spontaneous combustion). I’m going to try to write about what it was like in the Saengar Theater that night, and what it meant for me to be there. But first – and so that I can stall for a bit more time to get my thoughts together – let’s take a look at Bob Dylan’s long history with the Big Easy.
The earliest Dylan/New Orleans connection, unless I'm mistaken, is on his first album, in the form of the traditional song ‘House of the Rising Sun’. There was some distant hope that Dylan might sing this at the Saengar, seeing as the show took place on the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan, but (not surprisingly) it wasn’t to be. Bob has revisited 'Rising Sun' very occasionally over the years – most recently in 2007 – but for me the most interesting performance is the one Dylan gave at the home of Eve and Mac MacKenzie in April 1963. In this version, Bob sings the alternate melody favoured by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly.
During the early sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1962, Bob recorded a traditional song called ‘Going Down to New Orleans’. The song is a close relative of the blues standard ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’, which Dylan reworked on his 2006 album Modern Times.
New Orleans was still on Dylan’s mind a year later. During the sessions for The Times They Are A-Changin’, Bob recorded several takes of an original song called ‘Bob Dylan's New Orleans Rag’, which he also performed at his famous Town Hall concert in New York City in April 1963. ‘New Orleans Rag’ mentions the historic Rampart Street several times (coincidentally, the Saengar Theater is on the corner of North Rampart Street and Canal Street), although, curiously, all mention of Rampart has been removed from the official published lyrics.
Not content with simply writing about New Orleans, Dylan visited the city the following year while on a road trip with friends, just in time for Mardi Gras. This trip is detailed in Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, and by Joe B. Stuart, who was there. My favourite version of this story, however, appears in Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 Dylan biography Bob Dylan, and contains this exchange:
Out in front of one bar they came across a young white street singer who was busking – playing for the coins of passersby – his guitarwork and singing style a fusion of Leadbelly and Guthrie. “Hey,” Dylan said, “can I borrow your guitar?” The singer handed it over and Dylan began to sing a couple of things off his first album. “Man, the kid exclaimed, “you sound just like Bob Dylan.” Bob’s face was impassive. “Saw Dylan once,” he said. “A place in the village. He’s alright, I guess.”
Dylan didn’t play a show in New Orleans until the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, when he played two shows (one afternoon, one evening) on 3rd May at The Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas Street. Since then, he’s been back many times, playing a variety of venues: the Saengar Theater in 1981, 1991 and 2015 (and now 2022); the Lakefront Arena in 1989, 1999, 2002, and 2011; the House of Blues in 1994; McAlister Auditorium in 1995; the Municipal Auditorium in 2003; and appearances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fairgrounds Racecourse in 1993, 2003 and 2006. In 1988, Dylan even played a show at the Pavilion at Audubon Zoo, just a stone’s throw away from the animal enclosures. There may still be some elephants at the zoo that remember this performance.
It was during this visit to New Orleans that Bob met Daniel Lanois for the first time, stopping into the studio while Lanois was producing the Neville Brothers’ album Yellow Moon. A few months later Dylan would be back in the city again, holed up with Lanois at a house in the Garden District to work on the album that would become Oh Mercy. Jeff Hannush reported in the May 1989 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine that Dylan had been spotted about town:
Dylan’s presence in New Orleans has caused a stir among the locals. Residents are abuzz with reports of various Dylan sightings, and a gossip columnist for the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, has gone so far as to install a semiregular Dylan Watch as part of a daily column. But one local hairdresser claimed that no one in the city could possibly recognize Dylan — because to disguise him, she had cut off all of his hair. (The haircut story turned out to be false, thankfully - TE)
Bob writes about this period at length in Chronicles Volume One, sharing his impressions of the city.
New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, but none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful between every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can’t see it but you know it’s here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.
Scott Warmuth’s 2008 essay 'The Dylan Doodlebug' revealed that Dylan had borrowed several phrases from a New Orleans travel guide by Bethany Bultman, incorporating them into both Chronicles and the song ‘Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee’ on “Love & Theft”. In 2016, Dylan held an exhibition of his paintings, entitled The New Orleans Series, at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He has mentioned New Orleans in his songs ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’, plus the elusive mid-1980s outtakes ‘Nothing Here Worth Dying For’ and ‘Won’t Come Back Til They Call Me Back Again’ on the bootleg After the Empire. New Orleans also features in the traditional song 'The Lakes of Ponchartrain' which Dylan performed frequently in the early years of the Never Ending Tour.
There is a big New Orleans connection in Bob’s band, too: bass player Tony Garnier, who is the grandson of early New Orleans jazz musician D’Jalma Garnier. Tony’s older brother, multi-instrumentalist D’Jalma Garnier III, is still active on the city’s zydeco scene. In 1998, Tony was interviewed by the New York Times, where he shared his recipe for an authentic Louisiana gumbo. Between 2002 and 2019, Dylan’s band featured a genuine New Orleans rhythm section, as drummer George Receli also hails from the Big Easy.
In 2017, Dylan enlisted New Orleans author Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters and the novel City of Refuge (amongst many other books), to write the liner notes for the album Triplicate.
*
That brings us to the Saengar Theater, 19th March 2022.
I was struck by the manner in which this show began. You may have attended theater shows that have been proceeded by an announcement advising the audience that the show will begin in ten minutes, and could everyone please take their seats. Well, that didn’t happen here: Bob and the band simply appeared onstage at the stroke of 8 o’clock and began cranking out the vortex-like intro to 'Watching the River Flow', leaving bewildered audience members stumbling around in the dark trying to find their seats. On top of that, the sound (at least from where I was sitting) was cranked up insanely loud for the first two songs, forcing people to yell at each other as they tried to figure out seat number mix-ups.
It might sound like I’m complaining, but I loved all of this. There’s something very appropriate about Bob Dylan arriving and immediately throwing everything around him into chaos - may he continue to do so for a long time to come.
Seated in the balcony, I felt like I could appreciate the huge amount of thought that has gone into the visual presentation of this show. It’s very surreal: you’re looking at the musicians mostly in silhouette, with all the lighting coming from the floor beneath them and the curtain behind them. Guitarist Bob Britt has become a visual focal point, positioned at the back of the stage in the centre, often adopting a gunslinger stance. Bob Dylan, meanwhile, surveyed the crowd from behind an upright piano.
The other musician who frequently caught my eye was drummer Charley Drayton. Everything he does is fascinating. I’ve written before about how I suspect that Bob likes to have at least one person in the band with a lot of stage presence that he can play off, and it feels like Charley is fulfilling that role right now.
There were many highlights. ‘False Prophet’ swung hard, so much so that the studio version now sounds too slow in comparison. ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ was a revelation – surprisingly quiet and menacing, sometimes feeling like a Shakespearean soliloquy, and a showcase for some great rhythm section work by Tony and and Charley. I wasn’t sure about the recordings of the totally reworked version of ‘Key West’ I had heard before the show, but it clicked for me hearing it in person, with Bob in full storyteller mode. Doug Lancio nailed the short guitar solo on ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’ (which always strikes me as the core of that song), and then had a chance to stretch out on ‘Melancholy Mood’, the one song that remained from my first Dylan show at the London Palladium in 2017. Multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, meanwhile, watched Bob like a hawk from his riser overlooking Dylan's piano.
There were some moments in the show that had a comical feel to them. Bob sometimes walked out from behind his piano to soak in the applause – curiously, he often did this while the lights were down, which prompted huge roars from the first couple of rows who could see him, and confusion from everyone else. At one point a guitar tech solemnly walked onstage to present Bob Britt with a Gibson Flying V. Some of the audience leaned forward in anticipation of some hard rock, only for Dylan and the band to launch into the serene ‘Key West’.
Despite all of that, the best was saved for last. 'Every Grain of Sand', much like 'I Believe in You' and some of Dylan's other religious songs, has the effect of making it feel as though the band and the audience have disappeared, and you are left to witness an intensely private moment between Dylan and the object of his faith. The band achieved a rare kind of unity with this song, where they ceased to be six individuals and temporarily morphed into a single being. Moments like this are what it's all about.
My only complaint about the show was that it flew past in a blur. Before I knew it, I was back on Canal Street with everyone else, excitedly discussing what we had just seen. We were interrupted by the tour buses pulling away – everybody waved and cheered, and The Bob Express responded with a happy honk as it set off on its way.
It's taken me a long time to get here, but the bottom line is this: if you have the opportunity to see Bob Dylan and his band on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, don't hesitate! What we're seeing here is something precious and fleeting. Bob Dylan, unlike some performers you go to see who don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it.
Recording and concert dates from http://bjorner.com/still.htm
Last year I wrote about Bob's performance at the 2003 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival - you can read that here
