The 'John Brown' Paradox

Every Bob Dylan fan has a few songs they look forward hearing Bob perform live in concert or on a bootleg recording. Conversely, everyone has at least one song they don’t care for at all that has somehow become a concert regular. ‘Silvio’ was this for many fans in the 1990s (personally I quite like ‘Silvio’), while in 2017 I witnessed several people immediately get up and head for the bar/toilets as soon as Bob started playing ‘Spirit on the Water’. 

I also have a song that I never look forward to hearing, but – unlike the two previous songs mentioned, both of which Dylan tended to coast through - this is a song that he has almost always performed well. The song is ‘John Brown’, written in 1962 and performed 170 times since then. But if Bob always performs it well, why do I never look forward to hearing it?

At first, I thought the lyrics might be the problem. The vast majority of Dylan songs contain a lot of room for different interpretations; even songs that tell straightforward narratives (like ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, dating from the same time period as ‘John Brown’) are somehow able to mean vastly different things depending on how they are performed. A song like ‘Masters of War’ can be confrontational and in-your-face (Berkley ‘88) or quiet and seething, overflowing with barely-supressed rage (Woodstock ‘94). ‘John Brown’, the story of a soldier who goes off to war only to return horribly wounded to the horror of his mother, does not possess this this malleability. No matter how much it is rearranged, it can never grow beyond what it is.

It’s possible that Dylan wasn’t quite happy with the song when he wrote it: it was not recorded for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and only turned up on an obscure ‘various artists’ album on the Folkways label called Broadside Ballads Vol 1, where Bob was credited as ‘Blind Boy Grunt’. Onstage, meanwhile, the song received just two outings – once at the Gaslight Café on 15th October 1962, and then once again at New York’s Town Hall on 12th April 1963 (plus a performance on a Chicago radio show on 26th April) – before being retired, seemingly for good. 

Bob did, however, record the song as a Witmark demo in August 1963, but The Staple Singers were the only major act to cover the song during that decade, for their album Pray On in 1967 . Aside from covers by British folk band Heron in 1971, and future Time Out of Mind alumnus Jim Dickinson in 1972, no one appears to have recorded a cover of ‘John Brown’ for the remainder of the 20th Century. For all intents and purposes, the song had been forgotten.

It’s possible that Dylan had forgotten about ‘John Brown’ too, when, in the summer of 1987, it unexpectedly re-entered his life. He was rehearsing for his tour with The Grateful Dead, and they wanted to play old songs; the “seldom seen ones”, as Dylan calls them in Chronicles. One of them was ‘John Brown’, and, sure enough, Bob performed it for the first time in over 24 years at the first Dylan & The Dead show on 4th July in Foxboro, Massachusetts, with the song making two other appearances on the six-show tour.

It’s here that the life of ‘John Brown’ truly begins. The song made regular appearances on Dylan’s ‘Temples in Flames’ tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers later in 1987, and went on to become a recurring feature of the Never Ending Tour. Whilst never becoming a setlist mainstay, it was performed in every year of the NET from 1988 to 2012, with the exception of the years 1993 and 2003.

There are many performances of ‘John Brown’ that I love. The intense performance with the Heartbreakers from Jerusalem in 1987; the even more intense performance with G.E Smith from Berkley 1989; the great acoustic version from Bob’s Unplugged album, which for my money is the best thing on the disc. Recently, I found an amazing ‘John Brown’ from Tokyo on 4th March 2001, which finds Dylan starting the song alone on acoustic guitar, the band gradually slipping in behind him as the story builds to its crescendo.

So, what is it with the weird disconnect between my feelings for these performances and my feelings for the song itself? I stumbled upon a possible answer to that question while reading Paul Williams’ book about Neil Young, Love to Burn. Taking a moment to draw a comparison between Young and Dylan, Williams writes on page 88:

“Neil Young and Bob Dylan are performing artists, and it is incomplete to consider their song creations as pieces of writing that express the intentions of the songwriter. They also express the intention of the performer, at the moment of performance.”

And on the next page:

“Which is to say, don’t take the performer’s art for granted. The songwriter may have been inspired (or not). But the most important thing now is whether the performer is inspired (in relation to this, song, this performance) tonight.”

So, Bob Dylan the songwriter might not been especially inspired when wrote ‘John Brown’, but Bob Dylan the performing artist is nearly always inspired when he sings ‘John Brown'. Bob usually sings very clearly when he performs this song, and the arrangements tend to be sparse – he wants make sure the words are heard and the message gets across.

I’m not sure that I’ve really solved the mystery of my mixed feelings for this song. However, the next time I see ‘John Brown’ on the tracklisting of a bootleg recording, maybe I'll be more inclined to give it a chance.

Concert/recording dates from bjorner.com and bobdylan.com

The Only Bob Dylan Bootleg I Own

Despite having numerous live Dylan recordings stored away on my computer, the only Bob Dylan bootleg I own in a physical format is a mysterious CD entitled Bob Dylan and the Never Ending Tour Band. It claims to have been “Recorded in Florida, USA, in November 1992”, but Bobsboots.com reveals that the show really took place in Pentange, Luxembourg on 21st February 1993. Bob is credited as "The Irresistible Maestro Bob Dylan" (a title I really wish he had used for his stage introduction back in the day).

Had I simply downloaded this show, I probably would have listened to it once and then forgotten about it forever. However, there’s something about owning music on physical media that forces me to devote a little more time to it than I might otherwise. I've been listening to this CD every so often for a while, and over time I’ve come to enjoy it a lot.

Early 1993 was a time of transition for Bob Dylan. The previous year had seen him add multi-instrumentalist and pedal steel extraordinaire Bucky Baxter to the band, bringing a variety of new textures to what had previously been a hard rocking garage band sound. There was also increasingly prominent Grateful Dead influence: not only had Bob hired a second drummer (originally Charlie Quintana, who was then replaced by Winston Watson in September 1992) to play alongside the soon-to-leave Ian Wallace, but by the end of '92 he was also stretching the songs out with ever-expanding instrumental jams.

This particular trend would continue into 1993, and arguably become the defining feature of the year's performances. Just looking at some of the track times on the back of this CD gives you a taste of what was going on: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (11:32), ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ (10:38), ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ (9:11). These songs were being stretched to the limit, and sometimes beyond.

I initially found the long track times and endless jamming off-putting, but over time I’ve come to see that that there was a certain logic to it. A possible explanation for it can be found in the Winston Watson documentary Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries: Drummer Winston Watson’s Incredible Journey. At one point Winston is talking about band chemistry, remarking that real bands are people who grow up playing music together for years. How do you replicate that kind of chemistry when you’ve been hired to play with people you’ve never met before? Winston explains that, when you’re being paid, that chemistry just has to happen.

I think that these long jams were Dylan’s way of making sure that it did happen – and it worked. Within a year, the John Jackson /Bucky Baxter/Tony Garnier/Winston Watson line-up had evolved into one of the tightest, most cohesive bands Bob would ever play with. Early 1993 shows like this one were simply the first tentative steps towards getting to that point.

Another interesting aspect of this show is Bob’s general onstage demeanour. He seems laser-focused, as if he knows exactly what he’s doing onstage and what he’s hoping to achieve. The difference from a couple of years earlier is remarkable; where 1991 often found Bob looking lost and engaging in strange between-song patter, this 1993 show finds him silent and stern, completely locked into the task at hand. You definitely get the sense that he’s hearing a sound in his head that he wants the band to reproduce – they aren’t quite there yet, but they will be.

Dylan is also doing interesting this with his voice. Playing around 100 shows every year had taken a swift and dramatic toll on Bob’s vocal chords, and Bob appears to have concluded that, if he was going to continue doing this, he needed to find a new way to sing. Here, we find him pushing himself beyond the limits of his range, using the melody of a song as a jumping off point from which to experiment. Once again, the fruits of this new approach would be revealed long-term, with the vocal renaissance of 1994-5. Dylan was playing the long game.

But what about the performance itself? Well, there’s not much particularly noteworthy about this show – it’s good, but perhaps best listened to in the context of what came afterwards. It does, however, contain my all-time favourite version of the Australian folk song ‘Jim Jones’ from Dylan’s 1992 album Good as I Been to You, with Bucky Baxter’s accordion giving the song even more of a nautical flavour than it already possesses. You can listen to it here.

I'm very fond of this show, even though there are many NET performances I would listen to ahead of it. As a physical object, it feels like a possession, a souvenir of an age (that I’m too young to have experienced) where CDs like this would have been like gold dust, a rare document of a Bob Dylan show that had taken place in some faraway country. I’m grateful to live in a time where live recordings are much more accessible, but that doesn’t stop discs like Bob Dylan and the Never Ending Tour Band from having a strange aura of magic about them.

The Changing Face of 'Idiot Wind'

When I was originally getting into Bob Dylan back in 2013, one of the first things I did (being blissfully unaware of Spotify at the time) was go to the library and take out a bunch of Dylan CDs. If I remember correctly, I came home with Blood on the Tracks, Good as I Been to You, Together Through Life, and Tempest – a pretty random selection, but one that offered a sampling of three distinct periods in Dylan’s career. I loved Tempest, and liked parts of Good as I Been to You and Together Through Life (my appreciation for them would grow over time), but the one that made the strongest impression was Blood on the Tracks, and one song in particular: 'Idiot Wind'.

I had never heard anything like 'Idiot Wind' before. In hindsight, I think this was the first time I had heard a song that was angry. The voice was hissing, spitting and snarling, soaked in sarcasm and contempt. What was this? More than anything I had heard up to that point, 'Idiot Wind' felt real, almost frighteningly so. Listening to it almost felt uncomfortable, as though I were intruding on a private conversation.

At the time, I had no idea about the convoluted backstory to this song and the album as a whole, and even less of an idea about the existence of studio outtakes and live versions of 'Idiot Wind' that cast the song under a new light altogether. But now that I am aware of all of that, I find the way this song evolved over time absolutely fascinating, to the point where I now hear each version as complementing the others, with all of them telling a larger story when considered as a whole. My own personal 'Idiot Wind series' is comprised of a) the album version b) a studio outtake recorded at the earlier New York sessions, commonly known as ‘the organ version’ thanks to Paul Griffin's haunting keyboard work c) the live performance from Fort Collins in 1976, which was featured as the final track of the Hard Rain album, and d) a live performance from 5th May 1992 in San Francisco.

The atmosphere of the album track is one of bitterness and recrimination, but the ‘organ version’ could not feel more different. This take has a peacefulness about it, as if the narrator has taken a walk after an argument with their spouse and, now that the initial anger has died down, is staring thoughtfully at the stars, thinking it all over. There’s a surprising tenderness in this version of the song – even the “you’re an idiot, babe” line is softer here, sometimes directed inwards, sometimes outwards, sometimes both – coupled with a deep sadness and confusion. He can see it’s all slipping away, but he doesn't know what to do about it. He's scared. This really hits home in a verse that didn’t make it onto the album, which is gut-wrenching in its portrayal of the narrator's bewilderment and fear:


Figured I’d lost you anyway

Why go on, what’s the use?

In order to get in a word with you

I’d have had to come up with some excuse

And it just struck me kind of funny...

The Fort Collins/Hard Rain version of 'Idiot Wind' once again offers us another mood altogether. It still feels like the same narrator from the previous two versions, but now he’s in a totally different frame of mind. He knows his marriage is broken beyond repair, and now he’s taking a perverse, drunken glee in demolishing what’s left of it. Of all of the performances of the song I’ve heard, this one is  the most unsettling. It has a self-destructive quality about it: it makes me think of things spectacular moments of destruction like a star imploding, or the death throes of some enormous sea creature. This is the end of the road set to music.

Except it wasn’t the end of the road. Sixteen years later, Bob unexpectedly returned to this song and this character, unveiling a new arrangement in Melbourne on 2nd April 1992, which remained in the setlist for the next several months and arguably peaked during May of that year. For a long time, my favourite performance of Idiot Wind from this period was the spectacular rendition from San Jose, but this has recently been knocked off the top spot by the version from 5th May in San Francisco, which has the added bonus of Jerry Garcia sitting in on electric guitar.

I often think that Garcia might have been the best sideman Dylan never had. As Andrew Muir remarked in One More Night: Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, the Grateful Dead frontman was “one of the few who could walk onto Dylan’s stage and instantly be in tune to what was going on and able to add, almost immediately, something to the overall sound.” Jerry certainly does that here; just the way his guitar dances around Dylan’s vocal on the lines “What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good/ You find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom” is enough to make me wish he had joined Dylan’s band full time.

Dylan, meanwhile, brings an amazing range of emotion to his performance, everything from regret to paranoia to despair. This is still the same narrator from the earlier versions, but we now find him a shell of his former self, haunted by his past actions but still too proud to apologise, and perhaps knowing deep down that it’s far too late for that anyway. All he can do is keep arguing the same old points even though he knows he’s wrong, his every word another shovelful of dirt on the burial mound of this relationship. In the liner notes for his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, Dylan referred to this period of his Never Ending Tour as “The One Sad Cry of Pity Tour”, and that description suits this haunting version of 'Idiot Wind' down to the ground.

All of this speaks to Dylan’s extraordinary ability to rework his songs over the years, not just through rearrangement (apart from changing the key, the rearrangements to Idiot Wind have been relatively minimal) but also through dramatic interpretation. This skill is reminiscent of artists like Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra, who were frequently able to infuse their old songs with new meaning and gravitas years after originally recording them. It remains to be seen if the story of 'Idiot Wind' is truly over for good, or if there is still a chapter yet to be written.

The Story of Bob Dylan's MTV Unplugged

"[M]y opinion is that his secret weapon's the sunglasses"

- Paul Williams, in his review of Unplugged from his book Watching the River Flow

I like all of Bob Dylan’s albums. Now, I don’t mean that in an everything-he-does-is-amazing way, but I have found that if I approach a Dylan album with an open mind, and (perhaps most importantly) without comparing them to one another, I will often be surprised at how much even the less well-regarded records have to offer. Having said that, there’s one album in particular that it took me a very long time to appreciate: 1995’s MTV Unplugged.

In 1990s, the MTV Unplugged TV show was all the rage. It seemed like anyone who was anyone was lining up to appear on the programme, which, with its accompanying live albums, had also proved useful in rehabilitating the careers/consolidating the comebacks of ‘60s/’70s stars who had endured a rough decade in the 1980s. Bob Dylan, by the time he appeared on the show in November 1994, would have been acutely aware of the success contemporaries like Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Neil Young had enjoyed with their Unplugged specials and albums. Even Tony Bennett, who had struggled commercially since the advent of the British Invasion, was able use his MTV Unplugged appearance to cement a comeback that has continued more or less unabated to the present day.

Dylan, at the time, was in desperate need of such a comeback. His album sales had declined dramatically during the 1980s, and the brief commercial respite afforded by 1989’s Oh Mercy had not carried over to subsequent albums. His most recent record, the folk song collection World Gone Wrong, had peaked at a dispiriting number 70 on the U.S. Billboard chart. On top of this, Bob had developed a habit of giving poor performances in front of massive television audiences, including his appearances at the 1991 Grammys, David Letterman’s 10th Anniversary Special in in 1992, and Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993 – all of which must have only served to alienate audiences further.

Before making the decision to appear on Unplugged, Dylan attempted to take matters into his own hands. Booking himself for a two-night, four-show stay at New York’s Supper Club and hiring a film crew helmed by director Michael Borofsky (who would later film The Pixies in a similar environment), Dylan recorded what is assumed to have been material for a potential television special and live album. The bootlegs of the shows reveal Dylan to be in prime form, tearing through the four acoustic sets with the passion and commitment of a man with something to prove. Unfortunately, the entire project was swiftly scrapped, and neither the film nor the album was released.

There are several possible reasons for this. Given Bob’s poor commercial standing at the time, he may have simply been unable to find a network willing to pick up the special, especially as it featured no special guests and a setlist that was light on well-known hits – factors which may also have made Columbia reluctant to release a live album of the shows. However, since the performances have remained in the vaults for nearly three decades, despite reaching almost mythical status amongst fans, it’s arguably more likely that there is something about the shows that Dylan was/is unhappy with.  Personally, I think they are fantastic performances and desperately wish the film would be released.

Still, the appeal of a high-profile TV special was impossible to deny. Almost exactly one year after the Supper Club shows, Dylan and his band were back in New York filming an MTV Unplugged special. The circumstances could not have been more different to the year before: instead of an intimate club, Bob now found himself in the comparatively sterile surroundings of Sony Studios. Unusually, he kept his sunglasses on during the whole two nights of filming, and seems to have either decided or been persuaded to wear an outfit that evoked the image of the iconic Highway 61-era Dylan. Just from a visual perspective, the objective was clear: Bob Dylan was looking to make a good impression.

This extended to the setlist, too. At some point, Dylan made it known that he intended to perform a set of folk songs, but was informed by executives (most likely from Columbia, who would have been thinking about the sales of the upcoming live album) that this wouldn’t do, and that Bob needed to bring out the hits. Dylan duly complied. On some level, it’s probable that he realised this was something of a make-or-break situation: he had a golden opportunity to reassert himself as a top-tier artist, and if he performed poorly, or simply failed to connect with the TV audience watching at home, it would be difficult to see where his recording career could go from here. On the other hand, a success could be used as something to build on.

It’s worth noting that these tapings presented a very different environment to Dylan’s usual Never Ending Tour shows. There, Dylan performs a kind of highwire act, reshaping his songs to (and sometimes beyond) breaking point in a nightly exploration of what it means to be an artist. That’s not what was required of him at these Unplugged tapings. What he needed to do here was be palatable, in order to reach both younger viewers (“Wow, this Dylan guy seems pretty cool”) and older ones (“Is that Bob Dylan? I used to listen to him years ago....”). It might have been frustrating for fans who knew what Dylan was capable of to see him holding back in this fashion, but a potential Grammy’s ‘91 scenario was simply not an option for Bob at this point: he had to play it safe.

And these aren’t bad performances, by any means; in fact, there are gems to be found. ‘Shooting Star’, ‘John Brown’ (receiving its first official release on a Dylan album 32 years after it was written), ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Dignity’ are my favourites from the official disc, while the outtakes include stellar performances of ‘I Want You’, ‘Hazel’, ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You’ and ‘My Back Pages’, amongst others. There are no huge risks being taken, but the performances are uniformly tight and professional.

The TV special received warm reviews, with the likes of The New York Times and The L.A Times announcing that Dylan was on the comeback trail. However, the real measure of Unplugged’s success, at least as far as Columbia was concerned, would be on the Billboard Chart. Thankfully, the album - released in May 1995 - delivered, becoming Dylan’s highest charting record since Infidels in 1983. 

The success of the special and album was significant. Unplugged, while not necessarily offering a true representation of Bob Dylan the performing artist, did serve to introduce him to a new audience, and perhaps to reintroduce him to an old one. When Dylan released his next album of new material – 1997’s Time Out of Mind – they were waiting with open arms.

 

 

Looking Back at 'Don't Look Back'

Recently, I realised that, despite being a Bob Dylan fan since 2013, I had never seen Don’t Look Back. That's right: the most famous Dylan documentary of all, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at his storied 1965 tour of England. How had I not seen this film?

Well, there are a few reasons. One is that clips from Don't Look Back turn up all over the place – Dylan playing ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ for Donovan, Dylan trying to find out who threw a glass out of his hotel window, Dylan berating Time magazine journalist Horace Judson. I almost felt as though I had seen the film, just because of how well-known these clips are. Another reason is that the 1960s are the most thoroughly documented period of Dylan’s career, which meant I always assumed that this film would simply cover what has become well-trodden ground.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Don't Look Back is fascinating on a number of levels: the images of 1960s England, the skilful direction of D.A Pennebaker, the unsettling presence of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman floating serenely through the film like a great white shark. But the most intriguing aspect of Don’t Look Back, for me at least, is watching a young Bob Dylan come to terms with superstardom, and everything that accompanies it. This, in some ways, becomes the main dramatic thread of the whole film.

When we first meet Bob, he seems pretty happy, even as journalists crowd around him to ask questions about him and his songs. He teases them a little with a giant lightbulb, but is polite and even charming towards them. Over the course of the film, however, the tone of these interactions gradually changes, as Dylan meets fans, fellow musicians, and more journalists. Whilst well-meaning, all of these people want something from him – answers, an autograph, or maybe just that most precious commodity of all: his time. It looks exhausting, and reminded me of a comment Rolling Thunder Revue member Ronnie Blakley made in the 2019 Martin Scorsese documentary about Dylan seeking refuge from “the onslaught of strangers.”

One particularly telling moment comes when Dylan meets a group of fans, who inform him of their distaste for his recent forays into the world of electric rock ‘n’ roll.

“My friends were playing with me on that song,” Dylan replies, playfully but with a hint of terseness. “Y’know, I have to give some work to my friends. I mean, you don’t mind that, right? Huh? You don’t mind them playing with me if they play the guitar and drums and all that stuff, right?”

“It just doesn’t sound like you at all,” the fan insists. “Sounds as if you’re having a good old laugh.”

“Well, don’t you like me to have a good old laugh once in a while? Isn’t that alright with you?” Dylan is still speaking in a playful tone of voice, but you get the feeling he’s straining to remain polite.

Finally, it all comes to a head during the infamous interview with Time Magazine’s Horace Judson, where Dylan lets rip with both barrels at the unsuspecting journalist. I’ve always found this scene hard to watch – I can’t help but feel bad for Judson – but I have to admit that it makes much more sense within the context of the entire film, after Bob has had to endure an entire tour’s worth of questions and small talk coming from every direction.

An interesting counterpoint to the Judson showdown is the scene where Bob is unexpectedly invited to meet the High Sheriff’s Lady. I’ve lived in England all my life and have never heard of the apparently still-extant High Sherriff’s Association prior to watching this film - but she’s here, and has specifically requested an audience with Dylan. Bob, for his part, seems delighted to meet this very proper, very English lady, who proudly introduces him to her sons. Bob gives her a harmonica, and she says that he and Bob Neuwirth absolutely must come to stay at her mansion next time they’re in England. The whole thing is surreal, but it sticks with me because the High Sherriff’s Lady might be the only person in the film to approach Dylan without any ‘baggage’. To her, he’s not the ‘Voice of a Generation’; he’s just a nice young man who sings nice songs that he wrote by himself.

It struck me while watching this film that I think I understand why Dylan prefers touring with a band. Frankly, touring as a solo artist looks like an incredibly isolating experience. I actually found myself feeling grateful for the presence of Bob Neuwirth as Dylan’s touring companion – while Neuwirth is by most accounts a divisive figure, to say the least, he appears to be the only person in the film (along with Joan Baez, who departs fairly early on) who is actually Dylan’s friend. Once Bob is on stage, however, it’s just him facing the world alone; no one to turn to for a smile or a shared joke, no one to interact with or play off musically, no one to pat on the back at the end of a concert and say “hey man, you played really good tonight.” I guess stand-up comedians must feel like this all the time.

This post was inspired by the excellent book Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan by C.P. Lee

Another Never Ending Tour: The Bob Dylan - B.B. King Connection

You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, but there are other musicians I like besides Bob Dylan - one of them being the late, great B.B. King. Recently, I was happy and surprised to learn, thanks to an article by Tony Attwood on the Untold Dylan blog, that King had recorded a Bob Dylan song: a Shot of Love-era outtake called ‘Fur Slippers’, which King recorded for the soundtrack to the 1999 CBS miniseries Shake, Rattle & Roll: An American Love Story. 

The Dylan version of this song (co-written by Bob's Gospel-era bassist Tim Drummond) has never been released (Edit: it has now! - 19/09/21), although it was apparently shortlisted for inclusion on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 before ultimately being left aside. I haven’t managed to track down any mention of how ‘Fur Slippers’ found its way to B.B., but the ‘90s was a decade when Dylan was happy to gift unreleased songs to other performers, including Willie Nelson, The Band, and Sheryl Crowe. Perhaps he thought ‘Fur Slippers’ would be a good fit for King and sent it his way.

Hearing two of my favourite performers cross over in this fashion reminded me that, besides ‘Fur Slippers’, B.B. King had something else in common with Bob Dylan: a Never Ending Tour....

Bob Dylan has spent an extraordinary amount of time on the road over the last three decades, but the touring life of B.B. King makes Dylan’s NET schedule seem positively conservative by comparison. Hitting the road with his band in the early-to mid-’50s (sources differ on the exact year), King toured continuously until his final performance at Chicago’s House of Blues on 3rd October 2014. And when I say continuously, I mean continuously; in all of that time, B.B. never seems to have taken a single year off. In his prime, he also doesn’t appear to have broken his tours down into ‘legs’ as most performers do. Charles Sawyer’s authorised biography The Arrival of B.B. King, published in 1980, describes King as having taken a total of just two months' vacation over the preceding thirty years, with B.B. choosing instead to simply grab a few days off here and there to return to his home in Las Vegas.

Sawyer also reports that, at the time the book was published, King was playing an annual average of 300 shows a year, and in 1956 had performed a staggering 342 one-night engagements. Even in his final years in the early 2010s, King was still performing around 100 shows a year.

As has been the case with Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, B.B. King’s touring band evolved significantly over the years. Originally (according to Sawyer) a sprawling thirteen-piece group featuring a large horn section, by 1957 King had scaled the band down to a smaller unit led by drummer Sonny Freeman, who would remain with B.B. as his bandleader for the next eighteen years. During Freeman’s tenure, the band acquired the unofficial moniker of ‘Sonny Freeman & The Unusuals’; it was various configurations of this group that appeared on the classic live albums Live at the Regal (1965), Blues is King (1967), Live at Cook County Jail (1971), and Live in Japan (Japan-only release 1971, wider release 1999). Arguably the greatest tragedy of King’s recording career is that he rarely used his touring band in the studio, although the albums Blues on the Bayou (1998), Makin’ Love is Good For You (2000) and A Christmas Celebration of Hope (2001) did feature his excellent latter-day backing group.

Despite Dylan and King's respective Never Ending Tours criss-crossing the globe simultaneously for years, I can only find one instance of their paths intersecting, when King opened for Dylan in Adelaide, Australia on 19th April 2011 (they had previously appeared on the same bill at the inaugural Farm Aid event in 1985, three years before Dylan began his NET). Although they didn’t play together, there’s a lovely photo of the two meeting backstage that captures the mutual admiration that must have existed between these two 'road warriors'.

*

Possibly the most impressive aspect of B.B King's six-decade-long touring career is that it's practically impossible to find footage of him coasting or performing badly. Even when age began to slow him down in his 70s and 80s, I have no doubt that he was giving it everything he had, every night, until he could do it no more. Here are a few videos of the King of the Blues in action: 

Must I Not Wonder Within: 'What Good Am I?' and Bob Dylan in Japan 2014

Bob Dylan songs have a habit of sneaking up on me. I can listen to a song for years and think of it as just another song on an album, and then, without warning, that very same song will suddenly come into bloom before my eyes. For this reason, I’m always cautious about dismissing anything Bob Dylan does, as there’s a good chance that I'll come to love it eventually if I don’t get it right away.

The latest song to reveal itself in this manner has been ‘What Good Am I?’, from 1989’s Oh Mercy. Until recently, this song had always passed me by, perhaps due to it being placed immediately after the twin peaks of ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ and ‘Most of the Time’. It wasn’t the studio version that turned me onto ‘What Good Am I?’, however: it was a live performance from 23rd April 2014 in Osaka, Japan.

Usually, Dylan songs go through various permutations as they are performed over the years. Nothing is sacred, with lyrics, melody and arrangement often torn apart and reassembled like one of Dylan’s scrap-metal sculptures. Curiously, despite being performed more than 200 times over a 25-year period (1989-2014), ‘What Good Am I?’ remained strangely immune to this practice. Not only did the arrangement change very little over that time, but the song also seems to have been played in the same key (E) for this entire period. This is extremely unusual, but it also raises the question of why this song remained relatively untouched by Dylan’s famous tendency towards reinvention.

Dylan’s comments on the song in his autobiography Chronicles offer some potential answers:

“When we began working on “What Good Am I?” I had to hunt for a melody and after working on it for a suitable amount of time Danny [Lanois, producer] thought he heard something. I thought that I was onto something but hadn’t quite found it yet. I was looking too hard. When it’s right, you don’t have to look for it. Maybe it was only a foot and a half away, I didn’t know. But I had exhausted my energy and thought I might as well just go with what Lanois liked, although it was too slow for my taste. Danny used layered rhythms to create a mood for this song. I liked the words, but the melody wasn’t quite special enough – didn't have any emotional impact. Setting aside our personal differences, we worked on this song for a while and completed it.”

It sounds like Dylan felt that he had allowed the song to slip through his fingers in the recording studio. “I thought that I was onto something but hadn’t quite found it yet”. “Maybe it was only a foot and a half away”. This is probably a common occurrence for Dylan, but the fact that he altered the song so little over years of live performance suggest to me that, in the case of ‘What Good Am I?’, the studio version  was just a hair’s breadth away from what he was hoping to achieve. If his vision couldn't be realised in the studio, perhaps it could be onstage.

There are many other wonderful live versions of this song (Nagoya 1994 is a particular favourite), but – for now at least – the Osaka 2014 is the one for me. Where the narrator on the studio version found himself facing a sudden, terrible epiphany of self-doubt, the atmosphere in the Osaka performance is very different. The song has now taken on the feel of a Shakespearean soliloquy, with the narrator, now much older, staring into his own soul, or perhaps up towards the sky, and asking “Am I a good person? And if not, can I be redeemed?”. These are the same questions Michael Corleone was seeking to answer in The Godfather Part III, and that Frank Sheeran faced at the end of The Irishman. In both of their cases the answer was a devastating “no”, but the fate of our narrator is left much more ambiguous.

The song ends with a beautiful pedal steel/electric guitar flourish. It’s one of those rare performances where, although the band is playing during the whole song, it feels as though Bob is onstage entirely alone, as was the case with ‘Song to Woody’ in 1999/2000 and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ in 2018/19. Even the audience recedes far into the distance. All that remains is one man, alone with his thoughts.

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The Osaka 2014 performance is not on YouTube, unfortunately, but I did find an performance from five days earlier in Nagoya that's almost as good: