Bobcat Nation:
Memoirs of a Young
Bob Dylan Fan

by Adam Selzer

Contents:

CHAPTER ONE:
By Way of Introduction

CHAPTER TWO:
A Brief Dylan Bio

CHAPTER THREE:
I Was a Teenage Bobcat

CHAPTER FOUR:
The Old, Weird America
Dalton and Atlanta GA, 2001

CHAPTER FIVE
Love, Theft, and Dutch Sailor's Eyes
Nashville 2001

CHAPTER SIX
Adam and Mike's Excellent Adventure
Newport Folk Festival 2002

CHAPTER SEVEN
Risking Your Life for the Rail
The Atlanta Lightning Storm, 2003

CHAPTER EIGHT
Cowboys and Hippies
Dylan and the Dead 2003 tour

CHAPTER NINE
We Can All Be Famous
For Fifteen People
Chicago and Atlanta, 2004

DYLAN REVIEWS
2005-Present

Chapter Four:
The Old, Weird America

                In 2001, I was in my second year of college at the State University of West Georgia in Carrolton, going through what some might call my Goth Folksinger stage. I was sharing a dorm room with a guy named Joe who played African percussion when I performed folk songs around town (a combination that went over very well, believe it or not).

                Joe was the kind of guy who used to really get annoyed at having to go to see The Allman Brothers with his mother, because, to him, it was just going to see his mother's old hippie friends. His mother was quite a character. Joe had spent most of his teenage years as a punk-rock iconoclast; while I lived with him, his hair went back forth between being solid black (which his mother pronounced to be"too plain") to being a pattern I can only describe as leopard-skin. But, while his musical taste generally centered around punk and goth bands, his tastes were really very varied. He'd listen to classical, adored Gene Krupa, and liked all of the Tom Waits, German cabaret, klezmer, and traditional folk music I played in the dorm. After all, he was always ready to explain to anyone why Woody Guthrie was every bit as much a punk as Johnny Rotten.

                And, of course, he harbored a definite respect for Dylan. His mother had gone to see the concert at The Fox in 1995, and he'd never quite forgiven her for not taking him.

                In Spring, Dylan began to announce concert dates that included a stop at a festival in Nashville, and we decided that we had to go. After all, it was Nashville: who was to say that Johnny Cash wouldn't show up for a duet? We'd earned a few bucks by taking first place in a "Battle of the Bands" contest, and decided to make the trip.

                A month before the show, though, I still hadn't quite gotten around to getting our tickets without knowing exactly why. Then, quite suddenly, a show was announced in Dalton, Georgia. Immediately, I decided that going to this would be better than going to the Nashville festival. For one thing, it was closer. Driving through the mountains of Northern Georgia and Southern Tennessee in a car of questionable abilities had me a little bit nervous. Second, the Dalton show would be a regular, solo show, not a festival gig. That meant a smaller crowd and a longer set. And, honestly, I wasn't kidding anyone. Johnny Cash wouldn't be showing up at the Nashville show. Deep down, I'd always known that. And, for the record, it turned out to be right.

                Another major plus of the Dalton show was that the tickets (only 29.50, if you can believe that) weren't being sold through Ticketmaster. Everybody hates Ticketmaster. The way that they've nearly monopolized the concert ticket industry is, in my mind, quite deplorable, as is the ridiculous service charge that they tack onto the already unbelievably high ticket prices. I'd have to spend some time on the phone to get tickets from the box office, but there was no danger that I'd have to listen to N'Sync while waiting, which I'd done in the lineup once in '98, when the Ticketmaster geniuses decided to put Dylan tickets onsale at the same time N'sync tickets went on sale.

                Of course, this led to the danger that I wouldn't be able to get a good seat. You can camp out in front of your telephone if you like, but it won't get you a better spot in line. But the venue in Dalton held 4100 people, according to Bill Pagel's "BobDates" web page, which was always the first and last word on concert information. That's not much compared to big arenas, but I wasn't sure that there were even that many people living in Dalton. Good seats, I reasoned, should be easy to get.

                I asked Joe if he'd ever been to Dalton.

                "Well," he said, "yes, I have. It epitomizes Georgia, actually. It's boring and stupid." High praise indeed.

                "Do you think that they'll be able to get 4100 people to go to a Bob Dylan concert?" I asked.

                "Hell no," he said.

                Intrigued, I looked up Dalton on the web. The official page of the town was easy to find with a simple web search.

                "Welcome to Our Town," it said, though I wasn't actually there yet. "Dalton, Georgia. The Carpet Capital of the World." Oh, good lord (I'm saying that in the most delighted way possible)! You just don't see towns this cheesy anymore! Though Des Moines and Omaha might be competing for the title of Insurance Capital of the World, neither are really advertising the fact.

                The rest of the web page wasn't what you'd call exciting. There was a picture of a red building which I figured was probably either a schoolhouse or a courthouse, though it might have been a bank, against a plain white background. I got a definite impression that the town worried about people looking at a sharp, colorful web page and thinking that it was a lovely town, only to be horribly disappointed when they showed up. Let's have a cheer for truth in advertising, shall we?

                After rooting around for awhile, I found a bit about the arena in which the concert would be held. I got the idea that they hadn't held too many concerts there; it appeared to be used mainly for craft fairs and Civil War Reenactments. It said that 4,164 was the "projected" capacity, which I guessed meant that they'd never actually had that many people in there before. Since there would be reserved seating at this show, I assumed that they would be bringing in some chairs, which might lower the capacity considerably. I just hoped that the acoustics would be reasonable.

                Digging further into the web page, I found that there were individual pictures of such notables as the city clerk and the building inspector. However, there was a link to a much-nicer page for the Dalton State College, the presence of which nicely did the job of explaining why Dylan would be playing in town. He likes to play college towns.

                Dalton State College is a pretty small school, with just over 3000 total students, 2/3rds of which were Freshmen, and a slightly disturbing 93% of whom were white, according to the information I got from the web page. I'm not sure if those 3000 were included in the overall town population of about 22,000. College-town or not, it hardly sounded like the sort of town that could get 4000 people to go to a Bob Dylan concert.

                But it's just the sort of town in which I wanted to see Bob Dylan play. Bob is one of the last of the great troubadours, playing all over from the cities to the hamlets, for anyone who wants to hear him, from the Saints to the Damned. Bob is actually sometimes credited for starting the sort of music later known as "Americana," (though, naturally, his "Americana" was heavily inspired by older American music, which itself was inspired by even older European and African music.)

                The classic American Small Town, the kind you see in Thornton Wilder plays, is a dying breed today, if it still exists at all. Smaller towns today are generally built around streets containing the same old sterile strips of fast food restaurants and Wal-Marts. Those older towns which are left today probably won't be around for long, and what Dylan critic Greil Marcus calls That Old, Weird America, the place and mindset in which much of Dylan's music is firmly rooted, is quickly dying out, to be replaced by the Great American Mall. Very rarely does one get the chance to see a legend perform in a small town on a Wednesday night. But I, like everyone else who could make it to the area and come up with thirty bucks, had just that chance, and I, for one, certainly intended to take it.

                Then, another show was announced, at the Music Midtown festival in Atlanta. Music Midtown was a hot, crowded festival that was perfect for people who liked to be around a bunch of drunk thirteen-year-olds. I'd been a few times in high school, even seeing Dylan there in 1996, which gave me the rare chance to be kicked in the head by crowd-surfers during "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." By college, there were very few artists that I would be willing to attend Music Midtown to see.

                Dylan, of course, was one of them.

                So (and I promise I'll only say this a few more times), I decided to go to a couple of Dylan concerts.

                ****

                Towns in America today can generally be divided into two categories. I'll call the first one The Mall.

                Most of the country, particularly the suburban part, is now in The Mall category. They're the towns made up of isolated subdivisions of featureless, dull houses. Somewhere amongst all of these there'll be one or two main roads featuring an endless stream of fast food companies and big-name retail outlets. Wal-Mart is a major factor in the town's economy. In fact, Wal-Mart employs more people than any other company in the United States, despite the fact that it's hardly known for being a great employer. Heck, a recent commercial had an employee saying "If I can afford this stuff, anyone can!" In other words "Wal-Mart pays its employees so little that I can guarantee that I make less than you, and the company is fine with me bragging about that on the air." That's business-ethics in The Mall for ya.

                In The Mall, working at Wal-Mart has become the modern equivalent of going to work in the mines. In many ways, Wal-Mart has become a new town square, and the towns in The Mall are, for all practical purposes, just live-in extensions of Wal-Mart. Cold, featureless, and sterile. The houses are almost all white, off-white, or gray. The landscaping of the highways somehow makes them even less scenic. Everything is new, shiny, phony, and dull. Now, if you'll all turn in your hymnals to page 137, we shall sing a few choruses of "Little Boxes."

                Of course, not everything about The Mall is bad. It offers easy access to a wide selection of merchandise, generally at reasonable prices, and, for most people, it's preferable to living in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from anyplace where there's much of anything to do. The schools tend to be good, and, if there were any sidewalks, it would be safe to go walking on them. And, of course, it tends to be generally modern, and one can't argue too harshly against modernization.

                The other category of town is what Dylan critic Greil Marcus calls "The Old, Weird America." (See his book, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes) These are generally the towns and suburbs built at least thirty or forty years ago. Some of them actually have a town square. Instead of subdivisions, there are neighborhoods, full of relatively odd-looking houses. There are generally still fast food restaurants and Wal-Marts, but, surrounding them, there are still some local, independently owned places. In short, towns in That Old, Weird America are the towns which still have some character, even a bit of mystery about them. The sort of old towns that look sort of like Norman Rockwell paintings, with the addition of an awful lot of cemeteries. The sort of towns you imagine existing outside of the cities before there were suburbs.

                Why do I mention all of this? Possibly because the environment in which one hears music can affect the way the music sounds to the listener. Punk rock sounds best when you're riding through the suburbs in the backseat of your friend's beat-up, powder-blue Honda. The band Counting Crows sounds best on overcast days, and, as everyone knows, all music always sounds different in the dark. Hearing "Desolation Row" in the middle of the forest can be a very different experience than hearing it in your car on a crowded city street. As Marcus spends a whole book pointing out, many, though by no means all, of Dylan's songs are rooted in the Old, Weird America. And I don't think music ever sounds better in The Mall.

                So, as the Old, Weird America is, for better or worse, gradually replaced by The Mall, Dylan's songs may begin to sound different. Most likely, they'll seem even more surreal than they did when they were first released. Most of Dylan's old songs that don't take place in bustling city sound as though they take place in The Old, Weird America, and, if they can only be imagined in The Mall, they'll seem even more surreal. Many of his characters might have seemed like Picasso-esque grotesques in the old towns, but in a modern airport, they'd be first in line for a cavity search.

                One day, God forbid, maybe everything will crash. When one looks at The Old, Weird America, and thinks of the hobo-filled, Oh Brother Where Art Thou era of the 1930's, it's important to remember that all of that took place after the roaring '20's. Perhaps another crash, or nuclear war, or whatever, could come along. What we'll wind up with, I think, is a society similar to the one described in "Desolation Row." No one in the song seems to know what's going on or who they are, so they adapt the personas of famous people and characters. Then the songs that seem bizarre in The Mall might suddenly sound prophetic. Or maybe not. I don't know. I'm just trying to seem smart here.

                Hold everything. After writing that last passage, I drove off down I-20 listening to "Desolation Row," in which one of the lines is "Praise be to Nero's Neptune/The Titanic sails at dawn/and everybody's shouting out/which side are you on." Shortly thereafter, I passed Arbor Place Mall in Douglasville. Outside was a 50-foot-high carnival attraction called the Titanic Super Slide. It was an inflatable slide shaped like the sinking Titanic. I'm not making this up. Riders slide down the deck into blue inflatable waves. I was in awe. I'd never seen anything so gloriously, wonderfully tasteless ("Weee! Look, ma! I'm sliding my way into a cold watery grave!") and it suddenly occurred to me that I'd never seen much of anything so ironically American, presented in a way that offered not a hint of irony, in my life. In 1962, Dylan sang "It doesn't seem to be very funny/what some people will do for money," in the rather funny song "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues." That was almost 40 years ago, and it's only getting worse. If the Titanic Super Slide is quintessentially American, then maybe Desolation Row has arrived already. We've all gone sailing off the deep end (into inflatable, plastic waves.) They're not selling postcards of the hanging anymore; they're making carnival rides out of it.

                The town in which I was living while attending school in 2001, Carrollton, Georgia, was an old town perched somewhere in between That Old, Weird America and The Mall. It had weird neighborhoods, a lovely town square, and local eateries, right along side the miles of fast food chains and the Wal-Mart. Like most town squares, the stores therein were generally fairly bizarre. There was a cafe or two, only one of which ever seemed to be open, a frame shop, a bakery, and a couple of useless crap shops. My favorite place was an outfit called S&M TV Repair. ("We'll whip your TV into shape!") ("You've heard of hitting the TV to get it to work...") (Okay, I'll stop.)

                Like an awful lot of these old towns, it was apparently a great boon to the local economy when Furniture and Undertaking became separate occupations. In this small town, I know of about five funeral homes in a one mile radius, and about six furniture stores. And yet they couldn't seem to get a decent bookstore or movie theatre, which I still find puzzling. Don't people want something to read while they sit in all of that hand-crafted furniture waiting for the funeral to start?

                It's a bizarre little town that grows on you after awhile. There's a waterslide in the middle of the old cemetery (really). If you go driving around, you'll find boarded up places with names like "Lazy Lous (sic) Flea Market" (Lou was apparently too lazy to use an apostrophe), and, in the middle of the "tree memorial garden," which is nearly inaccessible on an elevated median in a busy street, is a large, metal statue of a tree, a plaque at the bottom of which reads "Guiding Beacon To the Great Raccoon." I am, by nature, a city-slicker, but I like Carrolton. It's a weird little town with a reasonably centralized population, and it offers fairly easy access to Atlanta.

                But, like most old places, it has its dark side. The town square is lovely, but one can't help but remember that the KKK used to march through it pretty regularly, and still does from time to time (or so I've been told). Even as late as 2001, the town repeatedly elected jerks like Bob Barr, who gave keynote addresses to white supremecist groups, to congress. No one is saying that The Old, Weird America was without its share of problems, after all.

                Dylan is, perhaps, the greatest example of a truly American artist. His songs and style may come from The Old, Weird America of traditional folk music, but songs like "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Visions of Johanna," and "Subterannean Homesick Blues" show that he's certainly got a handle on The Mall. By combining rock and folk, you could even say that he's the man who joined the Old America with the New America, making him both timeless and contemporary, the quintessential American artist. Or maybe he's not. Maybe it's Springsteen, or maybe it's Tom Waits, who somehow manages to be undeniably a very American artists, but also rather European at the same time. Waits' recent work is heavily rooted in American traditional music, much in the way that his early work was rooted in jazz, or his 80's work was rooted in European music.

                Springsteen, for my money, never quite tapped into the Old, Weird America in quite the way that Dylan or Waits have (though he identified parts of it in contemporary America quite nicely, at times seemingly inventing his own New Weird America). Springsteen wasn't touring in 2001, and Waits doesn't get out on tour much at all. Dylan, however, is still a great Troubadour. He has changed as much over the years as the country has over the centuries, all the while remaining true to himself in a way that America itself only tries to be. Springsteen and Waits both represent various periods and eras of America, and both have represented more than one era at different times. But only Dylan really brings it all together, bringing it all back home 100 or more nights out of the year.

                So in spring of 2001, (all together now)... I decided that I should go to see a couple of Dylan concerts.

                **

                I woke up early the day tickets to the Dalton show went on sale at the box office, and started calling at exactly 10am. The line was busy. It suddenly occurred to me that, in this era of call waiting and Ticketmaster, it had been a long time since I'd even heard a busy signal. After about twenty minutes, I finally got through - to a message that said no one was there to take my call. Unbelievable, I thought. For a minute, I actually found myself wishing that I could just go to the nearest grocery store and get the tickets through Ticketmaster. Not for long, of course, but for a minute or so.

                Then I found out that the problem was that the number listed on the BobDates webpage wasn't the correct number to call. The correct number was on the Dalton Convention Center web page, and I wound up getting through relatively quickly. The person on the other end of the line (the person!) was very friendly and helpful.

                Get this: they only added a $1.50 mailing fee to the $29.50 tickets. That's it. Ticketmaster would've charged me a mailing fee, a shipping fee, a handling fee, a service charge, a convenience charge, a restoration fee, and an extra five bucks for the kosher meal, which wasn't being served, after charging sixty bucks for the seat in the first place. This was only $29.50 to start with! Most shows by those days had gotten unbelievably expensive. The good seats at a show like Madonna or The Rolling Stones were going for a good $250 per seat by then. When, exactly, did rock and roll become such a bourgeois affair? Rock and the bourgeoisie seem like fairly strange bedfellows to me, but, well, here we are. When I saw Springsteen, the parking lot was a sea of SUVs, and, during the show, I was treated to the delightful sight of thousands of middle-aged, balding, successful business-men pumping their fists and shouting "Tramps like us!"

                The tickets came in the mail a week later, and looked more like movie tickets than concert tickets. It's always nice to add a non-Ticketmaster stub to one's collection, though, and I loved the way it said "An Evening With Bob Dylan - Highlands Arena" on the top. I hadn't known that the place was called the Highlands Arena, but that's a fine name for a place to see a Dylan concert.

                By the time of the Dalton show, I was in slightly better shape than I had been in months, financially speaking. Besides the few bucks we'd won in the Battle of the Bands, the day before the trip I sold a couple of textbooks with which I was finished. (well, almost finished, anyway.)

                I'd assembled a motley crew to accompany me on the trip. Besides Joe, there was Brent Greene, an artsy fellow who looks like a younger version of Tom Waits. Sarah Johnson, a friend of Joe and I who happened to me named after Dylan's first wife, would be the lone female in the group. None of the three had ever seen a Dylan show before, but they'd heard the bootlegs that I frequently played in my car.

                We met up in the campus cafeteria at 11:00, ate some lunch, and climbed into my '85 Volvo wagon. It had no air conditioning, but the seats were pretty comfortable, and I'd spent most of the day before putting together mix tapes to accompany the drives to and from Dalton.

                The first major road down which we drove was, appropriately enough, Highway 61. Highway 61, in western Georgia, is a fun road. While Carrolton might be perched between The Old, Weird America and The Mall (veering a bit towards the former), when driving down Highway 61, after getting out of Carrollton, one is clearly in The Old America. You drive past beat up skeletons of what appear to have been either juke joints or shipwrecks - one or the other, but it's impossible to tell. Past Mother Dora, the palm reader. Past a bunch of houses with fully functional wells in the front yard. Past old, Civil War-era cemeteries. I had the mix tape set up to play Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" and a few Carter Family songs as we drove down this particular stretch of road. Brent and I sang along with "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" in harmony, having just watched Night of the Hunter, a movie that featured it, a couple of days earlier.

                Finally, when we came to the Wal-Mart (it had to turn up, y'know?), it was time to turn onto I-20, which we took to I-285, which led to 75, on which we would stay for pretty much the remainder of the trip. As the scenery got more interesting, Sarah was given the task of writing down anything I'd want to mention in my review later on.

                As we progressed further and further North, we started coming to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. As we drove further into the mountains, the billboards got more and more entertaining. After awhile, almost all of them advertised either "PEACHS" (sic) or "P-NUTS" (really sic). When I first moved to the South, I found all of the misspelled signs a bit depressing, but I gradually learned to find them amusing. As we approached Dalton, most of the billboards seemed to revolve around carpet, including one whose mascot was an utra-un-pc "Little Indian Boy," complete with a mohawk. I don't know about you, but whenever I see an extremely pale Native American kid with a mohawk, the first thing I think of is how badly I need a new carpet.

                When we hit Dalton, the Highlands Arena, where the show would be held, was about the first thing that we saw. It was a nice place in the mountains - literally. From the bottom of the mountain, we could see the arena perched about halfway up.

                Dalton isn't really a small town, though, and there's nothing terribly old or weird about it, at least as far as I could tell. The web page, which I had found so entertaining, could be considered something akin to false advertising. The place looked an awful lot nicer on the page. In reality, it was mostly a dingy sort of retail wasteland, full of stores of crap that no one wants. Aside from the standard Wal-Marts and fast food joints, there were a hell of a lot places to buy carpet - it was, indeed, probably the carpet capital of the world. There were almost as many mills as stores.

                One of the problems the town has (and I say the word "problem" in a cautious sort of way), is its large Hispanic population. Not that the Hispanic people are a problem, by any means. The problem is that, as in most places, they're getting the short end of the stick. I read an article awhile back about how teachers in Dalton said that there were lots of really smart Hispanic kids in the school system, kids who should have been able to go to college. But, since neither they nor their parents were legal U.S. citizens, they couldn't get the financial aid they needed, and wound up going to work in the carpet mill. The girl working at Subway spoke both English and Spanish extremely well; you'd think that a person with such a valuable skill could get a better job than working in a fast food joint, unless she was still in high school, which she didn't appear to be. Then again, maybe she was just extremely passionate about sandwiches. It takes all kinds, after all.

                We pulled into Dalton at about 2:00, which meant that we'd have an awfully long time to kill hanging around town. I can tell you right now that the challenge of killing four or five hours in Dalton is a challenge better left unmet. At Sarah's suggestion we went into a place called Big Lots, which sells cheap factory leftovers that Wal-Mart can't sell - a great place to find items loaded with camp value (not to mention cheap beef jerky.)

                The music in Big Lots, however, did a great job of illustrating my earlier notion that the environment in which one hears music affects the way that the music sounds. Over the speakers at Big Lots came the song "Frozen," off of one of Madonna's recent records. The last time I'd heard the song in public was in a little restaurant one night in London a few months earlier (I was visiting some relatives who were living there). There, the song had absolutely floored me. Drawn me in and haunted me. The way Madonna was singing seemed directly in the tradition of Homer's Sirens. "Man!" I remember saying to everyone near me. "This is great!" Wandering through the aisles of Big Lots in Dalton, Georgia, however, it just sounded like elevator music. Not even a little bit affecting, let alone haunting.

                After cruising the old main drag of Dalton (such as it was) a couple of times, we determined that the only place worth checking out was probably…the mall. I know, I know. Here I am, writing this chapter contrasting The Old Weird America and The Mall, and, when I get to what's supposed to be The Old, Weird America, all I can think to do is go to the mall. We figured maybe there'd be a movie theater there (there was), and that maybe it would be showing a movie that looked worth seeing (nope!).

                As we walked through the parking lot, an older fellow approached us and asked us which celebrity was in the mall. We, of course, didn't know. "There's a big line outside of The Sound Shop," he said, "I think someone's signing autographs in there. I think it's maybe Green Day. Or maybe Rod Stewart."

                Well. That piqued our curiosity. We hadn't counted on seeing Green Day or Rod Stewart that day. If all went well, maybe they'd be in there having a cage match!

                Once inside the mall, we located the shop in question and went to see for ourselves. There was indeed a line gathered outside, filled mostly with vaguely punk/goth type kids who, for some reason, weren't in school. They certainly didn't seem like the sort of kids who would be all that keen on meeting Rod Stewart. As it turned out, there wasn't anyone in the store. They were all waiting in line get tickets to see the band Tool, who would be playing in town sometime in the near future. So that left us to find something else to do in the mall.

                We hit the bookstore first, in which the "Local" section was filled with the works of local authors. About half of them were religious books about the Apocalypse. The other half had titles like America in Trouble, and America Under Siege, and seemed to share the same message: "The Government is about to take over the country, so you'd better buy a lot of guns, bunkers, and electrical generators today!" (and here I had turned my bomb shelter into a gym). Maybe Dalton was weirder than I thought.

                Next door to the bookstore was something I hadn't seen in a long time - a video arcade. It wasn't much of a video arcade, but, well, one can't be choosy. It had been months since I had had the opportunity to play Skee-Ball.

                After milling around in the arcade and bookstore for a good two hours (bored, for the most part), we figured we'd had about enough of the mall, and went out to the car to see what else we could find. Nearby the mall was a little ice cream parlor called Ice Castle. Not some big chain, just a little, independent ice cream parlor. Ice cream sounded good to all of us, so we went in.

                It took me a minute to warm up to the place. It was full of people who appeared to be at least 80, and it smelled like a nursing home that also manufactured steak sauce. But, once I got used to the smell, the place was super. It had a whole bunch of flavors of ice cream, and also sold sandwiches and bowls of chili, just like a real old diner. We sat at the bar (the bar!) eating huge waffle cones that cost a mere $1.50, and sat there talking and eating (the ice cream was terrific, by the way) for quite some time. If you're ever in Dalton, I recommend it highly. You can't miss it; you're sure to see the giant statue of an ice cream cone from the road. If they took the Kenny G off of the stereo, the place would be a solid A+.

                We went to the arena after we finished our ice cream, a good hour before the doors opened. At the box office, we picked up some fliers that were half-sized versions of the poster (free, as opposed to ten bucks for the actual poster), and milled around talking to other fans. From the stereo in someone's van came the sound of the Halloween 64 bootleg, which I was skillfully able to identify in seconds. My parents would have been proud.

                I spoke to a couple of people from New Jersey, several from Tennessee… not a single person from Dalton, actually. While I spoke to everyone around me the whole time I was there, I never met anyone who actually lived in Dalton. The show didn't sell out - I'd say that it was about 2/3rds full, maybe 3/4ths - but it was easy to see how Dalton got that many people to see Bob Dylan - they imported them.

                Once we were in the arena, we were no longer in The Mall, or in The Old, Weird America, or even in the mountains; at least, not for all practical purposes. We were just in an arena, one which could have been in any other town or city in the country.

                The crowd was mostly not-quite-hardcore Bob fans, people who'd seen him a few times over the last several years. There were a few real hardcore people there, some of whom I spoke to in the parking lot, but none sitting right around me.

                My hands were practically shaking by ten-til-eight. The arena was filled with the smell of the Nag Champa incense that they burn before every show. My, how I love that smell. As long as I live, whenever I smell Nag Champa (which, of course, is the sort of thing that you smell every single day when you live in sub-suburban Georgia), it'll make me feel like I'm at a Dylan concert. When I listen to audience-made tapes, I can almost smell the stuff.

                Then, the lights went down. Not all the way down, but down enough that we knew the show was about to start. Bob walked onto the stage, amid all sorts of cheering, of course, a few seconds before he was announced. Like most shows on the 2001 tours, he was dressed in a black suit and white shirt, making him look vaguely like an old riverboat gambler, which may well have been the point.

                Every show at the time started with a sort of bizarre announcement from an offstage roadie: "Good evening, ladies and gentleman, will you please welcome Columbia Recording Artist - Bob Dylan!" Odd that Bob prefered to be called a recording artist night after night, when he did so little recording as opposed to so much performing. Personally, I think it's so that every bootleg tape started out with a plug for Columbia Records.

                After the introduction, Bob launched right into "Duncan and Brady," an old Leadbelly song about a man who's "been on the job too long." It wassort of a weird opening number. For one thing, you have the greatest songwriter of the 20th Century come onstage, and the first thing he does is sing a song that he didn't write. Also, the first words of the song, and, therefore, the first words out of his mouth are "Twinkle twinkle little star." I guess that it sort of shows Bob's sense of humor. For a while in the 80's, he opened by covering "So Long, Good Luck and Good-bye."

                Opening with a cover had been a custom since 1999. Most shows started with old bluegrass gospel songs, such as "Hallelujah I'm Ready to Go," most of which he appeared to have learned from Stanley Brothers records. This, of course, begged the oft-asked question of whether Bob still considered himself a Christian. You could make a pretty good case that he is, but you could also make an equally good case for the idea that he'd reverted to Judaism. In 1997 interviews, he said he currently subscribed to no organized religion, that instead he "believed in the songs." If he no longer considered himself a Christian, it seemed odd that he would choose to sing Jesus-related songs onstage, but, then again, he was singing songs about Jesus twenty years before his born-again period. Sometime in 2000, "Duncan and Brady," a song pretty well devoid of religious references, became the opening song of choice, and it stayed that way, with fairly little variation, for some time. The song is a real mover and shaker, and probably served as a good warm up for Bob and the band, not to mention the crowd.

                Most nights of the tour, the second song had been "Mr. Tambourine Man," which I'd seen Bob play several times. However, when guitarist Larry Campbell (who, with his newish facial hair, looked like the guitarist in "Almost Famous") went for his violin, I knew that we were going to get "My Back Pages." And what a version it was! Bob sang it nicely, with the violin adding a lovely touch. Towards the end, Bob walked back to the drum riser and picked up one of his harmonicas. Only the second song, and he was already playing harp! I'd seen shows where he never touched 'em. This was the first indication that Bob was, for lack of a better term, inspired that night. He was obviously into the music, even going so far as to take just about every guitar solo himself, which seemed a bit silly, in a way. On Bob's right was Charlie Sexton, a guitar virtuoso, and all he was doing was playing rhythm!

                The third song (always a critical song in the setlist, the "three spot") was "Desolation Row," just as it had been at the last show I saw. The arrangement rocked, and Bob sang the hell out of it, but it was not my favorite version of the song. The 99-01 version presented it as just a regular rock song. The original recording from 1965 is an apocalyptic report, with Bob wailing about all of the bizarre things he's seen, sounding almost terrified at times, even if the song is rather humorous. My personal favorite version is the one recorded for MTV Unplugged in late 1994. Here, Bob plays the Tour Guide, leading the listener through Desolation Row, whispering little bits of gossip about the bizarre characters. The clip-clop percussion suggests the sound of a horse walking down the road, enhancing the illusion that we're all in some caravan, taking a tour of Desolation Row with Bob as our guide, right until the last verse, when the perspective changes from third person to first (a very neat trick.) In the 2001 versions, however, Bob just played it as a rock song, singing only five or six of the ten verses. I missed the "praise be to Nero's Neptune" and "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood" verses…but who was I to complain? Bob Dylan can play whatever he wants, however he wants. We're all just beggars at his feet, and beggars can't be choosers. We were lucky he was still playing at all. And, anyway, the rocked-up, get-em-moving arrangement made it ideal for the three spot.

                After that, they put away the acoustic instruments and went for the electric guitars. After the hard-rocking-if-acoustic "Desolation Row," the difference was somewhat subtle, but the sound was definitely, well....louder.

                First up for the first electric set was "Crash on the Levee," a twisted little tune from the mid-sixties Basement Tapes, conjuring up the image of someone crashing his car into a levee just to start a flood, presumably killing himself, and apparently doing so just for revenge against one of his friends. "Oh, mama, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now!" he shouts. The Dalton performance was heavy and fast, with Tony Garnier adding a wicked bass line. The song hadn't come up very often in the past few years, but it was the opening song at several shows in 95-96. It's one of my favorites of the Basement Tapes, and I was delighted to get to hear it live. While the instrumental meter didn't really change, at least to my untrained-but-practiced ear, Bob sang each verse progressively faster, making the speaker in the song (who, of course, isn't necessarily Bob himself) seem to get more and more excited, or more and more demented.

                Next came another song that didn't come up much - never, in fact, until about a year before - "Tell Me That It Isn't True." It's a fun little song from the 1969 Nashville Skyline album, a little song about a rumor. Not the sort of song on which one would expect an instrumental jam, and there wasn't one. Just Bob, playing Bob the Actor, even making his face into the expression of the kind of person who would be saying such things to his lover. There was a lot of demand in his delivery - "You've got to tell me!" but also a bit of nervousness ("oh, god, what if she say's it's true?")

                By now, going just by the choices of songs so far, it was evident that we were getting a pretty special show. In the days after the show, other people who saw it would all use the word "special" to describe it. After five songs, he'd played four that I'd never heard him play before. A couple of days later, I met a guy who'd seen four songs he hadn't seen before in Dalton, and he'd been to over 150 shows.

                Next up was the more common "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," sung in a fun arrangement. Not all of the verses were there, but Bob sure did sing the verses that were there like a man possessed (to the possible detriment of the melody). If the place wasn't rocking before, it was now. Larry was playing an acoustic guitar, Bob and Charlie were still on electric, which gave the song the makings of the jam number into which it turned towards the end. Most interesting, to me, was that the guitar riff changed around a lot. One verse it would be this way, then it'd be that way, and then back to this way, but it was all seamless, a testament to what a great backing band Bob had those days. It's a good-time song.

                Then it was back to acoustic, and at first it sounded to me like they were doing "Don't Think Twice"…and I was pretty close. Then the first line came out, "Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat," and I just about jumped out of my skin. It was "Mama You've Been on My Mind!"

                In many ways, lyrically, "Mama…" is a sequel to "Don't Think Twice." A few months after the breakup, after being on that long, lonesome road for awhile, thinking about the lover left behind. It was never put out on a regular album, though a 1963 recording is on The Bootleg Series, and it has been played live at least once or twice on just about every tour, including several times (in 1964 and 1975) as a duet with Joan Baez. The Bootleg Series version is slow and mournful, and the versions with Baez were mercilessly sped up and, as the Bootleg Series liner notes mention, hammed up, leading to one of my personal favorite recorded concert moments - listen closely between verses on Live 64 and you can hear Bob asking Joan what the first line of the next verse is.

                The Dalton version was beautiful, not too slow and not too fast. It was tender…but you could dance to it! It was too danceable to be plain folk music, but without the necessary twang which would have turned it into bluegrass. Instead, it was a sound all it's own, making the performance almost completely timeless, both musically and lyrically. The crowd loved it, even clapping along at times. And, towards the end, Bob brought the harp back! The wonderful vocal delivery had been the icing on the cake of getting to see the song in the first place, so I guess the harp must have been another layer of icing. Gorgeous, transcendent…I have to save my adjectives. There's still a lot of shows to describe here.The harp, for the record, was a kicking-a-stone-down-the-long-lonesome-road-and-whistling-as-I-go sort of solo. I don't think I'll be reusing that one. I've heard a lot of versions of "Mama You've Been On My Mind," both live and studio. Some of them are a lot of fun, but go too fast for the listener to focus on the absolute beauty of the words. Others go slowly, but leave out some of the fun. Others disregard the melody a bit. But this one was juuuust right. The most perfect version of the song that I'd ever heard.

                I knew that anything could happen next, and it did. I knew it from the first note on Larry's bouzouki - it was "Fourth Time Around!" We'd just been so enormously blessed as to see the semi-obscure "Mama You've Been On My Mind," and then Bob grants us a great "Fourth Time Around." "Fourth Time Around" was played at most of the 1966 Europe shows, once on the ‘74 tour, once in ‘75, once and once in ‘78. After that, it took a twenty year break before coming back in Europe early in ‘99, much to everyone's surprise. Even then, though, it was a rarity, coming up just a few times in ‘99, and a few more in 2000. It was up there on the list of songs I'd never expected to see live, but, well, here we were! I was thrilled from the first strum of the guitar.

                "Fourth Time Around" is a little movie of a song. You can get the gist of the plot, and recognize the great elements of irony in the story, on a casual listen, but digging into it will reveal many more subtleties in the story line. The tune and story are both remarkably similar to the Beatles "Norwegian Wood," to the point that many people think that it's something of a parody (which helps to explain the clever title.) Most versions focus on either the tune or the story, one but not the other, but, in Dalton, it was a little bit of both. I tell ya, though, it was a little hard to concentrate. I was simply too excited to be seeing him playing the song at all. Vocally, Bob was playing the Witness here. As if he was telling someone exactly what happened, as if to set the story straight once and for all, but having a good time doing it. At times, Bob almost seemed like he was trying to remember all of the details of an event that happened long ago, for the benefit of someone who wasn't there, but wanted to know the story (that'd be the audience). There was just the briefest of instrumental jams at the end, closing with someone (Larry?) playing -get this- the sitar riff from "Norwegian Wood." I was grinning from ear to ear.

                Next up was "Tangled Up in Blue," a song Bob had played at just about every show I'd ever seen. A lot of the longtime fans have heard just about enough of it, and there are times when I was one of them, but I had to wonder if Bob could ever find a reasonable replacement for it. It's certainly one of Dylan's greatest songs, after all.

                Of all of Bob's songs, "Tangled Up in Blue" may be the song that has evolved the most. There are a couple of recorded versions; the full-band version on Blood On the Tracks, and a solo acoustic version that's slow and unbelievably sad (and, just in case it wasn't cool enough, you can hear the buttons of Dylan's coat sleeve clicking against the guitar) which you can hear on The Bootleg Series. When it was first performed live, it was a solo acoustic number; slow, but not as slow as the outtake. In 1978, it was presented as a grand ballad, with Bob singing/reading the lyrics accompanied by an organ and a saxophone. In 1984, it was once again a solo acoustic song, but with a new melody and almost totally rewritten lyrics. In the earlier parts of the Neverending Tour (late 80's, early 90's), it was a hard rocking, Grateful Dead style rock song. The acoustic-with-band version, which became a fixture in '95 brought the song full circle, sounding very similar to the original album version, both musically and lyrically. In Dalton, there was only one lyrical change (in the "working on a fishing boat" section), and the verse about the topless place was dropped, but the song fulfilled its purpose - it was a fun crowd pleaser. Bob shouted out the lyrics with abandon, reworking the delivery, starting with the second verse, to draw out the last couple of words in each line. Listening to the recording, later, the way he sings the last word in every line gets downright hypnotic. I'm not sure I've ever heard a recording of the song where he does so to such an extent - and I've heard an awful lot of versions. And that guitar work right before the last verse, repeated after each line in the last verse - man! This version of the song was really one that drew you in.

                Some of the longtime fans are got a little tired of hearing the song, even going so far as to step outside for a cigarette when Bob played it, but I could never bring myself to complain about it. Decades or maybe centuries from now, when music and art lovers play the "if you could go back in time to see five concerts" game, there are a few that'll come up over and over. One of the original performances of "Rite of Spring" that caused a riot. The night at the Theatre an der Wein when Beethoven premiered, among other things, his fifth symphony. The Beatles on Sullivan. An early Elvis show. Robert Johnson playing with his amplified guitar, drummer, and bassist (if that ever really happened). And, oh yes, Bob Dylan on one of his "on" nights. Well, he we are, in an era when Dylan is playing some of the best concerts of his career, and he's playing "Tangled Up In Blue," one of his greatest songs. How can one possibly complain?

                I figured that that'd be the end of the second acoustic portion of the show, following the regular pattern of three-acoustic-three-electric-repeat before the long encores, but, after a brief conference, Bob and the band kept the acoustic instruments on. A bonus acoustic number! As if we needed further proof that Bob was having fun that night!

                The bonus number was an old folk song called "Searching For a Soldier's Grave," which Bob had started playing a year or so earlier. The first time it was played, the BobDates setlist listed it as "In Search of His Grave," without any author credit given. This, of course, set off quite a flurry in the internet Dylan circles until the correct title and authorship of the song were found. Personally, I thought that "In Search of his Grave" was too good a title to waste, and immediately wrote a song of my own by that title.

                While a fairly light song musically and lyrically, "Searching" did a great job of highlighting Larry and Charlie's vocal skills. They were both great guitarists, of course, but reviewers tended to overlook the fact that they were also, arguably, the best backing singers Bob ever had. Singing along with Bob almost all the way through "Searching," they gave the song a lovely, old-timey feeling that it would probably lack if Bob sang it solo. Interestingly, the song is sung from a female point of view, similar to Dylan's version of "House of the Rising Sun." Singing a woman's song was pretty common in the old folk and bluegrass tradition, but very few people still bother with it; most singers change the pronouns around to make the speaker their own gender when necessary.

                Then it was back to the electric instruments, and the first song was "Standing In the Doorway," a fairly-rarely played number from the most recent album, Time Out of Mind. This marked only the second time of the evening ("Tangled" being the first) that Bob had played a song written after 1969.

                "Standing" was played in a version similar to the album version, except for the fact that Dylan sang it (rather than the near-spoken delivery on the album) in manner that, believe it or not, brought to mind Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennet. You can only do so much crooning with Bob's voice, but that's just what he was doing. In any case, if Sinatra sang this song, it would sound about like the Dalton performance, but with a little less drama. On the chorus line, there was a definite sense of desperation, and a bit of disbelief, in Bob's voice.

                As with many Time Out of Mind songs, there's been a lot of speculation as to whom the song is addressing. Who left him standing in the doorway crying? Who abandoned him? Sara? Carolyn Dennis? Suze Rotolo? Greil Marcus once put forth the proposition that the songs were about feeling abandoned by God, and looking at them from that angle adds a whole new dimension to the songs. Maybe it's right, and maybe it's not. Maybe it's impossible to be right or wrong in such interpretations. In any case, it's a song about being abandoned by somebody or something. The more ways one can find to take that, the more it says about the power of the song. Getting into specifics may just keep the listener from being able to connect to the song personally. As Bob himself says in the song, "I see nothing to be gained by any explanation."

                Immediately afterwards came a weird, psychedelic techno sort of noise, and I figured it was either a new song, a new introduction to an old song, or one wild re-tuning session. A little from columns B and C, as it turns out, as Bob and the band launched into a sped up, in your face rock and roll hard-hitting, somewhat syncopated version of "Cold Irons Bound," another Time Out of Mind song. In this arrangement, Bob sang the first half of each verse accompanied mainly by drums, with a wicked guitar lick between lines. In the second half of the verses (staring with "I'm waist deep"), he'd be singing like a man doing his best to stand up, accompanied by a falling-down bassline. Then he'd sing the chorus line, "I'm twenty miles out of town, cold irons bound," once, so that we got the message, and then he'd repeat the same line, only faster, louder, meaner, and with more determination, and the guitars would absolutely COOK. In the album version, Bob seems a bit resigned to his fate of being twenty miles out of town and cold irons bound, but in this version, he made it clear that he was planning to break out.

                Meanwhile, the lights were doing a really neat trick. While the lighting on the band itself seemed more or less the same throughout, in the background were large silhouttes of the band. For a moment there'd be a silhouette of Bob and Tony, and then it would switch to silhouette of Larry or Charlie and David. The shadows changed in sync with the music. Make no mistake - this was rock music. Hard rock music.

                I can't even describe how cool the song sounded, between the arrangement, the tough-as-nails vocals, and the light show. It didn't just rock, it ROCKED SO HARD IT KICKED MY ASS. "That," said Joe, sitting next to me, "was about the coolest thing I've ever heard." Not bad for a not-quite-sixty year old, eh? Bob went from a hit rock song, played acoustically, to an old bluegrass song, to a Sinatra-style crooning song, straight into a hard rock song that most heavy metal bands would give their right eye to play. Quite a progression! And, naturally, Bob wasn't done yet.

                The song to close the set was "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat," which was played up as a dirty, muddy, Chicago blues sort of song. It sounded like something you'd expect to hear from Muddy Waters, if he was joined by BB King, and Bob was clearly enjoying himself with it. It rocked pretty hard, though any rock song played after that incredibly great version of "Cold Irons Bound" was bound to seem a bit anti-climactic. About midway through the song, Bob stopped playing his guitar (though the band kept the riff going) and spoke, for the first time in the evening.

                "Ladies and gentlemen I wanna introduce my band to you right now," he said, as the band played on. "Some of the finest players in the land!"

                He then proceeded to introduce the band, finishing with the bassist, Tony Garnier (or, as Bob said it, "Tony Garniieeeer." I've always gotten the idea that Bob likes to say Tony's name.)

                That was all the between song speaking Bob did for the night, but we were lucky to get that. There've been tours and shows where Bob didn't even bother to introduce the band, though he certainly seemed to do it at every show with his 2001 band. I guess he figured that a band as good as that one deserved to be mentioned.

                Then came the Formation. Bob and the band put away their instruments, assembled at the front of the stage, and stared at the audience for a minute or so. This was a fairly new part of the show, having emerged just the previous year. Maybe it was to add a bit of a theatrical touch to the show, and maybe Bob just wanted the chance to stare at us for a second. A lot of people, at any given show, are probably just there to stare at him, and maybe he figures he may as well give them the chance to do so. Or maybe it just seemed like a better way to end the set, as opposed to just walking off the stage. I don't know. I just know that it's cool.

                The band was only offstage for a minute or so before coming back and launching right into "Things Have Changed." Oh, how I love that song! It was probably the biggest surprise of the year 2000 for Dylan fans. When people first started posting to newsgroups saying that they'd just heard a new Dylan song on the radio, I, as well as just about everyone else, assumed that they were mistaken, if not actually lying. But, lo and behold, a few weeks later, the song appeared on the Wonder Boys soundtrack, and, the next spring, it went on to win an Oscar.

                And what a great song it was! It had all of the desperation of Time Out of Mind, but with a much more humorous angle. The world is still a screwed up, lonely place, but, suddenly, this all seems rather funny to the singer. The song is classic Dylan - great lines, great melody, and a Chaplinesque blend of humor and pathos. Its release proved, to just about anyone who doubted, that Dylan was as good as he ever was. It was recorded in August of 1999, and first played live in March of 2000. How he managed to sit on it for that long, I'll never know.

                The version he sang in Dalton was mostly the same as the album version, but with more energy, and a little more emphasis, at times, on the humor of the song. You could almost hear a sly snicker behind quite a few of the lines.

                About midway through the performance of the song, I noticed that the Oscar was sitting on an amp behind Larry (probably a replica, but, hey!). There was no move to acknowledge it, but, still, there it sat. Bob must have been so proud of having won it! And rightly so, of course.

                The second encore was "Like a Rolling Stone," one of Bob's great classics. The original, 1965 version is a sneering, joyous insult. A long list of all the things someone has done wrong, and the mocking chorus asking "how does it feel?" A real "Oh, how the mighty have fallen!" sort of thing.

                Naturally, the song didn't sound the same in 2001 as it did then. The voice is older, the organ was gone from the original version, and so was the harmonica. Instead, it was presented as a guitar rock song.

                The intonation of the lyrics in Dalton presented Bob as something of a soothsayer character. There was a confidence in his voice on the verses that suggested he was telling a person on the street all about themselves. Almost like a street evangelist, saying "You have sinned! Here's exactly what you did…," then going on to list the person's sins exactly. You could almost hear the person saying "How did you know?" with wide, amazed eyes.

                But if Bob was just playing some sort of street preaching soothsayer, the "how does it feel?" chorus would have just been a token question, to get the person to admit that they felt bad. But that isn't how Bob played it. As he asked "How does it feel," his voice was full, mostly, of curiosity. I don't think I'd ever heard a version where it sounded like he was really interested in how the person would answer the question! It was like he was some sort of angel out of a movie like Wings of Desire. Knowing every single thing about a person, except for how it feels to be them - which he's dying to know. It was a "Like A Rolling Stone" for which to die, I tell ya. Track down a copy of the tape. listen to the way he sings the "jugglers and the clowns" line. There isn't any way that I can describe the way he sang that line in Dalton, suffice it to say that it knocked me out when I heard it (you can hear the crowd screaming in reaction to it on the tapes). It still knocks me out whenever I play the tape, and even Joe comments that he loved the way that line sounded. Make no mistake - Dylan is a master singer who knows how to work a crowd.

                The lights onstage turned a cool, jazzy blue for the next encore, "If Dogs Run Free." No one in the world would have guessed that this song would be a predictable encore all through late 2000 and early 2001 until the night he first played it, back in October of 2000. With Bob playing acoustic guitar, and Larry and Charlie playing electric, the song was performed in a very loungish, jazzy sort of way, with Bob half-singing, half-reciting the lyrics, adding in an extra word here or there. "Just do your thing / you might even end up being Queen or King! / If dogs. Run. Free!" Not a great song, lyrically. It was probably meant as a bit of a joke.

                As the song ended, I shouted out "But, Bob! Dogs don't run free!"

                "I think that's the point, Adam" said Joe.

                I always felt that the song was Bob giving the public what it wants ("Bob the Poet"), in the light (some would say silly) form of poetry popular at the time the song was released (via Rod McKuen, the best-selling poet of the 20th century). People wanted Bob to be poetic, but at the same time their idea of poetry seemed to be very light, dull verse, so Bob decided to try his hand at that. What made him decide to resurrect the song is a matter of speculation; maybe he saw Jewel's poetry book and was reminded of McKuen.

                Back to electric, next up was a rocking "All Along the Watchtower," with Charlie's solos and Larry's steel adding a lot. Bob has played this song a more frequently than any of his other songs, somewhere in the ballpark of 1500 times so far, and there have been many different versions. Almost every version, though, sounds more like the Jimi Hendrix version than Bob's original version. Bob himself has said that, when playing it, he feels like he's playing a tribute to Hendrix. The last version I'd seen, in 1999, had been a tight, fast version, serving to emphasize the claustrophobic nature of the song itself. This version, with the wicked steel lick, de-emphasized the claustrophobia a bit, but emphasized the scary elements of the song. It's a spooky song, after all, when you get down to it. Rock and horror have always gone well together, and this arrangement made the song into something menacingly spooky, which was all sorts of fun to hear. Actually, the current arrangement may just be my favorite. I'm not too partial to the flashy versions from 78-86, and the crowd-rousing versions that were played for years as the third song at every show through most of the 90's were cool, but not this cool. If anything, I'd call this version a tie with the original, acoustic version. Charlie could really work wonders on that song, and Larry's steel guitar was cool, too.

                Next came another acoustic number, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," in a relatively new arrangement. It was a slowed down, simple version, very similar to the original recording, with Larry and Charlie "oooh oooh ooohing" in the background, singing along with Bob on certain lines. To put it simply, it was a stunning, heartbreaking performance. I've never been a huge fan of the song, but Larry and Charlie's backing vocals made all the difference in the world. The song, which normally sounds about like a throwaway to me, sounded like a masterpiece in Dalton. It was, without question, the best version I've ever heard of the song. Better, even, then the Rolling Thunder Revue versions from 1975, which are pretty damned good themselves.

                Then came the last of the encore set, "Blowin' In the Wind," in a neat arrangement, eschewing most of the melody, up until the chorus, at which point Larry and Charlie sing back up vocals. In 1962, the song was full of optimism. When Bob said that the answer was blowing in the wind, it was like he was telling everyone a secret. The answer was out there, waiting to be caught. But, well, you don't need Donovan to tell you that you can't catch the wind. In the 2001 arrangement, there's more frustration than optimism. He gets to the chorus, and starts spitting the words out like stones, with Larry and Charlie singing along in harmony. The answers are out there, all right. But, after all these years, he still hasn't quite caught up with them. "The answers, my friend, are blowin' in the wind," they sing, tossing out the words one at a time, before repeating those last few words "the answers are blowing IN THE WIIIIIINNNND,' with the last word drawn out, sounding like the voice of a man being carried off in the wind, followed by a nifty, on-and-on-round-and-round guitar lick.

                By now, the crowd was on its feet, dancing in the aisles. We'd just heard Bob Dylan play 20 songs, and it looked like he'd be coming back for another.

                Predictably, the next, and last, encore was "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35," presented as a guitar song, just as muddy and bluesy as "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat" had been. Bob only sang a few verses, and the rest of the time had a great time taking turns playing solos with Larry and Charlie. People get sort of tired of hearing the song on tapes, but it's a blast to hear it live, not least because Bob was clearly having fun singing it, strutting around, shaking his head back and forth, making goofy faces, and doing that thing he did with his knee, which may or may not have been called "dancing." I left my seat and tried to get as close to the stage as I could get (I made it up to about 10 feet from the stage), dancing along with everyone else. I knew it was likely to be the last song of the night, and Bob certainly ended on a high note.

                We hung around outside for quite awhile, talking, first, to a particularly flirtatious t-shirt dealer (whose tye-died shirts featuring a picture from Greatest Hits Volume 2 weren't quite as tacky as the one I'd bought in Birmingham) and a bootleg audio tape peddler, with whom I had a nice discussion about the Forest Hills 65 tape. Both of them said the same thing: "Tonight was really special."

                We then drove back to Carrollton, listening to the tapes I'd made of the show (which turned out rather terrible, and were missing several songs due to a recorder malfunction), along with the mix tapes I'd made beforehand. The show had been special, all right. And I felt special myself, just for having been there. After all, it was Dylan's last solo concert (the final three shows on the tour were at festivals) before his sixtieth birthday. The last time he would play "Fourth Time Around," "Mama You've Been On My Mind," "Tell Me That It Isn't True," "Standing In the Doorway," or "My Back Pages" or "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat" before turning sixty. Pretty neat, if you ask me.

                Everyone who'd come with me agreed that the show had been a hit. That's a pleasant change from recent years, when the hardcore fans tended to spend a lot of time convincing people that the show they'd just seen was good.

                We got home at about 2 am, and I had a final exam, in algebra, at 8 that morning. Of course, I wasn't fully prepared. I never was, with algebra, even though I'd done some studying at the ice cream shop in Dalton. I wound up answering a fair number of the questions with limericks.

                QUESTION: Find LglnX2.5bc12v9 base 3 to three decimal places

                ANSWER: A drunkard named Mr. DeFaces

                Would daily drink 8.5 cases

                He said to his wife

                "That's the meaning of life -

                correct to three decimal places!"

                I'd like to brag that I gave up a decent grade in algebra to see a Bob Dylan concert, but, well, I wouldn't have gotten a decent grade, anyway. Trust me.

                *

                While there's a break in the action here, let me speak a bit about Dylan's voice. One thing that you constantly hear from critics is that Dylan can't sing. You hear this mostly from people who've never listened to him; to his fans, his voice is phenomenal. Admittedly, it's not a Broadway-type voice, but you can't measure a voice just by how clear it is; you also have to measure it by how well it fits the songs that it's singing. Give me Marianne Faithfull's scratchy, world-weary 1996 rendition of Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny" (from Threepenny Opera) over Lotte Lenya's version any day. Dylan himself said it best, in the 1965 song "She's Your Lover Now." "My voice is really warm/it's just that it ain't got no form/but it's just like a dead man's last pistol shot, baby."

                A lot of fans like to invoke the idea that "It's not the voice, it's the in-to-NAAAA-tion." That's a large part of the appeal of Dylan's voice, of course. His voice may, admittedly, take some getting used to, but what he does with his voice is unbelievable. If not every vocal delivery in every version of every song has been great, it's usually because Dylan tends to experiment vocally, and, naturally, not every experiment can be a success. But when it succeeds, oh, my how it succeeds. Listen to the vocals on the Sheffield ‘66 version of "Visions of Johanna," or the Biograph version of "Isis" (recorded live in Montreal, 1975.) Or just listen to way he sneers "how does it feeeellll?" in "Like a Rolling Stone." Personally, I like to play people the recording of "Hard Times In New York" town from The Bootleg Series Volume 1. The phrasing is terrific, the guitar playing isn't bad at all, and the voice is crisp, yet weathered. It's a folksinger voice if ever there was one; he sounds remarkably like he's about 60. Actually, though, he was only 20, the age that I was in 2001. I tried singing like I was 60 when I was 20. It's not as easy as Bob made it seem.

                On the way home from the Birmingham '99 concert, my friend asked me, cautiously, if I thought that Bob Dylan was a good vocalist. Of course, I said that I did. His voice is perfect for the songs he sings. Bing Crosby would look dumb if he tried to sing most of them, no matter how good a singer he was. Robert Goulet is a great singer as well, but did you ever hear his version of "My Green Tambourine?"

                Maybe it's just me. My favorite vocalist, besides Dylan, is Tom Waits, whose voice sounds like he has a mouthful of nails, each of which has a cold. It's not the voice that makes him a good singer; its how he uses the voice. Similarly, some of my favorite singing ever is the album on which Marianne Faithful, whose voice now sounds like her vocals chords are made of cocaine and sand, sings Kurt Weill songs; the worn voice fits the material perfectly. The same is true of Dylan.

                I can't explain it. No one can explain it. There's something about Dylan singing Dylan that just transcends everything, and makes the songs and performance sound as though they came from some primal place in the universe. Most of his 60's contemporaries (McCartney, the Stones), are putting on great shows, but they're essentially Broadway shows - the songs and sets are carefully arranged, and their are elaborate pre-show video presentations to remind you that you're about to see a legend. Dylan's intro his having an offstage soundman read a silly introduction that came in a newspaper review a few years ago, almost as a parody of the video intros (in the same way that the cover of John Wesley Harding may have been a parody of the Sgt Pepper cover), then plays a set of songs that may be totally different from the night before.

                And sometimes the arrangement is a failure. Sometimes the band isn't cooking, or the vocal experiments aren't working. But in almost every show, there are these little moments - the way he sings a line or a verse, the way he sings the same chorus four different ways - that just bring forth these moments of transcendence that my friend Michael G. Smith calls "lightning bolts of ecstacy.") It's a kind of moment that, if you have ears that can hear it, can only be found at Dylan shows.

                As an added bonus, the tickets are usually a LOT cheaper than tickets to the Stones.

                Then again, maybe it's just me.

                **

                I was going to the Atlanta show, at the Music Midtown festival, by myself. I didn't know anyone else who was planning to go to the show who wanted to spend the whole time staking out a good spot at the 96Rock stage, waiting for Dylan to show up.

                I drove to my parents house in Snellville first, to drop off my stuff, and then proceeded to the nearest train station. I say "train" hesitantly, because the MARTA system (Atlanta's not-exactly-spectacular public transportation) is also sort of a subway, at times. I guess it's kinda neat. The insides of the trains are paneled with contact paper designed to make it look as though the trains are made of either wood or dirt, depending on which train you're in. Personally, I'd rather think that the trains were made of a material a little more stable than dirt.

                Along the way, I caught a glimpse of a bar called Dottie's, to which I'd gone a couple of months earlier, because a friend's band was playing there. It was a delightfully dingy little place. My first thought was that it was a redneck bar, what with the sawdust on the floor and the Hank Williams Sr. on the juke box, and, at first, I stood around, scared to death that someone was going to beat me up. But it gradually became apparent that, besides the rednecks and old men in baseball caps (most of whom were fighting amongst themselves), there were a fair number of beatniks present. I shot a game of pool with a Bukowski-fanatic (and lost), then discussed early murder ballads with the band. It was a fun place, if a bit tough. Not a trace of The Mall in sight.

                After the band played, as I was standing outside, talking to my friend from the band, we were approached by an older black man in a psychedelic outfit. He said he was a jazz drummer.

                "Now," he asked, with a lot of flair, for a stammering drunk, "have you ever heard of….The Sixties?"

                "Um…sure," I said.

                "We had a re-vo-LU-tion in the sixties," he said, "out there!" He pointed to the parking lot, as if to indicate that the revolution had taken place right next to the spot where my car now sat. "First, they ass-ass-in-at-ed the President. Have you heard of that?"

                "I've heard rumors," I said.

                "See, they called it assassination, but it was really a coup d'etat, because after that, the Government was different. And I was a black hippie. And we had a re-vo-lu-tion. Out there! Have you heard about that?"

                It was becoming obvious that the guy was a little on the drunken side, but I had a question that I just had to ask.

                "So," I asked. "Are you into Dylan?"

                "Dylan!" he exclaimed, with a wild look in his eyes. "Dylan!" and he walked off, muttering "Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan…" I always love to see the effect Dylan has had on people, y'know?

                I got to the station nearest the festival, and followed the crowd to the festival gate, which was several blocks from the station. The sun was hot. The water bottle I'd brought with me had gotten warm…and they wouldn't open the gates for half an hour. I took a seat, and waited…it would be an evening full of waiting, but most great days tend to be. Luckily, I struck up an interesting conversation with the guy waiting next to me (we spoke about how hot it was), and a girl I knew from school showed up, which gave me someone else to whom to speak. That helped the time go by, but once the gates were open, it would be every man for himself.

                When the gates finally opened, I ran all the way to the 96 Rock stage, stopping only to buy a new bottle of water (only three bucks - cheap!) I was thirsty enough to buy a couple, but I was a bit poor, as I've mentioned, and peeing just doesn't happen at these general admission shows, unless you're rude, crass, and unconcerned about the shoes of those in front of you.

                This would certainly be a concert in The City - the Atlanta skyline surrounded the venue. I may talk a lot about how great The Old, Weird America is, but I really love cities - usually. I love Chicago, New York, London, Minneapolis…but Atlanta seems to be a poor excuse for a city. The roads twist around and change names frequently, making it impossible to find your way around. I once crossed the intersection of Peachtree and Peachtree about five times in less than a mile. I would say that the city is a fine example of what happens when function follows form, but there isn't much in the way of form, either. It's not so much a city as a bland, sprawling mess, every part of which seems to be brought to you by Ted Turner and Coca-Cola.

                From inside the festival, though, it seemed all right. In the distance, we could just see the silhouettes of several skyscrapers, which lit up at night, and, early on, the sun was kind enough to go behind one of the buildings. It made for a pretty nifty setting for a concert, really. Cooler than an arena, I'd say.

                My first rule for having a good time when attending a concert alone is to make friends with the people near me. The people congregated around the front of the stage were mostly other hardcore Dylan fans, which gave me, once again, that delightful pleasure of discussing Dylan with other fans who knew all of the trivia. Most of us were wondering whether Dylan and Patti Smith, who would be playing just before him, would sing Dylan's "Dark Eyes" as a duet, as they had last time they played together, back in late 1995. It didn't seem likely (and, just so I don't build suspense with no payoff, I'll say right now that it didn't happen), but we didn't care. We were all happy just to see Bob. And we all raved about how "special" the Dalton show had been.

                Many of these people had seen Bob many more times than I had (one guy said he'd seen him over 150 times, a number I hope to attain myself someday). Quite a few of them had come from an awfully long way away. Funnily enough, probably half of the people to whom I spoke were either from Iowa or had gone to college in Iowa. This was a most welcome surprise, since I myself was born and raised in Des Moines. It is indeed a small world after all. And, refreshingly, no one really seemed to notice that I was about half the age of the others. It only came up once, when a guy asked me if I'd been at the show in Davenport, Iowa, back in 1990. I was 10 at the time, and going from Des Moines to Davenport would have been a pretty taxing bike ride.

                Of course, between the many hardcore Dylan fans, there were an awful lot of drunks. We all hoped that, since the show was at the stage run by the classic rock station (which rarely played Dylan), rather than at the stage run by the modern rock station (which never played Dylan), there'd be less moshing and crowd surfing than there had been when Dylan played the festival five years before. And there was. But there were still an awful lot of people (mostly frat boys and sorority girls, I'd guess) who were just at the festival to get drunk and/or stoned. No one offered my any drugs, but about 10 people asked me if I "had any." I wished I had some baseball cards or something equally silly to pull out when they asked me that. "Yeah, I got some…you need any of these ones?"

                Most annoying, to me, was the fact that there were an awful lot of drunken girls sitting on the shoulders of drunken guys. This always struck me as terribly rude, since it blocks the view of an awful lot of people behind you. When doing so, taking off one's shirt seems to be common courtesy (and some of these girls were, indeed, rather courteous), but that still doesn't help the people behind you. I had to remind myself that, for most people, the festival wasn't about music. It was about getting drunk, making an ass of yourself, and puking on innocent bystanders. Luckily, there wasn't too much of that crowd standing right next to me. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded, for the most part, by Dylan fans. Well-behaved ones, at that, which isn't always a given.

                The first performer up was a fellow named Pete Yorn, and his set was, in a word, adequate. Not great, but not bad, either. Certainly adequate. His main problem, really, was that he had all the stage presence of a walnut (which, in all fairness, is about how most people come across on a mid-day festival stage). As soon as he stopped playing, the crowd went back to talking about Dylan.

                Next up was a fairly popular band called Drivin n Cryin. They were played on the local radio stations quite a bit, and had quite a following. Their music was pretty good, but, once again, they suffered from a real lack of stage presence. Bob is one of very few people who could put on a really great show just by falling asleep onstage. There are only a couple of other acts who could do that, and the first two bands at Music Midtown weren't among them.

                It got dark just a few minutes after Drivin n Cryin finished their set. After a few more minutes of talking, Patti Smith came on and showed us how the big kids play rock music. She had more stage presence in her hat than either of the other two bands had in their whole bodies. I wasn't too familiar with Patti Smith's work beforehand, but, midway through the show, I resolved to get acquainted with some of her albums. She rocked. I mean, really, she rocked! She strutted around on the stage, waved to the crowd, and recited poems and told jokes between songs. She managed to rant about MTV, the Government, VH1, and the festival itself without missing a beat in the middle of her songs. Everybody was singing along - even I, after I picked up on the words. Very rarely does a band with which I'm not terribly familiar knock me out so thoroughly.

                As a person next to me said, "Only Bob could go on after a show like that!" There are probably a few others who could pull it off, but not many. "Have fun with Bob!" Patti shouted as she left the stage. Fun. I knew that it was fun to see Bob. I certainly enjoyed it. But "have fun with Bob" is something you don't normally hear people say. I liked the way it sounded, just the same.

                Bob came on, amidst all sort of wild cheering, at about 10pm, launching right into "Duncan and Brady." Bob again seemed to be using the song as something of a warm up, and the crowd used the song as a time to secure a place to stand. For all its faults, there was something great about the energy of the crowd. The excitement level was palpable, and Bob really seemed to be enjoying it, even more than he had in Dalton, where the crowd spent most of the show sitting down.

                The fellow next to me and I started up playing "Name That Tune" early on, and, damn it, we were fast, if I do say so myself. We'd predicted that the second song would be "Mr. Tambourine Man," since this was a festival show, and, therefore, likely to be a Greatest Hits set list. It took about one chord for us to figure out that we were right. I'd seen him play the song several times before, and I don't think he'll ever top the stripped down, prayer-like reading that he played at that first show I saw back in 1995. But Music Midtown 2001 came close. It was a sped-up version, and Bob was clearly having a good time playing with the melody, emphasizing the first word of most line…"MYYY senses have been stripped MYYY hands can't feel to grip…" similar to the way he'd sung it at the Towson, Maryland, show the year before. For a song he'd sung hundreds of times before (and of which he'd claimed to be tired back in 1986), he really seemed to be getting a kick out of it. The way he spat out the "forget about today" lines was truly magical. Unfortunately, it was a pretty short version, including only three verses, which would set the standard for the night. But we knew ahead of time that it would be a shortened show. The only thing we could do was enjoy it.

                Next up was a "Desolation Row" similar to the Dalton version. I had hoped for "It's All Right Ma," which had been the three spot at a couple of recent shows, but one can't have everything . The guy next to me, who had seen Dylan over 150 times, was a bit disappointed as well, mostly because he knew Bob would only be doing five or six of the verses.

                Festival audience or no, though, the song wasn't rocked up quite as much as it had been in Dalton. It didn't sound as much like just a guitar-based rock song, it sounded more like excited color commentary from the Desolation Row town square. In one show, and just part of another, we'd seen, among other things, Bob the Actor, Bob the Soothsayer, Bob the Witness…and now, believe it or not, Bob the Sportscaster. Who knew?

                Next was another acoustic number (for the festivals, he'd been playing five or six acoustic songs, followed by five or six electric songs, rather than two short sets of each, before the encores, presumably to save time). The familiar opening chords indicated immediately that it was "Tangled," a little earlier in the set than it was normally played. The arrangement was pretty much the same as it had been in Dalton, but it fed off of the energy of the crowd, making it a bit more exciting. We all applauded and cheered when he got to the "heading for another joint" line. At the end of the verses, Bob played a mean guitar solo which was built around just two notes (the "guitar people" like to complain that Dylan doesn't have enough notes in his solos for their taste, but he can do an awful lot with just a couple of notes. I think his solos work very well for the songs.) As soon as he finished the solo, he walked back to the drum riser and, to everyone's delight, picked up a harmonica, into which he began wailing away, with "round and round here we go again" type of solo that complimented the songs lyrics.

                The next song took me a minute to recognize, the guy next to me beat me when figuring out what it was. We had expected "Searching For a Soldier's Grave," but it was "This World Can't Stand Long," an old folk song that Bob had played a lot in 2000, but not at all in 2001. Only Bob Dylan would have the guts to follow up a hit rock song with a slow, apocalyptic bluegrass song in front of a crowd of rowdy drunks! A lot of people on the newsgroup took the appearance of this song to mean that Dylan was, indeed, pretty concerned about the message in the song - that the world is about to be destroyed, because of the sins of man. But, watching him sing it from about the front row center, I find that hard to believe. There he was - and I got a real kick out of this - singing a song about the world being destroyed with fire for being too full of hate, and he was grinning happily, obviously having all kinds of fun, the whole time. It was positively Chaplinesque, in a Dylanesque sort of way. The song was arranged similar to "Searching For a Soldier's Grave," with Larry and Charlie singing great harmony, singing the chorus with Bob a cappella (except for the occasional drum beat) at the end.

                The electric set started out the same way it did in Dalton - with a similar performance of "Crash on the Levee." Who says Bob never does protest music anymore? The Mississippi River was cresting that week, so Bob sang a song about floods! Interesting that he'd follow a death-by-fire song with a death-by-water song, I thought.

                A girl a few spaces down from me shouted "Play 'Just Like a Woman,' Bob!" And, lo and behold, the next song, as we were able to tell from the opening lick, was "Just Like a Woman." It was a pretty commonly played song, but I'd never seen it before, though it was high on my "want list." It had taken me eight shows, but there I was, in the front row.

                I've never been terribly crazy about the arrangement he was playing at the time, which disregarded a lot of the melody, leaving most of the lyrics to be more-or-less recited, (wheras the words and notes drop in like raindrops on the original recording), but that night's arrangement was very good. The melody was recognizable, though the guitar was still emphasized, and the song built up to a lovely crescendo in the last verse, followed by a nifty, not-too-many-notes guitar solo by Bob. The highlight of the arrangement, though, was Larry's eerie-sounded steel guitar, which gave the whole song a cool mysterioso feel. There was a little steel guitar mistake towards the end, but, other than that, it turned what could have been a fairly messy arrangement into something outstanding.

                Next up was another repeat from Dalton - "Stuck Inside of Mobile." Once again, it was no surprise, and all we could do was have fun with it, and have fun we did. We danced, we sung along, and Bob sung the hell out of it. Then, to our great surprise, he again walked back to the drum riser to pick up a harmonica. Harp of "Stuck Inside of Mobile!" Would wonders never cease? No one was able to recall any other instance, recent or otherwise, of Bob playing harp on that particular song, making it a real surprise in the middle of a non-surprise. Over the next couple of years, he would get much more creative than he had been with which songs used harmonicas, but, at that point, it was still a novelty.

                Next up came something we took a few moments to recognize. We'd expected the show to remain a Greatest Hits affair throughout…we certainly hadn't expected "Where Teardrops Fall!" The guy next to me actually hugged me when Bob started playing it; after all, this was only the second performance of the song in the last five years, and only the 11th performance ever. Though the Oh Mercy album, from the late eighties, had a lot of great songs, very few of them were played live regularly. Indeed, it was fairly rare that he played a song from the 80's all through the Neverending Tour (with the exception of "Silvio.") By the time Bob got to the first line, all of the hardcore fans were going nuts. Of course, the drunks behind us didn't realize what was going on - they used the "slow song" as an opportunity to get into a fight.

                The next song sounded, at first, like "Wicked Messenger," but turned out to be "Drifter's Escape," which Bob had used to open the set last time he had played at Music Midtown. The arrangements of the two songs at this time were identical; fans began referring to it as "Wicked Drifter," and many wondered whether Bob decided which one to sing after the band had started playing.

                The electric set ended with a rocking "Rainy Day Women," the refrain of which, "Everybody must get stoned," was taken to heart by quite a few people in the audience. "Go ahead!" said the security guard in front of me. "Smoke up! You can't not smoke during this song!"

                The story goes that the song was conceived, written and recorded in less than twenty minutes, and it's quite possible. It's long been popular to try to figure out what it "really" means, but, personally, I'd have to say that it's a joke song that means exactly what it sounds like it means, basing its joke on a little play on words. Of course, like most Dylan songs, it can be taken a lot of ways, which only indicates that it's a pretty good song. When people start taking more out of a song than the artist put into it, the song can't be all bad.

                We sized up the performance in the break between the first set and the encores. It might not have been quite as special a show as Dalton had been, but, man, Bob was obviously enjoying himself. It was apparent that he was feeding off of the energy of the crowd and having a good time playing, which, in it's way, is sort of amazing. He's played these same songs night after night, upwards, in some cases, of 100 times per year, and he still appears to be having all sorts of fun playing them.

                The encore set was the same as it had been in Dalton. "Things Have Changed" sounded almost exactly the same as it had in Dalton, but it seemed to take a verse or two to find it's rhythm. Once it did, though, Bob got into some fun vocal stylings, half-singing half-speaking a lot of the lines. There are a lot of great vocal opportunities in the song, and Bob took just about all of them. We spent a lot of the song trying to see if the Oscar was onstage again; it was hard to tell, since the stage was a good ten feet off the ground, and separated from the crowd by a ten foot trench filled with security guards. Finally, after much neck-straining and jumping up and down, we determined that it was set up on an amp just behind Tony, a bit hard to see in front of bright red lights. But it was there.

                Next came what I would call the main surprise of the encores - "Like a Rolling Stone." It was no surprise that he played it, and the arrangement was the same as in Dalton, but, through the vocals, Bob managed to make it into a different song. I was expecting to hear the lyrics delivered in the same "curious soothsayer" persona Dylan had used in Dalton, but I didn't. Instead, what I heard in Dylan's performance was pure sympathy. Not the joyful, sneering mocking of the early versions, not the power of the 70's versions (though the power was certainly present), just sympathy. Heartbreaking, heartwarming sympathy. Same song, same words, different emotions. He ran through the verses almost tenderly, as though he were listing mistakes, rather than sins. Everyone makes mistakes. Then came the chorus, and the curiosity from the Dalton version was gone, too. There was a bit of downright fatherly "well, I told you this would happen" in the voice, but it was mostly just "I'm sorry this happened to you. We all make mistakes. It could have just as easily happened to me." Really a remarkable testament to Dylan's abilities as a vocal stylist.

                I didn't even notice it until I listened to the tape later on, but the Atlanta version didn't include the "Jugglers and the Clowns" verse at all. Maybe that verse would have taken away from sympathetic feeling. Maybe Bob has different lyrical arrangements for the different emotions expressed in the songs. Or maybe he just shortened the song because he was low on time. The song still worked, in any case. The brilliant way in which he'd sung the "jugglers" line in Dalton probably wouldn't have worked as well in this performance (once again, get the Dalton tape, preferably a better copy than the one I made, if for no other reason than to hear how wonderfully he sings that line). Listening to the tape, I notice that the Dalton version left out the "finest school" verse. Funnily, I didn't notice the missing verses during the performances themselves at all.

                Next in the encores, it was back to acoustic instruments for "If Dogs Run Free." The city skyline backdrop should have added a new dimension to the way this jazzy number sounded, but, somehow, it just wasn't as effective as it had been in Dalton. Being inside gave it a sort of a lounge, coffee shop feeling that simply wasn't present in an outdoor, crowded show. Instead of being fun and superbeatnikcool, it was just plain fun.

                Next up was a guitar-based "All Along the Watchtower," more similar to the early-90's version than the Dalton version. The spookiness was still present in the way Bob delivered the vocals, but, standing in a crowd of happy drunks, outdoors, it's hard for much of anything to sound all that spooky. Instead, it came off as a slightly jazz-tinged rock and roll crowd pleaser. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

                The atmosphere also didn't work as well for the next song, which was, again, that stunning arrangement of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." It sounded fabulous, make no mistake, but it wasn't quite as affecting when played for a crowd of drunks, many of whom probably thought that the song was written by Axl Rose, than it had been in a comparably intimate arena setting. Then again, maybe it's just that I wasn't hearing the arrangement for the first time again.

                "Highway 61," being a mostly guitar based rock song, came across as a party song, which worked well for the crowd. Bob sang most the lyrics that he was going to sing right away, and then, again, let the song turn into an all-out guitar jam, dueling with Charlie and Larry, pausing occasionally to sing another verse. After awhile, it was difficult, even from the front, to see who was playing what guitar part, though one certainly noticed that Tony's bass was turned up a bit. Here, Bob got into the dancing and posing that had been absent, on this night, from "Rainy Day Women."

                We knew that the next song, "Blowin' In the Wind" would be the last song of the evening, since it was the shortened, festival set list. It was the same, harmonious arrangement that we'd heard in Dalton, but, maybe because of the crowd, there wasn't much of the frustration I'd heard before. It was more of a classic "ballad" sort of song. It's an ideal closing song, really, a nice way to say good-bye. He's played us his songs, and he's told us all he knows, but there are still a few questions that just can't be answered. He can't tell us the answers, either, but he can tell us what some of the questions are, and where the answers are, before he leaves.

                Then, donning his black hat, Bob joined the band in a very brief formation, then took off, probably straight to the bus, to head off to Nashville. The next two sets would be, for the most part, repeats of the Music Midtown set list, only shorter. Atlanta was the last time he'd play "If Dogs Run Free" on the U.S. tour.

                That was the end of the festival for the night, and everybody left at once, making for one crowded train ride. Walking towards the station, I happened to notice that just about every single person around me was talking on a cell phone. It was just about midnight, and they all had someone whom they had to call as soon as the show ended (busy city, eh?) Just to fit in, I took my own phone out and pretended to talk to somebody named Bernie (the bastard owes me money).

                I only heard one bad review of the Atlanta show, from an anonymous person who said that they'd come 800 miles to see Bob, and found "an old man trying to hang on, but who ought to just let go." The problem for a lot of people is that they immediately get disappointed when Dylan doesn't look exactly the way he looked in 1965. After that, they're disappointed that the songs don't sound exactly the way they sounded on the records. Well, that's their loss. No reasonable person could expect Bob, at 59, to look and sound as though he was still 24. Futhermore, there's no way that he could play all of the songs exactly the way they used to sound unless the band consisted of dozens and dozens of musicians. Hell, a lot of the songs sound better now than they did on the records.

                Personally, I think that a lot of people decide to dislike the shows as soon as they notice that Bob isn't playing solo acoustic guitar and wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt. I've never even seen a picture of him wearing one those. Ever.

                Maybe it's just a matter of it being an acquired taste. I know people who thought that he was lousy a few years ago, but gradually came to decide that he's still as good as he ever was, after getting past the initial shock of the fact that (gasp) he doesn't sound exactly the same as he used to sound.

                Most people, however, seemed to think that the show was great. The new and casual fans liked that he played a lot of the songs that they wanted to hear, and the hardcore fans were glad to hear "Where Teardrops Fall," as well as the great performances of the more expected songs.

                So that was it. The Nashville show, the next night, would have an even shorter setlist, as would the Memphis show the night after that. And that was it for the U.S. Spring leg of the Neverending Tour. By the next time he played a live show, he'd be 60 years old.

                Rumor had that he'd be doing another U.S. tour in late summer/early fall. Personally, I couldn't wait. Sure, I'd gotten to see the man eight times…and, while I knew how lucky I was just to have seen him once, eight simply wouldn't be enough. He was still out there, heading for another joint. And he'd be back in the southeast in less than six months.

<-Previous             Next->