March 28, 2004
The New York Times
Dylan on the Verge
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
"It's just Halloween â?? I have my Bob Dylan mask on, I'm masquerading," Bob Dylan jokes at one point during "Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall." The remark is typical of Mr. Dylan's humor â?? sly, self-referential and cryptic enough to cause alert listeners to question how much truth lies beneath the laughter. The last four decades have, of course, revealed Mr. Dylan to be an ultimately unknowable master of disguises â?? "Masked and Anonymous," as the title of his recent film aptly put it.
But on Oct. 31, 1964, an adoring audience in his adopted hometown of New York brought a very different set of assumptions to Mr. Dylan's performance. Back then, he was still seen as a righteous voice of protest, a champion of the civil rights and disarmament movements, the "singing poet laureate of young America," as Robert Shelton of The New York Times, an early and passionate supporter, described him in his review. Dressed simply and accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and harmonica, Mr. Dylan stood in implied contrast both to the show business flash of Sinatra-era singers and the witless commercialism of teen-fodder pop stars.
But as a well-known Paul Simon lyric notes about 1964, "It was the year of the Beatles/ It was the year of the Stones," and Mr. Dylan, who had befriended the Beatles a few months earlier, was keenly aware of the impact those groups had made. His audience roared with approval as Mr. Dylan opened his show with his trenchant anthem "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and roared even louder when he brought out Joan Baez, the epitome of the socially active artist, to accompany him on four songs, including the antiwar diatribe "With God on Our Side." But what no one, perhaps not even Mr. Dylan, understood that night was how soon and how profoundly the times would change him.
That tension underlies "Live 1964," the latest in the "Bootleg Series" of previously unreleased material by Mr. Dylan that his label, Columbia Legacy, is steadily putting out. In one sense, by the time of that concert Mr. Dylan had already made his move. His album "Another Side of Bob Dylan," which had come out five months earlier, included "My Back Pages," a song that bluntly disowns the moral absolutes of the folk and political scenes that had claimed him. And at Philharmonic Hall Mr. Dylan performed three as yet unrecorded songs, "Gates of Eden," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," that in their wild, whirling imagery advertise the dramatic next phase of his artistic journey.
But Mr. Dylan introduces the new songs either tentatively or with ironic put-ons, as if he can't quite fix his own intentions â?? or doesn't want to reveal them â?? and hasn't determined how they will affect his relationship to his worshipful followers. "Gates of Eden," he says, is "a sacrilegious lullaby in D Minor" and "a love song," while the grimly intense "It's Alright Ma" is "a very funny song." The tone of his remark about wearing a mask, which follows "Gates of Eden," is almost reassuring in this context. Don't worry, he seems to be saying, you can still see me as the person you want me to be â?? for now.
Very soon, however, that would no longer be possible. Astonishingly, within the next 10 months Mr. Dylan would release both "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited," albums that would explode the folk movement and channel a bolt of aesthetic ambition into rock 'n' roll. Some of Mr. Dylan's fans would come along for the ride; some would denounce him as a Judas. So the heady atmosphere of unity that both Mr. Dylan and his audience are determined to preserve on "Live 1964" now feels at once bracing and poignant, one last, idyllic rendezvous before the storm to come. Â
Anthony DeCurtis is the executive editor of Tracks and a writer for Rolling Stone.
