Bob Dylan a standing ovation when he walked out, but I was damned if I was going to light any matches.
What the press did not prepare me for was the sound, the singing, the playing, and the impact. I wasn’t prepared to hear “Rainy Day Women” come store-porching off the stage as a big, brawling Chicago blues; for the black usher dancing down the steps of the hall, waving his flashlight and singing “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door”; for the delight I felt when Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko rushed a single mike for a chorus just like Paul and George in A Hard Day’s Night. I wasn’t prepared for one bit of what mattered about the show, and I doubt if anyone else was either.
Never—not in 1965 when they were the Hawks, not at their 1969 debut at Winterland, or at half a dozen other concerts—have I heard the Band play with the fire Dylan got from them this time around. I’ve seen reports that barely mentioned their presence, let alone the music they made, but between sets, or the next day, the Band was what people wanted to talk about first. Robbie’s guitar playing was unmatched—he drove through two shows with a pointed frenzy most of his performances only hint at—but the difference was the beat.
It was a massive, intensely syncopated THUMP that at first overwhelmed everything else. Everyone knows Levon Helm is a great drummer, but this time he played like a star. He was working right at the heart of rock ’n’ roll—sometimes Richard Manuel joined him on a second set of drums, and while it was fun to watch, musically I couldn’t tell the difference. It was the authority of Levon’s beat that let Dylan, Robbie, and Garth Hudson sing and play with a freedom that with any less of a foundation would have seemed merely personal; with Levon there it was still personal, and also shared, sympathetic, dependent—on stage, and out in front of it.
Nothing the Band did on their own touched what they did with Dylan. Against the Band’s comradeship he presents a physical image of utter self-reliance (though he cannot get where he wants to go without them and his new songs are about the poverty of going it alone); against their careful intelligence he pits genius, erratic and eager for rules to break (the Band at their worst have never been as embarrassing as Dylan at his, and at their best they write history while he makes it); against the Band’s pleasure in music (they smile, he frowns), Dylan sets a nervous fury, an impulse to drama.
There is a side to the Band that is uncertain and a bit scared of the crowd, a side that takes refuge in a sort of rational craftsmanship. It’s an emotional limit that only Garth Hudson always escapes, and it may be the source of both the spare elegance of Robbie’s best lines and of the precise, even constricted arrangements the Band uses on stage and on record. There’s also a side that is wild, mad, and chaotic, and it comes out, in their music, only in
snatches: an occasional guitar solo, Garth’s crazy piano on “The Weight,” on “Don’t Do It.”
But this is a side of the Band that Bob Dylan almost always breaks wide open. He takes the spotlight, and they are free to follow their hearts. They get a certain energy playing with him they don’t get from each other—and in any case they can’t handle his twisting vocals with neat arrangements. They have to set the beat, play for it and against it, even risk collapsing the song for the chance to touch the emotions of anyone who listens. They have to give Dylan the momentum he so obviously wants and play for themselves.
The music, then, was not neat, it was not orderly, it was not elegant. It was fierce: riding that beat, full of hard-won arrogance, love, and anger. At first the music hit in explosions, and then resolved itself into textures—Garth’s organ flowing delicately over a solo from Robbie that was pure anarchy while Dylan’s howls cut across both. Then, when you thought you had a grip
What the press did not prepare me for was the sound, the singing, the playing, and the impact. I wasn’t prepared to hear “Rainy Day Women” come store-porching off the stage as a big, brawling Chicago blues; for the black usher dancing down the steps of the hall, waving his flashlight and singing “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door”; for the delight I felt when Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko rushed a single mike for a chorus just like Paul and George in A Hard Day’s Night. I wasn’t prepared for one bit of what mattered about the show, and I doubt if anyone else was either.
Never—not in 1965 when they were the Hawks, not at their 1969 debut at Winterland, or at half a dozen other concerts—have I heard the Band play with the fire Dylan got from them this time around. I’ve seen reports that barely mentioned their presence, let alone the music they made, but between sets, or the next day, the Band was what people wanted to talk about first. Robbie’s guitar playing was unmatched—he drove through two shows with a pointed frenzy most of his performances only hint at—but the difference was the beat.
It was a massive, intensely syncopated THUMP that at first overwhelmed everything else. Everyone knows Levon Helm is a great drummer, but this time he played like a star. He was working right at the heart of rock ’n’ roll—sometimes Richard Manuel joined him on a second set of drums, and while it was fun to watch, musically I couldn’t tell the difference. It was the authority of Levon’s beat that let Dylan, Robbie, and Garth Hudson sing and play with a freedom that with any less of a foundation would have seemed merely personal; with Levon there it was still personal, and also shared, sympathetic, dependent—on stage, and out in front of it.
Nothing the Band did on their own touched what they did with Dylan. Against the Band’s comradeship he presents a physical image of utter self-reliance (though he cannot get where he wants to go without them and his new songs are about the poverty of going it alone); against their careful intelligence he pits genius, erratic and eager for rules to break (the Band at their worst have never been as embarrassing as Dylan at his, and at their best they write history while he makes it); against the Band’s pleasure in music (they smile, he frowns), Dylan sets a nervous fury, an impulse to drama.
There is a side to the Band that is uncertain and a bit scared of the crowd, a side that takes refuge in a sort of rational craftsmanship. It’s an emotional limit that only Garth Hudson always escapes, and it may be the source of both the spare elegance of Robbie’s best lines and of the precise, even constricted arrangements the Band uses on stage and on record. There’s also a side that is wild, mad, and chaotic, and it comes out, in their music, only in
snatches: an occasional guitar solo, Garth’s crazy piano on “The Weight,” on “Don’t Do It.”
But this is a side of the Band that Bob Dylan almost always breaks wide open. He takes the spotlight, and they are free to follow their hearts. They get a certain energy playing with him they don’t get from each other—and in any case they can’t handle his twisting vocals with neat arrangements. They have to set the beat, play for it and against it, even risk collapsing the song for the chance to touch the emotions of anyone who listens. They have to give Dylan the momentum he so obviously wants and play for themselves.
The music, then, was not neat, it was not orderly, it was not elegant. It was fierce: riding that beat, full of hard-won arrogance, love, and anger. At first the music hit in explosions, and then resolved itself into textures—Garth’s organ flowing delicately over a solo from Robbie that was pure anarchy while Dylan’s howls cut across both. Then, when you thought you had a grip
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