Thursday, April 28, 2005

I saw Bob Dylan's ghost last night.

It showed up at the strangest place: a Bob Dylan show
at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California. Now,
this is *not* a dramatic way of saying that Dylan is
through, or is a shadow of his former self, or
anything like that. What I mean is that, wittingly or
not, Bob Dylan created the conditions for this spirit
to appear, and sure enough it did.

Dylan and his medium-sized band--bigger than Timbuk 3,
smaller than Lyle Lovett's traveling circus--were
arrayed in a crescent formation on the Paramount
stage, with Dylan ensconced behind his electronical
piano at the tip of the crescent at stage right,
directly across from his guitarist. This left the
center of the stage vacant, a vacuum that was just
crying out to be filled. Enter the ghost. Despite
frequent and increasingly plaintive requests from the
audience to play his guitar, Dylan stayed rooted to
the stage behind his keyboard (actually, he was far
from still: the 2005 Bob Dylan seems to be more
interested in old-fashioned showmanship than anything
else, and the combination of his graying hair and
relentless jitterbugging put me in mind of Elvis
Presley with a Brillo pad where his pompadour
should've been).

Dylan has always offered fairly radical
reinterpretations of his catalog in performance, and
as he blazed through versions of new songs, freeform
FM album cuts and generation-defining hits which
sometimes bore only the faintest of resemblances to
their recorded counterparts, a very strange thing
happened. Somewhere between the expectations of the
audience, Dylan's references to his own past, and that
electrical-alchemical process that creates a third
thing at a live show, that vacuum at center stage was
filled. Today's Bob Dylan was scat-crooning away
behind his piano over to the side, and a doppelganger
golem shimmered and glowed there in the middle,
receiving melodies, memories, desires and emotions
from everyone in the house and then radiating an
amalgam of them all back out to all points of the
compass. Maybe it was just the cheap hydro that was
wafting out of the stalls in the bathroom during
intermission, but during certain songs ("Tangled Up In
Blue", "Ballad of a Thin Man"), I felt like I could
actually see the thing. Wired on amphetamine
imagination and just a little bit out of focus, like
the cover of Blonde on Blond, blazing with passion and
derision as it laughed at all of us, who had summoned
it to appear and then sang a scratchy, ethereal duet
with the actual man onstage.

It was very strange.

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