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Old 08-30-2008, 01:16 PM   #1
charlene
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Join Date: May 2000
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Default Dylan - article in Toronto Star

by Greg Quill - Aussie singer-songwriter who lives in Toronto and writes and is a music critic for the Toronto Star-
http://www.thestar.com/comment/colum...article/477254
picture at link.
MY FAVOURITE MOMENT: Bob Dylan concert
TheStar.com

The night a rebel folk poet reinvented rock 'n' roll

ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO (see link)
Bob Dylan performs and his band (Mickey Jones on Drums, Rick Danko on Bass and Robbie Robertson on Guitar) perform in this 1966 file photo in Manchester, England. Email story

Aug 13, 2008 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (5)
Greg Quill
Entertainment Columnist

I knew, as my first real lover and I huddled over his songs by candlelight in her tiny student flat in Glebe, on the edge of the Sydney University campus but significantly not part of it, that Bob Dylan was probably a very dangerous artist, a rebel and a rule-breaker, a poet so safe in his cleverly invented skin that he was virtually unassailable.

A mystery to the world at large, he was a revelation to those who dared to listen with open hearts and minds.

Dylan was the first songwriter to use the language and thematic matter of folk music and blues – love, death, work, struggle, alienation, migration, suffering – to construct an alternative to the trite and trivial, love-saturated pop model churned out by the music industry of the day. He was reinventing popular music, making it big, profound, important.

In retrospect, Dylan was the quirky quintessence of the spirit and intellect of the largest, smartest, best educated, most pampered, most curious and most expressive generation in history. He was bound to happen.

And because he shone so brightly, because he was the living hope of that great emerging consciousness, he was, for a time, a folk hero in the truest sense.

But with his profane electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and with the release of the rock-enhanced albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in the same year, Dylan had served notice that he wanted out of the folk club.

His followers – and back then, many did regard him as a saviour and visionary – were divided.

Some felt they'd been duped, manipulated and betrayed by a canny entrepreneur who really just wanted to be a pop star like the clowns he once reviled.

Others feared his dalliance with electrified rock 'n' roll buried the power and meaning of his words, and hoped it would pass.

A few went with him whole hog and set out with him on what they believed was a journey across a new musical frontier, destination unknown.

So it was amid this ideological and artistic tumult that my girlfriend and I found ourselves with tickets to the second of Dylan's two Sydney concerts – Wednesday, April 13 and Saturday, April 16, 1966 – in an immense former cattle arena known as the Stadium.

The atmosphere was explosive. Sydney was the first stop on Dylan's first "electric" world tour, and no one knew what to expect.

Fears were quelled in the first half of the show, an acoustic set of new-era Dylan favourites, some from the yet-to-be-released Blonde On Blonde: "She Belongs To Me," "Fourth Time Around," "Visions Of Johanna," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Desolation Row," "Just Like A Woman" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." The diminutive singer, befuddled by the Stadium's revolving stage, which turned 90 degrees at the end of every song, astonished us with the clarity of his enunciation, his wry phrasing and the musical brilliance of his extended, free-form harmonica solos.

But after intermission, when the band – Toronto's The Hawks, minus drummer Levon Helm, who had been replaced inexplicably by volcanic pounder Mickey Jones – launched into an unbelievably loud "Tell Me, Momma" then "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)," pandemonium reigned. People around us screamed their disapproval, demanding aural relief. Others headed for exits in disgust. Children were held to bosoms as if Satan had suddenly materialized. Fights between the faithful and diehard folkies erupted high in the shaky bleachers.

I remember Jones's cannon snare and mammoth kick drum beats locking into Rick Danko's bass notes like orchestrated artillery, and Garth Hudson's soaring organ glissandos, but not much of Robbie Robertson's guitar (he was tasteful to a fault), which was overwhelmed by Dylan's rhythmic punch. The music packed such a visceral wallop that it demanded a visceral response.

The remainder of the electric set – notable for the inclusion of "One Too Many Mornings" and "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," from his Greenwich Village acoustic period – went by in a blur, till the final offerings, "Ballad Of A Thin Man" and "Positively Fourth Street," when Dylan poured all the venom and scorn he could muster into the crackling air.

Outside in the street, Jen and I were speechless. There was no way of putting what we'd just witnessed, this queasy shifting of cultural gears, into words.

Something really big had just happened and we both knew, without having to say it, that our lives would never be the same.
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